What choosing Palin says about John McCain

Short answer: nothing good. McCain has managed the bizarre feat of being both stupidly rash and coldly cynical at the same time.

Greg Sargent at TPM has a pretty thorough rundown of just how completely disastrous the choice is starting to be for McCain, and that's what happens when you don't vet your VP before you pick her, but I think even more important than how terrible she turned out to be is what it says about McCain that he made that choice.

This is a man who's running on experience and judgment. Pick me, not that other guy, he's saying, because that other guy doesn't know what he's doing. With me you'll get steady, sober, experienced leadership.

Not so much. This seems to have been a last-minute decision, made without all (or even more than a few) of the facts. One of McCain's own advisers said this:

"This was really kind of rushed at the end, because John didn't get what he wanted. He wanted to do Joe [Lieberman] or [Tom] Ridge."

John didn't get what he wanted. He was, apparently, finally persuaded, days before he had to make a decision, that if he picked Lieberman or Ridge, who are pro-choice, his base would revolt.

So, instead of picking someone he had thoroughly vetted, like Tim Pawlenty or Mitt Romney, who would have been acceptable to his base but also reasonably qualified, or pushing the decision back a week so he could really investigate Palin, he just picked her, having spoken to her twice in his life. He has literally known her for fewer months than he has houses.

Some people voted for George W. Bush in 2004 based on reasoning like this: 'Well, I don't agree with him, but I know where I stand with him.' It seemed poorly reasoned to me, but apparently a lot of people found it compelling. Bush would be wrong, but he would be wrong predictably. Apparently a lot of people find that reassuring.

Those people should be very worried about John McCain. Choosing Palin says that McCain, when he can't get exactly what he wants, is inclined to make important decisions rashly and without seeking out any of the relevant facts. He lacks even Bush's sense of political self-interest. He's liable to do a lot of inexplicable and random things as president, many of which will be as disastrous for the country as Palin is shaping up to be for his campaign.

As Matthew Yglesias observed:

One is reminded that one of the principal powers of the presidency is the power to appoint people — federal judges, ambassadors, cabinet secretaries, subcabinet officials, FEC members, the Amtrak board, all kinds of things. Presidents don’t always put the best people in these positions, but normally they give the matter some thought. Even an unqualified crony gets his job because somebody knew him. Is McCain going to just pick people at random in order to “shake things up?” Not bother to do any vetting in order to preserve the element of surprise?

McCain has achieved the strange feat of making Barack Obama simultaneously the "change" candidate and the "safe" choice.

Tax Plan Comparison

Back in June, the Washington Post ran an interesting chart comparing the Obama and McCain tax proposals. It recently came to my attention when it was referenced in the Dr. Housing Bubble blog. First I'll give you the chart, then I'd like to talk a little bit about the misleading ways tax debates are often framed.



One of the biggest problems with tax debates is they're often framed only in terms of income tax. This is misleading for a couple of reasons:

First, families in the upper brackets often get much of their income from investments. Long-term capital gains aren't taxed as ordinary income — they're taxed at a flat 15% for the income levels we're talking about. This means wealthy taxpayers never really feel the full impact of tax rate changes.

Secondly, Social Security payroll taxes are only paid on income below $102,000. This means the tax system as a whole is considerably less progressive* than it first appears, since these taxes are paid at a flat 15.3%**.

Of course, the biggest caveat of all is that these plans would no doubt look very different by the time they got through Congress. Obama's proposal to raise the $102,000 cap on Social Security taxes would probably face a tough fight, for example.


* I use "progressive" here in the tax accounting sense — meaning a tax rate that increases with increasing income.

** This is a slight oversimplification. Self-employed persons pay 15.3%; everyone else pays half of that, with their employer paying the other half for them.

And now the real story

I thought Obama's speech was incredible.

If you're not one of the nearly 40 million people who watched it live (that's a stunning number; it's actually the highest ever for a political convention), do yourself a favor and watch it for yourself now.

The thing I love about Barack Obama is that he seems to understand that, while he's uniquely positioned to be the face of this movement--attractive, telegenic candidate, different at a glance from the hacks who've been destroying the country, brilliant orator with a background as a community organizer--it isn't actually about him. We cheer for Obama not to feed his ego and not because we think he'll solve everything by himself. We cheer for Obama because he's the face of a movement of millions of us who have had enough.

We want government to work for us, not just line rich people's pockets. We're sick of being fed shit sandwiches and told by the government and the media alike why it's good for us. And Obama laid out a vision last night, in front of 70,000 live listeners and 40 million on television, of what America could look like.

The argument that Obama is some kind of empty suit running on vagueries and his own personality has always been nonsense. Anyone who has been to www.barackobama.com is drowning in policy specifics. And anyone who watched Obama's speech last night could only conclude that Obama is trying to sell the country on his actual policy agenda. I suppose he's betting that people mean what they say when they tell pollsters they actually want liberal policies (like progressive taxation, environmental protection, affordable and universal health care, reproductive rights, etc.).

George W. Bush, by contrast, ran two campaigns in which he did everything he could to obscure his real agenda, and thus he had no mandate to enact it. Which is why in his second term, when people noticed his policies other than bombing the shit out of brown people (and noticed that that wasn't really working out in any case), everyone started hating him. They hadn't actually voted for gutting social security, using the full force of the government to keep a brain-dead woman alive despite the wishes of her family, and doing nothing about hurricanes. Or endless war, either. At least, they didn't think they had.

And that's what's different about Obama. He made the case last night that you should vote for him because his policies are the ones you believe in, while John McCain will just continue the ones you hate.

As Kevin Drum put it, if this works, "he'll not only win, he'll win with a public behind him that's actively sold on a genuinely liberal agenda. This is why conservatives have so far been apoplectic about his speech tonight: if he continues down this road, and wins, they know that he'll leave movement conservatism in tatters. He is, at least potentially, the most dangerous politician they've ever faced."

I believe. You can watch it for yourself.

Dan Quayle with breasts?

So McCain picked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. I guess it's actually not shocking he didn't pick someone obvious. Nobody much cared about McCain's running mate choice when everybody thought he was going to pick Mitt Romney or Tim Pawlenty. And we all knew he really couldn't pick Lieberman.

So basically he picked an obscure governor who, prior to getting elected governor of Alaska in 2006, was mayor of a town of 9000 people. He picked her because she claims to be a reformer (although that's apparently mostly bullshit--remember, George W. Bush ran as a "reformer with results" in 2000), and because her youth--she's three years younger than Barack Obama--he apparently hopes will offset his own age. And I suppose he decided he couldn't beat Obama with a two-old-white-guys ticket.

Basically McCain has apparently decided to chuck the "experience" argument entirely and try to out-"reform" and out-"change" the Democratic ticket. Good luck. (Palin also has zero foreign policy experience--on that score she really does make Barack Obama look like, well, Joe Biden.)

It's a desperate and weird gamble and I'm actually not particularly worried that it will work. It does change the dynamic of the coming Biden-Palin debate, though. Biden will mop the floor with her, but it won't matter. If Biden is really good (and that's why Barack picked him, after all), he'll beat Palin by demolishing John McCain.

The funniest thing about this one is that apparently, she delivers her home state of Alaska to the Republican column. Has it come to this? No Democrat has carried Alaska since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and McCain had to pick the governor of the place to be assured of winning it?

EDIT: Bonus. Palin says "nookyoolar" too. Does anyone besides me get the feeling that this selection might become a punchline very soon, and have the effect of making the Democratic ticket look serious and the Republican ticket look laughable and desperate?

It's not a hard question.

Define 'honor,' Senator McCain.

JM: Read it in my books.

Time: I've read your books.
JM: No, I'm not going to define it.

Time: But honor in politics?
JM: I defined it in five books. Read my books.

Going down to brass tacks, this is probably the result of the campaign (that John McCain does not speak for) having words with John McCain to start speaking for it. Thus, McCain takes no chances now, and is clearly irritated by that.

But how hard is it to define "honor"? If he really knew what it meant, and if he believed in it as more than a nice decorative ribbon atop his former Prisoner of War status, he would have no trouble defining it. The trouble is that his campaign has not taken an honorable stance as anyone could possibly see it, and so he knows that if he goes that route, he'll be trapped into categorizing his campaign's tone.

As the campaign creaks onward, John McCain is going to be more and more limited in his responses. No one on his side wants another "houses" fluff (which was ironically made because he probably felt he had to defer to his staff on everything). Thus, I'm sure McCain is going to become crankier and crankier as he's caught between what he wants to say and what he thinks his campaign wants him to say. He won't have the acuity to stay on message and speak off the cuff at the same time. I'll be very surprised if we don't see some minor meltdown at the debates, even if all the questions are framed in his favor.

The light at the end of the tunnel

I was driving earlier and I tuned in to Air America's live broadcast of the Democratic National Convention.

I was just in time to hear Hillary Clinton move that Barack Obama be declared the nominee by acclamation.

And Speaker Pelosi asked if anyone seconded the motion, and the crowd erupted like thunder.

And I found myself crying.

Before Trinity, there was the B Reactor

A few days ago, the Hanford B Reactor, near Richland, Washington, was designated a National Historic Landmark. The eventual goal is to turn the building into a museum; the reactor has been shut down and defueled for 40 years, and many areas, including the control room and the reactor front face, are decontaminated and safe for the public to view.

This was the world's first industrial-scale nuclear reactor. Built quickly and under heavy secrecy during World War II, the B Reactor and its associated processing plants produced the plutonium for the first atomic bomb test at the Trinity Site, and later for the "Fat Man" bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. Enrico Fermi himself oversaw its initial startup.

Understandably, the site's new status has provoked some dismay from letter writers, including one who felt "that designation honors the birthplace of the most devastating weapon of war ever created," and another who asked, "Is having unleashed the nuclear demon ... something about which we should boast?" This prompted me to write the following letter to the editor, which I thought I would also share here.

I read the two letters to the editor on Wednesday that expressed dismay about the Hanford B Reactor's new status as a national historic landmark. I thought I'd give a slightly different perspective.

Two years ago I had the privilege of seeing the B Reactor in person, thanks to getting a slot on one of the rare public tours of the Hanford Site. It was impressive, sobering, and thought-provoking. Standing there, I found it impossible to forget that what went on inside that hastily-constructed cinderblock building changed history. A new era dawned when the world's first atomic bomb, built with material produced by that reactor, was detonated. As a nation we may still be debating whether this was a step we should have taken, but we owe it to future generations to preserve the B Reactor Building as part of the context for that debate. It's an incredibly important part of history and it deserves its landmark status.

The dawn of the atomic age, and the Cold War that followed, have left very few public landmarks for people to look at and contemplate. I feel strongly that it's important to preserve what we can from that era -- not necessarily because we're proud of what transpired, but because those events changed the world.