There’s been an interesting conversation going on, prompted by this guest post by Gregory Gause, professor of political science at University of Vermont and director of its Middle East Studies Program. In his post Dr. Gause notes that in recent months Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has taken a number of steps which, considered together, appear to be a concerted attempt to position himself as the new strongman of Iraqi politics. The moves include establishing his bona fides as a symbol of Iraqi nationalism by insisting on a date for the withdrawal of U. S. forces, eliminating opposition within Shi’ite politics with his campaign against the Sadrists, taking on the Awakening Councils demonstrating that Iraq will remain Shi’a-controlled, and consolidating his position within his own political coalition.
Marc Lynch (Abu Aardvark) replied to the post with a thoughtful commentary noting, among other things, the gap between PM al-Maliki’s intentions and his capabilities:
Maliki’s aggressiveness conceals his precarious political position. State institutions remain rickety, corrupt, and inefficient. His ruling coalition is shaky, despite the return of the IAF to his government, and even the core alliance with the Kurds has come under pressure over Kirkuk (i.e. Barzani’s denunciation of the authoritarianism in Baghdad).
Sam Parker (Iraqologist), posting at abu muqawama, responded with an intriguing post on the delicate political balance in Iraq, a struggle between those who are currently in power and those who would like to be in power, the “Powers That Be” and the “Powers That Aren’t” or the PTB and PTA for short.
It’s natural to conclude from this, as Gause appears to, that Maliki is making a bid to be a strongman. The big problem with this argument, as Abu Aardvark points out, is that 1) the PTA are down but not out and 2) Maliki is not strong enough yet to be a strongman. In other words, the PTB still need each other and Maliki still needs the PTB. The reason they need each other is that there is not yet a real “national” security force that is both strong enough and loyal enough to any one group or person for any one of them to emerge dominant. When it comes to beating down the PTA, the PTB and their armies are unified and all on the same side. But if the PTB try to go after each other, it would be a total bloodbath, especially with the rest of the country not pacified yet. Gause’s strongman theory and the implications he draws from it are correct, if instead of a single strongman you think of the PTB as an emerging authoritarian regime but one that, at least for now, depends on the alliance of the PTB.
I can’t contribute substantively to the commentary on the Iraqi political aspect of this conversation but I believe that from the American viewpoint if PM al-Maliki is trying to position himself as a new strongman in Iraq whether real or illusory it constitutes a problem for the United States. As the leader of the fledgling, highly imperfect democracy in Iraq, the al-Maliki government would be worthy of our support as part of our grand strategy in the War on Terror (remember the War on Terror?). As the strongman of Iraq al-Maliki would just be yet another strongman in a region in which strongman-type governments are the predominant form. We might support him nonetheless as the lesser evil but we’d be running the risk of taking the course that we’ve been criticized for in the past as earning us the enmity of people in the region—supporting repressive regimes. That’s the price of a return to the policy of realism for which some Americans seem to yearn.
The presidential race was essentially tied going into the party conventions. As expected, Barack Obama got a small bounce, somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 points, from the Democratic convention. As expected, McCain is getting a bounce from his convention. The wild card factor, the announcement of Sarah Palin as McCain’s running mate and her subsequent convention speech, seems thus far to have worked out swimmingly, reenergizing the campaign with the base.
The shake-out from all of this, though, is that we’re right where we started, with a race that’s essentially tied. Yesterday’s Zogby poll has McCain-Palin at 49.7 percent and Obama-Biden at 45.9 percent. Then again, Zogby, who uses a complicated party weighting and likely voter adjustment, had McCain up 47.1 to 44.6 going into his convention. Gallup’s daily tracking poll — which uses a ridiculously small sample and does not screen out those unlikely to show up to vote — had McCain up 4.2 points as of Friday. RealClearPolitics, which hasn’t updated since Friday and whose most recent polls therefore don’t fully account for the GOP bounce, has Obama up 2.4.
What’s interesting, though, is that despite the race having shown no real movement in the national head-to-head polls, Obama has made some gains in the more meaningful state-by-state race. Electoral-Vote.com has it Obama 301, McCain 224, Ties 13. On the eve of the conventions, they had it at Obama 269, McCain 256, Ties 13. The difference? The flipping of Ohio and several western states from “Barely GOP” to “Barely Dem.” Their methodology is overly reliant on single polls (RealClearPolitics still has it at 273-265) but the movement bears watching.
I’ll continue to believe, unless confronted with strong and sustained contrary evidence, that this is Obama’s race to lose. All the fundamentals point to a Democratic win this year and he’s a much more dynamic speaker than McCain. That it remains a statistical toss-up — that Obama isn’t running away with it — at this stage is interesting, indeed.
Sorry about the BtVS video (which is mildly spoilerish for the show, BTW). It’s not my intent to get into “Bangel” shipping, it’s just hard to find McLachlan videos that allow embedding. As this song was actually used in the show (over the scene that appears at about 2:11), a good many of the ones that can be embedded are Buffy tributes of some sort.
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In a study published Wednesday by Dublin-based EU think tank Eurofound, official and reported work hours were compared across the EU. Europe’s hardest workers, at least in terms of hours spent on the job? Full-time workers in Romania and Bulgaria, the EU’s newest members, put in 41.7 hours a week. Germany ranked 6th, with workers reporting 41.1 hours a week spent at work.
The report, which analyzed statistical data from all of the EU member countries, found that the 15 pre-2004 members of the EU spend an average of 39. 5 hours a week on the job, while people in the 12 new member states work 40.6 hours on average. Of the top 10 countries, seven — Bulgaria, Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia and Hungary — joined the EU after 2004.
[...]
Vacation time also varies dramatically from country to country. Swedes have a generous 33 days per year of paid vacation, while Estonians get just 20. Germans rank high here, too — third on Eurofound’s list, with 30 days per year.
This is mostly a function of affluence, of course, but also an indication of culture. It’s noteworthy, for example, that Estonians, who are at the bottom of the EU vacation scale, get twice the paid vacation time that Americans do.
It should be noted that the EU numbers aren’t just averages: They’re government mandated minimums! And, no, the figures above do not include public holidays. The U.S., of course, guarantees 0 days of paid vacation.
A new Rasmussen poll has Sarah Palin viewed favorably by 58 percent of likely voter respondents, compared with the 57 percent favorables that both John McCain and Barack Obama enjoy. Yes, that’s a statistical tie but it’s pretty impressive considering that 67 percent of the country had never heard of her a week ago.
Not surprisingly, there’s a strong partisan breakdown, with 89 percent of Republicans, 33 percent of Democrats, and 59 percent of unaffiliated respondents viewing her favorably.
More interesting — although partly explained by party — is that she’s much more popular with men (65 percent favorable) than with women (52 percent). A separate Rasmussen survey released Wednesday found that men prefer Palin to Hillary Clinton 49 percent to 45 while women prefer Clinton to Palin 57 percent to 35. Go figure. Maybe Will Wilkinson is on to something with his “Paglian chtonoic sexual power” analysis.
McCain has benefitted from a “Palin bounce,” getting a jump of 12 percent (from 42 to 53) amoung Republicans and 11 percent (54 to 65) among independents in the week since making the announcment.
Jim Henley makes an interesting observation about a repeated line from John McCain’s acceptance speech that was actually the theme of this year’s Republican National Convention:
“Country First” is a fascist idea. There ought to be a fairly large number of people, things and groups that are more important to you than your “country.”
While hyper-nationalism is a key component of fascist ideology, it doesn’t follow that loyalty to country is fascist. McCain isn’t advocating blind obedience to government authorities. Rather, he’s expressing a profound sense of duty to stand up for our shared ideals.
This excerpt from the speech captures that spirit:
And, finally, a word to Senator Obama and his supporters. We’ll go at it — we’ll go at it over the next two months — you know that’s the nature of this business — and there are big differences between us. But you have my respect and my admiration.
Despite our differences, much more unites us than divides us. We are fellow Americans, and that’s an association that means more to me than any other.
We’re dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal and endowed by our creator with inalienable rights. No country — no country ever had a greater cause than that. And I wouldn’t be an American worthy of the name if I didn’t honor Senator Obama and his supporters for their achievement.
One presumes McCain doesn’t quite literally mean that he values his citizenship above, say, his family, friends, and former comrades in arms on a day-to-day basis. I’m rather sure he doesn’t. But he’s willing to risk all those things, and his life itself, in support of a higher calling.
America was quite literally founded on the idea of individual rights. But while we’ve declared those rights to be inalienable and God-given, they nonetheless have to be guarded and defended by men like John McCain[*].
___________
*To clarify, I’m referring to those willing to put their lives on the line to defend the country as McCain did in his younger days. While I think McCain’s past service tells us something about what kind of president he’d be, I’m not arguing by extenstion that Obama wouldn’t protect the country were he elected.
John McCain has accepted the nomination of the Republican Party for president. His speech, like Barack Obama’s a week before, was long for my tastes and contained far too many bromides that could have been in any convention speech of his party in recent years.
McCain continued a strategy that I’ve disagreed with but that has gotten him this far in building so much around his Vietnam experience. His repeated professions of love for his country, accompanied by chants of USA! USA! USA! put me in mind of the Olympics. As I keep reminding myself, though, I’m not the target audience.
McCain’s speech wasn’t as funny as Sarah Palin’s and his delivery wasn’t as good as Obama’s. Despite having delivered big speeches, including convention speeches, for years, he seemed to have difficulty dealing with unexpected applause.
He’s not selling himself as an orator, though. He did what he had to do: Delivered a competent speech, contrasting his service and experience with that of his opponent, while emphasizing that he understands the need to deal with the country’s problems. The speech won’t generate a groundswell of support but will likely both steady the base and appeal to moderates.
Update (Alex Knapp): My main problem with this speech, as with Palin’s, was not so much the delivery as the writing. This one was particularly bad from that angle–there was no narrative or flow to the thing. It jumped from biography to patriotism to attacks to policy to patriotism to biography. It was disjointed and I think that made it more difficult for McCain to do what he needed to do. It was also surprisingly short on detail–I think the most time was spent talking about education reform and energy (with no mention of solar even though he mentioned other alternatives, which I thought strange).
However, I thought McCain handled the protesters well. (Note to everyone who thinks about protesting an event like this: you always make yourself look like an idiot and end up hurting your own cause. Plus, it’s rude. Stop it!) And while I think that a lot of the promotion of McCain’s history as a POW this election has bordered on tasteless, I thought that it was well handled in this speech. Personally, I’m not sure he needed to bring it up at all, but he did it with a lot of grace and that portion was by far the most effective part of his speech.
All in all, I’m not sure if the speech made much of an impact on voters, but I don’t think it hurt, either. At this point, most people are pretty familiar with John McCain, and he didn’t really give them anything different.
