Did Sonia Save Baseball?
As I noted a few weeks back, Annie and I have a very slight acquaintance with Judge Sonia Sotomayor, newly nominated for the Supreme Court. As our interactions with her were entirely pleasant, we were thrilled that Obama chose her for the opening.

My affection for Sotomayor began fourteen years ago, when she issued the injunction that ended the 1994-95 baseball strike after nearly nine months and a canceled World Series. The president alluded to this decision in his nomination announcement yesterday:

"During her tenure on the district court, she presided over roughly 450 cases," he said. "One case in particular involved a matter of enormous concern to many Americans, including me: the baseball strike of 1994 and '95."

To laughter, the president said, "in a decision that reportedly took her just 15 minutes to announce -- a swiftness much appreciated by baseball fans everywhere -- she issued an injunction that helped end the strike."

"Some say," the president said, "that Judge Sotomayor saved baseball."

I thought this was a bit much, but I do believe that by bringing the strike to an end when she did—and specifically forestalling the start of the 1995 season being played with replacement “scab” players—Sotomayor significantly reduced the damage done by the work stoppage. Had the season began with the non-union players, baseball’s history would have been scarred by the labor dispute--something I think would have been far more damaging than the retrospective understanding that subsequent years were marred by steroid use. For instance, Cal Ripken’s consecutive games-played streak--which did so much to remind people what they loved about the game--would have ended if those games had counted. That’s the sort of thing people simply don’t get over.

George Will, however, disagrees:

"The president is a gentleman and a scholar and a great ornament to our society, but he's not a great baseball historian," Will told us.

"He says that when she ended the baseball impasse that was interrupting play in 1994 and 1995, she saved baseball," Will says. "Far from it. What she did was overturn in a sense, the essence, the underlies, the essential theory of American labor relations, which is the parties should slug it out because they know best and whoever wins, wins."

Will says that "in fact, what she did was take sides, took union's side against the management, and in so-doing, wasted 262 days of negotiations. That, far from saving baseball, consigned baseball to seven more years of an unreformed economic system, which happened to be the seven worst years in terms of competitive balance."

Sotomayor, Will says, "delayed the restructuring of baseball. So I would say that far from her saving baseball, as the president says, that in fact, baseball thrives now because we got over the damage that her judicial activism did in that strike."

As much as I often want to punch Will in the nose for his superciliousness and generally douche-ish inclinations, I’ve mostly enjoyed his writings about baseball. “Men at Work” is an excellent book, offering strong insights into what drove Tony Gwynn and Orel Hershiser to the greatness they showed in the ‘80s and ‘90s while exhibiting Will’s genuine love for the game on both an intellectual and experiential level; I can relate.

Here, though, he’s just dead wrong, and I have to believe that the view is driven by his inner partisan rather than his inner seamhead. His opinion presumes much about the nature of that dispute—specifically, that it was rooted in differences so pronounced that their substantive resolution was of greater consequence than getting back to the game itself.

Anyone who’s examined the history of baseball’s labor conflicts understands that the real story as the collective bargaining agreement wound down in the early ‘90s was the determination of small- and mid-market owners to break the MLB Players Association—as much because these rich and powerful men were infuriated at their repeated losses to the union as for actual bottom-line considerations. Thus, Fay Vincent was pushed aside as Commissioner in 1992 and replaced with “interim” Commissioner Bud Selig, who retained his ownership of the Milwaukee Brewers (and as such made a joke of the Commissioner’s putative responsibility to act “in the best interests of baseball”). While MLBPA honcho Don Fehr seemed every bit as much of a dick as Czar Bud, the union essentially was playing defense. But a faction led by White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf wouldn’t compromise, and basically forced the strike. About five weeks later, the World Series was canceled. A few months afterward, spring training opened in Florida and Arizona with non-union players; despite the public outcry against this, the owners were fully ready to begin the season (and, to my memory, charge full ticket prices) using them. Sotomayor’s ruling forestalled all that, effectively compelling the owners to send the scab players home and ensuring that the 1995 season would be played with the big-leaguers.

But the real vapidity of Will’s argument is shown by the fact that it did take seven more years to resolve those underlying issues—and meanwhile the game thrived (albeit thanks in large part to steroid-fueled home run binging). The CBA was first revised in 1997 and began to address some of the owners’ concerns through the “luxury tax” provision and revenue sharing. Those measures were expanded upon in 2002, when Will evidently believes the “economic system” was reformed; the owners finally achieved a measure of success by threatening to contract two teams, but both sides blinked at the prospect of another long strike. Ultimately, the magnitude of the changes ultimately agreed upon that year didn't come close to the abolition of the reserve clause in the ‘70s that ushered in the age of free agency.

As for the “competitive balance” line, that’s a canard: during the period to which Will alludes (1995-2002), six NL teams won the pennant, and five different clubs won the World Series. It would have been more except for the fact that the Yankees put together a historically great team that won four titles between 1996 and 2000—and did so not primarily by buying free agents, as they did before and since, but by home-growing two future Hall of Famers (Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera) and other big stars like Bernie Williams and Andy Pettitte, and surrounding them with talented grinders like Scott Brosius, Tino Martinez, Jeff Nelson and Mike Stanton. There are many previous periods of baseball history in which you could take an eight-year stretch and find just two or three champions, and maybe four pennant winners in both leagues; during the '50s, a time I suspect Will would rhapsodize as a golden age for baseball, the Yankees won the AL pennant in all but two years, and the Dodgers, Braves and Giants ruled the NL.

And all this is even before you consider the silliness of comparing baseball, with its monopoly protections, to other fields in which “the essential theory of American labor relations” might be more pertinent.

Thus: suck it, Poindexter.

Get Over Yourself, Kid
I'm not a big pr0n connoisseur, so it's probably not surprising that I'd never heard of Sasha Grey until very recently, when I read that she would be starring in a new Steven Soderbergh film called "The Girlfriend Experience." If you haven't either, the basic story as I understand it is this: Ms. Grey (not her real name) is 21, and has been working in what porn kingpin Al Goldstein, with refreshing directness, used to call "fuck films" since she was 18. According to this filmography, she has appeared in 167 productions since 2006, which I gather is about the normal pace.

But as she goes out to promote the Soderbergh flick, Grey is at pains to differentiate herself from other adult film performers (even as Soderbergh freely admits that he cast her to capitalize on her notoriety). And since it's a good story, and the hard up (heh heh) newspapers are particularly desperate for those right now, the feature writers are playing along:

Moreover, Grey is establishing herself as a burgeoning multimedia mogul. She calls herself a "performance artist," is filming a documentary, writing a graphic novel and a "sex philosophy" book and recently launched her own production company with the twin goals of changing the look of pornography and empowering women.

"Part of the reason I got into this business was to change it," Grey said. "I can take my fantasies and ideas and deliver those to an audience. It's all an extension of who I am."
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The actress' literary agent, Marc Gerald, is working with Grey on a coffee-table book featuring photos she took on porn sets over the last few years; it will function as a kind of "manifesto" for her singular outlook. The as-yet-untitled book from Vice/MTV Books has a tentative publication date of early next year.He pointed out that the actress operates "to the extreme" in both her business and creative pursuits. "She has an intellectual curiosity you can't force or manufacture," Gerald said.

For her part, Grey -- a petite Sacramento native who speaks with a kind of flat affect and still possesses the physique of a teenage girl -- seemed more interested in talking about her new production company Grey Art than "The Girlfriend Experience." The plan going forward is for her to act as her own manager, work exclusively for herself (rather than one of the big agencies that represent most porn performers) and even direct her own movies.

"All women have the right to be feminist whether you're pro-porn or anti-porn," she said. "But I think it's definitely about continuing to put the control in women's hands. And sending a positive message to our society that every girl in porn is not abused and cracked out."

Her past films include "Face Invaders," "I Wanna Bang Your Sister," and "The King of Coochie 4," which presumably is difficult to follow if you haven't seen the first three; those are all from 2009. To be fair, though, the project Grey did before "Coochie 4" was "Throat: A Cautionary Tale," which presumably has some philosophical heft along with (I'm guessing) multiple penetration action.

(Actually... I did look up a review of this movie. Link definitely NSFW, but I have to admit that it does sound at least sort of interesting plot-wise. It sounds like a remake of "Deep Throat," which I've also never seen but supposedly represented the high point of "art" in the field.)

I don't mean to be (very) judgmental here, nor do I doubt that people in the porn trade can be thoughtful or creative like anyone else. If Sasha Grey wants to be an artist, best of luck. But let's keep it real: people aren't watching this stuff to have their minds expanded, and on the cognitive dissonance scale her behaving as if they are is kind of akin to a NASCAR driver trying to peddle a book of poetry.

Meet the New Boss
Obama's national security speech on Thursday morning at the National Archives was, if nothing else, characteristic: he traced the recent history of an issue as he understands it, sketched out (if slightly oversimplified) the two competing positions, saluted the sincerity of people who hold those views, then tried to stake out a thoughtful middle ground. It's a good trick, even if we've seen him do it a few times now--those who compared today's remarks to the speech Obama gave last spring after the Jeremiah Wright scandal blew up were onto something in structure, at the least. And it certainly beats the "I'm right, and you're not only wrong but morally cretinous" POV of the previous administration on substance and style, hissed out by the vileness that is Dick Cheney moments after Obama wrapped up.

In truth, though, there is far less of a gulf between the policies of this administration and the last one than Cheney seems to believe. Jack Goldsmith, the former Bush administration head of the Office of Legal Counsel, declares as much in this New Republic article--though he notes that a part of the explanation is that many of the worst Bush/Cheney excesses had been curtailed by the last couple years of their administration. For Goldsmith, a serious conservative whose apostasy involved not being quite as psychopathic as some of his bosses, this continuity comes as much happier news than it does to me, or to many on the progressive side of these questions. Here is how he characterizes the distinction:

The main difference between the Obama and Bush administrations concerns not the substance of terrorism policy, but rather its packaging. The Bush administration shot itself in the foot time and time again, to the detriment of the legitimacy and efficacy of its policies, by indifference to process and presentation. The Obama administration, by contrast, is intensely focused on these issues.

The Bush White House had a principled commitment to expanding presidential power that predated 9/11. This commitment led it early on to act unilaterally on military commissions, detention, and surveillance rather than seeking political and legal support from Congress, and to oppose judicial review of these and other wartime policies. The public concerns about presidential power induced by these actions were exacerbated by the administration's expansive rhetoric. Department of Justice opinions and presidential signing statements, for example, made broad claims for an untouchable Commander-in-Chief power that were unnecessary to the tasks at hand. Just as damaging was the administration's frequently expressed desire to expand executive power in order, as Vice President Cheney put it, "to leave the presidency stronger than we found it."
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The Bush administration's opposite rhetorical strategy led many people to suspect that the president was acting to increase his own power rather than to keep the country safe. The strategy's main effect was to distort the legitimacy of many Bush wartime practices that had been uncontroversial in previous wars. The early Bush administration failed to grasp what Lincoln and Roosevelt understood well: the vital ongoing need to convince the citizenry that the president is using his extraordinary war powers for the public good and not for personal or institutional aggrandizement. By the time the Bush administration began to act on this principle in its second term, it was too late; its credibility on these issues--severely damaged not only by unilateralism and expansive rhetoric, but also by mistaken intelligence in the war with Iraq--was unrecoverable.

President Obama, by contrast, entered office with great stores of credibility in speaking about the dangers of terrorism and the difficulties of meeting the terror threat. The new president was a critic of Bush administration terrorism policies, a champion of civil liberties, and an opponent of the invasion of Iraq. His decision (after absorbing the classified intelligence and considering the various options) to continue core Bush terrorism policies is like Nixon going to China. Because the Obama policies play against type and (in some quarters of his party) against interest, they appear more likely to be a necessary response to a real terror threat and thus less worrisome from the perspective of presidential aggrandizement than when the Bush administration embraced essentially the same policies.

To be clear, I don't believe that the new boss is substantially the same as the old boss. Put this down to partisan or temperamental preference if you like, but I do trust Obama more: he's empathetic and thoughtful where Bush was dogmatic and unreflective, I believe he has far greater knowledge of and respect for the Constitution, and unlike Bush he's surrounded by advisers who will articulate viewpoints favoring restraint. Still, this isn't what I was hoping for--because the administration's position implicitly (and in some cases explicitly) reserves the Executive Superpowers for future presidents, some of whom will be more along the lines of Bush (or Cheney himself) in temperament and inclination.

Another, related problem is that in past instances of presidential powers expanded in wartime, the wars had ends. Indeed, Obama (echoing Bush) stated today that this "war" won't conclude with a signing ceremony in which the other side formally gives up the fight. So there might not ever be an endpoint to the powers Bush wielded and Obama claims--and for that matter, as Glenn Greenwald writes, we're never not at war:

Nothing excites our media stars more than saluting and fetishizing the President as a "War President" and "Commander-in-Chief" (David Broder today, in his column entitled "Obama in Command": Obama is "continuing, with minor modifications, the policies and practices of his Republican predecessor . . . . Obama's liberal critics are right. He is a different man now. He has learned what it means to be commander in chief"). But isn't the phrase "war president" a complete redundancy when it comes to the U.S.? Which American presidents were not "war presidents"?

Bill Clinton presided over his war in the Balkans and various bombing campaigns in Iraq ("Operation Desert Fox"), Afghanistan and the Sudan; Bush 41 had his war -- the glorious Desert Storm -- against Iraq, which followed his intrepid invasion of Panama; Reagan conducted his various secret wars in Central America and got his direct war glory by invading Grenada and by bombing Libya (heroically taking out the infant of that country's leader); Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon were all "war presidents" in Southeast Asia; Truman and Eisenhower both presided over the Korean War and the Cold War. I suppose Jimmy Carter may be one of the very few Presidents to whom the label may not apply, since our military involvement during his four post-Vietnam years was of the indirect kind, though even Carter presided over the attempted military rescue of American hostages in Iran and the peak of the Cold War. And I've omitted far more American military actions from this list than I included.
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In other words, there's no such thing as an American President who is not a "war President." We never go more than a few years without some kind of a direct war, and are always waging covert and indirect ones. American presidents are inherently "war presidents." We don't really have any other kind. To vest a specific power in a President on the ground that he's a "War President" is to vest that power in presidents generally and permanently.

That's why this media construct that things are different for "war presidents" -- we have to give "war presidents" greater power and leeway; demand less transparency and accept more secrecy; acquiesce to abridgments of civil liberties when "America is at war"; and, coming soon under the Change banner, allow them the right to imprison people indefinitely with no trials even beyond "war zones" -- is so manipulative and misleading.

As I've written before, our system since the latter stages of the Vietnam conflict has made it far too easy for political leaders to send large numbers of organized, heavily armed Americans beyond our borders to work their will. That's what happens when there's no draft and no potent antiwar constituency of principle, and if that remains unchanged after the experience of the last seven years--when a shockingly small percentage of the citizenry bore all the terrible costs of the conflicts--I can't imagine what will alter the terms of the debate. As Greenwald also notes, if there's one aspect of our contemporary political culture that would shock and appall the Founders, the ease with which we go to war probably would be it.

The Mets and the Phillies
It's been interesting in the last couple years to watch the cognoscenti of the baseball world, most especially but not exclusively the folks at Baseball Prospectus, turn their affections from the Phillies to Mets just as the Phillies began to emerge as the divisional power. I do understand why: on balance, the Mets' core of David Wright, Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran and Johan Santana is no worse and arguably better than the Phils' core of Chase Utley, Ryan Howard, Jimmy Rollins, and Cole Hamels, and the Mets have more money to spend (though the Phils have more than enough to compete these days). The Mets seem to "win" every off-season, having added Francisco Rodriguez (and J.J. Putz) last winter, Santana the one before that, Carlos Delgado and Billy Wagner before 2006 and Beltran and Pedro Martinez a year earlier; the Phillies didn't really measure up with winter acquisitions in any of those years.

Yet the Phils have won the division the last two seasons, and are tied for first through a month and a half this year despite an atrocious collective performance from the starting rotation and a series of meltdowns from closer Brad Lidge (who might be in the midst of another as I type here). The biggest reason the Phils edged out the Mets in each of the last two years is probably the jobs done by the two general managers, Pat Gillick for the Phils and Omar Minaya of the Mets, filling in around their superstars: Gillick found guys like J.C. Romero and Jayson Werth for nothing and made in-season trades for the likes of Joe Blanton, Scott Eyre and Matt Stairs, while Minaya tossed away the likes of Heath Bell and Jesus Flores a couple winters back and let his club's depth deteriorate to the point that he was relying upon journeyman reliever Luis Ayala to close games during the 2008 stretch drive after Wagner got injured. And right now, with Delgado on the shelf and Reyes nicked, he has Jeremy Reed playing first base and Ramon E. Martinez starting at short. As Rob Neyer notes, that's no good for a team with basically unlimited money:

You know what's worse, though? When Tim Redding is your fifth starter. Because you know what that means, don't you? It means that Livan Hernandez is your fourth starter. I happened to be at the ballpark in San Francisco last Friday night, and I just sat there in the first inning, dumbfounded, as Hernandez gave up hit after hit after hit. I can't say that I exactly felt sorry for Hernandez -- after all, nobody forced him to take the Mets' money this spring -- but I couldn't quite help myself.

More, though, I felt sorry for Mets fans who have to put up with a pitcher like Livan Hernandez every five days (particularly if he really is the club's fourth starter, and really will pitch every five days). Frankly, there's simply no excuse for a team with a new ballpark and a $150 million payroll to trot Hernandez out there regularly, and wind up with Jeremy Reed at first base in a close game, and Angel Pagan in left field at the same moment, and ... well, you get the idea. I can't feel sorry for the Mets, and I can't feel too sorry for their fans. Not with that payroll. As a guy who just likes to watch good baseball, though, I find this odd collection of talent just a little bit offensive.

The episode this is "worse" than was last night's Mets loss, for which I didn't quite stay awake. It featured Ryan Church, not tagging third base as he trotted home on what should have been the go-ahead run in the 11th inning, after which he was called out; and the last two of five errors in the bottom of the inning as the Mets fell to Los Angeles by a 3-2 score.

In addition to the Mets' depth problems on display, the gruesome defeat, or rather its aftermath, highlighted the other big difference between the Mets and the Phils. The first of the two errors in the 11th came after a leadoff walk, when Dodgers batter Xavier Paul hit a fly ball to center; Beltran called for it, but left fielder Angel Pagan--another backup pressed into duty--either didn't hear him or ignored him. The ball ticked off Beltran's glove and rolled away, putting men on second and third with no outs. Three batters later, the Mets lost the game when emergency first baseman Reed made a throwing error on a possible double play--but it was the fly ball that both did them in and revealed the club's other serious issue. From the game story:

Pagan and Beltran converged. Beltran said he called the ball, “like, six times,” but Pagan did not move.

“Pagan was still in the middle and I couldn’t see the ball,” Beltran said. “If Pagan would have called that ball, my job is to get out of the way. Basically he stood in the middle and I just couldn’t see the ball.”

This would never, ever happen on the Phillies. Beltran is a superstar, a guy whose contract is worth nearly $120 million; Pagan is a journeyman who's still probably thrilled to get the per diem. It's never good form for any player to toss a teammate under the bus, but for a star to do that to a backup is... well, it's awful. And for a manager, in this case Jerry Manuel, to allow that sort of dynamic to fester borders on gross negligence.

The Mets and Phillies are sufficiently close in talent that a big injury or two, or even simple luck, could determine which club wins and which loses--as arguably those factors did the last two seasons. But for as much as old-school baseball types probably overvalue non-quantifiable factors like "chemistry," I'd certainly rather have the Phils' non-quantifiables.

Three Peeks Into the Right-Leaning Mind
Richard Posner, a prolific author and highly regarded judge on the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, bemoans the marginalization of the conservative intellectual:

By the end of the Clinton administration, I was content to celebrate the triumph of conservatism as I understood it, and had no desire for other than incremental changes in the economic and social structure of the United States. I saw no need for the estate tax to be abolished, marginal personal-income tax rates further reduced, the government shrunk, pragmatism in constitutional law jettisoned in favor of "originalism," the rights of gun owners enlarged, our military posture strengthened, the rise of homosexual rights resisted, or the role of religion in the public sphere expanded. All these became causes embraced by the new conservatism that crested with the reelection of Bush in 2004.

My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.

By the fall of 2008, the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.

During the later Bush years, I thought that right-wingers were increasingly falling prey to the same temptation that did in the Left a generation ago: seeing the world not as it was, but as they wanted it to be. (Witness the Terri Schiavo intervention, the effort to privatize Social Security, the complete unwillingness to rein in market excesses, and the irrational belief that diplomatic isolation combined with kicking someone else's ass would somehow deter North Korea and Iran from their nuclear ambitions.) Usually when this happens, an electoral smack in the face or two is sufficient to prompt a return to reality-based politics, as was the case with Democrats after their landslide losses in 1972 and 1984. Today's Republicans, however, seem more eager to double down on what they see as purity and most of us regard as unhinged extremism than to seriously engage on the most important issues of the day with good faith and new ideas. It's less a philosophy than a dogma, and consequently the party is increasingly less a coalition than a cult.

So it's maybe not surprising that the foremost defender of the faith will pen her testimonial:

Sarah Palin is ready to tell her side, agreeing to publish a memoir with HarperCollins. The book comes out in Spring 2010 — the year she is up for re-election.
"There's been so much written about and spoken about in the mainstream media and in the anonymous blogosphere world, that this will be a wonderful, refreshing chance for me to get to tell my story, that a lot of people have asked about, unfiltered," the Alaska governor and 2008 vice presidential candidate said during a brief telephone interview Tuesday with The Associated Press.
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"Being a voracious reader, I read a lot today and have read a lot growing up. And having that journalism degree, all of that, will be a great assistance for me in writing this book, talking about the challenges and the joys, balancing the work and parenting, and, in my case, work means running the state," Palin said.

"I've read a variety of books, and that helps shape my opinions and my views."

Maybe the upside of Palin repeatedly insisting that she reads a lot is that it might inspire some of her admirers to do the same, and once somebody starts reading, the odds that they'll begin to think for themselves improve. Then again, based on this one example, reading Palin is likely to prove as headache-inducing for anyone who values coherence as was listening to her speak in interviews and campaign appearances.

She does not, however, represent the nadir of right-wing thought, at least so long as the RNC is around:

A conservative faction of the Republican National Committee is urging the GOP to take a harder line against both Democrats and wayward Republicans, drafting a resolution to rename the opposition the “Democrat Socialist Party” and moving to rebuke the three Republican senators who supported the stimulus package.

In an e-mail sent Wednesday to the 168 voting members of the committee, RNC member James Bopp, Jr. accused President Obama of wanting “to restructure American society along socialist ideals.”

“The proposed resolution acknowledges that and calls upon the Democrats to be truthful and honest with the American people by renaming themselves the Democrat Socialist Party,” wrote Bopp, the Republican committeeman from Indiana. “Just as President Reagan’s identification of the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire’ galvanized opposition to communism, we hope that the accurate depiction of the Democrats as a Socialist Party will galvanize opposition to their march to socialism.”

The measure is likely to pass next week, over the objections of party chairman Michael Steele. Actually, Steele comes across as thoughtful on this question, writing in a memo that "while he believes Democrats 'are indeed marching America toward European-style socialism,' ... officially referring to them as the Democrat Socialist Party 'will accomplish little than to give the media and our opponents the opportunity to mischaracterize Republicans.'” Personally, I'm almost surprised that the members didn't go with something like the Stinkypoop Homoterror Party.

Other than providing some amusement, the descent of modern conservatism from Posner and Buckley to Palin and Bopp does nobody any good. Without an electorally competitive Republican Party (or some new alternative to it), we'll increasingly see the worst of the Democrats; indeed, it could be happening already. The next example of effective one-party rule that leads to good governance will be the first.

Overwhelming Force
I just received a phone call from Mayor Bloomberg's re-election campaign. Caller ID registered it as "UNKNOWN CALLER," which most often means it's Annie calling from her work number, but not this time. When I answered, a real live person began to read his script about the Five-Borough Economic Plan and its wonderful job creation and sustainability components. At the end of this maybe thirty-second spiel, the caller asked if the mayor could definitely count on my vote in November's election.

I responded, "We'll see."

He then asked what was the number one issue I was concerned with in the city, at which point I said that I didn't really have time to talk (not true) and he wished me a great day and got off the phone. In retrospect, I should have answered "overturning term limits," which is by far my biggest potential reason for not voting to re-elect the mayor; as I think about it now, I'm dying to know what the script's response is to that complaint. (Given the extensive market research we know Bloomberg conducted in 2005 and presumably is utilizing again this year, I'm guessing that it goes something like this: anyone who complains about term limits is probably a reform-minded liberal, so the best counter-argument is that Bloomberg's independence and freedom from partisan constraints has been of great benefit to the city over the past eight years and will continue to stand us in good stead through the current difficult economy.)

But more to the point, I'm just blown away by the fact that, six months before the election and at a time when Bloomberg's approval ratings remain high and he doesn't even have a clear opponent, the campaign has phone bankers on the payroll calling registered voters. Then again, he's already spent millions on TV advertising that emphasizes the same Five-Borough Economic Plan--that phrase must have tested through the roof--so paying some schlubs $12 an hour to make phone calls doesn't represent an additional major expense.

For the record, I still consider myself undecided. The question remains whether a Bloomberg in his third term (historically a bad idea for New York incumbents), ever more convinced of his own infallibility but still independent by virtue of his unfathomable wealth, is preferable to a Democrat who probably lacks the mayor's managerial acumen and comes pre-corrupted by all the institutional forces that warp the miserable breed known as New York City Democratic politicians. At the moment, my answer is "probably," but I'm open to being convinced otherwise.

Elections Have Consequences
The unemployment figures released on Friday--while still quite horrible--suggest that we might at least have hit bottom in the current recession. But I find much more encouraging the remarks of the President yesterday:

[I]f we want to come out of this recession stronger than before, we need to make sure that our workforce is better prepared than ever before. Right now, someone who doesn't have a college degree is more than twice as likely to be unemployed as someone who does. And so many of the Americans who have lost their jobs can't find new ones because they simply don't have the skills and the training they need for the jobs they want.

In a 21st century economy where the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge, education is the single best bet we can make -- not just for our individual success, but for the success of the nation as a whole. The average college graduate earns 80 percent more than those who stopped after high school. So if we want to help people not only get back on their feet today but prosper tomorrow, we need to take a rigorous new approach to higher education and technical training. And that starts by changing senseless rules that discourage displaced workers from getting the education and training they need to find and fill the jobs of the future.
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So today I'm announcing new steps we are taking to do exactly that -- to give people across America who have lost their jobs the chance to go back to school today to get retrained for the jobs and industries of tomorrow.

The idea here is to fundamentally change our approach to unemployment in this country, so that it's no longer just a time to look for a new job, but is also a time to prepare yourself for a better job. That's what our unemployment system should be -- not just a safety net, but a stepping stone to a new future. It should offer folks educational opportunities they wouldn't otherwise have, giving them the measurable and differentiated skills they need just -- not just to get through hard times, but to get ahead when the economy comes back.
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Say an unemployed factory worker wants to upgrade his skills to become a mechanic or a technician. In many states, that worker might lose temporary financial support if he enrolls in a training program. And to make matters worse, unemployment might mean he can't afford higher education, and he likely won't qualify for federal help simply because he may have made a decent salary a year ago, before he was laid off.

Well, that doesn't make much sense for our economy or our country. So we're going to change it. First, we'll open new doors to higher education and job training programs to recently laid-off workers who are receiving unemployment benefits. And if those displaced workers need help paying for their education, they should get it -- and that's why the next step is to make it easier for them to receive Pell Grants of the sort that Maureen used.

I've asked my Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, and my Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, to work closely with states and our institutions of higher learning and encourage them not only to allow these changes, but to inform all workers receiving unemployment benefits of the training programs and financial support open to them.
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These steps are just a short-term down payment on our larger goal of ensuring that all Americans get the skills and education they need to succeed in today's economy. And to that end, I have asked once again every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. It can be community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship; but whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma. And we will be backing up that effort with the support necessary. And we will ensure that by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.

In the weeks to come, I will also lay out a fundamental rethinking of our job training, vocational education, and community college programs. It's time to move beyond the idea that we need several different programs to address several different problems -- we need one comprehensive policy that addresses our comprehensive challenges.

Not to overdramatize it, but this is the speech that many of us in workforce development have been waiting to hear from a president for the bulk of our professional lives.

It's not LBJ on civil rights or Reagan in Berlin--hell, I might not even have known about it if it weren't for emails circulated by advocacy groups; job training and education have never been sexy content for the press, and as far as I can see, there was no prominent coverage of this speech other than a line or two of reference in stories about the job loss figures. But it sends the message both that Obama gets that knowledge now drives our economy (and that, going forward, this is a much more solid foundation for growth than a return to insanely over-leveraged financial shenanigans), and that his policymaking will reflect this understanding. Three years ago, we had a president who annually proposed to gut funding for human capital formation activities and a Congress that half-heartedly pushed back to moderate the worst of the cuts but still enabled a year-over-year reduction in support, even as an increasingly dynamic/unstable labor market (of which more below) necessitated a stronger safety net. Now we've got a president who understands the problem and a Congress that, if anything, might push him farther on ensuring adequate resources. (Here is the administration's fact sheet on Department of Labor funding in the FY2010 budget.)

And not a moment too soon. Over the last thirty years, we've seen a handful of related fundamental changes in the labor market: manufacturing jobs have all but disappeared, unions have shrunk in power and influence, and income returns to education have spiked, as this 2008 chart shows:



The trend is, if anything, probably accelerating and intensifying. According to a presentation by an economist with the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, between 1979 and 2005-2007, the percent change for expected lifetime earnings in constant dollars for New York City residents was -8.8 percent for those who didn't complete high school; -3.6 percent for high school graduates; -2.5 percent for those with one to three years of college; +28.5 percent for bachelors degree completers, and +45.5 percent for those with a masters or higher. Further, as Obama remarked, education also provides a strong measure of protection against unemployment, through good times and bad.

The upshot of all this, as was noted in the same presentation, is that the public has a huge stake in the educational attainment of its citizens. Over the course of a working lifetime, a New Yorker who didn't complete high school could be expected to cost the public treasury $134,037 more, in cash and in-kind assistance and "institutional costs"--incarceration, the shelter system, and so forth--than he or she will pay in taxes. By contract, a high school graduate or GED completer will contribute a net $192,715, and someone with a Master's or higher can be expected to contribute a net of more than $1.5 million. (Presumably, this isn't me; this is me, plus some corporate macher who makes in a day and a half what I make in a year, divided by two.)

Of course, all this is good reason to invest much more than $50 million in dropout reduction--but that's probably another subject for another day. And more needs to be done to help low-income people balance responsibilities of employment, family, and education, including policies around flex-time and income insurance (one of the notions Obama seems to hint at in the speech). But this is a very promising start.

Embedded in our societal ethic of rugged individualism and deference to free markets is the notion that education is primarily a private good, especially after high school when it's no longer publicly provided or mandated, where the rewards of attainment accrue more or less solely to the educated individual. But in a global economy where we compete on grounds of skill, innovation and creativity, this is less true with every passing day; aggregate educational outcomes in any community you care to discuss exert an enormous impact on equality, prosperity, and public safety, to name just three factors. It's profoundly encouraging to me that our current leaders seem to appreciate this reality.

Courtship
I remember well when William Brennan retired from the Supreme Court in the summer of 1990, eventually to be replaced by a New Hampshirite named David Souter about whom very little was known. As a sensitive and desperately undersexed 17 year-old, I wrote a long non-rhyming poem that, among other things, lamented Brennan's retirement; a year later, Fugazi put out a song that carried the same message, but rocked a lot harder.

Souter, however, turned out to be a pretty fair justice--an enormous disappointment to the militant Republicans who championed his nomination, and an unlikely hero to the liberals who initially viewed his appointment with dismay. When he announced his plans to retire last week, the right took one last opportunity to boo and hiss a man they regarded as a betrayer before starting the pre-emptive demonization of whoever will replace him. I thought this recent article made an important point, though: Souter could credibly argue to be a "judicial conservative," in that he showed a consistent deference to legal precedent and a sympathy to the notion that overturning established legal norms would create chaos within American jurisprudence as well as in the affected domains of policy.

Perhaps not surprisingly, this is the kind of conservatism I can get behind: a reluctance to change too much too fast, or to impose an unambiguous, ideologically driven preference upon a public far more divided in its views. In the realm of policy, this likely constrains liberals more than conservatives: it furnishes the most compelling argument against blowing up the current patchwork of health coverage in favor of a single-payer system, for instance. In matters of law, however, this is exactly the sensibility that the likes of John Roberts and Sam Alito seem most determined to sweep aside--hence their decisions gutting school desegregation and aggressively reinterpreting the Second Amendment, among other matters previously thought to be settled. There are few more bitter ironies in public life today than self-described conservatives bemoaning "judicial activists," when the judges most determined to discard precedents and impose their own views from the bench are all now found on the far right.

I think one would have to go back to Lyndon Johnson's presidency to find the last "activist liberal" appointed to the Court. One question now facing President Obama is whether he will seek to replace Souter with a Roberts or Alito of the left, or a Souter-type champion of judicial restraint. Another way to frame this choice is whether Obama's ideal justice would more regularly do battle with conservative ideologue Antonin Scalia, or seek to bring the consistently inconsistent Anthony Kennedy over to the liberal side.

Among the rumored candidates for the nomination is Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who would be the first Hispanic justice and third woman ever appointed. Sotomayor first got public attention--and won a permanent spot in my heart--in March 1995, when she issued the injunction that ended the baseball strike. The evolving debate over her possible nomination offers an interesting window into the state of our national discourse: coincidentally or not, the right's emerging critique of Judge Sotomayor--that she's possessed of a second-rate intellect and an obnoxious temperament--aligns almost perfectly with the stereotypical denigration of Puerto Ricans from the Bronx; she happens to be a Puerto Rican from the Bronx. Glenn Greenwald offered a devastating takedown of this smear against Sotomayor earlier this week that's well worth a read.

I've always found the Supreme Court pretty compelling anyway (did I mention I wrote a poem about William Brennan's resignation when I was 17?...), but Sotomayor's prospects for elevation especially so because I know her--very slightly--socially.

The judge presided at the 2005 wedding of one of Annie's friends, a lawyer who had met her professionally and struck up a friendship, at a private residence in Connecticut. At the reception afterwards we talked about baseball a bit; she's a huge Yankees fan, as you might expect from a Bronx native. She's not, however, very fond of Alex Rodriguez, whom she claimed couldn't hit in the clutch. (I disagreed then, both on the grounds that clutch hitting doesn't exist and that the guy had delivered in enough big spots to discredit the argument; four years later, I'm not as sure about either point.) She was also at a party in Brooklyn thrown by the same friends a few months later, and wound up giving Annie and me a ride into Manhattan at the end of it--during which she solemnly pronounced that she could tell we were "a good couple."

Obviously this doesn't have much to do with whether she would be an effective Supreme Court justice. But I'll admit it has me rooting for her appointment.

Boob vs. Lech
Amusing/sad poll finding of the day:

The latest Marist Poll is a mixed bag for Gov. David Paterson (D-NY). It's partly bad news -- and partly really bad news.

This number must really hurt: When New York's registered voters are asked whether they would rather have Eliot Spitzer or David Paterson as governor, it's Spitzer 51%, Paterson 38%.

Back to Spitzer in a bit, but let's briefly consider the desperate straits of the incumbent. Overall, Paterson's approval rating is at 19 percent, and almost every story involving the governor's popularity now includes the words "record low." He's evidently committed to running next year regardless, despite widespread speculation that Attorney General Andrew Cuomo will take the top spot on the Democratic ticket. (That Cuomo leads Paterson by about 50 points in polling certainly strengthens this theory.)

But Paterson's evident plan to revive political fortunes seems as confused and boneheaded as everything else in his accidental tenure--even if some aspects of it are surprisingly admirable. The obvious strategy for him would be to emphasize his African-American heritage, a gambit that makes particular sense against Cuomo; the current attorney general and son of the three-term governor saw his 2002 bid for the statehouse founder when he went up against state Comptroller Carl McCall, an African-American behind whom Democratic leaders had coalesced early in the campaign cycle. Cuomo ultimately withdrew from the race before the primary and has spent much of his time since trying to rebuild his bridges with black voters and party insiders.

Even if Paterson doesn't generally present himself as a "black politician"--to his credit, as far as I'm concerned--he does hail from the Harlem Democratic machine, and rallying the New York City establishment behind him probably would suffice to hold off Cuomo. His highest-profile campaign-like move to date, however, has been to come out in favor of same-sex marriage... a position supported by majorities of whites and Hispanics, but opposed by a plurality of African-Americans. Add in that Paterson's timing, if not his underlying position (he was a champion of same-sex unions in the state Senate for years before joining Spitzer's ticket as lieutenant governor in 2006), is pretty explicitly political, and it's not hard to see how the position could sap enthusiasm in the black community for his re-election, if not actual support.

(Of course, this is more than a little tricky for Cuomo as well. Our Democratic electorate is pretty liberal, after all, and if he tries to run to Paterson's right on marriage equality--by favoring civil unions, say--he'll risk turning contributors and volunteers back toward the governor. Personally, as an absolutist on marriage equality who's not fond of either Paterson or Cuomo, it could be a threshold issue for my primary vote... though the thought of voting for Paterson makes me almost physically ill. Considering both this issue and his past tangle with McCall, Cuomo is surely hoping that Paterson withdraws from the race before he has to jump in and take him on directly.)

Meanwhile, Paterson continues trying to govern while struggling with public contempt on a level far more intense than even George W. Bush saw. I think the guy's done a fairly awful job, failing to manage his legislative majorities and looking ever more ineffectual on the subject of the MTA bailout--something I keep meaning to write about here, but that makes me angry well beyond the point of coherence. Still... 19 percent? If I had to, I could make an argument for the guy: he finally got reform of the Rockefeller Drug Laws through, he passed a budget that has more spending than I or many New Yorkers would have preferred but managed not to gut education or social services, as right-wingers were calling, and recently he issued an executive order that will please many union members. (Another naked political gambit, but probably good policy nonetheless: there's no reason why public subsidies should support employers who bully and deprive their workers as a matter of course.) So the low rating likely has as much or more to do with a by now well established public perception of Paterson's ineptitude than a reasoned consideration of his actions in office--though, again, I think that perception is grounded in reality. (Conservatives can and have argued that Bush was the victim of a similar dynamic in his last two years, and to be fair, the bulk of his substantive disasters probably did come while he enjoyed far more public support than he did in 2007-2008.)

The evident public preference for Paterson's unfortunate predecessor also makes more sense than it might at first seem. In 2006, Spitzer won an overwhelming victory; the race was really more a coronation than a contest. By the time his sexcapades drove him from office, his ratings were way down from the early public adoration he'd enjoyed... but still around twice Paterson's current approval. Spitzer never seemed overwhelmed or unequal to the office; he just came across as a bullying asshole in a job where some diplomacy was called for. Ironically, that unpleasant type-A nature probably would be playing well today as "the sheriff of Wall Street" likely would be a media fixture in debates over post-crash regulation of financial markets. Sadly, the job I think Spitzer would be absolutely perfect for--leader of a new "Pecora Commission" to investigate the facts behind the pre-recession machinations and recommend corrective measures--is probably beyond his reach thanks to his legacy as Client Number Nine.

Specter and the Sinking Ship
Democrats are mostly exulting today at the news that longtime Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter will leave the Republican Party to caucus with them and run for his seventh term as a Dem next year. It's not hard to understand why they're pleased, nor why Specter made the switch. But I think the fact that he's leaving the Republicans suggests something about our politics that should trouble anyone with a stake in the system's success: it's now evidently impossible to be a Republican if you deviate from the party line in any significant way. Or as Glenn Greenwald (no fan of the move, by the way) put it:

The G.O.P. now resembles a religion more than a political party, where any deviance from established dogma is considered heresy that warrants excommunication. Its collapse into a Southern regional party has taken one large step forward. It is remarkable to watch an already marginalized party purposely shrink itself further.

The somewhat misleading math of "60 Senators to cut off debate" aside, I think it could easily be argued that the country, if not the Democrats themselves, is better off with someone like Specter remaining among the Republicans. The Senate runs on compromise, and as frustrating as they might be, the moderates in both caucuses usually drive those compromises. There are now perhaps five Republican Senators--Snowe, Collins, McCain, Voinovich, and Lugar--whom Democrats could even reasonably approach on this or that issue to cut a deal. But even those five will come under that much more pressure not to compromise in a smaller but more ideologically "pure" party.

For their part, the Democrats are likely to find that their caucus becomes exponentially less manageable as it expands. Whereas Specter before could extract concessions as a possible crossover vote to invoke cloture, as on the stimulus measure, he will now do so from inside the tent--and he'll be joined by as many as a dozen other Democratic Senators asking why the noob should get more deference than they. Given the difficulties that congressional party leaders already have endured (or as some might put it, caused) in advancing Obama's agenda, another unreliable vote could cause more harm than good.

The bigger problem, however, is with the Republicans. It's sad, but not surprising, that the most common reaction from the rightward side of the political spectrum to today's big news has been "good riddance." And it's not just from irate bloggers or grass-roots activists, either; Republican Sen. Jim DeMint stated that he would rather have 30 reliable-voting Republicans in the Senate than 60 "who don't have a set of beliefs." Among the Republicans, it's clear that ideological purity now runs far ahead of actual influence on the policymaking process.

But one of the ironies of Senate problem children like Specter and--it must be said--Joe Lieberman is that even as they frustrate colleagues and infuriate party loyalists, they see themselves as principled iconoclasts--public servants who consider each issue on its merits rather than merely deferring to the party leaders. As individuals, I find them both pretty loathsome; Lieberman's dishonesty and sanctimony are well established, and Specter looks today like an enormous hypocrite as well as a craven opportunist. (Which he is: he actually jumped in the other direction 43 years ago.) At the same time, though, their "unpredictability" might be more admirable, and is almost certainly closer to how the Founders imagined that the Senate should function, than the increasingly common party-line voting on both sides.

Perhaps the biggest difference between the two parties today is that the Democrats now tolerate heterodoxy on a wide range of issues, while the Republicans do not. The concern now is that the Democrats will (further?) abandon their principles in favor of holding onto power, while the Republicans already have abandoned everything but a very parochial interpretation of their own.

Degrees of Difficulty
This past week in news was increasingly dominated by the debate over whether the government--not, importantly, "President Obama"--should investigate further into the decisions and actions taken to implement a torture regime during the Bush administration. Putting aside Republican apologists like the endlessly vapid Peggy Noonan who would prefer that we just "keep walking" past the unpleasantness, there are two arguable positions: the one evidently held by the president himself, that a deeper inquiry into what happened and who if anybody should be held accountable would take up too much political oxygen and impose an unacceptable opportunity cost on getting other public business done (as explained, if not necessarily championed, by Marc Ambinder), and that concepts of the rule of law and equal justice under it are so important that national honor demands an investigation. After some ambivalence, I'm now solidly in the second camp with Andrew Sullivan and others. I don't really care if anyone goes to jail--but a full airing of what happened, particularly how prevalent the practice of torture was (how far beyond "name" terrorists like Khalid Sheikh Muhammed it went), and whether it was used to try to produce "evidence" that would support the Iraq war, is necessary both to understanding our recent history and to do as much as possible to ensure that mistakes aren't repeated.

I worry, though, that the process of coming clean to ourselves and the world regarding our deplorable and illegal actions will go undone for the same reason that we might not get health care reform or effective environmental legislation or even common-sense regulation of the finance industry: it's too damn hard, and it would impose disadvantage on some powerful people and/or groups. As a culture, it sometimes seems we have come to believe that if a thing isn't easy, it isn't worth trying.

Have we really done anything "politically difficult" in the last forty-plus years? Lyndon Johnson passing Medicare and Medicaid and civil rights legislation in 1965 is the last example that comes to mind. I guess one could make a case for the 1986 tax reforms, which did represent positive change but, as I remember, spread the pain broadly enough and was carried out on enough of a bipartisan basis that nobody really stood out as bearing the brunt of it and no politician obviously lost his job as a result. Bill Clinton's first budget, which passed on a straight party-line vote, was effective as policy--it sent the signal to the financial markets that the administration would be responsible in addressing deficits, and thus helped kick off the boom of the '90s--but it was devastating from a political perspective. The Democrats seem to have learned from that experience that responsible governance was lousy politics, and the experience confirmed the Republicans in the divisive and ideological practices they've trafficked in ever since.

To me and, I think, many other progressives, Obama seemed preferable to Hillary Clinton because he seemed to have the clarity of vision to understand that some fundamental changes were needed to ensure America's continued prosperity, and because unlike the Clintons he wasn't so enmeshed in the status quo, or cowed by the experience of coming under vicious criticism, that he would hesitate to push for those big changes. In the best case scenario, he really will prove to be a "pragmatic visionary" (or visionary pragmatist, I guess) who can create the largest possible coalition for needed changes but then does not hesitate to take on a tough fight. The announcement last week that the Democrats would retain the reconciliation option to get health reform done was a good sign in this respect. But on many small points--the few fiscally responsible measures in the budget proposal, for one--I worry that he's backing off too much. The resolution of the proposed "defense cuts" (which actually amount to a four percent increase in a military budget that's already more than triple what Russia and China spend combined) will be revealing on this question, as will the probably much more consequential battle to appropriately price fossil fuels (about which Tom Friedman has some worthwhile thoughts in today's NYT).

Obama's calm manner and temperamental disinclination to throw sharp elbows has stood him in good stead through his first months in office and probably has had a lot to do with the encouraging movement in "right track/wrong track" polling numbers--a difficult-to-quantify but important measure of public support for a president's approach as well as his policies. But at some point he's going to run into fights, tough ones at that. The importance of his winning them goes beyond the specifics of the issue; we need to remember that Americans still can attempt difficult things, and accomplish them.

Lagging Indicators
New York magazine is an odd duck: its main obsessions seem to be the Hamptons scene and the trashy TV show "Gossip Girl" (seriously: go to nymag.com ten days in a row, and I guarantee you'll see those two words on the home page seven or eight of them at least), but they also frequently offer truly interesting features on politics, culture, and the economy. The current issue includes a story that touches upon all three: The Wail of the 1%.

In a witch hunt, the witches have feelings, too. As populist rage has erupted around the country, stoked by canny politicians, an opposite rage has built on Wall Street and other arenas where the wealthy hold sway. Its expression is more furtive and it’s often mixed with a kind of sublimated shame, but it can be every bit as vitriolic.
...
Their anger takes many forms: There is rage at Obama for pushing to raise taxes (“The government wants me to be a slave!” says one hedge-fund analyst); rage at the masses who don’t understand that Wall Street’s high salaries fund New York’s budget (“We’re fucked,” says a former Lehman equities analyst, referring to the city); rage at the people who don’t “get” that Wall Street enables much of the rest of the economy to function (“JPMorgan and all these guys should go on strike—see what happens to the country without Wall Street,” says another hedge-funder).

A few weeks ago, I had drinks with a friend who used to work at Lehman Brothers. She had come to Wall Street in the mid-eighties, when the junk-bond boom spawned a new class of globe-trotting financiers. Over two decades, she had done stints at all the major banks—Chase, Goldman, Lehman—and had a thriving career directing giant streams of capital around the world and extracting a substantial percentage for herself. To her mind, extreme compensation is a fair trade for the compromises of such a career. “People just don’t get it,” she says. “I’m attached to my BlackBerry. I was at my doctor the other day, and my doctor said to me, ‘You know, I like that when I leave the office, I leave.’ I get calls at two in the morning, when the market moves. That costs money. If they keep compensation capped, I don’t know how the deals get done. They’re taking Wall Street and throwing it in the East River.”

Now, a lot of people in New York have BlackBerrys, and few of them expect to be paid $2 million to check their e-mail in the middle of the night. But embedded in her comment is the belief shared on Wall Street but which few have dared to articulate until now: Those who select careers in finance play an exceptional role in our society. They distribute capital to where it’s most effective, and by some Ayn Rand–ian logic, the virtue of efficient markets distributing capital to where it is most needed justifies extreme salaries—these are the wages of the meritocracy. They see themselves as the fighter pilots of capitalism.

"Fighter pilots of capitalism" is a great phrase for it, implying a taste for danger, an esprit de corps, and a frank realization that sometimes you get splattered all over the sky. It also captures the grandiosity of the traders' pretensions: after all, they aren't facing off with the fate of western civilization at stake--they're moving money around. And when they get shot down for making a mistake, others bleed for it.

I don't have tremendous sympathy for the complaints of the Wall Streeters. (Does anyone?) But one point any honest observer must acknowledge is that these people operated under a set of rules and assumptions that, while things were going well, relatively few people took issue with. (Take it from a New Yorker who does understand, painfully, how much our city budget has come to rely upon Wall Street bonuses.) It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that society at large mirrored and cheered on the bankers. We now despise them for doing pretty much the same things for which three years ago they were lionized.

As Washington denuded the regulations that had constrained finance, the banks themselves encouraged their employees to pursue maximum risk. Bonuses were paid based largely on short-term profits. “It was the culture of what some called IBG-YBG: I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone,” says Jonathan Knee, a senior managing director at Evercore Partners. Wall Street championed the ethos of “Eat what you kill.” The most aggressive employees, those who took the greatest risks, thought of themselves less as members of a firm and more as independent contractors entitled to their share of the profits. In this system, institutions tended to be hostage to their best employees. “The feeling is, if people don’t get compensated adequately, they’re going to go out and do this on their own,” says Alan Patricof, who founded the private-equity firm Apax Partners.
...
I asked [an industry veteran] what will happen if Congress succeeds in regulating compensation. “These guys will not work on Wall Street,” he says flatly. “People go to Wall Street out of greed. When I was interviewing for jobs, frequently some form of the question came up: How much do you want to make money? If my answer was something like—and it wasn’t—but if my answer was, ‘I’m here for intellectual betterment,’ their response might have been, ‘University is a great place for you.’ They want people who think ‘I’m greedy, I want to be a billionaire.’ That was viewed as a really good thing.”

I would like to think that the trauma of this recession will lead to some degree of cultural change in the financial sector. But this doesn't seem particularly likely, given the ongoing prominence of industry leaders and sympathizers among top policymakers, and maybe it's not even entirely desirable. Capitalism runs on, if not greed, then certainly self-interest; the whole idea of the invisible hand is that we collectively do better as each of us attempts to better ourselves individually. Perhaps the answer isn't to reform Wall Street, but to more effectively circumscribe its activities and the risks we allow it to run on the collective behalf.

4/20
The New York Times settles (maybe) a question we were discussing with some friends this past weekend: how the number "420" became associated with marijuana consumption, to the point where today's date became a "high holiday" of sorts.

Mr. Hager said the significance of April 20 dates to a ritual begun in the early 1970s in which a group of Northern California teenagers smoked marijuana every day at 4:20 p.m. Word of the ritual spread and expanded to a yearly event in various places. Soon, marijuana aficionados were using “420” as a code for smoking and using it as a sign-off on fliers for concerts where the drug would be plentiful.

Other explanations offered had to do with the molecular composition of THC and police radio shorthand for pot-related lawbreaking. Since this guy is also just offering a hearsay explanation, it's perhaps appropriate that the answer remain a bit hazy.

The Times article also notes the growing optimism of drug legalization advocates that marijuana will gain some legal recognition in the relatively near future. For his part, Andrew Sullivan has been trying to move the ball down the field by running a series on his blog he's branded "The Cannibis Closet," featuring letters from established, successful people who regularly indulge in the forbidden flora. Here are a few representative examples.

I'm for decriminalization and interested in the revenue-raising possibilities of full legalization with a government monopoly, though I wonder if the policing costs of enforcing that monopoly would absorb too much of the savings from enforcing the criminal statutes to make such a move worthwhile. And I'm basically on board with the first argument of Sullivan and other pro-legalization voices: that heavy use of marijuana is less harmful than alcoholism. (For one quick illustration why this is a defensible point, see here.) But the breezy implication, bordering on outright assertion, that pot is totally harmless, troubles me. Obviously there are things it's just not a great idea to do while high, including many of the same things (driving, operating power tools, etc) one shouldn't do while drunk. The effects of long-term use, though, can be damaging as well, and as is the case with alcohol, an individual's body type and chemistry has a big impact on tolerance as well as how one holds up over a span of years with it.

Beyond that, it's said that "marijuana addiction" is almost a contradiction in terms: there's no physical dependency that develops, as is not the case with heroin or alcohol. But the line between addiction and habit--something one does regularly, almost as a matter of routine--is not always entirely clear, and I can say with some confidence that a pot habit carries some unhealthy consequences. You might eat too much, and not well; you might circumscribe your social circle. Mental acuity suffers, as does ambition; recall goes a bit fuzzy in spots. On the other hand, it can be a hell of a lot of fun, and a spur to creativity and relaxation. Essentially it rearranges one's senses and abilities: some things get better, some things get worse.

I guess the takeaway from all of this is that simplistic answers--total prohibition or total celebration--add no value. But the rational answer from a policy perspective (it should be allowed, but with as full public information as possible and responsible controls, similar to how we treat alcohol but probably without the celebratory advertising) and a personal perspective (nothing necessarily wrong with trying it, but understand what it is you're doing) might remain beyond the grasp of a society that still tends to embrace the simplistic.

Update: Mark Bowden has a worthwhile column in today's Philadelphia Inquirer that tracks my feelings on the legalization/celebration question fairly closely.

Shining a Light on the Dark Side
At some point I stopped following the legal questions around our national embrace of torture during the Bush years. Maybe it's that I can handle pure evil on its own, or lawyerese on its own, but the combination is just too much for me. So it was with some surprise that I read earlier this week that today marked a deadline for the release of Office of Legal Counsel memos from the Bush administration detailing what was and was not allowable in terms of techniques for "enhanced interrogations"--as Orwell reminds us, it always starts with language--under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. Bloggers like Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald presented the question of whether the Obama administration would release the memos without enormous redaction as a threshold test for how sincere the former Constitutional law professor was in his professed embrace of transparency and determination to move the country beyond the shameful practices embraced by his predecessor.

He passed.

The Department of Justice will today release certain memos issued by the Office of Legal Counsel between 2002 and 2005 as part of an ongoing court case. These memos speak to techniques that were used in the interrogation of terrorism suspects during that period, and their release is required by the rule of law.

My judgment on the content of these memos is a matter of record. In one of my very first acts as President, I prohibited the use of these interrogation techniques by the United States because they undermine our moral authority and do not make us safer. Enlisting our values in the protection of our people makes us stronger and more secure. A democracy as resilient as ours must reject the false choice between our security and our ideals, and that is why these methods of interrogation are already a thing of the past.

In the same statement, in a move that probably frustrated many on the left, Obama also declared that there would be no prosecutions of CIA personnel who conducted the torture. On balance--and viscerally distasteful though it is--this is the right decision: his point that intelligence operatives must be able to carry out orders without concern for their own legal jeopardy is correct.

If anyone should stand in the dock, it's the OLC lawyers who drew up the memos, as well as their political masters in the Office of the Vice-President. That seems unlikely, though, considering Obama's language that "this is a time for reflection, not retribution." I still want to see the moral monsters who drew up these policies called to account, but simply having the truth out there represents an important first step to reclaiming something of our good reputation in the world.

And the memos themselves? I haven't read them closely--in fact I just skimmed through, before reading any of the other coverage, to get a sense of how much blacked-out blocks of text there was. But one thing that did catch my eye in passing was the extensive language regarding what interrogators could and could not do in one psychological torment planned for suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah: putting an insect into a "confinement box" with the suspect:

In addition to using the confinement boxes alone, you also would like to introduce an insect into one of the boxes with Zubaydah. As we understand it, you plan to inform Zubaydah that you are going to place a stinging insect into the box, but you will actually place a harmless insect in the box, such as a caterpillar. If you do so, to ensure that you are outside the predicate act requirement, you must inform him that the insects will not have a sting that would produce
death or severe pain. If, however, you were to place the insect in the box without informing him that you are doing so, then, in order to not commit a predicate act, you should not affirmatively lead him to believe that any insect is present which has a sting that could produce severe pain or suffering or even cause his death. [REDACTED] so long as you take either of the approaches we have described, the insect's placement in the box would not constitute a threat of severe physical pain or suffering to a reasonable person in his position. An individual placed in a box, even an individual with a fear of insects, would not reasonably feel threatened with severe physical pain or suffering if a caterpillar was placed in the box. Further, you have informed us that you are not aware that Zubaydah has any allergies to insects, and you have not informed us of any other factors that would cause a reasonable person in that same situation to believe that an unknown insect would cause him severe physical pain or death. Thus, we conclude that the placement of the insect in the confInement box with Zubaydah would not constitute a predicate act.

Consider the baseline absurdity of that phrase: "a reasonable person in his position."

It should be mentioned that Abu Zubaydah is a clearly evil guy, whose least offenses included running a terrorist training camp and recruiting for al Qaeda; he's no innocent by any stretch. But he's also fucking nuts, a truth that was known before they started torturing him:

As part of his look into the capture and interrogation of Zubaydah, Suskind quotes Dan Coleman, the FBI agent who was the bureau’s first case agent on Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, and who had been working the terror beat since the 1980s. Soon after his capture, Coleman described Zubaydah as “insane, certifiable, a split personality” — an opinion, according to Suskind, that was shared by the CIA’s top brass, and conveyed to the president and vice president. Despite this, Suskind reports that when the president learned that Zubaydah was mentally ill, he told then-CIA director George Tenet, “I said he was important …You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?” Tenet, ever the company man, replied, “No sir, Mr. President.”

But more to the point is the case of Zubaydah’s diaries, seized during his capture in March 2002. In making the case that Zubaydah was mentally ill, Suskind explains that his diaries were written in the voices of three people, Hani 1, Hani 2 and Hani 3. Hani 1 was a boy, ten years younger than Zubaydah, Hani 2 was the same age as Zubaydah, and Hani 3 was a decade older. “What was being observed,” Suskind writes about the diaries, “by three pairs of eyes, meanwhile, was often less than compelling — what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said … in page after page. Zubaydah was a logistics man, a fixer, mostly for a niggling array of personal items, like the guy you call who handles the company health plan, or benefits, or the people in human resources. There was almost nothing ‘operational’ in his portfolio. That was handled by the management team. He wasn’t one of them.”

Despite this, every bit of information extracted from Zubaydah through torture (Suskind recounts the particulars of his treatment in gruesome detail) sent teams of FBI agents and local law enforcement officials scrambling across the country, trying to put out fires that didn’t really exist.

Orwell wrote in 1984 that "the purpose of torture is torture." In this case, if Suskind is to be believed, the purpose of torture was to save face for the president, and its consequence was an enormous amount of man-hours and money expended on false leads from a madman who probably was just trying to blurt out anything to get the caterpillar out of the box. That at least we're starting to come clean about this deep stain is the only redeeming element; we'll take it.

Harry Kalas, 1936-2009
Legendary Phillies broadcaster Harry Kalas passed away today, a couple hours before the Phils took the field in Washington. He was 73 years old.

I'm having trouble putting into words what Harry meant to me, or probably to most anyone who grew up a baseball fan in the Philadelphia area over the last forty years. He was, very simply, the voice of the game, someone who shaped my enjoyment of the game probably to a greater extent than anyone else--players, writers, other broadcasters, whoever. One common sentiment on Back She Goes and The Good Phight today was that Harry's joy, his love of baseball win, lose, or rainout, helped make the team and the game fun even when the Phils were dreadful, as they were through the late '80s and most of the '90s. It was a treat to enjoy the game with him, every game; his voice and style were perfect for the day-in, day-out nature of baseball.

(And as I'm typing this while listening to the Nationals announcers butchering Harry's craft with a barrage of homerism, forced camaraderie and useless information--finally muting the computer for some blessed relief--I'm just thinking of how fucking great a broadcaster he was. Harry let silence tell the story as much as speech: he seemed to recognize, as so few young announcers do, that the background hum of a ballpark filled with fans is itself thrilling, and far superior to words that hold no value. There was something almost sacred about being in the car, usually by myself, listening to that background hum before Harry's midwestern tones broke through the silence with the next pitch: "fastball down low, the count is two and one.")

My childhood at its best was Harry calling a Mike Schmidt home run. Earlier today, Schmitty returned the favor.



He went fast, doing what he loved--he'd called a thrilling comeback win in Denver yesterday and was getting ready for today's game when his time came. He got to enjoy the 2008 championship, and best of all, we got to enjoy it with him.

Rest in peace, Harry. You'll be deeply missed.

A Test
Regular readers here (all four of you) know that I supported Barack Obama in large part because I thought he had the nearly unique ability among contemporary American politicians to not just respond to and/or try to manipulate public opinion in support of policies that he (and I) might favor, but to actually shift public opinion over time through education and persuasion. This means both directly engaging the public through speeches, interactions, electoral and issue campaigning, and so forth, and resetting the terms of debate by mobilizing favorable segments of the public to push intermediaries in the news press and the culture at large toward more favorable terrain. As Lincoln and Roosevelt showed, it's neither a quick process nor something that necessarily can happen absent traumatic circumstances like Civil War or Depression, but it is possible.

I mention this again because Matt Miller puts his finger on a concern that could turn out to be Obama's biggest short-term political challenge as well as the greatest test of his ability to move the needle on fundamental questions of American political culture: the "best" size and role of government, rates of taxation and level of engagement with citizens' lives. I share Miller's diagnosis but dissent from his prescription:

Obama never answered the question of how his epic debt can be squared with his call for generational responsibility. He can’t, because it can’t.

Behind this fudge is a secret: Obama and his advisers expect to limit such debt via broader tax increases, presumably in a second term. As every honest observer knows (and as I show in this chapter of my book The Tyranny of Dead Ideas), once this recession is past, taxes will go up in the years ahead no matter who is in power. John McCain’s top economic advisers from the campaign say so themselves. That’s because we’re retiring the baby boom, which means we’ll be doubling the number of people on Social Security and Medicare. We already have trillions of dollars in unfunded promises in these programs. The math simply doesn’t work at current levels of taxation.

...[T]he one hard truth Barack Obama won’t utter is that all Americans will have to pay higher taxes before long.

Why not? The answer, at one level, is obvious, but it’s instructive to dissect. Having sat in such meetings in the early Clinton years, I suspect the conversation at the White House ran something like this. Yes, the president’s advisers told him, at some point taxes will need to rise broadly for the reasons described above. If we didn’t inherit this economic mess, we might be discussing it now as part of a plan to put Medicare and Social Security on a sounder footing. But tax cuts are needed for most Americans to combat the recession—and, by the way, that’s what you promised in the campaign. Saying the truth publicly—that taxes will need to rise once the recession is past—will let the GOP brand you as a tax-and-spend socialist. They’ll try to do that anyway based on the modest taxes for the top you’re proposing, but if you go this further step, their charge may well stick. Given how tough times are for most Americans today, floating the prospect of future tax increases would cost you too much support, and your ambitious agenda—hard to enact under any circumstances—would be imperiled. Better to finesse this tax thing for now.

Emphasis mine. As the article continues, Miller argues that it really isn't "better to finesse" this long-term question--but I would counter (unhappily) that while he's probably right in a perfect world, in the one we all live in it's irrational to sacrifice the entire progressive agenda on the altar of immediate intellectual honesty.

Crazy as it seems, I think the problem is that for those not paying fairly close attention, which is most people, the connection between taxes and government services doesn't immediately come to mind--certainly not for government services of value to the individual who's thinking about it. After forty years of right-wing framing and advancement of a critique that, to be fair, had some basis in reality, the notion that comes to mind when one hears "higher taxes" is of Big Gummit reaching into one's pockets to throw pizza parties, treat special interest buddies to hookers 'n' blow, provide full body massages to welfare dependents, or something similarly silly and/or offensive. As Miller points out, Obama or any president at this point would face the choice between raising taxes and cutting entitlement spending. But until a measure of rationality is reintroduced into the discourse, the only reasonable political move is to BS and delay the painful moment when the subject is raised. Even if public confidence in government is rising some (as Obama's approval ratings suggest), I can't imagine it's close to where it would need to be to ease congressional Democrats who recall 1994--when a small tax increase, which eventually succeeded beyond anybody's hopes, demolished big Democratic majorities in the midterms.

Maybe the real question is what flavor of irresponsibility one prefers. Mark Schmitt writes that after years of the Bush administration and congressional Republicans pushing tax cuts first, then bringing up the spending side afterward, progressives have flipped the script:

The economic crisis makes deficits not just acceptable but essential as economic stimulus. We can advocate new investment in neglected priorities such as education, clean energy, and health reform, while avoiding the annoying question: How are you going to pay for all that? Just as the Republicans were able to treat taxes in isolation, we have the privileged position -- granted by unhappy accident rather than Ponzi tactics -- of being able to spend without consequence.

But the separation of spending from taxation cannot last, either. Stimulus is, by definition, temporary. As President Barack Obama's first budget proposes, when the economic cycle turns, we will need to bring the deficit down to a historically manageable level. While economists have different views about what that level is, it is unquestionably below the level projected under current tax and spending policies.

As Schmitt notes, the Bush-era Comptroller General, David Walker, believes that our political system is simply unable to embrace the hard decisions and has called for a "fiscal responsibility commission," which could somewhat take elected officials off the hook for having to raise taxes AND cut services--which I remember hearing a bipartisan panel of three experts, including Walker, saying a few years back would be the only way we could eventually dig out. (I think this was that.)

Schmitt wants to take issue with Walker's prescription and let the debate play out through normal channels, writing: "Progressives have nothing to gain from evading the long-term fiscal crisis. Genuinely transformative economic policy requires connecting the investment we favor with the taxes that will eventually finance it and being willing to restructure the tax system entirely." If this is to happen, though, the country's most prominent progressive will have to lead the way.

The Limitations of Jocknalysis
When commercials began airing in December for the New Year's Day launch of MLB Network, the 24-hour-a-day all-baseball cable channel, Annie worried that our marriage as well as my livelihood might be at risk. While this hasn't turned out to be the case--basically I now just watch the channel for the few minutes per day I might previously have spent with "SportsCenter"--I am obviously happy to know with total certainty that anytime, day or night, I can turn on the TV and enjoy baseball-related programming. Turns out that MLB Network's content is a lot like pizza: even when it's relatively bad, it's still pretty good.

At this early point, however, MLBN is held back by the same problem that besets almost all sports TV programming: too much deference to the wisdom of ex-palyers. Joe Sheehan at Baseball Prospectus highlighted this issue a few weeks back, pointing to a short discussion on the channel's flagship show "MLB Tonight" about the longstanding "stats versus scouts" debate:

Sean Casey and Barry Larkin paid lip service to the value of performance analysis, and then insisted on evaluating players by anything but their performance. Harold Reynolds was all over the place, dismissing the use of stats entirely because of things that happened in his own career, calling stats "ridiculous," then calling out some of the projections presented without presenting reasons why he disagreed with them. Larkin used the term, "a quality .215 [batting average]," which if nothing else gives me a great name for a fantasy team.

Host Matt Vasgersian—a BP reader who frequently would name-check BP on Padres' telecasts—drove the discussion off course by asking the panel to choose between "the guy with the calculator" and "the guy with the straw hat." That is, of course, a false choice. No team ever has to choose, as Dayn Perry so eloquently explained years ago. All three players chose the scout, after which Vasgersian made the key point that a scout sees a guy three times, while his stats see everything the guy has done. The players nonetheless cited the scout's opinion as being more valuable than what the analysis could provide.

My problem isn't with these opinions, which are to be expected. My problem is with the lack of another viewpoint. Setting Vasgersian up as the opposition is inadequate to the task, not because he's not talented, but because it's not really his role and he's not invested in the argument. Asking three former players about the value of performance analysis isn't going to produce an interesting discussion, because players' opinions on this stuff, with rare exception, fall into a narrow range. A real discussion on this issue would involve other voices, and even if those voices were to be shouted down or marginalized for lack of a baseball-reference page, well, they needed to be heard.

I was thinking about this earlier today when watching the rebroadcast of MLB Tonight as the panel, this time comprised of host Vasgersian and analysts Sean Casey, Billy Ripken and Al Leiter--all ex-players--discussed the Braves' signing of signature player Larry Jones Jr. to a three-year contract extension for $42 million. They all loved the deal without a word of criticism.

Now, Jones (whom, like any good Phillies fan and/or New Yorker, I loathe) had a great year in 2008, hitting .364 with 22 home runs. He's the face of that (accursed) franchise, a likely future Hall of Famer who has been one of the game's best hitters for the better part of 15 years. But he's turning 37 in three weeks, and misses at least a month every season: in the last five years, his at-bat totals have been 472, 358, 411, 513, and 439. Given everything we know about how baseball players age, and the Braves' competitive positioning in a division with two deeper-pocketed teams (the Mets and Phillies) and two other young, cheap and improving clubs (the Marlins and Nationals), was it really wise to buy Jones's age-38, 39 and 40 seasons and an option for his age-41 at $14 million per year?

Well, maybe. But there are two sides to the story. This post on Talking Chop, a Braves blog affiliated with The Good Phight under the SportsBlog Nation umbrella, effectively lays them both out--and gives the pro-deal spin from an honest fan perspective which I at least find more compelling than the likes of Ripken, Casey and Leiter applauding a former colleague getting paid.

What I really would like to see, though, is someone on the MLB Tonight panel, presumably a non-player (maybe an executive between jobs, maybe a writer/analyst type), who could make that case to their faces: yes, it's a PR coup for the organization in that it pleases the fans and sends a positive message in the clubhouse that loyalty and performance will be valued, but there's also a real risk that the 2011 and 2012 Braves will be hamstrung by directing an ever-larger share of that $14 million into the trainer's office. If nothing else, it would make for better television.