Influx of Wisdom from the New York Times
Sun Mar 30, 2008 at 07:38:54 PM PDT
I like the New York Times. In a classic case of serendipitous synchronicity, the last few days have brought us a virtual flood of excellent opinionating. I wanted to bring it to your attention, in case you don't read it yourself.
This delightful deluge ranges over (in no particular order) the mortgage crisis, derivatives markets, financial regulations, the Bush administration, Wall Street, the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, Barney Frank, the Federal Housing Administration, Larry Kudlow, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Glass-Steagall Act, the Iraq war, Sunnis and Shiites, foreign policy, Ronald Reagan, domestic policy, tax policy, budgets, earmarks, comedy writing, the press, public speaking, acting, Dwight Eisenhower, the Justice Department, Congressional hearings, waterboarding, the Central Intelligence Agency, partisanship, foreign relations, The Wizard of Oz, March Madness, YouTube, the Harvard Law Review, conspiracy theories, ignorance, anti-intellectualism, insults, education, Sinbad, Bosnia, propoganda stunts, viral politics, the Iraq occupation, Moktada al-Sadr, Nuri al-Maliki, Abdul al-Hakim, Basra, Baghdad, Iraqi elections, international trade, Iran, and much much more.
Continued below...
I disagreed with the New York Times's endorsement of Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. I loathe that they have given such a magnificent soapbox to toxic Bill Kristol. I left their once-fun political blogs because a steady churn of concern trolling in the comment threads turned reading it into a chore. And, some days Paul Krugman seems to have been playing drinking games with the Clinton Kool-Aid. (I wonder what kind economists play? Are beer bongs involved?) Despite all that, I still find it to be a fine source of news and opinion in most respects. Check out these excellent examples of thinking and writing at the same time!
On Friday, Dick Cavett gave some invaluable history, criticism and advice for presidents and presidential candidates giving speeches in "Candidate, Improve Your Appearance!" Teaser:
We keep getting articles and reports of how John McCain is adored, cuddled and all but fondled in the back of his bus by his devotees in the press; who are arranged, it sounds like, at his feet before his big, relaxing chair. His ability to create and maintain this camaraderie is surely a vastly valuable thing. One trait those "ink-stained wretches" of the press especially like about him is his candor and what’s been termed his risk-taking frankness and sense of irony. This affection for him may account for why they fail to do him the favor of pointing out how badly he delivers a speech.
...
I mean those speeches from behind the lectern, center stage, requiring the three teleprompters right, left and center. They are invisible to the audience and are supposed to create the illusion that you are not reading. And they do, when skillfully used. Ronald Reagan went to England with them when they were new. Armed with them and his acting ability he astonished the Brits with what they took to be his spontaneous speaking at length, sans text.
It’s a pleasure to watch Obama’s mastery of the technique. And Clinton — and I didn’t say "even Clinton" — uses it much better than McCain does. And just about everybody does it better than the capering loon who does soft-shoe in the White House while young Americans are dismembered and splattered in Iraq. Sometimes when he speaks I can forget who he is momentarily and find myself actually pulling for him; probably from misplaced performer empathy. His speechifying has a strong odor of remedial reading about it, combined with an apparent fear that there might be some hard words ahead.
Also on Friday, in "Loans and Leadership," Paul Krugman weighed in on the differences between the three presidential candidates' proposals for dealing with the mortgage crisis:
Mr. McCain is often referred to as a "maverick" and a "moderate," assessments based mainly on his engaging manner. But his speech on the economy was that of an orthodox, hard-line right-winger.
...
True, Mrs. Clinton’s suggestion that she might convene a high-level commission, including Alan Greenspan — who bears a lot of responsibility for this crisis — had echoes of the excessively comfortable relationship her husband’s administration developed with the investment industry. But the substance of her policy proposals on mortgages, like that of her health care plan, suggests a strong progressive sensibility.
...
I was pleased that Mr. Obama came out strongly for broader financial regulation, which might help avert future crises. But his proposals for aid to the victims of the current crisis, though significant, are less sweeping than Mrs. Clinton’s: he wants to nudge private lenders into restructuring mortgages rather than having the government simply step in and get the job done.
On Saturday, Joe Nocera presented a range of insiders' insights into the regulatory implications of the mortgage crisis in "A System Overdue for Reform." Teaser:
For months, Mr. Frank has been among the leaders of those pushing Congress and the administration to move quickly to help people who got subprime mortgages and are now in danger of losing their homes. He’s introduced legislation, for instance, to mandate that the Federal Housing Administration guarantee refinanced subprime loans — but only if the lender takes a write-down on some of the principal and the terms are ones that the borrower can actually repay.
...
You may have noticed that when the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., made his big Wall Street regulation speech a few days ago, in which he took a far more cautious — or tepid, depending on your point of view — position on the need for new regulation, he took a swipe at Democratic proposals like Mr. Frank’s, saying that most of their ideas "are not yet ready for the starting gate."
...
"I think investment banks need to be regulated," Mr. Kudlow told me flatly. He added that although he often disagreed with Mr. Frank, he felt that he was "a good thinker and not a knee-jerk liberal." I’ll tell you, I nearly fell off my chair.
The mortgage crisis has transformed into one of my favorite stories. I'm really looking forward to seeing where Rep. Barney Frank goes with his ideas. With the Bush administration's dogmatic refusal to recognize reality, I figure that Frank has a good nine months to hold hearings and craft a solid, sensible plan before anything with a chance of actually working will also have a chance of getting signed into law. I'm tempted to get a law degree just so that I will be able to fully appreciate the beauty of the end result. For more objective takes focused on Paulson's desperate attempt to make doing nothing look like doing something, see yesterday's article "Treasury’s Plan Would Give Fed Wide New Power" and today's article "In Treasury Plan, a Reluctant Eye Over Wall Street."
Also on Saturday, Gail Collins snarked her way through a vivisection of John McCain's particular problems with that mortgage crisis issue (and Bush, and Iraq, and Social Security, and budgeting) in "McCain Forecloses Early." Teaser:
Then McCain gave a foreign policy speech in which he broke dramatically with the administration by acknowledging that we should probably quit invading other countries in the face of enormous opposition from our allies.
No fair! He got to start first! Why aren’t the Republicans required to use primary rules that allocate delegates in a fair, proportional way that makes it impossible for anybody to actually win? If McCain were still running against Mitt (Available for Vice President) Romney and Fred (Available for "Law & Order" Cameo) Thompson, he would, of course, still be sounding like a divorced-from-reality loon. But once a Republican clinches his party’s nomination, he moves to the middle, stops dropping Ronald Reagan’s name every five seconds and begins describing himself as a "Roosevelt Republican," hoping that older working-class voters will think he means Franklin.
Fortunately for the quivering Democrats, McCain has also felt compelled to speak about the mortgage crisis. His economic thinking — which is, in any form, a brand-new phenomenon — harks back to the time when Republicans all seemed to be elderly rich guys who muttered a lot about bonded indebtedness. The public’s deep lack of enthusiasm for this worldview was what encouraged Reagan to change the subject to optimism and abortion.
The rest of the opinion articles that I will highlight are from today. First, "My Way or the Highway" is an uncredited editorial slamming our fearless brainless leader's foolish inflexibility:
President Bush likes to talk about not being swayed by public opinion, especially the views of Democrats. At a news conference last December, he said the most important criterion for picking a president is "whether or not somebody’s got a sound set of principles from which they will not deviate as they make decisions."
Unhappily for the country, we have learned that Mr. Bush has no idea when standing on principle becomes blind stubbornness and then destructive obsession. So it goes with his choice to run the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Steven Bradbury.
...
Mr. Bradbury is widely viewed on both sides of the aisle as such a toxic choice that he will never be confirmed. The Senate has already refused to do so twice. Still, Mr. Bush clings to this lost cause, snarling the confirmation process for hundreds of nominees and crippling parts of the federal regulatory apparatus.
Speaking of the Bush administration's loose grip on reality, in "A Civil War Iraq Can’t Win," Anthony Cordesman explains how the current uptick in violence relates to the internal politics of Iraq. I really didn't understand this before. I'm alarmed by the thought that McCain still doesn't, despite having grave responsibilities as a U.S. Senator and spending oodles of taxpayer dollars on fact-finding photo-op junkets. Teaser:
The third risk — and one that is now all too real — is that the political struggle between the dominant Shiite parties could become an armed conflict.
Fighting is now occurring in southern Iraq and parts of Baghdad between the Mahdi Army, which is under the control of the populist cleric Moktada al-Sadr, and a coalition of forces led by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s Dawa Party and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a powerful party led by a Maliki ally, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. This latter coalition has de facto control of much of the Iraqi security forces, and Mr. Hakim’s group has its own militia, called the Badr Organization.
Much of the reporting on this fighting in Basra and Baghdad — which was initiated by the Iraqi government — assumes that Mr. Sadr and his militia are the bad guys who are out to spoil the peace, and that the government forces are the legitimate side trying to bring order. This is a dangerous oversimplification, and one that the United States needs to be far more careful about endorsing.
Speaking of refusals to withdraw, Maureen Dowd expresses frustration with both Hillary's persistence and Obama's restraint in "Surrender Already, Dorothy." Teaser:
One Obama adviser moaned that the race was "beginning to feel like a hostage crisis" and would probably go on for another month to six weeks. And Obama said that the "God, when will this be over?" primary season was like "a good movie that lasted about a half an hour too long."
Hillary sunnily riposted that she likes long movies. Her favorite as a girl was "The Wizard of Oz," so surely she spots the "Surrender Dorothy" sign in the sky and the bad portent of the ladies of "The View" burbling to Obama about how sexy he is.
But who knows? Obama and Bob Casey talking March Madness to the patrons of Sharky’s sports cafe in Latrobe, Pa., on Friday night seemed demographically clever. But it is always when Hillary is pushed back by the boys that women help hoist her up.
Speaking of demographic minefields, in "'With a Few More Brains...'" Nicholas Kristof points out that conspiracy theories are a general problem in America, not one limited to the African-American community. Indeed, they're just one part of an even broader anti-intellectualism and dumbed-down discourse:
These days, whites may not believe in a government plot to spread AIDS, but they do entertain the equally malevolent theory that the United States government had a hand in the 9/11 attacks. A Ohio University poll in 2006 found that 36 percent of Americans believed that federal officials assisted in the attacks on the twin towers or knowingly let them happen so that the U.S. could go to war in the Middle East.
Then there’s this embarrassing fact about the United States in the 21st century: Americans are as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution. Depending on how the questions are asked, roughly 30 to 40 percent of Americans believe in each.
...
"America is now ill with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism," Susan Jacoby argues in a new book, "The Age of American Unreason." She blames a culture of "infotainment," sound bites, fundamentalist religion and ideological rigidity for impairing thoughtful debate about national policies.
Finally, rounding out this cornucopia of thoughtfulness, Frank Rich makes a strong argument for the twin powers of a new viral politics and the ongoing story of Iraq in "Hillary’s St. Patrick’s Day Massacre." Teaser:
Sometimes only a shrink can decipher why some politicians persist in flagrantly taking giant risks, all but daring others to catch them in the act (see: Spitzer, Eliot). Carl Bernstein, a sometimes admiring Hillary Clinton biographer, has called the Bosnia debacle "a watershed event" for her campaign because it revives her long history of balancing good works with " ‘misstatements’ and elisions," from the health-care task force fiasco onward.
But this event may be a watershed for two other reasons that have implications beyond Mrs. Clinton’s character and candidacy, spilling over into the 2008 campaign as a whole. It reveals both the continued salience of that supposedly receding issue, the Iraq war, and the accelerating power of viral politics, as exemplified by YouTube, to override the retail politics still venerated by the Beltway establishment.
What’s been lost in the furor over Mrs. Clinton’s Bosnia fairy tale is that her disastrous last recycling of it, the one that blew up in her face, kicked off her major address on the war, timed to its fifth anniversary. Still unable to escape the stain of the single most damaging stand in her public career, she felt compelled to cloak herself, however fictionally, in an American humanitarian intervention that is not synonymous with quagmire.
I hope that you enjoy them as much as I did!
Permalink | 24 comments