Americans' Perceptions Explain their Preference for Obama

Some results from the most recent CBS News/New York Times poll caught my eye. First, just to repeat a point I've made before, reporters who are so fond of discussing poll results suggesting that Sarah Palin is not prepared to be president rarely point out that people are not terribly impressed with Barack Obama's level of preparation either:


What is the idea? Americans are going to vote against McCain because they think his VP choice is not prepared to be president, but they are going to vote for Obama despite the fact that he is relatively unprepared? I think the evidence suggests that, despite what you might think, people are not overwhelmingly concerned about a candidate's level of preparation for the job. But reporters are generally horrified by Palin (understandably, given their political views), so they frequently emphasize an issue when discussing Palin that also places their preferred candidate in a negative light (but they seem not to notice that).

In some respects, Americans seem to know what they are about to do. For example, they know that they are about to elect a liberal, not a moderate:


In fact, more people see Obama as a liberal (57%) than see John McCain as a conservative (47%). That seems about right to me.

Americans correctly believe that Obama will pull our troops from Iraq, but they seem to mistakenly mistakenly believe that McCain will send more troops to Iraq:


Americans simply do not appreciate that we have already won the war in Iraq, and all we are doing now is slowing turning things over to the Iraqis as they become increasingly able to handle things on their own. That's why even McCain says that he is likely to soon be reducing (not increasing) the number of troops in Iraq. Yet Americans think he is going to send more troops, perhaps because they think a "civil war" is on the brink of spiraling out of control once again. This misperception aids Obama.

Perhaps most remarkable to me is the fact that Americans believe that Obama will be able to work with members of the opposite party (slightly more so than McCain):


This is remarkable because the only evidence that Obama can work in a bipartisan fashion is that he occasionally speaks words to that effect (but there is not the slightest hint of it in his past behavior). By contrast, McCain has a clear history of reaching across the aisle. I am amazed by how easily Americans are influenced by mere words while being largely unaffected by past behavior. I'm the other way around. This probable misperception aids Obama.

You'd think that Americans would see Obama as bigger threat than McCain when it comes to raising taxes. Amazingly, it is nearly tied:


Half of Americans think that Obama will raise taxes on them (which makes sense because he's talking a lot about tax increases and he's known to be liberal), whereas a similar percentage (46%) believes that about McCain (which is odd because he is talking about cutting taxes for everyone and is known to be conservative). This misperception also clearly aids Obama (because something that should be hurting him is not).

On the other hand, when it comes to corporate taxes, Americans have it about right:


Although this perception seems right on the money, Americans do not seem to appreciate the fact that raising taxes on corporations largely translates into raising taxes on individuals in a non-progressive way. This misperception aids Obama.

Americans also think that Obama's plan will make the economy better (54% believe that), whereas only 32% believe that McCain's plan will do that. How raising taxes on the rich, increasing the capital gains tax rate, raising taxes on corporations and erecting barriers to free trade will make the economy better escapes me. By huge margins, people also believe that Obama will provide health care for everyone while making the economy better.

Based on the perceptions that people have, I can see why Obama is on track to win the election. Where some of those perceptions come from is a complete mystery to me.

GDP Shrinks in the 3rd Quarter

The 3rd-quarter "advance estimate" of the quarterly change in GDP came in at -0.3%. I plotted up the quarterly figures for 2007 and 2008 to place this number into some perspective (the values for 2008 are in red):


Overall for 2007, the nation's GDP grew at 2%, but it consisted of 2 good quarters of strong growth and 2 quarters of essentially zero growth. The value for all of 2008 is sure to come in lower than that, and it will surprise no one if we finally see two quarters in a row of negative GDP (the third quarter and yet-to-come fourth quarter of 2008). Two quarters of negative GDP growth is one definition of a recession, and even I'm prepared to accept that this is probably what is in store for us (unlike virtually everyone else on the planet, who declared the US to be in a recession -- or even a depression -- a year or two ago).

Bad news on the economic front apparently equals good news on the political front for Barack Obama. There is no actual reason why it should be this way, except that, via Pavlovian conditioning, George Bush is president at the same time that this downturn is happening, so he (and, via generalization, the Republican party) gets the blame. The Democrats in general and Barack Obama in particular are the reflexive beneficiaries.

Setting aside Pavlovian conditioning, I must say that I just don't get the theory that says that, in an economic downturn, the thing to do is tax the rich, tax corporations, increase capital gains taxes, erect barriers to free trade, and transfer wealth directly to non-tax-paying citizens in order to restore economic growth. Still, data trump theory, and we are apparently about to perform this economic experiment, so we'll see how it goes. Perhaps I'll adopt the redistributionist theory if our economy is humming along at 2.5% GDP growth a year after Obama takes office (assuming he wins, which I do assume). From what I've seen in the past, tax cuts (not tax increases) pull you out of a recession. That was George Bush's approach the last time we entered a recession (after the dot-com crash and the attacks of 9/11), and it led to 4 straight years of strong GDP growth. Could raising taxes during an economic downturn have the same effect? I guess we'll see, but I currently doubt it. I hope I'm wrong.

A Surprising Endorsement for Barack Obama

Michael O'Hanlon is a Democrat and a Senior fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution. He oversees the indispensable Iraq Index, and he wrote a famous op-ed in July of 2007 for the New York Times in which he said the following:

A War We Just Might Win

By MICHAEL E. O’HANLON and KENNETH M. POLLACK
Published: July 30, 2007

VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.

The political debate about Iraq was, indeed, surreal. Critics, including (and especially) Barack Obama did not pay attention to the details, yet they had very strong opinions about what to do anyway. That's almost impossible to believe, and watching the willfully uninformed express strong opinions about Iraq can only be described as a surreal experience. On my blog, for example, I repeatedly referred to the "eerie code of silence" adopted by almost all Democrats on the issue of al Qaeda in Iraq. While al Qaeda was killing more than 10,000 Iraqis with their suicide bombers alone (and killing many more by other means) in a deliberate and successful effort to provoke sectarian violence in Iraq, virtually all Democrats claimed that the violence was nothing more than a civil war resulting from centuries of enmity between that country's various ethnic groups and that the real war against al Qaeda was back in Afghanistan (where, until very recently, al Qaeda was doing nothing at all). Surreal indeed.

Unlike most on the left, O'Hanlon paid attention to the details (more so than anyone, in fact). As such, even in July of 2007, he knew that military progress was finally taking hold. At the same time, the editors of the New York Times, like Barack Obama, had a different view. Here is what they thought was the right approach in July of 2007:

The Road Home

July 8, 2007

It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit.
...
Whatever his cause was, it is lost.
...
Americans must be clear that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave. There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide. Potentially destabilizing refugee flows could hit Jordan and Syria. Iran and Turkey could be tempted to make power grabs. Perhaps most important, the invasion has created a new stronghold from which terrorist activity could proliferate.

Compare Iraq today to what the New York Times envisioned just a little over a year ago (had Barack Obama's troop withdrawal plan been implemented, that is). O'Hanlon's judgment was, quite obviously, far superior to that of the New York Times and, more to the point, far superior to that of Barack Obama.

Later, in September of 2007, O'Hanlon came to the defense of General Petraeus after his testimony to Congress (while many others on the left proudly savaged this brilliant and patriotic general):

Petraeus Doesn’t Cook the Books
Just the facts.

By Michael O'Hanlon

For those reading this after watching General David Petraeus’s Monday testimony, I strongly suspect that my main argument will have become apparent to many: General Petraeus is a straight shooter who does not and will not cook the books.

Most Democrats had a different view at the time (to put it as charitably as possible). O'Hanlon is a Democrat, but he did not lose his mind over the issue of Iraq. That's rare.

In light of this, it came as a surprise to me that O'Hanlon has endorsed for president the man who was at the very center of the surreal debate over Iraq (and whose views are as surreal as ever). Here is some of what he said about Obama in that endorsement:

However, the likelihood of defeat in Iraq is now far less, even with something resembling Obama’s plan. This fact is of course one of the great ironies of the campaign. Because of the remarkable, historic success of the surge that John McCain supported and Barack Obama opposed, the latter’s unfortunate views on future Iraq policymaking are no longer quite so important or so disqualifying, for me at least. It is now possible that we can begin with Obama’s plan (not unlike what many Iraqi politicians currently espouse—though they are in many cases overconfident, and politically motivated, themselves) and after suitable modifications in the coming years wind up with Iraq as a semi-stable place.

I agree with part of this. Obama has rigidly adhered to a troop withdrawal plan that would have been strategically disastrous for the United States had it been implemented when he first proposed it (just consider the picture presented by the editors of the New York Times). However, thanks to the incredible success of George Bush's troop surge, Obama's Pavlovian withdrawal reflex would be less disastrous now. In fact, it's one reason why I don't fear an Obama presidency as much as I otherwise would. But here's my question: although Obama's poorly thought out plan would, due to George Bush's good judgment, be less disastrous now, shouldn't one consider what that plan suggests about Obama's judgment? For some odd reason, O'Hanlon does no such thing. It is as if one should take for granted the fact that, although Obama was as wrong as one could possibly be about the most important national security issue he faced since joining the Senate, it does not bear at all on his judgment about national security issues. That his being profoundly wrong about Iraq is, in fact, so utterly unrelated to any assessment of Obama's judgment about national security issues that one can reasonably endorse the man for president without devoting so much as a single sentence to the "judgment" issue.

That's where I part company with the otherwise incredibly thoughtful Michael O'Hanlon. In Obama's view, it was better to sheepishly accept defeat at the hands of al Qaeda (as we once accepted defeat at the hands of the North Vietnamese) and to allow genocide to unfold before the horrified eyes of the world (an outcome that would have forever been blamed on America, and rightly so) than to ensure al Qaeda's defeat and the safety of the innocent people of Iraq before departing that country. That reflects profoundly impaired judgment on the part of the man who is likely to be our next president. To me, anyway, but apparently not to O'Hanlon.

The Polls are not Close

If you read my blog, you must know that I have reservations about Barack Obama. To me, the fact that Obama demonstrated colossally impaired judgment on the most important national security issue that he faced since joining the Senate (namely, whether to support the troop surge that has led to victory in Iraq or to invite disaster and defeat by proposing a troop withdraw instead) does not recommend him highly for the job. In addition, the idea that taxing the rich and increasing taxes on capital gains (while erecting barriers to free trade) is the best way to restore economic growth in the face of a severe recession is, to me, not even remotely plausible.

Then again, Obama wants to increase direct funding aid to states (and my own professorial salary is not unrelated to the state's budget health), he wants to increase government aid for college tuition (my professorial salary is also related to students being able to make such payments), I believe that he would increase finding for science (part of my salary also comes from research grants, too) and he wants to pay for all this by taxing those who make more than $250K (my professorial salary is not even close to that level). Hmmm...Go Obama!! Whoever said there was a problem with spreading the wealth around, anyway?

Kidding aside, I'm not a big fan of Obama's approach to either national security or the economy, but that does not prevent me from recognizing that he has a big lead in the polls. Based on what I've read and heard on the radio lately, many others think that race is close (based on some recent polls) and that the media is trying to pretend otherwise. Lord knows that I accept the incontrovertible fact that the media distorts the news through a left wing filter, but they are not distorting the polls. Moreover, the polls are not "all over the place," as many seem to believe. Instead, the polls are about what you'd expect them to be if Obama true lead was approximately 7%. If you are like most people, your reaction to this assertion might go something like this: "Give me a break. Some polls show an effective tie. Others show that Obama leads by as much as 14 points. Something is obviously wrong." No, nothing is really wrong. The reason why people have trouble with this is that they do not have clear intuition about how much poll-to-poll variability one should expect due to random chance alone. To show you how much variability you should expect, I ran 200 simulated polls, each with 1000 simulated respondents. In every single one of these 200 simulated polls, Obama had the support of 50% of the underlying population, whereas McCain had the support of 43% (because I programmed it to be that way). That is, Obama's lead was always 7%. Each poll was (in simulation) conducted in the same way as every other poll and without any bias. That being the case, you might suppose that since Obama's programmed lead was actually 7%, then a well-conducted poll of 1000 people should reveal that his lead to be 7%. But that's not right. If I polled, say, 1 million people, then the obtained poll result would always be close to the programmed truth (i.e., 50% to 43% -- a difference of 7 points). But when only 1000 people are sampled, there is a lot of random error. Under those conditions, some polls will indicate a lead that is larger than 7%, whereas others will show a lead that is smaller than 7%. You no doubt have some awareness of this already because you know that polls have a "margin of error." Given that there is some margin of error (often said to be about 3.5%), what should the various polls show if Obama's true lead were 7%? Should they show various leads ranging from 6% to 8%? Or should the apparent lead vary more than that due to random chance alone? I ran the 200 simulated polls to illustrate the answer, and here is what I found:


Out of 200 polls of a population in which Obama actually leads by 7%, only 33 polls showed the lead to be 7% (the correct answer). Every other poll (167 of them) showed the lead to be something else. One poll even suggests that McCain has a 2-point lead. Generally speaking, the polls range from about a 1- or 2-point lead to about a 13-point lead for Obama. And that's basically what the various polls are showing today.

If the race were actually close (e.g., if Obama had only a 1-point lead), then a bunch of polls would be finding that McCain is in the lead (due to random chance alone). But if you look at the polls that have been conducted over the last few weeks, not a single one shows McCain in the lead. The only way that could happen is if the race is not close (e.g., if Obama had a lead of at least 6 or 7 points).

On the Drudge Report a few days ago, I saw a headline about the "most accurate poll" from 2004 now showing the 2008 race to be effectively tied. You might think "gee, the best poll from last time shows the race to be close this time; therefore, I'm going to believe that poll." Don't think like that because it makes no sense whatsoever to do so. One of my 200 random polls may absolutely nail the outcome this time around. Others will be far off the mark. Even so, all 200 polls were methodologically identical. If I gave them all different names (if I called one of them the AP poll, another the New York Times/CBS News poll, another the Zogby poll, another the Gallup poll, etc.), the most accurate poll would still not be any better than the least accurate. By random chance alone, one has to win (much like a lottery winner wins due to chance alone).

My point is juts this: The polls show Obama with a pretty big lead. End of story. Does that mean he'll win? I think he will, but there are several unknowns. Perhaps Obama will fall victim to the Bradley Effect. Or maybe there is a hidden Palin effect this year. Or maybe McCain will find a way to close the gap before election day. Or maybe McCain will win the electoral college vote even if Obama is well ahead in the popular vote. My only point is that, right now, Obama leads according to the polls, and his lead is about 7 points. A poll that shows his lead to be only 1 point is as wrong as a poll that shows his lead to be 13 points (and both are wrong mostly because of random error). The turnout models used by different pollsters are having some effect on the variability as well, but the polls would be "all over the place" under the best of circumstances (unless many thousands of people were sampled). That's why you have to look at the average of all the polls (and ignore every single individual poll) to figure out where Obama and McCain stand in the polls today.

Obama wants to Grow the Economy from the Bottom Up

Finally, I get it. All along, I've understood Obama to be making the argument that we should raise taxes on the wealthy to make things fairer than they are now (e.g., it is a way to reduce income inequality). Although I'm not sure that raising taxes on the wealthy is the best way to address the issue, it has never seemed like a preposterous idea, especially if the cost would be to, say, reduce GDP growth from 3% to 2.5%. Perhaps the increased sense of fairness would be worth the overall cost in economic growth. Lately, however, I've been wondering if it makes sense to spread the wealth around in the name of fairness despite the fact that the U.S. economy is in a downward spiral. Under those conditions, shouldn't the emphasis be placed on pro-growth initiatives instead of being placed on anti-growth measures designed to increase fairness?

In response to a question on Good Morning America, Obama said that he did not regret his "spread the wealth" comment. More interesting to me was this statement about the effect of his spread-the-wealth approach on growing the economy:

"The American people understand the way you grow the economy is from the bottom up."

Count me as one American who does not quite understand this argument. If I am interpreting him correctly, Obama is now saying that spreading the wealth will not only make things fairer (an argument I understand) but will also accelerate growth in a declining economy. That is, the theory is that you grow the economy from the bottom up by taking from the rich and giving to the poor.

That's how you grow the economy? That's an amazing theory, and I wish he'd spell out the details. It does not seem likely to me that taking from the rich and giving to the poor will increase GDP growth (though it might spread the wealth in a way that seems fairer, specially to those on the receiving end).

Nobel Prize Winners Discuss the Economy

I have such a simple question about Barack Obama's plan for the economy: as we plunge headlong into a deep recession, will tax increases (on those making over $250K, corporations and capital gains) plus anti-free trade protectionist legislation promote growth or accelerate the plunge? MSNBC asked 7 Nobel-Prize-winning economists what they thought should be done, and I read their responses with interest to see what they would say about this. Surely they would all put their reputations on the line by staunchly defending the idea that increasing taxes and opposing free trade are the key elements of any successful plan to fight off a recession. I have taken what seems like the key statements from each.

1. First up is Paul Krugman:

First, the economy will almost surely be in a nasty recession by January. As soon as possible, the administration and Congress should fight this recession by putting in place a major fiscal-stimulus plan, this time centered on spending rather than tax cuts—aid to stressed state and local governments, expanded and extended unemployment benefits, and some serious public-works spending. The goal is to do well while doing good—to provide much needed help to individuals and help repair our frayed infrastructure, while at the same time supporting demand and employment.

OK, no tax cuts plus increased government spending. But what about tax increases and protectionist legislation (i.e., what about these key aspects of Obama's plan)? He does not say. I wonder why?

2. Next, we have A. Michael Spence:

It will need to continue to inject capital into the financial system and take measures to ensure the functioning of the payments system and short-term credit markets. It will also need to return to the mortgages and reset terms, avoid a flood of foreclosures, all of this for efficiency, equity and political reasons. It will then need to inject a fiscal stimulus while communicating a plan to return the budget deficit to more sustainable levels in the medium run. It will need to coordinate policies with other major economies to avoid unintended and unwanted volatility in capital flows searching for the safest haven.

Tax increases and protectionist legislation? Will they help to fight off a recession. Not a peep about that. I wonder why?

3. Next, Joseph E. Stiglitz:

We will almost surely be going into a deep recession—the longest since the Great Depression. The immediate focus will be how to prevent it from getting worse.
...
To recover, however, we need more; investments in infrastructure and technology. Green investments on alternative-energy sources and public-transport systems can help wean us off our oil dependence.
...
To get the resources to attack these daunting problems means that we will have to raise taxes, at least on upper-income Americans, and use all of our resources wisely. There are two major sources of waste in our economy: the first is in the military, where spending has been unbridled—including on weapons that don't work designed to fight enemies that don't exist. We could have more security with a smaller military budget. The second is in health care.

OK, finally. This fellow is obviously a down-the-line liberal, which is fine. Like Paul Krugman, he also wants more government spending, and he wants to pay for it by taxing the rich. I assume he thinks that increased government spending coupled with a tax increase on the rich (plus increasing corporate taxes and increasing taxes on capital gains) will help to grow the economy and stave off a recession. He does not mention protectionist legislation, but these comments sound so liberal overall that I assume he favors that as well. Still, I wish he'd come right out and say it.

4. Next, Edward C. Prescott:

...I would remind the next president that changing the rules of the game too dramatically can have unintended consequences, which are often suboptimal. Indeed, even hinting that rules will be changed can alter expectations and change behavior.

This is especially true on the issue of taxes. There is no more important issue on which a president can affect the economy than the question of taxation. Recent research has revealed that tax rates are the key factor in determining the economic health of developed nations. Ingenuity, risk-taking and productivity are the engines of economic growth, and all are dependent on properly aligned incentives. High tax rates are the surest way to squash those incentives and stall that engine.

He's obviously conservative, and he refers to research that confirms what seems intuitively apparent to many. In his eyes, Obama's plan will squash ingenuity, risk-taking and productivity. It's hard to imagine how Obama's plan would do the opposite, but those who plan to bet their retirements by voting for him must believe otherwise for some reason.

5. Next, Eric Maskin:

Yet, government can save the day. By infusing money into some banks, it allows them to begin lending again. With a big enough infusion, the chain reaction reverses, and ultimately the market is restored to health—at which point the government presumably gets its investment back.

What about tax increases and protectionist legislation, which are key aspects of Obama's plan of attack? He does not say. Why not?

6. Next up, Edmund Phelps:

The American dream became "home ownership" rather than a successful career. To redress the balance, the next president should press Congress to provide businesses with additional subsidies to help them invest, comparable to the subsidies it provides households—through Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac—to buy homes.

If America is to continue to be the place where ordinary people find stimulation, challenge, novelty and fulfillment, our business sector will need more dynamism and inclusion than it has shown lately. This will require a restructuring of the financial sector to serve business innovation. The tiny band of "angel investors" and venture capitalists can't do it all. Also, the next administration must act to stimulate jobs for the disadvantaged, many of whom are now in prison. I have long advocated that a subsidy be paid to each firm employing low-wage workers as a way of raising their pay and stimulating their employment. Barack Obama's planned hiring subsidy is a step in that direction. But we have miles to go to get back on the track for dynamism and inclusion.

OK, he likes Obama's planned hiring subsidy. What about Obama's plans for tax increases and protectionist legislation? Will those aspects of the plan help to stave off a deep recession? Like many of the others, he simply does not say.

7. Finally, Sir Clive W.J. Granger:

The $700 billion bail-out proposed by Congress did not pass the simple acceptance tests, but the "British" suggestion introduced by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is performing well and getting wide attention.

The next president could state, for example, that his administration is implementing something like the British proposal, which clearly makes some common sense [even if unclear economics] and is being introduced by several other countries. The cost is less than previous schemes and is designed to be reversible in four or five years if successful. The money is going exactly where it is most needed! Should the Brown plan be widely accepted and acted on, we will still all face a few weeks or possibly even months of uncertainty before the world's economies get back on a sound trajectory.

Concerning [worries that] government spending would be too great: it would be less than continuing the Iraq war for a few years and much less than going to war with Iran, which is so casually debated. The costs should certainly be kept watch over and publicized.

He sounds liberal enough (at least based on his comments about Iraq and Iran), but I'm not seeing unequivocal support for tax increases and protectionist legislation.

Well, maybe Obama knows what he's doing. After all, in the past he's...Well, what has he done, exactly, that gives you confidence that he has what it takes to pull this country out of its nose dive into a deep recession? McCain might not have what it takes either, but tax cuts and free trade (the core aspects of his approach) are thought by most to promote growth even if it is also true that the rich may benefit more than the poor (thereby increasing perceived unfairness). But right night now, the focus should be on promoting growth, not increasing fairness. If Obama's plans exacerbate the recession, the poor will be hurt most of all (and that's not very fair). Obama keeps saying we need a change, but I don't really think we need change for the worse. If you think things can't change for the worse, then I think you need to think again.

It's not the News; it's the Prosecution vs. the Defense

A new Fox News poll shows Obama in the lead by 9. But a new AP poll shows that Obama's lead is only 1 point. Do these polls disagree? No, they don't. Although it's not the main point of my post today, I'll just mention once again that (a) the average of all the polls show that Obama has about a 7-point lead, (b) the margin of error in most polls is approximately 3.5%, (c) when the stated margin of error is 3.5%, the margin of error on the size-of-lead statistic (e.g., "Obama has a lead of X%) is much larger. More specifically, the margin of error on the statistic of interest (who leads and by how much) is approximately double the stated value. Therefore, (d) due to random chance alone, if Obama's true lead is approximately 7%, you would expect polls to show an apparent lead ranging from 0% (i.e., 0% = true lead minus 2 times the stated margin of error) to 14% (i.e., 14% = true lead plus 2 times the stated margin of error). As it turns out, that's about the variability you see in current polls. Thus, the various polls don't disagree with each other, and the polls are not all over the place. Instead, they exhibit the normal variability you'd expect to see if Obama's actual lead were about 7%. It does not seem likely to me that McCain can overcome a lead that big in a mere two weeks, but we'll see. The fact that he is likely to lose is somewhat surprising when you consider that the same AP poll that shows a close race also inquired into this matter:

In your opinion, please tell me whether you think each of the following candidates does or does not have the right type of experience to successfully serve as President of the United States.

The results? Two of the 4 people on the national ticket are judged by less than 50% of respondents to have had the right type of experience. One is Sarah Palin (only 30% think that she has had the right kind of experience), and the other is Barack Obama (only 46% think that he has had the right kind of experience). But Sarah Palin is at the bottom of her ticket (and therefore has time to gain experience); Barack Obama is at the top of his (and will therefore get his training on the job). He hasn't had the right kind of experience, but Americans don't care. They are apparently going to put him in the White House, and then they are going to hope. Me too. That is, I hope he knows what he is doing even though I don't have strong reasons to believe that he does based on his past performance. Incidentally, more than 60% of Americans believe that John McCain (65%) and Joe Biden (62%) have had the right kind of experience.

In any case, back to the Fox News poll. That poll shows a lead for Obama that is pretty close to what appears to be the true value. But a more interesting result from the poll was this:


Incredibly, by nearly 8 to 1, people believe that members of the media want Barack Obama to win. A mere 5% of respondents think that the media is neutral. In a better world, that number would be much, much higher. Even Democrats (by an incredible 69% to 12%) appreciate the obvious fact that the media prefers Obama. Democrats are the ones who, for years, have been arguing that the media is unbiased. They don't think so any more, and this just reinforces my view that the news is now an adversarial enterprise. When you encounter a story about a Republican at ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, MSNBC, CNN, the Washington Post or the New York Times, you can't regard that story as "news." Instead, you should think of it as the case for the prosecution. Then, before making a judgment about the story's validity, you have to go to Fox News, the Washington Times, conservative blogs, or talk radio to get the defense. Then make up your mind. When the "news" story involves a Democrat, these roles are reversed. Most people don't think this way. Even though they are increasingly aware of the media's bias, they still paradoxically think they are listening to the news when they read a story about a Republican on CNN and then see that story elaborated on the Daily Show or Saturday Night Live. But, in a court of law, you'd never listen to the prosecution's case and then make a decision about a defendant's innocence or guilt. Instead, you'd listen to the defense and then make that decision. Nowadays, it's the same way with the news.

In light of the media's glaring obvious preference for one candidate, this should not really come as any surprise:

NEW YORK - John McCain may long for the days when Barack Obama got the lion's share of the media attention: Coverage of the Republican candidate has been overwhelmingly negative since the conventions ended, a study released Wednesday found.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism's report illustrates how the media echo chamber can send things spiraling out of control for a candidate. It's likely to give ammunition to people who say the press has been biased against McCain, but the organization said its findings on this were inconclusive.

"It's quite possible for there to be elements of enthusiasm for one candidate or another," said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Washington-based think tank. "That's a failure of professionalism if it's there. But this report can't suss it out."

Inconclusive? Well, it's true that no one finding, all by itself, can conclusively establish a bias on the part of the media that now is so extreme that it escapes the attention of almost no one. That's why I periodically point out that EVERY SHRED of evidence points in the same direction. Although no one piece of evidence, considered on its own, conclusively establishes the media bias, all of the evidence put together establishes the existence of that bias beyond a shadow of a doubt. As such, if you doubt the existence of that bias, it says much more about you than about the state of the media. Here again, I summarize all of the evidence that I am aware of (with the latest findings reported by Pew that I discussed above adding to my ever growing collection of relevant evidence). The thing to note is that, no matter how you slice it, the evidence points in the same direction: the MSM leans left, and that affects how the news is covered. If you disagree, please cite all of the evidence that suggests otherwise. As hard as you try, you'll find that there is no such evidence.

For starters, if you just take a poll ask people if news coverage is too liberal, too conservative or just about right, you results like these:


As you can see, if you are a Democrat, news coverage feels just about right. To everyone else, it seems to lean left (which is precisely why it feels right to Democrats).

The Pew Research Center conducted another poll that asked reporters to just say whether they are liberal, moderate or conservative. Here are the results:


Reporters mostly call themselves "moderate," but many more reporters admit to being liberal than conservative (by a ratio of almost 5 to 1).

MSNBC identified 144 journalists who made political contributions between 2004 and 2007 according to public records of the Federal Election Commission. The question of interest was this: Which party received the most donations from these journalists? The results are shown in this chart:


In summary, consumers of the news think that news coverage leans pretty far to the left, the reporters themselves acknowledge that they lean left, and reporters donate to Democratic candidates far more than they donate to Republican candidates.

As you might expect, reporters who lean left report news that is biased in the leftward direction. A careful analysis of the news conducted by political scientists at UCLA shows that this is, indeed, the case. Their report, called "A Measure of Media Bias," is available here. They started with the observation that U.S. senators have been ranked on a scale of 0 to 100 according to how conservative or liberal they are (with 50 being about the midpoint). Very liberal senators with a score close to 100 might cite liberal think tanks 10 times as often as conservative think tanks. If a news outlet like the New York Times did the same thing, it would get a score close to 100. Very conservative senators with a score close to 0 might cite conservative think tanks 10 times as often as liberal think tanks. If a news outlet like Fox News did the same thing, it would get a score close to 0. Here are their results for different news outlets (with scores greater than 50 showing a liberal slant and less than 50 showing a conservative slant):


As you can see, only Fox News and the Washington Times are more conservative than the average American. All other news outlets tilt in the liberal direction to varying degrees. The Wall Street Journal is the most liberal news outlet, which is surprising because everyone knows that it is a conservative newspaper. Actually, though, it is the journal's editorial pages that are very conservative (and that's why you think of it as a conservative publication). Its newsroom is left wing, even more so than the New York Times (and that's saying something).

Another study from Harvard University examined how the media covered the various presidential campaigns during the primary season. The results are about what you'd expect (unless, that is, you deny that the media leans left). For example, who gets more coverage, Democratic candidates or Republican candidates? Need I even ask?


Who gets more positive coverage, the top Democratic candidates or the top Republican candidates? Need I even ask?


Let's look at the network evening news in particular:


In the positive category, it is 2-to-1 in favor of the Democrats. In the negative category, well, it's obvious.

The report describing these new findings goes out of its way to explain how these results might not reflect a liberal bias (e.g., Barack Obama is a new face, Hillary Clinton started to campaign earlier than the others, etc.). New reports always do that even though they also always reveal the bias. You can, if you work hard enough, explain away any one piece of evidence concerning the political inclinations of the mainstream media. But my point is this: when every single way of addressing this issue leads to the same conclusion -- namely, that a left wing media reports the news from a left wing point of view -- then that conclusion becomes inescapable. I know this isn't even a debatable issue any more, but I still think it is valuable to review the evidence every once in a while. Collecting the evidence as I do does not make me a conservative. Whether you are liberal or conservative, you can't really dispute the fact that the evidence consistently points to a liberal bias on the part of the mainstream media. It is the evidence that makes that case, not me. If you know of evidence that points in the other direction, do tell.

McCain vs. Obama on Free Trade

It seems generally agreed that as our economic situation worsens, the benefit goers to Barack Obama. This is a great mystery to me.

Don't get me wrong. I understand the skin-deep, superficial reflex that goes something like this:

"Bush, a Republican, has been president for 8 years. The economy is tanking, jobs are being lost, and retirement accounts are disappearing. McCain seems a lot like Bush, so it's time to give the Democrats a try. We need a change."

Although I understand that reflex, it does not make any actual sense. First, the idea that Bush is somehow responsible for the subprime mortgage crisis, whereas Obama has long showed good judgment about giving loans to those who can't afford them, is simply not credible. Second, moving up the line a bit, the idea that Bush was a big proponent of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whereas Barack Obama has long understood and warned about the dangers of those government-sponsored organizations, is also not remotely credible. Moving up the line still further, the idea that either Bush or Obama had any real clue about the various investment irregularities that are contributing to the current crisis (or that either one of them would have known what to do about it in advance) cannot be seriously entertained. Although a few people saw this credit crisis coming (just as some saw the dot-com crash coming), the truth is that this was probably going to happen no matter what anyone did.

But let's forget all that and just pretend that this crisis is all Bush's fault and is the inevitable consequence of Republican economic policies. If so, does it then make sense to turn more and more to Obama as the economy gets worse and worse? To answer that question, you have to consider what he plans to do about it. Here is some of his plan to confront what may be the worst recession we've faced since the Jimmy Carter years:

1. Increase taxes on those who earn more than $250,000
2. Increase capital gains taxes
3. Increase taxes on corporations
4. Erect trade barriers

Is there a credible economist anywhere in the world who believes that the best way to jump-start a failing economy is to increase taxes on the rich and on corporations? If you know of one, could you please point me to the analysis that defends that claim? I just don't understand the argument. To me, Obama's plan seems unintentionally designed to greatly worsen the coming recession (all in the name of "fairness"). When the day comes that you lose your job or you start having to lay off employees, perhaps you'll feel good about the fact that everyone is suffering (so it's much more fair now), but I won't.

Well, what about that last idea (erecting trade barriers)? Is that a pro-growth strategy that makes sense in a time of economic crisis? To answer that question, I looked at a survey of the membership of the American Economic Association. The results were published in the Journal of Economic Education in 2003 (the article can be found here), and I grabbed a snapshot of the key result:


That is, on the assertion "Tariffs and import quotas usually reduce the general welfare of society" (italics added), 72.5% of Ph.D. economists agreed, 20.1% agreed with provisos, and only 6% disagreed. Obama's plan, more so than McCain's, moves in the direction of tariffs and import quotas. Thus, far from being a time-tested and theoretically sound intervention to rescue a failing economy, this is another aspect of Obama's plan that will, if anything, accelerate the plunge.

Polls show that people trust Obama on the economy more than the trust McCain (who wants to cut taxes, cut spending, and increase free trade). What the heck are people thinking? I'd like to know. Perhaps they are thinking that Obama is the guy who will finally cut wasteful government spending. Is that it? If so, what on earth makes them think like that? In the debates, John McCain kept pointing out that Obama introduced nearly a billion dollars in pork barrel spending in his first 3 years in the senate. Obama's politically effective but intellectually vacuous response was that a billion dollars is a drop in the bucket compared to the out-of-control spending we must confront. While that's true, the point is that Obama's approach to reckless spending in this particular domain (i.e., pork barrel spending) is indicative of mind set with regard to government spending in general. The same is true of John McCain, who did not propose any significant pork barrel throughout his long senate career. So, on top of everything else, it is far more likely that McCain will cut wasteful government spending than Obama. Yet people trust Obama, perhaps because, when he speaks, he seems calm and intelligent.

Finally, I must say that the probable election of Barack Obama has a bit of a silver lining for me (even though the rationale for voting for him escapes me). I have job security, I have a pretty secure retirement even if the economy goes south, and I depend on government spending for a good deal of the money I make. McCain scares me because I think he really will hold the line on spending (as the next president should). That will be detrimental to my personal financial situation. As such, although I disagree with Obama on matters of national security (very strongly) and the economy (strongly, but somewhat less so), I am not lying awake at night worrying about what he will do to my finances. It's everyone else I worry about.

UPDATE: Obama strikes back against McCain's complaints about those proposed tax hikes. But does he explain how the tax hikes will affect economic growth as well fall into a recession? Let's see:

RICHMOND, Va. – Democrat Barack Obama on Wednesday brushed aside Republican charges that his tax plan amounts to socialism, but he acknowledged it involves "spreading around opportunity" so that wealthier Americans — like himself — pay a little more to help lower-rung workers.
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On taxes, McCain launched a new attack over the weekend, saying Obama's plan to provide a $500 tax credit would include even those who pay no taxes and "convert the IRS into a giant welfare agency, redistributing massive amounts of wealth at the direction of politicians in Washington." McCain has accused Obama of favoring socialistic tax redistribution policies.

Obama's response at the news conference did not address the $500 tax break. Instead, he said that overall, he wants to reverse the cuts that went to the wealthiest Americans when Bush's plan was enacted in 2001 and use the revenue to give tax cuts to workers who make less than $250,000 a year.

"That does involve us spreading around opportunity and it means that for people like myself, making a lot more than $250,000 a year, paying a little bit more so that the waitress who is surviving on minimum wage can put a roof over her head," Obama said.

OK, got it. Money from the more well off can be used to put a roof over the head of the less well off. That makes perfect sense to me. What will the effect of the tax increase be on economic growth as we spiral down into a recession? Doesn't that seem like a fair question?

What's So Awful About "Spreading the Wealth"?

At the New Republic, Jonathan Cohn asks this question: "What's So Awful About "Spreading the Wealth"?

Charging everybody the same tax rate might sound simple. But it would actually impose a much harsher burden on the poor, since they end up spending much--if not all--of their incomes on the basic necessities of life, such as food, clothing, and shelter. As one famous 18th century philosopher argued,

“It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expen[s]e, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”

That famous philosopher is Adam Smith. If Adam Smith likes the idea of spreading the wealth around, does that make him a socialist, too? That's what Cohn is asking.

Having a progressive tax code, which is what Adam Smith was talking about, and having an economic mind set that is largely centered on the notion of "spreading the wealth around" are not the same. Charging the rich a higher tax rate to pay for, say, the nation's highways probably seems reasonable to most Americans. We all make a contribution and we all share the benefit. Under those circumstances, the fact that the rich pay a higher percentage of their incomes in taxes does not seem particularly objectionable. By contrast, as Obama sees it, the idea of "spreading the wealth around" is not merely about asking the rich to cover more of the highway budget so the poor can keep more of their wage earnings. Instead, the Obama tax plan spreads the wealth around by taking money from the rich and directly transferring it to able-bodied individuals who pay no federal taxes at all. At least that's the claim made in this analysis, which sounds credible to me:

Obama's Tax Plan Is Really a Welfare Plan

Barack Obama's tax plan is the opposite of supply-side economics. He proposes to raise marginal rates for just about every federal tax. He also proposes a raft of tax credits that taxpayers can receive if they engage in various government-specified activities.

Moreover, the tax credits would mostly go to those who pay little or nothing in federal income taxes. His trick is to make the tax credits "refundable." Thus, if the tax credit is for $1,000, but the taxpayer would otherwise only pay $200 in taxes, the government would write a check to the taxpayer for $800. If the taxpayer pays nothing in federal income taxes, the government would pay him the whole $1,000.

Such credits are not tax cuts. Indeed, they should be called The New Tax Welfare. In effect, Mr. Obama is proposing to create or expand a slew of government spending programs that are disguised as tax credits. The spending on these programs is then subtracted from the total tax burden, in order to make the claim that his tax plan is a net tax cut overall.
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The latest Congressional Budget Office data shows the bottom 40% of income earners already pays no income taxes. Indeed, they receive a net payment from the federal income tax system -- meaning from the taxpayers -- equal to 3.8% of all federal income taxes, because of the refundable tax credits under current law.

If this is right, then I don't think that what Obama proposes is what Adam Smith had in mind. The direct transfer of wealth to the able-bodied non-tax-paying poor might be the hint of socialism in Obama's plan that some detect. And a point that many seem to have forgotten about is that Obama wants to spread the wealth around the entire globe, not just to the able-bodied non-tax-paying poor in America. A bill he introduced in the Senate was called the Global Poverty Act of 2007:

S. 2433: Global Poverty Act of 2007

A bill to require the President to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to further the United States foreign policy objective of promoting the reduction of global poverty, the elimination of extreme global poverty, and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people worldwide, between 1990 and 2015, who live on less than $1 per day.

As I discussed yesterday, if we actually pursued this strategy in the manner envisioned by the UN's Millennium Development Goal, it would amount to a massive increase in inter-government welfare. In other words, under Obama's overall plan of attack, we'd be making a direct transfer of wealth not just to the poor in America but also to the poor around the world.

Although Obama clearly resonates to the idea of spreading the wealth on a grand scale, he seems to have no equivalent concern about the creation of wealth (in stark contrast to Adam Smith). Adam Smith was not fundamentally centered on the idea of taking from the rich to give to the poor. Instead, he was fundamentally concerned about the creation of wealth, but he also acknowledged that a progressive tax code makes sense as well. Obama seems to have the very opposite mind set. That is, to Obama, spreading the wealth is the primary consideration, whereas generating wealth appears to be of secondary importance.

Finally, Obama wants to spread the wealth by increasing taxes on the rich (and on corporations) at a time when the nation may be plunging headlong into a deep recession even though the proposed tax increases will, if anything, accelerate the plunge.

Now what was that question again?

Obama Wants to "Spread the Wealth" Around the Globe

It seems fair to characterize conservatives as being largely concerned with the creation of wealth and liberals as being largely concerned with the fair distribution of any wealth that happens to be created. As America falls into what may turn out to be a steep recession, it seems reasonable to ask whether now is the time to focus on policies that create wealth or on policies that spread the wealth around. Policies that create wealth tend to make everyone better off (except, perhaps, those at the lowest end of the economic totem pole, who are nether better off nor worse off), but they also tend to cause greater income inequality. Policies that emphasize the redistribution of wealth have the opposite effect (i.e., everyone is worse off, except for those at the bottom, but income is distributed more fairly). At least that's what I have concluded from my past analyses comparing the U.S. economy (where income inequality has been growing for years) to European economies (where incomes are more equal).

Barack Obama seems largely focused on spreading the wealth for purposes of fairness, not to stimulate economic growth. On his website, for example, he says "Obama will ask the wealthiest 2% of families to give back a portion of the tax cuts they have received over the past eight years to ensure we are restoring fairness and returning to fiscal responsibility." No less an authority than Larry Summers seems to agree that the motivation underlying Obama's tax plan is the issue of fairness:

At a conference at Harvard Business School last week, Summers defended Obama’s plans to tax the wealthy by pointing to the huge rise in inequality over the past 30 years between the earnings of the top 1% and bottom 80% of the country. “It is immense compared to any discussion of changing the tax system here or there,” he said.

He's not saying that this aspect of Obama's tax policy stimulates growth. Instead, he's saying that it levels the playing field (i.e., it increases fairness). The fairness argument also seems to underlie Obama's now famous response to Joe the plumber:

"I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they've got a chance at success, too. I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."

Spreading the wealth around is good for everybody? Good in what way, exactly? In the sense that it stimulates the economy, creates jobs and enhances worker productivity? I don't think so, and neither does he (or so I assume). If your job or your retirement income depends on a growing economy, you might want to think about that before voting for Barack Obama. At a minimum, you should look for his detailed explanation about how taxing the rich and taxing capital gains and taxing corporations will accelerate economic growth instead of accelerating the nation's plunge into recession. I don't believe that he has made that case, and that's because his proposal to "spread the wealth around" is more about fairness than it is about stimulating the economy.

Speaking of spreading the wealth around, Obama's recent comments reminded me of another plan to do just that, except that in this case the plan was to spread your wealth around the globe, not just to the less-well-off in America. To do that, Obama introduced a bill called the Global Poverty Act of 2007:

S. 2433: Global Poverty Act of 2007

A bill to require the President to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to further the United States foreign policy objective of promoting the reduction of global poverty, the elimination of extreme global poverty, and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people worldwide, between 1990 and 2015, who live on less than $1 per day.

The Millennium Development Goal, which Obama's bill embraces, is a UN initiative described here. This resolution (adopted by the General Assembly in 2000) proposes to do many things, including:

• To halve, by the year 2015, the proportion of the world’s people whose income is less than one dollar a day and the proportion of people who suffer from hunger and, by the same date, to halve the proportion of people who are unable to reach or to afford safe drinking water.

• To ensure that, by the same date, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling and that girls and boys will have equal access to all levels of education.

• By the same date, to have reduced maternal mortality by three quarters, and under-five child mortality by two thirds, of their current rates.

• To have, by then, halted, and begun to reverse, the spread of HIV/AIDS, the scourge of malaria and other major diseases that afflict humanity.

• To provide special assistance to children orphaned by HIV/AIDS.

• By 2020, to have achieved a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers as proposed in the "Cities Without Slums" initiative.

Noble goals, all. But how much would the initiative cost and how effective would it be? John McCain keeps referring to more than $800 billion in new spending being proposed by Obama, and I think he might be referring to Obama's Global Poverty Act of 2007. Here, one has to be careful. True, it is a proposal to spread US wealth around the world, but it does not mandate any actual spending. Instead, it is one of those irrelevant "goal-setting" bills that mandates that somebody report back to Congress every once in a while on any progress that is being made towards achieving the stated goals. The Congressional Budget Office offered this cost estimate:

Based on information from the State Department, CBO estimates that implementing S. 2433 would cost less than $1 million per year, assuming the availability of appropriated funds. Enacting the bill would not affect direct spending or receipts.

S. 2433 contains no intergovernmental or private-sector mandates as defined in the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act and would not affect the budgets of state, local, or tribal governments.

Thus, the bill itself will not cost much at all. On the other hand, it does seem fair to ask how much it would cost to achieve the goals that Obama believes that the United States should commit itself to achieving. This information can be found at the Millennium Project:

The Millennium Project was commissioned by the United Nations Secretary-General in 2002 to develop a concrete action plan for the world to achieve the Millennium Development Goals and to reverse the grinding poverty, hunger and disease affecting billions of people. In 2005, the independent advisory body headed by Professor Jeffrey Sachs, presented its final recommendations to the Secretary-General in a synthesis volume Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

A pdf report on the costs of achieving the Millenium goals (found here): says:

These ODA [Official Development Assistance] estimates suggest that donors should prepare to double their ODA-to-GNP ratios during 2006­15 compared with today. That is, the ratio of ODA to donor GNP should be 0.5 percent of GNP or above, approximately twice the current level. Since our calculations leave out certain major categories of aid that are likely required in the future—major infrastructure projects, increased spending on adjustments to climate change, postconflict reconstruction, and other high-profile geopolitical priorities—we believe that donors should commit to reaching the long-standing target of 0.7 percent of GNP by 2015. Roughly three-quarters of that will be directed to the Goals, and the rest to other ODA needs.

While clearly not sufficient in themselves, substantial increases in aid are necessary for countries to achieve the Goals. Just as developing countries need to honor their commitments in terms of improved governance, rich countries must meet the commitment made in Monterrey by making “concrete efforts towards the target of 0.7 percent of gross national product as ODA to developing countries.” ... The UN Millennium Project urges all developed countries to follow through on the Monterrey commitment “to make concrete efforts towards the target of 0.7.” We urge that “concrete efforts” require a specific timetable for reaching 0.7, and specifically a timetable before 2015, the target date for the Goals.

That figure of .7% of GDP, when you do the calculations, comes to an extra $845 billion in spending for the U.S.:

Jeffrey Sachs, who runs the U.N.'s "Millennium Project," says that the U.N. plan to force the U.S. to pay 0.7 percent of GNP in increased foreign aid spending would add $65 billion a year to what the U.S. already spends. Over a 13-year period, from 2002, when the U.N.'s Financing for Development conference was held, to the target year of 2015, when the U.S. is expected to meet the "Millennium Development Goals," this amounts to $845 billion. And the only way to raise that kind of money, Sachs has written, is through a global tax, preferably on carbon-emitting fossil fuels.

I wonder if right now is the best time to be talking about taxing carbon-emitting fossil fuels in addition to taxing the rich? Maybe Obama has another plan to fund this initiative. He must have some plan because he does not appear to be kidding when he says that we really should meet the Millennium Development Goal, as he made clear when proposing his bill:

“Eliminating global poverty remains one of the greatest challenges we face, with billions of people around the world forced to live on just dollars a day,” said Senator Obama. “We can ­ and must ­ make it a priority of our foreign policy to commit to eliminating extreme poverty and ensuring every child has food, shelter, and clean drinking water. As we strive to rebuild America’s standing in the world, this legislation will not only commit to reducing global poverty, but will also demonstrate our promise and support to those in the developing world. Our commitment to the global economy has to extend beyond trade agreements that are more about increasing corporate profits than about helping workers and small farmers everywhere.”
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For years, America has committed to improving the lives of the world’s poorest people. In 2000, the U.S. joined more than 180 countries at the United Nations Millennium Summit and vowed to reduce global poverty by 2015. We are halfway towards this deadline, and it is time the United States makes it a priority of our foreign policy to meet this goal and help those who are struggling day to day.

Conservatives tend to think that enhancing free trade is the way to lift the world's poor out of poverty, whereas liberals tend to think that making inter-government welfare payments is the better way to go (as I discussed in some detail here). Obama is clearly a liberal in this regard (no surprise there), and the point is that he wants to spread the wealth on a much broader scale than he suggested when chatting with Joe the non-plumber.

Obama wants to put up barriers to free trade and to instead spread your wealth around the globe in a well-meaning but possibly misguided effort to help the poor and to raise our standing in the wrold. You might think that increasing aid to poor nations is all part of an "evolving standard of decency," but that might not be the case:

Economists see aid to poor nations as ineffective

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Aid to poor countries has little effect on economic growth, and policies that rely on such claims should be reexamined, two former International Monetary Fund economists wrote in a paper released this month.

"We find little evidence of a robust positive correlation between aid and growth," wrote Raghuram Rajan, who stepped down as IMF chief economist at the end of 2006, and Arvind Subramanian, who left the IMF this year, said.
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"One of the most enduring and important questions in economics is whether foreign aid helps countries grow," they wrote.

"There is a moral imperative to this question: it is a travesty for so many countries to remain poor if a relatively small transfer of resources from rich countries could set them on the path to growth."

But if there is no clear evidence that aid boosts growth, then handing out more money makes little sense, they said.

In other words, welfare to poor nations is a lot like welfare to poor people. Obama clearly has his heart in the right place. It's where his head is that worries me.

Palin on Obama's Tax Plan

I think I agree with Palin here:

Palin was also asked if she and McCain believe that Barack Obama’s tax plan, which would raise taxes on Americans making over $250,000 and provide tax credits to middle and lower-income workers, is socialist. At a campaign rally in New Mexico earlier Sunday, Palin said Obama wants to "experiment with socialism."

"There are socialist principles to that, yes," Palin said of Obama's plan. "Taking more from a small business or small business owners or from a hard working family and then redistributing that money according to a politician’s priorities. There are hints of socialism in there."

Asked if think the government’s plan to inject billions of taxpayer dollars directly into troubled banks amounts to socialism — a belief held by many conservative legislators, talk radio hosts and bloggers — Palin said, "No, I do not."

"I believe that there are those measures that had to be taken by congress to shore up not only the housing market but the credit markets also, to make sure that that’s not frozen, so that our small businesses have opportunities to borrow, and that was the purpose, of course, and that part of the bailout and the shoring of the banks," she said.

Obama's tax-the-rich plan is all about "fairness," not about preventing the economy from falling into a recession. In that sense, there is a hint of socialism in the plan (but just a hint). Infusing money into the banking system, by contrast, has nothing at all to do with fairness and everything to do with preventing a general economic collapse. In my view, that makes it a rather different kind of government intervention. It's an emergency response to an unexpected financial crisis, not a deliberate plan to "spread the wealth" in order to make things fairer for the have-nots.

Obama's Judgment and Powell's Endorsement

Many believe that Obama is intelligent and that, therefore, he will show good judgment as president. My own feeling is that, although he is intelligent, his one big test of judgment was a colossal miscalculation, one that shows that he is more of a liberal reflex machine than a man whose intellect translates into sound judgment. The main test of Obama's judgment came when we faced a choice point in Iraq back in the fall of 2006. Al Qaeda's foreign leadership in Iraq was directing its steady stream of foreign suicide bombers to slaughter innocent Shiites, and the Shiite militias were responding in the way that al Qaeda intended by executing Sunni males in Baghdad by the thousands every month. What to do? That was the question, and the answer reflects on the judgment of our political leaders.

Obama's idea was to withdraw our forces as quickly as possible, and he introduced a bill in January of 2007 to do just that. Bush's idea was to order a troop surge, in part to capitalize on the fact that the Sunnis were showing signs of turning against al Qaeda in Iraq. The results are evident in civilian casualties figures:


What you see in this chart is the result of Bush's judgment about what to do when violence was spiraling out of control in Iraq. Imagine that Obama's judgment had prevailed instead. And when you exercise your imagination in that regard, don't be ridiculous. To be ridiculous, just pretend -- merely because the thought crosses your mind -- that peace would have broken out in Iraq when our troops were withdrawn. The liberal editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post have both endorsed Obama (well, the New York Times may not have done so yet, but they will). And, in the past, they have both addressed the question of what would have happened had our troops been withdrawn at the height of sectarian violence in Iraq, as Obama seriously proposed to do. Here are the editors of the ultra-left New York Times (putting the best possible spin on Obama's judgment back in the summer of 2007):

It is possible, we suppose, that announcing a firm withdrawal date might finally focus Iraq’s political leaders and neighboring governments on reality. Ideally, it could spur Iraqi politicians to take the steps toward national reconciliation that they have endlessly discussed but refused to act on.

But it is foolish to count on that, as some Democratic proponents of withdrawal have done.
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Americans must be clear that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave. There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide. Potentially destabilizing refugee flows could hit Jordan and Syria. Iran and Turkey could be tempted to make power grabs. Perhaps most important, the invasion has created a new stronghold from which terrorist activity could proliferate.

Imagine that. And here are the editors of the Washington Post on the same subject:

BOTH Mr. Obama and Ms. Clinton propose withdrawing U.S. troops at the most rapid pace the Pentagon says is possible -- one brigade a month. In the 16 months or so it would take to remove those forces, they envision the near-miraculous accomplishment of every political goal the Bush administration has aimed at for five years, from the establishment of a stable government to agreement by Iraq's neighbors to support it. They suppose that the knowledge that American forces were leaving would inspire these accords. In fact, it more likely would cause all sides to discount U.S. influence and prepare to violently seize the space left by the departing Americans.

With equal implausibility, the Democratic candidates say they would leave limited U.S. forces behind to prevent al-Qaeda from establishing bases. They assume that an Iraqi government that had just been abandoned by the United States would consent to the continued presence of American forces on its territory. In all, Ms. Clinton and Mr. Obama speak as if they have no understanding of Iraqi leaders, whom they propose to treat as willing puppets.

Now visualize, if you will, the picture painted for us by the New York Times and the Washington Post. Had the scenario they envisioned materialized (as it almost certainly would have), you would have blamed it on Bush. Obama no doubt would have as well. As such, it would not have hurt him politically despite being catastrophic for the people of Iraq. But we now know that it was a test of Obama's judgment, and we further know that the genocidal consequences of his well-meaning plan would have been his fault (had his plan prevailed).

Now that Colin Powell has endorsed Obama, I wondered what he thought about the troop surge and about Obama's troop-surge judgment in light of what we know now. Powell did not support the precipitous withdrawal of U.S. troops over a 16-month window (as Obama did), but he opposed the surge and, like Obama, declared that it would not work:

U.S. forces 'losing' in Iraq, Powell says

By Brian Knowlton
Published: 2006-12-17

WASHINGTON: The former secretary of state Colin Powell said Sunday that badly overstretched U.S. forces in Iraq were losing the war there and that a temporary U.S. troop surge probably would not help.
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Powell was deeply skeptical about increasing troop levels, an idea that appears to be gaining ground as President George W. Bush weighs U.S. strategy options.

"There really are no additional troops" to send, Powell said, adding that he agreed with those who say that the U.S. Army is "about broken."

He said he was unsure that new troops could suppress sectarian violence or secure Baghdad.
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Powell endorsed another study group idea: opening talks with Syria and Iran.
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A troop increase, he said Sunday, "cannot be sustained." The thousands of additional U.S. soldiers sent into Baghdad since the summer had been unable to stabilize the city and more probably could not tip the balance, Powell said.

Having opposed the surge himself, Powell may not hold it against Obama for having done so. What does Powell think of Obama's judgment, anyway, and what does he base it on? He's impressed, and he points to Obama's response to the recent financial crisis:

In regard to the financial crisis, which Powell called the candidates' "final exam," Powell said McCain appeared unsteady in dealing with it, while Obama had excelled in handling the situation.

"Obama displayed a steadiness, an intellectual curiosity, a depth of knowledge," Powell said.

"He has met the standard of being a successful president, being an exceptional president," he said.

But Obama did not do anything in response to the crisis of any significance. Or did I miss something? He didn't cancel his campaign activities and run off to Washington, as McCain did, but the absence of a response is not, in my view, evidence of profound judgment on the part of Obama. Politically, it was the better move during the course of a campaign, but that's all it was. He offered no detailed plan about how to combat the crisis. By contrast, his plan for Iraq in early 2007 was rather specific, and most agree that it would have created a humanitarian disaster and a strategic failure for the United States (not to mention a glorious victory for al Qaeda, which would have been rightly seen as having evicted American forces).

What this demonstrates to me is that Obama's initial opposition to the war in Iraq was not really evidence of good judgment. It was a liberal reflex, one that responded again when push came to shove in the fall of 2006 (and, at that time, the liberal reflex would have led to a disaster, one that would still be unfolding before our horrified eyes today). Thus, unlike Colin Powell, I do not see evidence that Obama's intellect reliably leads to good judgment on his part. In fact, on matters of national security, the evidence suggests just the opposite.

UPDATE: Powell also said this about his endorsement of Obama:

As a key reason, Powell said: "I would have difficulty with two more conservative appointments to the Supreme Court, but that's what we'd be looking at in a McCain administration."

I actually do see this as an argument in favor of voting for Obama. As I noted here, the average age of the 4 most liberal members of the court is 75, whereas the average age of the 4 most conservative members is about 60. Thus, the next president is likely to be replacing liberals, including the most liberal (and oldest) member of the court (Stevens). Although I strongly disagree with quite a few liberal positions these days, when I step back and think about it, I don't really want a Supreme Court that tilts strongly in one direction or the other. If McCain wins and appoints another one or two young conservatives, we'll have a pretty conservative Supreme Court for a long time to come. That isn't necessarily a good thing. Then again, if Obama wins, all three branches of government will be under the control of pretty far left liberals. Even if you are liberal yourself, that should concern you.

Biden vs. Palin on Patriotism

Joe Biden struck back at Sarah Palin on the issue patriotism yesterday:

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Biden Mocks Palin in N.M. Visit, Says Entire Nation Is Patriotic

Alicia A. Caldwell
Associated Press

MESILLA — Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden mocked rival Sarah Palin's comment in North Carolina that she loves visiting "pro-America" parts of the country, arguing that the entire nation is patriotic.
...
"We are one nation, under God, indivisible," Biden shouted to the crowd. "We are all patriotic, we all love this country."

We may all be patriotic but perhaps not equally so. For example, when asked, Democrats question their own patriotism far more than Republicans do. According to a poll that you can find here -- which shows what has become known as "the patriotism gap" -- the two parties clearly differ in the percentage who strongly agree with the statement "I am very patriotic":


How dare Democrats question their own patriotism!

It is surely unfair to question the patriotism of all Democrats, but it seems at least a little fair to question the patriotism of the 50% of Democrats who were either openly cheering for the other side or who were not sure if they wanted America to prevail in Iraq when the troop surge was announced (even if our success would mean a more stable Iraq). Here is a snapshot of the key result:


If hoping for the success of al Qaeda and other insurgents in Iraq is not unpatriotic, what is?

A Nobel Prize Winner's Analysis of the Troop Surge

Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize in economics the other day. I am sure that the fact that he is a reliable anti-Bush fanatic did not hurt his cause, but I am equally sure that he won the award for work that was innovative and extremely influential. I don't doubt that he deserved the award, but I did wonder if his undeniable expertise in economics extended to other domains that he likes to write about, such as the situation in Iraq. For example, did he use his Nobel-Prize-winning intellect to correctly predict that the troop surge would succeed beyond the wildest dreams of most, or did he just mindlessly adopt the standard liberal line ("the troop surge has failed") and then write a defeatist op-ed in the New York Times? Here is some of what he said, back when push came to shove (and MoveOn.org was using the pages of the New York Times to imply that General Petraeus was betraying his country):

A Surge, and Then a Stab

By Paul Krugman
The New York Times

Friday 14 September 2007

To understand what's really happening in Iraq, follow the oil money, which already knows that the surge has failed.
...
Here's how I see it: At this point, Mr. Bush is looking forward to replaying the political aftermath of Vietnam, in which the right wing eventually achieved a rewriting of history that would have made George Orwell proud, convincing millions of Americans that our soldiers had victory in their grasp but were stabbed in the back by the peaceniks back home.

What all this means is that the next president, even as he or she tries to extricate us from Iraq - and prevent the country's breakup from turning into a regional war - will have to deal with constant sniping from the people who lied us into an unnecessary war, then lost the war they started, but will never, ever, take responsibility for their failures.

That is, not only had the troop surge failed in September of 2007 (which is, ironically, the very first month in which its spectacular success first became apparent to the world), but we neocon liars were getting ready to dishonestly blame America's defeat on liberal peaceniks who forced a troop withdrawal just as victory was at hand.

Now that victory in Iraq actually does seem to be at hand, it seems clear that if Paul Krugman and Barack Obama (and the editors of the New York Times) had gotten their way, it really would have been true that "...our soldiers had victory in their grasp but were stabbed in the back by the peaceniks back home." Moreover, Krugman's column was obviously attempt to ensure that blame for the possible breakup of Iraq and subsequent regional war would be blamed on Bush instead of the liberal peaceniks who would been responsible for it. In that sense, he is just like the editors of the New York Times, who foresaw the consequences of a troop withdrawal, but favored it anyway and preemptively blamed Bush for the nightmare that would have transpired:

The Road Home

July 8, 2007

It is frighteningly clear that Mr. Bush’s plan is to stay the course as long as he is president and dump the mess on his successor. Whatever his cause was, it is lost.

The political leaders Washington has backed are incapable of putting national interests ahead of sectarian score settling. The security forces Washington has trained behave more like partisan militias. Additional military forces poured into the Baghdad region have failed to change anything.
...
When Congress returns this week, extricating American troops from the war should be at the top of its agenda.

That conversation must be candid and focused. Americans must be clear that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave. There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide. Potentially destabilizing refugee flows could hit Jordan and Syria. Iran and Turkey could be tempted to make power grabs. Perhaps most important, the invasion has created a new stronghold from which terrorist activity could proliferate.

The administration, the Democratic-controlled Congress, the United Nations and America’s allies must try to mitigate those outcomes — and they may fail. But Americans must be equally honest about the fact that keeping troops in Iraq will only make things worse.
...
President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have used demagoguery and fear to quell Americans’ demands for an end to this war. They say withdrawing will create bloodshed and chaos and encourage terrorists. Actually, all of that has already happened — the result of this unnecessary invasion and the incompetent management of this war.

In other words, the surge has failed, the war is lost, the troops should be withdrawn, genocide will ensue, al Qaeda will have its foothold in Iraq, a regional war may break out, and it's all Bush's fault. That's how it seemed to the editoris of the New York Times. However, in hindsight, things are much clearer now. Had all of that chaos actually happened (i.e., had we allowed genocide to play out by withdrawing our troops), it really would have been the fault of the so-called peaceniks. Fortunately for everyone, the peaceniks did not get their way.

More to the point, failure and genocide in Iraq would have been the fault of Barack Obama had the troop-withdrawal bill he introduced in January of 2007 succeeded. My belief is that not one in 10 Americans understands any of this. To them, Iraq was some kind of hellacious mess for a while, so pulling our troops was not such a crazy idea. Now that things are vastly better in Iraq, the war is not worth thinking about. And that's pretty much the extent of the average analysis. As such, voting for Barack Obama does not seem to most Americans like voting for a man who exhibited colossally impaired judgment on the most important national security issue he faced as a U.S. Senator. Obama is intelligent, but as Dennis Prager often points out, intelligence and judgment are not the same. The Nobel Prize winner's analysis of the troop surge proves that.

UPDATE: Contrary to what I predicted, the Washington Post endorsed Barack Obama for president today. This surprised me given their earlier analysis:

Barely acknowledging the reduction in violence, the Democratic candidates insist that U.S. troops are, as Ms. Clinton put it, "babysitting a civil war." In fact, the surge forestalled an incipient civil war, and U.S. commanders and diplomats in Iraq don't hesitate to say that if American forces withdrew now, sectarian conflict would probably explode in its full fury, causing bloodshed on a far greater scale than ever before and posing grave threats to U.S. security.

BOTH Mr. Obama and Ms. Clinton propose withdrawing U.S. troops at the most rapid pace the Pentagon says is possible -- one brigade a month. In the 16 months or so it would take to remove those forces, they envision the near-miraculous accomplishment of every political goal the Bush administration has aimed at for five years, from the establishment of a stable government to agreement by Iraq's neighbors to support it. They suppose that the knowledge that American forces were leaving would inspire these accords. In fact, it more likely would cause all sides to discount U.S. influence and prepare to violently seize the space left by the departing Americans.

With equal implausibility, the Democratic candidates say they would leave limited U.S. forces behind to prevent al-Qaeda from establishing bases. They assume that an Iraqi government that had just been abandoned by the United States would consent to the continued presence of American forces on its territory. In all, Ms. Clinton and Mr. Obama speak as if they have no understanding of Iraqi leaders, whom they propose to treat as willing puppets.

Today, the editors see this as a minor little miscalculation against the vastly more egregious error committeed by John McCain: he chose Sarah Palin as his running mate. And they express the hope that Obama is simply lying about what he plans to do about Iraq.

Thanks to the surge that Mr. Obama opposed, it may be feasible to withdraw many troops during his first two years in office. But if it isn't -- and U.S. generals have warned that the hard-won gains of the past 18 months could be lost by a precipitous withdrawal -- we can only hope and assume that Mr. Obama would recognize the strategic importance of success in Iraq and adjust his plans.

We also can only hope that the alarming anti-trade rhetoric we have heard from Mr. Obama during the campaign would give way to the understanding of the benefits of trade reflected in his writings.

That is to say, they are endorsing the man who they hope is misleading the nation on the issue of national security in order to get elected. Well, like Obama says, it's all about "hope" and "change." The editors of the Washington Post seem to have caught the "hope" virus.

The U.S.-Iraqi Security Pact vs. Barack Obama

I have been watching with great interest the negotiations between the Americans and the Iraqis regarding the status of U.S. troops after the first of the year. To me, the negotiations seem divorced from the increasingly apparent reality of an Obama administration. Unless Obama is lying about what he plans to do just to get elected (always a possibility), all of this is much ado about nothing:

Iraqi leaders consider troop deal with U.S.

(CNN) -- Iraqi leaders met Tuesday to review a draft of an agreement on the future of U.S. troops in Iraq, a senior adviser to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said.

A senior Bush administration official said the text calls for U.S. troops to leave Iraqi cities, cease street patrols and return to their bases by June, unless Iraqis request their support.

The agreement also calls for U.S. troops to leave Iraq by the end of 2011 unless Iraqis ask the United States to stay, the senior official said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussions.

The key difference between what Obama would do and what a president interested in securing our apparent victory in Iraq would do concerns our response to a deteriorating security situation. In what struck me as an inhumane (not to mention strategically disastrous) plan, Obama proposed to pull our troops from Iraq as quickly as possible even when sectarian violence was spiraling out of control and civilian casualties were approaching 3000 per month. Thus, the idea that, under his administration, U.S. troops would leave "unless Iraqis ask the United States to stay" is preposterous. The Iraqi government wanted us to stay when their country was falling apart and their people were being slaughtered by al Qaeda terrorists and Shiite militias, but Obama basically said "screw you."

Now, Obama is running on a platform that says to the Iraqi government: "good bye, you are on your own come hell or high water, even if it means sacrificing everything our troops died for over the last 5 years." That's Obama's explicit promise to the American (and the Iraqi) people, and that's what makes these negotiations seem so bizarre to me. If Obama wins, these negotiations have to do with the short time period from January 1, 2009 (when the UN mandate expires) and January 20, 2009 (the day Obama takes office). If he is a man of his word, our efforts in Iraq will end on that day and our troops will be confined to their bases (thereby "ending the war") and then pulled out of the country over the next 16 months. Thus, the negotiators should probably include a clause that begins "If Barack Obama wins the election and is telling the truth about what he plans to do, then..."

UPDATE: This is news worth thinking about:

As Iraq cools, rebels go to Afghanistan

KABUL: U.S. military successes in Iraq have prompted growing numbers of well-trained "foreign fighters" to join the insurgency in Afghanistan instead, the Afghan defense minister said Tuesday.

The minister, General Abdul Rahim Wardak, said that the increased flow of insurgents from outside Afghanistan had contributed to the rising intensity of the fighting here this year, which he described as the "worst" since the U.S.-led offensive toppled the Taliban government in 2001.
...
U.S. commanders have said that most of the foreign fighters operating in Afghanistan are Pakistanis, Arabs, or people from Muslim countries and communities in Central Asia and the Caucasus, including Chechnya. They note that some Islamic militant Web sites have been encouraging fighters to go to Afghanistan rather than Iraq, where insurgent operations have been sharply reduced in the last 18 months.

That is, Islamic insurgents have been defeated in their attempts to evict American forces from Iraq, so they are regrouping to fight against our efforts in Afghanistan instead. Barack Obama nevertheless insists that Iraq never was the central front in the war on terror, and that is just downright scary. He seems not to know that Osama bin Laden "took his eye off the ball" and sent foreign jihadists to Iraq after the U.S. invaded. He seems not to know that those jihadists have been all but defeated there, while tarnishing their reputation throughout the Muslim world (i.e., they were defeated militarily and they have suffered a huge propaganda defeat as well). The man who might be president instead believes that Afghanistan remained the central front in the war on terror all along and that Iraq was a "distraction." And an adoring mainstream media, instead of calling him on this glaringly obvious problem in his attempt to think through this issue, lovingly allows him to pontificate unchallenged. How did it ever come to be this way?

UPDATE II: Al Qaeda has not completely given up in Iraq, which explains why coalition forces were able to carry out this "distraction" in the war on terror:

U.S. Says Al Qaeda in Iraq's Second in Command Killed

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

The U.S. military says the No. 2 leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq has been killed by Coalition forces during an Oct. 5 operation in the northern city of Mosul.

The military has positively identified the insurgent leader as a Moroccan known as Abu Qaswarah or Abu Sara.

Wednesday's statement says he became the senior Al Qaeda in Iraq emir of northern Iraq in June 2007 and had ties to senior Al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

A foreign jihadist in Iraq with ties to al Qaeda's global leadership? Impossible. By the way, those al Qaeda leaders are thought to be in Pakistan, not Afghanistan.

More on Obama and ACORN

I've been following Obama's less-than-completely-truthful attempts to dissociate himself from ACORN on his "fight the smears" web page (here and here). The changing story on the web site suggested to me that his association was real and that he was trying to mislead the public about that by claiming not to have "worked for" ACORN (as if the issue were solely about whether or not he was a paid employee of that organization).

Today, Jake Tapper of ABC News catches Obama in the act:

Being Squirrelly About ACORN

October 13, 2008 2:15 PM

As reports pile up of voter registration fraud connected to ACORN -- the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now, a group that advocates for low-income voters – the campaign of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., has sought to downplay his past ties with the group.

But in their efforts to do, Obama campaign officials found themselves forced last week to correct an erroneous assertion made on the campaign’s “Fight the Smears” webpage that “Barack was never an ACORN trainer and never worked for ACORN in any other capacity.”

That wasn’t true.

In fact, ACORN spokesman Lewis Goldberg told the New York Times that Obama conducted two unpaid leadership training sessions for ACORN’s Chicago affiliate in the late 1990s.

The “Fight the Smears” website now asserts, "Fact: ACORN never hired Obama as a trainer, organizer, or any type of employee.”

Key word: hired.

Goldberg told the Times that Obama’s work for ACORN was unpaid.

You can see the old version HERE and the new version HERE.

Tapper covers a lot more detail that is worth checking out as well. I'm guessing that only Tapper will care. To get the mainstream media excited and outraged, McCain would have to be the one pulling a stunt like this.

UPDATE: Obama claries his relationship with ACORN:

"first of all, my relationship to ACORN is pretty straightforward. It's probably 13 years ago when I was still practicing law, I represented ACORN and my partner in that representation was the US Justice Department in having Illinois implement what was called the 'Motor Voter' law, to make sure that people could go to DMV’s and drivers’ license facilities to get registered.. It wasn’t being implemented. That was my relationship and is my relationship to ACORN.

"There is an ACORN organization in Chicago," Obama continued. "They have been active. As an elected official, I've had interactions with them. But they are not advising our campaign.

I read this as an outright denial that he ever trained ACORN activists to shame banks into making home loans to high-risk, low-income minorities. If all he did was to defend ACORN as a practicing attorney, that's really not so bad.

Since it looks like Obama is going to win, I just hope that (a) he never did embrace ACORN's radical ideology (which is hard to believe given his 20-year association with Reverend Wright and the education reform efforts he led with Bill Ayes) or (b) he has divorced himself from his prior radical views and has actually become the more moderate and thoughtful person that he presents himself as being (now that he is running for president).

Obama will meet with Iran without Precondition, but Iran won't Meet with Obama without Precondition

Barack Obama said that he'd meet with the rogue leaders of the world, including the leaders of Iran, without preconditions. In his debate with McCain, he obscured the issue, and the media let him get away with it. He obscured the issue by saying that he never claimed that he would not "prepare" for such meetings by first arranging for lower level meetings, as if the charge was that he'd meet "without preparation" instead of "without precondition."

A "fact check" at CNN had this to say:

Fact Check: Would Obama meet 'unconditionally' with Iran?
...
A questioner asked in a July 23, 2007, Democratic debate if the candidates would be "willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?"

"I would," Obama said. "And the reason is this, that the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them — which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration — is ridiculous."
...
The Obama-Biden Web site calls for "tough, direct presidential diplomacy with Iran without preconditions."
...
Obama said in a New York Times interview published on May 29 that he opposed preconditions on talks, such as the "Bush administration policy of making high-level meetings contingent upon Iran's agreement to suspend its uranium enrichment program."

Obviously, the charge that Obama would meet with rogue leaders without precondition is true. To escape from the political consequences of that naive stance, Obama objects to the word "unconditional:"

But Obama draws distinction between unconditional meetings and no preconditions for talks.

The article said Obama isn't for "automatic discussions at the presidential level" and that he "would order lower-level preparatory talks to determine Iran's motives before agreeing to higher-level meetings."

Obama said on July 23 in Israel that he would be willing to meet with any leader if he thought it would promote the national security interests of the United States, but he said there is a difference between "meeting without preconditions and meeting without preparations."

Obama apparently draws a distinction between "unconditional" and "no preconditions," but last I checked, "unconditional" means "Without conditions or limitations." The difference between "Without conditions or limitations" and "no preconditions" escapes me, but I guess it's clear enough to the mainstream media and to those who support Obama's approach to foreign policy. Also, Obama states that there is a difference between "meeting without preconditions and meeting without preparations," but that is about as relevant as suggesting that there is a difference between "meeting without preconditions and meeting without having eaten breakfast." Yes, there is a difference between "meeting without preconditions" and several billion other things I could mention, but that does not change the fact that Obama's avowed policy is to meet with rogue leaders of the world without precondition. You know that it's true that he would do this because he doesn't deny it. Instead, he obscures it by bringing up irrelevant points (which is what he did in his debate with McCain as well).

So what's the problem with holding talks with Iraq without precondition? Won't that help to restore our "standing in the world," which is one of Obama's goals? The problem is that Iran will set preconditions for such talks. And, unfortunately, Obama seems all too eager to comply with one of their demands:

Iran's Vice President Sets Two Preconditions for Talks with US

TEHRAN (FNA)- Vice President for Media Affairs Mehdi Kalhor said on Saturday that Iran has set two preconditions for holding talks with the United States of America.

In an exclusive interview with the Islamic Republic News Agency, he said as long as U.S. forces have not left the Middle East region and continues its support for the Zionist regime, talks between Iran and U.S. is off the agenda.

It is the Americans who are in dire need of reestablishing ties with Iran, he underlined.

Iran is not obliged to reestablish ties with the U.S., he said.

"If they take our advice, grounds for such talks would be well prepared," he said.

It is stupidity to hold talks without any change in U.S. attitude, he underlined.

This is not a new stance, but no one in the mainstream media seems to appreciate that fact (which is why they don't ask Obama about this little problem with his approach). Here, for example, is a story from late 2006 that illustrates the problem:

Iran sets conditions for talks with U.S. on Iraq

Tehran says it will only engage in dialogue if U.S. unveils withdrawal plan
Dec. 9, 2006

MANAMA, Bahrain - Iran will only hold direct talks with the United States on Iraq if Washington announces plans to pull its troops out, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said Saturday.

One month later, in January of 2007, Obama did his best to comply with Iran's main precondition by introducing a bill to withdraw our troops from Iraq as quickly as humanly possible:

Obama Bill Sets Date For Troop Withdrawal

Candidate Goes Further Than Rivals

By Shailagh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 31, 2007; Page A04

Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, one of the most prominent Democrats in the 2008 presidential field, proposed for the first time setting a deadline for withdrawing troops from Iraq, as part of a broader plan aimed at bolstering the freshman senator's foreign policy credentials.

Obama's legislation, offered on the Senate floor last night, would remove all combat brigades from Iraq by March 31, 2008. The date falls within the parameters offered by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which recommended the removal of combat troops by the first quarter of next year.

Since Obama appears to be on course to winning the presidency, I wonder if someone might suggest that he tie his "we will withdraw from Iraq without precondition and regardless of the consequences on the ground" pledge to Iran's pursuit of a nuclear bomb? That is, he could say "we will meet your precondition (surrendering Iraq to whatever may come its way) if you will meet ours (surrendering your nuclear bomb program) -- and then we can triumphantly pretend that we are meeting without preconditions." Of course, Iran would just agree to this and then violate the agreement once our troops were gone by getting on with the development of their nuclear bomb. Still, that's a smidgen better than just agreeing to their primary precondition while having no preconditions of our own.

The State of the Race

I must say that I can understand the growing pessimism of McCain supporters. Look at the latest numbers from RealClearPolitics:


Obama leads by almost 8 points in the average of national polls, the trading markets now see him as the overwhelming favorite, and he leads in almost all of the battleground states. If McCain comes back, it will be as miraculous as his prior comeback in the Republican primary (if you recall, he was counted out of that race, too).

Although I can understand the growing pessimism about McCain, I do not understand what Americans are thinking. McCain is, indeed, a bit erratic, and Palin is, indeed, unqualified to be president. But Obama is similarly unqualified, and he is either what he now claims to be (a post-partisan, post-racial smooth-talking problem-solver who will bring much needed change of some sort to America) or he is what his long history of behavior suggests he is. Most Americans must embrace the former theory, but I cannot let go of the latter.

Obama seems to have worked with ACORN in pushing banks to make subprime loans, he never questioned what was going on at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in any serious way, he received more donations from those agencies but anyone but Senator Dodd, and two of his advisors were high ranking officials of those agencies (though they may have been only tangentially related to his campaign). There is nothing in that profile to suggest that he is the man to lead the way out of this crisis. He also worked with Bill Ayers. Obama's defenders see this accusation as an attempt to paint Obama as a domestic terrorist sympathizer, but it's not. Ayers is a militant left wing radical (so much so that he is unrepentant about his prior terrorist activities), and he has a radical left wing educational agenda. Here is what Ayers's said in a 2006 speech before Hugo Chavez:

[M]y comrade and friend Luis Bonilla, a brilliant educator and inspiring fighter for justice … has taught me a great deal about the Bolivarian Revolution [i.e., Chavez's movement] and about the profound educational reforms underway here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chavez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution, and I’ve come to appreciate Luis as a major asset in both the Venezuelan and the international struggle—I look forward to seeing how he and all of you continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane….

Obama worked with Ayers to distribute tens of millions of dollars in funds from the Annenberg Foundation to reform education in Chicago. Do you know what he did, exactly, during those years? I don't either, and the media's lack of interest in the subject (coupled with their maniacal zeal to investigate every minor nuance of Sarah Palin's life) is an amazing thing to behold. For now, I assume that Obama was pushing for education reforms that were consistent with the radical left wing activist agenda that so appealed to Ayers in Venezuela. Perhaps Obama will clarify the matter if he ever writes a third book about himself.

In his early years, Obama was proudly supported by the New Party (as discussed here, for example). Unlike others, I don't see this as a socialist party. To me, they look like the far left end of mainstream American politics. This, I believe, is precisely where Obama is on the political spectrum. He runs from the label "liberal," and the media allows him to get away with it, but I don't see any evidence that he is anything but a doctrinaire liberal. That being the case, it is not shocking to me that his 2007 voting record in the Senate was judged by the National Journal to be the most liberal of all. He may not actually be the most liberal senator, but it seems fair to say that he is more liberal than your average liberal Democratic senator.

For 20 years, Obama tolerated a preacher pushing an anti-American, black-liberation theology. Not because Obama himself shares that view but because he is so far to the left that it is, to him, an understandable (and unobjectionable) world view. Either that, or you actually believe that he was unaware of the true Reverend Wright until just a few months ago. It is a little scary to me that most Americans actually seem to believe Obama's explanation.

In the midst of the worst economic crisis in memory, Obama wants to raise taxes on those making more than $250,000 per year and to also raise taxes on corporations. In addition, he wants to restrict free trade agreements (if you believe what he says). I doubt that credible economists would construe this as a pro-growth agenda. Instead, in an era of declining growth, these policies would almost certainly accelerate the slide.

Obama promises to pull our troops from Iraq, even now that victory is nearly at hand (and this is the exact same policy he preferred when it would have ensured defeat for the American military and outright disaster for the Iraqi people -- not to mention victory for al Qaeda in Iraq). He promises to cut spending for missile defense, and I think that most believe that he will cut defense spending significantly overall.

With a Democratically controlled Senate, Obama will appoint the kind of judges who would impose gay marriage on the electorate no matter what they think about it. I think that gay marriage ought to be legal, but not because a judge suddenly detects that gay marriage is protected by the constitution. While these judges will find in the constitution the protection of gay marriage, they are unlikely to detect any language stipulating that people should be treated equally on the basis of skin color. Although I do not support diversity-based affirmative action (at all), I actually support treating black differently due to this nation's history of government-sponsored discrimination against them. Still, it's hard for me to confidently assert that such programs would be constitutional. But the judges that Obama will appoint will have no problem with even diversity-based affirmative action programs.

Obama's defense of abortion rights is as extreme as you will find in American politics (which, again, is consistent with his far left stance on just about every issue). My own feeling is that abortion should be legal up to the point where brain activity is too humanlike to ignore. No judge can draw that vague line based on what the constitution says. That's why we have politicians. But the judges that Obama appoints are unlikely to have any line in mind short of actual birth 9 months after conception.

A few months ago, I would have said that I don't believe that Americans will vote for Obama once they take a close look at his record. What I did not foresee was that Americans would, in their zeal for change, simply choose to overlook that record and to hope for the best. Right now, that looks like the plan that most Americans have adopted. If so, Obama's focus on two undefined terms with positive emotional assocations ("hope" and "change") will go down as one of the most brilliant political ploys in the history of American politics.

Obama and ACORN

In an earlier post on the origins of the subprime mortgage fiasco, I noted that ACORN had harassed banks into making subprime loans to minorities. I also noted allegations that Barack Obama had trained members of ACORN to do just that. To check on those allegations, I went to Obama's "fight the smears" web site (here) noted that (at the time) it said this:

Fact: Barack was never an ACORN trainer and never worked for ACORN in any other capacity.

I then described my reaction:

I read his web page as attempting to create the impression that he was not associated with ACORN by claiming that he never worked "for" ACORN. But did he work with them to advance their cause? His web site does not say. I wonder what he would say, if asked?

Today, McCain released a new advertisement accusing Obama of training members of ACORN to harass banks. This surprised me, so I went back to Obama's "fight the smears" web site. The "fact" quoted above has been changed and now reads:

Fact: ACORN never hired Obama as a trainer, organizer, or any type of employee.

This interesting change reinforces my view that Obama is using his lack of formal employment with ACORN to create the impression that he did not train members of ACORN to do things like badger banks to make subprime loans to minorities. Someone needs to ask him if he ever did that.

Is Obama's Tax Plan about Increasing Fairness or Stimulating Growth?

Economically speaking, things look pretty shaky out there. I've always warned against trying to predict the future, and I've repeatedly shown for years that economists are always wrong when they say things like "we are already in a recession." It might be different this time.

I do not have a clear understanding of the complicated global financial arrangements that have contributed to the current crisis. As such, I have no way to actually analyze that aspect of the problem. Like you, all I can really do is watch government officials furiously throw hundreds of billions of dollars at the problem (hoping they know what they are doing) and watch the stock markets around the world crash. Although one has to be humble about trying to predict the future, it is hard for me to imagine that we will avoid a recession this time. But I'm not yet this pessimistic:

Poll: 60% say depression 'likely'

Poll finds 6 of 10 believe a depression is somewhat or very likely - seeing 25% unemployed and millions homeless and hungry.

By Chris Isidore, CNNMoney.com senior writer
October 6, 2008: 4:23 PM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Nearly six out of ten Americans believe another economic depression is likely, according to a poll released Monday.

It might not be quite that bad, but let's just agree that the economy is in trouble (big trouble, perhaps). With that in mind, let's consider Obama's tax plan:

Barack Obama’s tax plan delivers broad-based tax relief to middle class families and cuts taxes for small businesses and companies that create jobs in America, while restoring fairness to our tax code and returning to fiscal responsibility.
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Middle class families will see their taxes cut ­ and no family making less than $250,000 will see their taxes increase.
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Obama will ask the wealthiest 2% of families to give back a portion of the tax cuts they have received over the past eight years to ensure we are restoring fairness and returning to fiscal responsibility.

OK, most of us will see tax savings, but the wealthiest are going to pay more. Here is how much they pay now (these are 2004 figures):


The top 5% -- those who will pay more under Obama's plan -- make 33% of the money and shoulder 57% of the tax bill. Does Obama want to raise taxes on the wealthy because he believes that it will stimulate a struggling economy (one that many see as heading for a depression), or because he wants to restore "fairness?" From the text above, it seems clear that he wants to restore a sense of "fairness to our tax code."

Here's my question: is now really the time to do that? GDP growth is most likely grinding to a halt (and the economy may even start to contract). Will raising taxes on the wealthy while reducing taxes for the rest of us cause GDP to increase faster than it otherwise would or to decrease faster than it otherwise would? I know that, as some see it, a tax increase on the wealthy will make things fairer, but my question is unrelated to fairness. What is its likely effect on an already struggling economy?

Obama's plan also includes vague suggestions about closing "inefficient loopholes" for corporations, which I assume means that he plans to raise corporate taxes as well. That sounds fair (potentially). But what will its effect be on job growth and GDP growth (compared to not raising taxes on the rich and on corporations)? To me, that's the only question (at least right now).

UPDATE: OK, ignore me and take into consideration what 5 Nobel laureates (and a bunch of other economists) have to say:

Barack Obama argues that his proposals to raise tax rates and halt international trade agreements would benefit the American economy. They would do nothing of the sort. Economic analysis and historical experience show that they would do the opposite. They would reduce economic growth and decrease the number of jobs in America. Moreover, with the credit crunch, the housing slump, and high energy prices weakening the U.S. economy, his proposals run a high risk of throwing the economy into a deep recession. It was exactly such misguided tax hikes and protectionism, enacted when the U.S. economy was weak in the early 1930s, that greatly increased the severity of the Great Depression.

We are very concerned with Barack Obama's opposition to trade agreements such as the pending one with Colombia, the new one with Central America, or the established one with Canada and Mexico. Exports from the United States to other countries create jobs for Americans. Imports make goods available to Americans at lower prices and are a particular benefit to families and individuals with low incomes. International trade is also a powerful source of strength in a weak economy. In the second quarter of this year, for example, increased international trade did far more to stimulate the U.S. economy than the federal government's "stimulus" package.

Ironically, rather than supporting international trade, Barack Obama is now proposing yet another so-called stimulus package, which would do very little to grow the economy. And his proposal to finance the package with higher taxes on oil would raise oil prices directly and by reducing exploration and production.

We are equally concerned with his proposals to increase tax rates on labor income and investment. His dividend and capital gains tax increases would reduce investment and cut into the savings of millions of Americans. His proposals to increase income and payroll tax rates would discourage the formation and expansion of small businesses and reduce employment and take-home pay, as would his mandates on firms to provide expensive health insurance.

After hearing such economic criticism of his proposals, Barack Obama has apparently suggested to some people that he might postpone his tax increases, perhaps to 2010. But it is a mistake to think that postponing such tax increases would prevent their harmful effect on the economy today. The prospect of such tax rate increases in 2010 is already a drag on the economy. Businesses considering whether to hire workers today and expand their operations have time horizons longer than a year or two, so the prospect of higher taxes starting in 2009 or 2010 reduces hiring and investment in 2008.

In sum, Barack Obama's economic proposals are wrong for the American economy. They defy both economic reason and economic experience.

Perhaps Obama will cite counterarguments of some other Nobel prize winners. For the moment, this all makes sense to me.

Supreme Court Implications of the Presidential Election

Although the National Journal ranked Barack Obama as the most liberal U.S. senator based on his 2007 voting record, this interesting analysis appears to be a serious attempt at ranking all members of congress:


The height of each bell-shaped curve reflects the number of senators or representatives that have a particular score. So, for example, looking at the dark red curve (which represents Senate Democrats), you can see that it reaches a peak at about -0.35 on the Liberal-Conservative dimension. That means that most of the Senate Democrats receive a score near -0.35 (which is the average score for the Democrats). Clinton is to the left of (i.e., is more liberal than) the average Democrat, and Obama falls slightly to the left of her. So, according to this analysis, Obama is clearly more liberal than your average Senate Democrat, but he is not the most liberal member of the senate. Also, McCain falls much closer to the center than Obama does. This is a nice chart, except that I'd have reversed the colors (using red for conservative, as is usually done). In any case, this offers a rough guide as to the politics of the person who may be nominating Supreme Court justices in the next 4 years.

I also found this interesting ranking of Supreme Court justices based on their 2006 voting patterns. In that year, Justice Thomas and Justice Stevens agreed with other least often, so they were declared the most conservative and most liberal, respectively, for that year. Based on how often the other justices voted with them, the rank ordering of the Supreme Court justices (conservative to liberal) comes out like this:


Seems about right. I have the 4 most conservative justices in red and the 4 most liberal in blue. Kennedy is purple because he's in the middle. Here are those same justices sorted by age:


As you can see, it is likely that it the next term, the president will more likely be replacing liberal justices than conservative justices. In fact, the most likely justice to be replaced is the most liberal one of all (Stevens). Thus, it seems to me that if Obama wins, the ideology of the Supreme Court may not change all that much even if the Democrats end up in control of both the House and the Senate (as seems quite likely). The court will shift a bit to the right if McCain wins because his nominee is very unlikely to be as liberal as Stevens (but also very unlikely to be as conservative as Alito -- because he would have to get that nominee through a Senate controlled by the Democrats). Still, with regard to the Supreme Court, liberals should be more worried about the upcoming election than conservatives. The average age of the 4 conservative justices is about 60. The average age of the 4 liberal justices is about 75. It's not hard to imagine that Stevens and Ginsburg will both be replaced in the next term, and they both just happen to be the two most liberal members of the court.

Obama's Plan to Address the Central Front in the War on Terror

I have long been aghast that Barack Obama can be nonsensical when discussing his plans for the war on terror, yet no one in the mainstream media seems to understand the simple issues well enough to call him on it. His technique in the past has been to blur the distinction between Afghanistan and Pakistan when identifying the location of al Qaeda's current hideouts (as if their camps are located "between" Afghanistan and Pakistan) so that it superficially sounds like we would be fighting al Qaeda by sending more troops to Afghanistan. In last night's debate he finally stopped making that ridiculous move, so the irrationality of his plan should be coming into sharper focus even for those who don't pay close attention to the details. Here is some of what he said:

I believe that part of the reason we have a difficult situation is because we made a bad judgment going into Iraq in the first place when we hadn't finished the job of hunting down bin Laden and crushing al Qaeda.

So what happened was we got distracted, we diverted resources, and ultimately bin Laden escaped, set up base camps in the mountains of Pakistan in the northwest provinces there.

They are now raiding our troops in Afghanistan, destabilizing the situation. They're stronger now than at any time since 2001. And that's why I think it's so important for us to reverse course, because that's the central front on terrorism.

I agree that, now, Pakistan (not Afghanistan) is the central front in the war on terror, whereas for the last 4 years or so bin Laden and Bush agreed that Iraq was the central front. But now that al Qaeda in Iraq has been largely suppressed, the focus is increasingly on al Qaeda's camps inside Pakistan. However, almost everyone believes that bin Laden escaped into Pakistan well before the U.S. invaded Iraq. Same goes for the Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Many other al Qaeda and Taliban militants were in Pakistan by then as well. That's where their camps were set up after they were evicted from Afghanistan. That being the case, how would having more troops in Afghanistan instead of sending those troops to Iraq back in 2003 have led to the defeat of al Qaeda without invading Pakistan? Is Obama saying (a) that he does not believe that al Qaeda and the Taliban escaped into Pakistan or (b) that he would have ordered U.S. forces to invade Pakistan?

Speaking of al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan, Obama said:

They are plotting to kill Americans right now. As Secretary Gates, the defense secretary, said, the war against terrorism began in that region and that's where it will end. So part of the reason I think it's so important for us to end the war in Iraq is to be able to get more troops into Afghanistan, put more pressure on the Afghan government to do what it needs to do, eliminate some of the drug trafficking that's funding terrorism.
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I'll be very brief. We are going to have to make the Iraqi government start taking more responsibility, withdraw our troops in a responsible way over time, because we're going to have to put some additional troops in Afghanistan.

Gen. [David] McKiernan, the commander in Afghanistan right now, is desperate for more help, because our bases and outposts are now targets for more aggressive Afghan -- Taliban offenses.

OK, so that's what the extra troops are going to do in Afghanistan, namely, eliminate some drug trafficking and launch some offensives against the Taliban. Except for the part about immediately withdrawing troops from Iraq (thereby allowing al Qaeda to resurrect itself there), Obama's basic plan sounds about right to me. But will an offensive against the Taliban in Afghanistan automatically defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan, or is the plan to invade Pakistan, which is where al Qaeda is located? Obama explains:

Look, I -- I want to be very clear about what I said. Nobody called for the invasion of Pakistan. Sen. McCain continues to repeat this.

What I said was the same thing that the audience here today heard me say, which is, if Pakistan is unable or unwilling to hunt down bin Laden and take him out, then we should.

OK, no invasion of Pakistan. If we discover where bin Laden is hiding inside Pakistan, and the government of Pakistan is unable or unwilling to take him out, we don't need more troops in Afghanistan to do the job ourselves. A Predator drone or a team of U.S. special forces could do the job right now. And whether or not we get bin Laden, there will still be those al Qaeda training camps inside Pakistan, and al Qaeda's remaining leaders will still be plotting attacks against us.

So how is it that taking troops away from Iraq and sending them to Afghanistan is equivalent to sending our troops to the central front in the war on terror (when even Obama agrees that the central front is in Pakistan)? Unless we plan to invade Pakistan, which Obama has ruled out, his plan amounts to withdrawing troops who are fighting al Qaeda in Iraq in order to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan while doing nothing to fight al Qaeda in Pakistan. Yet he keeps implying that, to fight al Qaeda, our troops need to be taken from Iraq (where they are supposedly not fighting al Qaeda) and sent to Afghanistan (where they supposedly will fight al Qaeda). It makes no sense.

Tracing the Origins of the Subprime Mortgage Fiasco

Stanley Kurtz has written an amazing article on the origins of the mortgage meltdown. Today, I attempt to bring you the short version. In an earlier article, Kurtz made this point:

THE seeds of today's financial meltdown lie in the Community Reinvestment Act - a law passed in 1977 and made riskier by unwise amendments and regulatory rulings in later decades.

CRA was meant to encourage banks to make loans to high-risk borrowers, often minorities living in unstable neighborhoods. That has provided an opening to radical groups like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) to abuse the law by forcing banks to make hundreds of millions of dollars in "subprime" loans to often uncreditworthy poor and minority customers.
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In fact, intimidation tactics, public charges of racism and threats to use CRA to block business expansion have enabled ACORN to extract hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and contributions from America's financial institutions.

Here is the Wikipedia summary of the Community reinvestment Act:

The Community Reinvestment Act (or CRA, Pub.L. 95-128, title VIII, 91 Stat. 1147, 12 U.S.C. § 2901 et seq.) is a United States federal law designed to encourage commercial banks and savings associations to meet the needs of borrowers in all segments of their communities, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.[1][2] The Act was intended to reduce discriminatory credit practices against such neighborhoods, a practice known as 'redlining'.[3] The Act requires the appropriate federal financial supervisory agencies to encourage regulated financial institutions to meet the credit needs of the local communities in which they are chartered, consistent with safe and sound operation.

I think the "safe and sound operation" part got somewhat muddled in later years. The new article by Kurtz claims that ACORN had both a 2-part bank-intimidation strategy and a later strategy of changing the rules at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In Part 1 of the bank-intimidation strategy, ACORN protesters would "...break into private offices, show up at a banker’s home to intimidate his family, or pour protesters into bank lobbies to scare away customers, all in an effort to force a lowering of credit standards for poor and minority customers." Later, in part 2, ACORN used the Community Reinvestment Act to block a wave of bank mergers that occurred in the early 1990s. They did so by using public records of mortgage applicants sorted by race, gender, and income to argue that banks were systematically biased in their lending practices. Such evidence was used to block bank mergers until the banks lowered lending standards for minorities.

All of this was effective at changing the rules at particular banks, but it ran into a problem with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. As Kurtz notes, "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy up mortgages en masse, bundle them, and sell them to investors on the world market." However, they would not buy loans that did not meet high credit standards. Thus, even though ACORN was making progress in getting individual banks to lower lending standards, the banks would still put up considerable resistance on the grounds that they'd be stuck with these mortgages (because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would not purchase them). Thus, the rules at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had to change, and pressure was brought to bear to do just that. By the mid-1990s, this is what was happening:

At this point, both ACORN and the Clinton administration were working together to impose large numerical targets or “set asides” (really a sort of poor and minority loan quota system) on Fannie and Freddie. ACORN called for at least half of Fannie and Freddie loans to go to low-income customers. At first the Clinton administration offered a set-aside of 30 percent. But eventually ACORN got what it wanted. In early 1994, the Clinton administration floated plans for committing $1 trillion in loans to low- and moderate-income home-buyers, which would amount to about half of Fannie Mae’s business by the end of the decade.

And then came the day that people who never should have been approved for home loans could not make their mortgage payments. Now the world is scrambling to figure out hope to cope with that.

I assume that other complicated financial issues contributed even further to the whole mess (mark-to-market accounting and credit default swaps), but the ground floor problem appears to be that many people cannot pay their mortgages (mainly low-income folks who have subprime loans), and those early efforts by ACORN and similar groups to get poor people into houses seems to be largely responsible for that.

Barack Obama says that he was never an ACORN community organizer. He also says this about his relationship with ACCORN:

In his capacity as an attorney, Barack represented ACORN in a successful lawsuit alongside the U.S. Department of Justice against the state of Illinois to force state compliance with a federal voting access law. For his work helping enforce the law, called “Motor Voter,” Barack received the IVI-IPO Legal Eagle Award in 1995. (For more about Barack’s career, check out our Obama bio.)
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Fact: Barack was never an ACORN trainer and never worked for ACORN in any other capacity.
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Blackwell’s attacks against ACORN and community organizers continue a vile Republican pattern of mockery and viciousness against this noble profession. Community organizers are the very individuals Republicans should be celebrating for helping people to help themselves rather than depending on the government.

That last sentence seems to imply that Obama is sympathetic to ACORN, and he does not say that he never worked with them to advance their housing goals. At tonight's debate, I hope that someone will ask him exactly what he did do to help ACORN advance its cause. I read his web page as attempting to create the impression that he was not associated with ACORN by claiming that he never worked "for" ACORN. But did he work with them to advance their cause? His web site does not say. I wonder what he would say, if asked?

Meanwhile, Pakistan has Become the Central Front in the War on Terror

There has been a lot going on in Pakistan over the last two months, including an offensive by the Pakistani army against tribal militants and a relentless series of strikes by Predator drones. With regard to the recent military offensive, here is a new report:

29 September 2008

Pakistanis flee into Afghanistan

The UN says 20,000 people have fled Pakistan's tribal area of Bajaur for Afghanistan amid fighting between troops and militants in recent months.

The UN's refugee agency says almost 4,000 families have crossed north-west into Afghanistan's Kunar province.

The army began a sustained campaign against militants in Bajaur nearly two months ago.

Some 300,000 others have fled east within Pakistan in recent weeks with many of them living in temporary camps.

The military says it has killed more than 2,000 militants in the fighting.

And those Predator strikes are effectively targeting the Taliban's (and al Qaeda's) leaders. The latest of 11 such strikes since August seems to have found its mark:

Taleban fury as US strike kills 20

06 October 2008
By Shtiaq Mahsud

THE Taleban response to an apparent US missile strike in Pakistan indicates a senior militant may be among 20 people killed.

The US has ramped up cross-border strikes that target alleged al-Qaeda and Taleban hideouts in Pakistan's tribal regions bordering Afghanistan.

In the case of Friday's alleged US strike in North Waziristan tribal region, which was believed to hADVERTISEMENTave killed several Arab fighters, government officials have been notably quiet.

The Taleban, however, were reportedly responding with fury.

Also worth noting is the fact that Pakistan has a new spy chief who seems to be on the right side of this fight:

September 30, 2008 (AP)

New Pakistan Spy Chief Seen as Tough on Militants

New Pakistan spy chief seen as tough on militants, takes job amid US concern on border buildup

Pakistan's army chief named a general considered a hawk in the fight against al-Qaida and the Taliban to head the country's powerful spy agency, asserting his control at a time of U.S. concern that rogue operatives are aiding Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan.

Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shujaa Pasha oversaw military offensives against militants in the lawless border regions with Afghanistan in his most recent job as director general of military operations.

His appointment as head of the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, the country's main spy agency, was part of a broader shake-up of army top brass announced late Monday by military chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.

The moves were seen as a bid by the reform-minded general to revive the prestige of Pakistan's armed forces and assert control over the spy agency following the downfall of ex-President Gen. Pervez Musharraf in August.

Meanwhile, the Taliban's leader in Pakistan (not to be confused with overall leader Mullah Mohammed Omar) is said to be seriously ill (and other reports say that he is dead):

Pakistani Taliban leader Mehsud seriously ill: officials, militants

5 days ago

ISLAMABAD (AFP) — Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud is seriously ill with diabetes and may even be in a coma, security officials and militant commanders close to the Al-Qaeda-linked warlord said Wednesday.

Local television reported that Mehsud, the head of the country's umbrella Taliban organisation, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), had died overnight -- but officials and militant sources insisted he was still alive.

All of which brings me to today's news:

Sources: Taliban split with al Qaeda, seek peace

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Taliban leaders are holding Saudi-brokered talks with the Afghan government to end the country's bloody conflict -- and are severing their ties with al Qaeda, sources close to the historic discussions have told CNN.
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According to the source, fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar -- high on the U.S. military's most-wanted list -- was not present, but his representatives were keen to stress the reclusive cleric is no longer allied to al Qaeda.

Details of the Taliban leader's split with al Qaeda have never been made public before, but the new claims confirm what another source with an intimate knowledge of the militia and Mullah Omar has told CNN in the past.
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A second round of talks is scheduled to take place in two months, the Saudi source said.

I'm not sure how this will all play out, but the central front in the war on terror right now has switched from Iraq to Pakistan. Recent developments don't look all that promising for al Qaeda as their Taliban allies, after taking a serious beating, may be seeking peace.

UPDATE: This article is worth reading as well:

Our secret war in Pakistan

Posted: Tuesday, October 07, 2008 8:29 AM
Filed Under: Islamabad, Pakistan
By Richard Engel, NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent

Don’t even ask, I was told, on U.S. military bases in Afghanistan at Bagram and Jalalabad.
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And certainly don’t ask about the troops on bases here in Afghanistan who don’t wear uniforms, have long beards (so they can better blend in during covert operations), tattoos and don’t mingle with regular soldiers.

They eat in their own chow halls, plan their own missions and don’t talk much. They don’t talk at all to the media. They’re the men who have been called in to cross into Pakistan when the drones can’t get deep enough to find and kill their targets.

They are elite Special Operations Forces, the most-highly trained and covert of the U.S. military. They are America’s ghost warriors.
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The Army Times, a military newspaper, recently reported that the U.S. will temporarily halt ground incursions into Pakistan. The newspaper quoted an unnamed Pentagon official as saying, "We are now working with the Pakistanis to make sure that those types of ground-type insertions do not happen, at least for a period of time to give them an opportunity to do what they claim they are desiring to do." The newspaper said the halt did not apply to the incursions by drones.

Political News: The Prosecution vs. the Defense

When Sarah Palin speaks, people listen. For example, her debate with Joe Biden was one of the most watched debates in history. I don't think people were tuning in to hear what Joe Biden had to say. As a second example, Sarah Palin made headline news yesterday when she said:

"We see America as the greatest force for good in this world," Palin said at a fund-raising event in Colorado, adding, "Our opponent though, is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country."

Her brief comment has now placed Barack Obama's association with unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers in the spotlight once again. Sensing that this attack was coming, the New York Times launched a preemptive strike in staunch defense of Obama:

The crossed paths of Obama and ’60s bomber

Records suggest Dem has played down contact, but that two weren't close

CHICAGO - At a tumultuous meeting of anti-Vietnam War militants at the Chicago Coliseum in 1969, Bill Ayers helped found the radical Weathermen, launching a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and United States Capitol.

Twenty-six years later, at a lunchtime meeting about school reform in a Chicago skyscraper, Barack Obama met Mr. Ayers, by then an education professor. Their paths have crossed sporadically since then, at a coffee Mr. Ayers hosted for Mr. Obama’s first run for office, on the schools project and a charitable board, and in casual encounters as Hyde Park neighbors.
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A review of records of the schools project and interviews with a dozen people who know both men, suggest that Mr. Obama, 47, has played down his contacts with Mr. Ayers, 63. But the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called “somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.”

Just after Palin attacked, CNN dutifully sought to defend Obama as well:

Several other publications, including the Washington Post, Time magazine, the Chicago Sun-Times, The New Yorker and The New Republic, have debunked the idea that Obama and Ayers had a close relationship.

Debunked the idea? Those are not the words of someone reporting the news; those are the words of someone adding editorial comment to a politically charged issue.

In the distant past, reporters sought to objectively present what was happening in the world. Later, suspicions about the objectivity of the news were raised when it became clear that the mainstream media largely consists largely of liberals. When this fact finally became too obvious to deny, many reporters insisted that despite their liberal views, they rise above partisanship and present the news in objective fashion. But since Barack Obama was nominated for president, that claim now rings as hallow as earlier denials that reporters were generally liberal. What this means is that, to get the news, you can't just listen to or read what we used to call "the news," and this is true whether you hail from the left or from the right.

Nowadays, consumers of the news have to be more like jurors in a jury box. Jurors listen to the prosecution, and then they listen to the defense. Afterwards, they make a decision about who has the stronger argument. But the important point is that no decision is made until both sides of the story are told by people who are invested in one outcome or another.

In coverage of political news, the defense and the prosecution switch roles depending on who the candidate is. If the candidate is a Republican (John McCain or Sarah Palin), the prosecution consists mainly of:

The New York Times
The Washington Post
The New Republic Magazine
Associated Press
Reuters
CNN
MSNBC
CBS News
ABC News
NBC News.

High-traffic liberal blogs could be listed as well, but they are not much of a factor because the mainstream media already presents their arguments (though without the expletive-laced sneering). The defense (of Republicans) consists of

Fox News (on cable TV)
The Washington Times
Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Hugh Hewitt, Dennis Prager, and Michael Medved (all on the radio)
National Review Magazine
Instapundit
Powerline

Quite a few other blogs could be listed as well.

When either Barack Obama or Joe Biden is the topic of a story, these roles reverse. Right now, for example, National Review is serving as the prosecution on the Barack Obama/Bill Ayer's issue, and the New York Times and CNN are rushing to the defense. Stanley Kurtz provides the prosecution's rebuttal to the defense offered up by the New York Times and CNN. Readers can read both analyses and then make a decision for themselves as to who has the stronger argument.

To me, that's where we've come. Political news presented by liberals is no more objective than political news presented by conservatives. As such, like a juror, consumers of the news need to seek out both sides of the story. Unfortunately, many get both sides of the story from places like the New York Times. But that's like listening to a defense attorney present both the defense and a summary of the prosecution. In a court of law, it seems intuitively obvious that this is not a reasonable way to get at the facts. When the situation is polarized and adversarial, as it is in a jury trial, the only way to get at the truth is to listen to both sides of story presented by advocates for both sides. Political news has become as polarized and adversarial as a jury trial. The only difference is that many people have not yet fully appreciated the implications (implications that become more apparent when the jury trial analogy is considered).

UPDATE: More defense (from a CNN factcheck):

Verdict: False. There is no indication that Ayers and Obama are now "palling around," or that they have had an ongoing relationship in the past three years. Also, there is nothing to suggest that Ayers is now involved in terrorist activity or that other Obama associates are.

Of course, there is no claim that Obama and Ayer's are now palling around or that they have had an on-going relationship in the past 3 years (no one thinks Obama is dumb enough to do that). This is how the defense summarizes the case made by the prosecution. That is, they declare as false charges that were not made. Next, the CNN fact-checker says that there is no evidence to suggest that Ayers is involved in terrorist activity now (as if someone is suggesting otherwise). In defense of Obama, CNN declares as false charges that no one is making. And they are not even trying to disguise their misleading effort to protect the candidate who they hope wins in November. This is how defense attorney's defend their clients (whether they are guilty as charged or not).

Just to be clear, the charge is that Obama was comfortable associating with an unrepentant terrorist between about 1995 and 2002. As the CNN factcheck also says:

Beginning in 1995, Ayers and Obama worked with the non-profit Chicago Annenberg Challenge on a huge school improvement project. The Annenberg Challenge was for cities to compete for $50 million grants to improve public education. Ayers fought to bring the grant to Chicago, and Obama was recruited onto the board. Also from 1999 through 2001 both were board members on the Woods Fund, a charitable foundation that gave money to various causes, including the Trinity United Church that Obama attended and Northwestern University Law Schools' Children and Family Justice Center, where Dohrn worked.

The charge is that Obama was comfortable doing this with Ayers (and, in addition, that his efforts "to improve education" amounted to encouraging young students to embrace left wing activism, not to improve their math and science skills). Note how the factcheck "verdict" is completely unrelated to the charge.

UPDATE II: More from the defense here. This time, it's a reporter for the AP, and he gets a little hysterical with an opinion piece that the AP calls an "analysis:"

WASHINGTON (AP) - By claiming that Democrat Barack Obama is "palling around with terrorists" and doesn't see the U.S. like other Americans, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin targeted key goals for a faltering campaign.

And though she may have scored a political hit each time, her attack was unsubstantiated and carried a racially tinged subtext that John McCain himself may come to regret.

Racially tinged subtext? That's no analysis. It's the same Pavlovian reflex that defense attorneys have when the prosecution touches a nerve. The same maneuver was once successfully employed by the defense attorneys at O.J. Simpson's murder trial.

The Murder Rate in Baghdad

What is the violent death rate in Baghdad, and how does it compare to other major cities? In this post, I estimate the number of violent deaths in Baghdad in recent months and make the assumption that this value is the true (i.e., long-term) value. You are free to disagree (e.g., you might assume that violence will spiral out of control again), but I just want to be clear that I am making the assumption that the reduced level of violence that we've seen over the last few months is representative of what is to come.

As I noted in previous posts, the AP reports that the number of violent deaths in the entire country of Iraq has recently hovered at about 500 per month. This is about the same figure that I estimated using other means. Using the casualty figures at Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, I estimate that about 40% of these deaths (roughly 200 per month) occur in the Baghdad municipal area.

The population of the Baghdad municipal area is estimated to be 7 million. I don't know if this figure takes into account refugees who left during the raging sectarian violence. Some estimates put the overall number of refugees living outside of Iraq at nearly 2 million, with another 1.6 million internally displaced. However, as noted in the article, "...those numbers include many who fled during the 1990s, long before the invasion." To estimate the violent death rate in Baghdad, I'll use a population estimate of 6 million, which assumes that about 1 million have fled the area as a result of recent sectarian violence.

With 200 violent deaths per month and a population of 6 million, the estimated violent death rate in Baghdad comes to 40 per 100,000. It would be lower (34 per 100,000) if I use the population estimate of 7 million and higher (48 per 100000) if I assume that the population is as low as 5 million. But 40 per 100,000 seems like a reasonable estimate based on current trends.

How does that number compare to the rates in other violent cities? According to this article in Foreign Policy magazine, Caracas, Venezuela (under Hugo Chávez) has a murder rate of 130 per 100,000. That is more than 3 times as violent as Baghdad. Cape Town, South Africa has a murder rate of 62 per 100,000 inhabitants, which is 50% higher than the murder rate in Baghdad. The big surprise to me was that New Orleans has a murder rate that is estimated to fall between 67 (according to the New Orleans Police Department) and 95 (according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation) per 100,000. That is to say, New Orleans is, as best I can tell, a much more violent place than Baghdad is right now.

This made me wonder how Baghdad compares to other cities in the U.S. in terms of violent death rates. I found this pdf report of murder statistics and used the information I found to create this chart:


A caveat: I computed the murder rate using the Baghdad municipal area, not Baghdad proper. The estimates for U.S. cities are probably based on numbers from within the city limits per se. Thus, it may not be a perfect comparison, but it seems reasonably fair to me because, unlike in American cities, I don't think that the violent death rate in Baghdad would change very much if computed based on what happens within the city limits per se or using the entire municipal area. Still, I don't know that for a fact, so this caveat is worth keeping in mind.

There are, of course, a lot of security personnel in Baghdad keeping a lid on things, and we don't know that violence will remain this low. For example, in the past, al Qaeda concentrated many of its horrific suicide bombing attacks in Baghdad, yet Democrats have long denied that al Qaeda was a major source of violence in Iraq. Barack Obama (who is one of those Democrats) might win the election this November and then make good on his pledge to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq in order to send them to Afghanistan. If he does that, al Qaeda is almost sure to resume its assault on Iraq. Why wouldn't they? If Obama wins, one can only hope that Iraqi security forces are up to the job of keeping al Qaeda at bay. They might be, but only time will tell. For now, anyway, it seems that Baghdad is a safer place to be than Washington D.C.

Casualties in Iraq: September, 2008

Although Barack Obama continues to campaign on the promise that he will "end this war," the American military has apparently beaten him to the punch. They are, in fact, defeating our adversaries in Iraq in a way that was almost unimaginable back when Obama introduced a bill to begin withdrawing our troops -- thereby accepting defeat -- in January of 2007 (the very first month of the troop surge). Here in September of 2008, civilian casualties in Iraq remain near the lowest levels ever seen, as shown in this annotated chart (with the source of data and essential corrections described here):


As always, the dark purple bars represent the months associated with George Bush's troop surge, and the black bar represents the month in which al Qaeda finally succeeded in its quest to ignite out-of-control sectarian violence by bombing the Golden Mosque. Amazingly, al Qaeda remains the major cause of violence in Iraq today. Although only 268 civilian deaths were recorded by Iraq Coalition Casualty Count for the month of September, approximately 100 of those deaths were attributable to attacks that are typical of al Qaeda (e.g., suicide bombers, parked car bombs). In fact, as best I can tell, virtually all mass casualty attacks in Iraq these days are attributable to al Qaeda. Here is one example:

Iraq Bombings Leave 30 Dead

Blasts Target Policemen in Diyala, Military Personnel in Baghdad

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

BAGHDAD, Sept. 15 -- More than 30 people were killed in bombings in Iraq on Monday, including one in Diyala province in which a female suicide bomber attacked policemen gathered to celebrate the release of a fellow officer from a U.S. detention facility, Iraqi officials said.
...
In Baghdad, twin car bombings near the city's main passport office killed at least 12 people shortly before noon, officials said.
...
"We currently assess this heinous atrocity as an al-Qaeda in Iraq attack," Lt. Col. Steve Stover, a U.S. military spokesman, said in a statement, referring to the Sunni insurgent group.

Al Qaeda is no longer the extremely potent force it once was in Iraq (not by a long shot), but it is not quite dead yet. Here is what al Qaeda was previously capable of doing (this from back in August of 2007):

Iraqi officials: Truck bombings killed at least 500

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- The death toll in the suicide bombings Tuesday in northern Iraq has risen to at least 500, local officials in Nineveh province said Wednesday.
...
The Tuesday truck bombs that targeted the villages of Qahtaniya, al-Jazeera and Tal Uzair, in northern Iraq near the border with Syria, were a "trademark al Qaeda event" designed to sway U.S. public opinion against the war, a U.S. general said Wednesday.
...
Al Qaeda in Iraq is predominantly Sunni, and Mixon said members of the Yazidi religious minority have received threatening letters, called "night letters," telling them "to leave because they are infidels."
...
Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf, an Interior Ministry spokesman, said there were three suicide trucks carrying two tons of explosives. At least 30 houses and other buildings were destroyed.

Through it all, the Democrats have tried to deny any significant role for al Qaeda and to convince the world that the violence in Iraq was nothing more than a civil war. That is, they behaved exactly as al Qaeda hoped they would, and I cannot quite bring myself to forgive them for it. Here is a mind boggling example from May of 2007:

Transcript: Sen. Chris Dodd on 'FOX News Sunday'

Monday, May 07, 2007
...
WALLACE: Let's talk about one aspect of that. The Democrats now seem in a race to try to come up with a plan to get out of Iraq.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, the number two Al Qaida leader, says the bill that you Democrats sent the president is proof of the American defeat in Iraq. And we'll talk about the details in a moment.

But does your party run the risk of being seen by the American people, as they were after Vietnam, as soft on national security?

DODD: Again, this is a civil war going on in Iraq. This is not the United States versus Al Qaida. It's Shia versus Sunnis tearing each other apart. It's gone on for centuries, but particularly here right now.

The United States is being asked to, in a sense, referee a civil war. And at $2 billion a week, $8 billion a month, Americans believe that we have done all we can possibly do, and Iraqis have to decide whether or not they want to end this civil war and the sectarian violence.

The idea that this is a winnable conflict by the United States -- every military leader from the very outset have said this is not a situation where there's a military victory for us here.

...
WALLACE: But, Senator, if I can just press this point, though...

DODD: Certainly.

WALLACE: ... Here you have Zawahiri in a video -- he seems to think that Al Qaida has a stake in this fight.

DODD: Well, they may think that, but I'm not going to let my foreign policy be decided by Mr. al-Zawahiri. Obviously, he's playing his game here.

He'd probably like to see us stay down there, bogged down, at the costs we're increasing here, the loss of lives, not to mention the isolation of the United States. The status quo is unacceptable.

Zawahiri was playing a game? In truth, Senator Dodd was playing a game (a political game). And, of course, Barack Obama has long adhered to the same politically convenient fiction:

Thursday, 11 January 2007

Obama: 'We're Not Going To Babysit A Civil War'

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration is working to persuade a skeptical Democratic-led Congress to accept the president's announced troop buildup as the last best chance for reversing Iraq's slide into anarchy.

President Bush's new strategy, announced Wednesday in a prime-time address to the nation, increases U.S. forces in Iraq by 21,500 and demands greater cooperation from the Iraqi government.

"We're not going to baby sit a civil war," Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., told NBC's "Today" Show Thursday. He said the Democratic-controlled Congress would not undercut troops already in Iraq but would explore ways to restrict the president from expanding the mission.

No wonder he wanted to withdraw our troops at the very height of sectarian violence in Iraq. His conception of what was happening was completely wrong, so it made sense in his mind to accept Harry Reid's assertion that "this war is lost" and to withdraw our troops (thereby condemning the innocent people of Iraq to an even more horrible fate). Fortunately, General Petraeus was not as misguided:

The U.S. military commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, said on Thursday al Qaeda was bent on committing what he called "sensational" attacks designed to fuel more sectarian violence.

Speaking in Washington, Petraeus said al Qaeda was now "probably public enemy number one" in Iraq.

The results of the general's analysis are plainly apparent in my chart above. They are also evident in this chart of U.S. military casualties from hostile fire:


As I said, Barack Obama will not "end this war" because the U.S. military has pretty much already done so (i.e., they have nearly achieved victory in Iraq).

A few days ago, I analyzed the violent death rate in Iraq relative to the other nations of the world. I used a figure of 575 deaths per month (an estimate of civilian deaths plus deaths of security forces and other combatants). For the last two months, the Associated Press puts the overall number of deaths in Iraq at about 500. Thus, using the most recent months to estimate the annual trend, it seems that my chart is fairly accurate, so I will show it again:



As you can see, Iraq is not the most violent place on earth by any means. Take out mass casualty attacks by al Qaeda (as will eventually happen, I believe) and it will be noticably less violent than Mexico and Russia.

At long last, and as might be expected, the American public is coming around to the idea that the war in Iraq will be successful , a perception that will eventually severely complicate the media's effort to portray George Bush as the "worst president ever:"

War on Terror Update

Plurality, For First Time, Says Iraq War Will Be Judged A Success

Tuesday, September 30, 2008
...
In a national telephone survey Monday night, 41% said history will rate the war in Iraq a success versus 39% who said it will be seen as a failure, with 20% undecided (see crosstabs). These findings echo those of the previous two weeks (see trends).

By contrast, in August of last year, 57% believed history would judge the U.S. mission in Iraq a failure, and only 29% disagreed.

By August of next year, these numbers will look even better, unless Barack Obama wins and makes good on his stubborn pledge to withdraw U.S. forces regardless of conditions on the ground. But if he does that, failure in Iraq will be his burden to bear, not George Bush's.

UPDATE: It is simply amazing to me that a point of heated debate in the past is now reported as if we knew all along that one side of the argument was correct (and it is not the side that Barack Obama and the Democrats misleadingly pushed for so long). Here is a report today from the Associated Press that gets it basically right:

Iraqi police: Bombs kill 19 near Shiite mosques

Blasts occur as worshippers left prayers; separately, 6 killed in shooting

BAGHDAD - Suicide bombers targeted Shiite worshippers as they left morning prayers Thursday at two Baghdad mosques, killing 19 people and injuring 50 others, police said.
...
No group claimed responsibility, but attacks on Shiite civilians are widely associated with Sunni extremists like al-Qaida in Iraq hoping to re-ignite the sectarian conflict that pushed the nation to the brink of civil war two years ago.

I might have just added the key point that the sectarian violence that al Qaeda hopes to re-ignite with this latest attack was initially ignited by them as well. That's what the civil-war vs. central-front-in-the-war-on-terror debate was all about. The Democrats, including Barack Obama, insisted that it was all just a civil war based on longstanding enmity between Shiites and Sunnis. General Petraeus (and, really, anyone who could think beyond a bumper-sticker slogan) argued that al Qaeda was sending its foreign suicide bombers to Iraq (not to Afghanistan) to kill innocent Shiites in an effort to goad the Shiite militias into slaughtering Sunnis. It worked, and it is exactly what they are still trying to do again with this latest attack.