All Whitey, all the time

I recently visited relatives in New England, and my visit roughly coincided with the FBI's apprehension of gangster Whitey Bulger. It's hard to express just how much this story has dominated the area's news. The newspapers have lead with the story of Bulger's arrest for a week now, and the local TV news have covered it nonstop.

Last week, I watched what I believe was the local NBC affiliate interviewing Whitey's neighbors in Santa Monica, where he'd resided since the mid-90s. (We were apparently neighbors for a year or so.) They then managed to get a rare interview with actor Mark Wahlberg. Wahlberg, of course, was one of the stars of Martin Scorsese's "The Departed," in which Jack Nicholson played a fictitious character inspired by Whitey Bulger. Not surprisingly, Wahlberg had little to add to the coverage.*

All this media attention has a cost, of course. Boston reporter David Bernstein informs me that on Tuesday, the state of Massachusetts had to pass an emergency 10-day extension of its budget because the FY 2012 budget is late. That's actually pretty big state government news. Nonetheless, both the Boston Herald and the Boston Globe used Associated Press reporting to cover that story, since all their regular reporters are off in Whiteyworld.


*It's a pet peeve of mine when actors are interviewed about the political aspects of movies they're in or characters they've played. It's not that they're not smart or informed about such matters -- they certainly can be -- but it's just so far from their area of expertise. This is why I love "Inside the Actor's Studio," where actors get to talk about the challenges of acting and filmmaking. I could listen to Stallone tell the Rocky-esque story of the making of "Rocky" a hundred times and not be bored. In general, I'd much rather hear Julia Roberts talk about the difficulties of playing Erin Brockovich than hear her talk about Erin Brockovich's legal research.

Challenging a sitting president

Rhodes Cook says that Obama's in relatively good shape for reelection because he's not facing a challenge from within the Democratic Party:

For some time now there has been a political rule of thumb: Presidents with little or no opposition in their party’s presidential primaries go on to win reelection, while those who must weather a significant primary challenge are defeated in the fall election.

At this point, there are no signs of a Democratic primary challenge to Obama.

If there was, he would have reelection problems of the first magnitude. For if a president has trouble uniting his own party, how can he successfully reach out to independents and voters from the other party in the fall? The answer over the last century has been that he can’t.

I must respectfully disagree with the direction of Cook's causal arrow. Obama is not facing a challenge from within the party because he's in decent shape for reelection.

Yes, Carter faced a primary challenge in 1980 and lost in the general election, and the same thing happened to Ford in 1976. But the only reason those presidents faced primary challenges was because high quality candidates (Teddy Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, respectively) and their funders and endorsers calculated (correctly!) that their incumbent president was weak, would likely lose, and would likely drag down others in their party should they be at the top of the ticket.

Obama's path to reelection is far from certain, but it will largely depend on what happens with economic growth over the next year. Democrats with presidential ambitions realize that the economy will probably not slip into a recession in the next year and that presidents rarely lose their reelection bids unless the economy is in a recession. Just that much information is enough to keep the high quality challengers at bay until 2016.

To the blandest go the spoils

Beverly just rocked too
hard for Carson Daly.

I found the selection process on "The Voice" pretty interesting. Generally, whether the selecting was being made by the professional coaches (elites) or the audience (masses), the pattern was pretty much the same, with the more interesting artists being eliminated in favor of the blander but more broadly acceptable ones. The duos, the country singer, the chanteuse, the guy who sounded like a gal... all fell to generic pop singers. The final episode was no exception: the elimination began with both of the show's lesbians, leaving only the very attractive, versatile, but almost completely uninteresting Javier and Dia.

I think there's a lesson there for democratic elections. I'm not sure whether to consider "The Voice"'s electoral system nonpartisan or multi-partisan (the four judges had broad power to "nominate" their contestants). Regardless, it shows the down side of Downsian convergence. No one is really offended, but no one is really satisfied, either.

Okay, there are important differences between being The Voice and being, say, The President. Beverly or Xenia or someone else could have been chosen as a pop star and done the job very well, while, say, Dennis Kucinich or Michele Bachmann, while very interesting candidates, would not make particularly good presidents, in my opinion anyway. The nature of the job makes it vitally important to have allies who can help pass legislation, and bomb-throwers really don't have those kinds of allies. A pop singer doesn't need such alliances.

Okay, comparison over.

Slow summer links

I haven't been posting much lately, as you've probably noticed, but I do occasionally see some good links. Here are a few:

• There are some great details about New York's gay marriage vote in this NYT piece. John Sides expands a bit here and here on what the vote means for political science, particularly the part about the Republican-controlled state senate allowing a vote on which Republicans got rolled.
• Chris Matthews predicts that Michele Bachmann will beat Mitt Romney in New Hampshire. I assume he's trying to distract us from his prediction that Donald Trump would actually run for president.
• Reihan Salam explains that running modest deficits is actually good public policy a lot of the time.
• Jonathan Bernstein notes that the downside of being a country that doesn't back down from a fight is being a country that can be goaded into stupid, self-destructive conflicts.
• I can't remember who recommended this to me, but the History of Rome podcast series is great.
• "Usher of the Black Rod" is an actual job title. And the man who holds it is very busy.
• New Jersey Governor Chris Christie orders flags to be flown at half mast in honor of Clarence Clemons. Here's one of the Big Man's greatest solos:

Taking the pledge

Shira Schoenberg:

During his presidential campaign, [George H.W.] Bush signed Norquist’s pledge not to raise taxes. The candidate then made his famous statement at the 1988 Republican National Convention: “Read my lips: no new taxes.’’

But the deficit soared, Democrats controlled Congress, and Bush was forced to raise taxes. Democrat Bill Clinton used the broken pledge against Bush during his reelection campaign — and Bush lost.

Read my lips: don’t break promises.

Not so fast. Yes, pledges are important, and the stories of candidates taking them, or refusing to do so, chronicled in this article are interesting and relevant to the current race. And I don't think it's a huge stretch to say that pledges matter in elections, although they're probably much more important in nominations battles than general elections. Mitt Romney may face real difficulties wrapping up the nomination due to his refusal to sign an anti-abortion pledge -- that sends a signal to pro-life activists, who are major contributors of money and volunteers for Republican candidates, that he may not be their best choice of candidate.

And back in 1992, George H.W. Bush's decision to renege on his anti-tax pledge cost him significant support among Republicans and contributed strongly to Pat Buchanan's primary challenge. But to suggest that Bill Clinton only won the general election that year because Bush broke a promise is an extraordinary leap and goes against most of what we know about how elections work.

The Dream

Matt Yglesias' post on the rather meager ambitions of the liberal vision of the American Dream reminded me of Pink Floyd's "The Gunner's Dream":

A place to stay, enough to eat
Somewhere old heroes shuffle safely down the street
Where you can speak out loud about your doubts and fears, and what's more,
No one ever disappears, you never hear their standard issue kicking in your door.
You can relax on both sides of the tracks
And maniacs don't blow holes in bandsmen by remote control
And everyone has recourse to the law
And no one kills the children anymore.

Roger Waters' vision wasn't particularly radical, but even three decades later, it still sounds pretty appealing.

There can be only two

In a recent column, Mike Littwin simultaneously condemns and engages in the practice of lumping Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann together in the Republican presidential nomination contest. He's hardly the only one doing this -- many political journalists seem to believe there's only room for one conservative woman in the contest. Later in the same column, he seems to suggest that Bachmann or Tim Pawlenty would quickly dispatch with the other, since there can only be one Minnesotan in the race. Meanwhile, Holly Bailey tells us that Jon Huntsman has to distinguish himself from Mitt Romney, since there's only room for one moderate Mormon former governor in the contest.

Still, for my money, no one seems to be falling for this trope harder than Time magazine, which has likened the GOP nomination contest to a March madness bracket. The metaphor only works in the narrow sense that there are currently many competitors and there will eventually be only one, but the mechanism for determining the winner is obviously entirely different. Every candidate will appear on the New Hampshire and Iowa ballots.

Let me just make a quick point here: in the long run, there's only room for one candidate, period. By this point next year, the Republicans will have settled on a single nominee. Prior to that, of course, there may well be just two candidates competing in the post-New Hampshire primaries and caucuses. But there's no reason those candidates can't be two women, or two Minnesotans, or two Mormons, or two Protestant white guys (although no one seems to have concerns about that).