John McQuaid

NOAA’s hurricane modeling projections show that Gustav has taken a slightly more favorable turn – favorable at least for New Orleans. This track takes it substantially west of the metro area, with a possible landfall in Morgan City. That’s way out in the marshes, with not much else around:

Obviously, you can’t predict a landfall five days in advance. So this is all speculative. But that doesn’t mean anyone should underestimate the grave danger posed by this storm. In Louisiana, they’re not; residents are gearing up for mass evacuations, sandbags are being placed along the Lake Pontchartrain levees, and the city plans to haul people with no transportation out by bus or train.

So, on the eve of the 3rd Katrina anniversary, some lessons have been learned. The problem is, the big lessons weren’t. New Orleans remains woefully unprotected. Should a major storm come in at the wrong spot, the city would be swamped, and all the progress of the past three years undone and then some. This article gives a good outline of some of the strengths and persistent weaknesses of the levee system. One big improvement: floodgates on the drainage canals connected to Lake Pontchartrain that, in essence, allowed the open sea an entree into residential neighborhoods in 2005. One big problem: the “funnel” where N.O. meets the eastern marshes remains, and a major storm surge barreling into the small space would put the Lower 9th Ward, St. Bernard Parish, and eastern N.O. back underwater, and possibly the core of the city as well.

All of this raises a good question for the nation’s politicians as they duke it out at their conventions this week and next: why are we still playing Hurricane Roulette in the Gulf with New Orleans?

This is not looking good for Louisiana:

A suite of computer models on which the Hurricane Center bases its forecast stubbornly move the storm towards landfall along a narrowing band of the northern Gulf of Mexico coastline between just east of Pensacola, Fla., to just west of Houston.

Several of those models bring Gustav ashore just east or west of New Orleans as a Category 4 hurricane after weakening from Category 5 strength.

Of course, computer models are all over the place:

The worst case scenario – a track taking Gustav just west of New Orleans – remains statistically unlikely. Gustav could stall, weaken suddenly, or veer off toward relatively unpopulated areas.

But the real question here is, what kind of a storm surge will Gustav generate, and will the New Orleans-area levee system be able to withstand it? The Corps of Engineers is still working on its big post-Katrina upgrade, which will ultimately give the metro area protection against a 100-year flood level. The problem is, a Category 4 storm will almost always generate a greater-than 100-year flood level. (Which is why the current upgrades are inadequate.) If Gustav comes ashore as a Category 4, on a worst-case track, it will overwhelm the levees. The only question is exactly where, and how deep, the flooding will be.

Speaking of history, here’s a variable that could cause a significant disruption to the media’s focus on next week’s Republican Convention. Hurricane Gustav is now over the Caribbean and is forecast to enter the Gulf of Mexico this weekend as a Category 3 storm. Already, Bobby Jindal is saying he may cancel his convention speech if events warrant.

The GOP’s fortunes aside, this looks ominous.

So much is being said about the Democratic National Convention I’m not sure I have too much to add. Most of my observations are of the very short, very disposable Twitter-length variety, which Is why I’m also now tweeting in the Huffington Post DNC feed. I am not in Denver. I’ve attended five national political conventions, and while they are fun, and important for party regulars as a networking/enthusiasm tool, the faux-drama the media build up around them is unjustified. About the only thing that really matters – because a lot of voters actually see it – is the nominee’s acceptance speech.The convention “bounce” is a real phenomenon. But according to Nate Silver it typically dissipates a few weeks after the event, and weeks before election day.

Only two conventions in recent memory flirted with disaster. One was the 1988 Republican convention: after George H.W. Bush picked Dan Quayle, the week was dominated by questions about Quayle’s qualifications and use of family connections to secure a spot in the National Guard, thus avoiding Vietnam. The other was the Republican 1992 convention, hijacked by culture warriors (remember Pat Buchanan’s keynote speech? “There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side.”)

But neither of those problems made any observable difference in the election. Bush gave an excellent speech in 1988 (though “read my lips” would come back to haunt him), then won. And his political problems were so profound in 1992 that even a flawless convention wouldn’t have made up for them.

By the same token, a lot of observers are complaining about the bland tone of Monday night’s proceedings, its absence of entertaining attacks. Well, one of the most entertaining opening night attacks came in 1988, when Ann Richards skewered Bush: “Poor George. He can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” By today’s standards of punditry, the combination of the D’s home run and the R’s disaster in 1988 should have set the course for the fall. History had other ideas.

There’s been a lot of criticism in the left-blogosphere about Mark Halperin’s comment this morning on ABC that Obama’s “houses” attacks will backfire terribly by unleashing a world of hurt from the McCain campaign:

Halperin: My hunch is this is going to end up being one of the worst moments in the entire campaign for one of the candidates but it’s Barack Obama. […] I believe that this opened the door to not just Tony Rezko in that ad, but to bring up Reverend Wright, to bring up his relationship with Bill Ayers.
…
Stephanopoulos: Don’t you think that was going to come up anyway?

Halperin: I think it would have been hard for John McCain, given the way he says he’s going to run his campaign, to do all this stuff without the door being opened.

Needless to say, this is not how politics works, nor is it an accurate description of how the McCain-Obama faceoff has unfolded so far. It’s a bit of pro-McCain spin, a trial balloon released to see if the media buys it. Campaigns, especially negative ones, need as many pretexts and post-hoc justifications as they can get, and they need the media to buy into them. This is pretty obvious. So you wonder, does Halperin really believe his own statements? Is he allowing himself to be used?

One way to look at this is to view high-level punditry as an information market. As Nate Silver noted last week, Halperin and other top-level pundits are not really information-seekers (i.e., journalists) so much as information brokers. They act as intermediaries between campaigns and the the media. Campaigns feed them a mixture of inside information. Some of it’s “hard” data about strategy, ad buys, organizational activities in different states. But some of it is pure BS – spin that the campaign wants floating out in the mediasphere, in hopes that it will shape the daily news cycle, or better, the overall direction of media attention.

Campaigns and pundits actively trade on these nuggets, each getting something in the exchange. Campaigns get their spin out there, and pundits win access and with it, prestige, fame, money, et al. It’s classic non-zero-sum.

The problem is, of course, that participating in this information market at some point becomes inimical to good journalism. The more “inside” you get, the more you become a vessel for the campaign(s). The harder it is to sort the BS from the useful information – after all, the BS itself still reveals something about campaign strategy. Floating a small trial balloon of this sort does show us what McCain is trying to do – pin blame for attacks on Obama on Obama. But to have true value in the campaign information market, it must be presented not as spin – i.e., something to be questioned – but as the pundit’s own insight.

The other thing about the constant serving up of idle speculation in the guise of news is that it allows all kinds of ideological shadings to creep in. Since campaign coverage is impressionistic and interpretive, reporters can basically deliver a “message” of their own, dressed up in faux-objective style. This two-faced approach is one of the things eroding the credibility of traditional mainstream media. 

Today’s example, already much remarked-upon,  is this Ron Fournier piece on Biden, headlined “Analysis: Biden pick shows lack of confidence,” and begins with this lede: “The candidate of change went with the status quo.”

The eye-catching hed/lede (which are what most people will see scanning their computer screens or newspapers) communicates two things: Obama is not confident and Obama is a hypocrite. The rest of the piece is pretty standard stuff. So one assumes the AP is out mainly to catch your eye, to provoke. But it offers no real evidence of a “lack of confidence” or hypocrisy, really. And thus, only leaves us confused as to where the AP, once the straightest of straight-shooters, is coming from on this.

It’s somewhat embarrassing to leave up a post about Obama igoring the news cycle, then go offline for a week, and in that week have Obama come roaring back and completely dominate the news cycle - first with the attack on McCain’s “houses” gaffe, then by whipping the media into a days-long speculative frenzy over the VP pick.

But I’m still stuck on the underlying question – how important is the campaign news cycle, at least in August, when few “real people” are paying attention? Over the past 20 years there’s been a proliferation of campaign-related media (principally, cable TV and the Internet, incorporating both traditional and new media). By its nature, most of it is pure BS speculation on tactical campaign moves. It plays 24/7, has its own set of rules, is accountable to no one. Chris Lehman summed it up well this week in an interview with Ken Silverstein of Harper’s:

The reporters and editors who are composing these inane pieces are pretty much talking to each other. I saw a Washington Post headline the other day, “Who’s No. 2? Obama Keeps Everybody Guessing.” No—the “everybody” in that construction is you. Imagine if you were covering the baseball playoffs and you wrote that there was massive speculation about who was going to win. It’s manifestly moronic because you’re writing about a scheduled event that is going to take place on a known timeline. You’re contributing nothing. It’s the opposite of news; any useful public information is entirely missing. But that’s the way the press bubble operates. Not only do reporters write about what they’re talking about, but they’re writing about each other. Notice the passive construction in these stories about “rampant speculation” and ask yourself, “Who’s doing the speculating?” It’s the reporters who are; most voters, being sane people, might think about it for a second but then they move on to the next thing in their day.

While 90 percent of this speculation is meaningless, the campaigns are plugged into it, and trying to maniuplate it, so it has some effect on the shape of the campaign, and ultimately on the vote itself. But it seems clear that all those pundits both a) overestimate their own importance and b) are increasingly disengaged from any meaningful understanding of voter behavior itself. This can’t be good for democracy.

A presidential campaign is a complex, multitiered effort. It includes field organization and GOTV, fundraising, polling, advertising, advance, event planning. But the way a campaign comes across to the media, on a week-by-week or even hour-by-hour basis, has little to do with what the campaign is actually doing. It’s a contest between candidates and their organizations to dominate the news cycle and the nation’s attention. That in turn is supposed to fuel a candidate’s “momentum” in the polls and/or arrest that of his opponent. You can’t just keep repeating your message – well, you can, but that’s not enough. There’s an element of macho one-upmanship involved. A particularly over-the-top attack, a cheap shot in an ad, a taunt, are all potential big winners in this contest. Which is why the conventional wisdom says they must be answered immediately.

The practical result is a self-reinforcing cycle, feeding, and fed by, cable chat shows, web page views, even book sales. We’re treated to endless speculation about who won the week, what events might be incrementally moving polls, how events in the real world – such as the current Russia-Georgia conflict – might be perceived relative to the candidates’ public statements and the public’s perceptions of them.

But is all this just an illusion? Presidential campaigns have gotten longer, and 24/7 coverage of them starting 2 years out has become de rigeur. There’s not much evidence, meanwhile, that this has altered Americans’ traditional lack of interest in politics, or that potential voters are paying more attention to politics or making their minds up earlier (if there is, please direct me to it). Matthew Yglesias, meanwhile, argues that the daily/weekly fluctuations in polling at this stage is mostly attributable to random noise rather than contemporaneous events. This makes a great deal of sense. And to the extent events do impact polls at this stage, the predictive value of those polls – what they say about the actual vote on election day – is low.

For example, did McCain’s tough rhetoric on Georgia this week actually win votes? Despite all the loose talk about the Cold War’s return, It seems unlikely that in November, when people are in voting booths, that Georgia is really going to be a big factor for him.

It’s interesting, because while the McCain campaign is following a typical Pavlovian script – baiting Obama and the media with nasty, mocking attack ads, posturing on Russia, et al – the Obama campaign seems not to care much about winning today’s news cycle. It has responded to McCain’s attacks for the most part but is hardly driving the debate. Andrew Sullivan laments this apparent diffidence: “Since Obama’s hubris in Berlin, he has lost almost every cycle of this campaign, and lost all of them quite badly. I’m not sure his campaign gets how far they have sunk, and how ineffectual and passive Obama has seemed these past few weeks.”

This is an overreaction, but I puzzle about this too. Does the Obama campaign really not care that much about winning news cycles? If they do care, why has the response been so lame? Or do they know something we don’t? Is this confidence or hubris? On one level, this is tantalizing. If the news cycle really is an overrated factor in voter behavior, and Obama wins without slavishly feeding the media maw, the results could be quite positive: future campaigns might be less dumb, with less Rovian provocation for provocation’s sake.

George Lucas crammed the Star Wars universe full of technology. But all that hardware never seemed to work as it should have in a truly tech-dominated society. The latest, apparently execrable SW effort is no different:

At one point one Robot tells another a number identifying a sector in which he sees trouble and the other robot doesn’t get the number right. Who the fuck made these robots, the goddamned Marx Brothers? Seriously, why do the robots even speak to one another. The whole point of a Robot army would be one where each Robot was aware of the knowledge of every other robot.

A robot army in the SW universe ought to be a formidable instrument of state terror. Instead, it’s a running, pratfall-filled joke. And there are many other silly tech breakdowns. How does R2D2 so easily manage to tap into the computers running the Death Star and other enemy vessels, shutting down garbage compactors, elevators, etc.? There’s no security, not even a password. The obvious rejoinder is that one theme of the SW movies is the limits of technology as a brute-force solution to problems, as when Darth Vader lectures (then force-chokes) a hapless imperial officer: “Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.”

However, the films themselves are such testaments to moviemaking technology at the apparent expense of everything else – plot, character, heart – and, by the time of the prequels, so completely devoid of human qualities, that this theme has itself become something of a joke. The movies mock a 1970s-era concept of computer tech while making hollow gestures to humanistic, archetypal ideas.

Gas prices have moderated for the moment, but not the discussion about the long-term effects of rising demand and tight supplies, which will keep upward pressure on prices until something changes. This means we’re entering into a historic transition that will have many effects on our material surroundings, the economy, geopolitics. This could hit some violently bad patches, but overall it should be good, inasmuch as it pushes us to stop spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere not out of some semi-speculative policy decision but out of economic necessity. 

There’s been an interesting discussion on whether high gas prices will destroy suburbia. Here’s James Kunstler, who says yeah, the subdivision is doomed and vast swaths of the built landscape will soon be worthless:

We face an epochal demographic shift, but not the one that is commonly expected: from suburbs to big cities. Rather, we are in for a reversal of the 200-year-long trend of people moving from the farms and small towns to the big cities. People will be moving to the smaller towns and smaller cities because they are more appropriately scaled to the limited energy diet of the future.

Energy costs aren’t only force shaping American settlement patterns, of course, and it’s notoriously difficult to forecast future economic history. But the pressures of rising fuel costs are already forcing changes in behavior, and it’s not hard to imagine a cascade of changes in our surroundings and routines in the near term, the tempo of which haven’t been seen since the immediate postwar period. (This is not even counting global warming.)

Meanwhile: Russia’s recent resurgence, complete with flag-waving, neo-imperialist wars against defenseless neighbors, owes a lot to the high price of oil. A decade ago Russia was an economic and military basket case. Today the Cold War is back, baby. But today’s Russia is nowhere near the global powerhouse the Soviet Union was. Its heavy dependence on fossil fuels to prop up its economy, the brinksmanship over pipelines, etc. indicate more intrinsic weakness than strength. To the degree the West manages a relatively rapid transition away from fossil fuels in the coming decades, Russia will see both the foundation of its economy and its strategic advantage rapidly erode. If I were Putin, I’d be concentrating not on cuffing Georgia around but on training software engineers.

Update: The commenter is right – the Russian IT industry is robust and growing. My bad. However, it seems far from clear that a Russian economy so heavily reliant on fuel exports, with a relatively small yet growing IT sector still imbedded in a corrupt system, would do well in the event of an oil/gas bust.