Category: Politics

Alas, another attack on free speech comes down the pike from the heinous George Soros, toppler of governments, destroyer of currencies, champion of democracy and employer of partisan attack dogs. His minions at Media Matters are upset that a technology journalist left comments on blogs expressing political opinions last year.

Shocking, huh? Doncha know that when you go to work for a paper they own you? See BuzzMachine and prepare to laugh.

Howard Dean is still confused about his big flame-out, having just posted this to his blog:

Today my candidacy may come to an end–but our campaign for change is not over.

“May” come to an end? Howard, your campaign came to end weeks ago in New Hampshire. The people have spoken, it’s over, face the music and move on.

Apparently, Dean can’t stand the prospect of going back to private life and will try and put together some sort of an organization that will make him a permanent nag of all Democratic Party candidates, kinda like Nader only not as destructive at the polls. It’s hard to say what Dean’s organizational or policy contribution really is, however. It’s not like the Internet candidacy was his idea or even that good an idea in the long run, and on the policy front he’s just a standard issue DLC guy with a little post-Vietnam pacifism thrown in for flavor.

Maybe he’s going to train future candidates on public speaking (rimshot).

UPDATE: New York Times blogger Matt Bai thinks Dean has a legacy.

Jeff Jarvis is working on an Op-Ed on the Dean/Blog problem, which will be worth reading. Jeff’s already said that he figures Dean’s problem is that the blog effectively insulated him from the Iowa voters by coating his campaign with a thick gel of True Believers who didn’t represent the ordinary people who make electoral decisions, and I think that’s a big part of the problem.

But there’s another way of looking at things that may cast more light on the events leading up to the Great Meltdown on caucus day in Iowa. Instead of asking why Dean wasn’t able to use his super-fantastic organization to sway the voters in Iowa, we should be asking how such a marginal candidate was able to build such a large and dedicated following in the first place. After all, the “I have a scream” speech tells anyone who cares to pay attention that Dean doesn’t have the right stuff to be the leader of the free world: not the temperment, not the character, not the policies, and not the staff and advisers. But he’s raised more money than the other Democrats, even those like Kerry and Gephardt who’ve been in the game for long enough to have cultivated their own large followings and networks around the country.

Dean captivated the hearts of an army of naive and inexperienced followers who only know politics and Dean through the Internet and through their Internet-enabled MeetUps. Most of them joined the campaign not because of any specific admiration of Dean – there’s not much there to like – but because his campaign gave them to tools to get together, mix with each other, make friends, and swear allegiance to a Movement. Had they come to meet Dean in the old-fashioned face-to-face way, they would have noticed that his emotional affect is off, but the Internet hides emotion and allows us to substitute our wishes about a person’s emotional makeup over hard information about it.

So Dean captured well-meaning, naive people by hiding his character behind a screen, as so many scammers have done before him. Fortunately, the face-to-face nature of retail politics in Iowa and New Hampshire provided the necessary corrective to the Internet’s blind spot.

And that was good for America, even if it was a tragedy for George W. Bush, the Emergent Democracy crowd, and Dean’s insiders.

George Lakoff is a student of propaganda and influence who uses his learning to take shots at moderate and conservative Americans in the interest of his left wing values. His method is pretty transparent once you’ve seen it a couple of times. He ostensibly tosses out a theory of journalism that attempts to wring some controversy over the practice of finding the story behind the story, and then he maps a theory of politics on top of that. The theory of politics holds that the right appeals to a “battered child” instinct, while the left is virtuous and pure. But that’s not really the message, it’s the misdirection that’s calculated to get an emotional reaction from the reader, which suspends his critical reasoning and therefore enables Lakoff to get into their heads with some warped perceptions, such as these:

…the national Republicans [made an] effort over several years to make Davis look bad by hurting the California economy…energy deregulation was brought in by Republican governor Pete Wilson…there was no real “energy crisis.” It resulted from thievery by Enron and other heavy Bush contributors, thievery that was protected by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission run by Bush appointees. The Bush administration looked the other way while California was being bilked and went to great lengths not to help California financially in any of the many ways the federal government can help. Arnold had had a meeting with Ken Lay and other energy executives in spring 2001 when Lay was promoting deregulation, but denies any complicity in the theft. Arnold is now promoting energy deregulation again.

The energy bill that was passed in 1996, while Wilson was governor, was written by the man who would become Davis’ finance director, Steve Peace, and approved unanimously by the legislature. If Steve Peace, a Democrat, wrote a bill that was intended to get Davis recalled, he was pretty far-sighted about it, as nobody had any idea that Davis would someday be elected governor and then would attach conditions to the bill through his PUC that would make it suck, and cause a crisis in California before Bush was elected President.

If the architects of the deregulation were so clever, how come they didn’t realize Enron would be bankrupt by the time Davis was recalled? Only Lakoff knows for sure. But there’s more:

…California’s Republican legislature also went out of its way to make Davis look bad, refusing to support reasonable measures for dealing with the budget problems…the recall petition was paid for by a wealthy conservative legislator… signature gatherers were paid handsomely… some signatures were from out of state, which is illegal. [There was] an enormous amount of money and organization put into the Schwartzenegger [sic] campaign by Republicans.

California’s legislature had comfortable Democratic majorities in both houses throughout the Davis governorship, of course. The recall petition, which started as a grass-roots effort by Ted Costa, was certainly accelerated by Darrell Issa’s $1.6M contribution, about ten cents a voter. But how does that compare to the $60M Davis spent on his re-election and the $25M he spent fighting the recall? Like what it is, nothing.

But there’s more:

The Republicans manipulated the media using some of the frames we have discussed to hide facts and create false impressions. From the perspective of the facts we have discussed, the election does seem to fit the Right-Wing Power Grab frame.

Except, gee whiz, the media were relentlessly pro-Davis and anti-recall. Not only did the LA Times assign an unprecedented squad of 24 to dig up dirt on Arnie, all the major papers editorialized against the recall. So where was this media manipulation, on the Fox News channel watched by, at most 500,000 California voters out of an electorate of 9 million?

The people recalled Davis and elected Arnie because they, unlike Lakoff, aren’t fools, and they can’t be manipulated by fools all of the time. It’s called “democracy” and that’s what you ignore at your peril.

Hat tip to Doc Searls.

Today I learned some cool stuff from my buddy Mitch Ratcliffe:

…the California state budget is larger than the combined budgets of other states, as it is the eighth largest economy in the world.

This explains a lot. California has roughly 15% of the American population, and according to Mitch, its state government spends more than all other states combined, or roughly four times as much per capita. No wonder those folks are in trouble.

BTW, that economy is around 5 or 6 in the world, depending on stuff.

The “we’re too smart to vote for a movie star” meme has entered a new phase, wherein Frisco Area residents proclaim their superior education as the reason for their voting to retain the Davis status quo. (See: Mark Simon via Dr. Frank).

Once again, let’s look at how education interacts with voting preferences. From the VNS Exit Polls in the 2000 Presidential Election, we have a handy chart:

As you see, Democratic Party voters tend to be concentrated in two educational groups, high-school dropouts and holders of advanced degrees. Most advanced degrees are Masters’, held by union-member school teachers, and most Ph. D.’s work for universities or government-supported institutions. So we have a simple matter of people voting their interests: the welfare class and union members vote for the party of big government, and non-union working people with high-school and college degrees vote Republican.

(The same pattern held in California on the Recall: people at all educational levels from high school grad to college degree voted for Arnie, but people with advanced degrees went for Bustamante. High school dropouts were not reported. Is anyone surprised that the teachers’ union supported Davis and Bustamante?)

The Bay Area has a lot of people with advanced degrees, a lot of immigrants, and a lot of people who haven’t thought about politics since college. All of these groups are conservative, in the sense of endorsing the status quo, which happens to be the Democratic Party around there:

“A lot of people have been brought up in a political culture that is very left,” said Shanto Iyengar, a professor of political communication and mass media at Stanford University. “They really live in a cocoon.”

It has become a form of conservatism to be a liberal, Starr said.

“Today, outside the box is the box,” he said. “Who would be outside the box in San Francisco? A thoughtful conservative.”

So Bay Areans vote liberal because they’re conformist and conservative in their life styles and values, and because they’re sucking the government teat.

Not too complicated.

Emergent Democracy advocate Mitch Ratcliffe explains his objection to the Davis recall in an effort to deal with my claim that the recall was in fact a model of democratic action:

There’s nothing wrong with recalls or the initiative process in a widely informed society. When there are very few sources of news and they militate with political groups to elect someone who reads scripts but doesn’t speak extemporaneously, they leave something to be desired.

So Arnie is another moron, like that Bush fellow who stole the 2000 election from that smart Gore fellow, and the voters are uninformed owing to our paucity of news sources, which today include just about every news outlet on the planet, and the blogs, etc. Fine. Now what would we ignorant citizens know if we were as well-informed as the Emergent Davis boosters? This:

…the budget crisis is the result of Pete Wilson’s misguided energy deregulation policies and collusion by the Bush Administration with the energy industy, not to mention the Bush Administration’s general failure in domestic policy leading to the bankrupting of the states

Now to Ratcliffe’s credit, he didn’t make this up; rather, he’s citing a well-traveled meme that you can find on any number of far-left blogs, news organs, and talk radio shows. The only trouble with it is that it’s complete crap. The State of California did sign $8B in long-term electricity contracts after Davis finally stepped in and tried to deal with the rolling blackouts of 2001. But these contracts were financed by bonds to be paid off my utility rate-payers. So when the legislature dealt with a $38B budget deficit, these bonds weren’t part of it – they’re off the books.

So yeah, if Ratcliffe were “informed” he probably wouldn’t have voted for Davis as he did, and if everyone were informed, it would have passed by acclamation.

On his other point, I haven’t noticed any states going bankrupt. California’s budget deficit exceeded the total deficits of all other states, and you clearly can’t blame that on Bush. Unless you’re “uninformed”, of course.

Dan Gillmor offers a few suggestions for California’s next governor:

* Schwarzenegger should ask the Legislature to take all of the fiscally relevant propositions of the past several decades…and put every one on the table for an overall reform.

* Make California the showcase for wide-open, taxpayer-friendly e-government.

* Reform the state’s utility regulation.

* Make data privacy a centerpiece.

* Schwarzenegger should also call his pal in the White House on several matters of interest to Californians (and everyone else).

These are generally sound recommendations, but I do have some quibbles (hey, this is a blog, after all). California is the national leader in e-government, and has been for several years – all the bills are on-line, and many committee hearings are broadcast on cable TV and on the Internet in Real Audio. The legislature offers a service that automatically sends you e-mails when the status of bills changes, and most of the legislators publish e-mail addresses. So we’re actually in good shape on this front.

Arnie is already making strides on utility de-regulation, although I’m not sure Dan is going to like them. Dan wants a competitive market for telecom, but not for electricity, and I suspect Arnie wants to see more competition on both areas.

The fiscal area is probably the most interesting, and I don’t expect Arnie to go after Prop. 13. It gets a bad rap, as does Prop. 98, but these are things the voters are very proud of, and they’re not going to change in any meaningful way. Nor should they, as they place limits on government spending that are important in a state whose legislature is far to the left of the citizenry.

Recommendations to the Governor is an interesting exercise, though. Got any?