Month: September 2008

The Democrats’ Denial-of-Service Attack

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The TV news is all Palin, all the time. And daughter of Palin. Politically this isn’t necessarily bad for Republicans, to the extent it focuses scrutiny on Governor Palin, who I think stands up well to it. However, it is bad (or good, depending on your partisan inclination) in that it removes scrutiny from Obama, who does not. The risk of a media pile-on on Palin was one of the risks McCain took in selecting Palin. Only time will tell if it was a justified risk.

The distributed Obama campaign — including the Obama organization, leftist bloggers and MSM — quickly figured out the dynamics of the situation and are responding effectively. The campaign or bloggers introduce daily talking-points that are repeated and amplified by a media cascade and can generate enough network (online and TV) discussion to crowd out most other topics. That’s what happened today and yesterday. Today’s main talking point was, McCain didn’t adequately vet Palin. This is clearly not true, given that McCain’s people were checking out Palin months ago. Yet given the story about the daughter, the talking point is just plausible enough to give media people cover in keeping it alive for a day as a major story. Conservative and Republican bloggers and MSM people unwittingly help their opponents by focusing even more attention on Palin in order to defend her and correct the record. While all of this is going on, Obama is almost invisible, and he appears to have picked up a few points in the polls. (Notice that the bounce didn’t begin until waves of Palin stories rescued him from the media spotlight.) The concurrent weather story, which isn’t really a story but is being hyped for all it’s worth by the pro-Obama media, further distracts scrutiny from Obama.

Conservative MSM people haven’t quite caught on to the full extent of what is happening. Their supposedly non-partisan colleagues are gleefully helping Obama by repeating endlessly “questions” about Palin that displace both McCain’s message and serious scrutiny of Obama. Who wants to talk about Obama’s relationship with Ayers, or about offshore drilling or tax cuts, when there’s juicy gossip (or merely reckless speculation) to be spread about Palin’s family. On Brit Hume’s show tonight, the conservative commentators were almost sputtering with rage at the Democrats’ dishonest attacks on Palin. Yet these same conservative commentators spent most of their time attempting to rebut the attacks, which means they didn’t talk much about anything else. Larry Kudlow devoted much of his show to defending Palin. Conservative media people watch impotently as their leftist colleagues do Obama’s work. The big-media conservatives aren’t temperamentally or tactically equipped to respond effectively. Perhaps the pro-McCain bloggers will do better.

Obviously Obama would like to keep Palin at the center of media focus. Obviously McCain would like to keep his own policies, and Obama’s failings, at the center of focus. McCain’s electoral prospects depend on how quickly he and Palin can maneuver to shift the focus back to Obama. McCain may yet come out OK if public disgust with scummy media partisanship generates a backlash, or if voters lose interest in the MSM’s dishonest Palin-as-soap-opera meme. Whatever happens, it’s clear that Governor Palin and her family are in for a nasty ride. The leftist political-media complex will go all-out to destroy her as long as attacking her deflects attention from the radical leftist at the head of the Democratic ticket.

UPDATE: Other views, from Rich Karlgaard, Jay Cost and Tom Smith (Smith’s post links to several additional good posts).

McCain Bad for Jews/Israel?

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Ron Coleman disagrees and provides an alternative hypothesis:

Like a good Zionist, Goldberg looks everywhere for Israel’s disastrous state but the most obvious place: Israel. The vast majority of its awful policy decisions, whether in terms of defense, international relations, tactics, economics and domestic policy, are not in any way decided or even on the radar on Pennsylvania Avenue. They are the result of a string of breathtakingly incompetent governments purporting to run a depressingly corrupt kleptocracy to please an obsolescing and self-loathing elite that lacks the will to even purport to lead a confused and mainly unmotivated populace that obsesses on a slim minority of practitioners of its own religion in its midst as the bogeyman that explains its existential hopelessness. A preposterously irrational and self-destructive foreign policy is almost besides the point and is hardly a surprise — but a secular Zionist can hardly be expected to wrestle with this honestly when there are Republicans to blame and election in the air.

I don’t share Ron’s disdain for secular Zionists, not all of whom are leftists and not all of whom are unwilling to blame Israel for its own mistakes. However, I agree that Israel’s current problems are largely of its own making, the consequence of years of bad leadership. Bush II has been, until recently, the most pro-Israel US president since Truman, and I see no reason to think McCain would be much worse. (I do think there’s reason to expect Obama to be worse, a la Jimmy Carter.) Goldberg ignores the fact that Israel’s leaders have made numerous bad decisions (empowering Arafat, withdrawing precipitately from Lebanon and Gaza, not attacking Syria or destroying Hezbollah in 2006, etc.), and have always had the option of saying no to ill-conceived US proposals. Israel’s central problem is its corrupt political culture — largely the result of socialism, a poorly designed electoral system that makes leaders unaccountable, and an addiction to US subsidies. I don’t know what the remedy for Israel’s fundamental problems is, or if there is a remedy, but blaming Bush or McCain seems way off the mark.

Russia and Georgia – An Economic Mistake

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Economic Impact of Georgia Invasion

A recent Wall Street Journal article titled “Borrowing Costs Increase Sharply for Russian Firms” lays out the economic toll that Russia will begin to feel from their invasion of Georgia. Per the article:

“the Georgian conflict has sparked prohibitively funding costs… conditions have deteriorated significantly for Russian borrowers, as reflected by sovereign and corporate-credit spreads, which have widened sharply, substantially increasing the cost of borrowing… but even then, an attractive premium may not be enough to entice investors to participate in deals… the majority of investors won’t want to participate right now. They will prefer to wait for signs of improvement, and right now there are no clear signs.”

For Russian companies seeking debt financing, this war comes at a bad time. The world debt markets are already being roiled by a lack of liquidity and losses, making even solid companies with low credit risk scramble for funding. Now add to this the fact that Russia seems to be actively repelling the West, this makes Russian instruments an even bigger risk.

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Energy, Productivity, and the Middle Class

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It being Labor Day, there will doubtless be many political speeches and newspaper articles touching on the rise of the American middle class and crediting this rise to labor unions and perhaps also to FDR’s New Deal.

I don’t mind giving some of the credit to unions. But the primary driver of middle class affluence has been the availability of plentiful and low-cost energy…especially in the form of electricity…coupled with a whole array of productivity-increasing tools and methods, ranging from the horse-drawn harvester to the assembly line to the automated check sorting machine.

The middle class affluence enabled by these factors is gravely threatened is gravely threatened by the Democratic-“progressive” hostility toward energy production and distribution in all practical forms, and by the endless set of productivity-sapping policies advocated by the same group of people.

Over the long term, or even the medium term, a nation cannot consume more than it produces. It doesn’t matter how aggressive the unions are, or what tax policies are in place, or how much Oprah-like sympathy for the unfortunate is exuded by politicians–if you harm the productive power of a nation, its average standard of living is going to go down.

Low-energy, low-productivity societies can support a very wealthy elite, and have historically often done so, but they cannot support a broadly affluent middle class.