Neocorticalism and Its Weaknesses

[Blogger's note:  I went dark halfway through writing this.  Started it back in November, then got diverted into a self-imposed software project and lost interest for a while.  Not sure I'm back to blogging for real--we'll see.  No doubt you, my three readers, are incredibly excited!]

Just finished reading [well, last November] Ray Kurzweil's How to Create a Mind.  This has the usual Kurzweillian arguments about why all information technologies--including those associated with biology and neuroscience--grow at an exponential rate, irrespective of the actual technology base.  It extends his singularity books by going a bit deeper into how to build artificial cortical pattern recognizers, and makes the argument that a hierarchy of these modules pretty much constitutes the human mind and its consciousness.

Kurzweil references Jeff Hawkins's On Intelligence, one of my favorite books of all time.  Kurzweil takes issue with some of the details of Hawkins's model, but the two authors both agree on several central points:

• Both note the existence of a "cortical algorithm", where all areas of the neocortex work pretty much the same and project axons in pretty much the same way.  This means that patterns get recognized the same way everywhere, and project up to higher level pattern recognizers and down to excite, reinforce, or inhibit lower level patterns.
• Kurzweil thinks that consciousness is an emergent property of a big neocortex, while Hawkins thinks that consciousness is "what it feels like to have a cortex".
• Both of them spend a lot of time on input pattern recognition, but very little time on motor outputs.
• Both treat the thalamus and brain stem as I/O devices, with little to do with consciousness (although Kurzweil does note that the thalamus is essential to be conscious).
• Hawkins thinks that the secret sauce for complex cognition lies in the time-dependent behavior of cortical activation, where pattern #1 primes the downward links for pattern #2 to be activated if things go as the patterns expect them to in the immediate future.  Kurzweil is strangely silent on time-dependent behavior, which is weird, since speech recognition is so heavily time-biased.  I think he's glossing over some behavior of hidden Markov models in which I'm not expert.  He may also be slightly cagey about trade secrets.

I think that they're barking up the right tree with respect to the cortical algorithm, but they're both minimizing the importance of the older brain structures.  I have some trouble with this "neocorticalist" approach.  Here are my big objections:

• Neocorticalism can't really explain attention.  As I've said before, I think that attention is likely an incredibly ancient property and is intimately involved with consciousness.  I'm prepared to believe that human-style self-reflection and theory of mind might be new, emergent properties, but they can only emerge because of some repurposing of older mechanisms.
• Simple pattern matching doesn't get you very good motor performance.  I'm prepared to believe that the motor cortex is coordinating intentions and hifgh-level actions, but the whole business seems way too asynchronous to allow us to be catching balls or playing the piano.  The cerebellum is clearly involved, but I suspect that you need a way to make the neocortex semi-synchronous.  There's some evidence that the basal ganglia are involved at least in time perception; I'll bet we're going to discover that the same structures are "clocking" groups of neocortical patterns to coordinate activities in the motor cortex.
• One of the things that was intriguing about Hawkins's architecture is that it hinted that the learning process self-organized the cortical hierarchy so that novel or unlearned activities were first handled, somewhat hesitantly, at high levels, but the learning process pushed down the salient features into lower level learning, but no mechanism was described for how this happens.  Kurzweil pretty much ignored this, going so far as to posit some kind of central allocator of pattern recognizers.  There's something subtle going on here that pure neocorticalism can't capture.

Since this book was published, Kurweil has taken a high-level technologist position at Google, which has also bought, DNNresearch, Geoff Hinton's startup.  Deep learning, a term coined by Hinton, has been getting a lot of press recently.  It's pretty clear that Google has decided to pour money into this.  It's a problem that's amenable to implementation in cloud computing, so the fit is pretty good.

People implementing deep learning train each layer in a multi-layer network separately, using unsupervised feature detection.  ("Unsupervised" means that you don't tell the layer when it's done something right or wrong--you merely let it classify inputs as it sees fit.)  This still can't be quite what biological systems do, because they can figure out their own layering, which has to be imposed for deep learning.  My guess is that layering in humans is governed by chunks of the cortex that are genetically predisposed to accept axons from I/O-like areas of the thalamus and other parts of the brainstem.  They therefore learn to detect features associated with that kind of input and project out to a more amorphous set of regions, which can then combine multiple projections into novel features.

This still doesn't define a mechanism where layers compete with each other to identify features at the appropriate level of detail, but you can see how that might emerge with enough feedback between layers.

My guess is that we're going to discover that a huge amount of our cognition is dependent on a fairly arbitrary set of input regions mapping to another fairly arbitrary set of cross-regions, and so on.  But note that "arbitrary" doesn't mean that they're not genetically predetermined.  The stability of those mappings across most humans is what allows us to communicate with each other and what allows us to perceive most individuals as "sane".  One of the most interesting things about figuring out how all this hangs together is the possibility of producing entities that think radically differently from us but which still can extract insights about the universe that we're not optimized to perceive.

Things are going to move pretty quickly from here.  We aren't close to a strong AI using this kind of technology, but the Watson/Jeopardy thing shows that you can get an awful lot of interesting work out of something that you wouldn't necessarily want at your dinner party.

Laptop U

The New Yorker has a really excellent summary about taking massively open online courses (MOOCs) into higher ed, and what it will mean to the evolution of both elite and non-elite universities.  The key bit that I hadn't thought about:

“Imagine you’re at South Dakota State,” [Peter Burgard, a professor of German at Harvard] said, “and they’re cash-strapped, and they say, ‘Oh! There are these HarvardX courses. We’ll hire an adjunct for three thousand dollars a semester, and we’ll have the students watch this TV show.’ Their faculty is going to dwindle very quickly. Eventually, that dwindling is going to make it to larger and less poverty-stricken universities and colleges. The fewer positions are out there, the fewer Ph.D.s get hired. The fewer Ph.D.s that get hired—well, you can see where it goes. It will probably hurt less prestigious graduate schools first, but eventually it will make it to the top graduate schools. . . . If you have a smaller graduate program, you can be assured the deans will say, ‘First of all, half of our undergraduates are taking MOOCs. Second, you don’t have as many graduate students. You don’t need as many professors in your department of English, or your department of history, or your department of anthropology, or whatever.’ And every time the faculty shrinks, of course, there are fewer fields and subfields taught. And, when fewer fields and subfields are taught, bodies of knowledge are neglected and die. You can see how everything devolves from there.”

 There's always been a disconnect between MOOCs and basic research, one that I've never been able to resolve.  Since, I'm not really oriented that way, I hadn't thought about the dual problem that occurs in the humanities.

Of course, this implies that humanities teaching needs to be kept alive through constant research and reinterpretation.  I can buy this argument, because teaching stale, received wisdom is going to be so uninspiring to the teachers that the uninspiration will wear off on the students.  It's actually a nifty explanation for why modern humanities teaching gets so wacky:  When all the best re-interpretations have already been taken, you've got to wander out into two- and three-sigma territory to find something new.

...Or Maybe Romney Lost Because His Campaign Was Incompetent

This post on the goat rodeo that was Project ORCA might explain a lot.

By 2PM, I had completely given up. I finally got ahold of someone at around 1PM and I never heard back. From what I understand, the entire system crashed at around 4PM. I'm not sure if that's true, but it wouldn't surprise me. I decided to wait for my wife to get home from work to vote, which meant going very late (around 6:15PM). Here's the kicker, I never got a call to go out and vote. So, who the hell knows if that end of it was working either.

So, the end result was that 30,000+ of the most active and fired-up volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated when they could have been doing anything else to help. Like driving people to the polls, phone-banking, walking door-to-door, etc. We lost by fairly small margins in Florida, Virginia, Ohio and Colorado. If this had worked could it have closed the gap? I sure hope not for my sanity's sake.

The bitter irony of this entire endeavor was that a supposedly small government candidate gutted the local structure of GOTV efforts in favor of a centralized, faceless organization in a far off place (in this case, their Boston headquarters). Wrap your head around that.

Read the whole thing--this bite only gives you the vaguest flavor of what happened.

Modern presidential campaigns require many of the skills needed by an actual White House staff.  They require vision and strategy.  But the also require superb tactical execution and, newest and perhaps most important, a firm grasp on complex, automated systems design, testing, rollout, and execution.  Based on this description, the Romney campaign utterly failed the test.

I'd be much, much happier with a Romney presidency.  But this is the sort of thing that telegraphs that might have been really screwed up.

A key tenet of the Democratic catechism is that Democrats are smarter than Republicans, and therefore should have more power in governing.  The Project ORCA post-mortem doesn't sound like it's going to do anything to dissuade anybody from thinking that the Democrats are right.

Mitt Romney Lost Because of Abortion

The despondency, fear, and loathing in the GOP has begun, with a wide range of explanations for Romney's loss in what should have been a slam-dunk year against Obama.  So far, I've seen:

• The GOP will never win until they have the courage to nominate a conservative.
• The GOP will never win until they nominate a competent moderate and don't drag him down in the primaries.
• The GOP will never win until it fixes its core values to appeal to hispanics and women.
• The Obama campaign had an amazing secret sauce to get out the vote, and the GOP will be fine next time because they'll have the same secret sauce.
• We're no longer a center-right country, and conservatives need to concentrate on seizing the cultural levers of power.
• We're no longer a center-right country, so conservatives need to build themselves a parallel society next to the one that's ultimately going to fail.  (If you've got an hour and half to burn, listening to Bill Whittle grope his way toward something coherent on this topic is kind interesting.  I suspect that when he's done with this it won't sound quite as looney as it did in spots.)
• We're no longer a center-right country, and we're all gonna die.

Some of these are laughable.  Some of them are pretty close to the truth.  Some are... worth deeper consideration.  But I think the most plausible is that the Obama campaign not only had a secret sauce for getting out the vote, but they had a real issue on which to ladle the secret sauce.

The Obama campaign, with a little bit of mind-boggling stupidity from the Republicans, managed to scare women out of their minds, convincing them that Romney was unacceptable.  And they did it over abortion.

I have a wife, two daughters, and a son.  One of my daughters and my son are apolitical--they are, in effect, the dreaded low-information voters, but they don't vote.

My wife also didn't vote, but she's far from a low-information voter.  She's just decided that voting only encourages the bastards, and they're all equally bad.  Plus, we live in Texas.  Why bother, when you know what the result is?

My oldest daughter (she's 31) is well-informed and a regular voter.  She has the handicap of having a BFA from a California art college, so she's been exposed to the absolute worst that liberal academia could possibly throw at her.  However, she's also my daughter, so she's emerged as a relatively centrist, probably slightly left-of-center, voter.

She considered voting for Romney and liked a lot of his economic ideas.  But she ultimately decided that she couldn't vote for him because she was sure that he was going to destroy the reproductive rights infrastructure in the US.  All arguments to the contrary were lost on her.  Romney and the Republicans were just too dangerous even to consider voting for them.  According to her, all of her friends thought the same way.  My wife thought the same way; if she'd voted, she would have voted against Romney for this sole issue.

Now, this is admittedly the smallest sample possible.  And my daughter admittedly is part of the Austin artsy-musician-y community, which is pretty liberal.  But I have a hunch that Obama won the election because of people like her.

The abortion issue poisons all attempts the GOP will make to regain a working electoral majority.  Unmarried women won't vote for them.  Married women who remember the 60's won't vote for them.  Only married women who are happily building families will vote for them.  Since this is a shrinking demographic, the anti-abortion activists in the GOP will manage to lose election after election for their candidates.

I am pro-abortion.  I hate the term "pro-choice" because using it prevents a frank confrontation with the ugly truth about abortion:  It's a way to kill something that would otherwise turn into a human being.  When it comes to things like this, the individual has no "choice"; society gets to make laws that bind its citizens to certain courses of action.  I don't support a burglar's right to choose whether to rip me off; I'm anti-burglary.  I don't support a violent felon's right to choose whether to beat the crap out of me;  I'm anti-battery.  But I'm pro-abortion.

Why?

Before I can explain why, I have to make things worse.  See, I actually believe that a fertilized egg is alive and for all intents and purposes human.  Will all such fertilized eggs implant and start pregnancies?  No.  But hormonal contraception will guarantee that pretty close to 100% of any zygotes that would implant, don't, and die.  Will all pregnancies result in a live birth?  No; about one third of all pregnancies end in spontaneous miscarriage.  But abortion again guarantees that almost 100% of all viable pregnancies against which it is performed will end without a live birth.  (And the small fraction that don't--well, we'll get to that.)

A common "pro-choice" argument is that a blastula, or an embryo, or an early-to-mid-term fetus isn't human because it's not viable ex vivo.  That's certainly true, but a baby isn't viable ex vivo either, without its mother's care.  Yet (almost) all cultures consider babies to be human.  Another argument is that a fetus is something less than human because it lacks many uniquely human features and faculties.  But a baby lacks many of those faculties as well.  And a baby resembles an adult human about as much as a blastula resembles a baby.  Don't think so?  Try touching a baby's arms together above its head.  Babies are born as partially-grown heads with a minimum life-support system.  They don't look or act much like people.  We're awfully fond of them, for powerful evolutionary reasons, but the only thing they have in common with adult humans is a genotype.

So, given all of the above, how can I possibly be pro-abortion?

I'm pro-abortion because we as a society get to decide when the taking of human life is justifiable and when it's murder.  We can kill people in wars and celebrate the people who do so.  We can kill people in defense of ourselves or our families and society holds us blameless.  We execute humans that have done things so heinous that we as a society consider ourselves better off without their continued existence.  We almost always regret the taking of human life, even when justified, but we do it anyway, in some circumstances.

I consider early-term abortion to be justifiable homicide.

Sounds really bad, doesn't it?  And yet, I think I can support my argument, and further show that it's merely an attempt to put something that about half the people in the country support onto a semi-ethical foundation.

For fifty years now, ever since the technology became available, women have been able to control their fertility.  The ability to do this might not have resulted in breaking down the gender-specific roles we had in our culture.  We might, as a society, have decided that women should have remained homemakers in single-income families, even if those families had control over the number of children they had, including the ability to have none at all.  Indeed, there were plenty of arguments in the 70's and 80's to that very effect.  But those arguments failed.  We provided women largely equal opportunity in almost all aspects of modern life.  It dramatically improved our economic output, but it also made the two-earner family a requirement, because the economy adapted to the new economic power afforded to women.  We can't go back to a gender-segregated set of societal roles.  If we did, our economy would collapse.

An unwanted child is therefore now an economic disaster.  Not only does it affect the woman, who can't work effectively for a long period, it also affects her entire family.  A family living hand-to-mouth on two incomes can cease to be viable as the result of an extra child.  Loss of viability could mean dissolution of the family, inability to raise the existing children properly, homelessness, hopelessness, and who knows what other misery.


So the equality of women has led, irreversibly, to families with a lot less slack in their finances, and that in turn has led to the requirement that women be able to control their fertility.  That's largely achieved through contraception but when that fails, early-term abortion is a necessity.

Of course, women could just stop having sex, both in an out of wedlock, until they wanted children.  But again, we've crossed that bridge as a society and burned it behind us.  And let's be honest:  that was never really an option, was it?  Even before contraception, women had sex, sometimes with disastrous consequences.  But it's what human beings do.  Depriving half of the country to engage in an activity that makes almost everybody happier is a horrible idea.

But what of the unwanted child itself?  The "pro-life" (a term as deceptive as its opposite) argument is that the child's right to life trumps any amount of economic hardship for the family into which it is born.  That's a valid topic for debate, but I suggest that everybody who espouses that belief should spend some time with the chronically poor.  And there's nothing that will make a family chronically poor faster than having unwanted, unaffordable children.

Economically non-viable families produce socially non-viable children at an alarming rate.  Sure, lots of kids escape chronic poverty, but lots don't.  And those unlucky kids don't just grow up poor.  They grow up... stunted.  Stifled.  Hopeless.  And we're not just talking about the unwanted child here; that child's siblings suffer the same hardships, even though they're completely innocent of the action that dropped their family below the line.

Almost everybody, even the most ardently pro-life, believe that abortion is justifiable to save the life of the mother.  This makes sense:  if the mother dies, the fetus dies with her.  Better to sacrifice one life than two.  But why doesn't that argument apply to the family as a whole?  Where's the moral distinction?

More than anything else, that's why I believe that early-term abortion is justifiable homicide.  But let's not kid ourselves:  this is a bad thing, even if it's sometimes a necessary thing.

I don't think I'm going to change any minds among the pro-life faction here.  But let's return to the political now.  If for no other reason than that economy can't manage without it, abortion is going to continue.  The pro-life faction needs to understand this.  They're not going to win.

Even worse, though, the pro-lifers recently came close enough to succeeding that the other side, the political side that can't live without the cover of their "pro-choice" half-truth, had to consider the possibility that they might win.  This inevitably forces the pro-choicers to fight for every last inch of political ground.  No issue that even whiffs of "reproductive rights" can be ceded.  They'll mobilize every last resource to fight for the most repellent of practices, because they know that every time they lose a battle, the owners of the "pro-life" half-truth will advance, ready to conquer the next issue.  Neither side can back down.

And yet, I'll bet that an overwhelming majority of Americans would agree with the following:

• Partial-birth abortions are an obscenity.  Unless the life of the mother is threatened, there should never be an excuse for this practice.  
• If the baby from a medically necessary abortion is born alive, it needs to be treated as a baby.  That may mean that the mother has the right to make the agonizing choice to withhold medical care and watch her child struggle and die, or it may mean that we as a society are on the hook for endless care of a premature baby, if that's the mother's choice.  But we can't cross that line; if the child is born alive, it's born alive.
• Short of medical necessity, there is no excuse for an abortion later than the end of the first trimester.  If the mother is an idiot and doesn't know she's pregnant, too bad.  She can put the baby up for adoption after she's carried it to term.  If we're going to tolerate abortion at all, we have to treat it as acceptable only as a failure of contraception, and that demands that the mother take some responsibility for understanding what's going on with her body and making a prompt decision.
• Pregnant minor children are their parents' responsibility.  The parent decides what happens, just like with any other medical procedure.  If the parents decide that their daughter should carry a pregnancy to term, so be it.  After all, the baby will be their responsibility.  Withholding notification from parents is insane.

This looks like the best--possibly the only--compromise that's possible on this issue.  It's an important issue, even if it poisons every piece of political discourse that it touches.  Fundamentally, this is about what acts a society considers to be murder, and I can't think of a more important public policy topic.

But the social conservatives need to understand that abortion isn't going away.  The social and economic pressures to continue it are overwhelming.  Societies have the morals that they can afford, and our society can't afford the cost, both in economic and human terms, of unwanted children.  Until they understand this, and work out a firewall compromise like the one I've outlined above, they're going to continue to lose elections.  They got too close to succeeding in rolling back a set of laws whose existence most women depend upon, and they're never going to be given another chance to do so.

If they hold on to this, they will be politically annihilated, over and over again, until they stop.  And the net result will be a continued fraying of economic prosperity, liberty, and consensus culture.

The Joys of Unrequited Blogging

I noticed today that sometime in the last 24 hours I have exceeded 5000 all-time page views.

I've been writing my little screeds--550 of them now--into this blog now for a little more than five years.  5000 page views is a microscopic number for that amount of time, especially when you consider that the vast majority of those are robots or weird search-throughs.  I know that there are a handful of you out there who are actual readers, and maybe one or two that are regular readers.  Thanks for bearing with me.  You must find some of this stuff interesting or you wouldn't bother.  It makes a huge difference to know that I'm not always shouting into the void.

But, to be honest, I'd keep writing this even if there was nobody receiving.  I've always liked keeping up with the news and having an opinion about it.  I've found that you don't really know what your opinion is until you write it down.  Writing it down in a form that's fit for consumption by another human being gives me a little responsibility to be semi-clear, semi-coherent, and semi-civil.  All of those are nice personal qualities, deserving of periodic maintenance.

If you scroll back through my history, you'll find that my posting levels wax and wane, depending on what shiny object has currently attracted my attention.  Presidential campaigns tend to make me cranky, and I'll increase my output.  The result of presidential campaigns tends to make me depressed and post-averse for a while.  We'll see if that pattern holds up.  I'm not sure what would happen if somebody that I actually liked won.  Maybe one day I'll find out.  Hey, it could happen.

I post a three of four comments a week on other blogs.  No doubt the few of you who read this came to me through one of those.  I'm sure that the comments get more readers than the blog.  Maybe some day that will change.  Maybe not.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to run a successful blog.  I'm not sure I'd enjoy it.  I certainly don't desire it enough to market the blog, fool with search rankings, or write the inflammatory posts that seem necessary for the amateurs to be successful.  But it might be interesting if it just happened, but that's about as aspirational as I'm going to get.

So I'll just keep plugging away, if you don't mind--or even if you do mind.

Again, thanks.

Please Assume the "Brace" Position for Our Ride Over the Fiscal Cliff

In early September, I made another prediction on which I'd like to double down:

...Maybe the Republicans will suddenly decide to put the best interests of the nation ahead of political power games.  But the problem is that they honestly, truly believe that the endpoint of a successful second term for Obama results in national ruination.  Compared to that, a double-dip recession seems a small price to pay.  Furthermore, repeal of the middle-class tax cuts will mitigate the deficit caused by the recession, which will make the deficit hawks happy.  Bottom line:  the GOP is gonna play scorched-earth if Obama wins.

I don't think this is a good idea.  A double dip will put us way too close to a debt crisis for comfort.  But I'm not sure that the House GOP thinks that a debt crisis can be avoided any more.  Maybe they make the calculation that the deficit reductions from nuking the Bush tax cuts in toto are enough to stave off the debt crisis and give them the political whip hand.

Let's look at this a bit more closely:

1. Short of an encyclical by His Holiness, Father Grover, pontiff of the Church of No Tax Increases Ever, most House Republicans are on pretty firm ground refusing to vote for any replacement to the expired Bush tax cuts, while still getting to execute a huge tax increase that will ultimately remove a big chunk of the deficit.
2. Obama may offer to extend the Bush tax cuts again, but that has a certain Lucy-with-the-football-esque quality to it.  Better to get the pain out of the way early in Obama's second term so he gets blamed for the shambles, rather than getting pinned up against the next mid-term or presidential election.
3. There is no upside to the Republicans for a grand bargain unless it's a clear win for them.  That would involve, at the very least, genuine tax reform and a deal to soft-land the transfer payments crisis at some viable percentage of total outlays (60% would be my guess).  I think Obama's too arrogant to take that deal.  (Minor prediction:  We'll hear at least one of the phrases, "Elections have consequences" or "I won" from the President some time in the next 3 months.)
4. There is nothing but political upside for the GOP to doing nothing.  Things going to hell in a handbasket three months after Obama's reelection has a cause-and-effect association that will impress even the lowest of low information voters for a long time.  ("Long time" >= 4 years.)

In short, the only thing that saves us is if Obama is willing to take a big, yummy bite of Mr. Boehner's Famous Crap Sandwich.  ("Ya want dingleberries on that, Mr. President?" he asks with a big,--oh, what's that modifier?--grin.)  I'd love to believe that Obama has the character to understand his position and do the right thing, but I think we're way too close to his blind spot for him to exhibit the necessary self-awareness.

Oddly enough, tax reform could be Obama's salvation.  You can hide a huge tax increase under the guise of "reform" and nobody will be able to figure it out.  But it'll come at a price, one that will look oddly Romneyesque when the dust settles.  My proposal:

• Across-the-board rate reduction of 5% in exchange for capped deductions and a reversion to the 20% capital gains rate at incomes above $500K.  Similar corporate tax reform.  The package should bring in $1 trillion over 10 years.
• An additional $2 trillion out of Medicare and Social Security over 10 years.  The best solution would be to means-test both programs.  I don't think Obama can go for premium support after all the stupid things he said during the campaign, but he's gonna have to throw the GOP a bone that convinces them that he's not going to get the savings with price controls.
• A targeted set of reforms to ACA:  a reduction in IPAB's power and smoothing over the small business penalty for hiring the 50th employee would go a long way.
• From there, we're down to needing about an extra $1 trillion in cuts over 10 years.  This is within the zone of possible agreement between Obama and the GOP.

It's doable, but I have to say that the GOP has a massive strategic advantage going into this.

The Forecast: Moderate Gloom With Scattered Paranoia

Well, that was a bummer.

Over the past couple of months, I'd come to admire Mr. Romney immensely.  He ran an absolutely abysmal campaign up until October 1, and then suddenly got everything together.  He would have made a superb steward of the US executive branch.  Oh, well.

Now:  Did I call it, or what?

A boring presidential election is a ratings disaster.  It can't be allowed to happen.  So a Romney comeback is a financial imperative.

Furthermore, a Romney comeback is a damn good story.  Think of the drama as the Romney campaign reenergizes itself, retools its message, and claws its way back to within a whisker's breadth of its opponent.  It's the perfect third act.

It's also just the thing to show Obama at his pluckiest.  The beleaguered President, beset by a sea of troubles, slowly gains the upper hand over his rival against all odds, only to become complacent and have things almost slip away.  But at the last moment, he too rights his campaign, just in time to squeak out a win.

All is right with the world.  The media get the outcome they want, and their network executives get to take home their bonuses.

And now, for the paranoia:  If it weren't for Obama tanking the first debate, there would have been no drama to the race.  Obama would have coasted to at least a six point victory, and nobody would have watched the news for the crucial last month of the campaign.

So, if you were a media executive with access to the highest levels of the Obama campaign, and you could convince the President that the election was in the bag no matter what, do you think you could convince him to go limp for the first debate?

Nah.  Surely not. 

Right?

Intrade, Sunday Afternoon

Note that Obama, after rising substantially over the last couple of weeks, is now starting to tail off again:

Still not looking good, but you'd expect to be seeing things rising close to 100% if there were a real consensus yet.  A negative first derivative is a good thing.

UPDATE 11/07/12:  I'm retroactively nominating this post for this year's First Annual Radical Moderation Whistling in the Dark Award, for the most willful denial of reality written down this year.

Party Identification, Revisited

Nate Sliver is now contending, with fairly strong evidence, that the only way that Romney can win is if there is statistical bias.  By this he means a systematic sampling error, rather than some kind of partisan bias.

Today we also have an NBC/WSJ/Marist poll from Ohio showing Obama with a 51 to 45 lead.  (Full PDF here.)

All of this got me to thinking about the brouhaha back in September about party identification.

Back then, there were a whole bunch of Republican proxies raising questions about Democrats being oversampled in the polls (all rapidly southbound for Romney at the time).  The argument was that pollsters appeared to be filtering likely voters based on a party identification model that looked weird, given the GOP's strength in 2010 vs. 2008.

It was a bad argument, because party identification isn't used to filter likely voters.  However, party identification is a commonly asked question in presidential preference polls.  One would expect party ID to be somewhat correlated with presidential preference, but not completely.  As a general rule, party ID should be a lot less volatile than presidential preference.

This is where things get kinda strange.  Take, for example, the Marist poll above.  It found party ID to be 38% Democratic, 29% Republican, and 32% independent.  When you compare that to exit polling in Ohio in 2008 and 2010, here's what you get:

Party ID	2008 Exit Ohio	2010 Exit Ohio	11/03/12 Marist Ohio
Democrat	39	36	38
Republican	31	36	29
Independent	30	28	32

Obama won handily in 2008 and the Democrats made significant gains in the House and Senate, so a +8 spread for the Democrats sounded reasonable.  And, in 2010, note that the zero spread between the two parties indicated a sharp shift to the Republicans, as the election results confirmed.

But look at the Marist results for November 3 likely voters: you wind up with a spread of Democrats +9, even greater than that of 2008.  Now, I'm willing to believe that the GOP isn't as strong in Ohio as it was in 2010 but, given the state of the country and Romney's rapid (and dramatic!) rise following the debates, the GOP is almost certainly not doing worse than it did in 2008.  Something's wrong.

Now, I am not saying that the pollsters have done biased filtering for likely voters.  These people live and die on their professional reputations, and they're simply not going to risk going into the tank by applying any illegitimate filter criterion, let alone one with such a strong coefficient.

But there is something profoundly wrong with these numbers.  They don't make sense.  Why?

The only answer I can come up with is that there is indeed some sort of systematic sampling error at work.  Maybe it's a problem with the cell phone model.  Maybe it's just that the people who will actually answer a survey these days are very, very odd.  Maybe it's something more subtle.  But the party ID numbers don't pass the smell test, and that means the sampling is weird.

Given that I think that Nate Silver is correct, this is very good news for Romney.  Or at least not bad news.  Or... news.  My conclusions have a high standard error.

Benghazi

This is one of those issues where I find myself walking a narrow path between cynicism and naivete.  My inner cynic knows that all administrations lie about national security in general and war in particular, so I'm not surprised that the Obama Administration is spewing contradictory stories to sow confusion like an octopus squirts ink.

But my inner naif keeps telling me that the American people deserve a straightforward accounting before they vote.  (Well, before a lot of them vote.  Some of us have already pulled the trigger.)

So let's see if we can organize the giant mudslide of data into something vaguely coherent.

This much we seem to know:

1. A 16-man security team, after having its tour extended for four months, was pulled out of Libya on August 14.
2. There were at least two requests for enhanced security that went from State's regional security manager to his superiors.  Both were either ignored or denied.
3. The US consulate was attacked twice prior to the 9/11/12 attack, although one of the attacks was conducted by recently fired Libyan guards.  The British ambassador had also been attacked and the Brits had withdrawn their mission.
4. There was no spontaneous riot at the consulate.  The attackers moved directly on the consulate with small arms and at least RPGs.  By the time of the battle at the annex, they had a mortar crew in place.  We do not know if the attack was spontaneous in response to the rioting elsewhere, a pre-planned attack that was moved up to capitalize on the riots, or a planned attack that may have incited the riots elsewhere for greater impact.
5. There was a drone overhead throughout most of the attack.  The annex was feeding situation reports in real time back to at least the CIA.
6. Panetta says he was aware of the attack shortly after it began, but the intelligence was too poor to mount a rescue.
7. The President says that he directed has National Security team to "make sure we are securing our personnel and doing what we need to".
8. Fox News reports that the CIA annex asked for permission to go to the aid of the consulate and were told to stand down.  David Ignatius's reporting indicates that this command may have only lasted a half hour while the CIA checked with friendly militias.  These two reports are somewhat in conflict.
9. The same Fox News report indicates that after the battle for the annex began, repeated requests for military support were made to the CIA.  These requests was denied.  The CIA denies this.  The same report indicates that one of the men in the protective detail had painted targets from the roof of the annex with a ground laser designator.
10. On 9/12/12, Obama did indeed use the words "acts of terror" but if he was referring to the Benghazi attack, jeez, talk about burying the lede.  Read the transcript for yourself.
11. The official Presidential Daily Brief version of the attack still referred to protests over the film the day before Susan Rice went on the Sunday shows, so she may have been acting on the best official assessment she had.  Per this report, the CIA reassessed at just about the time Rice was floating the "protesting the film" story to anybody who'd put her on camera.
12. Jay Carney stated that the attack was in protest of the movie on 9/20/12, long after the PDB had been updated.  Obama's UN speech of 9/25/12 never mentioned terrorism but referred to the protests and the movie repeatedly.
13. Carter Ham's replacement as commander of AFRICOM was announced on 10/18/12.  Per Jennifer Griffin, this action had been planned for some time, contrary to speculation that he was relieved while attempting to send in a rescue.

This much we either suspect or can infer:

1. It's possible that the White House was unaware of the requests for extra security but, given the IED attack, the attack that destroyed one of the walls around the consulate, and the June attack on the British ambassador, it seems incredible (aka "unbelievable") that the White House didn't know that there was a problem.  They clearly didn't act.
2. It's possible that the CIA stovepiped the situational reports and didn't share them with the Pentagon, but it's inconceivable that they withheld them from the White House.  Given Panetta's comments, it's almost certain that DoD was looped in pretty early.
3. Several bloggers, most notably Blackfive,  commented that nobody paints a target with a GLD unless there's an air asset in the area, because the GLD is visible in night vision goggles and gives away your position.  This seems to contradict statements that the drones were unarmed and/or that no other armed air assets were in the area.  If that's true, then somebody told them to hold fire, which could only have come from the White House, the Pentagon, or General Ham, the AFRICOM commander.
4. While it's possible that Susan Rice didn't get the word, either deliberately or inadvertently, the White House must have known that there was more to this than a riot that got out of hand.  And there's no way that they kept Jay Carney in the dark on this without some ulterior motive.

There are some important outstanding questions:

1. Why were the security requests ignored?  Was there a diplomatic rationale?  Was there a political rationale (i.e. because extra security weakened the narrative of an acceptably orderly aftermath of the Arab Spring, or that organized Islamist militants were in decline)?
2. What was the nature of the attack in Benghazi? Was it pre-planned or extemporaneous to capitalize on the protests about the move?
3. Why did the Obama Administration muddy the waters so much after the attack?  Was it incompetence, political strategy, or something else?

And, finally, we can make some judgements:

1. The President has allowed a massive management failure to occur on his watch.  There is some sort of serious dysfunction between State, CIA, and DoD, both in escalating threat assessments to the President and in managing an emerging military situation.
2. The most charitable thing that can be said about the messaging in the aftermath of the attack is that the White House was hopelessly confused.  More likely, it knew it had a political liability on its hands and it muddied the waters as much as possible, while deliberately burying the truth in a bunch of untruths that could plausibly be interpreted as the "fog of war".
3. The President has been ignorant or at least incurious about how well his foreign policy narrative jibes with reality.  That disconnect has cost American lives and severely diminished American soft power.

Is this a disqualifying event for a second Obama term?  Not all by itself.  But it is a rather stunning sequence of situational misjudgement, risk-averse crisis management, and craven obfuscation.

Why "Investment" and "Nation Building at Home" Are Going to Fail

I feel like I'm beating a somewhat dead horse here--or perhaps stabbing it with an obsolete bayonet--but I'd like to reintroduce the chart that represents the single largest threat to our continued national existence.  I posted a slightly different version of it here, but I've relabeled some curves and added some trend lines to make things a bit more specific:

This is straight from White House statistics.  There are a lot of versions of this chart floating around, but most of them show payments to individuals, aka mandatory spending, aka entitlements, as a percentage of GDP.  Those are plenty alarming, but I think this one makes the case a bit more persuasively.

The American public will only put up with a certain level of taxation, so revenues are going to be capped at some relatively constant amount of GDP.  The real problem is what we spend those revenues on--what the outlays are.

This chart ought to scare the crap out of you.  Note that the linear regression here is pretty tight and, well, it's linear.  This shows payments to individuals rising at a pretty constant 0.77% per year.  Now obviously, this can't go one forever, because it's impossible to exceed 100% of total outlays.  But so far, there's very little sign of the curve going asymptotic.

What that means is that discretionary spending is being crowded out very rapidly.  So when Obama talks about making education a priority, or rebuilding infrastructure, or investing in basic research, most of which are essential, he might as well be shooting the breeze with his buds from the Choom Gang.  (Yes, double entendre intended.)

But he's right;  we do need all that "investment".  But he is so dead set on preserving the national entitlement culture that we simply can't do it.  Until we realize that we can't pay everybody enough money to make their lives totally secure and anxiety-free, we're merely swapping a bit of comfort today for decades of misery in the not-too-distant future.

Horses and Bayonets

Obama had a nice zinger in the foreign policy debate:

You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military's changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.

Nice, but stupid. And dangerous. Here's why:

It's lovely having ships that are vastly more capable than those of the past. And there's no doubt that a modern aircraft carrier can dominate the skies over a nice, hefty chunk of territory. And there's also equally no doubt that a modern missile sub can pretty much destroy half a continent. But power isn't the only criterion you're interested in. There are three other important factors.

First, Obama seems to think that ships don't get destroyed in wartime. An aircraft carrier is the biggest, fattest target ever to float, and a lot of creativity has gone into figuring out how to destroy it. That's why aircraft carriers sail in the middle of giant task forces, whose sole purpose is to protect the carrier. But the odds of losing a carrier in a full-up war are non-trivial. For that reason, you need redundancy, both in task force ships and in task forces themselves.

Second, highly capable ships are extremely expensive. Sometimes it's better to build cheaper, less capable ships, which can be moved around more flexibly.

Third, the most likely naval foe of the next 50 years is China. If they confront us, they're likely to do it everywhere, all at once. That means that we could face pressure from East Africa all the way to the US west coast. A carrier task force can control a chunk of sky and ocean maybe 750 miles in radius, but it sure can't control half the world simultaneously. Moving carriers around is slow and dangerous. You need enough task forces to meet the plausible threats.

It's simple to draw down the size of your navy by dropping out a carrier task force or two. But doing so allows your most likely enemy to put you in a serious hole with a couple of lucky hits, and then overwhelm your capabilities by causing trouble in a lot of places at once.

Obama seems to think that the navy is there to be impressive. He doesn't quite understand that it's only impressive if your adversaries think that it can fight a real war.

The Puppy-Dog Theory of American Power

Back during the Cold War, we in America viewed the Soviet Union as an expansionist power, determined to bring Communist revolution to the rest of the world, by force if necessary.  But we viewed ourselves as a defender of freedom and democracy--in short, we thought of ourselves as a conservative force.

This was nonsense.  The United States is the most successful revolutionary power in the history of the world.  We overthrew more regimes and wrought more massive social changes across the globe than the Soviets ever dreamed would be possible.  But we mostly did it by example, not by force.

American diplomacy is at various times astute, innocuous, short-sighted, or just plain feckless.  American military power also waxes and wanes, but for most of recent history even a weak American military is stronger than most of the rest of the world put together.  But the most effective tool in the US foreign policy arsenal is soft power.

When you allow American goods and services, American business, and most of all American ideas into your country, your country is going to change.  It's going to get more consumerist, which you will find very crass.  It's going to get more morally diverse, which you will hate, at least to begin with.  And it's going to get more democratic.  If you're a dictator or a totalitarian regime or a theocracy, the worst thing you can do is engage with American interests, because your people are going to get impatient with you.

At the end of the Cold War, the strategy of spending the Soviet military into oblivion was well thought out, but the thing that ultimately did the Soviet Union in was when its citizens learned about American consumer culture and wanted it for themselves.  The same thing happened in Southeast Asia, and China, and numerous South American countries.  India's economy was radically restructured to enormous benefit when the Indian people understood what American-style consumerism could bring.  Even nominally democratic countries in Western Europe became freer, more market-oriented, and more prosperous for embracing American ideas.  Other countries think we're rude and unsophisticated, naive and arrogant.  Maybe they're right.  But they're missing the point:  our secret sauce is so tasty that everybody eats it, even as they're complaining that it's just bland junk food.

Imagine America as an eager, happy, friendly puppy-dog.  The puppy is kind of annoying, but most people love puppies.  If you let the puppy jump into your lap, it's going to put its paws on your chest, it's going to get its face in your face, and it's going to lick you to DEATH.  That's American soft power.

Of course, lots of people who like dogs don't want to deal with the mess that the puppy will make their your laps.  But it's harder to refuse when the puppy's owner dotes over it and hands the puppy to you, all the while exclaiming how cute and cuddly it is.  That's what American diplomacy is for.

And the American military?  Oh, one final thing:  The puppy is a Doberman Pinscher.  It's very cute, but its mother is curled up on a doggy-bed about ten feet away.  She's a very well-trained Doberman and will only react if you're mean to the puppy.  If you toss the puppy out of your lap, the mother will growl.  If you make the puppy yelp, the mother is likely to get up and nip you on the leg.  But if you really hurt the puppy, the mother might just rip your throat out.  Then the puppy will have to go play with your kids.

But it's a really, really cute puppy.  Just let it lick you--you'll be friends for life!

What Romney Should Have Said About Libya

My esteem for Hillary Clinton's integrity went up several notches when she fell on her sword for the Obama Administration over the run-up to the Benghazi consulate attack.  Conventional wisdom seems to be that this pulled the teeth of any criticism of Obama on the security situation.  And indeed, Romney gave Obama a pass on this in the second debate and focused on the, er, "communication problems" he had with calling a terrorist attack a terrorist attack.

This led to Romney's lowest point in the debate, with the prez summoning much outrage and then getting an assist from the Candy Crowley.  Coming right at the end of the debate, it was a heavy hit against Romney.

What he should have said was this:

I was a business management consultant for much of my life in the private sector, so I know what a well-run organization looks like.  The leader of an effective organization fosters a culture where subordinates are trusted run their departments, but where serious problems are identified and communicated promptly up to the leadership.

The United States government is like any other organization, and President Obama is currently its leader.  The warnings coming from Benghazi were clearly a serious problem.  If they weren't communicated up to the White House national security staff, and then on to the President, then that is certainly evidence of a dysfunctional organization.  There's only one person responsible for dysfunction in an organization, and that is its leader.

It's not surprising that President Obama doesn't know how to foster a healthy organizational culture; after all, his career in politics has given him no experience in doing so.  But that doesn't change the fact that when an emergency arose, his organization failed to respond correctly to it.  We need a leader with management skills suited to running a serious government.  I am that leader; President Obama is not.

Take that, l'esprit d'escalier!

Lara Logan's Speech

Just so we all remember what we're up against:

If you haven't seen the 60 Minutes segment mentioned in her speech, a copy of it is here.  This is important.

Architecture and Implementation, Strategy and Tactics

Before I retired, I was a software architect.  It's a strange job.  Software architects typically don't code (at least in big companies); instead, they sit the intersection between marketing, engineering, and project management, and attempt to describe how a product should fit into overall corporate strategy, and how it should be constructed so that it's easy to build, easy to maintain, easy to use in conjunction with other products, and easy to extend.  A good architect can explain to the engineers why they're building something, while only sketching out the roughest outline of how to build it.  Good products can happen without architects; indeed, the most innovative--and disruptive--products usually happen without architects.  But a lot more bad products happen without architects.   When you're engaged in a major evolution of a huge, complex product line, good architecture provides a road map for implementation, which can save millions of dollars in misguided development.

Architecture is to implementation what strategy is to tactics.  A good strategist has a gift for knowing what it is that a government--or a campaign--really needs to accomplish, and can suggest the broad outline for how to achieve that goal.  It's then up to the tacticians and the troops actually to accomplish it.

The Romney tax plan is an architecture.  Romney steadfastly refuses to come up with specifics for the tax expenditure cuts because he knows that an architect that dabbles in implementation over-constrains the final outcome, which usually prevents the best implementations from emerging.  (Mind you, the "best implementation" of a piece of legislation is almost an oxymoron, but that's often because the problem is already massively over-constrained by the various legislators' pet peeves and favors they owe their supporters.)

It is completely legitimate to ask, "Can this architecture be implemented?"  We have a variety of studies that have argued that the answer to that question is "no" and another set arguing "yes".  My impression is that the TPC study, the most famous of the "no" variety, has managed to generate a bad answer by exactly the kind of over-constraint that Romney has sought to avoid.  I'm pretty sure that Romney's architecture is valid, although maybe with a 15% tax cut instead of 20%, and maybe with some investment tax expenditures on the table.  Romney's not going to say that, for the same reason that he's not going to propose any of the details about cuts.

The tax plan may be good architecture, but I'm not sure it's good strategy.  It's opened his campaign up to charges of vagueness that have real traction.  It's further opened it up to charges that he's being disingenuous.  This looks like a fundamental tradeoff--Romney wants to get elected, but he wants to get elected to do something, so he has to preserve his ability to act in the event he gets to be President.

But let's look at another example of strategy:  the Obama-Biden approach to the debates.  I think that the Obama campaign's over-arching strategic assumption going into the debates was that all they needed to do was make Romney and Ryan look stupid.  This was a fundamental mistake because neither Romney nor Ryan are stupid.  The fact that Obama and his team thought that they were is a colossal misjudgement, one that many voters quite rightly may decide disqualifies them for office.

Even worse, after being presented with evidence to the contrary in the first debate, the campaign doubled down on the "they're stupid" strategy and had Biden attempt to bully Ryan into submission.  But, while Biden landed a couple of solid hits to Ryan, Biden's contempt for Ryan, whether manufactured or real, came through so plainly that the content of the debate, which might have given Biden a slight edge, became irrelevant.  Again, the Obama campaign made a fundamental strategic mistake, compounded by poor execution by Biden.

I'll make a prediction:  Obama's performance in the next debate will be much more aggressive, but his strategy won't change.  The idea that his opponents are stupid and/or unworthy is so deeply ingrained in his personality that it's incomprehensible to him that a simple demonstration of contempt won't be enough to carry the day.  The next debate will be a draw, but the audience's greatest takeaway will be what Obama thinks of Romney, rather than what he thinks of his own policies.

The failed debate strategy might be forgiven if it weren't part of a pattern of consistent strategic miscalculation that pervades Obama's entire term:

• The diplomatic "reset" strategy only succeeded in convincing both our friends and our enemies that the US would be reluctant to act in the face of any aggression.
• Obama decided to expend all of his domestic political capital on a health care law that nobody can understand.
• Obama decided that there would be no consequences to booting Iraq Status of Forces Agreement.
• Surging troops into Afghanistan while simultaneously setting a rigid timetable for their withdrawal has allowed the Taliban to adopt a hit-and-run strategy as they run the clock out.
• Finally, Obama has adopted a strategy of encouraging legislative gridlock and blaming the Republicans for it, based on the assumption that he can get anything through Congress once he's been reelected.   We'll see whether this one worked in about a month.

Obama's strategic deficiencies might be partly forgiven--as Clinton's were--if he were a good political tactician, deferring to his staff for the strategy while concentrating on the tasks of executing on legislation and selling it to the American public.  But he's not very good at that, either.

We elect presidents for their ability to think strategically.  Evidence of consistently poor strategy should always be a disqualifier for office.

On Rediscovering Partisan Rage

I have to admit that this cycle's presidential campaign has filled me with something close to despair.  It's not the divisiveness--divisiveness is a key ingredient for healthy debate.  It's not the gratuitous nastiness, although that's certainly extremely unpleasant.  Ultimately, it's the tired, mindless, I-must-never-deviate-from-the-talking-points back-and-forth between pundits from either camp A or camp B that has caused me pretty much to stop watching cable news, or TV news in general.  And the internet is hardly better.  There are a huge number of sites that I avoid simply because I know in advance exactly what they're going to say, and that any headline that looks like it might contain new content will always prove to have an utterly specious argument.

I voted against McCain in '08 and I don't regret it.  But I've never been very happy with Obama.  He is, fundamentally, a big-government, anti-business politician who doesn't understand the proper ratio of collective action to redistribution.  And, I have to say:  I don't like him.  He's arrogant, condescending, inflexible, and dismissive to the point of intolerance of any idea or person that challenges him.  It makes him a lousy negotiator and a lousy leader.  No doubt my judgement is the result of a deep-seated racism that I didn't know I harbored secretly.

For all of these reasons, and because, if I'm forced to take sides, I'm a moderate conservative, I was pretty excited about Romney to begin with.  I became noticeably less excited after interminable debates with the Six Dwarves forced him to morph into the worst possible version of himself.  I then gradually subsided into apathetic torpor as he ran a surprisingly ham-handed campaign.  Still, because I am forced to take sides, I had more-or-less decided to vote against Obama, while holding out a faint hope that Romney would do something to make me a bit more enthusiastic.

I have to admit that I had a sort of daydream where Romney came out in the first debate and simply annihilated Obama.  But it was a daydream similar to the one where I find a group of dedicated scientists and engineers working on an uncharted tropical island to build a starship to contact the alien civilization they'd secretly discovered in the Alpha Centauri system five years ago.  Very cool, but kinda long odds.

Then Romney came out in the first debate and simply annihilated Obama.

I've always liked the architecture of Romney's tax plan.  Its goal is to provide preferential treatment to small and medium-sized businesses, which will benefit from lower marginal rates disproportionately, because they don't have a huge number of deductions that they can take, nor do they have a lot of capital gains.  Couple that with the possible simplification of the tax code (it never really works out, does it?) and Romney's commitment to keep everything revenue neutral, and it looked like a winner to me.

The Tax Policy Center analysis worried me a bit, but it only looks bad because Brown and Looney rule out fiddling with capital gains or dividend tax expenditures and statically score the plan.  I'm convinced that there's wiggle-room in Romney's position to do the fairly small adjustments that would be needed to maintain revenue neutrality while keeping progressivity the same as the current code.  There are a lot of different ways to do this, as I discussed here.

The Obama people have been parading the "5 trillion dollar tax cut to benefit the rich" meme around on the stump for months.  It's the most egregious of strawmen, since it ignores half of Romney's plan (which Romney has described consistently for some time now).  But what the hell?  It's the campaign.  Eventually the truth will out on stuff like this.

And sure enough, Romney slapped Obama down multiple times on this in the debate.  This ultimately devolved into an "Is not! Is so!" argument.  But at the end of the debate, Romney had told Obama to his (slightly averted) face that Obama's description of the plan was a strawman and had clearly described the constraints of the plan's architecture (revenue neutrality, no revenue loss from the rich, offset lower marginal rates with reduced tax expenditures) and the rationale for doing this (stimulate small business).  He answered every single one of Obama's objections.

Now, it's a perfectly reasonable argument to accuse Romney of making a plan up that he has no intention of implementing, and I fully expected Obama to do that.  What I didn't expect, because it had been so thoroughly rebutted in the debate, to such devastating effect, was Obama to go back to the "5 trillion dollar tax cut for the rich."  Yet, in his Madison, WI rally yesterday, we have this:

Now, some of you may have heard, last night we had our first debate. (Applause.) And I just flew in from Denver, and I was telling folks there, when I got on the stage, I met this very spirited fellow who claimed to be Mitt Romney. (Laughter.) But I know it couldn’t have been Mitt Romney -- because the real Mitt Romney has been running around the country for the last year promising $5 trillion in tax cuts that favor the wealthy. And yet, the fellow on the stage last night -- who looked like Mitt Romney -- (laughter) -- said he did not know anything about that. It was all news to him.

I'm trying real hard not to be naive here.  But the news cycle yesterday was dominated by one idea and one idea only, clearly fed right out of the Obama campaign's talking points:  Obama lost the debate because Romney is a liar.  It is such a mindless defense of Obama's abysmal performance, and it has been perpetuated so glibly, that I have experienced something that I try very hard to avoid in thinking about in politics.

I have become enraged.

Before this, I had to respect the Obama campaign for driving--and largely winning--the argument, because the Romney campaign simply couldn't get their thumbs out to defend themselves.  But when Romney successfully defends most of his platform ten feet away from the President, I insist that the President answer with something better than, "La la la la la, not listening!"

This man, our President, is either intellectually vacuous or morally bankrupt.  The possession of either trait disqualifies him as a suitable candidate for the office of President of the United States.

There's the Drama

Romney had a very good night tonight.  Per polling data, he came out on top by more than 2-to-1.

But it wasn't that good a night.  If you believe the talking heads--even the pro-Obama ones--Romney's performance was a game-changer.  That may be, but it's awfully convenient that Romney is now in dramatically better shape.

Golly, I wonder what this will do for ratings?

Redefining Redistribution

The various recent sound bites from Obama on "redistribution" have been rebutted in an odd way through various Democratic talking points.

In the rebutting of the 1998 Loyola speech, Democrats have noted that the Republicans' release of the sound bite is deceptively edited, and that immediately after Obama discusses his belief in redistribution, he talks about market-based solutions.  (Clip, transcript, and gratuitous commentary here.) 

But it's pretty clear from the clip that Obama is talking about markete-based solutions to further redistributive ends. 

The next avenue of rebuttal has been more along the lines of, "Redistribution is just what government does."  An example of this is Deval Patrick's argument on Meet the Press yesterday:

We-- it seems to me the first question ought to be what is it we want government to do and not do.  And then what’s the sensible way and fair way to pay for that.  I really believe in this no-- notion just as the president does of common cause and common destiny that we all have a stake in educating our kids.  We all have a stake in ensuring that this country is well defended.  We all have a stake in investing in the infrastructure that creates a platform for economic growth and-- and opportunity and indeed we all have a stake in the American dream.

Notice that entitlements don't get mentioned explicitly anywhere in Patrick's argument.  And that's where things get kinda sneaky.

For argument's sake, let's define two terms to describe the totality of what government does with its revenues:

• Collective action involves the transfer of tax monies to activities that benefit the public in general, rather than specific individuals.  Defense, law enforcement, infrastructure, education, and research subsidies would all fall into this category.
• Redistribution involves the transfer of tax monies to individuals for purposes of increasing their wealth beyond what they can make as free agents in various markets.  Social security, Medicare, various welfare programs, EITC, GI Bill programs, and various kinds of individual loan guarantees all fall into this category.

Now, I've obviously defined the terms to make my argument--feel free to call them "X" and "Y" if that'll make you more comfortable.  But it's misleading at best to define "redistribution" as "the transfer of tax monies to any end that the government sees fit."

I'd be a bit surprised to find any Republicans that would object to the use of of tax monies for many purposes of collective action.  No doubt there'd be brisk debate about whether individual investments were cost-effective or not, but in general everybody agrees that collective action is a legitimate government activity.

Similarly, I don't think you'll find more than a tiny fraction of Republicans--even Mitt "47 percent" Romney--who disagree with government being responsible for some amount of redistribution.  But almost all Republicans and conservatives are alarmed by the growth of redistribution at the expense of collective action.

Let's go to a table on the White House's web site, "Table 3.1--Outlays by Superfunction and Function: 1940-2017" (Excel).  This lists the percentage of outlays for various government functions.  (Weasel words:  this is federal spending--things might look somewhat different if you included state and local spending, but I'll bet not much different.)  I rolled up the percentages of the the various superfunctions as follows:

• Collective action:  national defense, physical resources, net interest, other functions, and undistributed offsetting receipts
• Redistribution: human resources (which contains education, which I'd label as collective action if I were more diligent, but it's a tiny amount)

Here's the graph from 1940 to 2017:

I think this adequately explains conservative concern over redistribution.  Conservatives would love to be able to spend more on infrastructure and research and law enforcement and, yes, defense.  But it's simply not possible if the redistribution trend continues.

A good society should give the poor a hand up, and it's lovely to care for your sick and elderly, but ultimately societies have the morals that they can afford.  If we can't flatten out the redistribution trend, the government will ultimately collapse.  Then there will be no redistribution at all.

An Obama Foreign Policy Report Card

We're going to grade on a curve here, because the world is a strange, chaotic place, and there are genuine limits to foreign policy, especially diplomacy.  Foreign policy is about subtlety; a minor nuance can be the difference between success and failure.  Often the right strategies are obvious, but how you execute them makes all the difference.  The other key to successful diplomacy is never to take your eye off the ball; sustained action is essential, even when there's no crisis.

Obama came into office with about the usual amount of naivete.  The only three post-war presidents that weren't naive were the ones that had done serious thinking on foreign policy before they took office:  Eisenhower, Reagan, and H.W. Bush.  So Obama gets a partial pass on making some rookie mistakes.  In general, I'd say he made about the usual number of forced errors and a somewhat higher number of unforced errors.

Loosely grouped, from the best to the worst, let's review:

Full-Blown Success

Libyan Arab spring.  I think this is Obama's one crowning achievement.  Far from leading from behind, he capitalized on French anxiety about its North African interests to forge an effective alliance.  Escalating from a no-fly zone to a ground support mission--without putting boots on the ground and pissing off the whole Arab world--showed a strategic flexibility that was surprising, given all the things I'll cite below.

Bin Laden mission.  Possibly a slam-dunk (because the political fallout of chickening out would have been vastly worse domestically than the fallout from trying and failing), but Obama gets credit for doing it.  And the burial at sea (or otherwise undisclosed location) was pure genius.

The Cairo speech and international approval.  No question about it:  Obama's conciliatory tone and light touch has made the world feel better about the US.  Note that "feeling better about" and "respecting" are two different things, but all things being equal, the world at large has a better opinion of us, which gives us a little wiggle room when we have to be bad-asses.

The drone campaign.  There's been some criticism of this, both from an international law perspective and from the point of view that we're depleting intelligence sources by not capturing more of these guys.  But, in a world that's very tired of American boots on the ground, the drones are cheap and effective.  As for the international legality, I think the Bush Administration put in place a decent framework for the waging war on non-state actors and Obama had the good sense to quietly affirm and consolidate it:  People who conduct military operations against the United States or its interests can expect the US to conduct military operations against them, whether they're state actors, non-state actors, or even American citizens acting from offshore.

Western Pacific alliances.  The round of diplomacy that resulted in a tiny Marine force stationed in Australia was timed nicely to capitalize on China overplaying its hand in the Western Pacific and Southeast Asia.  It was a low-cost gesture that made all of China's neighbors a bit more confident in the US commitment to containing any Chinese expansionary tendencies.

Free trade agreements.  Obama gets props for following through on the Bush-negotiated free trade agreements with Columbia, Panama, and South Korea.  These were being held hostage by the Democratic Senate at the end of the Bush Administration, and Obama gets credit for providing a (rare) modicum of adult supervision after he was elected.

Did As Well As Could Be Expected 

The Arab Spring in general.  As a supporter of the Bush Doctrine, I understood that any trend toward democracy in the Arab world was going to be messy, unsatisfying at best and fraught with peril at worst.  It was, it is, and it will remain so for a good decade or so.  Obama could have done a bit more in the aftermath to advise the liberals in Egypt (which is really the only place we care about) against the Islamists, but the risk of getting caught doing it would have greatly outweighed the benefits of possible success.  Like it or not, the Islamic world is going to move from autocracy to, if not outright theocracy, at least a government where the lines between the political and the religious are really damn blurry.  In thirty years, we'll see if it's possible to transition to liberal democracy.

China.  It's impossible to tell at this juncture whether Obama did well or poorly, but nothing overtly bad happened on his watch.  He hasn't screwed up on economic relations and he's been adroit at capitalizing on Chinese missteps in the Western Pacific and Africa.  So far so good.


North Korea.  What can you say?  It's a nightmare, but it's mostly a nightmare for the North Korean people, and there's nothing we can do for them.  The good news:  Their nuclear and missile programs are having trouble (hopefully with some assistance from us), they didn't invade South Korea, and their capacity for mischief-making is still low.  Obama has provided benign neglect, which is about right.

The Iraq drawdown.  Given that Iraq is vastly more important than Afghanistan, it's nice that Obama stuck to the Bush timetables, and the drawdown proceeded smoothly.  As for what happened near the end of the drawdown, see the "total failure" section.

Mexico.  Something happened in Mexico?  Nope--and that's usually good news, as it is in this case.

Could Have Done Better

Syria.  I'm going to score this one as an "incomplete" but I'm leaning toward a grade of "opportunity missed".  Given our situation with Iran, a collapse of Alawite Shiia rule over Syria and a Sunni-dominated government would be a huge help.  Granted, the most likely Sunni domination would be Islamist, but that's the likely endpoint no matter what.  Getting there sooner, even if it bothers the neighbors a little bit, is probably better.  No-fly and air-based ground attack aren't really options, but lots and lots of anti-tank weapons and covert training would be handy.  Maybe those things are going on--I hope so.

Hillary Clinton.   As a political sop, Secretary of State was a nice bone to throw Hillary, and I had high hopes that she'd learn the job fast enough--she seems to be smart.  It doesn't appear to have happened.  Obama would have done better with a professional diplomat.  Plus, what's the deal with Hillary choosing Madeline Albright as her fashion role model?

The Green Revolution.  It was highly unlikely that the post-election Iranian uprising was going to succeed.  But moral support would have gone a long way, and no doubt would have improved our chances of being able to influence the liberal elements of the Arab Spring.  They probably still would have lost to the Islamists, but they wouldn't be in complete disarray right now.  Even more important, however, is that we were in a position to start cultivating grass-roots support amongst the opposition forces inside Iran.  We blew that right out the window with our silence.  If revolution ever does come, it's not going to be revolution that owes the US a favor or two.  There were subtle things to be done here, but the Obama Administration doesn't know how to do subtle diplomacy.


The Arab Fall.  The initial response to the protests over the video was genuinely disgraceful.  But the big problem with the protests rippling through the Islamic world is that they were forseeable and could have been mitigated with proactive diplomacy.  The Obama Administration took its eye off the ball, with predictable results.  They don't seem to understand that, when you just leave things alone, you cede ground to people who are actually willing to engage.

Post-Bin Laden relations with Pakistan.  Honest, I'd just like to disengage with Pakistan and throw the whole country down the memory hole.  It's a despicable government, failing to manage a set of fairly despicable tribes and allowing them to do despicable things.  But it's a government with nuclear weapons (which by several reports are highly insecure), controlling territory that we need for our logistical tail into Afghanistan, and a major problem for India, the one country that has a chance of counterbalancing China in South and Southeast Asia with something approaching Western ideals.  Not informing the Pakistanis of the bin Laden raid was completely correct, but everybody was caught flat-footed at Pakistan's rather predictable response.  We're right on the cusp of Pakistan changing from frenemy to enemy, and that didn't have to happen.

Islamism in the Sahel.  The stuff happening in Chad, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, the Sudan, and Somalia has moved from general lawlessness (not a national security issue) to the beginnings of a broad-based foothold for Islamism and international Islamic terrorism (definitely an issue).  The attack on the Libyan consulate seems to have brought this to a head.  Again, this is just plain old neglect.

Canada.  How is it possible to make your best trading partner start building pipelines with an eye toward favoring Chinese trade over your own?  I mean, it's Canada, for chrissake.  Stupid.

International respect.  The Obama Administration appears to be widely perceived to be feckless.  Everybody's really happy when the US isn't using the big stick, but nobody except our enemies is happy seeing us throwing the big stick under the bed with the old GI Joe collection.  Half-hearted diplomacy is worse than no diplomacy at all--but no diplomacy is pretty bad.  Obama was incredibly naive--or arrogant--when he decided that the force of his oratory was going to preserve American influence while making everybody love us.  It's OK if they don't love us.  It's not OK when they don't fear us, at least a little.

Total Failure

Guantanamo.  Naive, naive, naive.  He should've just kept his mouth shut.  He didn't understand what the Bush national security changes were all about until after he took office.  He didn't understand the difference between law enforcement and military operations.

Climate change.  The policy would have been worth a 'B-' in a freshman intro to poly-sci course, but it's an 'F' in the real world.  Obama has no conception of how shooting his mouth off and then utterly failing on the follow-through weakens us internationally.  Climate change diplomacy isn't going anywhere until the rest of the world is caught up economically, and anybody other than a college sophomore would have known better.


Eastern Europe missile defense.  The policy of using Aegis cruisers in the Aegean and Black Sea is actually pretty clever, but throwing Poland and the Czech Republic under the bus damaged Eastern European confidence and pretty much convinced Russia that they could do whatever they wanted.


Israel.  OK, let's first understand that the temptation to take a crack at the Palestinian peace process appears to be something that is impossible to resist once you're President.  But other presidents have been smart enough not to add preconditions onto the talks that cause the Palestinians to demand a major concession--a rollback of settlements--before they'll even sit down at the table.  The Obama Administration managed to put negotiations back a couple of decades in an afternoon.  Add on the mindless snubbing of Netanyahu, who is, admittedly, a bit of an asshole, but previously was a steadfast ally, and our alliance with Israel has gone from one with genuine moral authority, where the only mature liberal democracy in the Middle East was endorsed fully by the US, to a sterile military alliance where the two parties mistrust one another.  Small wonder that Netanyahu has started to meddle in American politics--his country is being backed into an untenable position, and he doesn't have much to lose.

Afghanistan.  Obama predicated his campaign on a fundamental untruth:  that Afghanistan was the "good war" and Iraq was the "bad war".  So he was more-or-less obligated to pay lip service to winning in Afghanistan, which has always been impossible.  Dither, surge, but surge while committing to an exit timetable, dither some more, ignore the Afghan government, and sit counting the hours until we can declare victory and retreat.  Afghanistan was unwinnable from the start and we accomplished as much as we were going to in the first three months of 2002.  Bush was right to focus on Iraq (which has real strategic importance), and Obama's entire strategy for both wars was recto-cranially inverted.  It would have been fine to use the election as a reason to pull out, but half-heartedly surging and then failing utterly sends yet another signal to people who really, really hate us that they can get away with just about anything and the only response will be for internal political consumption.

A nuclear Iran.  Let's start with the fabled "reset" where we were going to dial down the rhetoric and talk to Iran.  That buys them almost two years on their nuclear program.  Then we go limp on the Green Revolution, which buys them still more time.  Then we are utterly incapable of doing a deal with China and Russia at the UN, which might have brought real sanctions down on the Iranians in time to prevent them sprinting toward nuclear readiness.  Then we telegraph total unwillingness to do anything military by leaking Israel's plans.  It would all be laughable if it weren't so damn dangerous.  With Iranian nukes, Israel can't deter them.  With Iranian nukes, the whole Middle East will proliferate, because the threat that the Iranians hold over the region is intolerable.  And with Iranian nukes, Iran can extend its covert military operations wherever it wants with little to no threat of retaliation.  And now Obama won't even talk about military action until after the election.

The Iraq SOFA.  Major military involvement in Iraq had to end--the American people weren't going to put up with it, nor were the Iraqis.  But the Iraqis would have been overjoyed to have anti-terrorist forces and a tripwire against the Iranians.  But the Obama Administration so badly booted the Status of Forces Agreement negotiations that we're left with nothing.  Make no mistake:  American interests in Iraq are all about oil, just like the protesters said in 2003.  And that's a damn good reason to have a military presence in Iraq.  We don't, and the country has effectively gone dark for us, almost as dark as after the Iran-Iraq War.  Iraq may stumble along to become a decent democracy, but the odds against it went up quite a bit when the last American serviceman left the country.

All-in-all, The Obama Administration's foreign policy is a lot like a lot of Democratic administrations.  They don't quite understand why you have to remain engaged.  That's not fatal in the short run, but you're likely to leave the a flaming bag of poop on the doorstep of the guy who comes after you.

Where's the Drama?

Looks like Romney's going to lose.  A mediocre convention, a poorly timed remark on the North African riots/attacks, and the leaked video from a fundraiser have combined to drive most of the Republican establishment into a slough of despond, the Democrats into premature fits of triumphalism, and Intrade into a twenty percentage point excursion in the President's favor over the last ten days.

This clearly won't do.  I predict that this will be Romney's low point, and the finish will be much closer.

Why?  Because the media are highly professional.

What?!  The media are biased, aren't they?  Well, yes, all things being equal, the members of the media skew somewhat liberal in their opinions, and it comes through in their reporting and their editorial choices, when it can.  But all things aren't equal.  Ratings are at stake.  Editorial management and their reporter staffs will do what it takes to make a profit, because that's what they're in business for.

A boring presidential election is a ratings disaster.  It can't be allowed to happen.  So a Romney comeback is a financial imperative.

Furthermore, a Romney comeback is a damn good story.  Think of the drama as the Romney campaign reenergizes itself, retools its message, and claws its way back to within a whisker's breadth of its opponent.  It's the perfect third act.

It's also just the thing to show Obama at his pluckiest.  The beleaguered President, beset by a sea of troubles, slowly gains the upper hand over his rival against all odds, only to become complacent and have things almost slip away.  But at the last moment, he too rights his campaign, just in time to squeak out a win.

All is right with the world.  The media get the outcome they want, and their network executives get to take home their bonuses.

Business will trump ideology every time.  By and large, that's a good thing.  But it's important to understand how all the various actors benefit if you want to understand what's really going on.