Chicago Boyz

God Bless America.

Walter Russell Mead’s two recent pieces (in the Wall Street Journal and in the LA Times) argue that the Democrat’s weakness on defense are likely to cost them the next election. Mead suggests in both articles that the Democrats can win by running to the right of Bush on the war. Kennedy, after all, ran on the “missile” gap and outflanked Nixon on the right. Mead notes that historically, the Democrats have been the “war party” — Wilson, FDR, Truman, Johnson all led us into major overseas commitments. But that really is ancient history. Since 1972, with McGovern, the Donks have been peaceniks. Mead correctly points out that Democrat voters in Iowa and New Hampshire have signalled that opposition to the war is not the issue they care about most. This, he suggests, opens the way to a more hawkish stance for a Democrat candidate. He notes, astutely, that the Clintons are already taking this stance.

Some proposals he offers:

For example, Democrats in Congress could introduce a bill to make it harder for immigrants from countries that condone terror to enter the United States. Or one that would make it easier for the families of terror victims to sue, say, European and Middle Eastern banks and other companies that have done business with terrorist organizations. They could announce a strategy for the war on terror that is more comprehensive than anything the Bush administration has offered — and they could attack the administration for lacking a strategy for victory.

Mead omits one that I think could be a winner — a vocal public attack on Saudi Arabia as oppressive, misogynistic, terror-supporting, undemocratic, Islamic fundamentalist, anti-semitic, and the homeland of the 9/11 hijackers. Attacking Bush’s handling of Saudi Arabia could be very popular.

Still, while Mead would like the Democrat party to move back toward the public mainstream on foreign policy, I don’t see it happening until after the primaries are over, and by then it will probably be too late to convince moderate voters in the general election that they are reliable on defense. Still, this is the area where the Democrats are weakest, and you can count on them making some efforts, even bold ones, to catch up with Bush in this area. Nominating General Clark probably won’t do it, since he has come off as a nutcase.

But there is another bold step the Democrats could take to hammer Bush on his foreign policy — nominate Anthony Zinni for VP.

— deserve a blog all their own; a paid one, which is why I won’t be doing it unless somebody offers me an outrageous rate, like 40¢/word. So all I’m putting in this post is tidbits:

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Lex sent me an excellent article yesterday about the effects of offshoring U.S. IT jobs.

It’s very readable and compelling. I like the analogy the author uses with movies and the portrayal of computers at the work place:

“The growing détente was reflected in 40 years of Hollywood films. Desk Set, from 1957, was about a research department head who keeps her job only after a battle of wits with a computer (the machine blows up). By 1988, the computer had moved from threat to weapon: In Working Girl, Melanie Griffith has both a stock market terminal and a PC on her desk and uses her skills and knowledge to move from secretary to private office. By the time Mike Judge made Office Space in 1999, the PC had faded into just another bit of cubicle furniture.”

I found another good article that makes a similar argument albeit slower to read and more numbers oriented.

I like the analogy this article makes comparing the rise of IT India to the proliferation of the desktop computer. There’s no catchy line, so I’ll try to spell it out. When computers first started, the money was in making stuff like DRAM and chips. But chips were expensive to make, so computers were expensive to buy. With the offshoring of chip production, computers became a cheap commodity, and we have mass proliferation of the desktop PC. With a PC on every office desk, productivity soared.

Like PC’s, the money now is in writing code and trying to make sense of all that computing power. By extension, the final product is prohibitively expensive, such as an integrated SAP or Oracle system. It’s expensive, so only the richest companies can use it to boost productivity. So if you can offshore and decrease the cost of technology by magnitudes, you make technology more accessible to more people. And as this previously expensive technology proliferates, you get another jump in productivity.

Creative destruction has been the rule for centuries, and it’s still the rule now. I probably should have picked up on it earlier, but it’s the most compelling argument I’ve heard for offshoring service jobs to India. I’m liking this offshore idea more and more now.