South Dakota Politics

Time for a change

I have been posting on this blog since 2005 and running it for last several years. It has been a labor of love, but I have decided that it is a burden I can no longer afford. I need to divert more of my time to my scholarly pursuits.

I have established a new blog: Natural Right and Biology. Beginning immediately, that is where most of my blogging time will be spent. I invite all of my readers to check out the new blog and, if you are interested, join in the discussion. There will be political topics, to be sure; but the focus will be much narrower.

I won't close this one down just yet. I probably will post from time to time. I will try to interest others to take up the torch, but I am not optimistic about that. I am rather sad about this. I flatter myself and my SDP colleagues in believing that this has been a significant contribution to the local blogosphere. I am very grateful to those readers who have frequently participated.

Where we are now

If secession is a joke in the U.S. (and it is, even if it is a bad joke), it is something more serious in Spain. From Walter Russell Mead:

Exit polls from the regional elections in Catalonia show that pro-independence parties are winning a huge majority: up to 95 of the 135 seats in the regional assembly, according to analysis from the Financial Times. Worse, from Madrid's point of view, the radical pro-independence forces are doing unexpectedly well. The next Catalan government will now be convinced that it has a mandate to hold a referendum on independence that Madrid says is illegal.

I don't expect the pain in Spain to split the plain, but this is clearly a sign of the perils toward which fiscal irresponsibility is pushing the world.

It's clear what is pushing Spain into its worst constitutional crisis since the death of Franco: the colossal failure of the European currency union. European policy makers foisted a currency they did not understand on a continent that wasn't ready for it, and the result is what may be the single most expensive economic policy fiasco ever seen. With neo-Nazis on the march in Greece, the extreme right making gains in eastern Germany, European public opinion everywhere turning harsh and inward looking and now a looming secession crisis in Spain, it seems evident that the final bill for the euro won't just involve money.

What is happening virtually everywhere is a colossal failure of leadership. We might want to keep that in mind as we deal with our own fiscal crisis. From the WSJ:

For years, the government has gotten by without having to produce the kind of financial statements that are required of most significant for-profit and nonprofit enterprises. The U.S. Treasury "balance sheet" does list liabilities such as Treasury debt issued to the public, federal employee pensions, and post-retirement health benefits. But it does not include the unfunded liabilities of Medicare, Social Security and other outsized and very real obligations.

As a result, fiscal policy discussions generally focus on current-year budget deficits, the accumulated national debt, and the relationships between these two items and gross domestic product. We most often hear about the alarming $15.96 trillion national debt (more than 100% of GDP), and the 2012 budget deficit of $1.1 trillion (6.97% of GDP). As dangerous as those numbers are, they do not begin to tell the story of the federal government's true liabilities.

The actual liabilities of the federal government—including Social Security, Medicare, and federal employees' future retirement benefits—already exceed $86.8 trillion, or 550% of GDP. For the year ending Dec. 31, 2011, the annual accrued expense of Medicare and Social Security was $7 trillion. Nothing like that figure is used in calculating the deficit. In reality, the reported budget deficit is less than one-fifth of the more accurate figure.

Two things seem obvious from this. One is that millions of people are going to get a fraction of what they have been promised. The other is that the pressure to cushion that blow by taking more and more from the productive economy will only grow more severe as time goes on. Governments at the state and national level will bend under that pressure, and so cook the goose that lays the golden eggs. Welcome to the future.

Lincoln

The weight of historical attention bears down ponderously on the slavery question in the 1850's, secession and the military campaigns of the Civil War, and on Reconstruction. By contrast, the ratification of the Civil War Amendments (13-15) receives relatively little attention. It often seems as if these were mere consequences of the Northern victory, assumed to be uninteresting because inevitable.

However, even if they were inevitable (a very questionable assumption), they still had to be slogged through at the time. While the 14^th Amendment proved to be much livelier in constitutional law, the 13^th had by far the greatest impact. It ended slavery in the United States and thus erased both the terrible stain of that institution and the tension that had brought about our most terrible war.

Steven Spielberg's Lincoln focuses very narrowly on the President's strenuous efforts to push the 13^th Amendment through the House of Representatives. It is a pretty good story. The Amendment passed the Republican controlled Senate on April 8, 1864, but in June it failed to gather the necessary two thirds in the House. Lincoln pulled out all the stops, including bribing some Democrats with lucrative offices, to push the Amendment through in January of 1865. The film is silent about the efforts to assure ratification by three fourths of the state legislatures, though that is also an interesting tale. Nevada, I gather, was admitted just in time to ratify.

To create the requisite drama, Lincoln forcefully builds a case that the end of slavery was a tenuous thing as the war drew to a close. The Emancipation Proclamation was a war measure that might have ceases in force, perhaps under Court order, after the South surrendered. Sentiment in favor of abolition was in large part motivated by the view that it was necessary to end the war. Lincoln needed to end slavery before he ended the war, or else the South's peculiar and terrible institution might survive.

I am unconvinced. To be sure, a lot of the opposition to slavery and especially to its spread was motivated less by moral scruple and more by hostility to the spread of Blacks. Still, everyone understood that slavery was the single cause of the great national schism. I cannot believe that the Congress elected in 1964 would not have put an end to it.

That is a small if significant quibble with the film's historical assumptions. Otherwise, it tells a great and true story. The character of Lincoln rings true and bright throughout. He is always telling stories, sometimes to the dismay of his staff. He recalls his reading of Euclid, from whom he learned the talent for logical argument that is evident in his great speeches and the single, shining truth that if any two things are equal to a third, they are equal to each other. That is a mathematical version of the self-evident truth that all men are created equal.

Along with Lincoln the political theorist, it gives us Lincoln the master of men. We see a lot of Machiavellian tactics deployed to gather every last vote. Lincoln makes mutually irreconcilable promises but manages to keep the balls in the air just long enough to score the winning point. We also see several key figures such as Thaddeus Stevens forced to compromise laudable moral principles (the absolute moral equality of all human beings) in order to win as much equality as was practically possible. There is a lot of wisdom in that.

Lincoln is a magnificent piece of film making. One of its many strengths was superb casting. Daniel Day-Lewis is one of the finest actors in the business. His Lincoln rings true because the character's shrewd political genius always wears the mask of the clown. Lincoln bears personal and national tragedy on the shoulders of an unbreakable sense of humor. His constant recourse to humorous stories, even when they are not appreciated by the people in the room, is proof that his principles are rooted in an appreciation of real live human beings.

Sally Field seems to have been born to play Marry Todd Lincoln. Without her husband's love of life, she is slowly but inevitably being crushed by it. David Strathairn (William Seward) has a priceless voice and a very convincing bearing. Tommy Lee Jones gives us Thaddeus Stevens. If the historical Sevens didn't look and talk like this, that would rank among his failures. That is just a sample. One distraction as I watched was that I kept trying to remember where I'd seen this or that excellent actor before.

The real star of the show, however, was the dialogue and action. The former struck my ears as authentic and, better yet, delicious. Lincoln's exchanges, Steven's insults hurled at Democrats on the floor, these were beautiful and frequently enlightening. Meanwhile the action was perfect and rare. Instead of a chase scene, we get manipulations on the floor of Congress and three political operatives targeting and reeling in wobbly Democrats.

If you want a sanitized view of history, this film is not for you. If you have a taste for reality along with an appreciation of human virtue, this film will satisfy. Lincoln is a love poem to the American Republic.

Rubio & Obama on the Theological-Political Problem

Don't miss Daniel Engber at Slate. He has an excellent piece that exposes both the theological-political problem, as we readers of Spinoza like to call it, and the double standard under which Republicans labor. In an interview with GQ Magazine, Senator Marco Rubio fielded a deep question.

GQ: How old do you think the Earth is?

Marco Rubio: I'm not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that's a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I'm not a scientist. I don't think I'm qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to answer that. It's one of the great mysteries.

As Engber points Rubio was subject to some scathing comments for his answer, at Slate itself and at the New York Times. Not so the politician who said much the same thing in 2008.

Q: Senator, if one of your daughters asked you—and maybe they already have—"Daddy, did god really create the world in 6 days?," what would you say?

A: What I've said to them is that I believe that God created the universe and that the six days in the Bible may not be six days as we understand it … it may not be 24-hour days, and that's what I believe. I know there's always a debate between those who read the Bible literally and those who don't, and I think it's a legitimate debate within the Christian community of which I'm a part. My belief is that the story that the Bible tells about God creating this magnificent Earth on which we live—that is essentially true, that is fundamentally true. Now, whether it happened exactly as we might understand it reading the text of the Bible: That, I don't presume to know.

Engber parses and compares the two passages to reach the obvious conclusion:

To call Rubio a liar or a fool would be to call our nation's president the same, along with every other politician who might like to occupy the Oval Office. If a reporter asks a candidate to name the age of Earth, there's only one acceptable response: Well, you know, that's a complicated issue … and who am I to say?

As any reader of this blog knows, I believe in evolution and in Darwin's theory of natural selection. I have no doubt that the earth is billions of years old, though to state that it is precisely 4.54 billion years old as a fact, as Juliet Lapidos does at the Times, confuses data with scientific models.

I don't think Engber is right to say that there is only one [politically] acceptable response. Either Rubio or Obama might have said that the earth is billions of years old because that is settled science. While a large percentage of Americans do seem to hold a literalist view of creation (at least according to Gallup) there is no reason to think that they care very much whether their representatives hold the same view.

The responses of Rubio and Obama are nonetheless proper for a minor and a major reason. The minor one is that was no good reason in the contexts to offend the theological beliefs of large blocks of voters. The major one is that elected officials have no authority to pronounce the truth on such matters as this. Rubio is dead spot on to point out that this has nothing to do with any question that he has to be concerned with as a Senator.

I would go further than Engber to say that their responses were more philosophically defensible than the musings of Rubio's critics. Modern science makes certain fundamental assumptions about the Kosmos: that it is coherent and intelligible, that sensory data is a reliable indication of what is real, etc. These assumptions are perfectly reasonable and appropriate. Without them, science is impossible. They are hardly unquestionable.

Consider the following question: is it conceivable that God created the entire universe six days ago? All the stars in the heavens, along with my memory of my childhood, dinosaur fossils, and Susan Rice, have been in existence for just six twenty-four hour days. The answer is yes, it is conceivable. Science has no means of evaluating that possibility, given the assumption of an omnipotent (if somewhat mischievous) God. Anyone who genuine loves science, as I do, has to recognize the limits of its scope.

Mr. Obama and Mr. Rubio exercised a caution that is intellectually respectable, wise beyond their pay grade. As Engber shows, only the Republican suffers for it.

Holiday Viewing

It is not exactly Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, but do yourself a favor and watch the documentary The Big Uneasy about the failures of the Army Corps of Engineers that had much to do with the catastrophe that was Katrina.  The film was made by, of all people, Harry Shearer of Spinal Tap and The Simpsons fame.  But the film is highly educational and slightly infuriating.  If you do Netflix Watch Instantly it is there.  It is also available to Amazon Prime members.  If you are not a member of Amazon Prime you can watch the film for $3.99.  It is $4.99 on Itunes. 

Burma Save

President Obama's trip to Southeast Asia is interesting to anyone who is paying attention to geopolitics. What do Burma, Cambodia, and Thailand have in common? Proximity to China would be the one big thing.

The President was the first Chief of State to visit Burma. He wants to reward the brutal junta that rules that nation for moving in the direction of less brutal. It is likely that the concerns of Burma's strongmen over growing Chinese power and aggression mostly explain their decision to be better dictators. That allowed the President to combine our concern for human rights with our strategic interests.

Nothing on his tour is likely to stand out more than his visit with Aung San Suu Kyi. She is the face of democracy and human dignity in her country. She spent fifteen years under house arrest after the military nullified the 1990 election. She has paid her dues.

I wish that the President had not chosen to refer to the nation as "Myanmar". This use of the junta's invented name for the nation was not necessary. However, his visit with Suu Kyi is much more important. This was very well done, Mr. President.

Another Sign of the Apocalypse

Does it not seem like the hand of God that, just as several states are legalizing recreational marijuana, Hostess Twinkies are going out of production?

Rice Mill

Mr. Obama obviously understands how to win office. It is a bit disturbing to see how little he understands the government of which he is the head. He seems to think that there is something inappropriate when two Senators (John McCain and Lindsey Graham) threaten to block a hypothetical nomination. UN ambassador Susan Rice is thought to be a candidate to replace Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.

If Senator McCain and Senator Graham and others want to go after somebody, they should go after me.

It is not easy to imagine what the President means by "they should go after me." Is he suggesting a Teddy Roosevelt style round of fisticuffs?

In fact, when a Senator attempts to block a Presidential nomination because of a policy disagreement with the President, they are going after him. That is how the confirmation process works. That is what makes it a basic part of the system of checks and balances. The Senate can check the President precisely by holding up his nominations. Does this former law professor really not understand this, or is he merely contemptuous of the process?

Likewise, it is precisely the job of the Senate to review his nominations and reject any that they find wanting. Dana Milbank, no friend of conservatives or Republicans, thinks that there are good reasons why Rice is ill-fitted for the head post at State. From the WaPo:

Obama's over-the-top defense of Rice was surprising, particularly in contrast to the president's relative indifference in accepting the resignation of CIA chief David Petraeus, one of the most capable public servants. And it was disappointing, because McCain, even if wrong on the particulars, is right about Rice. She is ill-equipped to be the nation's top diplomat for reasons that have little to do with Libya.

Even in a town that rewards sharp elbows and brusque personalities, Rice has managed to make an impressive array of enemies — on Capitol Hill, in Foggy Bottom and abroad. Particularly in comparison with the other person often mentioned for the job, Sen. John Kerry, she can be a most undiplomatic diplomat, and there likely aren't enough Republican or Democratic votes in the Senate to confirm her.

Back when she was an assistant secretary of state during the Clinton administration, she appalled colleagues by flipping her middle finger at Richard Holbrooke during a meeting with senior staff at the State Department, according to witnesses. Colleagues talk of shouting matches and insults.

The President has an unfortunate tendency to think that his electoral victories mean that he and his people are above criticism. In fact, it is precisely the opposite. Taking office in a republic opens one up to criticism. The President's remark at his very rare press conference was way out of line. That may explain why he so rarely exposes himself at such a venue.

Noxious Numbskullery for Secession

When you lose a game or two at the card table, you generally have two choices. You can keep playing or gather up your chips and go home. If you decide on the latter, you can be a man about it and just admit that your skill or your luck played out. Or you can you can whine that the deck was stacked against you. When the game is politics in America, you have to face the fact that the game is going to go on. Trying to cash out is a fool's choice.

In recent presidential elections, states have become increasingly polarized. A Democratic candidate has a snowball's chance in El Paso of winning Texas or South Dakota. A Republican candidate will win Massachusetts only under the shade of flying pigs. Unfortunately for Republicans, a number of key states are leaning Democrat in a reliable sort of way. Republicans have lost the popular vote nationwide in five of the last six presidential contests.

It is no wonder, then, that some folks in Republican leaning states want to leave the table. A bunch of folks in something like twenty states have signed petitions on behalf to those states to secede from the Union. Is this something anyone should be concerned about? No.

It is unclear how many people actually signed the petitions. There is nothing to keep the insurgents from signing petitions in other states, so we may be looking at a group about as large as the total number of Wayne Newton fans. Heck, they may even be the Wayne Newton fans.

Our neo-secessionists may be fire breathers of old, but they are collectively incapable of warming a single ice fishing hut. They don't represent the Republican Party or the Tea Party movement, let alone the states wherein they really reside. They're crackpots.

It is nonetheless a good occasion to consider the old idea of secession. Several years ago I listened to a Civil War reenactor in Confederate garb who told the room that the Constitution guaranteed the rights of states to secede from the Union. I told him afterwards that there was no such thing in the founding document. He seemed confused. He was.

This Republic was ordained and established by We the People of the United States. It can only be dissolved by the same, and not by the people or government of any state or of any group of states. Any doubt about that proposition was settled when Lee surrendered to Grant.

Southerners like to consider themselves gentlemen and so they are on the whole. Secession in the 1860's was not a gentlemanly act. The South participated in an election and then refused to accept the outcome. That's like agreeing to accept the outcome of a coin toss and then going back on your word. I didn't vote for Barack Obama, like most of my fellow citizens in South Dakota. He won, fair and square. That means he has my consent to be President. Only a child could pretend otherwise.

Revenuers

Is our fiscal dilemma a spending problem or a revenue problem? The answer is obviously yes. The President has proposed raising revenues chiefly by allowing the Bush era tax cuts to expire only on the upper income brackets. By the estimates of the CBO and the Tax Policy Center, taxing the rich would net an additional $900 billion over ten years. That is well under the total deficit for any year since Obama took office. Additional revenue increases proposed by the President would bring the total "saved" to $1.6 trillion. That would erase the deficit for 2009 and about a quarter of the deficit for 2010. If our fiscal problem has a revenue solution, that isn't it.

What about allowing the Bush cuts to expire for all tax payers? The Christian Science Monitor has some interesting data that we might have considered during the recent election campaign.

The cost of extending all the tax cuts is $4.5 trillion over ten years. The cost of extending all but the top bracket cuts is $3.7 trillion over ten years. (Both costs are without associated interest costs.) In other words, allowing the upper brackets to expire saves only about $800 billion out of $4.5 trillion–or just 18 percent of the total cost. In other words, change the choice to extend the tax cuts to one extending just the "middle-class" tax cuts, and you only shave less than one fifth from the tax policy segments in the chart above, and policymakers would still be choosing to deviate quite substantially from the current-law baseline by extending and deficit-financing those tax cuts. Based on the (over-)dramatic, political mud-slinging over the two parties' tax policy positions, one would think there was a much bigger difference between extending the tax cuts "for the rich" and not.

The CSM piece is a comment on the CBO report from last August. Here is the CBO comment on what happens under current law (i.e. if the tax cuts and spending cuts are allowed to happen).

In CBO's current-law baseline, budget deficits are projected to continue to shrink for several years—to 2.4 percent of GDP in 2014 and 0.4 percent by 2018— before rising again to 0.9 percent by 2022. With deficits small relative to the size of the economy, debt held by the public is also projected to drop relative to GDP—from about 77 percent in 2014 to about 58 percent in 2022. Even with that decline, however, debt would represent a larger share of GDP in 2022 than in any year between 1955 and 2009.

So a $4.5 trillion tax increase still leaves us with a historically large public debt. For that to be manageable requires a lot of optimistic assumptions about what comes after 2012. However, the President is hardly proposing any such thing. His proposal differs from Bush policy only cosmetically. What happens if we keep the tax cuts largely intact?

Under the alternative fiscal scenario, deficits over the 2014–2022 period would be much higher than those projected in CBO's baseline, averaging about 5 percent of GDP rather than 1 percent. Revenues would remain below 19 percent of GDP throughout that period, and outlays would rise to more than 24 percent. Debt held by the public would climb to 90 percent of GDP by 2022— higher than at any time since shortly after World War II.

Should we allow all the Bush cuts to expire? I have said so before and I say so again. We are going to have to raise taxes. Allowing them all to expire immediately would be very painful in the short run. It might be the right thing to do, but we aren't going to do it. Raising the rates gradually seems like the only plausible policy. Either way, it is sheer fantasy to think that we can do it without bringing spending under control. Bear in mind that all of this is in the context of $16 trillion in federal debt. Sooner or later the bill is going to have to be paid.

Head, Meet Sand

There are many questions that arise from the Petraeus scandal.  Let me mention a few.  If Eric Holder knew about the FBI investigation this summer, why didn't the President of the United States know that his CIA director was under FBI investigation until two days before the election?  How is it possible that Eric Cantor found out before the president?  If the CIA and State Department knew within 24 hours that the attacks on Benghazi were terrorism, why didn't the president know it (as he claims) until over a week later?  Why is the president consistently left in the dark on these important matters? Who is getting fired over these inexcusable lapses?

Totally unrelated: I will be on South Dakota Focus on South Dakota Public Television tomorrow (Thursday) evening at 8:00pm Central discussing last week's election. 

The New York Times Tips Its Hand

Now that the election is over, the New York Times tips its hand.

Mr. Boehner did not rule out raising tax revenues altogether. But his talk of eventually lowering rates while closing unnamed loopholes ignores the fact that higher taxes for top earners are needed now to raise revenue for public investments that are vital to economic recovery. The most expedient and fairest way to do that is to allow the high-end Bush tax cuts to expire. Until the rich pay more, there will be no later consensus on spending cuts that eventually will be needed to curb long-term deficits.

The Times acknowledges that unspecified spending cuts will be needed "eventually" in order to curb long term deficits. Apparently the trillion dollars a year deficits we are running right now are no problem.

To take the Times seriously you would have to believe that eventually they will come around to accepting serious cuts in spending. Only a fool would believe that they will ever come around to that. Even if a reasonable person could believe it, he might want some indication of when it will happen.

The real kicker, however, is the first highlighted portion. A standard MSM description of the debt limit controversy goes this way: Democrats insist on spending cuts and tax increases; stubborn Republicans insist on spending cuts alone. In fact, Republicans oppose tax increases in part because they think that any increased revenue would only be used for more spending. The Times confirms this. Not only are they unwilling to accept genuine cuts in spending, they want to increase spending "on public investments that are vital to economic recovery".

There is a reason that the Senate has failed to pass a budget for three years in a row. A budget would have spell out the fiscal realities that the Senate Democrats and the Times wish desperately to ignore. Our Federal Debt stands above $16,000,000,000,000. The contribution of the interest on the debt is already larger than the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined. We can bring the troops home but we can't stop paying the interest on our debt. Eventually, it will squeeze out all other federal spending. Unfortunately, this is not many years down the road. The American Left is devoted to ignoring the problem. Eventually, we will all have to pay the price for that.

True Bond in Skyfall

After three films with Daniel Craig as James Bond, it feels as though we are finally getting back to the original formula. When Craig took over the role in Casino Royale, the series more or less rebooted. We see Bond earn his license to kill. This film presented us with a much more muscular and serious character than we have ever had before. The witty banter was there, but a hardness was added that was delicious for long time fans of the franchise. Quantum of Solace was a rushed job with a very weak plot, serving only to keep the interest going.

Skyfall might be the best executed Bond film in the entire catalog. It begins with a chase scene as always. Bond is hot on the heels of a stolen hard drive. He chases the thief and killer by car, motorcycle, and then across the top of a moving train. At the end of this exquisite action sequence, Bond is apparently shot of the top off the train by one of his own team. The point of all this is to give Bond the chance to die and return, an echo of the second finest Connery film: You Only Live Twice.

It is almost a sacrilege among 007 fans to suggest that any subsequent actor can surpass Sean Connery. I plead guilty. Much as I admire Connery's Bond, his character studiously avoided seriousness. Daniel Craig's is a serious interpretation of the primordial hero. He is loyal to Queen and Country, to be sure; but that loyalty is subservient to his heroic persona rather than the other way around. Bond is indispensable because he is loyal first and foremost to the idea of James Bond.

In Skyfall, we get, I think, the first hints of Bond's tragic past. This fits in nicely with the plot line, which builds on M's past. The incomparable Judi Dench took over the role of M, Bond's spymaster boss, in Golden Eye (1995). Prior to that, M was a minor part always played by some descent British character actor. Dench pushed out into real presence in the canon. In the current film, she is the center of the plot.

We also get a new reworking of a standard character, Q, the quartermaster techy. In the Connery films, Q was played by the marvelous Desmond Llewelyn. His Q was a throwback to the WWII era, the older guy who handed you a rifle and told you not to get it dirty when you were about to parachute into a swamp. The new Q (Ben Whishaw) is the younger guy who texts while asleep and tells you to return the equipment in working order. I have a suspicion Whishaw's casting is due to his resemblance to Benedict Cumberbatch, the star of PBS's Sherlock. When he hands Bond his new gun, a Walther PPK short, coded for your palm print so no one else can fire it, he remarks that it is not so much a random killing machine as a personal statement. Bond liked this Q just fine, and so do I.

Skyfall is not yet as good as a Bond film could be, but it is close. There is a surprising amount of just talking, with very good dialogue. The acting, the script, and the settings were very finely wrought. The score was luscious, with echoes of the great John Barry compositions that made the Connery films so memorable. The great Bond musical themes were used a bit sparingly for my tastes, but very effectively. Some choice Bond motifs were sprinkled in here in there, including the shot that always prefaced earlier films: Bond walking out and shooting into a circle that filled with blood. This movie went out of its way to promise more. I can't wait.

Despicable Krugman

If you think that the President should try to work with Republicans for the public good, as he himself has said that he intends to do, you'd be wrong. Or at least that is what one Paul Krugman thinks.

President Obama has to make a decision, almost immediately, about how to deal with continuing Republican obstruction. How far should he go in accommodating the G.O.P.'s demands?

My answer is, not far at all. Mr. Obama should hang tough, declaring himself willing, if necessary, to hold his ground even at the cost of letting his opponents inflict damage on a still-shaky economy. And this is definitely no time to negotiate a "grand bargain" on the budget that snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.

In saying this, I don't mean to minimize the very real economic dangers posed by the so-called fiscal cliff that is looming at the end of this year if the two parties can't reach a deal. Both the Bush-era tax cuts and the Obama administration's payroll tax cut are set to expire, even as automatic spending cuts in defense and elsewhere kick in thanks to the deal struck after the 2011 confrontation over the debt ceiling. And the looming combination of tax increases and spending cuts looks easily large enough to push America back into recession.

Nobody wants to see that happen. Yet it may happen all the same, and Mr. Obama has to be willing to let it happen if necessary.

Krugman is willing to see the United States plunged back into recession, with all the pain that that involves for people who aren't on the New York Times payroll, if that is what it takes to win another political victory over Republicans.

A reasonable person could think that Republicans are part of the problem. I consider myself such a person. Any solution to the fiscal dilemma facing the United States will include tax increases across the board. Republicans are adamantly opposed to any increase of tax rates. The same reasonable person would have to think that really significant spending reductions are a necessary part of the solution.

Consider that the "fiscal cliff" involves spending cuts of $1.2 trillion over ten years. That is less that the yearly deficits we have been running over President Obama's first term. We are on the road to fiscal disaster. Perhaps if we defer the necessary pain for a bit longer, economic growth will recover and make the problem easier to deal with. Still, the interest on the federal debt is almost as large as the calculated cost of the Bush era tax cuts and larger than the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined. We can and are winding down the wars, but we can't stop paying the interest. It will soon squeeze out all other federal spending.

Paul Krugman isn't the least bit interested in fiscal responsibility. He is very explicitly willing to sacrifice the American economy and grind up millions of ordinary people to the cause of humiliating Republicans. He is a despicable man. Let us fervently hope that the President does not share his view.

Republicans Lose Fair & Square. Now…

I watched the zombie apocalypse on my laptop from inside the South Dakota Public Radio booth Tuesday night. Keeping my seasoned commentator hat on did a lot to distract me. When I got back in town I went straight to see my Election Shaman. He split hours before I got there and left me with the hotel bill and bar tab.

After years of studying politics, the only thing I know for certain is winning feels good and losing feels very bad. To my readers who are happy today and to President Obama, I offer my sincere congratulations.

It is customary on these occasions to whine, make excuses, and launch accusations. I will not follow custom. The Republicans got beat fair and square. Yes, President Obama and his party had the press in the tank from the get go; however, that has long been true and it didn't stop the Republicans from a smashing victory two years ago, and it didn't stop George W. Bush from winning a second term.

Charles Krauthammer made the argument that Romney lost because he wasn't genuinely conservative enough. His evidence was that exit polls showed a slightly more conservative majority than in past years, at least regarding the size of government. However that may be, the only polls that count are the polls that count. It wasn't just Mitt Romney that lost, but a lot of conservative Senatorial candidates as well. Tuesday the Republicans took it on the chin.

President Obama won a majority by three tenths of one percent of the popular vote. That's a majority nonetheless. His popular vote margin was a hair over two percent. That's much smaller than the seven percent margin he enjoyed four years ago, which I think makes him the first President to be reelected with a diminished popular vote margin since FDR. Two percent is about the same as Bush in 2004, making it very small historically.

I don't believe that the Democrats won because they had a better ground game. Where was their ground game two years ago? I don't believe that Mitt Romney lost because he ran a poor campaign or because he was the wrong candidate. Those are infantile excuses.

There are two factors that determine the trajectory of elections. The direct factor is simply which way the voters swing. The national vote went one way in 2010 and another in 2012. Voters can swing both ways in the same state in the same election. North Dakota went for Romney by twenty points and gave the Senate seat to the Democrat Heidi Heitkamp by one point.

The indirect factor is reality. President Obama would probably have sailed to reelection if the US had enjoyed a typical economic recovery after the recent recession. What happens next if the economy slides back into recession in the next two years? Other realities are waiting in the wings. If you think that climate change is the crucial issue facing Americans and all mankind, you might notice that the President did not campaign on the issue. Ignoring the issue won't make it go away if indeed it presents a genuine existential threat to modern civilization.

If you think, as I do, that public debt is the genuine threat to the future of these United States, you might notice that this was not a major issue in the campaign. Ignoring the trillion dollar a year deficits won't make them go away either. The President frequently pays lip service to the problem but he has done nothing serious to address it. I predict that he will not suddenly become fiscally responsible now that he has "more flexibility."

If I am right, we will see deficits as large or larger each year that Obama remains in office. He will continue to produce budgets that no single Democrat in Congress will vote for. Harry Reid's majority (now two votes larger) will not produce budgets at all, as it has not done for the last three years. Our federal debt will increase from the sixteen trillion where it stands now to over twenty trillion when the President retires. Interest on the debt will begin to put a real squeeze on all other federal spending. In the meantime, unfunded obligations will put a similar squeeze on about half the states.

Fiscal reality will eventually have big political consequences. The Democratic Party is devoted to ignoring them for as long as possible. So far, it's working.

The Winner: Nate Silver?

Judging by the dour mood on Fox and their discussion of the exit polls, this is NOT going to be a late night.  Indeed, it does look like turnout was more like 2008 than all the conservative poll critics claimed.  Assuming exit polls are bascially correct.  The exit polls are sometimes wrong and tend to over estimate the Democratic electorate, so there is a thin reed of hope for Romney partisans.  So far, looking like an Obama night.

Update: I thought that Romney going to Pennsylvania was silly.  I thought it was more a sign of weakness than a sign of strength.  I was right.

Update 2: I guess the people of South Dakota REALLY don't want the legislature to get paid much for travel.  Very early the only ballot measures that seem likely to pass are the balanced budget amendment and cement fund amendment.  Referred law 16 solidly looking like a NO.

Update 3: Wisconsin is Obama's.  Looks the the Schaff 290 electoral vote scenario might have been too conservative.

Update 4: Ha, ha.  Robert Costa Tweets, "Looks like Senate stays Dem."  Really, ya think?  BTW, I am now watching Big Bang Theory.  It's funnier than Bob Beckel.

Update 5: This is how you know it's a crap night for Romney.  Polls have been closed in North Carolina for two hours and still there's no declared winner.

Update 6: Perhaps I should time stamp these.  8:36.  Is Matt "McGovern" underperforming?  In other news.  South Dakota goes big for Romney and Noem.  And New Hampshire for Obama.  The fat lady is humming "Flight of the Bumble Bee."

Update 7: If you ever wanted to know what a major pooch screw looks like, look at the GOP Senate candidates tonight.

Update 8:  You know, the Senate map looks good for Republicans in two years.  Perhaps they can nominate a gaggle of middle aged white guys who spout off a lot about rape.

Update 9: Fox calls Ohio for Obama.  And that just about does it.

Update 10: By my count (and not all votes are in as we approach midnight) the Democrats will leap to seven members of the South Dakota Senate and seventeen members of the House. 

My Election Shaman Calls It For Romney

Given all the weirdness in the polling and the who knows what it means effect of Hurricane Sandy, I have been worried about my Election Shaman. One more day and I was going to start checking bars, hospitals, and morgues. Not to worry. He showed up tonight tanned, rested, and ready. He was smoking a big Cuban (I didn't ask him where he got it).

ES shook his weathered bag and dumped the bones right out on my bamboo cutting board. He swears that they are made from the thigh bones of a Tammany Hall fixer who was crushed under the weight of fraudulent ballots. Anyway, he quickly pointed out a half-circle of stones in one corner of the spread. "Dat," said he, "is the arc of enthusiasm." I asked about what looked like a wavy line down center right. "Dis", he said, "is dee independents". After a long pause during which my inner ears began to itch, he finally said: "Romney." Pressed a bit more, he predicted an Electoral College win for Mitt of 315 to 223.

"Wait a minute", I objected; "aren't those Michael Barone's predictions?" My Shaman just smiled and said "dis Michael must be a very wise man." Okay, what about the Senate? "Not so bad a pouch screw as the Republicans deserve." I asked the Shaman if he could give me that in numbers. He said he could. I stared at him for a while and then asked for the numbers. "No change." And the House? "Republicans gain a few seats."

I am beginning to wonder what I pay this guy for. Oh, yeah, so I don't have to make predictions. Obviously, I hope my Shaman (and Michael Barone) is right. I think that is entirely possible. All the polling and analysis and wishful thinking come down to this one line from the CNN/ORC poll's note on methodology.

Among those likely voters, 41% described themselves as Democrats, 29% described themselves as Independents, and 30% described themselves as Republicans.

The CNN poll calls the election a tie. It is based on a sample of likely voters in which self-described Democrats outweigh Republicans by eleven percent. That is to say that CNN predicts a tie if Democrats increase their turnout advantage over 2008 by a third. This looks to me like utter nonsense. If Democrats really turnout is really a larger portion of the total than 2008, Obama will win in a landslide.

On the other hand, the PPP poll shows a five point lead for Obama in Ohio based on a Democratic advantage over Republicans of eight points. That is large enough to absorb a Romney win among independents.

Meanwhile, we have three polls with very large samples (Gallup, Pew, and Rasmussen) showing Republicans at parity or (Rasmussen) with a significant advantage. Here's John Nolte from Breitbart:

According to Twitter's invaluable NumbersMuncher, Rasmussen correctly predicted 2008 would be a D+7 election and incorrectly predicted 2010 would be D+3. (2010 was D+0, or even, so Rasmussen gave an edge to Democrats they didn't have.)

That would seem to me to be the bottom line. If the Democratic turnout advantage is under 5%, Romney wins the national popular vote. If Mitt wins the popular vote by more than a couple of percentage points, he wins Ohio and my Shaman is right about the Electoral College. If the Democratic advantage is what so many polls seem to find (or assume) then Obama gets four more years.

Putting my political scientist hat on for a bit, this is a very interesting election. We really don't know what is going to happen today. That is not a terrible thing. Let the wheel spin.

Prediction

Obama: 50%, 290

Romney: 48%, 248

Vikings: 6-10

Also, the Democrats will likely break even in the Senate and even have a shot at gaining one or two seats.  They are almost certain to gain Maine (with independent Angus King caucusing with Democrats), Indiana (a total pooch screw by Republicans) and also quite possibly Massachusetts.  Republicans are only likely to gain North Dakota and Nebraska.  Republicans might take Montana and (less likely) Wisconsin.  Republicans completely screwed up Missouri and are significantly performing under expectation in Florida and Ohio.  Also, they foolishly chose the idiot George Allen to lose another Senate race in Virginia.  Once again in places like Indiana and Missouri the Tea Party has hurt Republicans in Senate races as much as helping them.  Republicans really need to think hard about how they recruit for Senate seats and who they get to manage them. In the past two election cycles Republicans have pissed away at least 5 Senate seats by running "not ready for prime time" candidates.  

Noem: Not Gonna Get Out Dakota'd

Some may recall the story of George W. Bush and his lone run for the U.S. House of Representatives.  Running in a district centered in Midland, TX, Bush, who had just graduated from Harvard Business School, thought his family name would be enough.  But his opponent incessantly mocked Bush for his East Coast, Ivy League ties.  Bush lost.  Bush vowed that he'd never get out Texas'd again. 

This seems to be the main electoral strategy of Kristi Noem.  Over two elections we have seen that Noem is not going to get out South Dakota'd.  This election that has risen to nearly comic heights with the ridiculous ad attacking Matt Varilek because...he went to college overseas.  This web video comes at least close to celebrating being a rube over being educated.  I like the idea of being closely tied to ones place, but the line between devout localism and ignorant provincialism can be fine.

Noem seems to have little to offer as a candidate other than being "more South Dakota than thou."  As a challenger that isn't really a problem.  But cute ads and plaid shirts are not a subsitute for legislative achievement.  It is not enough that she shares the views and "values" of most South Dakotans.  She's not been elected to share our values, but to do something about them. 

This won't matter this year.  She's going to win.  But it is remarkable that a relatively poor candidate, Matt Varilek, is going to give Noem much more of a race than she counted on.  She'll probably be held to under 55%, which is a kind of moral victory for Varilek.  Unfortunately for Varilek, we call a thing a moral victory because in another more importance sense they are losses.  But someday Noem will face a quality challenger in an electoral year less favorable to her.  An incumbent will want to have more to offer than quaint stories about the farm. 

South Dakota Ballot

I think that the initiative and referendum process is a very bad idea. Like all the other states, South Dakota elects a governor and a state legislature. We expect them to do only three simple things:

1. provide generous services to the people of this state;
2. keep taxes very, very low; and
3. balance the state budget.

That looks a lot like my personal weight loss program: everything is on the table except dieting and exercise.

Giving the legislature an almost impossible task would make it too easy on them. So we also keep tying their hands by referendums and initiatives. There is one big problem and another bigger problem with this. The big problem is that we frequently use the state constitution to make policy. That is a little like trying to put the arrangement of furniture into a blueprint. A constitution should spell out the rules of governing; it should not be a means to fix legislative outcomes.

The bigger problem is that initiatives isolate a particular question from its effect on the rest of the laws and the budget. When the legislature decides to spend money on something, it has to face the fact that that money cannot be spent on something else. When the voters decide to spend money on a particular issue in an initiative, they are sheltered from that reality. This makes for irresponsible policy.

I find that these reflections make it a lot easier to decide how to vote on the various ballot issues. I apply them in the following analysis of this year's ballot.

Yes on Amendment M. The state constitution is not the place for restrictions on laws governing corporations. Since M removes such restrictions, yes is an easy call.

Yes on Amendment N. A five cents per mile constitutional restriction on travel reimbursement for legislatures (enacted in 1889!) is an absurdity. Again, this has no business being in the state constitution. We should remove the restriction.

Yes on Amendment O. I don't think that cement is as constitutional issue so I would rather see the business taken out of the state constitution. Amendment O replaces a dollar amount with a formula, which is at least a mild improvement.

No on Amendment P. A balanced budget is necessary for any government that cannot print money, and maybe for those that can. There is neither any need nor any use in stating the obvious in the state constitution.

So much for the alphabet issues. Now for the sexier, numerical referendums.

Yes on Referred Law 14. The governor and the legislature created a "Large Project Development Fund," which I suppose is intended to allow the Governor to encourage the development of large projects. I have no strong feelings about such a fund and neither do you. Or if you do, vote against the rascals who enacted it. Reversing the legislature's work shields them from your criticism and shields you from having to find out how your representative voted.

Referred Law 16. I am going to weasel out on this one. On the one hand, the legislative package that is referred to the voters here looks like a very big solution chasing a very small problem. On the other hand, anything that my South Dakota Magazine colleague Cory Heidelberger is so vehemently opposed to can't really be a bad idea. Much as I disapprove of the referendum process, it exists and I would vote against something I disliked as much as Cory dislikes this one. So I am taking the sub-courageous course of voting "present" on this one.

No on Initiated Measure 15. If you think that taxes should be raised and more money should be spent on education and Medicaid, I might agree with you. What both of us should do is talk to the people we send to Pierre and vote accordingly. Taxing and spending on such issues is something that should only be done with an eye to the state budget as a whole. That is what we pay our legislators to do. If we are going to bypass the legislature and create pools of money for specific purposes, why bother to fund a legislature at all?

We give our legislature an almost impossible task and yet they managed to accomplish it. South Dakota is a well-managed state, fiscally speaking. Let them do their job and then fire the rascals if you think they haven't done it well enough. Meanwhile, let's clean up the state constitution.

Yours Truly Live Tuesday Night on South Dakota Public Radio

I will be in the station in Vermillion beginning about 8pm.  You can listen in at KDSD-FM 90.9, or online: http://www.sdpb.org/radio/.