Archive for March, 2008

First Read looks at the delegate math for the primary and here’s the bottom line:

If the remaining contests split up “as expected” meaning Clinton wins her base states (PA, KY, WV etc.) and Obama wins his base states (NC, OR, MT etc.) and the two split Indiana down the middle, the two campaigns will likely split those 566 delegates right down the middle 283-283 (margin of error +/- 5 delegates). This means Obama would need 34% of the uncommitted superdelegates to hit the magic 2024 number, while Clinton would need 72% of the uncommitted Supers to hit 2024. [emphasis added]

Is there a reason the media is paying any attention at all to Hillary?

Update: Also see here and here (the second one is David Brooks!).

As the Professional Responsibility experts at the Above the Law teach us, if you make a masturbatory gesture to a judge, you’re only screwing yourself.

Their lawyer of the day is Adam Reposa.

Adam Reposa, 33, was held in contempt of court by County-Court-at-Law Judge Jan Breland for his “intentional and contumacious conduct during the court’s review of the plea bargain offer to his client before jury trial.”

Reposa, who could not be reached for comment, “made a simulated masturbatory gesture with his hand while making eye contact with the court in response to an objection by the state to his interference with the court plea bargain inquiry,” Breland wrote in a judgment of criminal contempt of court filed March 11.

Check the Above the Law post, for more of his exploits, including his graceful handling of the press and his inspiring YouTube commericials.

I was reminded by some that all of my posts recently have been anti-Obama, and there is a reason for that; McCain had the ability to win his nomination early, and the dems, with all of their plotting and scheming, is where that action is. They are getting all of the press, and thus McCain can quietly shore up his base and raise money. Hopefully, one of the things he is doing is honestly assessing his weaknesses and figuring out a way to address them. I hope that for at least two hours every day he is in a room with outstanding economists doing “econ 101” to build up his credibility. I hope he is doing electoral math. And I hope he is considering what I am about to propose.

One unexpected, or at least not often talked about, advantage of the dems inability to choose is it makes voters forget about the Republican primary and focus on what appears to be significant bad blood between Obama and Clinton. At least this is what I hope is what is happening, because if that is the case Mitt Romney should be the next GOP vice presidential candidate.

Mitt Romney, first and foremost, has been vetted. By running through the primaries the press has taken their shots, and he has more or less come through. In terms of “would he be ready to lead,” the most important of VP characteristics, Romney has it.

Romney has the conservative street cred that would motivate the base, which McCain supposedly lacks. He also is not abhorrent to the independents and liberals that McCain attracts, the way Huckabee might be, as demonstrated by the fact that Romney was elected governor of one of the most liberal states in the country. In terms of policy, Romney has the strongest economic background of any of the candidates, Republicans and Democrats. While I was looking forward to seeing how Clinton or Obama would challenge McCain on economics when their own background in that area is just as bleak and devoid of experience, this would shore up for McCain what is probably going to be THE policy issue. When I watched the debate, I think Romney had the most coherent health care policy answer of the Republicans, so he could help bring strength to that issue. And Romney is the only one with executive experience of the candidates being mentioned on either side. Again, that has to count for something. Romney is also ten years younger, to help calm the “McCain is too old argument.” Combine that with McCain’s experience, foreign policy background, and an actual history of bipartisanship as opposed to the mere promise of it, and this could be formidable policy platform and ticket.

In terms of the math, Romney shores up McCain strength in the non-Arizona western states. If a Republicans are going to do well, I think a good place to start would be to sweep everything west of the Mississippi and east of the California border. Romney would strengthen McCain in Minnesota, Nevada, and Colorado. Romney would take Massachusetts from the “never in a million years” column and put it in to “legitimate shot.” I think Romney would also strengthen McCain in Pennsylvania. McCain is already doing fine in Ohio, and the democrats snubbing of Florida and Michigan in the primaries should help the GOP in the general.

The thing is, two months ago, this can’t happen. There would appear to be “too much bad blood” and there would be no way that this could happen. However, thanks to the Democrats dysfunction, now it can. In comparison to Obama-Clinton, McCain-Romney doesn’t look that bad. A stronger GOP ticket combined with a bloodied opponent with less cash than they might have had otherwise all goes to help the Republicans in a race that was supposed to be a democratic blowout.

Thanks to Lally for alerting me that Charlie Rose recently interviewed one of my favorite authors, David McCullough. The interview with him gets better and better as it goes. Rose happens to have a great website littered with, as far as I can tell, just about every interview he has done. Below I have pasted a select few, but I encourage you to browse the website for your personal favorites.

Rose has the ability to disarm his subjects, he makes them real. He shows us who these people are and how they think. His show has survived the de-education of Americans through television and now we can conveniently learn from society’s greats while browsing the Internet. I have always admired the regal and scholarly glints in Rose’s voice.

David Brooks recently wrote an article on pragmatic idealism but without specifically calling it that. “Thoroughly Modern Do-Gooders” says:

Furthermore, we might as well take advantage of this explosion of social entrepreneurship. These are some of the smartest and most creative people in the country. Even if we don’t know how to reduce poverty, it’s probably worth investing in these people and letting them figure it out. The people who fit into this category tend to have plenty of résumé bling. Bill Drayton, the godfather of this movement, went to Harvard, Yale, Oxford and McKinsey before founding Ashoka, a global change network. Those who follow him typically went to some fancy school and then did a stint with Teach for America or AmeriCorps before graduate school. Then, they worked for a software firm before deciding to use what they’d learned in business to help the less fortunate. Now they work 80 hours a week, fighting bureaucracies and funding restrictions in order to build, say, mentoring programs for single moms.

The most succinct way that I can describe my politics, which I hope is a unique fusion of conservative means and liberal ends, is to call it pragmatic idealism. Brian once told me that I should just become a Democrat because a good deal of my political conclusions would be considered progressive. But this friendly hope of Brian’s misunderstands my view of what inspires and drives the world. To me it’s all about money. The world is run by the financial markets and it is most accurately portrayed through the lens of the Wall Street Journal, not our beloved New York Times. I view economics as the single most humanitarian pursuit. But how could this be so? This statement might seem bizarre given that we often equate money with base, anti-humanitarian pursuits. But to me, it is economic growth that saves people. The pragmatism and dirtiness of economic growth allows us to create enough leisure time and security for great, uncompromising, principled authors like Kant or Rawls to write about how we should not be pragmatic and capitalistic. Without the capitalism that Rawls scorned, he would have been a peasant in a field, working too many hours to push on the boundaries of philosophy and art. Capitalism is mankind’s crudest, bloodiest, and dirtiest invention, yet it has also created more humanity and beauty than anything else. The pragmatism of capitalism lies in its ability to conform to human nature, rather than in trying to change human nature to conform to an ideal.

How do we help people trapped in miserable and violent poverty in America, sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and elsewhere? Humanitarian change won’t be wrought by the protestor of sweat shops, the fair trade purchaser and volunteer, the campus crusader, the good-intentioned pastor, or the pristinely principled academic (Stephen Hartnett), rather it will come from the economics nerd reading Friedman and Hayek at the University of Chicago and a politician bold enough to enact that nerd’s theories. The world is about power. Power, informed and guided by the right ideas, propels the world toward good.

Here are three examples of pragmatic idealism. If you are trying to convince people to become vegetarian, instead of appealing to their altruistic instinct that animals suffer pain and understand pain at a level that parallels humans, an advocate should instead appeal to a person’s self-interest in having a healthy diet.

If you would like to see people lifted from poverty in poor countries, you should support sweatshops, as many liberal economists do, as a necessary means. If sweatshop protestors or fair trade activists succeeded in ending all sweatshop activities in Country X, the owners would simply move the sweatshops to Country Y resulting in many people losing their jobs in Country X without any means of creating new jobs. Furthermore, let’s say a sweatshop activist convinced every single American to never buy a sweatshop product again, which is the most successful apex they could reach, it would still say nothing of the purchasing habits of the other 6 billion people on the planet. Perhaps instead the activist could get an MBA or a JD and try to climb the corporate ranks of a multinational corporation so as to influence their policies from the inside. Change most often occurs inside institutions, rather than outside them.

Many of the leaders we consider to have held unwavering idealism actually practiced pragmatic idealism, my favorite example is Gandhi. He studied to be a lawyer – the most dreadfully practical degree available. Here is from the Philosopher’s Magazine, “Although Gandhi’s emphasis on intentions and duties often allows us to relate him to Kant, he is not really a Kantian. First, Gandhi describes himself as a ‘pragmatic idealist.’ He focuses on results. When he acted with good intentions and according to moral duty, but did not succeed in resisting hegemonic British imperialism, alleviating poverty and suffering, or overcoming caste prejudice and oppression, he evaluated his position as a ‘failed experiment in truth.’” In a book review of Gandhi’s Economic Thought, “Dasgupta repeatedly illustrates Gandhi’s pragmatism towards social and economic issues combined with his lucid, timeless and ideal ethical code.” Here you can read a book called Gandhi and Pragmatism. In a university speech, Gandhi’s grandson once “reiterated to the audience the necessary elements to achieve non-violence and the pragmatism that his grandfather’s philosophies hold in dealing with terrorism effectively.”

My problem with conservatives is that they often ignore the potential humanitarian power of their ideas, or rather, they are too self-serving to devote themselves to being an agent of God or of Good – they lack idealism. My problem with liberals is that they are often so concerned with actualizing their idealistic conception of the world that they forget to enact the pragmatic means necessary. Perhaps the strongest, or at least the most frequent, objection to pragmatism is some form of Kantian idealism which states that anything but the purest of means will corrupt the purity of the ends, and so the preference seems to be on not accomplishing to be death in a blaze of principled glory rather than sacrificing even an inch of principle in order to achieve some progress – think Ralph Nader, the Green Party, and many academics. Libertarians are sometimes guilty of this as well – Tom and Ron Paul come to mind. My biggest problem with Obama (and Clinton as well) is that he is preaching a brand of economics that died many years ago among economists. But to me, the highest ideal, the highest moral has always been realization of the end intended, or least a compromised version resembling it.

Conservatives are generally right about how the world works but they are generally wrong about where the world should go. Liberals are generally wrong about how the world works but they are generally right about where the world should go. My goal with this post is to convince both sides to learn from the other – I know that is a task I must personally accomplish more often. This is a muddy world dripping with pragmatic evil that can be stabbed only by pragmatic good.