Full Spectrum Blogging

Although I haven’t gotten anything up at Pushback today, and am probably too lazy to write something on ACB,I should probably point out that I posted some thoughts on the Lisa Belkin NYTM child care story up at The American Scene. I even made an awesome 2×2 matrix to express my ideas in graphic form. Yeah, because I’m that cool.

The Pop Perspective

I guess everyone is starting culture blogs these days, and hopefully, The Pop Perspective, helmed by Haley Swenson, will be more widely read than my own. It certainly deserves to be. I’d like to associate myself with her remarks on West Virginia and its reputation for inbreeding. Apparently, there actually isn’t anymore inbreeding or incest in West Virginia than anywhere else in the United States, the reputation developed as a way to explain the extreme poverty. Because, you know, people are poor because of their deficient moral character.

From Positive To Negative

Matt Stoller has a fantastic post outlining how the Obama campaign has turned into an effective fund raising and messaging machine, with more than a million donors and thousands of dedicated volunteers, all working for team Obama. This is, in many ways, what many progressive organizers have always wanted. For most of the last 20 years, the only real organized force within the Democratic party wasn’t totally organized around an individual (Bill Clinton) and promoted an ideology that was basically “whatever the activist wing of the party says we should do, we shouldn’t.” While this defensive posture made sense in the early 1990s, it quickly turned into cannabalistic posturing that proved horribly ineffective with the radicalism of the Bush era. It was the combination of the ineffectiveness of the Democrats and the Bush horrors that MoveOn (which actually started in response to the Clinton impeachment) and Democracy for America (once Dean for America) reacted to.

Into this breach Obama’s juggernaut stepped. And as Stoller outlines, it’s a powerful thing idea, one that out raises  traditional Democratic and progressive institutions and could actually replace them. Although it’s this type of organizing and energy that netroots folks have been desperately hoping for, Obama’s organization is still Obama’s organization. If Obama loses the election, or loses reelection, or turns into an unimpressive candidate, this Obama energy and organization will dissipate. What we should hope for, and what I would describe as likely, is that as president, Obama could use his organization to fund raise and support liberals in house, gubernatorial and senate races. Just like Reagan or FDR realignments transitioned from being about those candidates to about their ideas, hopefully an Obama realignment could do the same thing.

But for the time being, it’s slightly worrying to have such a potent organization based purely around the man himself. We would want progressive organizations to be based around progressive ideas. And there are some of them - just look at the alliance Andy Stern is building around national health care - but they are usually union or “special interest” based and aren’t considered in the same league as Move On or My Barack Obama. What distinguishes Obama from MoveOn or much of the progressive infrastructure that has arisen in the last eight years is that it is positive. It is pro-Obama, not anti-Bush/Gop. I’m not saying that there’s something wrong with being anti-Bush, but one can’t build a movement around purely oppositional feeling, eventually there has to be something positive. And just as the anti-Bush progressive institutions have been based around a particular feeling against one person, so the Obama infrastructure is built around elevated feeling for one person. This is not ideal, but because of the strictures of human psychology and the current state of our national politics, it’s probably the best we can do.

He’s Still A Whippersnapper

Minipundit, my east-coast doppelganger, is now a legal adult, and along with the ability to buy cigarettes and pornography, get drafted and be tried as an adult, he is no longer going by Minipundit, but instead Dylan Matthews.  Congrats dude.

And just in case the similarities between me, Matthew Zeitlin and he, Dylan Matthews couldn’t get any more striking.  My 18th birthday is just in four days, on the 24th, which, incidentally, was the same day he started writing his blog four years ago.

And yes, it’s true, we’ve never been sighted in any one place at the same time…

Zang. (”excellent” in Cantonese)

James Poulos, Postmodern Conservative, has been kind enough to bestow upon me the “Excellent Blog Award.” I particularly like his reasoning, seeing as we share very little politically and I can barely understand his posts when he really gets into the weeds of political theory.  He claims that I “Reminds me of me when I was young and responsible.”  Well, I’m now obligated to get my meme on and pass along this honorific to some other blogs, so here I go.

Minipundit - anyone whose been reading my blog knows how much I like this guy, my east coast alter-ego.  He’s like me, except with better music taste and without the typos.

Adam Elkus - the internet’s most precocious security analyst.  Even if you can’t tell your William Linds from your John Robbs and your 4G from your 5G, his stuff is consistently good.

Mike Meginnis - If there is one blogger who writes more and is read much less than he deserves, it’s my friend Mike.  Sure, he’s been linking to me since just about day one, but I read him regularly and he’s always good for keeping me on my toes about being more outraged.

Kerry Howley - You must have noticed that so far, the three blogs I listed had authors that were almost demographically identical to me — young and male.  Well, Kerry is both older than all of us guys and a woman, so how’s that for some diversity!  No, in all seriousness, she’s a pretty amazing journalist and when she does blog, she consistently finds some of the most interesting stuff on the internet to write about.  That and she’s the original blogosphere Lant Pritchett acolyte.

Will Wilkinson - In my youth (like three years ago) I was something of a libertarian. Had I stayed on that path, I would have hoped to blossom into someone like Will.  His posts do an amazing job of integrating political theory and economics to create a consistently intriguing Rawlsekian synthesis that is always this close to making me a libertarian again.

John Cain - My most prolific commenter and another good friend, his blog Soberish is updated all too rarely, but when it is, he’s a funny dude.  Not only that, but he’s also my gateway into the Science blogging community, and constantly keeps me weary of various cranks, quacks and phonies.

Phoebe Maltz - I always regret not blogging more about jewish issues, and one of the main reasons I don’t is because Phoebe oftentimes beats me to the punch and just writes about them better.   I also know way more about Sephora and Uniqlo because of reading her.

 Ned Resnikoff - Yes, I know, yet another young dude.  But “veritosity” is one of the most clever handles in the blogosphere and he’s also exceptional at the “just repeating what crazy Republicans have to say and pointing out how absurd it is” style of blogging.

Pax Americana - Sure, Corey Spaley only recently returned from a month long blogging hiatus, but really, how many MFA students are there in ’sphere writing about foreign policy?

Well, that’s nine, but I have to run.

War and Peace and Blog

Are you interested in what a bunch of high school seniors have to say about War and Peace? Well, on the off chance that you are, my English class has a blog that we’re using to document our journey through Tolstoy’s epic. I haven’t actually posted anything yet, seeing as I’ve only finished Volume I (out of four, which is roughly 300 of 1200 pages). But the book actually is as good as advertised and, not too surprisingly, it has a lot to say about the political and cultural moment in which we find ourselves. So, feel free to comment or just lurk, or even better, read the book. If you go 20 pages a day, you can finish it in just about. But even more importantly, you get to be able to say you’ve actually read War and Peace.

UPDATE: After alerting y’all to the blog, I was inspired to produce some content. Here’s my first post, it looks at the tensions between Tolstoy’s admiration for Lincoln and his view of history as expressed in War and Peace.

Personal Slights, Ideological Differences

I’ve wondered before why the netroots hadn’t embraced Obama.  Among the major candidates, he has consistently been against the war, is very Internet savvy and , has left-wing policies, is electable and aims to build a governing Democratic majority.  The major difference is that Obama eschews, rhetorically at least, a model of politics based around bloody, partisan, ideological confrontation - which is really the very core of the netroots program.   While I think this is a misguided approach, it’s a reasonable enough disagreement.  What Brad Plumer shows, however, is that occasional netroots distaste for Obama is guided by something less than an honest disagreement about how to implement progressive policy.  Look at, for instance, Jon Aravosis’ reaction to the Donnie McClurkin incident:

John Aravosis, a popular blogger and gay activist who says he was disappointed the campaign never contacted him. “Had they asked, we could have had some serious discussions to save them face and try to figure out how to advance our community’s interests in some way,” he told me. Says blogger Steve Benen, “My sense is [the campaign wasn't] fully aware of the discontent during that rough patch.”

This doesn’t look like honest concern that Obama was being too kind to homophobes, but merely that Obama wasn’t kissing the ring of certain prominent bloggers.  Bloggers, which really have the potential to be a new type of interest group, greatly compromise their status as an honest, ideological interest when they make comments that appear to be more narcissistic than anything else.  If bloggers expect that, in a controversy that they whip up and publicize, presidential candidates come to them and beg forgiveness, they really just look influence-hungry and their disagreements with candidates could become much less legitimate.  That would be an unfortunate side-effect of bloggers gaining prominence within the Democratic coalition.

Where Have You Gone Glenn Greenwald?

Less than a month ago, conflict erupted in the liberal blogsphere.  Dana Goldstein and Ezra Klein noted that Ron Paul was a problematic defender of civil liberties because of his opposition to abortion rights as as his occasional racism and hostility towards civil rights laws.  Glenn Greenwald wrote two posts that make the 500 pages of War and Peace I have to read by February 5th look like a pamphlet, castigating Goldstein and Klein for being pro-choice fundamentalists who simply didn’t care about indiviudal rights, as evidenced by them thinking that because “Paul wants to destroy the minimum wage, dissolve Medicare, end the Constitutional right to choice, prevent gay adoptions, preserve “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell,” undermine Social Security, dismantle public education, etc, etc…  and then call it true ‘liberty’” he wasn’t the best “liberty” candidate.

Both Klein and Goldstein noted that one reason they weren’t as hot on Paul as Greenwald was because of his history of race-baiting and racist comments published in his newsletters.  Greenwald, in the course of responding to Klein and Goldstein, simply did not discuss Ron Paul and race, even when he linked to Klein’s post where he explicitly said that Paul’s troubled history with racism was all he needed to not say kind words about him.  Dana Goldstein, in her “definitive takedown“  noted the known instances of racist commentary appearing in  Paul’s newsletters.  Greenwald in his two posts responding to them, didn’t mention “race” “racism” “black” or “newsletter.”  Now, to be fair, the newsletter story was not as big then, largely because Jamie Kirchick hadn’t yet written his article exposing just how widespread the racist commentary was.

But what has Greenwald, who said that Ron Paul had a “sterling record across the board on liberty”, written now that Paul has been exposed as a racist, or at least someone who didn’t mind having racist writing published under his name? If you search Greenwald’s archives for “Ron Paul”, you’ll find one mention of him since January 8th, when Kirchick’s article was published. On January 11th, Greenwald quotes Noam Scheiber’s reporting on the South Carolina GOP debate — that’s it.
Don’t you think that a fairly prominent blogger with a large following  who impugned Ezra Klein as not willing to say positive things about Ron Paul because Klein doesn’t want to “actually have to say or do anything that Chris Matthews would find strange, offensive or out of place” should say something about the fact that his favorite Republican, his Lone Voice in Defense of Liberty turns out to be a negligent race-baiter?  Shouldn’t he at least apologize to Klein and Goldstein and acknowledge that despite “Championing Mainstream Political Thought While Pretending to Oppose it” they were both right to smell a rat when it came to Paul.

Life Imitates Art…Creepily

At first glance, the GawkerStalker cell phone picture of 14 year old Gossip Girl star Taylor Momsen wearing a short skirt on a subway is just creepy. I mean, can it just be possible for a girl to ride a subway without being groped, oggled or have pictures taken of her for a snarky gossip blog? And on second, third and fourth glance…it’s still really creepy. But once you get over the creepiness, or at least just accept it, this has to be one the most surreal blog posts ever. Why is it surreal and not just gross?

Taylor Momsen plays Jenny Humphrey on Gossip Girl. What “Gossip Girl” refers to in the show is a blog written by an annoymous sleuth who reports on gossip among Upper East Side teens. In the show, what often happens is that some teen will take a picture of one of the main characters in a compromising situations — say Serena buying pregnancy tests. The tipster sends the picture to Gossip Girl, and within minutes, the picture and an explanatory caption show up on her blog and is sent out to the cell phones of the “Upper East Side Elite.” “Gossip Girl” is basically a small scale version of Gawker for this make believe universe.

Coming back to real life, Taylor Momsen was in a compromising situation — wearing a short skirt while sitting on a subway — and a sleuth took a camera-phone picture and sent it off to the gossip blog.  The only real difference between real-life and TV in this case is the name of the person involved — Taylor Momsen instead of Jenny Humphrey.  Surely Jean Baudrillard or Marshall McLuhan would have had some profound insight into this seminal moment in media cross-pollination and self reference, but I just think its weird.

Ramesh, Dinesh, Tomato, Tomahto

Stephen Suh of Cogitamus, in the midst of an impressive defense of being an angry partisan, makes a pretty elementary mistake:

Goldberg and people like him - such as Ramesh Ponnuru - want to argue that the Islamic terrorists who rail against the licentiousness of our culture are both connected to the secular, inclusive liberal movement and are absolutely correct: American culture actually is too hedonistic, too licentious. Oh, and it’s all those darn liberals’ fault.

While it goes without saying that an “angry partisan Democrat” wouldn’t be a huge fan of Ponnuru, Stephen Suh was probably thinking of a different conservative Indian pundit. While Ramesh certainly isn’t a social liberal, it was Dinesh D’Souza, not Ramesh Ponnuru, who wrote an entire book placing the blame for Islamic terrorism on liberalism. This was probably an innocent mistake, but still, when writing angry partisan screeds (not that there is anything wrong with that) it’s generally good not to confuse ones opponents on account of them having similarly foreign-sounding names and being part of the same ethnic group.

UPDATE: Suh has since corrected the mistake, and it clearly was an honest one.

When Someone Great is Gone

While it may seem like accepting an offer to be the Post’s online campaign editor in January of an election year is a pretty obvious move, I must say that I’m a bit disappointed that Garance Franke-Ruta isn’t blogging these days. Although she was often criticized (including by me) in certain sections of the blogosphere for both supporting Hillary Clinton and arguably being intellectual dishonest in criticizing the other candidates, it was undeniable that she really knew her shit when it came to writing about gender and the media.

Her discussion of the “secondary conversations” that women have with other women about politics was genuinely illuminating, and in wake of Clinton taking New Hampshire in the face of massively negative and sexist media coverage, I really want to know what she has to say. If you look back at some of her old posts, she seems downright prescient about the nasty turn campaign coverage took after Iowa. While there’s no doubt that I would disagree with much of what she would be writing, I certainly think that the blogosphere would be better off with her writing freely about Clinton and the media than with her writing boring campaign stories and working behind the scenes.

PS - What does it say about me that when writing about a working journalist, I refer to her in the past tense like she’s not around anymore? The blogosphere really is its own little world…

Why, Isn’t That Nice?

Have I mentioned how great the New York Times Opinionater Blog is?  I mean, Tobin Harshaw and Chris Sullentrop are just great, smart guys.   And no, this burst of praise has nothing to do with Harshaw callling me a “teen super-blogger.” Nothing at all.

A second note that’s more relevant to the original post.  While I praised Kristol’s first column, James Fallows is right to say that the writing is a bit cliche-ridden and Kristol does, in fact, quote Michael Medved when he cited Michelle Malkin, but I think Yglesias’ line of criticism, that the Times made a mistake in hiring Kristol because “You need to read his work with a decoder ring to try to figure out what’s happening” is misguided. You do need a decoder ring to read Kristol — but that’s precisely why Kristol was a good hire.  In an election year, we get an inside view into the mind of a key and influential figure in the conservative media establishment.  While that mind may be sometimes horrifying and daft, he’s still an important dude, and when he talks, people listen and the political climate can even change.  And from the Times‘ perspective, the fact that there is so much buzz about a rather anodyne horse-race column is a vindication, more than anything, of their decision.  Frank Rich or Maureen Dowd haven’t been able to create this much discussion or (probably) draw as much traffic to the site recently as Kristol has on his first day.

Stollerfreude, Post Debate Edition

Matt Stoller, despite my disagreements with him about Obama, is a very astute observer of Democratic politics, which is why I’m so surprised he said this, “What I do like about Obama’s message is that he’s talking about including the American public in the process of self-government. That’s new.” This just isn’t true. One of Obama’s main messages has been popular participation in government and activism. There’s a reason he always talks about his time as a community organizer, because it’s a model of the type of activism and participation that he thinks is important. Look at this line from his speech he gave announcing his candidacy:

After three years of this work [community organizing]…I became a civil rights lawyer, and taught constitutional law, and after a time, I came to understand that our cherished rights of liberty and equality depend on the active participation of an awakened electorate. (emphasis added)

Or this, from later in that opening speech:

It must be about us - it must be about what we can do together. This campaign must be the occasion, the vehicle, of your hopes, and your dreams. It will take your time, your energy, and your advice - to push us forward when we’re doing right, and to let us know when we’re not. This campaign has to be about reclaiming the meaning of citizenship, restoring our sense of common purpose, and realizing that few obstacles can withstand the power of millions of voices calling for change.

While that rhetoric sounds hokey, it shows that Obama really thinks that individual and community participation in government and activism is incredibly important, and this has been a key theme since the beginning of his campaign. And in light of his Iowa victory, which was driven by getting new, younger voters, was another example of his commitment to citizen participation. Ezra Klein captured this dynamic very well:

The beginning of his speech also shed some light on the results in Iowa. Obama begins by inviting two of his young, GOTV volunteers onto the podium. He talks about what it was like to be a volunteer and community organizer, to work long days for little pay, to be hungrier for inspiration than compensation. He talks, in other words, about what it’s like to be young and in the political process. And he transitions that very smoothly into an explanation of how to vote for him, who to talk to, what cards to sign for the campaign, etc. It’s a one-two punch that goes far in explaining why he amped up turnout among the young. His speeches begin by affirming them, then instructing them. It’s very smart — the sort of thing that’s unsurprising coming from a community organizer, but that you rarely see in politicians.

It’s not surprising that Obama considers the nuts and bolts of his GOTV workers so important. What is surprising is Stoller’s claim to have been blind to that dynamic. Or maybe Stoller is realizing that his hits on Obama look petty and wrong in wake of what happened in Iowa.

Stollerfreude

Earlier this morning, I pointed out the absence of Matt Stoller on OpenLeft, and he has now gathered some thoughts about the repudiation of his ceaseless attacks on Obama.  Even he realizes the central dynamic at play in Obama’s victory, that he managed to bring a lot of young and new voters, who are going to be at the heart of the progressive coalition Stoller speaks of so much.  Instead of the “problematic candidate” or the “conservative candidate” Stoller notices that he is bringing together a multiracial coalition that will necessarily be at the heart of progressive movement. He summarizes

  I loved his speech and the phrase the ‘tyranny of oil’, though I must confess that the theme of unity and America coming together to promote Obama struck me as weird at a victory speech for a Democratic caucus.  It’s not like the Republicans didn’t also have a caucus.  But on another level, there really is a multiracial emergence here, a new generation of activists taking over the party.

Hmm, for some reason, he doesn’t sound so harsh and anti-Obama these days.  Interesting.

Now Everything is Back to Normal

It’s comforting that, in these times of turmoil, we can still be assured that bloggers at the Corner, and Andy McCarthy in particular, are still willing to ascribe profoundly negative characteristics to a whole group of people based on little evidence besides the fact that they’re brown and Muslim.   From a fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, no less.

Will Anything Satisfy Matt Stoller?

The amount of goalpost moving among certain progressive blogs has been astounding. Ezra Klein makes the crucial point that every major and (almost) every minor Democratic presidential candidate is running a much more progressive campaign than would have been thought feasible in 2004. In 2004, no first tier candidate was talking about universal health care or withdrawal from Iraq. Now, all of them do.

While I understand the impulse to pursue a maximalist strategy because of inherent Democratic advantages and that left leaning pundits should be expanding the ideological benchmarks to put progressive ideas more firmly in the center, Matt Stoller’s overly dramatic criticism of Barack Obama is over the top. Like when he reacts to the deeply flawed Paul Krugman column attacking Obama by saying that “Obama is just a problem candidate for Democrats.”

What will Stoller be saying if Obama wins the nomination? Will he be glumly supporting the “problem candidate”, muttering Nader-like that he’s too “status quo”? I really don’t understand how a “problem candidate” could support Iraq withdrawal, massive government involvement in health care, a complete reappraisal of our foreign policy, scrapping the Bush tax cuts and the whole of Obama’s progressive agenda. There is a place for pushing Democrats to be more aggressive, more progressive and more partisan, but it can easily turn counter-productive and silly. Much of OpenLeft’s Obama commentary is going in that direction.

Where Else To Find Me

I just realized that Campus Progress allows anyone to sign up and start blogging there, and more importantly, it lists everyone’s posts on the main site.  So, seeing as I’m going to be a college student this coming fall, and hopefully will be accepted into a college tomorrow, I’ve decided to do some blogging over there.  My first post is an adaption of my post about James Flynn, so check it out.

Illegal Immigration and Social Security: Kaus Style!

Mickey Kaus gets counterintuitive and claims that high levels of illegal immigration aren’t the boon to Social Security that they are often thought to be:

I’ve always been told by defenders of the system that one of the main safety valves, should it begin to look insolvent, was the ability to let in more immigrants– increasing the crucial worker-to-retiree ratio. But to the extent the current immigration debate unexpectedly chases FICA-paying illegal immigrants away, and discourages admitting more legal immigrants, mightn’t it by the same token make Social Security less solvent than currently projected? … kf’s solutions: a) If the number of illegals actually falls dramatically, that’s what will make it possible to eventually get public support for a reasonable increase in quotas for legals; b) Find other ways to make the system solvent–like reducing the benefits of the affluent. If we have to raise taxes or cut benefits a bit more to make up for controlling the borders, it’s worth i

Kaus ignores two reasons why high levels of illegal immigration could still benefit social security. 1) To the extend that illegal immigrants are using fake social security numbers to get employment, they are the best thing imaginable for Social Security.  They still pay FICA taxes and won’t ever claim social security benefits.  2) Illegal immigrants have children in the United States who are citizens that will get legal employment and pay into the fund like everyone else.  It’s also unclear how we are chasing FICA immigrants away by tolerating large amounts of illegal immigration.  For example, our refusal to raise the H1B cap is a real example of having a policy that results in a low number of FICA-paying immigrants.

Kaus’ first supposed solution rests on the premise that status quo levels of illegal immigration is a bad thing, but I certainly agree that we should increase levels of legal immigration, just a matter of general policy.  His second solution is just the old Kaus tune — means testing benefits.  This shouldn’t surprise anyone, if there’s any discussion of Social Security in any imaginable context, that’s Kaus’ solution.

I’m trying not to sound too snarky here, but this post could have easily been written by a Kaus-imitating computer program.  Counterintuitive? Check. Explanation of how cracking down on illegal immigration will solve a certain problem/attempted debunking of a reason why illegal immigration could be good? Check.  Justification for means testing social security benefits? Check.  I’d say around 75% of Kaus’ policy-related posts include at least one of those elements, but it was impressive to see all three. The only thing that was missing was bashing teachers unions.

The Resnikoff Returns

One of the first bloggers to link to me and add me to his blogroll was Ned Resnikoff.  Unfortunately, he has been incommunicado for the last few months, due to a nasty combination of school work and a TPM internship.  Well, he’s back and blogging at full steam.  So I recommend yall check him out.  Also, the title of his blog “Veritosity” is quite clever.

The Onion Takes on the Blogosphere

I’m sure this will fly around the net soon enough, but here is the soon-to-be-classic “Entire Blogosphere Stunned by Blogger’s Special Weekend Post”:

NEW YORK—In what is being called a seminal moment in Internet history, a rare weekend post by 25-year-old blogger Ben Tiedemann on his website bentiedemanntellsall.blogspot.com rocked the 50 million-member blogosphere this Saturday.

The landmark post, which updated nearly every member of the global online community on the shelf Tiedemann was building, was linked to by several thousand sites, including Daily Kos, Digg, and The New York Times.

“Wow, what a special treat this was for all of us,” said Talking Points Memo head blogger Joshua Micah Marshal, who, along with all other bloggers, checks Tiedemann’s site every day just in case something monumental occurs. “I thought I was going to have to wait until Monday to find out if Ben decided to put [the shelf] in his bedroom or the living room. The pictures were great, too.”

Within two hours of going live, Tiedemann’s 15-word post received 34,634,897 comments.