John McQuaid

Enough with the debates, Sarah Palin, the bailout, the markets. How about some fisheries policy blogging?

As fish populations have collapsed or shrunk around the world, nation after nation has imposed tough quotas and regulations on fishing. But often the cure is worse than the disease. The typical regulatory regimes are complex and big burdens to fishers. Worse, they often don’t accomplish much because they’re watered down in the political process. So the world ends up with more struggling, angry fishermen, fewer fish, and a spreading economic and ecological disaster.

Is there a better way to regulate fishing without either putting the fishers out of business (too much regulation) or slowly killing off all the fish (too little)? Science magazine recently published an article (the paper itself is subscription only) on what’s long been the most promising solution, individual transferable quotas, or ITQs. The quota programs set an overall annual catch level, but unlike other forms of regulation, they divide it up into shares and distribute these among fishing enterprises. The shares can then be traded. This is attractive for many reasons: It changes a perverse incentive structure by introducing a financial stake roughly analogous to landownership in farming. It allows more flexibility in choosing when and where to fish. As the article says, “This provides a stewardship incentive; as the fishery is better managed, the value of the shares increases.”

Does it work? The Science article says yes. The authors reviewed the performance of 11,135 fisheries over 53 years, including 121 under ITQ regimes, and found that the latter are much less likely to collapse. Moreover, if ITQs became the default way to manage fishing, today’s alarming declines might be limited or reversed.

The media have embraced the idea, which has an appealing “markets in action” hook. What’s surprising to me, though, is how little this debate has changed since I wrote about it 12 years ago. There are more ITQ programs now than there were then, but they haven’t exactly taken the world by storm. And there’s a reason for that.

The problem – mostly glossed over in the coverage – is that ITQ programs can’t just be implemented with a snap of the fingers. They require robust government institutions to a) nurture the necessary political consensus in the affected fishing community; b) set overall catch limits that actually protect fish populations and allow them to grow and c) protect the “little guy” from predatory fishing enterprises that may try to corner the market on shares. In most places, including the United States, these robust agencies don’t (yet) exist.

I hope, and expect, that we will get a bailout bill out of Congress within a week. There’s simply too much at stake, the political and economic pressures too high, and the possibility of mass public backlash too great, for it not to happen. It’s easy to be against something when your constituents are angry and the consequences of voting no are vague. But when everybody’s 401K tanks, the political consequences become instantly concrete.

Having said that, though, who knows? With each passing day, the crisis deepens and Congress and the White House – abetted last week by John McCain – continue to fumble. Maybe we really are a banana republic. But this has to be seen as a logical consequence of the failures of the Bush presidency, a reductio ad absurdum of Bush-era GOP politics – government doesn’t work, so let the markets – which are always right – burn. And throw in some tax cuts.

The leadership vacuum in Washington right now has made it impossible for the government to act decisively. The president is supposed to step up, lay out the right thing to do, mobilize public support. And Bush has, ostensibly, been doing that. Except, not really, because nobody gives a damn what he says. Bush never really tried to lead the nation or Congress – he got what he wanted by coercion and manipulation. He spent most of his time in office not listening to anyone. Is it really surprising no one is listening to him now?

Executive power now lies not with Bush but in the technocracy headed by Hank Paulson – the professionals whom Bush did his best to marginalize and mock for most of his presidency. So it’s not surprising that they are very nearly a spent force as well.

Bush may have finally cast his lot with the realists. But his natural allies, the House Republicans, are still standing up for the kind of rigid, detached-from-reality approach – an increasingly incompatible mashup of blustery populism and pro-business policy hokum, capital gains taxes and such – that Bush pushed for most of the past eight years.

John McCain spent a lot of time in Friday’s debate repeating the mantra that Barack Obama was “naive” or “doesn’t understand” various things about foreign policy. But after reading Jonathan Weisman’s account of what happened last week with the budget bailout, it’s impossible not to conclude McCain is the naive one, at least when it comes to legislative brinksmanship.

As it was unfolding – McCain’s “suspension” announcement, the bailout deal taking shape, then apparently falling apart – it was impossible to figure out what was going on. Was McCain – who made such a big deal about returning to Washington to bridge the partisan divide – deliberately trying to derail the discussions by allying himself with the House Republicans, whose proposal was both politically and practically unworkable? That made no sense, even by the chaos-sowing standards of the McCain campaign. But what was going on?

Weisman recounts that McCain came back to Washington only to find himself exploited by the House Republican Study Committee (what is it they study, anyway – Hayek? Jude Wanniski?), looking to derail the talks, and outmaneuvered by the Democrats, who were looking to undermine McCain himself. This came to a head in a surreal meeting in the Cabinet Room:

Obama then jumped in to turn the question on his rival: “What do you think of the [insurance] plan, John?” he asked repeatedly. McCain did not answer.

One Republican in the room said it was clear that the Democrats came into the meeting with a “game plan” aimed at forcing McCain to choose between the administration and House Republicans. “They had taken McCain’s request for a meeting and trumped it,” said this source.

Congressional aides from both parties were standing in the lobby of the West Wing, unaware of the discord inside the Cabinet room, when McCain emerged alone, shook the hands of the Marines at the door and left. The aides were baffled. The plan had been for a bipartisan appearance before the media, featuring McCain, Obama and at least a firm statement in favor of intervention. Now, one of the leading men was gone.

McCain has been in Congress for 25 years. Why did he think he could ride into Washington – in the middle of a campaign, with the Republican Party divided, the Democratic Party united, and the fate of the nation literally on the line – and have everything fall into place around him?

One more brief observation about John McCain’s decision to temporarily suspend his campaign. It’s hard to believe this will have any practical effect on the matter at hand, passing a bailout bill. It could have the opposite effect, by injecting presidential politics and posturing into an intricate, and politically volatile, matter of policy. But influencing the policy, for good or ill, doesn’t seem to be what McCain’s after. It’s all about optics: he wants voters to see him as a leader capable of overcoming the partisan divide.

This doesn’t make much logical sense coming on the heels of nearly six weeks of divisive culture war politics. But it amounts to an appeal to one of the most dearly-held big media assumptions – that partisanship is always the problem and bipartisanship always the answer. In this view (reiterated, predictably, in today’s David Broder column, which blames both Congress and the White House for the government’s lack of credibility in the crisis) grand bipartisan gestures – bringing everyone together to solve the nation’s problems – are the way out of gridlock. Making these gestures is a sign of true leadership. Needless to say, this is a highly symbolic and unrealistic approach in a political landscape largely shaped by partisan Republican policies.

The McCain campaign tried to exploit the media’s tendency to seek out false equivalencies in fact-checking its ads and rhetoric. When that didn’t work so well, it attacked the media. Now it’s betting on another political media tic, the yearning for a kind of bipartisan utopia. Will it work?

It’s amazing to watch John McCain – who wasn’t doing all that badly in the polls until last week – try one desperate stunt after another in an attempt to change what his advisers must see as the inevitable dynamic of the campaign: an Obama victory. Obama seems to enjoy not just the advantage of the outsider in a “change” election, but also, in his comparative prudence, some of advantages of a successful incumbent too. The more McCain flails, the more reassuring a figure Obama appears to be.

It’s sad. McCain has all but ruined his straight-talk reputation by countenancing repeated lies and misrepresentations and shutting out the press, then attacking the press for pointing this out. The Washington Post/ABC poll showed Obama now leads McCain by 11 points on the “honest/trustworthy” question. Now, after wallowing in the worst of Rovian politics – and not even effective Rovian politics, but sloppy, unfocused tactics that are no doubt making Rove smack his forehead in exasperation – McCain expects voters to believe he wants to “rise above politics” by rushing back to Washington to … do photo ops? Talk to Richard Shelby? I don’t know how well U.S. voters understand our options in dealing with the banking crisis. But they do know that presidential candidates are politicians.

The Newark Star-Ledger‘s financial troubles are obviously profound. It’s a daily newspaper in a poor, chronically troubled city – what more do you need to know? But things took a truly alarming turn when the Star-Ledger’s owner, Newhouse-owned Advance Publications, announced in July it would either sell or shut down the paper if it didn’t achieve the cutbacks it deemed necessary through buyouts and significant union concessions. This week, the Newhouses reiterated that they’re dead serious:

Is it a negotiation tactic, or real?

That’s what Media Mob asked Advance publications president Donald Newhouse today regarding the memo that Star-Ledger publisher George Arwady sent out to staff saying that if a drivers union didn’t agree to a new contract, the paper would be in danger of closing.

“That’s what we’ve told our employees and we do not bluff or lie,” he responded.

This is one scary game of chicken. It’s not clear there is a potential buyer for the Star-Ledger, so there is a not-insignificant chance the venerable paper – Tony Soprano’s paper! – may be shuttered come January. Of course, if I had to put money on it, I’d bet that it won’t come to pass – the unions will make concessions, or a buyer will come forward – or perhaps the Newhouses are, in fact, bluffing.

But the closure scenario is extraordinary. Through endless rounds of newspaper downsizing, it still seemed unthinkable that a major daily would actually shut down. No longer. And ponder the implications of a newspaper-less city. Dailies are part of the civic glue that make American cities …. American. They hold institutions accountable. They provide essential information about what’s happening in the business, arts and NGO communities, and the city’s connection to the state government and Washington. Their columnists, if they’re good, can become a voice for the city itself. Without all that, what happens?

Does Newark even have an alt-weekly? Not according to these lists. That means just local TV, radio – and bloggers – regularly covering the city council, the mayor, and agencies in a city of 300,000. And that doesn’t include the sprawling suburban areas also in the S-L’s circulation area that would also lose coverage – and an important source of local information. Many have their own local papers, but most of those don’t have the regional perspective of a major daily.

With a deep recession looming, things are going to keep getting worse for the newspaper industry. Even if the Star-Ledger stays afloat (and surely the Newhouses don’t want to be the first owners to kill a major American daily), other papers may well go under in the coming months and years. And we’ll have to think harder about the implications of the newspaper-less city.

Expanding on one point in my Prospect piece:

The faux-objective style of the traditional newspaper is increasingly useless in a political landscape in which spin has leeched from campaigns into every aspect of politics and policy. The result: the prestige beats in Washington — campaigns and the White House — are increasingly detached from reality. The coverage tends to be impressionistic and insidery, a weird mash-up of Maureen Dowd, Karl Rove, Drudge, and cable news. And it has almost nothing to do with the day-to-day concerns of most people or the functioning of government itself.

It’s obvious to anyone watching cable that campaign coverage is its own universe, operating by its own internal rules, obsessed most of the time with hour-by-hour tactical advantage and hot-button cultural trivia. Not even hot button issues that matter, like abortion or affirmative action or the place of religion in the public square, but questions like Obama’s lipstick-on-a-pig comment. But has this same trend also shaped coverage of the White House and other more substantive government beats? I’d say yes.

With the Clinton psychodramas, one man’s personal failings became the stuff of right-wing obsession, and an impeachment effort that ignored the more judicious views of the public. The Drudge era began, and the media realized there was a reliable source of ratings gold in the mashup of the trivial and the presidential.

Later, with the runup the Iraq war, most of the media fell in line behind a series of spurious ideas: that Saddam Hussein was a strategic threat to the United States, that he had WMDs and was ready to use them, and that Rumsfeld, who deplored nation-building, could successfully manage the invasion’s aftermath. Meanwhile, as the Bush administration actively sought to delegitimize the “media filter” and pursued various radical projects – torture, the unitary executive, the surveillance state – the media reacted with caution and uncertainty. (There are, of course, exceptions to this – McClatchy, or the Gellman/Becker Cheney series, now a book.)

In a nutshell, both political institutions and media institutions behaved very badly, and neither has really recognized the problem, let alone done much work to acknowledge and recover from the inevitable loss of credibility. Most of the traditional media – the big papers, the networks – still go about their business as if they were still institutions commanding unparalleled respect and credibility, in part because they believe they are covering institutions that also have unparalleled respect and credibility. Today, after Iraq, Katrina, and the banking debacle, they don’t. You can sense this dissonance in many newspaper stories on the White House, which are infused with a kind of awe and written in the staid language of a bygone era.

I have a piece up on the American Prospect site on the demise of a venerable institution: the newspaper Washington bureau. I’ve read a lot of these pieces, which invariably lament the passing of an era, the threat to democracy, the human capital sucked out of the journalism world. All true. The problem is, though, that we’ve known for some time now that the traditional newspaper structure, including the Washington bureau, is doomed. Newspapers should have started thinking about this a decade ago, when the technology became available to blog, to post various forms of digital content, to tap into social networking. But they didn’t. Instead, they hung on, hoping to ride out the changes.

Meanwhile, the whole political-media ecosystem was buffeted by various political/social events. The Bush administration treated it with contempt. Cable news and Drudge drove political coverage, rewarding fluff and cultural hot buttons over the actual business of government.

The result: the whole Washington media infrastructure – bureaus, beats, and Broders – is in upheaval. What will replace it? A fascinating question.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, the White House was pushing the catchphrase “ownership society” to sum up its economic philosophy. The policies included limited privatization of various government-run programs including Medicare and Social Security, incentives to increase homeownership and, of course, tax cuts. This is mostly forgotten now, but it’s an interesting window into how George W. Bush and Karl Rove overlooked the brewing troubles facing the country and, more surprisingly, emerging political trends.

The ownership society had a composition similar to many Bush initiatives: about 50 percent giveaway to Republican interest groups, 30 percent campaign razzle-dazzle, 15 percent GOP anti-government shout-out and 5 percent functional policy proposal.

The underlying idea here was ambitious: to break the traditional alignment in many voter’s heads between the largest, most popular government social welfare programs and personal economic security. Playing on looming entitlement troubles, Bush was saying in so many words: the government won’t be there for you down the line. But the solution is not to fortify those programs but to begin dismantling them. You won’t need them because you’ll have ownership in your own private health care account, your home, and the stock market.

The ultimate aim was to break the back of the Democratic Party support by dismantling, or altering beyond recognition, its signature achievements and “brand.” It would be replaced by a Republican brand whose message was: you’re on your own, but that’s good, because you’ve got a stake in these robust markets. It had a kind of superficial appeal – the New Deal and Great Society are so 20th century, and the 21st is all about markets and globalization, etc.

But this was a radical and, it’s obvious today, crazy idea.

Markets are risky. Sometimes you lose your shirt. The whole idea of 20th century government social welfare programs is to cushion those blows, not say “bring ‘em on.” And today, the blows are raining down. “Ownership” is out – except when the government’s buying at the fire sale. And it’s not individuals the feds are bailing out, but the guys who helped bankroll the Bush campaigns and the “ownership society.”

For all its audacity, the McCain campaign still comes off as a random, desultory affair. The culture wars were once an organizing principal of American politics. Now, they’re just a frayed set of memes and imagery, pulled out and hurled into the campaign arena in hopes that they’ll move the right demographic groups and won’t tick off the wrong ones too much. I look at this phenomenon in a Guardian piece today:

Past GOP culture-war campaigns were negative, divisive and personal. But they made coherent arguments. When George HW Bush attacked Michael Dukakis as an out-of-the-mainstream liberal in 1988, he had a point. Dukakis was a traditional liberal during a time of conservative ascendancy. And the main points of attack were based on facts: Dukakis did nominally oversee the prison furlough programme that released a killer who then raped and assaulted a woman. He did veto a bill requiring the Pledge of Allegiance to the US flag be recited in Massachusetts public schools. In 2004, George W Bush’s denunciations of John Kerry as a liberal Washington insider who had trouble articulating clear positions also had the ring of truth.

Those campaigns were slick and sophisticated attempts to shape public opinion. By contrast, McCain’s ads and rhetoric sound like they’re generated by a bunch of twentysomething Republican bloggers, strung out on caffeine at 3am, each trying to out-snark all the others. The main thing the campaign has going for it is sheer outrageousness – that is, by hitting every conceivable cultural hot button and repeating untruths over and over, it will both get an anti-Obama message out and also dominate the news cycle.