Labour and the Democrats: a messy but necessary affair.

The Christian Science Monitor has one of those terrific, and short, meta-pieces about why labour's big split has occurred and why it matters. The title: "Big labor's split matters -- even to nonunion America." In a nutshell:

- the rise and fall of labor determines the balance of power in the United States. The stronger unions are, the less powerful business is. The weaker they are, the more power shifts to the corporate suite.

- Unions provide "countervailing forces" - the idea that government, business, and labor served to keep a check on one another...Today, unions are too weak, observers say.

- One reason for labor's weakness is the might of money. Organized labor gave $61.6 million to federal candidates and parties in last year's election, says the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington. Business interests donated $1.5 billion, some 24 times as much.

- One reason for labor's weakness is the might of money. Organized labor gave $61.6 million to federal candidates and parties in last year's election, says the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington. Business interests donated $1.5 billion, some 24 times as much.

- Even government isn't much of a counterweight to business nowadays in determining regulatory and taxation policies, some political scientists argue... "Government and corporations are so intertwined, there is no countervailing power," says Charles Derber, a sociologist at Boston College.

- Another key reason for the weakness of unions is that labor law has not stopped employers from taking increasingly aggressive actions against unions, often with the help of lawyers specializing in union busting... The penalties [for engaging in illegal anti-union activity] are so small that companies often consider them the cost of doing business...It's certainly far cheaper than paying the higher pay and benefits that a union is likely to negotiate...


I'm not at all optimistic about labour's split. Change to Win took with it not only the most successful union of the past decade, Andy Stern's SIEU, but also the union where much of the action is happening today, Joe Hanson's UFCA, which is spearheading the attempt to organize Wal-Mart.

The problem is that the UFCW is incredibly unlikely to succeed in its Wal-Mart organizing drive. The reason is that it's just too difficult to organize in the US under current labour law and current labour law enforcement. Not only is union-busting too easy and the laws protecting strikers too anemic, but, most important, unions must, under current state laws, must hold secret-ballot elections to obtain certification. As I wrote before, the empirical academic literature is unambiguous here; without automatic certification through a card check regime, union drives fail. This might be for perfectly good reasons: i.e. workers who feel pressured to publicly sign a card would reject a union in an anonymous vote. Fifty years ago, when unions were a force to reckon with, this might have been a theoretical debate worth having. But today, it's basicly irrelevent. With unions so weak and business so strong, the only question now is whether we think we'd be better off in a society without organized labour. If the answer is no -- and it should be -- then the one and only point must be to strengthen the union movement, not about whether the mechanisms that do so are completely "fair" to everyone involved.

And here's the catch-22. The only way that labour improves its lot is by getting a government back in power that's sympathetic to its organizers. That's why Priscilla Murolo is mainly right when she's quoted in the article saying that the Clinton administration "didn't do anything for labor," and wrong when she says that "labor is too ready to support Democrats in return for vague promises and cosmetic support." It's true that the Clinton Admin, to their lasting shame, didn't do anywhere near enough to promote the right to organize or to challenge negative public opinion about unions as just another interest group, and that Clinton's labour-friendly appointments to the National Labour Relations Board proved painfully temporary. But it's not true that the unions should therefore give up on supporting the Democrats or that Sweeney was therefore wrong to pour so much into getting Democrats elected. After all, 37 of the 38 Senate and 191 of the 198 House co-sponsors of Ted Kennedy's most recent introduction of the pro-card check Employee Fair Choice Act were Democrats.

So the Democrats owe labour. But more to the point, the Democrats need labour. The reasons are threefold: First, labour provides muscle in campaigns. Without the GOTV efforts of the AFL-CIO through its own locals and, in 2004, through organizations like ACT, neither of the last two US presidential elections would have been close, and who knows how the Congressional contests would have shaken out. Second, the unions give the Democrats their only real source of white male support outside of college campuses, and a political party can't govern effectively without some measure of support from their electorate's dominant racial-gender group. Third, and maybe most important, organized labour is the Democratic constituency that most overtly agitates for such public-good enhancing, and broadly appealing, legislation as a higher minimum wage and funding for the Occupational Health and Safety Board, and expansions of the Family and Medical Leave Act. This is a different, sometimes very different, kettle of fish from a lot of the other interest groups, and from an online activist base whose most pressing desires, though important, often look quite a bit more selective: strengthening environmental protections; bringing the troops home from Iraq; ensuring equal rights for homosexuals; ensuring a woman's right to abortion on demand.

Yet with Change to Win taking away three, and with UNITE-HERE, maybe four, of the most vital unions in the federation, breaking up local activist labour councils, and redirecting their dues from AFL-CIO political organizing, the Democrats lose a much needed source of funding and the important, widely attractive, demands that go with that funding. Which makes it harder for Democrats to win. Which makes it less likely that Kennedy's card check bill will ever get out of committee; that permanent striker replacement will ever be banned; that labour-friendly appointees will return to the NLRB; that penalties for union-busting will ever go up; and therefore that either of the union blocs will be successful in their newfangled service-sector organizing efforts, no matter how intense their new competition makes them.

It all comes down to the one thing I disagree with in the CSM article, it's closing passage:

At some point, [sociologist Charles Derber] says, the increasing economic stress and dislocation of many workers will become so great that it will create political instability and discontent sufficient to revive a new voice for labor - perhaps even trade unions.

"We are already close to that level," he adds.


That's, IMO, the fundamental mistake progressives make these days, thinking we're "near that level". No matter how unequal and how uncertain American society is, the US is so rich that most people who hold any political clout at all live better lives than they did 50 years ago. With so much affluence around, and no obvious class system, it's hard to convince people they need an organized voice, that things could be a lot better, that it's worth the risk and discomfort of making greater demands, particularly with the political force of the right telling them all the time it just ain't so. To the extent that people are stressed and unhappy, it's like Thomas Frank recently said, the sense that "that we are all in the grip of historical forces beyond our control, that the “invisible hand” is pulling the strings these days and that there is nothing we can do about low wages or outsourcing or the rest of it".

Of course, letting working life get worse so that we "hit that point" and it can get better isn't the answer anyway. That's the same hoary old logic that has led to centuries of death and misery and failed "revolution" all over the globe. The answer, unsatisfactory as it might be, lies in electing Democrats (or Republicans like Arlen Spectre who support the union cause) who can rewrite the rules to make it easier to organize. And on the other end of the stick, it's pretty damn essential that the Democrats, the next time they get the chance to do so, make sure that they really work like hell to deliver.

CAFTA vs. global trade liberalisation.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal repeated the storyline about CAFTA's potential effect on giving new momentum to the stalled trade talks in Geneva, where the WTO's Doha "development" round drags on toward what looks like what will be an unhappy conclusion in 2006. The Journal complained that the closeness and partisanship of the CAFTA vote put the damper on the deal's potentially stirring effect on the WTO-ites:

Congressional approval of a trade pact with six small Central American countries nudged forward the Bush administration's free-trade agenda. But the close vote and bitter fight underscored anxiety about the pace of globalization and clouded prospects for approval of future deals.

The 217-215 House approval of the Central American Free Trade Agreement early yesterday was a clear relief to proponents of continuing the post-World War II trend toward lower trade barriers.

"If we had not moved forward on Cafta, it would have undermined the U.S. position, which has been to lead the fight for globalization," said Calman Cohen, president of the business-backed Emergency Committee for American Trade.


Matt Yglesias pointed out recently that this is a fairly standard conservative line: sure, CAFTA was a porky deal, but blocking it would have been worse because of the message that would send on free trade and on the US's ability to lead the world toward the low-tarriff utopia in which agricultural products flow across poor country borders heading West, and leaving prosperity in their wake. The world's last respectable conservatives at The Economist editorialized as much a couple of weeks ago.

In fact, of course, CAFTA's passage on Wednesday night did nothing to create trade liberalization enthusiasm in Geneva where talks sputtered to yet another stalemate on Friday, to be resumed in Hong Kong in December. Contrary to what the Wall Street Journal says, CAFTA's failure to get the free trade juices flowing probably doesn't have that much to do with the narrowness of the vote in the House. It might, however, have a lot to do with this sort of thing:

It was just before midnight on Wednesday when Representative Robin Hayes capitulated.

Mr. Hayes, a Republican whose district in North Carolina has lost thousands of textile jobs in the last four years, had defied President Bush and House Republican leaders by voting against the Central American Free Trade Agreement, or Cafta.

But the House speaker, J. Dennis Hastert, told him they needed his vote anyway. If he switched from "nay" to "aye," Mr. Hayes recounted, Mr. Hastert promised to push for whatever steps he felt were necessary to restrict imports of Chinese clothing, which has been flooding into the United States in recent months.

...Mr. Hastert "said to me, 'If you vote with me, we'll do everything we need to do in your district to help with jobs,' " Mr. Hayes recalled.


or:

The last-minute negotiations for Republican votes resembled the wheeling and dealing on a car lot. Republicans who were opposed or undecided were courted during hurried meetings in Capitol hallways, on the House floor and at the White House. GOP leaders told their rank and file that if they wanted anything, now was the time to ask, lawmakers said, and members took advantage of the opportunity by requesting such things as fundraising appearances by Cheney and the restoration of money the White House has tried to cut from agriculture programs. Lawmakers also said many of the favors bestowed in exchange for votes will be tucked into the huge energy and highway bills that Congress is scheduled to pass this week before leaving for the August recess.


or:

The enormity of Bush's 2005 agenda suggests that his proposal to cut farm subsidies is nothing more than a ploy to demonstrate his supposed seriousness about halving the deficit by proposing cuts he knows won't pass, thus allowing him to blame the legislative branch for skyrocketing spending.
--The New Republic's editors, February 21, 2005

...After two months of fierce resistance from farmers and Congress, the Bush administration has dropped an effort to cut government payments to farmers.
--Associated Press, April 13, 2005


The major reason the Doha round isn't going forward is because, since about 2001, and especially at the Cancun negociations in 2003, the poorest countries (including Chad, Benin and Burkina Faso) have collectively decided not to take it anymore: "it" being the West's continued refusal to do anything about the US's subsudies to production of cotton, sugar and a whole host of textile goods, and the EU's subsudies to production and export of beef, dairy and sugar (though, in Europe's defence, the 2003 Common Agricultural Policy reforms were a damn site better than the US' 2002 Farm Bill). Together, these allow Western agricultural producers to charge prices on the global market near or below developing nation production costs and thereby gobble up market share, despite relative rich country inefficiency in growing things like cotton (here's a good factsheet on the stakes). The developing nations have sworn to stall talks on politically easier types of liberalization, say in services and textiles, until they get some movement on agriculture.

But globalization goes on apace. And one of its "inconveniences" is that increasing numbers of people all over the world, including the trade representatives and even large segments of the voting public in developing nations, can simply pick up a foreign newspaper or go online to the website of any mainstream Western media source to have a look at how the US really views the quest to free up trade, and what it really prioritizes in its trade agreements, and how really likely it is to take on its farming lobby. That is, it gets harder and harder to get away with being blatantly hypocritical on the global scene.

Guiltily, I admit I've been a sucker in the past for the "can't take a free trade setback" arguments for CAFTA (and, less guiltily, also to the argument that since the real impact is going to be on the Central American signatories to the pact and not on US citizens who will at most see a tiny decrease in the price of sugar and a relatively tiny loss of jobs to additional outsourcing, the US Congress should have honoured the wishes of the countries whose elected governments support and in some cases had overwhelmingly ratified the deal.) But it was still an unncessarily terrible piece of legislation and its giveaways not only to Big Pharma on generics and patent law (which would have been reason enough for me to overcome my qualms above and vote "no", just) but also to those wavering GOP congressmen who want to keep their private sheltered industries (textiles, sugar, cotton) nice & safe give the lie to the Adminstration's supposed global leadership role on trade liberalization.

If anything, CAFTA is more likely to increase global cynicism among denizens of developing countries who don't trust the West to treat them fairly than it is to give the cause of trade liberalization any kind of lift. That's more true today than ever. All any English speaker anywhere has to do is log on to the Washington Post's web page and do a bit of reading.

Never too early for a horserace.

Last night I procrastinated by looking at some recent polling. Republican-leaning outfit Strategic Vision has been posting up results of some state polls of what registered Dems and Repubs think of their prospective 2008 fields. (Come on, I deserve this. I've done plenty of serious blogging lately!)

Here are the early results (sorry for the ugly formatting; my tech support's mother is visiting this week):

Florida (posted July 21)

Republicans

Rudy Guliani 28%
Jeb Bush 19%
John McCain 17%
Newt Gingrich 9%
Bill Frist 5%
George Allen 4%
Mitt Romney 2%
Rick Santorum 2%
Chuck Hagel 1%
George Pataki 1%
Undecided 12%

Democrats

Hillary Clinton 35%
Al Gore 17%
John Kerry 15%
John Edwards 5%
Wesley Clark 5%
Joseph Biden 4%
Bill Richardson 1%
Ed Rendell 1%
Tom Vilsak 1%
Evan Bayh 1%
Barbara Boxer 1%
Undecided 14%


Georgia (posted May 17)

Republicans

Rudy Giuliani 22%
John McCain 19%
Bill Frist 11%
Newt Gingrich 9%
George Allen 7%
Mitt Romney 5%
Rick Santorum 3%
George Pataki 1%
Chuck Hagel 1%
Undecided 22%

Democrats

Hillary Clinton 30%
Al Gore 19%
John Kerry 13%
John Edwards 8%
Wesley Clark 6%
Bill Richardson 3%
Evan Bayh 2%
Joseph Biden 2%
Ed Rendell 1%
Tom Vilsak 1%
Barbara Boxer 1%
Undecided 14%


New Jersey (posted July 19)

Republicans

Rudy Guliani 39%
John McCain 22%
George Pataki 8%
Mitt Romney 6%
Bill Frist 6%
Rick Santorum 5%
Newt Gingrich 3%
George Allen 1%
Chuck Hagel 1%
Undecided 9%

Democrats

Hillary Clinton 40%
John Kerry 12%
Al Gore 10%
Ed Rendell 8%
Joseph Biden 7%
Wesley Clark 4%
John Edwards 4%
Bill Richardson 1%
Mark Warner 1%
Tom Vilsak 1%
Evan Bayh 1%
Barbara Boxer 1%
Undecided 10%

As an excited supporter of Newt Gingrich, the one and only Atari Republican, for the '08 GOP nomination, I'm thrilled to see my man almost breaking double digits in a couple of states. But what surprises me here is how Giuliani is absolutely kicking the collective asses of the rest of the Republican field, even in conservative Georgia. He's even beating Jeb Bush out in Florida! These are the same conservative Republican base voters who, for the most part, rejected McCain in favour of Bush in the 2000 primary, yet they look to be leaning toward supporting a pro-choice, pro-gay, pro-homeland security Republican in 2008 in almost the same proportions that Democrats are flocking to presumptive frontrunner Hillary Clinton. This might say somethng about how strongly grassroots Republicans still prioritize a strong role in the War on Terror (sorry, I guess that's now that's now the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism). It also means that the McCain-loving media should maybe stop talking about their man as the "800 pound gorilla" of the Republican field.

On the Dem side, the results are less surprising I think, except maybe for John Edwards' current poor showing among prospective Dem primary voters. Though it's worth remembering that early polls aren't just about name recognition but about postive name recognition. Almost any Democrat polled knows who John Kerry is, so the fact that he only averages about 15% in these polls is bad news for him (though I still think he's capable of surprising everyone again). HRC's numbers certainly look formidable. They're slightly lower than the numbers Gore was putting up among registered Democrats at roughly the same time in 2001 (45% according to Zogby; 44% according to TIME/CNN in May of 2001, and archived at the indespensible-to-junkies Polling Report). But, then, absent 911, Gore would probably have been unbeatable for the 2004 nomination in a crowded field.

Speaking of Gore, Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias make the case for him today. I think Matt in particular gets it right -- though I'm not sure the hawk-who-nailed-Iraq argument has much currency beyond the 18% or so of registered voters who indentify as "moderate Democrats" -- but in any case the point is moot if HRC runs. He'd never run against her, which is a damn good thing because the media coverage of such a contest would give any Democrat a perpetual migraine.

To be honest, I'm not sure Kerry would run against Clinton either. And I'm not sure that she, in the end, will run herself (in fact, I'm sticking to my prediction, however naive it may be, that in the end she won't, or at least won't if she thinks there's a decent field without her). So the multitude yelling "early polls are meaningless!" might be right, yet again. But, like last time, their correctness will depend on the decisions of the principles and on unforeseen external circumstances rather than on what the early polls inherently can't tell us. But I'm a big defender of polls. They're statistical populism. And they're so much fun.

Why the AFL-CIO's convention could be the DLC's worst nightmare.

I'm not a compulsive DLC-hater (hell, I even think Joe Lieberman has redeeming merits), but one thing that hasn't gotten much play in the most recent blogosphere anti-DLC dustup is the org's unfortunate decision on host its 2005 National Conversation at the same time as the AFL-CIO's 50th Anniversary Convention, especially knowing how momentous this particular convention was likely to be for the future of organized labour in the US. In asking major Dems who might have designs on the 2008 nomination (speakers included Hillary Clinton, Tom Vilsack the new DLC Chair, Mark Warner, and Evan Bayh) to attend their confab, the DLC were implicitly asking those Dems to prioritize a visit to Columbus over a visit to Chicago (where Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, John Edwards, Dick Durbin, Ted Kennedy and Barack Obama all paid their respects, stressing the Democrats' affinity with the cause of organized labour in whatever form it ends up taking.)

This may have been an innocent mistake on the DLC's part and I'm too lazy and too busy to try and track down whether that's the case (though a search on the DLC site for "AFL-CIO" and "John Sweeney" turned up no record of a statement from the group on the current labour standoff.) But it looks an awful lot like the sort of thing the DLC would do to stake out its turf. The DLC loves conflict, and that -- not its policy prescriptions or even its fundraising practices (though cozying the Dems up to business has a mixed blessing and certainly went waaayyy too far in the 90s) -- is its biggest problem. Taking shots at Markos Moulitsas is just dumb (though notably less offensive than Bull Moose's more recent snotty, facile comparison of petty self-hating labour with that mature, solidarity-lovin' DLC). Lecturing liberals about how we just haven't gotten over Vietnam and ought to stop obsessing over Abu Ghraib is also dumb, not to mention predictable and silly (as Digby explains). Tactics like this are bound to backfire, just as they did in vaulting the DLC's poorly-chosen nemisis, Howard Dean, into the Party Chair. But it's like the DLC just can't help itself.

Reading Kenneth Baer's Reinventing Democrats as I currently am just drives the point home further. Baer is a good writer and, I assume, a good Democrat. But his history of the DLC is a chronicle of the org's constant embattlement and alleged tenacity in the face of a parade of snarling rivals on the left, of an endless standoff with the party's "liberals" and even with the DNC itself. There's also a pervasive sense of affront and give-as-good-as-we-get running through the work -- for instance in Baer's recounting of Jesse Jackson's speech at the 1990 New Orleans DLC confab when he mocked the DLC by declaring himself "delighted [the Dems] are so united" on the sort of fundamental issues the DLC very much wanted not to be united with Jackson on. This led Al From to blackball Jackson from the DLC's 1991 convention, which in turn provoked charges of racism from Jackson, which Baer relates in appalled tones.

This isn't to argue that the DLC had no point to make in challenging the McGovern-Mondale model(s) of Democratic politics; or that New South convervative Democrats like Sam Nunn, Lloyd Bentson and Martin Frost didn't need an organization to collectively bargain for their place, and their voters' place, within the party; or that the DLC is just a bunch of fake Republicans putting a pro-choice face on corporatism. It's not even to argue that they didn't need to symbolically distance themselves from figures like Jesse Jackson and to challenge a few comfy leftist assumptions. But the truth is that the DLC's pervasive southern conservative identity politics looms as painfully large in Baer's account as does Jackson's "progressive" identity politics. And, while the DLC is decidedly less southern-oriented now, its reliance on anti-liberal identity politics doesn't seem to have diminished much with time. In other words, the DLC might preach the need for a positive message, but its philosophy has always been, and is now, very -- ridiculously -- zero-sum.

The implicit disrespect for the AFL-CIO at its most fateful of gatherings is just one more bit of evidence of the DLC's essential worldview. It's ironic too. If labour splinters and the Change to Win unions take their $35 million in annual dues away from the AFL-CIO's political coffers, that's voter-information and GOTV money the Dems just lose. As Steven Greenhouse pointed out in today's NYT, "In last year's campaign, unions mailed out more than 30 million pieces of literature and ran 257 phone banks with 2,322 lines in 16 states." If the unions scale back their political action in order to save themselves, someone's going to have to make up the difference in time and money to keep the party competitive. And if big donors don't flock back to Dean's DNC in the quantities they flocked to McAuliffe's DNC (and, actually, even if they do), the Dems will become even more reliant on the liberal network strung around the DLC's other current nemises: MoveOn.org, the Pheonix Group, the "netroots" at Daily Kos, and the ministrations of wildly-popular-with-the-base pop-cultural liberals like Michael Moore -- which is to say exactly the "upscale white liberals" (or more accurately upscale left-libertarian activists for whom the "small donor" status of giving several hundred dollars to the party during election season is not a great sacrifice) that Marshall has recently been bemoaning as the greatest current threat to the DLC brand of electable politics.

Like the DLC, I don't see this as a particularly good potential development for the party or for liberal politics in general; I'm not sure the "netroots" (granted, an amorphous term encompassing many very capable party activists) have either the power nor the ideological message to start delivering elections to Democrats. But if I were the DLC, I'd be thinking about what the options really are here. And I'd be paying a lot more attention to and showing a lot more rhetorical solidarity with the fractious, Old-Democratic unions in Chicago and engaging in a lot less hollow self-praise for my remarkable "solidarity".

London's compunding tragedy.

Figuring out exactly what's happening in London leaves me blank. A week ago, the BBC profiled the four men who blew themeselves in the original July 7th bombing, from which the death toll has probably finally peaked at 56. One of the subway bombers, Mohammad Sidque Khan was a teaching assistent in Leeds:

During its last Ofsted inspection in 2002, the school's learning assistants had been singled out for special praise in dealing with a transient pupil population from a socially deprived area.

Mohammad Sidique Khan spoke about his work to the Times Educational Supplement at the time. "A lot of [the pupils] have said this is the best school they have been to," he said.


It's a pretty universal theme, trying to figure out why ordinary people do horrible things -- and in this case how al Qaeda's, or its affiliates' nihilism continues to appeal to people with the wherewithal, and the ability to conform to living middle class lives in the West. But the latest tragedy, following a failed copycat attack on Thursday (like the original attacks, it was three on the underground, one on a bus) in which nobody was seriously injured, came on Friday when five London police shot dead an innocent Brazilian man they thought was another suicide bomber in the metro.

The latter seems to have hit Londoners, and American liberals too, especially hard. As terrible as it is to see just how normal those who find suicide bombing appealing can be, in the end we expect terrorists, and the discontented, usually Muslem, youths who coopt and imitate al Qaeda tactics, to do terrible, antisocial things. It's awful, but it's awful because it's paradigm-affirming, not paradigm-shifting. It's our current reality.

But we expect more of the state, particularly the liberal state. And on top of that, it has to be said that the details of Mr. Menenzes's shooting are bad. The five cops in question were in plainclothes. They trailed Mr. Menenzes after he left a house they had under surviellance, allowing him to board a bus on route to the tube station. It's not entirely evident that they ever identified themselves as police to the victim as they chased him through a South London metro. And, perhaps worst of all, according to witnesses, they tackled him in a train he had entered, and had him pinned on the floor, before they shot him to death. In total, they fired eight shots, seven to the head and one to the shoulder (head shots are required policy to incapacitate a potential bomber with a trigger device).

Khan might spook us because he represented the sort of angst, and hate, that can lurk even in the most normal-seeming human circumstances. The cops who killed Menenzes, on the other hand, remind us of what can happen to societies on edge. The motives and perceptions of a dark-skinned foreign nationals being trailed for hours, then ordered to freeze by large white men in plainclothes naturally don't dovetail with the motives and perceptions of undercover cops fearing yet another suicide bomber setting himself off on a crowded train. Pluralistic society functions by harmonizing differing motives and perceptions with reason and common goals and applied, understood, codified law. But it's not inviolate or else pluralism wouldn't be controversial. Just look at Isreal, where a fundamentally liberal society has come to countenance terrible things (like Ariel Sharon and everything he represents) when faced with what must look like mindless and relentless acts of hostility from the Palestinians.

That's the whole point of terrorism. Terror isn't just about the bombing of situational innocents. It can also be creating the sort of national unease that pervaded the US after 911. (I remember my grandmother talking about a Jihadi plot to poison Lake Gaston in Virginia; I remember not being entirely confident in telling her she was being paranoid.) It can be making the state doubt itself and about making citizens, or any vulnerable subset of citizens, fear or doubt the goodwill of the state. However isolated an event the shooting of Mr. Menenzes might have been (this was, afterall, the first mistaken-identity shooting by Scotland Yard since 1999 and the BBC counts only four such crimes since 1980), and however much better off Londoners are for the presence and vigilance of Scotland Yard, the killing is still emblamatic of terror because it was so totally, horribly unnecessary: a bone-dumb abuse of authority resulting from a bone-dumb reaction to authority, and only possible because of the extremity of the time. Not that this stops London Mayor Ken Livingstone from sounding more than a little callous when he described Mr Menezes as another "victim of the terrorist attacks" on Sunday.

The irony, and perhaps the redeeming fact, of all this is that Britain is one of the world's most liberal, and tolerant, countries. A week after the first bombs went off killing thoses 56 Londoners on route, Pew published a survey of global attitudes toward religion and religious politics. Great Britain scored ahead of every European country, the United States and Canada for its citizens' favourable views of Muslems and among the top countries in the world for its favourable views of Christians and Jews. Maybe the most profound thing Britain can do now is to make sure they keep it that way.

Braude on pluralism.

Joseph Braude has a great piece on "the national-security case for pluralism" at TNR:

[T]hose who blame pluralism for making us vulnerable are missing an important point. They are right, of course, that a small number of Muslims living in the West pose a security risk; no one would argue that a liberal society benefits from the presence of radical sheiks and their followers. But diaspora Muslims may, in the long run, be doing more than any government policy possibly could to undermine Islamist terror. That's because Muslims living in America and Europe are a key conduit for the diffusion of Western cultural values to North Africa and the Middle East. Chief among these values are family planning and the education of women. In the course of traveling to and from their countries of origin, keeping in touch with friends and family by email and phone, and remitting billions of dollars in cash to the region annually, Muslim expats are steadily, quietly influencing the life-cycle decisions of their extended families; and there is strong evidence that this has already translated into lower birth rates in most Arab countries.

...People traffic means idea traffic. This simple point informs a landmark paper released at a U.N. conference last month by population studies scholar Philippe Fargues. The paper uses statistical data from the Middle East and North Africa to demonstrate convincingly that "international migration has contributed to contain the demographic explosion ... increas[ing] global security through demographic change. ... [B]ecause international migrants adopt for themselves, and send back to their home countries, models and ideas that prevail in host countries, they are susceptible to be agents of the diffusion of demographic modernity."


Access to birth control is absolutely the lodestone of female empowerment and self-determination. Sure, reducing fertility rates in the Middle East through Western contraception methods is a case of spreading Western values on non-Western culture, but what's beautiful about the effects of the Muslem diaspora as Braude describes it is that the decisions to adopt certain Western mores are individually voluntary, the results of personal experience and experimentation. Similar arguments can be made for opening up Third World and developing nations to the Internet and to other kinds of Western-originated media. It's a question of choice. One of the fundamental ideas of microeconomics (usually though not always true) is that any time an individual's choice set increases, he is unambiguously no worse off. While other aspects of globalization, like FDI and imports of goods, have the potential to actually limit the available employment and consumer choices in developing economies by driving local alternatives out, human mobility fundamentally enhances the choice set of the migrant (and, through him, his contacts back home) through experience, just like spending a year abroad in England increased my understanding of different kinds of Western culture and widened my effective choice set over where I might want to live and how I might want to behave in the future (like, say, leaving the eggs on the shelf if there's no more room in the fridge.)

Voluntary migration to the West allows non-Westerners to see for themselves what they might choose to emulate (and what they might reject) in Western culture. To the extent that we're willing to acknowledge that we believe certain Western practices (like allowing women easy access to birth control) are normatively better than the alternative, this is unambiguously a good thing. Pluaralism widens choice sets and creates effective demand for better ways of life. That's, afterall, why the Soviet Union worked so hard to keep society closed to images of the West; the socialist experiment relied on people not seeing the alternatives, not knowing about others' effective choices.

This is the good side of globalization. And it's one more good reason not to listen to the James Pinkertons of the world.

MacCleans on Walmart.

Canada's usually bad weekly news magazine, MacLeans, is being edgy this week (actually, last week now), offering a cover story defending Wal-Mart. To its credit, Steve Maich makes some good points about how the evidence of the Wal-Mart preditary effect isn't necessarily confirmed by data:

In 2002, Ryerson University completed the first major study on the company's impact on nearby small retailers, and found the opening of a new outlet is generally an economic boon for the whole area -- attracting other retailers and driving up sales at nearby eIn metropolitan areas, a new Wal-Mart was generally followed by an increase of $56.8 million in local sales, and the opening of 12.9 new stores. In rural areas, the commercial boost was $74.1 million and 16.7 new stores on average. Meanwhile, economic growth in areas with Wal-Mart stores far outpaced growth in places without them. The final line of the study said it all: "It is difficult to make the case that a Wal-Mart store actually puts other retailers out of business."

That study confirmed what Wal-Mart had long claimed: that its stores are economic generators, not predators. And, it seems, even small-business owners are coming around to that view. A 2004 Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce survey of more than 1,800 small-business owners across Canada found that just 16 per cent of respondents said they had been hurt by competition from big-box retailers like Wal-Mart and Home Depot. Five per cent said the big boxes had actually helped them, while the vast majority claimed little or no impact.


Maich also cites data from Hewitt Associates showing that Wal-Mart associates routinely report high job-satisfaction levels reletiave to their counterparts at other Canadian firms.

It's good for this data to be out there. But as a serious piece on the Wal-Mart debate, the article misses the boat in more ways than one. The first problem is the sources. MacLeans isn't ideological (though it's been pandering hard to Alberta recently). But writing an article like this is supposed to convert or influence people who have reservations about Wal-Mart. Yet Maich chooses for his opinion-quotes a representative of the anti-union National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation and economist Bruce Bartlett. Mods like me are open to defences of Wal-Mart, particularly when backed up by yummy statistics, but not so much when the justifications come from former Reagan tax advisors who routinely argue that inequality is a myth. More broadly, the way to defend an institution that's unpopular on the left is not to bring in a bunch of experts from the hard right, or representatives of the institution itself, to defend it.

But the article's bigger problems aren't with the defence of Wal-Mart so much as with the criticism of Wal-Mart's enemies. Maich essentially contends that Wal-Mart's critics -- "a broad array of activist groups and unions" -- are irrational, driven by "near-religious zeal" in their hatred of the corporate behemoth. But the people Maich shows ultimately making the decisions about whether to allow Wal-Mart into their communities are not activist groups and unions (who, the article shows, are relatively powerless), but city and town councils. These local governments are necessarily close to the grassroots, and directly accountable to local voters for their choices. If opposing Wal-Mart is anti-populist, the local population can reject the Wal-Mart opponents in the next election. In fact, the Cleveland example with which Maich leads off the article, supports this theory. There, the 78% of local residents who support the Wal-Mart development get their way in the end. The Democratic mayor who stands up to the United Food and Commercial Workers Union to help bring the Wal-Mart sides with what the people of her town want, the way any smart politician would. There's no evidence of heavy-handed liberal special interests carrying the day.

More generally, Wal-Marts may well be beneficial in the sort of downscale community to which the stores originally catered: areas where unemployment is high and development -- any kind of development -- is a priority. But in more densely populated urban areas where local proprietors can afford to charge higher prices to an upscale clientele and to pay higher wages (a form of market-based wealth redistribution), it can be an ugly, disruptive influence that increases overall income inequality by driving boutique wages down. Carol Foote and her 11,276 petition signers were perfectly justified to lobby to bring a Wal-Mart in Mirimichi. But that doesn't discredit the opinions of anti-Wal-Mart forces in Greater Vancouver where town and city councils have recently rejected Wal-Mart bids. In a way, this is the Tibout Sorting in action: the key is that communities, through their messy democratic process and the locational choices of the heterogenous population, makes the relevant decision.

More offputting still is MacLeans' obvious lack of sympathy for the labour movement and the "gradual death spiral" that makes it so desperate either to unionize Wal-Mart or to keep it out of unionized areas. Maich dismisses UFCW rep Andy Grossman's arguments about the larger "societal" implications of Wal-Mart and basically endorses Wal-Mart's view that its success "is an argument against the need for unionization". But Grossman's point is perfectly valid. The stakes here are not the sort of thing that can be determined by looking at worker-satisfaction surveys or sneering at the hyperbole of some Wal-Mart opponents. Robert Reich (who can be very good when he's not indulging his obsessive Clinton-hatred) wrote about the Wal-Mart dilemma early this year in the New York Times: in his view, Wal-Mart's success and controversy represents the fundamental divide between our rights and demands as consumers and our rights and demands as workers. In any one case, consumers are a huge body of people who gain marginally, while the workers are a relatively small body of people (in any one case) who are hit disportionately hard: about 0.4% of the American population works at Wal-Mart; over a third of Americans regularly shop there. Netting out the overall social cost or benefit is difficult and necessarily depends to some extent on normative or idoleogical judgements, as well as on accurate measures of the spillover between Wal-Mart's policies and those of other retail companies (Maich doesn't actually offer any statistics refuting the unions' claims that Wal-Mart drives down wages in its geographic and industrial vicinity). Netting out the social will -- what we as a society of workers are willing to give up for our consumer-side chasing after low prices and convenience -- is even more complex.

Reich focusses in part on the need for greater public debate. But there's actually lots of debate out there (much of it terrible) if you know where to look. Most people don't look because they aren't sufficiently interested, because they don't see the direct effects of these questions on their lives. And that's where, traditionally, the unions come in. MacLeans is right that the union movement sees Wal-Mart as essential to its survival, but that's not a confirmation of Wal-Mart's claim that it's all a cynical quest for more union dues. Saving itself requires that the union movement achieve a degree of relevance among the workers it hopes to represent. It does so by offering them tangible improvement in their working lives. If successful, this might even entail ending Wal-Mart's corporate philosophy as we know it; Wal-Mart apparently thinks so. It might entail some workers having to pay union dues even though they don't value the union. And -- as Maich's data suggest -- it might well result in majorities of Wal-Mart workers rejecting unionization in fair elections because they are exactly the type of self-selected individuals who value mobility more than stability and who are sympathetic to Wal-Mart's corporate credo of reducing consumer costs.

Right now, though, we can't know if this is the case. We can't know because Wal-Mart routinely blocks fair union elections (by shutting down stores if need be) and because half the Canadian provinces and all the US federal government have legislated difficult procedures for certifying unions, specifically manditory union elections. The empirical academic literature on unions is basically unambiguous in its conclusion that, without a card check regime (wihtout manditory elections), union drives fail to achieve certification except where support is already overwhelming. Some argue that's because of the opportunities for employer manipulation during the election drive; others argue it's because the public nature of card-check forces workers to sign cards even if they would reject a union in the privacy of the voting booth. But the fact remains that, without card check, union drives fail. And, while MacLeans dodges the topic completely, nobody can seriously argue right now that unions have too much power relative to their opponents in business.

So Wal-Mart may not be the evil force its opponents declare it to be. I'm quite open to the idea that it's not. But MacLeans is apologizing for more than Wal-Mart. It's apologizing for Wal-Mart's implicit contention that its model of capitalism -- harsh consumer-driven competition -- is undisputably the best, which in turn extenguishes the need for those who would modify the system to be heard. Taking the position of consumers over labour may well be the "grassroots" position as MacLeans' cover declares it to be. We're all consumers, and our interests are vital. But "consumer" is only one of our identities as citizens, even if it's our dearest and most easily tempted one. I'm not at all convinced that Wal-Mart embodies the best model of post-industrial civil society or that it couldn't be improved by having to go to the negociating table with its workers. Or that all of us wouldn't be better off if it did. Or that government shouldn't make sure those workers and their allies at least have a fair and obvious chance to make that choice.

Hitchens on Rove.

Christopher Hitchens at Slate has done the contrarian thing (that he does so well), defending Karl Rove's leaking of Valerie Plame's identity to Novak and Cooper. Essentially, he defends Bush and Company on three counts:

1) Wilson was and is a sleazy, glory-seeking braggart with no credibility. After he published his fateful op-ed, the White House needed to make sure the anti-war media had that subjective knowledge before they bought Wilson's take on events in Niger hook, line, and sinker.

2) The 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act that makes it illegal to knowingly out an undercover CIA agent if it could cause her harm is such a "repressive and absurd" law that it would be a mockery to really consider prosecuting Rove under it. And, anyway, his action probably doesn't fall under the Act's narrow and arbitrary definition of a crime.

3) What's really disgusting here is the media's using Rove as a springboard from which to confirm and hammer their false notion that there were never any Iraq-al Qaeda contacts and that Iraq wasn't in the yellowcake market. And the very biggest scandal is the press' acceptance of the "demented premise" of Fitzgerald's prosecution, next to which anything Rove did in his capacity as White House spinmeister is small ethical potatoes.


On count one, Hitch has a point, though he overstates his case when he claims that Wilson's word is "effectively worthless". (Wilson does, in my opinion, look like something of a shameless publicity hound and has been sloppy in his various assertions. Among other things, he also seems to have mistated his campaign contributions over the last two cycles). But, if Wilson was such a total flake, why didn't the White House simply attack him directly through the usual Mighty Wurlitzer channels? Why drag his wife into it, especially given her status? As Tim Noah pointed out, Plame had no authority to do anything more than recommend her (extremely qualified) husband; somebody else in the CIA had to authorize the trip. And Wilson never did claim that it was Cheney's office that did so. Yet Hitchens isn't at all disturbed by the oddness, and the total superfluousness (given Hitchen's view of Wilson's on-the-record credibility), of the Bushies' decision to attack Wilson anynomously as...what? the plaything of his wife?

On count two, Hitch is probably right that Rove doesn't look prosecutable under the 1982 Act, even though, contra Hitch, the Act says nothing about the leaker needing to think the leak is going to cause harm to the outed agent. But even assuming Rove isn't provably guilty of violating the Act, that doesn't mean Rove did nothing wrong. At the very least, Rove's action was sleazy, bone-stupid politics. He took a gamble that, in leaking Plame's relationship to Wilson, he'd never be outed himself. He lost that gamble, embarrassing the White House in the process and possibly even forcing them to nominate a non-wingnut judge to the Supreme Court to stem the bad press. Meanwhile, Bush and McClellan have said (or danced around saying) over and over again during the past two years that they'd fire anybody who turned out to be associated with the leak. They were right to say it because leaking Plame's identity was a nasty and pointless thing to do, as discussed above. They've backed themselves into a corner: there's no justification for keeping Rove on. He screwed up as a political shit deflector, cost taxpayers a lot of money, and has proved himself for the final time to be an irredeemable asshole.

And anyway, the main source of Rove's potential criminality isn't the original leak. It's the squirrelly ass-covering the followed it. Rove most likely lied to the FBI and if Fitzgerald is planning to go after him, that'll probably be the reason. In fact, Murray Waas' latest report for the American Prospect offers more background evidence that Rove did indeed mislead his FBI questioners by not disclosing his leak to Cooper during his first interview with them. If outing Plame wasn't itself a crime (and I accept Hitchens' premise on this), then lying to the FBI most certainly is. Contra Hitch, that's not a "non-storm in an un-teacup".

On point three, Hitchens makes a point to which I'm not, in principle, totally unsympathetic. The Washington Press Corps is inherently scandal-happy and often stupid. They can allow their desire for a good blood-in-the-water story to overcome any semblance of nuance, objectivity or fairness. Also, people in public life sometimes lie when forced into absurd situations, situations arbitrarily concocted by their enemies, and in response to questions about which the public has no right to know the answer. In fact, I can think of one famous case not so long ago that conformed precisely to this description. Coincidentally, Hitchens wrote about that one too, but, oddly, he was somewhat less sympathetic to Bill Clinton's lying under oath about sex than he currently is to Rove's (potential) lying under oath about legally iffy leaks. Maybe moving to the right has made Hitch more sympathetic to these sorts of tactics.

At any rate, Hitchens was wrong about Clinton (at least regarding the Starr investigation) and he is wrong about Rove. The White House deserves every bit of shit it's getting over this and hopefully a lot more.

What personal responsiblity ethic?

Ed Kilgore, watching the Rove-and-pals-leaked-a-CIA-agent's-identity-and-now-Rove-has-probably-perjured-himself situation get more and more unbelievably pathetic for the White House, writes about the big picture implications of the scandal over at TPMCafe:

Recall George W. Bush's meta-message during the 2000 campaign: it was time for a "responsibility era" to rein in the excesses introduced by the out-of-control Baby Boomer Bill Clinton. The grown-ups, emblemized by Dick Cheney and other Bush 41 exiles, were ready to give America a mature and accountable government.

That has turned out to be the biggest Bush lie of them all.


Yeah, except that this was always a red herring. Bush's message has never been about "personal responsibility", no matter how father-figurish Dick Cheney might have looked on the stump and no matter how many photo ops Bush took with Colin Powell. What Bush offered in 2000 was actually a wink-wink-nudge-nudge little deal: in return for a trillion dollars in tax giveaways to his old-economy country club friends, Bush and Cheney would send you a little cheque, keep their wangs in their pants, and basically stay the hell out of your life... more to the point, they'd keep those insufferable New Democrats the hell out of your life. Personal responsibility was, after all, an intrinsically Clintonian meta-message. The basic idea was that, if you as a citizen did your part and "played by the rules" (Clinton actually borrowed this now-iconic phrase from Geraldine Ferraro's 1984 nomination acceptance speech), the government would do its part and help you meet your potential. Even when Clinton signed ugly legislation like the 1996 welfare reform bill, he sold it, and hoped to improve it, as a part of this scheme: the government set out conditions and responsibilities that any able-bodied individual had to fulfill -- specifically, joining the paid economy -- and in return, it provided (in theory) more of what people needed to get ahead: job training, child care and wage-income supplements.

The essential appeal of Clintonism, at least in this aspect, was that it was inherently populist, even egalitarian. The Clintonites presented themselves neither as rarified figures like Reagan and Eisenhower had been, nor as pious moral guides like Carter. They offered engagement rather than dictation. But the fatal flaw was that, in so doing, they opened themselves to charges of hypocracy and, worse, to charges of hypocracy laced with contempt. By 1999, a smart Republican campaign could, and did, argue that Clinton (because of Monica) and Gore (because of Fundraising '96) hadn't kept their end of the bargain; they hadn't "played by the rules" and therefore the rules themselves were moot. Bush stirred up the classic Reaganish resentment of "big government" and combined it with the more personal, pointed resentment of the individuals -- Clinton and Gore -- who, he charged, hypocritically demanded that you conform to their arbitrary notion of the public good, even when their own lives were fucking messes. Only a very earnest New Democrat could think this was an appeal to "personal responsibility" (or as Bush's speechwriters put it, "honor and dignity"), beyond the narrowest sense of not doing the interns. It was actually more like a closetted appeal to South Park conservatism coated with a thin veneer of "compassionate" bullshit to keep the New York Times' op-ed columnists happy.

That's why we shouldn't be surprised about "the big lie". Personal responsibility, basic accountability, were never part of the deal. The Republicans, save maybe Jack Kemp here and John McCain there, haven't been about personal responsibilty since shortly after Watergate. That's why, as Kilgore points out, every challenge Bush has faced so far has been met with a flat rejection of personal responsibility... for the government of course, but also for the population. How should the US respond to a terrorist attack fuelled by Saudi oil money? Of course: it should up its consumer spending just to show those terrorists we can't be frightened into responsible energy consumption! Not asking for sacrifice made Bush popular and, afterall, not having to make sacrifices was what 50 million Americans and 5 Supreme Court judges voted for. The same callous laissez-faire ethic lay behind the fixing of the intel on Iraq; behind the "Mission Accomplished" stunt; behind the deliberate lowballing of the cost of the Medicare drug benefit; behind the breathtakingly nasty Bush-Cheney reelection effort; and especially behind the roughly $3.5 trillon in tax cuts that Bush has used to wreck the budget over the past five years. In all cases the White House did what was politically easy and served their short-run interests. It told Americans not to worry about the details, and requested only in return that Americans follow that advice.

So of course Bush stands behind Karl Rove, even though he has probably perjured himself and is, at any rate, a politically stupid and ethically indefensible thug. Bush likes Rove, and Rove was part of the package. Why should Bush have to fire someone he likes? That wasn't part of the deal. The deal was for Bush to keep Bill Clinton's / Al Gore's / John Kerry's meddling, goo-goo statist nose out of your fucking business. He's done that. Twice. The rest is gravy, dudes. Go out and spend, spend, spend.

Rove (probably) lied to the FBI. Why is he still on the White House payroll?

This is being blogged to death, of course. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Karl Rove, according to an extremely credible-looking report, lied to the FBI about his role in the Plame outing. Murray Wass reported for the American Prospect in March, 2004 that:

President Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, told the FBI in an interview last October that he circulated and discussed damaging information regarding CIA operative Valerie Plame with others in the White House, outside political consultants, and journalists, according to a government official and an attorney familiar with the ongoing special counsel's investigation of the matter.

But Rove also adamantly insisted to the FBI that he was not the administration official who leaked the information that Plame was a covert CIA operative to conservative columnist Robert Novak last July. Rather, Rove insisted, he had only circulated information about Plame after it had appeared in Novak's column. He also told the FBI, the same sources said, that circulating the information was a legitimate means to counter what he claimed was politically motivated criticism of the Bush administration by Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. [emphasis mine, as usual]


But that just isn't true. From what's been made public so far, we now know that Rove spoke to Matt Cooper (after Cooper called on Rove to brief him about a different story) on July 11, 2003 and told him then that Joseph Wilson had been recommended (actually "authorized", which, as Tim Noah points out, is false) for the trip to Niger by his wife at the CIA. And today we learn that Rove was also approached by Novak himself on July 8th, 2003 -- six days before the fateful column appeared -- after Novak got word from another source about Wilson's relationship to the CIA and the genesis of the Niger trip. Of course, at that point, Rove had the opportunity to stop the story from being published in the first place by refusing to confirm Novak's tip or by warning Novak against running with his scoop for national security reasons. But, according to today's Washington Post, he instead told Novak that "I heard that too" about Wilson and his CIA wife. Rove's brilliant attorney, Robert Luskin, is now claiming that Rove in fact was able to confirm Novak's scoop with information Rove had received earlier from a different journalist (presumably one of the other five to whom the White House shopped the information). But that journalist (pure speculation: might it have been Judith Miller?) and Novak must have gotten the original tip from somebody else, i.e. some other leaker in the Adminstration.

So at least one other journalist (unless it's Miller and she stays clammed up) and one other White House source stand to be embarrassed before all this is over. But in the meantime, the fact remains that if that Prospect article is accurate, Rove lied to the FBI about when he started blabbing. Disclosing Plame's identity may not in fact have been illegal. It's even possible (though unlikely) that Rove's motive in talking to Cooper was as benign as Luskin made it out to Byron York recently: that is, he was just trying to keep the "liberal media" from running further with the Wilson revelations to begin with and to make sure Cooper understood that Cheney's office had not authorized the trip. But lying to the FBI is a federal offence.

Anyway, White House officials have said (well, actually danced around saying), over and over, that they would fire anybody who turned out to have been involved with the leak, whether or not it was illegal. Here's the most relevant example from way back in September of 2003:

Q -- Scott, what do you say to people out there who are watching this, perhaps, and saying, you know, I voted for George Bush because he promised to change the way things work in Washington. And, yet, his spokesman --

MR. McCLELLAN: And he has.

Q -- and, yet, his spokesman is saying that there's no internal, even, questioning of whether or not people were involved in this and he's just letting that be handled at the Justice Department, and letting it be more of a criminal investigation, as opposed to almost an ethical --

MR. McCLELLAN: Dana, I mean, think about what you're asking. If you have specific information to bring to our attention --

Q No, but you say that --

MR. McCLELLAN: -- that suggests White House involvement. There are anonymous reports all the time in the media. The President has set high standards, the highest of standards for people in his administration. He's made it very clear to people in his administration that he expects them to adhere to the highest standards of conduct. If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration. [emphasis mine]


That I had to hunt and hunt for a quote that combined "involved with the leak" and some version of "would be fired" tells you how pathetic the press corps is at teasing concrete statements out of the professional bullshitters that run the Bush operation. Nevertheless, we have it here. McClellan didn't say "if anyone in this Administration was the [original] leaker" (which Rove likely was not). He said "if anybody in this Administration was involved with it". So unless the Bushies really want to start arguing that it depends on what the meaning of "it" is, McClellan basically committed the Administration to sack anyone fitting the description of what we currently know about Rove's involvement. And that is completely besides the fact that Rove apparently lied to the FBI, as well as, according to various other statements McClellan and Bush have made about Rove's innocence, to his bosses at the White House.

All of which means that Karl Rove's continuing employment ought to be deeply, deeply embarrassing to the Bushies. Of course that assumes that this crew can actually be embarrassed.

The bullshit. The lying. The yowling incompetence.

Heh, so it turns out that Karl Rove was behind the leak about Valerie Plame's identity to the Washington press corps back in 2003 (at least to TIME's Matt Cooper if not to Robert Novak). And even though Bush swore up and down that he'd fire the White House leaker if ever it came to light who it was, Rove is still very much on the White House payroll.

And, huh, now it seems that the interrogation techniques used at Abu Ghraib weren't the work of a few wayward soldiers so much as they were the fruit of one Major General Miller:

Interrogators at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, forced a stubborn detainee to wear women's underwear on his head, confronted him with snarling military working dogs and attached a leash to his chains, according to a newly released military investigation that shows the tactics were employed there months before military police used them on detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The techniques, approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for use in interrogating Mohamed Qahtani -- the alleged "20th hijacker" in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks -- were used at Guantanamo Bay in late 2002 as part of a special interrogation plan aimed at breaking down the silent detainee.

...A central figure in the investigation, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who commanded the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and later helped set up U.S. operations at Abu Ghraib, was accused of failing to properly supervise Qahtani's interrogation plan and was recommended for reprimand by investigators. Miller would have been the highest-ranking officer to face discipline for detainee abuses so far, but Gen. Bantz Craddock, head of the U.S. Southern Command, declined to follow the recommendation.

Miller traveled to Iraq in September 2003 to assist in Abu Ghraib's startup, and he later sent in "Tiger Teams" of Guantanamo Bay interrogators and analysts as advisers and trainers. Within weeks of his departure from Abu Ghraib, military working dogs were being used in interrogations, and naked detainees were humiliated and abused by military police soldiers working the night shift.

Miller declined to respond to questions posed through a Defense Department liaison. Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said it is not appropriate to link the interrogation of Qahtani -- an important al Qaeda operative captured shortly after the terrorist attacks -- and events at Abu Ghraib. Whitman said interrogation tactics in the Army's field manual are the same worldwide but MPs at Abu Ghraib were not authorized to apply them, regardless of how they learned about them. [emphasis mine]

...The abuses at Abu Ghraib included military police taking photos of themselves mimicking the tactics used at Guantanamo Bay. Several photographs taken in late 2003 at the prison outside Baghdad show detainees wearing women's underwear on their heads, detainees shackled to their cell doors or beds in awkward positions, and naked detainees standing before female soldiers. Perhaps the most famous image is of Pfc. Lynndie England holding a leash attached to a detainee's neck.

Qahtani, according to the investigative report, was once attached to a leash and made to walk around the room and "perform a series of dog tricks." The report also notes the use of "gender coercion," in which women straddle a detainee or get too close to them, violating prohibitions for devout Muslim men on contact with women. Interrogators also threatened to tell other detainees that an individual is gay, according to the report. Detainees at Abu Ghraib were posed in mock homosexual positions and photographed.


Pathetic. Yes, the military claims, probably correctly, that "the military achieved "solid intelligence gains," by interrogating Qahtani". But there's a difference between "the twentieth hijacker" and a bunch of schmoes, who might or not be Sunni geurillas, being held in an Iraqi prison during the US occupation of the country. And it's clearly not a difference the US military gave a shit about in practice. When you codify certain practices in your military handbooks; then you put a bunch of redneck kids from "the backwoods of West Virginia" (quoting the Human Rights Watch official in the article) in positions of responsibility under conditions of enormous stress, constant threat, and pathetic supervision like those at Abu Ghraib (and note that much of what was revealed today is foreshadowed in that Post piece from over a year ago); then you have them (under-)trained by the same people who oversaw coercive interrogation techniques of al Qaeda members (and think they got results using those techniques) you're going to wind up with an international embarrassment.

And when the Bush White House smells an international embarrassment, it does the only thing it knows how to do: it lies. Actually, it doesn't lie so much as it bullshits. Bullshitting is distinct from lying in that the bullshitter sometimes lies and sometimes tells the truth, but does so randomly, depending on whether the lie or the truth is more likely to make the problem go away, at least for a little while. The tactic also has the advantage of allowing White House defenders to fish out the little bits of truth and hold them up as examples of Bushie integrity.

Anyway, in the midst of the spin and the bullshit, the White House lied about Karl Rove and Valerie Plame (either that Rove wasn't involved when they knew he had been, or that they cared enough to fire the leaker when his identity became known). And it lied about the conditions and protocols and "chain of command" breakdowns that led up to Abu Ghraib. Just as a refresher, here's a taste of what Rumsfeld said in his May 4, 2004 press conference on the subject:

The system works. The system works. There were some allegations of abuse in a detention facility in Iraq. It was reported in the chain of command. Immediately it was announced to the public. Immediately an investigation was initiated. Six separate investigations have been undertaken over a period of months since January.


Investigations that might eventually turn up something that would refute statements like this?:


There's no question but that it has been my conviction that all of our rules, all of our procedures, all of our training is against abuse of people that are detained. You know that. I know that. I've been over it in detail.

And the fact that it happens -- notwithstanding the fact that it's against everything that they're taught, against everything that we believe, it's also against anything that any individual on their own ought to believe is right. And so there's -- all I can say is what I've said.


In the meantime, there's the more generic oh-this-is-tragic-but-hardly-our-fault bullshit:

The United States of America is a wonderful country. And the overwhelming majority of the people in this country are wonderful people. And certainly the men and women who serve in uniform are doing a superb job for our country. And does it mean that our country's perfect? No. Does it mean that everyone in uniform is perfect? No. And the world has seen problems of this type before, and I regret to say I'm afraid that people do things that they ought not to do, and that are harmful, and that are disappointing and are, in many instances, disgraceful.


This sort of thing (Hugh Hewitt might call it "talking in code to the hard right base") prompted the Weekly Standard, among many others, to editorialize on the White House's behalf on May 17, 2004:

...Neither are we sympathetic to the arguments of defense lawyers for the accused, echoed by friendly reporters, who want to point the finger of blame anywhere except at their clients. The prison guards were badly trained, we hear; they thought they were doing what the interrogators/contractors/CIA wanted them to do; they were cogs in a corrupt military machine. We might say something like that if we were being paid to defend these lowlifes. And, yes, there do seem to have been lamentable weaknesses in training and command. But "sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light" is evidence of a lack of humanity, not a lack of training. And consider this lovely detail: The Washington Post reports that there is "a new batch of photographs similar to those broadcast a week ago [which include] pictures showing crude simulations of sex among soldiers." Did the CIA encourage them to do that, too?


Well, maybe not the CIA...

The bullshitting, especially the lying parts of it, is upsetting. But what's really upsetting is the incompetence that underlies and enables the bullshitting and the resultant lying. It's the alarmingly myopic idea that, with enough spin, bad things will just blow over, be forgotten. For instance, did the Bushies really think the Plame investigation wouldn't eventually force those background sources to be made public, implicating Karl Rove in the affair? By the same token, did they not realise that some of those military investigations Rumsfeld talked about might well overturn the unfortunate "lowlifes" argument the pro-Bush-Rumsfeld forces were depending on?

The Bushies didn't invent bullshit. They're not the first administration in US history to lie, even about war. But spin is supposed to work; it's supposed to have some kind of structure, some kind of method. Otherwise it's just immoral and embarrassing. Like the Bush Administration.

On vacation.

Sort of like Bush...but I'm only gone for a week.

The myth of ideas; the myth of idea sustitutes.

Jonathan Chait is back with one of his long TNR cover articles knocking down the latest right-leaning, Tom Friedman-esque Beltway CW, that "Democrats/liberals lose because they lack ideas", a myth that has happily taken root over at RNC web headquarters.

The most instructive part of Chait's article comes after he gets through demolishing the notion that Dems and liberals have comparatively few ideas, and after he draws the perpetuatlly overlooked distinction between the free-floating idea and the effective political-power-backed idea, but before he gets around to lambasting the stupid notion that old ideas (like social security) are somehow intellectually inferior to brand spanking new ones (like social security privatization). Rather, the most instructive part of his article is where Chait takes on the presumed political effectiveness of the raw "idea", in particular its currency during elections:

...The constant invoking of the idea gap isn't entirely, or even mostly, disingenuous. Lots of politicians and analysts earnestly believe it. They believe it because they buy into a set of shared assumptions, usually unstated, about how U.S. politics works. The central assumption is that politics revolves around issues and ideas--rather than things like personality, tactics, and outside circumstances--and that the party that wins is the one that presents a more compelling vision of the future.

...Alas, this sort of thinking assumes a wildly optimistic level of discernment by voters. Polls consistently show that large swaths of the voting public know very little about the positions taken by candidates. In 2000, the National Annenberg Election Survey found that just 57 percent of voters knew Al Gore was more liberal than Bush, 51 percent knew he was more supportive of gun control, and a mere 46 percent understood that he was more supportive of abortion rights. "The voting behavior literature, which is massive, shows that people are not particularly idea-driven," explains Berkeley political scientist Nelson Polsby. "They don't know what the fashions are, with respect to what ideas go with other ideas." [emphasis mine]


This caught me up pretty short. In 2000, 54% of voters weren't confident enough in their knowledge of the candidates to tell pollsters that the Democrat favoured greater abortion rights than the Republican? This goes against the grain not just of the "power of ideas" argument but against the what I refer to here as the "power of idea susbstitutes" argument. Before reading those Annenberg numbers, I would have taken it for granted that most American adults would know and/or assume that any generic Democrat would, by default, support greater abortion rights than any generic Republican. The same would go, to a lesser extent, for gun control or gay rights or affirmative action. These are the sort of instinctual identity-group cultural issues that, it's often argued, brand the parties and decide elections by turning the attention of voters away from liberal candidates' more comprehensive, more clever, more important "ideas" on things like consumer rights and access to health care and education.

Plus, in this case we aren't even talking about the "generic Democrat"'s position on abortion. Two months ago, Ed Kilgore found occasion to reaffirm the post-2000 CW over at the DLC's NewDonkey blog:

Personalities aside, the biggest difference between Clinton '96 and Gore '00 had to do with how each candidate dealt with two sets of issues: culture, and role-of-government--both big "trust" issues in the South. Clinton was thoroughly progressive, but went well out of his way to make it clear that he wanted abortion to be "safe, legal and rare," that he supported a modest gay rights agenda because everyone who "worked hard and played by the rules" should be treated the same; and that he fought to maintain and even expand the social safety net on condition that it truly represented a "hand up, not a handout."

...Compare that message to Gore's, and you go a long way towards understanding why the guy lost nearly half of Clinton's southern white support [note: it was actually about 14% of Clinton's white southern support]. Gore was forever bellowing about partial-birth abortion legislation (supported by about three-fourths of southerners) representing a dire threat to the basic right to choose. While Clinton called for "mending, not ending" affirmative action, Gore pledged to defend every aspect of affirmative action with his life. Clinton talked about balancing gun ownership rights with responsibilities. Gore talked about national licensing of gun owners...].


That is, by drawing "bright red lines" on hot-botton issues (to quote the DLC's Will Marshall making the same point), Gore made American voters, particularly white Southern voters and "Reagan Democrats", fixate on these issues to the detriment of his larger ideas-based message. But Kilgore's (snotty) analysis doesn't square very well with Chait's quoted Annenberg numbers. So I went to the Annenberg site to see if I could sort the weirdness out. I couldn't find the Chait's specific survey numbers, but last publicly available release from 2000 found 60% (63%) of the public able to identify Gore (Bush's) position on abortion correctly. Granted, that was right after the first debate and those numbers could easily have fallen off again as they appear to have done following the conventions. Also, Chait may overstate the problem of voter cluelessness a little bit since the Annenberg's methodology suggests that their reports aren't based on samples of "voters", registered or likely or declared, but rather random samples of American adults. Since before 2004, only about half the eligible population was voting in presidential elections, Chait's numbers probably include the 30% or so of Americans who chose to remain clueless about politics but without any intention of taking their cluelessness into the voting booth.

Nevertheless, the numbers I did find are striking, particularly those in this post-Democratic Convention report. The Annenberg crew, Paul Waldman et al, took random phone samples of American adults before and after the 2000 Convention to see if public awareness of Gore's various positions actually improved during the festivities. The results are instructive. The percentage correctly identifying Gore's position on allowing HMO lawsuits increased from 42% to 51% between August 13 and August 18-21. The percentage correctly indentifying his support for spending federal money on health insurance for children went from 69% to 78%. The percentages able to identify his support for the McCain-Feingold provisions, capital punishment, prescription drugs under Medicare and gays in the military all climbed between five and seven points. But two issues on which voters didn't increase their understanding of Gore's position throughout the convention (and, according to Chait, never did) were in fact the two issues that Kilgore thinks finished Gore off: abortion and gun control. In fact, if you look at Annenberg's graph of the % of the public that correctly identifies Gore's position on abortion (at the top of page 4), it holds steady at just over 50% for most of the summer, rises during the first three days of the Democratic convention, and then drops sharply on the days directly following Gore's nomination acceptance speech. But here's what Gore actually said during his speech on the subject of abortion:

"And make no mistake: I will protect and defend a woman's right to choose. The last thing this country needs is a Supreme Court that overturns Roe v. Wade."

Tough stuff (and the biggest applause line of the night). Compare that to Clinton's 1996 remarks:

"We respect the individual conscience of every American on the painful issue of abortion, but believe as a matter of law that this decision should be left to a woman, her conscience, her doctor and her God. But abortion should not only be -- abortion should not only be safe and legal, it should be rare. That's why I helped to establish and support a national effort to reduce out-of-wedlock teen pregnancy, and that is why we must promote adoption."


So how do you reconcile that? Why did the percentage of Americans not knowing Gore's position on abortion actually fall in the wake of his speech, even as the number getting the message about the campaign's loftier "ideas" on health care and lawsuit rights actually increased?

I venture two answers:

The first is simply that the relevence of hot-botton social and "values" issues is overblown by liberals, rightwingers and centrists alike (actually, a lot of non-wingnut conservatives play down the "values" thing, maybe out of embarrassment at the possibility that their guy keeps winning on the strength of the electorate's hatred for gays). That is, when the DLC complains about the "bright red lines" that cost their guys elections, or when I complain (as I have many times) about the "emotional, instinctual" American voter, that may say more about the DLC and about me than it does about the candidates or the electorate. Isn't it possible that the vast majority of potential voters just don't care, and therefore don't spend any time thinking, about where presidential candidates stand on abortion and gun control? Of course there is a minority of voters that does think about these things and cares strongly about them and who cites these issues to exit pollsters as reasons for supporting Candidate X or Candidate Y. But these people tend to be politically active and partisan. Among the wider potential electorate, and among people who don't follow politics closely or form opinions about the candidates until near election time (and who therefore make up the vaunted "swing vote"), there appears to be less reason to believe the culture war is a great drain on Democrats' performance*. Afterall, despite Kerry's obvious comfort with guns and gunsport during the 2004 campaign and his shying away from advocating stronger gun control, the Democratic share among gun-owning households did not actually improve in 2004 at all. That's because the type of voter who could actually see the daylight between Kerry's and Gore's position on guns was the type of voter who was already voting for Kerry or for Bush.

The second, ralated answer, is that Gore was doing what Hugh Hewitt likes to sinisterly call "talking in code to the hard-left base". "Hard left" here implies people who actually knew what Roe vs. Wade refered to and, at the same time, supported it. And this is the crux of what I'm getting at: Of course, any journalist or TV commentator or blogger would immediately know what Gore was getting at when he brought up Roe and when he vowed to defend "a woman's right to choose". We knew, and the DLC cringed, because we give a shit. The fact that we give a shit about abortion and about where candidates stand on abortion means that we learn the code. We learn it so well that we assume that everyone else does too. But how many American adults (and what percentage of the 53% who watched at least some of the 2000 Convention) would have understood the reference? That is, how much currency does Roe actually carry in the popular conciousness? Survey after survey tells us that the American electorate is woefully uninformed about history and current events. Isn't it just as possible that a big chunk of voters simply missed hearing the word "abortion" in clips of Gore's remarks and, not having heard heard him or the post-convention commentators use the word, just didn't think about it; then, when pressed, repeated their passive uncertainty to the Annenberg pollsters?

The point of all this is as follows: Chait hits on an important truth in his piece. Apolotical Americans don't know much and don't care much about politics, probably much in the same way that I don't know much or care much about football. Many people it would find it mindnumbing that I don't know who won the SuperBowl (or the Grey Cup) last year. But I don't. I don't know not because I harbour any latent cultural hostility to football. It's just not something I choose to think about. If asked questions about it by a pollster, I'd just say that I didn't know the answers. On the other hand, I can quote verbatum chunks from Kerry's cultural issues answers at the third debate with Bush, and I typed that bit of Gore's nomination speech from memory. And, well, I write a blog about stuff like this.

Chait sums up as follows:

This conception of U.S. politics is especially compelling to intellectuals. It is a vision of a noble landscape in which philosopher kings hold sway. Each side has its visionaries, wonks, and pamphleteers, beavering away to see whose ideological manifestos, new syntheses, and ten-point plans will prove decisive in the next election. Writers and thinkers enjoy a heroic central role in shaping history: We--not grubby factors like attack ads or the state of the economy or the candidates' ease before the cameras--hold the future in our hands. Twenty years ago, Tom Wolfe appeared before a gathering of conservatives in Washington and declared that Marxism's appeal lay in its "implicit secret promise ... of handing power over to the intellectuals." The promise is not confined to Marxism. It seems to have seduced everybody.

Almost. If what I'm arguing is correct, the real seduction is not so the myth of intellectualism so much as the idea of emotional energy. It's not that those voters are unreceptive to our candidates' and spokesmen's ideas because of innate cultural prejudices or because they're more interested in who would be more fun to have a beer with. It's that they choose not to think about our candidates or our spokesmen at all. It's a passivity about politics that is entirely alien to the political junkie's mind.


* Note: as a caveat, these comments are probably more relevant to 2000 than to 2004 since 2004 was a very unusual election in the sense that both sides drew much more heavily and exclusively from their bases than usual and because the public was much more clued in. Therefore, I'd concede that the culture war, including all those gay marriage state ballot initiatives, might have had a larger effect on the 2004 outcome than my arguments here suggest.

Who could save Roe?

There's a lot more at stake in Sandra Day O'Connor's SCUTUS replacement battle than just the fate of Roe vs. Wade, as Jeffrey Rosen keeps telling us. With its current composition, the court is roughly 2 full votes away from being a full-fledged firebreathing anti-Congress behemoth; 1.5 votes away from overturning Roe (the extra half vote belongs to Justice Kennedy), and one vote (O'Connor's) away from becoming a much less moderate, humane, precedent-loving ruling body on subjects including, but by no means limited to, affirmative action, election law and the symbolic separation of Church and State.

Still, ending the era of Roe would mark a sea-change in American politics and would solidify the Bush presidency as the most radically rightwing in American history, which seems to be increasingly how Bush and Company wants it on domestic issues. And Roe is going to be at the heart of the O'Connor replacement battle. I'm no expert on SCUTUS stuff, so the following rhetorical questions are pretty basic. The questions are: (1) If the early media attention to Attorney General Alberto (Abu) Gonzales actually foreshadows his nomination to the court, is there any possibility that Gonzales will uphold Roe? and (2) If not, will Justice Kennedy, the new swing vote on Roe, vote to maintain its basic provisions under precedent?

When it comes to Gonzales, conservative groups are desperate to avoid another Souter or O'Connor; that is, to avoid a Republican judge whose nomination is acceptable to moderate Democrats and who then goes on to actually decide cases in ways that are acceptable to moderate Democrats. The BBC reports that conservative groups are already warning Bush that they don't like Gonzales:

Last week, a delegation of conservative lawyers met the White House chief of staff to warn that appointing Mr Gonzales would divide conservatives, the New York Times reports.

Paul M Weyrich, chairman of the Free Congress Foundation, said he had told administration officials that nominating Mr Gonzales would divide the president's supporters.

...We would oppose him because we don't believe he has a philosophy that we can determine said Tom Minnery of the Conservative advocacy group Focus on the Family.

The conservatives who oppose Mr Gonzales' nomination say he is too moderate and that his views on issues such as abortion and affirmative action are not far enough to the right.


Sounds promising, but there are three big problems. The first is that these groups are so extreme that their distaste for a particicular candidate means little in a broader ideological scheme. (For instance, the Free Congress Foundation's manifesto is to stop America's "long slide into the cultural and moral decay of political correctness" that will render it "no less than a third world country".) Their distaste for Gonzales, though probably heartfelt, is a necessary but by no means sufficient condition for considering him.

The second problem is that conservative distrust of Gonzales rests largely on his rather small judicial paper trail, a product of the fact that he was only appointed to the Texas Supreme Court in 1999, then packed up for the White House in December of 2000. It's true that Gonzales did at one point join the majority opinion allowing a 17-year-old to have an abortion without parental consent, meeting the "mature and sufficiently well-informed" clause in a parental notification law Governor Bush had recently signed; but as Ryan Lizza has pointed out, this wasn't a ruling on parental notification, but a ruling on legislative intent, as Gonzales took pains to point out in his opinion.

And, of course, Gonzales is awful for all sorts of other reasons that have nothing to do with abortion. In addition to his famous disdain for the Geneva Conventions, his "death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions" definition of torture, and his more general lack of enthusiasm for habeas corpus rights, there's also the matter of his record as Texas Secretary of State, in which he actively helped Bush make the state first in the nation in executions by denying clemency rights. He was also blithely corrupt vis-a-vis campaign finance conflicts of interest during his time on the Texas bench, a subject that ought to get more attention before he heads of the Supreme Court. In short, his appointment would be a national embarrassment, even if he does turn out to be a relative moderate. That's a big price to pay for the mere possibility that he might not vote to overturn Roe, based on a single opinion that actually had nothing to do with Roe.

The third problem is that, if Bush replaces O'Connor with Gonzales -- a male who will be sold on the talking-head shows and considered by the public to be a "moderate" -- he'll then probably need to replace Rehnquist with a woman. The shortlist of female possibilities ain't pretty, but one of them is surely going to be nominated to the Court. Edith Hollin Jones claims to oppose judicial activism but has also called Roe an "an excercise in raw judicial power" and has attacked the Endangered Species Act in her opinions. Edith Brown Clement, who serves with Jones on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, also looks like she harbours a fierce anti-Congress agenda (according to Rosen). And the nightmare scenario is that Bush tries to appoint one of his recent whackjob DC court appointments to the Top Job, either Justice Priscilla Owen or Justice Janice Rogers Brown, triggering the nuclear option in the process. On the other hand, if Bush replaces O'Connor rather than Rehnquist with one of these ladies (one of the first two), that could open the door for the appointment of Michael McConnell to replace Rehnquist, maybe even as Chief Justice. This terrific diary by a Kossack blogger makes the case that this could be a good thing, the sort of thing you might imagine from an "honest conservatism", if such a thing actually existed today.

The unpleasant fact is that neither Rehnquist nor O'Connor's replacement, whether or not it's Gonzales, McConnell or one of those firebreathing dames, is likely to vote to uphold Roe the next time a suitable case presents itself. In that case, the next logical question is, will Justice Kennedy take on that job? Kennedy has a history of voting with the conservatives on tangential abortion issues, and made his personal disgust with abortion known in his dissent in the 2000 Stenburg vs. Carhart partial-birth ruling. But he also joined the opinion of Souter and O'Connor in voting to uphold Roe in Casey vs. Planned Parenthood in 1992 [correction]. If Kennedy stays true to Casey, a post-O'Connor court might well be one that increases its hostility to abortion rights on issues like parental notification and tolerance for protesters outside clinics, but supports the basic provision under Roe and Doe -- that is the legal right to contract a first-trimester abortion under the "right to privacy" and to contract later-term abortions when certain conditions related to the mother's or fetus' health apply.

Or maybe not. According to a CNN report on the opening of Justice Blackman's records in 2004, Kennedy's vote in Casey was a last-minute defection from the Rehnquist-Scalia-Thomas-White anti-Roe position to a compromise position (granted, one that opened the door for lots of anti-abortion state initiatives), largely due to persuasion by O'Connor. And now she won't be there anymore to persuade him. Though public opinion polls don't show much systematic movement on abortion since 1992 (or since 1975 for that matter), America's hard right lobby is a hell of a lot stronger now. Kennedy himself is under constant lobbying, which has come to include cryptic threats from Republican senators, to Be a Goddamn Republican on this issue. How susceptable he is to that kind of indirect lobbying will almost surely depend on who's doing the talking in Supreme Court circles (and it's not comforting the Kennedy usually votes with the hardline righties on social issues like affirmative action). Even if O'Connor's replacement is an anti-Roe vote, how fervently anti-Roe it is may matter a lot in shaping Kennedy's willingness to swing. It may also determine how far the court goes on abortion, beyond just Roe itself. Cynthia Cooper (link above) argued some possible futures for Roe after the 2002 midterm:

A third scenario is the rollback and reversal of Roe. An anti-choice Bush nominee (replacing a moderate) could relegate Roe to the history books by providing the crucial fifth vote that determines there is no constitutional protection for abortion and overturns Roe.

A fourth scenario could be even more restrictive: the enshrinement of a fetal right to life. If an anti-abortion majority on the Supreme Court not only overturns Roe, but declares that life begins at conception or that a fetus has a constitutional right to life, abortion would be a crime in all states. Such a ruling would be the judicial equivalent of a "Human Life Amendment" to the U.S. Constitution that anti-abortion activists have tried, without success, to pass for years. [emphasis mine]


It's unlikely that Kennedy, who, despite his social conservativism is no Constitution in Exile hardliner -- having, for instance, joined with the liberal bloc to uphold (and some argue, expand) rights of eminent domain recently on the Kelo vs. New London decision -- would go that far. But how far things do go depends enormously on the voices replacing O'Connor and Rehnquist. A lot of well-meaning liberals argue that Roe is no good and should fall; that it was an indefensible legal decision and blocks a real political confrontation at the national level on the issue of a woman's right to choose. I have some sympathy with the argument (though no position on the legal legitimacy since I've never read the decision, only the commentary), but this sure as hell isn't the time for it. The intellectual dialogue in Washington over the "culture war" is abysmal right now, an endless parade of fever-swamp wingnuttery. Maybe, someday, it will improve. But until that happens, the court has to be a buffer against rampant and reckless rightwing stupidity...which means priority number one in these desperate times has to be figuring out the best way to keep it that way. It won't be easy.