It’s the Thought that Counts

A week ago, a group of ministers supported by the Alliance Defense Fund (which, by the way, is every bit as idiotic as the vagueness of its name would imply) made political endorsements in their sermons as part of the “Pulpit Initiative”.  This is something they’re not allowed to do under the regulations that come with their tax-exempt status.  The goal is to create a test case with the standing to challenge the constitutionality of that regulation.

I should say, first of all, that they have a legitimate argument, and I don’t believe the lawyers involved should be punished.  Yes, the lawyers told their clients to break the law, but with standing requirements what they are, this kind of thing is common in the US when people want to challenge laws.  That’s maybe unfortunate, but as long as the lawyers made very clear to these pastors what it was they were getting themselves into, I have no ethical complaint against them.

That said, it’s pretty clear to me that there is no ground for their suit.  Churches are in no way required to have tax exempt status.  It would actually be a constitutional violation to single them out for it, as it would be government sponsorship of religious activities.  The law ignores whether a given organization is religious.  What it does pay attention to is whether it’s a non-profit.  Non-profits, because society has decided they are worth encouraging, are given tax-exempt status, and donations to them are tax-deductible.

Non-profits in general, not just churches, are required to live by certain regulations if they want tax-exempt status.  One of these is a lack of overt campaign activities and endorsements.  (They’re allowed to talk about specific political issues, advocate for a bill, and a variety of other related things.)  The main reason for this is that making an organization tax-exempt costs the government money, and the country has decided it doesn’t want to subsidize these activities.  Also, allowing this would create a loophole a mile wide in campaign finance reform laws.  (And any attempt to add the regulations necessary to prevent that would subject churches to a huge amount of additional regulation.)

So what about free speech?  Don’t they have a right to make political endorsements?  The individuals do, and the clergy are free to engage in politics in their own time.  The organizations also do, but they don’t have a right to tax-exempt status.  When the government gives favors, it can attach strings.  There are limits of course, but this one is reasonable.

The real point here is a larger one.  When religious organizations get favors from the government, they get entangled with the government.  The separation of church and state is as much about protecting the church from the state as it is the reverse.  As soon as a religious organization becomes accustomed to government favors of some kind, it loses its independence.  The government can attach conditions to these favors that it would never be able to impose on the churches directly.  Even without the formal conditions, the religious groups have to be wary of doing politically unpopular things, since part of the backlash could be the removal of those favors.  If you think it’s important that government not dictate limitations on religious practices, then you should also think it’s important the religious groups get no special favors.  And those religious organizations that are so unhappy about the endorsement rules should think twice about demanding a faith-based initiative that allows the government to directly fund may of their activities.

Tags: free speech, law, politics, religion, religious freedom

It’s natural in an election with high stakes to follow closely any signs of who is going to win. The polls are by far the most noticeable of those signs, but everyone knows that the polls aren’t perfect predictors. There are two obvious reasons for this.

First, polls measure voters’ opinions at the moment, and those opinions can easily change before election day (and of course, some are undecided). Second, polls are a random sample of voters, and therefore suffer from random errors based on who happens to get polled. I think everyone is basically aware of these problems.

There are, however, other problems with them that I think people don’t really think about as much. The problem with these errors is that they don’t just make the polls less useful by introducing noise. They actually bias the results consistently in one direction or another. This is the kind of error that no amount of polling or averaging of multiple polls can eliminate. Here are a couple of the issues:

• Organization: The Obama campaign, which has a huge amount of money, has been spending a lot more on organizing (as opposed to ads) than is traditional. The campaign’s employees and volunteers are working incredibly hard to register new voters, and as soon as the registration deadlines pass, they’ll start preparing for getting out the vote (and in many cases, will start instantly getting out the early vote in states that allow it). Now McCain has his own forces, but overall Obama’s outnumber his substantially. Now, this varies a lot from state to state. In some states Obama has a huge advantage, while in others he has none. No one knows exactly what kind of advantage Obama might get in each state, but what we do know is that this isn’t picked up in the polls.
• Turnout: This overlaps with organization, but is different in some ways. Polls don’t just call X random people and ask them who they’re voting for. They call a bunch, then try to adjust their sample to match “likely voters”. This involves asking a bunch of questions to try to determine if each respondent is likely to come out and actually vote.  It also involves weighting their samples so that various demographic/ideological groups make up the same portion of the sample as they will voters in November.  This is always tricky, but it’s trickier this time.  There are issues of race and gender to play with, as well as the old question of whether young voters will actually show up.  The more likely this election is to violate patterns from previous elections, the more these models of who will vote are going to be guesswork and unreliable.
• Lying to pollsters: People sometimes tell people they’ll vote for X and then vote for Y, or that they’re undecided when they’re not.  It’s not just about people changing their mind since the poll.  Sometimes they just don’t tell the truth.  Why?  Well, there is a long history of people telling pollsters the things that they think the pollsters want to hear, or hiding things they find embarrassing.  Polls routinely show much higher levels of exercise, for example, or church attendance, than actually happens.  You could imagine several ways this would happen in this election.  One is the so-called “Bradley effect,” where voters say they are voting for a black candidate only to then not vote for him.  This seems to me like it would be likely in instances where the perception is that the main reason to vote against the candidate is racism.  If it’s widely accepted that non-racists can vote against the candidate, I wouldn’t expect it so much.  I could also imagine something of this sort based on the media message.  If the current media narrative is that Bush has bungled his presidency and the Republicans are hopeless, the voter might feel as if the pollster will look down on them for voting Republican.  This could lead to an artificially high number for any Democrat right now.  (Incidentally, my guess is that this effect existed and was largely deflated by the Republican convention, which is where McCain’s bounce came from.)  You could also imagine that this effect in general makes the polls more extreme in states with a clear favorite, because voters feel like they’re the odd ones out if they vote for candidate less favored in their area.
• Cell phones: Most pollsters don’t call cell phones.  If cell phone use is correlated with particularly political preferences, this could matter a lot.  Younger voters are more frequently cell-only, but this can be compensated for by overweighting other young voters who are contacted.  The real question is, within a given demographic group, whether those with cell phones likely to have a different political preference than those without.  Pollsters can’t control for everything with weighting, and I would assume cell phone ownership (to the exclusion of land lines) correlates with not just age and race, but also education level, income level, urban/rural location, etc.  This could mean a big difference is hidden here.

So to what extent do these effects exist, and if so, whom do they favor?  Really, no one has the slightest clue.  The best we can do is look at previous elections (including the primary) to see if they existed there.  Of course, there are multiple, possibly contradictory effects, and teasing out what’s going on is near impossible.  My guess is that all effects above do exist, if only in small amounts.  I also would be willing to bet that all except the lying favors Obama being better off than the polls imply.  The best analysis I’ve seen of this stuff is at FiveThirtyEight, but the analysis there of the Bradley effect is based on the Democratic primary, with a very different universe of voters and a lot of other complicating factors.  Same with the cell phone analysis, with similar problems (plus some others).

The bottom line is just that there isn’t enough information out there for us to really know anything that exactly, regardless of how much polling we do.  Don’t think of a state as guaranteed unless the polling margins are pretty big.  This is an unusual election, so don’t be surprised by unusual results.

Tags: politics, polling

Senator Grassley recently held hearings into how colleges use their endowments. There’s some understandable interest here. Universities frequently control large amounts of money, with a handful of them controlling huge assets. (Harvard, the richest by far, has over $34 billion.) With college costs rising faster than inflation, some in government have thought about ways to force colleges to put this money to work faster to help out with their expenses and reduce tuition. I really think this debate, though, has missed a few points.

First of all, and I think this is the most important point, the money has to be used on education/research eventually. Most of the money in endowments is tied to specific uses. It’s for scholarships, or the salary for a named professorship or something. Even what isn’t specifically targeted is going to end up being used by an educational institution. The real complaint here is just that colleges are saving more than they should — overvaluing education in the future as compared to the present.

I’m inclined to think they are not. Recognize first of all that, to a great extent, any lack of them funding education out of their endowments right now will be replaced with funding from people paying tuition, as long as tuition doesn’t get so high as to dissuade people from going to college. Now, I believe it’s clearly the responsibility of government to provide enough financial aid that everyone can attend college (assuming they put in the effort in high school to make themselves qualified). This is what’s annoying congressmen, since they don’t want to make room in the budget for it, and of course that’s understandable.

The real problem here, though, is that the vast majority of endowment money is held by only a small handful of schools. Maybe Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, and MIT can make college free for everyone for a little while by spending down their endowments (or at least, not growing them fast enough to keep up with inflation), but that only affects a tiny minority of college students in the US, and those schools already offer enough financial aid that students from poor families pay very little if anything. Most students go places that don’t have much in the way of endowments, and Congress is still going to have to offer enough financial aid to keep those places affordable.

However, these big endowments do constitute a form of national savings for the US. The American savings rate is low (or negative, really) and could use every bit of help it can get, and a half-trillion dollars in savings isn’t something we should be trying to get rid of. Also, more importantly, it helps to lock in the leading status of US universities. The world’s most elite universities are near-universally in the US (the main exceptions being Cambridge and Oxford). This is largely a consequence of economics. The schools with the ability to bring in the top people will always be the best. The US isn’t going to stay the world’s biggest economy forever, and the gap is definitely going to shrink fast. Building up huge endowments in our top universities essentially locks in their top position, guaranteeing that they’ll be able to fight and stay at the top even as the overall position of the United States deteriorates.

The government should try to avoid forcing private actors to spend their money. I’m not a libertarian, and regulation of nonprofits is something I could live with when clearly necessary. Here, though, I don’t think it is. Harvard is still raising lots of money, so clearly their donors don’t have a problem with the way the endowment is being used. At a time when the United States is failing in general to invest in the kind of long-term society-building things that keep a country at the top of its game, private charities that devote resources to planning for the very long term should be helped, not hurt.

Tags: college, economics, education

Bob Woodward’s new book, A War Within, is out, and is generating headlines with the report that the Bush administration spied on many in the Iraqi government, including Prime Minister Maliki.  (With Maliki, it was apparently successful enough to “know everything he says.”)  I really think the inclusion of this piece of information was a substantial failure of discretion on Woodward’s part.  Of course we were spying on the Iraqi government.  It would have been negligent not to spy on them.  There were death squads working for the Interior Ministry, and some people seem offended that we didn’t just trust them on principle.  It’s offensive, they say, that we were spying on an ally.

This reaction is incredibly naive.  Almost every country on earth has an intelligence program, and they all spy on each other, including their allies.  The US, for example, gets spied on by Israel and spies on France.  It’s not all bad — if your ally has a spy in your government, they know your promises to them aren’t lies, and there’s a lot more trust all around.  Good or bad, though, it’s business as usual.  No government is really particularly surprised or offended by it.  Their populations are, though, so the government has to act as if it’s a horrible surprise.

And this is exactly why I don’t think Woodward should have published what he did.  It angers Iraqis and damages the chance of success there.  (It should be noted that “success” in this case isn’t just something that’s good for the US, but pretty uncontroversially good for everyone.)  It’s harmful, but has no particular value to public discourse.  The spying isn’t controversial amongst anyone with the power to do anything about it.

There is, of course, a more complicated issue here.  The information in question was probably classified.  Clearly Woodward has a legal right to print it, but the person who told him the info was probably breaking the law.  In an investigation, Woodward could be called to testify and imprisoned if he didn’t reveal his sources.  Would it be proper to undertake these investigations and punishments?  Would it be better if they weren’t legally available?

The real problem with the shield law debate is that intuitions vary so much based on the information in question.  If the government has a secret program to burn down the houses of everyone who voted against the incumbent party, and you know it, you should leak it.  No one will disagree with this, and you’d probably have a parade thrown in your honor.  If instead you leak technical diagrams of US military weaponry, and the Washington Post publishes them on the front page, no one would support the Post, and everyone would support an investigation to find the leak.  The dilemma, of course, is that any law punishes someone for leaking (or printing) classified information applies equally well in both cases.  You can’t write an “unless it was good” exception.

In the end, I’m inclined to accept the status quo here.  It’s very unusual for reporters to be supboenaed and their ability to report stays intact.  (I disagree with those who want Woodward fired/subpoenaed/whatever.  I don’t think he should have printed this, but he has some very good stuff about why violence is decreasing in Iraq, and to have some subjective, unpredictable standard is going to silence a lot of good reporting.)  There is, though, some risk.  When you leak something idiotic, like the identity of a CIA agent, there is definitely some danger of jail time.  I feel uncomfortable depending so heavily on prosecutorial discretion, which can easily be political, but I don’t see any better alternative here.

Tags: bob woodward, iraq, journalism, spying

I’ve been away all weekend, and the stuff that has come out about Palin is almost too much for me to keep track of.  (We had plenty already.)  Let’s review in nice, condensed, bulleted-list format:

• Her 17-year old, unmarried daughter is pregnant and has dropped out of high school, but will be marrying the father and keeping the baby.
• She is being investigated in “troopergate,” where she is accused of trying to get the state trooper who was involved in a bitter divorce with her sister fired.  She is alleged to have fired the state police chief when he refused to fire the brother-in-law.  The report on this comes out a couple days before the election.
• She supported a group pushing to have Alaska secede from the United States (though there’s some confusion about how much).
• Despite bragging about turning down federal funding for the bridge to nowhere in her first speech as the VP nominee, she turns out to have supported it at first.  She didn’t refuse the federal money, but just allowed it to be diverted to other pork projects and eventually killed the bridge proposal when there was no money left for it anyway.
• Her husband was arrested for a DUI in 1986.
• As mayor she talked to the town librarian about banning books she found objectionable.
• She doesn’t believe global warming is man-made.
• In her first election, she took a traditionally nice, friendly small-town mayoral race and injected a lot of divisive social issues.
• She only met McCain in person once, months ago, and he had one brief phone-call with her about the vice presidency.

Now, these issues vary massively in importance.  The one that’s getting all the coverage, her daughter’s pregnancy, is the one I’m most conflicted about.  There is a slight bit of relevance to governance in that it maybe says something about her opposition to comprehensive sex education, but that’s only a minor relationship.  It really is irrelevant.  I am inclined to totally ignore it and criticize everyone who writes stories about it, etc.  What’s holding me back is the parallel hypothetical.  Say a liberal Democrat had a pregnant teenage daughter.  Would James Dobson be saying encouraging, supportive things about how much love was being shown the daughter?  It would obviously be used as an attack and a rallying point for those who believe liberals have no family values.  (It probably wouldn’t be used directly by a Republican opponent, but it wouldn’t need to be.)  Imagine if it was Obama, with all the racial stereotypes that come with it.  It would be a massive story and horribly damaging.  This of course is part of a larger, broader question.  Which is worse, to play dirty or to play clean and let those who play dirty win?  I’m not ok with either, and that’s why I’m still so conflicted on this one.

What worries me more is that the sexy but obviously unfair story is overwhelming the more mundane but in reality more worrying stories.  The first public statement she made included large, highlighted claims that were outright lies.  Supporting Alaskan independence?! That’s nutso kook territory.  McCain didn’t meet with her in person somewhere in between her becoming a candidate for the vice presidency and him choosing her?!  She has a history of doing whatever it takes to win an election and then making even the most uncontroversial job into a political appointment. These things are seriously worrying.  They fundamentally undermine her reputation as the honest reformer.  These things should be getting real coverage.  They’re much more important than the pregnant daughter story, but they can’t break through.  (Even the pregnant daughter story had some trouble, being purposely released at the moment that Gustav made landfall.)  I can only hope that, as the tabloid story passes, some real time is spent on the actual worrying issues.

I’ve also got to say, while on the subject, that the efforts to show that she is qualified to be president are now getting somewhat ridiculous.  We’ve gotten things to the effect of “Alaska is physically proximate to Russia, so she has foreign policy experience.”  There was the wonderful interview on CNN where Tucker Bounds couldn’t name a single decision that Palin had made as commander of the state national guard, despite bringing that up as important experience for her.  The winner, though, has got to be the person I just heard talking about how she had once “helped to run a family-owned fishing business.”  I’m all for that, but by the time you are in the presidential line of succession, things like that should be pushed to not-worth-mentioning status by other things on your resume.

Tags: politics, sarah palin, vice president

I’m not going to do a full post on the Obama speech because I largely agree with the conventional wisdom that everyone started spouting the minute it was done.  It was a very good speech, and it was excellent political theater.  I was particularly excited to see the counterattacks on McCain.  I say counterattacks rather than “attacks” or “defense,” and I think the distinction is important.  He defended himself against McCain, but he did so by attacking McCain for even making the attacks in the first place.  (Perfect example: attacking McCain for suggesting that Obama didn’t put his country first.)  Attacking the partisan attacks is a very good way to go on the offensive without totally ruining the bipartisan, new politics feel of the campaign.

Now, for the news of the day: McCain picks Sarah Palin for VP.  This is, as far as I’m concerned, a huge gamble in more ways than one.  There are some obvious upsides, though most of them are political/tactical rather than about good governance.  She has very good anti-corruption credentials.  That should definitely help get the McCain as reformer image back.  She’s also young, which helps, though it also might highlight McCain’s age.  Most importantly, of course, she’s female.  This is obviously an attempt to win over Hillary voters, and it’s one that has a meaningful chance of working.  It obviously won’t get nearly a majority (I mean, she’s vehemently pro-life, for starters) but getting a sizable minority would be plenty to do massive damage.  She also has a nice, conservative-friendly biography.

The downsides, though, are blatantly obvious.  The first one is her utter lack of any experience whatsoever.  She has two years as governor of Alaska, a state with fewer people living in it than most major cities.  She hasn’t touched a foreign policy decision in her life.  This is particularly noteworthy because of McCain’s attacks on Obama.  It’s not insane to claim Obama is short on experience.  At the very least, he has far less than McCain, but you can’t claim Obama is too inexperienced and then claim Palin is ready to jump into the presidency at a moment’s notice.  Being a prominent senator is clearly more experience than Palin has, even if it’s still your first term.  Moreover, Obama has all sorts of other resume items — community activism, a distinguished academic career, time in the state legislature.  Palin was mayor of a town of under 10,000 people.  That puts her somewhere in between high school principals and university chancellors in level of responsibility.  She definitely doesn’t have a distinguished early life either (second-place Miss Alaska followed by University of Idaho and no post-grad degree) or any other non-political credentials.  She doesn’t have anything like Obama’s early Iraq speech to show that despite not being in office she was making good policy decisions.  Choosing someone like Lieberman would have allowed McCain to continue the experience-based criticism.  Picking someone like Jindal or Pawlenty would have made it hard to criticize Obama.  You have to go pretty far into the land of the neophytes before Obama would feel comfortable going on the offensive on experience, but McCain has managed to do it.

Palin’s issue profile is also about as far the right as you could possibly fine.  She’s very fiscally conservative, which is something that, while I disagree with it, I can respect — there’s a legitimate argument to be made for it.  She is also, however, conservative in some ways that make no sense.  Reason has a good post about this.  There’s this great gem on global warming, for example:

Q. What is your take on global warming and how is it affecting our country?

A. A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location. I’m not one though who would attribute it to being man-made.

You’d think that the governor of Alaska of all places would be clear on this one by now.  My favorite, though, is this one, where she comes out in favor of teaching creationism in public schools.  Now, as much as we like to point out that intelligent design and creationism are in fact the same thing, it’s a little comforting to me that most proponents of teaching creationism at least feel the need to pretend they’re not advocating teaching a religious belief in a public school, or at least have enough deference to the Supreme Court to try to work around it.  Here, though, she goes against decades of established law and practice and actually calls what she’s supporting creationism.  It’s nice that she’s honest, but I really thought that phase of the debate was over by now.

“Teach both. You know, don’t be afraid of information….Healthy debate is so important and it’s so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both. And you know, I say this too as the daughter of a science teacher. Growing up with being so privileged and blessed to be given a lot of information on, on both sides of the subject — creationism and evolution. It’s been a healthy foundation for me. But don’t be afraid of information and let kids debate both sides.”

She’s also, of course, massively pro-oil.  Anyone from Alaska has to be.  Lots of states have their own self-interested idiotic policies.  In Iowa it’s ethanol, and in Alaska it’s oil.  I’m not particularly extreme on environmental issues.  I can definitely see the argument for drilling offshore or in ANWR, though I still come down on the other side.  What I can’t stand, though, is the implication that those decisions, which are pretty low-impact, could possibly take the place of strong efforts on alternative energy sources and other kids of research (electric cars, actually clean coal, etc.).  Nevertheless, here she goes right off the deep end:

I beg to disagree with any candidate who would say we can’t drill our way out of our problem…

The outcome of this choice is going to be a wonderful experiment in the intelligence of the average voter.  If voters are rational, she should be loved by the Republican base, but hated by independents.  She should win over very few Hillary voters.  She’s massively opposite Clinton on the issues.  If people though Obama was too inexperienced (the only rational reason I’ve seen for voting for Clinton but then choosing McCain over Obama), then Palin should seem much worse, and should hurt.  The only reason left for the Clinton-to-McCain switch is to literally say you are such a feminist that you will vote for a female regardless of the issues.  That’s a bizarre form of feminism, choosing the affirmative-action type voting motivation over things like abortion rights and equal pay.  I would have respect for someone who was honest about that motivation, but I think it’s so obviously idiotic that no one consciously believes that it’s the reason for their vote.  In general, Palin should hurt McCain’s appeal to anyone other than the far right wing.

If, however, voters are irrational (and they probably are), the outcome of this decision is unclear.  The youth and vitality and reform will help the brand.  She might make McCain look old, and the inexperience will definitely get some traction.  She’ll get some female support, and in a way being female might make it harder to get the far-right policy stuff to really stick.  It’ll be interesting.  There’s definitely no way anyone can criticize McCain for making a boring choice, at least.

Tags: barack obama, john mccain, politics, sarah palin, vice president

This was awesome.  I really have literally no complaints.  Bill Clinton was excellent.  John Kerry was excellent.  Joe Biden was excellent.

Clinton totally beat expectations (which were, admittedly, very low) and made it very clear that he was totally in support of Obama.  He vouched for Obama’s readiness, and got in a good amount of clear policy attacks.  John Kerry’s accusations of flip-flopping were exactly what I’ve talked about before as the way the Democrats needed to attack McCain, and because it’s John Kerry it’ll get noticed.  And as good as they were, Biden outdid both of them.  His speech was emotional, honest, and strident.  It was perfect for the blue collar voters that Obama has been targeting.  It was strong on implied mastery of foreign policy, and in a way that wasn’t about Biden’s mastery of the issue, but about Obama’s.  It packaged a coherent view of Democratic positions in a way I haven’t seen many do recently.  (I’m thinking about things like the psychological value of work, for example.)  It was aggressive and went after McCain, but didn’t come off as a negative speech.  He told Obama’s life story in an earnest way that no one else has (and Obama, because it would sound egotistical, can’t even attempt).  It was, overall, an absolutely great night.

Tags: bill clinton, convention, joe biden, john kerry

Well, the convention got better last night.  Schweitzer gave the kind of speech that I think should fill all the time in between the big headliners.  It was interesting and engaging.  It was exciting.  It got your attention, and it used that attention to make a point.  I really have trouble imagining that the Democratic Party, which includes half the professional politicians in the country, can’t find more people who can pull off that kind of speech.

Warner’s keynote speech was solid.  Obama’s keynote last year was the best contemporary political speech I’ve heard, and no one could be expected to follow with anything that would really live up to it.  Warner’s isn’t going to be historically noteworthy, but it was fine.

Of course, the big speech of the night was Hillary’s, and it was very good.  I can definitely nitpick it, but it was strong, and it did what it needed to do.  It’s particularly important because there has been some polling evidence recently that the movement of Hillary voters towards Obama was stalling short of completion.  This is surprising, since revelations since the campaign ended really undermine the only rationale there ever really was for picking her over Obama.  Anyone who hasn’t should definitely read Politico’s “Relentless” series.  It explains how Hillary chose less competent, less experienced staff because she wanted people who were personally loyal to her, and how she allowed (or maybe requested) those who tried to alert her directly of the horrible mismanagement of her campaign to be punished, rather than rewarded.  It’s exactly the loyalty-over-competence, dissent-squashing environment that led to intelligence failures and Katrina mismanagement in the Bush administration.  So much for the wonders of experience.  With these new revelations, there is little remaining ground for believing Hillary would have been a better president.

But that’s not really the point.  Even if Hillary was better qualified than Obama and deserved to be president, and even if she was unfairly blocked by a sexist media, responding by elimating constitutional protection of abortion rights, lengthening the war, and giving up all hope of healthcare reform is illogical bordering on insane.  This is obvious, but for some reason a large number of people haven’t seen it.  I don’t know why.  It might be feminist-oriented identity politics, or it might be racism, or it might just be that most people are dumb, but for some reason many people seem devoted to her in a way more fitting of a cult leader than a politician.  Nonetheless, it’s good that Hillary herself pointed this out.  We can only hope it worked.

Tags: brian schweitzer, convention, hillary clinton, mark warner

I’ve gotta say I was a little disappointed with the first day of the Democratic convention.  Michelle Obama’s very good speech was clearly the highlight of the evening, though of course it wasn’t the outstanding caliber we’ve come to expect of her husband.  It was worlds better than what most of the non-politicians on stage at these things can do.  It was on a good theme, and I was happy with it.

The Ted Kennedy tribute, on the other hand, I think was a real mistake.  My agreements with him are much greater than my disagreements, but he’s still not a hero to me.  It’s a generational thing, and a partisanship thing, but I just don’t think his appeal is that broad.  In many groups, he’s the epitome of the hated northeastern liberal.  Did we really need to have a video about him and his yacht?  This is not the kind of thing that could possibly attract swing voters.  Now, if the goal is to get wavering older, female Democrats, then maybe it wasn’t so bad.  I can see some benefit there.  Honestly, though, quotes about how Obama and Kennedy will be working hand-in-hand once Obama is president are not going to help with independents.  I know it’s hard.  He’s a hero to most of the people in the convention center, and his health problems made his appearance inspiring to those who have been following his difficulties.  Most Americans, though, haven’t been.  Seeing him give a generally normal speech wasn’t that surprising to them.  The Republicans are good at picking the stuff that will appeal to the audience at home rather than whatever those in the convention want to hear.  That kind of message discipline is sorely lacking in the Democrats.

The rest of the night was… well, it wasn’t.  Nothing got much attention.  Of course, this is partly because I was watching on CNN, which chose its commentators over many of the other speeches, but that’s exactly the point.  The Democrats need to put on a show compelling enough for CNN to feel like it makes better television than their repetitive talking heads.  I don’t care if it’s a governor, a senator, a CEO, an Iraq veteran, or a high school teacher.  They needed to find some people who know how to give a good speech and give them interesting things to say.  A little bit of talk about issues, a little talk about Bush and his incompetence, a little talk about McCain and his flip-flops, etc.  It doesn’t really matter exactly what it’s about as long as it’s not a brief bio of the person coming after you.  (Well, it does, but anything is better than nothing.)  What’s important is that it gets people’s attention.  Tonight really did not succeed in that respect.  Now, future nights I think will be better.  A quick look down the schedule definitely shows tonight as the weak night.  (Gore, Warner, and Hillary Clinton all speak tomorrow, for example.)  Still, it’s one opportunity that was largely missed.

Tags: convention, michelle obama, politics, ted kennedy

The Biden pick is excellent in many ways.  In these situations, I always have two conflicting parts of my personality.  One is the voter who wants whomever will be best for the job.  The other is the strategist who, having already decided I prefer Obama to McCain, wants whomever will maximize Obama’s chances.

The voter side of me is thrilled.  I’ve liked Biden for years because he’s clearly smart and knows his stuff.  He’s known and respected in foreign capitals for a reason.  In addition to having plenty of legislative experience, he was also a constitutional law professor like Obama, and is clearly willing to say what he thinks.  Really, he’s the kind of guy who should have a lot more national name-recognition than he does.  Americans are, in general, pitifully bad at identifying members of their own legislature, and Biden ought to be as easily identified as anyone.  If name recognition really worked the way it should, Biden probably would have had a very good shot at getting the Democratic nomination himself.

The strategist side is also happy, but not totally without reservation.  My concern is largely what I’ve said before — that I think picking someone whose credentials are largely in foreign policy does more to highlight and tacitly admit to a shortcoming on the issue than it does to address it.  Nevertheless, it clearly does something to address it.  There is also the strategic concern of his earlier comments about Obama not being ready, but I think this is, despite being a clear downside, not going to be horrible.

Biden does have a lot of other strategic considerations going for him.  He has blue-collar appeal, though I don’t think he has so much blue collar support at this point. I’m sure within Delaware he does, and he has a lot of national potential, but I don’t think he has the name recognition to have much support already.  (I think I caught on CNN that he’s the least wealthy senator?)  Also, he’s clearly very good at the nonabrasive attack.  He’s so straightforward with all his thoughts that his attacks seem like he’s just more candid about his thoughts than others are.  I think he’s one of few that can add the aggressiveness the Obama campaign needs without undermining the positive image.  His son is going to Iraq, which will be a mild background help. He has Pennsylvania roots, though I doubt that’s a huge thing (I think that Pennsylvania is actually not that big a concern — if Obama is losing there, he’s already lost).  Overall, Biden’s a politically solid pick, and I’m not sure anyone else would clearly be better, but from this perspective he’s not as unambiguously good as my voter side would rate him.

This is a good choice and a strong ticket.  Any Democrat should be happy.  Now I get to go back to being conflicted about whether I want to see a good Republican VP who I wouldn’t mind in office versus seeing a stupid choice (i.e. Romney) that’d maximize Obama’s chances.

Tags: barack obama, joe biden, politics, vice president