Today’s nov 7 election day

My view is that we oscillate  between parties but never with enough shift to actually move into the territory where solving problems is possible. The private world might be able if governing conditions were favorable, but that other world , the world is neither private nor public, the corporations, so control all possible events in their desire for sub-maximization , that the big issues of environment, education, community, are not dealt with .

I like to think that the voters do the very best they can with what they are given . Like when there is a change effort in a corporation , the employees psych out the seriousness of senior management . Is the effort funded sufficiently? re they really taking into account the disruptive consequences ? So in politics of voters try to send a message. When people voted for bush it wasn’t so much that they were voting for bush as they were confused  about Kerry.

So the we get a Cato essay The Myth of the Rational Voter by Bryan Caplan. He starts out

There’s an election tomorrow. Do voters know what they’re doing? According to the typical economist — and many political scientists — the answer is “No, but it doesn’t matter.” How could it not matter? The main argument is that the public’s errors cancel out.[1] For example, some people underestimate the benefits of immigration, and others overestimate the benefits. But as long as the average voter’s belief is true, politicians win by promoting immigration policies based on the facts.

this is a strange way to start because it is contrary to the very calm and rational actor theorywhich says that people are calculating their preferences accurately . But that of course assumes that the preferences are rational preferences allowing for rational choices.

 In my book, and in this essay, I focus on the public’s mistaken beliefs about economics.

I wonder what he means by “public”? 

we have the “rally round the flag” effect, the public’s tendency to support wars as soon as they have been declared.

Is it not rational to support the leaders (dumb though they be) , because social solidarity or its absence have real consequences .

The National Survey of Public Knowledge of Welfare Reform and the Federal Budget finds, for example, that 41% of Americans believe that foreign aid is one of the two biggest areas in the federal budget — versus 14% for Social Security.

This one is true, and alarming . But I wonder if the people are not thinking in terms of the psychic costs, not dollar costs . Of course the question they are asked does not provide for the psychic cost question. Certainly in the time of oil and empire “foreign  policy” is it the largest factor in the political climate .

So where is he going with this article , besides using current academic language ?

Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy. The overarching finding: Economists and the public hold radically different beliefs about the economy.[4] Compared to the experts, laymen are much more skeptical of markets, especially international and labor markets, and much more pessimistic about the past, present, and future of the economy. When laymen see business conspiracies, economists see supply-and-demand. When laymen see ruinous competition from foreigners, economists see the wonder of comparative advantage. When laymen see dangerous downsizing, economists see wealth-enhancing reallocation of labor. When laymen see decline, economists see progress.[5]

The economists, I imagine , are much more tied to the immediate markets whereas the people answering the survey are still affected by the great depression and the recessions of 72, 83, and are a very influenced by the biases of the Bush economy. 

Given what the average voter thinks about the effects of immigration, it is easy to understand why virtually every survey finds that a solid majority of Americans wants to reduce immigration, and almost no one wants to increase immigration. Unfortunately for both Americans and potential immigrants, there is ample reason to believe that the average voter is mistaken. If policy were based on the facts, we would be debating how much to increase immigration, rather than trying to “get tough” on immigrants who are already here.

HereHe is just plain wrong . The costs of immigration are a way of shifting labor costs from the corporation to the public who has to pay for education and health for the new workers . A problem with this article is takes the point of view of the winners in the current economy .

Now comes

So what remedies for voter irrationality would I propose? Above all, relying less on democracy and more on private choice and free markets.[12] By and large, we don’t even ask voters whether we should allow unpopular speech or religion, and this “elitist” practice has saved us a world of trouble. Why not take more issues off the agenda? Even if the free market does a mediocre job, the relevant question is not whether smart, well-meaning regulation would be better. The relevant question is whether the kind of regulation that appeals to the majority would be better.

Another way to deal with voter irrationality is institutional reform. Imagine, for example, if the Council of Economic Advisers, in the spirit of the Supreme Court, had the power to invalidate legislation as “uneconomical.” Similarly, since the data show that well-educated voters hold more sensible policy views[13], we could emulate pre-1949 Great Britain by giving college graduates an extra vote.[14]

but this is pathetic . Private choice means capital choice and the council of economic advisers would vote for the leading economic interests , the people who paid their salaries and got them elected or chosen .

This kind of thinking characterize what happens with me academically trained professions where the world is seen through the lands of the currently fashionable paradigm that made it to fit .

I see it as part of the cost of that the center of the university from the thinking to plumbing.   the Closing of the American Mind .

Juan Cole picks up 

The remark prompted conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan to raise the question of Bush’s mental fitness. Sullivan told CNN Bush is so delusional, “this is not an election anymore, it’s an intervention.”

I love it when a piece of language moves us along. “Inervention”. best we can.

My own answer: Bush is not insane, he is just not very good at putting policy into effect. That is, he is a mediocre leader who has to cover up his horrible mistakes with optimistic slogans because his lack of leadership skills leaves him with no practical alternative. Give me an example of any positive and successful accomplishment of his presidency, unmarred by substantial failures. Afghanistan? Israel-Palestine? Lebanon? Iraq? Al-Qaeda? Domestically, he has, by cutting taxes on billionaires, run up the national debt by trillions, and boasts in that insane yet just mediocre way of his that the deficit is “coming down.” He put the expense of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars off-budget, and somehow the business page journalists haven’t managed to notice that the deficit is not actually less than $300 billion if you count the wars. Nor is adding even $290 billion a year to the national debt a positive accomplishment. We pay interest on that debt, folks.

There are several problems here. What if the real purpose is oil and preventing the Russians and Chinese from having it? Bush even said so last week. But then, if so, why was the war so ineffecively fought, when it needen’t have been? Runsfeld’s folly of the surgical strike?

Cole also raises the question, who gets that interest?

He adds some links.

Veteran Foreign Affairs correspondent Helena Cobban has substantial experience with post-conflict trials and commissions. Her views of the trial of Saddam Hussein are therefore must reading.
Check out this new Middle East blog.
William S. Lind warns, correctly, that if Cheney expands the war to Iran, we could lose our army in Iraq.

The reaction of European leaders against the death penalty is impressive and adds a dimension to Cobban’s analysis .

The Lind link is ominous.

The danger arises because almost all of the vast quantities of supplies American armies need come into Iraq from one direction, up from Kuwait and other Gulf ports in the south. If that supply line is cut, our forces may not have enough stuff, especially fuel, to get out of Iraq. American armies are incredibly fuel-thirsty, and though Iraq has vast oil reserves, it is short of refined oil products. Unlike German World War Gen. Heinz Guderian`s army on its way to the Channel coast in 1940, we could not just fuel up at local gas stations.

From ABC’s too Republican The Note

 list of poll closings and reportings.

But

Poll workers struggle with vote machines

11/7/2006, 10:03 a.m. ET

By ANICK JESDANUN

The Associated Press

(AP) — Programming errors and inexperience with electronic voting machines frustrated poll workers in hundreds of precincts early Tuesday, delaying voters in Indiana and Ohio and leaving some in Florida with little choice but use paper ballots instead.

and, from Garrison Keilor


Today is Election Day. Millions of people across the country will be going to the polls today to elect new legislators, judges, sheriffs, and school board members. For the first 50 years of American elections, only 15 percent of the adult population was eligible to vote. To be eligible to vote at the time, you had to be a white male property owner. In Connecticut, you had to be a white male property owner of a “quiet and peaceable behavior and civil conversation.”

Thomas Dorr was one of the first politicians to argue that poor people should be given voting rights. As a member of the Rhode Island legislature, Dorr argued that all white adult men should have the vote, regardless of their wealth. He incited a riot to protest the governor’s election of 1842 and went to prison for treason, but most states began to let poor white men vote soon after. Women were given the right to vote in 1920, and many African Americans were prevented from voting in the South until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Today, the only group of adult American citizens who are regularly prevented from voting are convicted felons.

Gore Vidal said, “Half of the American people never read a newspaper. Half never vote for president. One hopes it is the same half.”

W.C. Fields said, “I never vote for anyone. I always vote against.”

I just re-read


Niall Ferguson: America’s Brittle Empire

The U.S. doesn’t have the necessary military manpower or fiscal solvency of its imperial predecessors in Iraq.

 

• This is in the spirit of “too bad”. I am not sure, but thinking through that vision is important, if multilateral friendship is not possible.

and,  Michael Novak, National Review

The Left is going to lose - big - because they have nothing noble, nothing beautiful, nothing real, nothing true, with which to lead. They are the merchants of illusion. And a significant majority of Americans, although not all, see through them. In a democratic election, however, it only takes a small majority to win. And the upcoming election of 2006 is not likely to be all that close. The Democrats piqued too soon. Just watch. [6/15/06]

I like this because it reaches, though the National Review is ahrdly elegant or beauatiful. It is also depressing close for the democrats, who need more. see my draft Garden World

and from Fromkin

Zachary A. Goldfarb writes in The Washington Post: “Former deputy secretary of state Richard L. Armitage, who was an influential adviser to Colin L. Powell when Powell was secretary of state, has weighed in on today’s midterm elections, saying they offer the United States a chance to win back lost allies around the world….

“‘We were exporting our anger and our fear, hatred for what had happened,’ Reuters quoted him as saying. ‘I think it’s understandable to a certain degree, but we’re well past that now and it’s time to turn another face to the world and get back to more traditional things, such as the export of hope and opportunity and inspiration.’”

and

Paul Krugman writes in his New York Times opinion column: “At this point, nobody should have any illusions about Mr. Bush’s character. To put it bluntly, he’s an insecure bully who believes that owning up to a mistake, any mistake, would undermine his manhood — and who therefore lives in a dream world in which all of his policies are succeeding and all of his officials are doing a heckuva job. . . .

“In other words, he’s the sort of man who should never have been put in a position of authority, let alone been given the kind of unquestioned power, free from normal checks and balances, that he was granted after 9/11. But he was, alas, given that power, as well as a prolonged free ride from much of the news media.”

The question has to be, why did the press not see it when so many of us did? His facial expressions, his laguage, hid past… The “americans like Bush” was a fabrication when extended from the few to the many. Part  of the answer might be that they, the press,  were so locked in it took

Frank Rich writes in his New York Times opinion column: “In retrospect, the defining moment of the 2006 campaign may well have been back in April, when Mr. Colbert appeared at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Call it a cultural primary. His performance was judged a bomb by the Washington press corps, which yukked it up instead for a Bush impersonator who joined the president in a benign sketch commissioned by the White House. But millions of Americans watching C-Span and the Web did get Mr. Colbert’s routine. They recognized that the Beltway establishment sitting stone-faced in his audience was the butt of his jokes, especially the very news media that had parroted Bush administration fictions leading America into the quagmire of Iraq.

“Five months later, a video of Mr. Colbert’s dinner speech is still a runaway iTunes hit and his comic contempt for Washington is more popular than ever. It’s enough to give you hope that the voters may rally for reality on this crucial Election Day even as desperate politicians and some of their media enablers try one more time to stay their fictional course.”

and

Clifford Geertz died today. Another marker. I admired his brining complexity to the ideas of anthropology - not brining but keeping alive amore compex tradtion.

In a 1995 interview with The Chronicle, he said, “Grand, master narratives just don’t appeal to me. I’d much rather zigzag, break off, start again.”

My colleague, Chrris Wright, aranged for us to meet at the Institute for Advanced Study, in about 1985.  My aim was to understand sociability there, the way in which people were encouraged, hosted to mix accross disciplines. Geertz was acerbic, and claimed low mixing and nothing to be done. His office, say eighteen by thirty or fourty feet, was a wonderful mix of books, journals and manuscripts, all set at an angle to the rather too “modernist” walls of an ascetic building.

In a 2001 essay, Mr. Geertz praised the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, N.J., whose faculty he joined in 1970, for its attempts to “break away somehow from the prevailing paradigms in the social sciences, poor imitations, mostly, of misunderstood physics, and to adapt those sciences to the immediate peculiarities of their supposed subject matter: the human way of being in the world.”

and, on the health of the political system Opinion Journal

If the party you prefer loses a string of elections, one response is to concede that it has the wrong policies or the wrong tactics. Another is to argue that the system itself is broken. Two new books take the second course and contend that American constitutional democracy is in deep trouble. Neither is written from what would be called a Red State perspective, which raises the question: Will a Democratic victory in today’s election suddenly restore the integrity of America’s political system and make the books less urgent for readers who have been feeling despair for the past couple of years?

Good question. My sense is that the dems in power will not make much difference. I hope I am wrong.

Of course, the Constitution’s design has a purpose–to make democracy republican and not “direct,” to slow it down, lest wayward passions push the country too violently in one direction or another. Time seems to have vindicated the Framers’ wisdom on such matters. Under this Constitution, the U.S. has become the most prosperous nation in the world, the dynamo of the world’s scientific and technological progress, and the defender of international liberty against the scourges of fascism and communism. It has also achieved a remarkable record of political continuity through periods of drastic social change. Mr. Levinson does not come close to showing why it would be prudent to rebuild this framework and put its redesign up for grabs.

US is prosperous, but the people are not. The country doesn’t work, by design, but then it can’t cope with problems that are over the edge of normal change allowed by the constitutional proccess. It has worked prettywell, but he dynamics of change are shifting towards a more fascist like system. that smebody as inept as Bush could become president hints at a broken system.