I don’t know how I missed it but yesterday in the New York Times Michael Gordon had what I think was a very fair and balanced assessment of the differences between Sen. Barack Obama’s and Sen. John McCain’s current positions on Iraq which I commend to your attention. In the article Mr. Gordon clears up at least one common misperception, i.e. that Sen. Obama plans to remove all troops from Iraq within 16 months:
Seeking to preserve a measure of flexibility, Mr. Obama said that he would “reserve the right to pause a withdrawal” if it led to a major increase in sectarian violence. He also reiterated that he planned to keep a residual military force to pursue militants from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protect American installations and personnel, and, if Iraqi forces conducted themselves in a nonsectarian manner, train Iraqi troops.
Mr. Obama said that such a residual force would probably include Special Operations forces, teams of military advisers, combat planes, attack helicopters, medical helicopters and perhaps some smaller-scale combat units to protect the advisers.
He declined to estimate the size of the force, saying he would decide that after consulting commanders. But Richard J. Danzig, a secretary of the Navy in the Clinton administration who is regarded as a likely choice to serve as Mr. Obama’s secretary of defense, said in a June interview with National Public Radio that it could number from 30,000 to 55,000 troops.
This underscores a point I’ve been making for some time. Events have overtaken the argument about Iraq. A good portion of the difference between the two candidates is now rhetorical. Sen. Obama is likely to withdraw some of our forces from Iraq, leave a residual force of some size in Iraq, and call it “ending the war” while Sen. McCain is likely to withdraw some of our forces from Iraq, leave a residual force of some size in Iraq, and call it “winning the war”. Partisans will hail their preferred candidate’s position as the correct one and castigate the opponent’s position as foolhardy.
There’s one other point on which I agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Gordon. The two candidates differ in their views of the importance of the mission in Iraq:
At its most basic, the dispute between Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain centers on the importance of the American mission. For Mr. Obama, the invasion of Iraq was a mistake and the efforts he would make there are essentially a matter of damage limitation. By defining a series of minimal goals, Mr. Obama would seek to reduce American forces.
Toward that end, Mr. Obama said his objective was a sovereign Iraq that was not a threat to the United States or its neighbors, was capable of controlling its own borders, was not a “base camp” for terrorists and was not experiencing “mass violence.” He said that it would be important that “the will of the Iraqi people is being expressed” though “the machinery of democracy may not be perfect.”
“I have to think about the fact that given our current levels of deployment our military is stretched very thin, and if we have a sudden situation, let’s say in North Korea right now, we have got some issues,” Mr. Obama said. “And that is before we start talking about the expenditures involved at a time when the administration just announced they want a $700 billion credit line. So that is the lens through which I view the situation in Iraq.”
For Sen. Obama, then, Iraq is mostly a distraction. Sen. McCain, on the other hand, sees Iraq as more significant:
“I agreed with both General Petraeus and Osama bin Laden, who both said that Iraq was the central battleground in this struggle,” Mr. McCain said. “And I also believe that Afghanistan is going to be a longer struggle in some respects. But the most important thing was that if we failed in Iraq, that it would have had adverse consequences throughout the region.”
Contra Arnaud de Borchgrave, Thomas Friedman, and others, I argue that it is highly unlikely that China, Europe, or anyone else overtakes the United States as the major economic player in the world.
The bottom line is that the current financial “crisis” is almost certainly a short term blip and that the United States is quite likely to continue our two hundred year trend of increasing real GDP per capita.
Since installing Firefox 3.03 recently, I’ve noted that images on OTB display only intermittently. I thought I had solved the problem by clearing the cache but it has now reappeared. Others have noted the same problem with Firefox.
Anyone have a solution to the problem, aside from switching browsers?
Checking out Megan McArdle’s site a bit ago, I noted a startling new look. Atlantic editor James Bennet confirms:
Yes, we have most definitely redesigned The Atlantic.com, as part of a broader effort that includes a redesign of the print magazine. Today’s relaunch provides a first look at our new nameplate–our revived nameplate, really. To create it, the graphic designer Michael Bierut and his team at the design firm Pentagram adapted a logo that The Atlantic used for more than 35 years in the middle of the last century. The image of the November cover, to the right, shows how the nameplate and our new fonts appear on the magazine.
Working with Pentagram, our art director, Jason Treat, has added a substantial dash of color to the site. When you refresh the home page, you’ll see the color in the horizontal bar at the top of the page change, as it rotates through a set palette. There’s no grand theory at work here–no attempt to link a particular shade with a particular idea or argument or piece of news; we just like the vibrancy of the colors and the freshness that comes with their changing.
Aside from the rather jarring splashes of color and the new logo, left unstated is the more substantial change: The completion of the rebrand of the magazine from Atlantic Monthly to simply The Atlantic. While even the previous logo and editorial style had dropped the “Monthly,” it still remained in the masthead, mailing addresses, and so forth. No longer.
Given the amount of content on the website, which is updated constantly throughout the day, and the fact that the magazine only comes out ten times a year, the “Monthly” had long stopped being an accurate descriptor. But it’s a substantial change for an institution that’s been around since 1857.
So far I have seen two articles indicating that this is not the case. The first is from Robert Higgs who is associated with the Independent Institute and has very strong libertarian views (so strong he might even hold anarcho-capitalists views). The second is from Alan Reynolds at the Cato Institute. Both rely on Federal Reserve data (the link goes to the page Reynolds used). There is just one problem, they appear to be wrong.
I took one of the time series that Reynolds noted, Real Estate Loans by U.S. commercial banks and graphed the weekly numbers. Here is the graph,
It looks pretty obvious to me that since late spring/early summer the growth of credit has been rather flat. After June 11th the trend is decidely negative. Yes there was a surge at the mid to end of July, but overall things look rather disappointing compared to the early half of the graph. If the trend up throgh March 26th were continued to the last date in the dataset we’d have Real Estate Loans of $3,777 billion. Instead we have $3,632 billion which is about 3.8% lower. Another way to look at it, prior to June 11th the average weekly change in real estate loans was about $4.77 billion, after that point the average weekly change was $-2 billion.
I don’t know about you, but that looks like there is less credit available than there would have been absent the current financial crisis. Further if you were to look at things like the LIBOR and TED they indicate that there is indeed less liquidity in the market than previously (link admittedly a bit old).
Market measures: Two market indicators showed the price of borrowing for banks remaining high - a sign that banks are nervous about lending to other banks. These indicators are “at levels that indicate the money markets are still locked up,” said Van Order.
One gauge, the “TED spread,” showed high prices of loans between banks. The TED spread measures the difference between three-month Libor and the three-month Treasury borrowing rates and is a key indicator of risk. The higher the spread, the bigger the aversion to risk. On Tuesday, the spread retreated to 3.04%, after surging to 3.53% - its highest level in more than 25 years.
On Sept. 5, the TED spread was only 1.04%.
Furthermore, the difference between the Libor and the Overnight Index Swaps rose to a fresh record high 2.46% from 2.20% Monday, according to data reported by Bloomberg.com. The Libor-OIS “spread” measures how much cash is available for lending between banks, and is used by banks to determine lending rates. The bigger the spread, the less cash is available for lending.
The Libor, or the London interbank offered rate, is a daily average of what banks charge other banks to lend money in London. Larkin compared the Libor “the dial on the engine of the car,” showing how much power the economy has. “And right now it is indicating that the car is severely overheating.”
We have seen from multiple data sources indicators that there is indeed less credit than there previously was, credit is indeed drying up.
Over the weekend, Dave Schuler closed his post “Winning in Afghanistan” with three very good questions:
What are our strategic objectives in Afghanistan?
What tactics will effect those objectives?
What are the logistical requirements of implementing the objectives?
Today in New Atlanticist, my former graduate advisor, Don Snow, gives an extensive response with “Are We Losing in Afghanistan.” He frames the questions thusly:
The problem in Afghanistan is conceptualization. What is the United States (and the NATO allies) doing there? There are two possible answers. One is that the United States is engaged in a counterinsurgency campaign against the Taliban, who are attempting to overthrow the Karzai government the United States helped put in power and now supports. The other is that the United States is engaged in a counterterrorism campaign, the object of which is the destruction of al Qaeda. The two are by no means the same thing, either as a conceptual objective or as a military problem. In fact, they may even be contradictory goals if pursuing one makes the other worse (which it may well be doing).
He fleshes out the answers in some detail at the link.
Rich Lowry argues that the McCain campaign’s decision to “double down” on character attacks in the last month of the campaign is a losing strategy.
McCain has to meet a higher standard. Not having a compelling economic message before the financial crisis hit was malpractice; now it’s madness. McCain’s pet causes of bipartisanship and earmark reform don’t qualify as such a message. Bipartisanship is an empty concept; the parties can unite just as easily to pass foolhardy laws as necessary ones. Meanwhile, only John McCain would — as he did in the first debate —steer a discussion about a complex global credit crunch onto earmarked federal spending for bear DNA research.
McCain has suffered from his own manifest lack of interest in economic issues. He was chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee for four years, but you’d never know it.
[...]
McCain has to make the case that Obama’s most dangerous association is with a Democratic Congress that will take Obama’s proposals for tax and spending increases and make them much worse.
Otherwise, the race might take on the cast of the 1992 campaign. In the midst of economic discontent, George H.W. Bush ran against Bill Clinton on character and experience. Clinton pledged to fix the economy. Bush had little or nothing to offer the middle class, while Clinton (like Obama this year) promised those voters a tax cut.
Obviously, I agree, but one of the major problems that McCain has on the economics front is precisely is lack of interest in such matters. In his speeches, he mouths platitudes against “greed.” In his record, he’s pretty much just voted with the rest of his fellow Republicans. He’s never been a leader on economic issues. And his campaign’s policy is emblematic of that. It’s a hodgepodge with no real focus. I believe that Barack Obama has some real vulnerability on economic issues. Particularly, his opposition to free trade agreements and his xenophobic ads against foreign cars and other foreign products, not to mention his ill-defined “regulate more!” solutions to economic problems.
John McCain could be hitting Obama on those issues. That he’s not, though, isn’t much of a surprise.
Barack Obama and Joe Biden continue to pull away from John McCain and Sarah Palin in the national polls, bolstered by the economic crisis and superior performances in the first two debates. The new WSJ/NBC poll parallels recent findings:
Voters were much more likely to say they felt good about Sen. Obama’s handling of the current economic crisis than they were to say the same of Sen. McCain. About one in three voters said they were “more reassured” by Sen. Obama versus just 25% who said that about Sen. McCain. Even worse, 38% of poll participants reported being “less reassured” by Sen. McCain’s approach.
Sens. Obama and Biden have a six-point lead, with 49% of registered voters saying they would vote for them, compared with 43% for Sen. McCain and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. That is up from a two-point advantage in the previous Journal poll, two weeks ago, and parallels other recent national polls. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.
“McCain has absorbed a very tough one-two punch — the financial crisis, then the debates,” said Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster who conducts the survey with Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart. “These two things have clearly led to a momentum shift in this campaign where Obama has started to slowly stretch his lead.”
Independent voters are among the most important voting blocs because many of them would consider voting for either candidate. In the Journal/NBC poll two weeks ago, independents favored Sen. McCain by 13 points. The new survey finds Sen. Obama leading by four points.
The highlighted portion is the key: That’s a huge swing among independents in short order. The good news for McCain is that these people are obviously changable; the bad news is that the election is four weeks away and there are not going to be many more opportunities for the proverbial “game changer.”
Slate’s John Dickerson notes that tonight’s town hall style debate may be a good one because they’re so much more unpredictable than the standard moderated debates.
“Ponytail Guy” is the term some in political circles use to refer to Denton Walthall, who asked a question in the second presidential debate in 1992. A domestic mediator who worked with children, Walthall scolded President George H.W. Bush for running a mudslinging, character-based campaign against Bill Clinton in 1992. Referring to voters as “symbolically the children of the future president,” he asked how voters could expect the candidates “to meet our needs, the needs in housing and in crime and you name it, as opposed to the wants of your political spin doctors and your political parties. … Could we cross our hearts? It sounds silly here but could we make a commitment? You know, we’re not under oath at this point, but could you make a commitment to the citizens of the U.S. to meet our needs—and we have many—and not yours again?”
It was an imbecilic question but, as Dickerson notes, the candidates took it seriously and it played into Clinton’s hands. As for tonight:
It might be a snooze-fest, full of earnest questions and foggy bromides. But with the spike in negativity coming just ahead of the meeting, there is a chance that one of the two candidates will have to face a question about the harsh tone.
There’s been a lot of talk recently about Joe Six-Pack. How will he vote? What does he want? One thing we know: You don’t want Joe Six Pack calling you out. Questions from regular voters are hard enough for politicians to handle—they can’t be ignored as easily as journalists’ questions—but as the campaign turns ugly, the candidates have to worry about questioners passing judgment.
McCain tends to be very good in this format but he can be uneven. During the Michigan primaries, for example, he was dead right but came off as insensitive when he told an auto worker that there wasn’t much a president could do to save his job. Obama is much better at the “symbolic national daddy” pose.
