John McQuaid

One more thought about the “lyin’ McCain” issue. There’s been some reasonable blogospheric pushback from Ross Douthat and Mickey Kaus arguing that calling McCain out for being a liar just isn’t a compelling line of attack. Douthat:

For much the same reasons that I never hated the Clintons, I can’t bring myself to worry about whether McCain has kept his “dignity” sufficiently intact while slugging it out for the Presidency: The point of being in national politics is to win elections and govern the country in accordance with whatever goals led you into the arena in the first place, not to please columnists who disagree with you on ideological grounds but appreciate a finely-tuned sense of political principle. And anyone who believes that McCain is running a uniquely dishonorable campaign for the presidency just doesn’t have enough historical perspective – or enough distance from their own passions – to comment sensibly on contemporary politics. Every successful politician and political movement has to master the art of below-the-belt, us-versus-them political engagement, because that’s how democratic politics works: You can appeal to the electorate’s reason all you want, but you have to appeal to their passions as well, and that means making them dislike and fear the other side as often as it means making them love you.

Kaus:

5. The current lib blog-MSM-campaign tack–getting outraged by McCain’s “lies”–is a total loser strategy. Why?

a) MSM outrage doesn’t sway voters anymore. It didn’t even back in 1988, when the press tried to make a stink about George H.W. Bush’s use of “flag factories,” etc. After this year’s failed MSM Palin assault, it certainly won’t work;

b) When Dems get outraged at unfairness they look weak. How can they stand up to Putin if they start whining when confronted with Steve Schmidt? McCain’s camp can fake umbrage all it wants–the latest is that an Atlantic photographer took some nasty photos that the mag didn’t run!–and nobody will accuse MCain of being weak. That’s so unfair. A double standard. Dems can learn to live with it or complain about the unfairness for another 4 years. Their choice.

There are three issues here: The McCain campaign’s unprecedented dishonesty; how Obama should respond; how the media should cover the persistent attempts to mislead. And these have all gotten mixed up in a way that, surprise, benefits McCain.

I agree with Douthat and Kaus that, generically speaking, attacking your opponent for lying is a dog-bites-man kind of message. Voters know politicians lie. Big deal. And most voters are not politically engaged enough to get the distinction between McCain’s serial whoppers and more garden-variety obfuscation. Moreover, the offended, scolding, moralistic tone of most Obama/Democratic attacks on McCain is annoying/irrelevant. McCain let us down, and it’s all so unfair and outrageous! As Kaus says, it looks weak.

The fact that McCain has abandoned his principles to win is wholly unremarkable. It has almost nothing to do with the issue at hand: being president. There may be a line of attack that works better than what we’ve heard – McCain has a problem with the truth, he says one thing and does another, etc. – in other words, something that makes voters question what kind of president McCain would be. (Given what we’ve seen, that’s a substantive question: will McCain return to a more conventional approach to communications if elected, or will we get four more years of disengagement from reality?) But what we’re hearing now is indeed classic Democrat loser talk.

Finally, there’s the media vs. McCain. This has gotten mixed up with the Obama vs. McCain issue because the media’s reaction is essentially identical to that of the Democratic establishment – shock, disappointment, honorable-man-dishonors-himself, wouldn’t it be horrible if this works, etc. This makes sense – McCain was once the Republican that both Democrats and the media could love unconditionally. But he isn’t anymore. You’ve lost him! It’s over! Please, get over it. This is another example of the Dowd-ization of political coverage – it’s all about character and personal drama.

When politicians lie, it’s the media’s job to expose those lies. That’s all.

The McCain campaign has the political world transfixed on its parade of falsehoods and culture war attacks on Obama. But the overarching theme here is actually outrageousness. By flagrantly, repetitively lying and putting out anti-Obama ads that run 180 degrees counter to reality, the McCain campaign has exploded the etiquette of presidential campaigns. Or, to put it another way, it’s violating what were considered immutable political laws – and amounts to a giant and risky bet that those laws are no longer operative.

It used to be, campaigns had a message. In making their arguments they routinely stretched the truth, but there was usually some slender factual basis for their statements. They tried to get favorable coverage for themselves and generate unfavorable coverage for the opposition. Finally, if your guy was behind in the last 2 weeks of the campaign, you started lying and sliming with abandon – and attacking the media.

Now McCain has skipped over all the other stuff and gone straight to the last-ditch, desperate phase. I doubt this will work, because it usually doesn’t when employed in the last 2 weeks. But of course, by that time it’s always too late. Now, maybe not. So who knows?

But there’s one law that, seemingly, hasn’t changed – the law of the news cycle. When a campaign does something audacious and outrageous – no matter how objectionable, or for that matter, stupid – it dominates the news cycle. The idea is, any news is good news. And with this kitchen sink approach, McCain dominates it on several levels beyond the usual attack-response-counterattack. It’s not just McCain attacks Obama. There’s also: McCain crosses line attacking Obama. McCain goes where even Rove wouldn’t go! Is the media covering McCain well, or does it lack a spine? Obama responds lamely. Obama vows to do a better job responding. McCain attacks Obama even more outrageously/dishonestly/incoherently. And the cycle repeats.

But I doubt this can continue for another seven weeks, because of a couple of other iron laws of media. One, the news cycle always changes, especially in a close race. The media get bored, or impatient – or maybe, in this case, disillusioned and outraged. Real news happens. The polls shift. A gaffe occurs. The other side “finds its voice.” The “narrative” changes. If the race remains close, I don’t see how McCain can, in effect, keep topping himself. And that’s the final iron law: outrageousness gets old.

In the spring of 2004 I attended a roundtable media discussion with John Kerry at his campaign headquarters. This was not long after Kerry had locked down the Democratic nomination. He was incoherent, droning on in an unorganized fashion about the mistakes of the Bush administration, and various programs he’d push for. There was no concise argument on why he should be elected, and not Bush.

He clearly felt he didn’t even need to make such an argument. It was obvious to Kerry that Bush was a failure. He seemed to be living in a kind of Democratic-liberal-Senate cocoon, assuming that its attitudes reflected those of the rest of the country – or at least, 51 percent of it.

As the campaign wore on, Kerry improved. But this basic, temperamental complacency followed him throughout. We had to wait until the first debate to hear him make a good argument against the Iraq war.

I hate to pile on Obama, as everyone is doing this week. But he seems to share this same temperament: that the blunderbuss attacks coming from the other side are absurd and irrelevant to the “real issues,” and thus unworthy of attention, except in rote “I will not be swiftboated” statements. And that the election will ratify what is already obvious to him, and to what he thinks is a majority of Americans.

Dukakis had the same problem. Remember this now-famous SNL sketch from 1988:

Diane Sawyer: You have fifty seconds left, Mr. Vice-President.

George Bush: Let me sum up. On track, stay the course. Thousand points of light.

Diane Sawyer: Governor Dukakis. Rebuttal?

Michael Dukakis: I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy!

It’s amazing that Obama and his team of geniuses could look back at the campaigns of the past 20 years and not devise a strategy to deal with what they’re facing now. The Obama campaign is the proverbial aircraft carrier, under attack by a swarm of kamikazes.

Or, maybe Obama really is doubling down on boring and passive. The fundamentals still favor him. And the message of the McCain attacks – that Obama is rude, or something – doesn’t seem compelling, at least compared the GOP attacks on Dukakis or Kerry, which at least made semi-coherent arguments about leadership. (Dukakis was a down-the-line liberal running during a time of conservative ascendancy; Kerry was a creature of Washington who had trouble articulating clear positions.) It may be that Obama’s apparent complacency about dumb attacks is justified – that people won’t buy it this time, that the news cycle gyrations are less important than the political universe believes them to be. We’ll see.

Worth noting: the McCain campaign is using a “kitchen sink” approach on Obama. First he was a lightweight celebrity. Then they got their own lightweight celebrity so that went out the window. This week Obama’s a boorish sexist, a pervert and a dangerous radical:

Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign launched a broadside against Sen. Barack Obama yesterday, accusing him of a sexist smear, comparing his campaign to a pack of wolves on the prowl against the GOP vice presidential pick, charging that the Democratic nominee favored sex education for kindergartners, and resurrecting the comments of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.

These attacks may monopolize media attention and force Obama off message. But they’re inconsistent. They aren’t really the kinds of charges that stick, either with the media or in the public mind. They lack the narrative thread necessary to drive news cycles beyond a day or two or to “define” their target. I really don’t know what McCain wants me to think about Obama anymore. A kind of furious incoherence appears to be the defining characteristic of late-stage culture war politics.

As I wrote yesterday, I think all the fulminations about McCain’s lost “honor” are silly. He is a politician who has made an ever-escalating series of dishonorable choices. They seem all the more so because of his previous record. But this is still unremarkable, and not a compelling point against him in the context of winning votes. I’m not saying that people should overlook McCain’s dishonesty – quite the contrary, it should be aggressively called out – but that the outrage contains a degree of personal disappointment in McCain that is beside the point.

The focus on McCain’s honor is actually a very Klingon view, which eerily resembles the purported McCain worldview – one shaped by war, military codes, and the fetishization of personal integrity. “He has no honor” is the ultimate Klingon putdown. I’m sure McCain feels stung.

But he’s not running to be the Klingon chancellor (fortunately for him, given that doing so requires rituals only slightly more elaborate than ours, including hand-to-hand combat). If you asked most Americans about the role of “honor” in politics, they’d probably say the two are mutually exclusive.

The Republican Party’s “drill baby drill” obsession is more than a little bit weird. On the surface, it’s one of those increasingly rare issues in which the interests of big-money GOP backers are aligned both with party rank-and-file opinion and with the public at large (at least as measured by polls). But because the actual economic impact of a “drill baby drill” policy on oil supplies and gas prices will occur in the future and be quite small – both for consumers and for the nation’s overall energy strategy – you have to assume the political efficacy of this issue is marginal. Anyone who drives knows that gas prices are unlikely to plunge if we throw open ANWR. It’s more like “every little bit helps.”

So, the wild enthusiasm we saw at the GOP convention and John McCain’s focus on this issue seem vaguely suspicious. Now we know why. This is more than your typical special interest gravy train. More oil and gas drilling literally equals more sex, drugs, and easy money!

Seriously, the Interior Department’s IG report is a depressing chronicle of corruption where it hurts the most – at the middle levels of government, where it can flourish with nobody noticing until it’s too late. One of the most insidious Bush legacies has been the way federal agencies were turned into full-service, one-stop shopping for various business interests. In this case, it’s not surprising that the political appointees running the Minerals Management Service, watching their lobbyist friends and colleagues rolling in dough, and seeing billions of dollars flow past their fingertips, would want some action for themselves. The lines between the regulators and the people they’re supposedly regulating were obliterated.

The broader problem here is, if we’re going to do more drilling – and hand out billions in alternative energy subsidies, and devise smart energy policies – we need a federal government that operates on the assumption that the national interest is distinct from (and sometimes opposed to!) the interests of business. A radical assumption, I know, and it will take a lot of work to reestablish it.

Scanning various blogs today, I’m amazed at the seething outrage at the McCain campaign’s plethora of dishonest tactics, from Sarah Palin’s lie about rejecting the Bridge to Nowhere to the ad charging Obama with promoting sex. Josh Marshall, who normally reads political events pretty coolly, has joined Andrew Sullivan in all-out high-dudgeon mode:

[McCain and Palin have] both embraced a level of dishonesty that disqualifies them for high office. Democrats owe it to the country to make clear who these people are. No apologies or excuses. If Democrats can say at the end of this campaign that they made clear exactly how and why these two are unfit for high office they can be satisfied they served their country.

Rather, I’m amazed not at the outrage itself so much as the fact that it seems to have obliterated all sense of proportion. Call it McCain-Palin Derangement Syndrome. Step back a moment: McCain is running for president. Both his place in history and the future of the country are on the line. In the words of George H.W. Bush, he’s going to do “what it takes” to become president. John McCain may have once had a reputation as a straight-talking, unconventional politician, and maybe that McCain could have made a go of it – we’ll never know. But now, for obviously well-thought-out strategic reasons, we’ve got a different McCain.

Certainly, McCain has made moral compromises here, will doubtless make more, and that will undermine if not destroy his stated quest to heal the divisions in Washington. This augers poorly for a McCain presidency, especially following on eight years of George W. Bush.

But do dishonest-but-effective campaign tactics really render McCain “unfit to lead”? No. Voters obviously don’t think it disqualifies him either, at least not in great numbers. Maybe they see the lies, but they also see the aggression. This is a guy who really, really wants to win – and that counts for a lot in a presidential campaign. If McCain wins, most people will quickly forget the campaign’s lies, distortions and negative ads, and his fitness will ultimately be tested by what he does in office.

Meanwhile, the howls over McCain’s lost “honor” and the appeals to America’s sense of fair play are, frankly, ridiculous. The man fights dirty. If you don’t like it, find a way fight back.

Carl Zimmer has an interesting piece in today’s New York Times arguing that the danger of invasive species may be exaggerated. A study published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (note to NYT: why don’t you link to the study itself?) examined the profusion of invasives in New Zealand and concluded that, rather than a zero-sum competition in which invaders win and native species lose, the reality is more complex:

Dr. [Dov] Sax, Dr. [Steven] Gaines and several other researchers argue that attitudes about exotic species are too simplistic. While some invasions are indeed devastating, they often do not set off extinctions. They can even spur the evolution of new diversity.

“I hate the ‘exotics are evil’ bit, because it’s so unscientific,” Dr. Sax said.
…
Dr. Sax and Dr. Gaines argue that competition from exotic species shows little sign of causing extinctions. This finding is at odds with traditional concepts of ecology, Dr. Sax said. Ecosystems have often been seen as having a certain number of niches that species can occupy. Once an ecosystem’s niches are full, new species can take them over only if old species become extinct.

But as real ecosystems take on exotic species, they do not show any sign of being saturated, Dr. Sax said. In their paper, Dr. Sax and Dr. Gaines analyze the rise of exotic species on six islands and island chains. Invasive plants have become naturalized at a steady pace over the last two centuries, with no sign of slowing down. In fact, the total diversity of these islands has doubled.

As the piece notes, this is sharply at odds with the conventional wisdom on invasive species – that by dint of their superior hardiness and fecundity they will almost always supplant the native competition. But the iconoclasm here is overstated.

It’s not shocking to find that this is only true some of the time. There are a lot of invasive species. But it’s only a subset of really bad ones that do the greatest amount of damage. Some of those cause actual property damage, such as zebra mussels or Formosan termites. In general, invasives pose the most problems where there is already a human footprint, which itself is a form of biological invasion (think grass, flowers, dogs and cats) that destroys local biodiversity. This is particular problem in parks, where the “natural” world comes in contact with the manmade one all the time.

It’s nice to find that in natural settings invasives can increase biodiversity. And it raises a long-smoldering question: what’s the value of the distinction between native and non-native? Is “native” biodiversity (which as the piece notes, is itself an artificial construct – over the centuries all species move around and interact with new neighbors) worth protecting for its own sake? In some cases, obviously. In others – especially where diversity is actually expanding – maybe not so much.

But let’s take the warnings near the end of the NYT piece seriously: Globalization is creating so many invasions we don’t really know where all this is going. In some places, invasions may create new and ever-richer biodiversity. In others – especially in the “disturbed” areas close to cities, suburbs and farms – the odds of getting nasty, biodiversity-killing pest species will likely continue to grow.

Coming a bit late to Mad Men, but enjoying it so far. Last night’s episode included a clever riff on our contemporary environmental mores: Don Draper takes his family on a picnic to a pretty woodland park. As he prepares to leave, he hurls his beer bottle (or soda, I couldn’t tell – but, given this show, probably beer) down the hill. A few minutes later, Betty Draper picks up the blanket and shakes all the garbage onto the grass. They drive off in their gas-guzzling new Cadillac.

By today’s standards this is shocking. Littering is still common, of course, but it is no longer ubiquitous. And whether they litter or not, most Americans know they aren’t supposed to. We can thank rising environmental consciousness, driven in part by PSAs like the famous “crying Indian” TV spot, still nine years off in the MM universe. So it seems guaranteed that MM will return to this issue, since in 1962, according to Wikipedia, Keep American Beautiful was already starting to mold the public consciousness with advertising:

Keep America Beautiful was founded in 1953 by consortium of American businesses, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and concerned individuals in reaction to the growing problem of highway litter that followed the construction of the Interstate Highway System, and an increasingly mobile and convenience-oriented American consumer. The goal of the organization was to reduce litter through public education and advertising.

KAB had many early local ad campaigns, including an effort in Pennsylvania that coined the term “litterbug.” Another popular television campaign theme from the mid 1960′s was “Every Litter Bit Hurts”featuring character “Susan Spotless.”

Yet what I found especially interesting was how little things have changed. We litter less and recycle more than we did in 1962. But the aggregate consumption and wastefulness of society is many times greater, and by most accounts leading us into serious trouble and major economic and social changes. So we may look back smugly on Don Draper’s environmental cluelessness, but in fact we are, collectively, far more clueless than he. We have a lot more information, but still aren’t acting much on it. And in another 46 years, people will probably be looking back on us with an even more jaundiced eye than we’re aiming a Don.

Note: Iron Eyes Cody, the actor who played the crying Indian, wasn’t an American Indian at all. His parents were born in Sicily. Amazing.

I have a piece up on the Guardian site with some post-Gustav reflections:

The fact is, due to feedback from human activities, nature has begun to change faster than US government institutions can keep up. There’s a healthy scientific debate over the potential role of global warming in hurricane activity. Some scientists believe a warming atmosphere will lead to more powerful storms. Others say the effects will be minimal. But most everyone agrees that hurricane activity in the Atlantic is in a dangerous, possibly decades-long upswing.

If it is indeed amplified by global warming, we’re going to see some storms unlike any in the past in the coming years. Meanwhile, the lure of living on the coast (and along riverbanks) has put many millions more people in the path of danger, along with their valuable properties, increasing the risk of huge, Katrina-scale losses that will test the insurance industry and the federal government’s budgetary limits.

In order to deal with this, we’re going to have to make some basic changes in how the government operates. Right now, it’s reactive – a major disaster happens (whether a natural catastrophe, or a crash in the financial system, or the food system, or … ) requiring some kind of federal intervention – not just a cleanup operation but some genuine reforms. Congress and the president do something (or not). But I’m guessing that global warming will accelerate the speed at which the environment is changing and quickly outpace all the systems we have in place to make sure people can go on living their lives. We’ll need a government that processes information faster, and acts more quickly.