Invisible Cities

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glt 07:26 - [Link]
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OK, it's Nov. 6, and a lot of the close senatorial races have fallen the Republicans' way. They have the White House, they have the media, they have the money--we know about their advantages--but why didn't the Democrats do more with what they had? Ample money, the beginnings of media coverage, organization around a common enemy, a good narrative line in many links between corrupt financial dealings and Bush and his team.

In this case, the media's narrative line has a lot going for it: they didn't really articulate an alternative. Some Democrats reasoned that they should vote to support a blank check in war with Iraq, get the item off the Congress's agenda, and get back to their preferred narrative. Others saw the absence of any brand identity in that kind of action. What resulted was a mixture of both and considerable confusion about what a vote for Democrats, as opposed to the local Joe, would mean.

If the Democrats are to a) rally enough opposition to slow down the considerable freight trains that will be coming down the tracks in the next two years, and b) work to retake the White House in 2004 and/or segments of Congress, they will have to take a page from the Republicans' book and develop some consistent, strong message. I very much hope that Daschle and Gephardt retire from their leadership positions after this.

Democrats can no longer gripe that Republicans stole the election, unless the small matter of threatening war and thus pushing their preferred topics off the front pages counts.

By the way, I very much like the piece by Thomas Friedman in today's NYTimes (registration required). He notes the rock-star-scale reception given Bill Clinton in Berlin, in contrast to the likely result if our boy W were to show up there, as indication that American optimism even in the face of much larger threats than Saddam is what the world values (and in the case of Al Qaeda, fears).

[T]he Bush team ? the President, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Condi Rice (Colin Powell is an exception) ? strike the world as cynical pessimists who believe only in power politics, much like 19th-century European statesmen. For the world, Bill Clinton is another J.F.K. and George Bush is another Thomas Hobbes . . . When the Bush folks sneer at things like the World Court or Kyoto, and virtually every other treaty ? without offering any alternatives but their own righteous power ? "they project an arrogance and obsession with power alone," said the political theorist Yaron Ezrahi. "This undermines the American idealism that made Europe aspire to emancipate itself from the history that brought us World Wars I and II, it delegitimizes American power as an instrument of justice and international order and it makes it impossible for the rest of the world to stand up and say: `I am a New Yorker.' "

We'll see if there's any compassion left in their conservatism, or cynicism.
glt 05:53 - [Link]
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Here's a post made a few days ago at my old weblog on Blogger.

Friday, November 01, 2002 :::

This is a temporary post, as Blogstudio isn't coming up yet . . . I'll copy this to that location when I can.


Paul Krugman is doing wonderful service for this country in his posts. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/01/business/01ACCO.html among others.) And if you want someone to pursue reasonable policies throughout the industry to make sure that auditors and whistle-blowers are safe from retribution for doing their job, you don't want to hire rubber-stamp appointments as this administration routinely does.


Krugman below:


Mr. Webster was chosen over better candidates precisely because accounting industry lobbyists ? a group that clearly still includes Mr. Pitt ? believed he would be ineffectual.


Let's call it the Pitt Principle. The famous Peter Principle said that managers fail because they rise to their level of incompetence. The Pitt Principle tells us that sometimes incompetence is exactly what the people in charge want.


In this particular case, ordinary investors demanded a crackdown on corporate malfeasance ? and Mr. Pitt pretended to comply. But this administration is run by and for people who have profited handsomely from their insider connections. (Remember Harken and Halliburton? And why won't the administration come clean about that energy task force?) So he picked someone with an impressive but irrelevant background, whom he could count on not to get the job done.


This principle explains a lot. For example . . . The attorney general's job is to uphold the Constitution and enforce the rule of law. So if you don't want that job done, you pick a former senator who doesn't have much respect either for the law or for the Constitution ? particularly silly stuff about due process, separation of church and state, and all that. He'll be just the man to respond to a national crisis by imprisoning more than 1,000 people without charges, while catching not a single person who has committed an act of terrorism ? not even the anthrax mailer.


The same principle can be applied at lower levels. Intelligence and defense experts should realistically assess threats to national security, and the consequences of U.S. military action. So if you don't want that job done, you place it in the hands of prominent neoconservative intellectuals, with no real-world experience. They can be counted on to perceive terrorist links where the C.I.A. says they don't exist, and to offer blithe assurances about fighting a war in a densely populated urban area when the military itself is very nervous.


But the most important application of the Pitt Principle comes at the top. The president's job is to unify the nation, and lead it through difficult times. If you don't want that job done, you appoint an affable fellow from a famous family who has led a charmed business and political life thanks to his insider advantage. He'll be the kind of guy who sees nothing wrong in seeking partisan advantage from a national crisis, even going so far as to declare that members of the other party don't care about the nation's security.


That way, a great surge of national unity and good feeling can be converted, in little more than a year, into a growing sense of dismay, with more and more Americans saying that the country is going in the wrong direction.


Joshua Micah Marshall suggested in the Washington Monthly recently that the W administration is the gang that can't shoot straight. Without contradicting his accounts of their incompetence, I would add that they are also intentionally evil, as shown by cases like this.

::: posted by Gary at 4:42 AM

That shows I'm up at really bad hours. Since then Pitt has resigned--on Nov. 5, election day, though why then rather than before is a puzzle to me--but on the dark side, the Republicans have apparently retaken control of the Senate as well as the House, so Bush and friends now can steamroll any piece of legislation they like.

More later.

glt 05:41 - [Link]
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