Bush in C’ville

Apparently, President Bush is spending part of his 4th July in Charlottesville, Virginia.  Or more specifically, at Monticello:

President George W. Bush will be the featured speaker at Monticello’s 46th annual Independence Day Celebration and Naturalization Ceremony on July 4. He bumped the previously scheduled speaker for the event, Ken Burns.

The security detail that Bush brings with him will certainly guarantee a headache for everyone involved. Monticello is still working out the details.

“A presidential visit involves some logistical challenges we haven’t figured out yet,” says Monticello spokesman Wayne Mogielnicki. Some of those challenges could be the protestors Bush—one of the most unpopular presidents in history—inevitably invites on his travels. [...]

Seventy-five people from 30 different counties will be sworn in as U.S. citizens. In the 45 years of the event, more than 3,000 people have taken the oath of citizenship at the event. Last year’s featured speaker was actor Sam Waterston of “Law & Order” fame.

There’s little word on why Bush, coming up on his eighth July 4 celebration as president, suddenly expressed an interest in attending.

“We have a standing invitation to the President of the United States to attend the naturalization ceremony at Monticello,” Mogielnicki says, “and he accepted.”

The 46th annual ceremony is scheduled to begin at 10am. It will be free and open to the public—or as open as these things get when a sitting head of state is in attendance.

(h/t to Ayisha)

 

Successful campaigns and competent administrations

Is there any connection between running a good campaign and being a competent president?  Ian Jordan at VB Dems thinks so:

Just a look at the campaigns McSame and Obama have run. From his announcement in winter 2007, the Obama campaign has continually shattered expectations, set new records, and break new ground all the while maintaining a functioning apparatus; whose engine is always fully greased. Never becoming broke and going into debt, always in a forward trajectory in terms of message, and harmonious collaboration with top staffers. This is a competently led organization.

How about John McCain? From his own ’surprise’ announcement’, John McCain has consistently
underperformed, mismanaged, and mangled opportunity. In contrast to Senator Obama’s winning his nomination, John McCain’s chief strategy was being lucky enough all his other party rivals sucked more than he did. His campaign was broke and support-less in the early fall…thanking its survival to attrition from others. It has frequently been in debt. His operation is so inefficient, talk of how inept it is is commonly discussed about between inside republicans (as the politico discusses) !

What this contrast tells us is simple. We have two candidates with very different ideas competing and selling us their abilities. When answering “Who has the ability to run our country”, answer first “As an extension of their know how, who has the ability to simply run their campaign”?

As much as I’m sympathetic to this line of thought, I’m not sure if it is actually reflected in reality.  By all accounts, Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign was the most organized and well-funded of all the Democratic primary candidates.  And he took that advantage into the general election, beating George H.W. Bush and becoming the first Democratic president since Carter (which, in the age of Reagan, wasn’t a small accomplishment).  President Bill Clinton, in his first-term at least, wasn’t nearly as effective as candidate Bill Clinton.  Clinton’s successes - the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, NAFTA - were outweighed by his failures: Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and famously, health care reform.  More importantly, his style of governing - keeping everything “in House,” not building strong relationships with Congress - ended up fraying the Democratic coalition and giving the Republicans an opportunity to make huge gains in 1994.  Which they did.

Really though, you only have to look at George W. Bush for an example of how the quality of a campaign doesn’t necessarily impact the quality of an administration.  Bush’s 2000 and 2004 campaigns were marvels of organization, and in 2004 especially, his campaign was able to successfully mobilize conservative voters to an unprecedented degree, as well as make inroads into traditionally Democratic constituencies (like Hispanics).  Obviously, this degree of organization and sophistication didn’t carry over to Bush’s presidency, where he’s been a miserable failure at best, and is certainly a contender for worst president in American history (James Buchanan better watch out).

The fact of the matter is that running a successful campaign and running a competent administration are two different skill sets.  And even if there is overlap between them, I don’t think there’s nearly enough to claim that being able to the former is a good indicator of being able to do the latter.

 

Facebook Fans

I just found out (via Megan McArdle) that Facebook has this crazy, newfangled “Blog Network” application.  Since I’m a shameless attention whore, I created a page, and now I need “fans” to populate it.  If you like what you read here, you should take the time to head over and become a fan of my blog on Facebook (and if you’d like, you can “friend” me too).

 

The possibility of nuclear terrorism

Thanks Jeffrey Goldberg, this is the most impressive bit of fear-mongering I’ve seen in a long time:

But at yesterday’s Aspen panel on nuclear non-proliferation, the general consensus was that there’s a reasonably high likelihood that a nuclear device will be detonated in an American city, New York or Washington most likely, at some point in the next ten years. And the experts on the panel, John Holdren and Joe Cirincione among them, are not exactly attached to the Bush Administration worldview. After such an attack, we’ll look back — those of us still around, obviously — on our efforts to combat al Qaeda and judge them inadequate to the task, just as we look back now on the Clinton Administration’s pre-9/11 preparations (and the Bush Administration’s, as well) as thoroughly inadequate. So I suppose I’m convinced of two things simultaneously: Al Qaeda is fairly weak, and not very popular at all, and that this might not matter as much as people think.

I’ve mentioned to friends that I hate the word “reasonably” when used this way.  Why?  Because it doesn’t tell you a damned thing about the claim being made.  What exactly is a “reasonably high likelihood?”  Is it a fifty percent or a five percent chance?  Is it relative to other events, or is it an objective likelihood?   And even if we knew what a “reasonably high likelihood” is, how is he defining a nuclear device?  Does he mean an actual nuclear weapon, or a dirty bomb (which is simply a regular bomb packed with radioactive material)?  If he means the former, then he’s moved out of the “reality-based community” and into the realm of fiction.  24 and The Sum of All Fears aside, the odds of a nuclear detonation in the United States are extremely small.  And it has almost entirely to do with the logistics of actually obtaining and transporting a nuclear weapon. 

A well-funded terrorist group has three options for obtaining a nuclear device: the black market, a “rogue state,” and the DIY option.  Now, the last option is so outlandish as to warrant immediate dismissal.  Unless we’re talking about Cobra here (and they aren’t nearly competent enough to pull it off), it’s extremely unlikely that any terrorist group - no matter how well-funded - could find the time, manpower and expertise necessary to build a nuclear device from scratch (as the link details, the smallest nuclear weapon program - South Africa’s - required $1 billion, 400 people, and twenty years).  That leaves us with the first two options, both of which are only marginally more realistic.  You count the number of nuclear weapon states on two hands, and of those, North Korea and Pakistan are the obvious candidates for “most likely to hand out WMDs like candy.”  Except, even the craziest leaders aren’t so irrational as to just hand out nuclear weapons to terrorists.  Not just because they are just as liable to be targets as anyone else, but also because in the event of a nuclear terrorist attack, the United States (and just about everyone else) will immediately suspect - and likely retaliate against - the country who seems guilty.  I don’t think there’s a single leader on this planet who would risk losing everything for - in the long run - such a small “pleasure.”

Now, as far as the black market is concerned, it’s probably possible for a well-funded group to  just buy a nuclear device.  And most likely, it would be a tactical nuclear weapon designed for battlefield use.  They are plentiful (the Soviet Union deployed as many as 4,000) and not terribly secure.  Unfortunately for our would-be terrorists, they are also extremely heavy and cumbersome, making it extremely difficult - if not impossible - to smuggle (the same goes for a nuclear weapon “donated” by a rogue state, chances are that it would be a crude, several thousand pound monstrosity).

“But,” you yell, “what about suitcase nukes!  Those are portable and easy to conceal, making them perfect for terrorist use.”

Again, lay off of the bad action movies.  Contrary to the claims of a Yeltsin-era Russian official , there is a fair amount of evidence to suggest that there aren’t a couple hundred “suitcase nukes” just floating around on the black market.  And even if there were, it’s unlikely that they would be any more dangerous than a conventional explosion (of course, there would be radiation to worry about).  According to a 2006 report released by the London Institute for Strategic Studies, the smallest nuclear weapon in existence had more bark than bite:

The smallest nuclear weapon known to have been built by the US was a plutonium device measuring 26.4cm by 38.5cm and weighing around 22.8kg. Yield was proportionately low: between 0.01 and 0.25 kilotons (at most, 140th the force of the Hiroshima bomb).

In fairness to Goldberg though, there is the possibility of a dirty bomb being detonated in a major American city.  In 2005, a group of security experts concluded that there was a 40 percent chance of such an attack:

The survey of arms control and national security experts also indicated there is a 30 percent chance there will be a major chemical or biological attack, Lugar said in a prepared statement released June 24.

“The prospects of a dirty bomb attack were pegged at 40 percent,” he said.  A dirty bomb is a high explosive that has been contaminated with radioactive materials.

The study surveyed 85 senior international scholars, policy-makers, diplomats, and technicians on the spread of dangerous weapons and international responses to the growing problem.

Outside of the initial explosion though, the effects wouldn’t be particularly devastating:

A dirty bomb — or radiological dispersion bomb — is a relatively unsophisticated device that combines radioactive materials with conventional explosives. When exploded, such a device scatters radioactive particles into the environment. No nuclear-fission reaction takes place as would occur with a true nuclear weapon, and, while anyone within the initial blast radius will probably be killed immediately, more casualties would probably result from the long-term effects of the dispersed radioactive material. According to Michael Levi, the physicist who managed a Federation of American Scientists’ (FAS) study into the effects of a dirty bomb explosion, protecting yourself after such an attack is a matter of getting indoors, showering, and not eating contaminated food or breathing open air. As he put it: “It’s really a matter of closing your windows and waiting for instructions.”

This is all to say that while nuclear proliferation is a serious concern - one that the Bush Administration or John McCain hasn’t taken seriously - it’s silly to get ourselves worked up over the possibility of an attack.  Next time, Jeffrey Goldberg ought to think twice before posting such useless, fear-mongering garbage.

 

I’ll explain later

For the record, I think McCain/Huckabee would be a pretty strong ticket.  A terrifyingly regressive one, but strong nevertheless.

 

Reaching out to conservative evangelicals

It looks like the Religious Right is beginning to coalesce behind McCain’s candidacy:

At a meeting Tuesday in Denver, about 100 conservative Christian leaders from around the country agreed to unite behind the candidacy of John McCain, a politician they have long distrusted, marking the latest in a string of movements that bode well for McCain’s general election prospects among the Republican base.

“Collectively we feel that he will support and advance those moral values that we hold much greater than Obama, who in our view will decimate moral values,” said Mat Staver, the chairman of Liberty Counsel, a legal advocacy group, who previously supported Mike Huckabee’s candidacy.

“There are people who came through the primary with very mixed emotions of the candidate,” Staver continued, noting that many in the group had been in Denver to attend a separate meeting for pastors. “This event was to put those aside.”

The group included leaders like Phyllis Schlafly, the long-time leader of Eagle Forum; Steve Strang, the publisher of Charisma magazine; Phil Burress, a prominent Ohio marriage and anti-pornography activist; David Barton, the founder of WallBuilders and Donald Hodel, a former secretary of the Interior, who previously served on the board of Focus on the Family. Jim Dobson, the head of Focus and an outspoken critic of McCain, did not attend. The McCain campaign was also not directly represented at the meeting.

Over at Shakesville, Melissa McEwan argues that this proves the futility of trying to peel off conservative evangelical votes from the GOP.  I’m not so certain.  If the Republican primary proved anything, it’s that the conservative Christian grassroots will act in its own interest, and not necessarily that of its leaders.   The rise of Mike Huckabee was - in some sense - a reaction against the pandering and positioning of the conservative evangelical leadership class.  It wasn’t until Huckabee had become wildly popular with the grassroots that he was embraced by the leadership (at which point, it was a bit too late).

Indeed, over the past two years conservative Christians (and evangelicals especially) have begun to reevaluate their political commitments.  Particularly among younger evangelicals, the “culture war” mindset is fading, and greater emphasis is being placed on the importance of humanitarian and environmental activism.  That’s not to say that younger evangelicals are any less conservative than their predecessors - in fact, they might even be more conservative - but that there is a definite opportunity for liberals to make inroads into the conservative evangelical community.  We don’t have to win most, or even many, conservative evangelical votes for it to make a difference.  And more importantly, we don’t have to compromise our core ideals to appeal to conservative evangelicals.  As long as Obama (or anyone else) realizes that, I don’t think reaching out to conservative evangelicals is a bad thing at all.

 

Racist of the day

Most of us are horrified when we read statistics like “1/3 of black men will spend of time in prison.”  We recognize that black men don’t commit a majority of crime in this country, and that the huge disparity in sentencing is in part a legacy of institutional racism. 

Well, I should stress that only most of us are horrified.  Because if you’re blogger “guywhite,” you use said statistics as an opportunity to spew racist bile:

In my last post, I wrote that according to the Department of Justice stats, 32% of black men are felons have spent over a year in prison (plus those who committed felonies, but received jail sentences under a year or probation… or committed a felony, but pleaded guilty to a lower misdemeanor charge or just got away with their crime just like O.J. Simpson).

Since then I got a comment by rhayat on another post who wrote:

I’m pretty sure that most black crime is, indeed, against other blacks… there’s no doubt that most black on black crime (other than murder) goes unreported - because of their “no-snitch” culture and lack of confidence in the police.

If that’s true, and I would bet that it is, it means that an even greater percentage of blacks are felons and that the difference between the black and the white crime rates is even higher.

Scary thought, isn’t it?

Congratulations guywhite! You’re a racist! 

*If you’re wondering how I find these people, it appears that at this guys website, one of my posts has appeared as a “related post.”

 

Obama’s “intellectual contribution”

In today’s Washington Post, Michael Gerson tries to argue that Obama - unlike Clinton or Bush - has yet to make a significant intellectual contribution to the political discourse.  In light of Obama’s two books - the first an excellent mediation on racial identity - and his widely acclaimed speech on race, it seems a little silly for Gerson to accuse Obama of somehow being an intellectual lightweight.  This becomes especially strange when you consider that the vaunted “intellectual contribution” of his former employer - George W. Bush - amounts to a disingenuous campaign slogan (”compassionate conservatism”) which was hardly, if ever, realized during Bush’s presidency (unless you want to argue that illegal wars and torture are somehow “compassionate”).   Even Bill Clinton didn’t add to the discourse so much as he adopted already widely circulating ideas and gave them a nice, brand new Democratic veneer.

By Gerson’s standards,”intellectual contribution” could refer to some half-baked idea you cooked up in a dorm-room BS session.  If Gerson were actually serious about evaluating the intellectual contributions of the candidates, then it would become immediately apparent that Obama has actually added quite a bit to the discourse.  For starters, Obama’s very candidacy has upended (and is upending) our assumptions and expectations with regards to race and politics.  With regards to foreign policy, Obama - in defending his comments last year - sparked a national debate as to how we engage with our enemies, and the process, made the dialogue just a little bit more amenable to positions that don’t end in “kill the bastards.”

Not that any of this really matters.  Because when it comes down to it, Gerson is just upset that Obama is actually a liberal (despite being occasionally unorthodox), and not some weaksauce Kerry-esque triangulator.

 

Do faith-based initiatives work?

In Ohio yesterday, Obama pledged to expand the role of faith-based organizations in delivering social services:

In an interview from Ohio, Obama, D-Ill., said faith-based groups can deliver more services with less bureaucratic red tape, and should not be prevented from receiving public money because of their religious affiliations.

“Frankly, in some communities,” faith-based social services “may be the only game in town,” he said. “And it’s important that we don’t leave them out as they carry on their work.”

A liberal Democrat pledging to expand a signature program of a conservative Republican president may come as a surprise, but as a former community organizer in Chicago, Obama knows personally the outsize role that houses of worship can play in their neighborhoods.

Obama is also making a heavy push to reach religious voters — particularly Catholics and centrist evangelicals. Polls show his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain, leading among those communities, but Obama may be quickly closing the so-called “God gap.”

The plan Obama unveiled Tuesday would expand President Bush’s Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives, which the Illinois senator said was under-funded and “never fulfilled its promise.”

I’m skeptical of Obama’s decision, but not out of any susipicion of faith-based initiatives themselves. I do think it’s a good thing that religious charities are eligible for federal funding. And as long as affected religious organizations adhere to federal civil rights laws (meaning they can’t discriminate in hiring or the distribution of services), and use the money for secular purposes (running a soup kitchen, and not paying for a new sanctuary), then I don’t see anything particularly wrong with providing government sending money their way.

If there is anything to protest about Obama’s support for faith-based intiatives, it is that it relies on the unproven assertion that faith-based organizations are more effective (than the government) at distributing social services. Despite being a pretty big part of the social landscape, there hasn’t actually been that much research done on the effectiveness of faith-based organizations. As far as I know, the last major piece of research was a study conducted in 2002 by Byron Johnson of the Manhattan Institute. Johnson reviewed more than 800 studies, most of them conducted between 1998 and 2002, in an attempt to determine if it’s possible to draw a conclusion about the effectiveness of faith-based organizations. And as it turns out, there simply isn’t enough research available to draw a real conclusion:

Proponents of faith-based initiatives feel strongly that faith-based programs are effective providers of many different kinds of social services. This systemic review has uncovered a number of solid case studies and multivariate evaluations providing at least preliminary evidence that faith-based programs can provide effective interventions. It is important to note, however, that the small number of intentional studies reviewed by itself, cannot unequivocally certify the claim that faith-based programs are more effective than their secular counterparts. [...]

Granted, as Johnson notes, there are positive implications to the research. It is completely possible that further study will find that faith-based organizations are more effective than their government counterparts (already, Johnson is willing to say that when it comes to highly personal interventions - like drug addiction - faith-based organizations may be superior). But further study is required before we can definitively make that judgment. In the meantime though, I don’t think Obama should make expanding funding faith-based organizations the “moral centerpiece” of his administration. Instead, he should work on making existing programs work, and ensuring that recipients are adhering to federal laws and regulations (since, if this is any indication, that hasn’t been the case). Like I said before, I do think providing funding for faith-based organizations is a good thing, but first we need to make sure that they work.

 

Questioning Patriotism

Yuval Levin comments on Obama’s “patriotism speech,” and reveals that he is either very forgetful or a little bit dishonest.

There were also some more particular perplexing passages in this speech. Obama thinks this election is “perhaps the most consequential in generations.” Why is that? In what particular ways is it, for instance, more consequential than the last election, or the one before that? Is it just because he’s running? He believes that in the debates about the Iraq war, “those who opposed administration policy were tagged by some as unpatriotic.” Like who? What would be an example of that? [Emphasis mine]

I hope Levin isn’t contending that there were no examples of administration opponents being tagged as unpatriotic.  Since, well, that would be a pretty ridiculous contention to make.  Especially considering the fact that there are literally hundreds of examples of war supporters tarring dissenters as at best unpatriotic, and at worse, traitorous.  For example, in the aftermath of 9/11, Andrew Sullivan write that the “decadent left enclaves on the coasts [that] may well mount a fifth column.”  In the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq (and in the months after), merely questioning the administration’s policy was sufficient to unleash a flurry of charges and accusations from the right.  Conservative columnist David Brooks chastized liberals for questioning the wisdom of war, saying that we “doubted, and continue to doubt American’s willingness and ability to serve as a force for good in the world.”  And noted hack David Horowitz was able to make a career out of questioning the patriotism of Democrats.

Even prominent politicians had their turn.  In his keynote speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention, Zell Miller all but called war opponents (and Democrats in general) “America-haters”:

While young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats’ manic obsession to bring down our commander in chief.

Motivated more by partisan politics than by national security, today’s Democratic leaders see America as an occupier, not a liberator.

In [Democratic leaders'] warped way of thinking, America is the problem, not the solution. They don’t believe there is any real danger in the world except that which America brings upon itself.

Kerry would let Paris decide when America needs defending. I want Bush to decide.

From 2003 up until shortly after Bush’s reelection, you couldn’t throw a stone without hitting someone who insisted that war opponents were - to use Dennis Miller’s phrase of choice - “cheese-eating surrender monkeys.”  Obama’s claim is (or should be) a totally uncontroversial statement of fact.