Archive for July, 2008

Robert Novak, columnist and conservative pundit has been hospitalized with a brain tumor.

My guess is that the “hit-and-run” described last week in our blog was due to the mental blackouts that accompany such maladies before they’re diagnosed. I would like to send my best wishes for his speedy recovery.

Tom Trumpinski

Lately I’ve been trying to teach myself about personal finance and the stock market. A good friend of mine who blogs as Grumblebear recommended a book called “The only investment guide you will ever need” by Andrew Tobias. The book breaks complicated investment ideas down into clearly explained, user friendly chunks, and it does so with grace and humor. Most importantly, it helps the novice investor quickly dispense with the sorts of investments most likely to get them into trouble.

Andrew Tobias also has a blog, and I wanted to draw your attention to an article he cites today with a series of 40 articles by prominent individuals at CNN Money called “The smartest advice I ever got.” It’s worth a look.

David Brooks is a smart guy. Which is why it was confusing when I read his column today on Barack Obama’s Berlin speech and discovered that he thinks “Obama made exactly one point with which it was possible to disagree. In the best paragraph of the speech, Obama called on Germans to send more troops to Afghanistan.” The essence of Brooks’ argument is this:

The great illusion of the 1990s was that we were entering an era of global convergence in which politics and power didn’t matter. What Obama offered in Berlin flowed right out of this mind-set. This was the end of history on acid.

Since then, autocracies have arisen, the competition for resources has grown fiercer, Russia has clamped down, Iran is on the march. It will take politics and power to address these challenges, the two factors that dare not speak their name in Obama’s lofty peroration.

The full text and video of Obama’s speech is here. I recommend you go read it or watch it before continuing with this post.

Done now? Good. If you were paying attention, you’ll notice that there were, in fact, many things on which people do in fact disagree. Ezra Klein points out a few of them here:

Within the space of a few lines, Obama calls “a world without nuclear weapons,” demands that we “reject the Cold War mind-set of the past, and resolve to work with Russia,” calls on Americans to “act with the same seriousness of purpose as has [Germany], and reduce the carbon we send into our atmosphere,” demands that we “reject torture,” and asks whether we’ll “welcome immigrants from different lands, and shun discrimination against those who don’t look like us or worship like we do.”

The real problem, though, with Brooks’ take is that it misses the point of the speech in a more fundamental way. It is easy to fit Obama’s rhetoric on unity with Europe into his previous rhetoric on unity in domestic contexts, as Brooks does when he says, “Obama speeches almost always have the same narrative arc. Some problem threatens. The odds are against the forces of righteousness. But then people of good faith unite and walls come tumbling down.” But while all politicians throw out rhetoric on bipartisanship and the American people coming together to solve problems, fewer politicians have been willing to articulate the kind of internationalist view of the world Obama did in his speech. There’s a difference between saying Republicans and Democrats should work together and arguing for a stronger commitment to internationalism. The former is vague and empty rhetoric, the latter is an articulation of foreign policy. And far from being a policy on which it is impossible to disagree, it is highly controversial and has been vigorously rejected by the Bush administration and the McCain campaign.

The heart of Obama’s speech, in my view, is this (emphases mine):

The fall of the Berlin Wall brought new hope. But that very closeness has given rise to new dangers – dangers that cannot be contained within the borders of a country or by the distance of an ocean.

The terrorists of September 11th plotted in Hamburg and trained in Kandahar and Karachi before killing thousands from all over the globe on American soil.

As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya.

Poorly secured nuclear material in the former Soviet Union, or secrets from a scientist in Pakistan could help build a bomb that detonates in Paris. The poppies in Afghanistan become the heroin in Berlin. The poverty and violence in Somalia breeds the terror of tomorrow. The genocide in Darfur shames the conscience of us all.

In this new world, such dangerous currents have swept along faster than our efforts to contain them. That is why we cannot afford to be divided. No one nation, no matter how large or powerful, can defeat such challenges alone. None of us can deny these threats, or escape responsibility in meeting them.

This is sweeping rhetoric, to be sure, but it’s also an articulation of a world view that argues that we have come to exist in a world increasingly defined by transnational threats and collective action problems, and that the only way we can successfully counter these threats and solve these problems is for nations to act cooperatively. Some, like Pat Buchanan, will argue that this view is incorrect and will instead argue for an isolationist foreign policy in which we respond to these threats by turning inwards and minding our own business. Others, like George W. Bush or John McCain, will argue that this view is incorrect because the United States is an exceptional world power that is allowed to and should operate separately from and above the rest of the international order.

Now, it’s true that the above distinctions are broad ones based on general theories of international affairs, rather than more detailed policy distinctions. But for one thing, most voters don’t have time and shouldn’t be expected to care about or learn much more than the candidates’ broader views on public policy. For another thing, the candidates’ positions on specific issues have been well-aired. But most importantly, broader views are what matter. The issues facing the country today will not all be the same as the issues facing the country four years from now. The best way to know how a candidate will handle the issues that arise in the future that we can’t foresee is to know what their general theories on policy are. Obama’s Berlin speech gives us a good look at his general theory of foreign policy. Agree with it or disagree with it, label it visionary or dangerous, but it’s not just empty rhetoric.

David Brooks is a smart guy. Which is why it was confusing when I read his column today on Barack Obama’s Berlin speech and discovered that he thinks “Obama made exactly one point with which it was possible to disagree. In the best paragraph of the speech, Obama called on Germans to send more troops to Afghanistan.” The essence of Brooks’ argument is this:

The great illusion of the 1990s was that we were entering an era of global convergence in which politics and power didn’t matter. What Obama offered in Berlin flowed right out of this mind-set. This was the end of history on acid.

Since then, autocracies have arisen, the competition for resources has grown fiercer, Russia has clamped down, Iran is on the march. It will take politics and power to address these challenges, the two factors that dare not speak their name in Obama’s lofty peroration.

The full text and video of Obama’s speech is here. I recommend you go read it or watch it before continuing with this post.

Done now? Good. If you were paying attention, you’ll notice that there were, in fact, many things on which people do in fact disagree. Ezra Klein points out a few of them here:

Within the space of a few lines, Obama calls “a world without nuclear weapons,” demands that we “reject the Cold War mind-set of the past, and resolve to work with Russia,” calls on Americans to “act with the same seriousness of purpose as has [Germany], and reduce the carbon we send into our atmosphere,” demands that we “reject torture,” and asks whether we’ll “welcome immigrants from different lands, and shun discrimination against those who don’t look like us or worship like we do.”

The real problem, though, with Brooks’ take is that it misses the point of the speech in a more fundamental way. It is easy to fit Obama’s rhetoric on unity with Europe into his previous rhetoric on unity in domestic contexts, as Brooks does when he says, “Obama speeches almost always have the same narrative arc. Some problem threatens. The odds are against the forces of righteousness. But then people of good faith unite and walls come tumbling down.” But while all politicians throw out rhetoric on bipartisanship and the American people coming together to solve problems, fewer politicians have been willing to articulate the kind of internationalist view of the world Obama did in his speech. There’s a difference between saying Republicans and Democrats should work together and arguing for a stronger commitment to internationalism. The former is vague and empty rhetoric, the latter is an articulation of foreign policy. And far from being a policy on which it is impossible to disagree, it is highly controversial and has been vigorously rejected by the Bush administration and the McCain campaign.

The heart of Obama’s speech, in my view, is this (emphases mine):

The fall of the Berlin Wall brought new hope. But that very closeness has given rise to new dangers – dangers that cannot be contained within the borders of a country or by the distance of an ocean.The terrorists of September 11th plotted in Hamburg and trained in Kandahar and Karachi before killing thousands from all over the globe on American soil.

As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya.

Poorly secured nuclear material in the former Soviet Union, or secrets from a scientist in Pakistan could help build a bomb that detonates in Paris. The poppies in Afghanistan become the heroin in Berlin. The poverty and violence in Somalia breeds the terror of tomorrow. The genocide in Darfur shames the conscience of us all.

In this new world, such dangerous currents have swept along faster than our efforts to contain them. That is why we cannot afford to be divided. No one nation, no matter how large or powerful, can defeat such challenges alone. None of us can deny these threats, or escape responsibility in meeting them.

This is sweeping rhetoric, to be sure, but it’s also an articulation of a world view that argues that we have come to exist in a world increasingly defined by transnational threats and collective action problems, and that the only way we can successfully counter these threats and solve these problems is for nations to act cooperatively. Some, like Pat Buchanan, will argue that this view is incorrect and will instead argue for an isolationist foreign policy in which we respond to these threats by turning inwards and minding our own business. Others, like George W. Bush or John McCain, will argue that this view is incorrect because the United States is an exceptional world power that is allowed to and should operate separately from and above the rest of the international order.

Now, it’s true that the above distinctions are broad ones based on general theories of international affairs, rather than more detailed policy distinctions. But for one thing, most voters don’t have time and shouldn’t be expected to care about or learn much more than the candidates’ broader views on public policy. For another thing, the candidates’ positions on specific issues have been well-aired. But most importantly, broader views are what matter. The issues facing the country today will not all be the same as the issues facing the country four years from now. The best way to know how a candidate will handle the issues that arise in the future that we can’t foresee is to know what their general theories on policy are. Obama’s Berlin speech gives us a good look at his general theory of foreign policy. Agree with it or disagree with it, label it visionary or dangerous, but it’s not just empty rhetoric.

Riding the Hell-bound Train just went on sale ten minutes ago.

Thanks for all of your patience, since took five months longer than I originally planned. I’ve got a new short-short story ready for the inaugural issue of the new, improved Urbanagora and am looking forward to a long and enjoyable run there.

Billy, Brian, Joshua–you’re the best.