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- The biggest revelation in Game Change is not that Harry Reid used an archaic term to describe the electoral chances of a black presidential candidate. It's that books like Game Change expose how pathetic elite political discourse in this country has become. The Reid story continues to dominate the news despite it revealing little about the 2008 election that we didn't already know. And while everyone is focused on a book which is the political equivalent of a celebrity tell-all, we can continue to ignore the fact that our political institutions are broken and few people in the news business are particularly interested in telling that story. Apparently this makes me incapable of appreciating "messy, sweaty, ugly, arduous competition between flawed human beings" because I'm obsessed with "numbers and probabilities and theories." For a nice rejoinder to this characterization, please read John Sides' defense of political science.
- Tom Geoghegan makes the case in an op-ed that the filibuster is unconstitutional. While I think you'd have a hard time convincing, say, the United States Supreme Court of this, Geoghegan also notes that routine supermajority voting is "at odds with the founders’ intent." His case for deigning the founders' intent, as it goes, is compelling enough. But the issue is that we should never need to deign the founders' intent. Just because they specified legislative instances where supermajorities were required in the Constitution, does not mean that all other instances should be constitutionally obligated to a simple majority vote. If they had intended that, they would have put it in the Constitution since they, you know, wrote the damn thing.
- I find it enduringly perplexing that standards of efficiency, accountability, and efficacy follow a dual track for large institutions of the private sector versus large institutions of the public sector. Here's Kevin Drum scratching his head at a recent comment from Andrew Sullivan, who apparently believes that "In the private sector for the most part, profound failures of this sort that could have led to the deaths of hundreds of people would lead to resignations and firings." Uh-huh. Because whereas the government is, for the most part, in the business of covering its hiney and rewarding incompetence, corporate America is a lean and efficient machine of meritocracy, whose motivation by profit ensures that accountability for malfeasance is a top priority.
- This New York Times piece on Fox News chief Roger Ailes refreshingly takes as a given that the cable channel under Ailes' leadership is a means towards an ideological end. Yet the more interesting aspect of the Ailes conservative view of America is that of hunkering down in a fortress, as our diabolical enemies plot our destruction. Indeed, you can extrapolate from this worldview support for torture, suspending certain rights, and launching expensive and futile overseas adventures. It's all about the precious bodily fluids.
- Weekend Remainders: Hear the cry of the Blue Dog Dem, whose pitch is "elect me so I'll have more influence over legislation that I ultimately don't care about"; Bill Clinton rallies the troops on health care; Obama bests LBJ for first-year congressional accomplishment; doubt has been cast on the Rove/Bush evangelical mobilization theory; and good newspapers like The New York Times need to stop indulging in explaining presidential behavior in terms of irrelevant and uninformative labels.
--Mori Dinauer
