Grand narratives, grand insecurities

If Bush wins despite being completely incompetent at running this country, running the other country, and running the War on Terror, this will be a part of the explanation:

It's comforting to think that Al Qaeda might be as easily marginalized as a bunch of drug-running thugs, that an ''effective'' assault on its bank accounts might cripple its twisted campaign against Americans. But Americans are frightened -- an emotion that has benefited Bush, and one that he has done little to dissuade -- and many of them perceive a far more existential threat to their lives than the one Kerry describes. In this climate, Kerry's rather dry recitations about money-laundering laws and intelligence-sharing agreements can sound oddly discordant. We are living at a time that feels historically consequential, where people seem to expect -- and perhaps deserve -- a theory of the world that matches the scope of their insecurity.

I think that the terrorists (Afghanistan aside) can't be beaten by invasions -- they'll be beaten by winning the hearts and minds of the Muslim world, by using diplomatic measures to run more effective international policing, and by exactly the kind of alliance-building that Kerry has in mind. But the above would explain why the American people won't settle for simple and careful measures that will actually work.

Play that wonky music

Much in the next presidential debate may depend on how specific and how varied the questions are. If the questions are general and Bush can just repeat a bunch of talking points without appearing evasive, he probably won't do so badly. But if the questions get specific, Kerry's greater policymaking experience will give him more to say that directly addresses the issue. Variety of questions is important -- if you remember how flummoxed Bush was by the "clean air and water" question in the last debate (that's where he started mumbing about diesel engines), you can see how Bush might break down against a bunch of unexpected questions from different angles. This, again, is something on which Kerry's decades of Senate experience are likely to help.

What worries me most is that Bob Schieffer, whose brother was named ambassador to Australia after being a business partner of Bush's, is moderating the debate. If he's the one coming up with the questions, this could be trouble.

Dred Scott

Why was Bush referencing the Dred Scott decision last night? Paperwight can tell you -- it has much more to do with abortion than with slavery. Thanks to Mark Kleiman for the pointer.

Profiles in hackery

I’m happy to see GOP hacks keep attacking Kerry on the "global test" issue. Anyone who actually listens to Kerry will see that their attacks don’t match up to his positions. If that’s what the Republicans are going to blow their spin opportunities on, fine by me.

Jonah Goldberg makes two criticisms that don't really go well together: "Not only did the crowd not laugh at Kerry's jokes, but Kerry didn't make any." He's wrong on both counts. From the CNN transcript:

Now, for the people earning more than $200,000 a year, you're going to see a rollback to the level we were at with Bill Clinton, when people made a lot of money. And looking around here, at this group here, I suspect there are only three people here who are going to be affected: the president, me, and, Charlie, I'm sorry, you too.

(LAUGHTER)

Fight in the town hall

The foreign policy half of this debate had me on the edge of my seat. It was like a fight scene in a good action movie -- I could feel the fury of the participants, I winced at some of the blows Kerry took, and I was excited when he struck back powerfully. I'd call that one a draw in absolute terms, though given that Kerry is still probably rated below Bush on foreign policy, that probably strenghtens Kerry a little bit in the polls.

Things went kind of loose in the domestic policy debate. Kerry won that, but not by as much as he should have. He should've spent his entire time in response to the environment question talking about the environment. And when Bush botched the last question, talking about how he'd take responsibility for making mistakes but not actually taking responsibility for any, Kerry should've called him on that. I don't know how palpable the disconnect between Bush's big talk about how he'd take responsibility and his inability to do so was, but Kerry really should've pointed it out, and then launched into his critique of Bush mistakes.

I was really happy with Kerry's response to the cute blonde girl who asked about abortion. He started strong, looked her in the eye, and ran the public/private sphere distinction that's familiar from liberal political philosophy. This allowed him to come across as a morally upstanding guy who cares about religion, and at the same time be supportive of freedom in the public sphere. Bush's last response to him on that question suggested an inability to comprehend the objections (health of the woman, incest) that Kerry had set on the partial-birth and parental-consent issues.

So I'm looking forward to the domestic debate now. That's Kerry's home turf, and I think he can hold it. People on Tapped have reported that the value of the "Bush wins" contract on tradesports has gone from about 61 to about 54 today. I don't think that big a swing is justified, but I do think we probably eked out material for a small gain tonight.

My precious...

Cheney's best moment from the VP debate:

I don't talk about myself very much, but I've heard Senator Edwards, and as I listen to him, I find some similarities.

I come from relatively modest circumstances. My grandfather never even went to high school. I'm the first in my family to graduate from college.

I carried a ticket in the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers for six years. I've been laid off, been hospitalized without health insurance. So I have some idea of the problems that people encounter.

So I think the personal stories are, in some respects, surprisingly similar.

It's like when you hear Gollum's backstory in The Fellowship of the Ring and you learn that once, long ago, he was an ordinary hobbit named Smeagol.

Bush campaign self-destructs

Just look at the new justification for invading Iraq.

WASHINGTON - President Bush (news - web sites) and his vice president conceded Thursday in the clearest terms yet that Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) had no weapons of mass destruction, even as they tried to shift the Iraq (news - web sites) war debate to a new issue — whether the invasion was justified because Saddam was abusing a U.N. oil-for-food program.

So Bush spent $200 billion, damaged our alliances, sent tens of thousands of soldiers away from their families, and got a thousand of them killed because Saddam was abusing a UN oil-for-food program? 

So much for staying on message. So much for being a steady leader. So much for making the least bit of sense. If they had gone to the "there were no WMD, but we had to eliminate Saddam to win the global war on terror for vague, unspecified, and implausible reasons" justification, they'd be better off. If they went to the "there were no WMD, but we had to make a bold and completely incompetent attempt at starting democracy" justification, theyd be better off. But this? When most Americans probably hadn't heard of the UN oil-for-food program before?

This election is in John Kerry's hands.

VP debate contentment

Edwards was clear and focused and smily and easy for the folks at home to follow. The closing address was exactly what you'd expect from him, and I was very happy with it. I'm thinking he accomplished more than Cheney did here -- he reemphasized parts of the Democratic message that we want voters to hear on election day. He repeated the Osama points and defused objections to the tax plan. I'm a little unhappy that he didn't bring up the minimum wage, and I had a stronger response to the flipflop question in mind than the one he offered. But, all in all, a good performance.

Cheney didn't do anything too bad, but he spent a significant amount of time looking down and scowling. He didn't drop as many talking-point bombs as Edwards did. I think he was somewhat harder for a non-politically-interested observer to follow than Edwards was -- he simply doesn't have Edwards' rhetorical abilities in organizing a speech. The knockout blow some people wanted him to score tonight -- demonstrating that Edwards was an intellectual lightweight -- wasn't scored, but it's not something that you could score since Edwards is a sharp guy.

In the end, Edwards advanced the ball further than Cheney did, so I'm content with this one.

How Osama got away

A few excerpts from a CSM article describing the bad planning on the ground:

Pir Baksh Bardiwal, the intelligence chief for the Eastern Shura, which controls eastern Afghanistan, says he was astounded that Pentagon planners didn't consider the most obvious exit routes and put down light US infantry to block them.

"The border with Pakistan was the key, but no one paid any attention to it," he said, leaning back in his swivel chair with a short list of the Al Qaeda fighters who were later taken prisoner. "And there were plenty of landing areas for helicopters, had the Americans acted decisively. Al Qaeda escaped right out from under their feet."

Untrustworthy allies:

Indeed, Mr. Ali paid a lieutenant named Ilyas Khel to block the main escape routes into Pakistan. Mr. Khel had come to him three weeks earlier from the ranks of Taliban commander Awol Gul.

"I paid him 300,000 Pakistani rupees [$5,000] and gave him a satellite phone to keep us informed," says Mohammed Musa, an Ali deputy, who says Ali had firmly "trusted" Khel.

"Our problem was that the Arabs had paid him more, and so Ilyas Khel just showed the Arabs the way out of the country into Pakistan," Mr. Musa adds.

It's not like we were lacking troops in the area:

More than 2,000 US marines are on standby in the Arabian Sea and Pakistan for what may become the largest manhunt in history, the search for Osama bin Laden.

How did all this go wrong? Military planners at the top were distracted, as Bob Woodward's book, "Plan of Attack" describes (transcribed by topdog04, whose piece on this is worth reading):

When he was back at the Pentagon, two miles from the White House across the Potomac River in Virginia, Rumsfeld immediately had the Joint Staff begin drafting a Top Secret message to General Franks requesting a "commander's estimate," a new take on the status of the Iraq war plan and what Franks thought could be done to improve it. The general would have about a week to make a formal presentation to Rumsfeld.... (p. 5)

"Hey," Newbold said in his best take-notice voice, "I've got a real tough problem for you. The secretary's going to ask you to start looking at your Iraq planning in great detail - and give him a new commander's estimate."

"You got to be shitting me," Renuart said. "We're only kind of busy on some other things right now. Are you sure?"

"Well, yeah. It's coming. So stand by."

..."Hey, boss," Renuart said, reporting that a formal request of a commander's estimate was coming. "So we'd better get on it."

Franks was incredulous. They were in the midst of one war, Afghanistan, and now they wanted detailed planning for another, Iraq? "Goddamn," Franks said, "what the fuck are they talking about?" (p. 8)

The conclusion:

In retrospect, it becomes clear that the battle's underlying story is of how scant intelligence, poorly chosen allies, and dubious military tactics fumbled a golden opportunity to capture bin Laden as well as many senior Al Qaeda commanders.

do widzenia

Looks like Poland is going home earlier than expected. Who will Bush boast about now?

Additional debate thoughts

If there was one moment where Kerry stepped ahead of Bush in appearing more presidential, it was on the "what's the biggest foreign policy threat" question. Kerry immediately answered that nuclear proliferation was the biggest threat, and proceeded to talk intelligently about it. Bush, unable to come up with anything bigger (because hey, there really isn't much bigger than that) just fell in line behind him. Suddenly Kerry was leading and Bush was following.

Why can't Cubanos visit Cuba?

Bush Administration policies usually make sense. Not in the "I can see how this would make the country better" kind of way, but in the "I can see why Karl Rove thinks this will help Bush get reelected" kind of way. A notable exception is the Bush Administration's new restriction on Cuban-Americans visiting their families in Cuba and sending them money. The younger generation of Cubans doesn't have the furious anti-Castro sentiment that would get them to support something like this, and many people in the more hardline older generation doesn't see any substantial benefit in it. This measure is a loser with the only community of people it seriously matters to, and it's not a winner with anybody else. So why is Bush pushing it?

I had a conversation tonight with Cuban history expert Rebecca Scott (wife of metaethics superstar Peter Railton). She made me aware of the weirdness of this situation and said that she didn't know how to explain it. Family is everything to Cuban-Americans and being deprived of the opportunity to visit a dying grandmother if they've already visited Cuba that year is something that will make them very unhappy. She can only conjecture about some kind of strange backroom deal between Bush and some major Cuban-American leaders, who have far more anti-Castro fervor than their constituents, under which Bush passes this agreement and the Cuban leaders deliver some dark and shadowy favor unto him. It's something to keep in mind when you're thinking about Florida.

Kerry 1, Bush 0

...and that's on a scale going from -5 to 5.

I was watching it with a bunch of Democratic grad students of the UM phil dept, and many of us were worried (not least my buddy Ira, one of the more politically astute folks I know). Kerry clearly didn't say the awesome things that many of us hoped he'd say. Lots of his time was spent in mumblytalk about alliances and global tests (can't you see the next GOP talking point?) and junk like that. But he had a few solid moments that genuinely advanced the ball. He explained his stance on the war: we both thought Saddam was the threat, but we had different ideas on how to disarm him. He criticized Bush for prioritizing Saddam over Osama, which led to an amusing Bush error where the two got conflated. And he saved his most pointed terms of criticism -- "colossal error of judgment" -- for that criticism. That's some astute media strategy right there. It's his most intensely worded criticism and it's what the papers will pick up on since he used his toughest words there. I'm glad to see that getting into the press, since I think the American people at least recognize the greater 9/11 significance of Osama over Saddam.

Bush, on the other hand, failed to get anything done. He just repeated the same tired "mixed message" talking points, and when Kerry failed to provide a stark example of a mixed message, the talking points seemed empty. Kerry even managed to turn the points against Bush on the North Korea issue. Bush had plenty of minor bloopers -- Saddam/Osama, the weird "tax gap" junk, and for the love of God "Poland!" -- which count against him. Worst of all, he seemed to stumble at the beginning of every question and didn't seem a bit like the strong leader that his campaign desperately needs him to appear as.

But if there's one thing I have to leave you with, it's this: the polls prior to this debate have Bush over Kerry in the solid double-digits on Iraq and terrorism. Just by standing up there and not saying anything disastrous, Kerry had the power to close that gap. Given that he outperformed Bush in a foreign policy debate, he's shored up perceptions of himself on the issue where he was weakest, and this bodes very well for him in the broader context of the race.

note: This post has been brought to you by several local Michigan brews, Captain Morgan, and a super-smooth Irish whiskey called Bushmills.

Getting facts into play

As the debates draw closer, one of my major concerns is that the Democrats haven't yet established a few key facts in voters' minds. This is something we could've accomplished during the convention if we weren't so concerned about being positive. But we didn't, so now we have to go into the debates with lots of undecided voters being aware of the following two facts in particular:

-The weapons inspectors were on the ground in Iraq, successfully getting Saddam to destroy some minor banned weapons, when Bush went ahead and started war. (My guess is that most Americans believe Saddam hadn't caved and allowed the inspectors at that time. If they knew inspections were going on, Bush's line about defending America vs. taking the word of a madman would be revealed as empty.)

-We had Osama pinned down in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, when Bush shifted military planners away from catching him and towards preparing for the Iraq war. (My guess is that most Americans think we never had any idea where Osama was in Afghanistan, and don't know that focus on Saddam made it harder to get him. If people were aware that the relation between capturing Osama and deposing Saddam was closer to an exclusive disjunction than a biconditional, they'd see how the Iraq war was a distraction from fighting terrorism.)

Reading Gallup

The Gallup Poll has Bush's 55-42 lead narrowing to a 52-44 lead in national polls. Still bad for Kerry? Not if you look at Party ID:

Likely Voter Sample Party IDs – Poll of September 13-15
Reflected Bush Winning by 55%-42%

Total Sample: 767
GOP: 305 (40%)
Dem: 253 (33%)
Ind: 208 (28%)

Likely Voter Sample Party IDs – Poll of September 24-26
Reflected Bush Winning by 52%-44%

Total Sample: 758
GOP: 328 (43%)
Dem: 236 (31%)
Ind: 189 (25%)

Bush went from a 13% advantage, when the sample went Republican by a 7% margin, to a 8% advantage when the sample went Republican by a 12% margin! Given that the 2000 turnout figures were 39D-35R, there's cause for rejoicing here.

Election Protection

Many posts ago I promised to mention an exciting Democratic volunteer opportunity. With the Election Protection program, you can go to polling places where Republican operatives have pulled dirty tricks in the past like posting flyers that advertise the wrong day for the election, intimidating voters at the polls, and exaggerating the requirements for voting. Your job is to notify the proper authorities if these things happen. Since suppressing minority votes through trickery is an important part of how Republicans win elections, this is a really important way to help the Democrats.

Unfortunately for my Texas readers, the program is only running in nine battleground states (well, eight plus Illinois). Michigan is one of them, so I'll be doing it up here.

Ten cuidado del nombre "Bush"

More from the New Democrat Network. I've had the song stuck in my head for a while. It's just an internet ad and not a TV one, but it's crazy fun.

Read the Book

You might have heard about how the RNC is sending out scare mailings claiming that Democrats want to ban the Bible. Michigan grad student Josh Brown opines that Republicans wouldn't be affected if such a thing were to happen, since they clearly haven't bothered to read the part about not bearing false witness.

(Admittedly, the joke has some paradoxical character. In the deeply counterfactual world where Bibles are banned, the GOP's claims would not be false.)

Only with the Democratic plan...

...will we have a better life.

So goes the last line of the New Democratic Network's ads, which are aired in Florida and target Hispanics. You might want to watch their Spanish ad about the minimum wage before you see the English one. Excellent stuff.

Update with spoiler (read only after you've seen the ad): There is a whole lot I like about this ad. It has a simple but powerful plot twist, it makes you feel the travails of a minimum-wage worker no matter how much money you make, and in endorsing the Democrats in general, it promises to help a whole bunch of Democratic candidates of the present and future. The beginning -- a man and a woman seemingly about to go to bed -- makes you wonder if something sexy is going to happen, which draws your attention. And then you see that nothing like that can happen, since the guy has to go off and work his second job. The plight of poor people is made sexually tangible. Wow.

Theoretical Taxonomy: Wussy and Badass

Via Jeremy Alder comes a taxonomy of philosophical views as Wussy or Badass. I agree with the comments about the wussiness of semantic tricks and win-win situations. I agree about the badassness of bullet-biting and Buffy (at least, in seasons 1-3). But this, surely, is false: "whenever a view compromises metaphysical commitments for epistemological reasons, it's totally wussing out."

What's more wussy than a view that gains all its resources by begging them off of an overly permissive epistemology? What's more wussy than the self-indulgence that refuses to do without even the most theoretically expensive metaphysical comfort? The badassness of epistemically rigorous, ontologically simple theories is the badassness of MacGyver. Remember MacGyver, who would outwit his enemies by building a bazooka out of a toaster, a 9-volt battery, and some dental floss? Deny him all but the weirdest, most unlikely resources, and he'd still defeat you. Such is the badassness of David Hume, the Logical Positivists, and Nietzsche. They charged into battle naked as woad-painted Celts, and the bards will sing of their boldness forevermore. While David Lewis loses big points for epistemic rigor, he gains them back by resourcefulness and a strange sort of simplicity. Here's a man who built accounts of modality, value, and the mind using nothing but concrete objects. Sure, he used way more concrete objects than anyone had ever seen fit to use before, but he didn't help himself to any abstracta or any irreducible properties of the normative or mental kind. It's quite an exercise in bazooka-building!