HELMS.

Like Matt, I'm a bit surprised to see conservatives heaping praise on Jesse Helms. Helms was an awful bigot with a secondary interest in destroying international institutions and increasing tobacco subsidies. The liberal equivalent would be a Communist fellow traveler who later in life dedicated himself to appropriating money for nominally left wing revolutionary fronts and procuring highway grants.

Some of my conservative friends often complain about the difficulty of constructing a "usable history" out of the movement's recent past, and I sympathize with their plight. When leading exemplars of your political tradition were trying to preserve segregation less than four decades ago, it's a bit hard to argue that your party, which is now electorally based in the American South, is really rooted in a cautious empiricism and an acute concern for the deadweight losses associated with taxation. That project would really benefit, however, if more of them would step forward and say that Helms marred the history of their movement and left decent people ashamed to call themselves conservative. The attempt to subsume his primary political legacy beneath a lot of pabulum about "limited government and individual liberty" (which did not apparently include the liberty of blacks to work amongst whites or mingle with other races) is embarrassing. But if it goes unchallenged, what are those of us outside the conservative movement to think?

THE CASE AGAINST MEAT.

I've been getting a lot of links along the lines of, "if meat becomes more expensive, everyone will starve! Is that what liberals want!?" The point of talking about meat in an energy context, however, is not simply that it's extraordinarily resource intensive; it's that it's extraordinarily resource intensive compared to other foods. People are starving because so many of us eat meat. If meat were to become more expensive, and folks began trending towards plant-based diets, world hunger would be substantially alleviated.

Unlike plants, which largely require sunlight to grow, animals require food to grow. Given current farming practices, that means grain. But all that grain isn't being reconstituted into delicious burger. It's helping the cow breathe, and walk around, and build strong bones, and make "mooing" sounds. Annoyingly, animals live for awhile before they become steaks, and that period turns out to require a lot of energy. This means it takes about 16 pounds of grain to "produce" one pound of animal flesh. That's grain, of course, that the poor can't eat, because it's bought by richer countries in order to feed livestock. And what grain remains is pricier, because the market for grain is tightened by the 756 million tons going to animal feed.

Animals also need land. Even if they're penned up in industrial agriculture settings. And it turns out they need a lot more of it than do most crops. The following graph (which comes from this pdf) tracks usable protein yield per acre for a host of foods. Meat doesn't fare well:

The pity is that this case, which is based around energy efficiency and resource intensity, gets tied up with critiques of "lifestyle liberalism." John Schwenkler, for instance, thinks I want people to eat less meat because I want to "make more people learn to live like I do." But I don't want to live like I do! Bacon is transcendent. The words "porterhouse" and "steak" make my mouth water. Pork belly makes me simultaneously believe in God and doubt my own religious tradition. And because of this, I'm not a full vegetarian. But I should be. And not liking liberals don't change the truth about meat: Industrial agriculture is cruel, meat production is a huge contributor to global warming, and the market for meat contributes to world hunger in a substantial and direct way.

THE INCONSISTENT POWER OF ARCHITECTURE.

From Alain de Botton's The Architecture of Happiness:

Endowed with a power as unreliable as it often is inexpressible, architecture will always compete poorly with utilitarian demands for humanity's resources. How hard it is to make a case for tearing down and rebuilding a serviceable but mean street. How awkward to have to defend, in the face of more tangible needs, the benefits of realigning a crooked lamppost or replacing an ill-matched window frame. Beautiful architecture has none of the unambiguous advantages of a vaccine or a bowl of rice. Its construction will hence never be raised to a dominant political priority, for even if the whole of the man-made world could, through relentless effort and sacrifice, be modeled to rival St. Mark's Square, even if we could spend the rest of our lives in the Villa Rotunda or the Glass House, we would still be often in a bad mood.

FROM THE INBOX.

"Bob" writes in:

Riding the subway is fun? Yeah, if you like dirty, stinky foreigners who can’t speak English.

I’ll ride on a subway everyday when you spend your Sundays at NASCAR races.

The combination of capitalism and petroleum products has done more to lift people out of poverty than every liberal idiot and idiotic liberal idea in the history of mankind.

By the way, it’s fucking July 4th and it’s cold outside dickhead.

WE'VE GOT THE FACTS AND WE'RE VOTING YES (OR NO).

Broadly speaking, I share Matt's model of the electorate:

the majority of voters are voting as blind partisans. Of the rest, most are being driven by the macro factors (shitty economy, sick of Bush) or purely by issue salience (vote Republican when I care about national security, vote Democratic when I care about the economy) or other such things. And yet, few people like to say that kind of thing. And this is where the campaign comes in.

The main impact of campaign attacks, I think, is not to actually change anyone's mind but rather to familiarize everyone with the talking points of the side they agree with. In 2000, voters who valued "experience" turned out to favor Al Gore strongly. In the 2008 campaign, I think it's clear that voters who value "experience" will favor John McCain. That's not, however, because there's some coherent bloc of "experience" voters who shifted loyalties -- it's because "experience" was a Democratic talking point in 2000 and it's a Republican talking point in 2008 so people change which candidate attributes they value. In 2004, you could find a lot of Democrats who thought John Kerry military service proved important things about his fitness for office, whereas in 2008 Republicans are more likely to say that about John McCain.

These are the sort of margins that suggest anything could've been the culprit. A couple hundred votes in Florida, a couple thousand in Ohio, and Democrats win. The losses weren't the clear consequences of a great economy or a popular Republican leader or a particular confluence of circumstances. Indeed, given the backdrop of 9/11, the elections have actually been substantially closer than one might expect.

But losses require some sort of change, and so what's happened is that the call for change has also come on the margins: The substantive beliefs of a party are protected by the powerful, but style can be thrown under the bus. So things like a candidate's penchant for pedantry, or his "elitist" bearing, became the acceptable culprits. The ideas remained basically the same. By 2008, however, the policy environment had shifted dramatically, and the Democrats had been out of power for almost a decade, and so the base elected someone who represented a more substantial break with the past. If Obama racks up a big win, however, it will be largely because the underlying factors (shitty economy, Bush fatigue) moved the core electorate, not because stylistic factors (great speeches!) moved the marginal electorate.

BEST 8 SONG ALBUM?

I have eight tracks left on eMusic this month. I'm too lazy to download individual songs, but I'm too stingy to let my allotted 65 songs go to waste. So tell me, o' people of the internet, what are your favorite 6 to 8 song albums? Who did a lot with a little?

CRIME.

Crime is the background noise to life in DC. Less an act of God than a certainty of time, it's thought of much like illness: You expect that it will happen. The question is when, and how bad it will be. In my direct friend group, about half have been mugged. Some had business-like, even slightly whimsical transactions. "Pleasure doing business with ya," the mugger said. One was severely beaten. Another had a knife held to her throat. Another had a gun shoved against the back of his head. And Brian was shot. Three times.

On the other hand, things are getting better. In 1991, DC's homicide rate was 81 per 100,000 residents -- the highest in the country. In 2006, it was 29.1 per 100,000 residents, the lowest rate since the 80s. But it sure doesn't feel safe. Some days, you finish keeping watch on your hospitalized friend and decide to get a drink. Sitting at the bar, you see police lights reflected in the glass. The ice cream shop across the street was just hit by armed robbers. Of course it was. Happened a few years ago, too. You laugh with your friends about it being the unluckiest ice cream shop in town ("What? Did the candy story have too complicated a lock?"), and then start talking about the new frozen yogurt place that opened up in Dupont. About time we had one of those, you say. Crime has become a conversational bridge, like talk of the weather or traffic.

Commenters say my link to Spencer's PayPal doesn't work, and I've not been able to figure out how to make it work. If you want to donate to Brian's recovery, you can PayPal me at ezra.klein@gmail.com. If you want to send notes, or DVDs from Amazon, or anything of that nature, you can send to:

Ezra Klein
The American Prospect
2000 L St. NW
Washington, DC 20036

If you're looking for ideas, here's my suggestion: Brian will probably be laid out on the couch for a bit, and the boy does love horror movies. About three nights out of five, I'll come downstairs in the morning and find that Brian fell asleep on the sofa watching reruns of The Hills Have Eyes, or some other movie about the Thing that came from the Place. So I'd go in that direction.

THANK GOD IT'S THURSDAY.

Yesterday I suggested that "a move away from oil will actually entail significant lifestyle benefits." Today I find that Utah is responding to high gasoline prices by moving state workers to a four-day workweek. In the private sector, telecommuting is on the rise. These moves save oil, yes, but the side effect is that workers get more flexibility and freedom in finding the work-life balance that works best for them.

GOOD PARENTING.

Matt worries that in the future, kids will understand the Star Wars series as a six-part epic, and they'll begin with Anakin's crummy movies rather than "A New Hope." Ross responds:

In the Douthat household, the prequels don't exist - not now, and certainly not in a future where I'm charged with introducing a new generation to the Skywalker universe. Indeed, I intend to carefully vet all of my children's friends to ensure that there's absolutely no risk of a playdate or sleepover bringing them in contact, even fleetingly, with Jar Jar Binks, Count Dooku, the midichlorians and Padme Amidala, Queen of frickin' Naboo.

THE META MOVIE.

I saw the trailer for Bolt when I went to see Wall-E the other night. Seemed cute, but I didn't realize it was quite so complicated.

FIXING FINANCE.

Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres have a neat idea for fixing campaign finance: Give every American an allotment of fifty "Patriot dollars," which they can direct to the candidate of their choice, and which will then result in a $50 grant to the candidate. Aside from the incredibly annoying name ("patriot dollars?" "patriot financing?"), it's an interesting idea that pairs a theory of public financing with an idea for increasing civic engagement. If you've got money to give, they theorize, you'll be more interested in figuring out who you can give it to.

Maybe. For now, the simplest reform, and the one that fits best with actual trends in funding, are the small-donor democracy ideas Mark Schmitt elaborated in Democracy a year or two back. The idea, basically, is that private funding isn't the problem. The problem is the tilt towards big donors, bundlers, corporate PACs. Since those groups can give $2,000 easily, politicians are more responsive to them than to small donors. You could solve that by putting a match or a multiplier on small donations. If you gave $250, say, it would be matched to $500. Or maybe $500 would become $1,500. In any case, small donors would become more economically competitive with large donors. Given the internet's remarkable success in enabling small donor fundraising and enlarging the pool of people willing to give, such strategies seem even more plausible now than they did two or three years ago.

BEUTLER AID.

If folks want to throw a couple bucks Brian's way to help defray medical costs, family travel, time out of work, and so forth, they should head thisaway.

THE COSTS OF CAP AND TRADE.

Sorry for the light posting today, I spent most of it hanging around outside Brian's hospital room. He, in turn, wanted internet access so he could catch up on blog reading. We got him his iPhone and everyone was happy.

But I did want to respond to this Dave Roberts post on cap and trade. Dave argues that cap and trade won't hurt the economy, and will certainly be better for growth than unchecked global warming and scarcity-driven volatility in energy prices. I agree with him. He thinks, however, that I don't. Which is peculiar. The point I made in my original post is very limited, and not, to my knowledge, controversial: A cap and trade carbon plan will raise the cost of carbon intensive products like gasoline. That's how it works to discourage carbon consumption. By capping emissions, and then lowering the cap, it makes carbon-intensive products relatively more expensive, which in turn increases the economic incentives to purchase, and develop, non-carbon intensive products.

This, in the short-term, makes gasoline more expensive. That's the point of it. There are a variety of ways to compensate people for making gasoline more expensive, but gasoline will still be more expensive. That's going to make cap and trade a tough sell. But that doesn't mean it will be bad for the economy, or bad for people in general. Money not spent on gasoline is money spent on other things. As carbon-intensive products become pricier, other products will become cheaper. Lots of good stuff will happen, and my sense is that a move away from oil will actually entail significant lifestyle benefits. That's why I talk about transit and food policy a lot. Transit is awesome. Not sitting in traffic makes people happier. Riding on subways is fun. Biking is a joy. Meat consumption is another major carbon issue, but here again, a diet where red meat was relatively more expensive and vegetables and grains relatively less would be healthier for us. It would mean fewer cardiovascular surgeries and less time watching loved ones breathe through a tube. It would free up health care money to spend on other things.

Cheap carbon has substantially shaped the evolution of our economy and national lifestyle. It's done an enormous amount of good. But some of the byproducts have been problematic. As we move away from a carbon-based economy, we'll have opportunity to rethink some of those issues, and possibly move forward in ways that make us happier, healthier, and freer. There's nothing to fear in that.

THE POWER OF REVIEWS.

Ross links to Erik Lundgaard's argument that "once you control for marketing budgets and theater saturation (big things to control for, obviously), well-reviewed movies tend to outgross their badly-reviewed competitors," and thus the world is just. I'd be interested to know if that effect is increasing over time.

This month, Radar has an interesting article on the contemporary inability of big budget movie star's to ensure box office success through sheer force of presence. The article quotes a lot of folks who seem puzzled by this phenomenon, but it seems fairly clear: Movie stars were effective for a reason. A decade ago, if you wanted to see a movie, and you didn't have the Sunday LA Times around, you just went to the movies and walked into whatever looked good. There wasn't much accessible information. One way for a film to signal quality was to feature a major movie star, because a big star meant lots of money, which meant that even if the production had problems, it would be slick and entertaining. So movie stars had a major effect; they signaled a sort of trustworthy professionalism on the part of the studio. Now, however, the net made it much easier to access direct information on the relative quality of film's, so not only do I have better information than casting, but it's become fairly clear that casting isn't much related to quality.

Moreover, review aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic have made that information much more authoritative. If one aging white guy didn't like Hancock, I'd probably just assume he wasn't into the concept. But since no one likes Hancock, I probably won't see the movie. They create consensus where there used to be only opinion. This may mean I miss some good movies -- Van Wilder, which I sort of love, got an 18 percent from Rotten Tomatoes -- but it also means I see fewer bad films. My sense is this is widely true, but I have no data on that.

TECHNOLUST.

Lee Sigelman was thinking of getting an iPhone 2, but had his head turned by the Sumsing Turbo 3000 XI Multitask. Looks pretty good:

ODD JOBS.

According to Mike Allen's morning playbook, Dan GLickman, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, has been named a member of the Board of Trustees on National 4-H. In other words, the dude now runs Hollywood and the Heartland. Expect Peggy Noonan's head to explode in 3, 2, 1...

RETURN OF TED.

According to the Boston Globe, Ted Kennedy isn't letting anything so trivial as an aggressive brain tumor prevent him from reforming health care:

Senator Edward M. Kennedy's office has begun convening a series of meetings involving a wide array of healthcare specialists to begin laying the groundwork for a new attempt to provide universal healthcare, according to participants.

The discussions signal that Kennedy, who instructed aides to begin holding the meetings while he is in Massachusetts undergoing treatment for brain cancer, intends to work vigorously to build bipartisan support for a major healthcare initiative when he returns to Washington in the fall.

As AARP's policy director, Jon Rother, says, "You have got to think this will be the Ted Kennedy Health Reform Act." When Kennedy's cancer was announced, I wrote, "without Kennedy, it's hard to imagine passing universal health care." Hopefully, we're not even going to have to try.

YOUR WORLD IN CHARTS: UNDERINSURED EDITION.

One of the tricky questions in health policy is how to delineate between different types of the insured. We talk a lot about those without any coverage, but a fair portion are hurtling through life with all the protection afforded by a rusted, rattling Kia. In some ways, these underinsured can be worse off than the uninsured, as they think, and even act, like they have coverage, only to find themselves financially ruined or totally betrayed when a medical calamity hits.

Last month, the Commonwealth Fund released a study trying to count the number of underinsured. They chose, as their cutoff point, spending 10 percent of more of income (percent if low-income) on out-of-pocket medical expenses, or having deductibles above 5 percent income. On first read, I was a bit unconvinced by that definition. But it turns out that the experience of folks who fit that description is a whole lot closer to the experience of the uninsured than the insured. Just ask the graph:

The Commonwealth Fund estimates that about 14 percent of the population was underinsured in 2007. That sounds about right, and it's a useful reminder that insurance isn't binary, wherein you have it or you don't. Rather, it exists on a continuum, with some folks being totally insured, some folks being half insured and half uninsured, some folks being totally uninsured but having access to emergency rooms, and so forth. This is how American rationing actually manifests. Canada might have waiting times for non-essential treatments, but we have cost barriers to all manner of treatments. Some can't afford the care, and so they go into debt, or have to sell their home. Others can't afford the care, and so they never get it. We count that waiting time as zero rather than infinity, but that's just a bad faith numbers trick meant to make us feel better.

SISTER SOULJAHIN FOR FUN AND PROFIT.

I've actually been meaning to link to this for a couple days, but Seth Colter Walls' effort to recall the original context of Bill Clinton's Sister Souljah move is a useful exercise. Of late, there's been a lot of talk of Obama moving to the center, but there's a difference between emphasizing previously expressed moderate positions, as Obama is, and using a particular political controversy to ostentatiously demonstrate independence from a particular wing of the party, as Clinton did. That's true whether or not you think Clinton's condemnation of Sister Souljah was cynical, or unfair.

BRIAN.

Since this is already getting coverage throughout the liberal blogosphere, I guess I should say it's true that internet blog person and real life friend Brian Beutler was mugged and shot three times last night while walking home. Because Brian makes 50 Cent look like a pansy, he's already been moved out of trauma and into a normal room, is expected to make a full recovery, and is cracking way better jokes than Reagan ever did. We're enormously thankful, and resisting the temptation to make snide comments about the Heller decision. But we did make a graph (click for full size, readable version):

In other news, you know what sucks? LAX during a bomb scare.

TRAVEL.

Today's an unexpected travel day for me, so posting may be light, layovers and plane delays depending.

MASSACHUSETTS: A PROGRESS REPORT.

I get a lot of questions about the success and failures of the Massachusetts health plan. More to the point, I see a lot of incomplete information about the plan, and vague speculation. That's understandable, until this month, there wasn't any reliable data out of the experiment. But thanks to the Urban Institute, we've got the first round of numbers, and I've written up a sort of progress report on the plan: Where it's succeeded, where it's failed, and what it hasn't yet tried.

Update: In the article, I note that Massachusetts is taking on cost control next. Charles Blandy at BlueMassGroup notes that the Senate President Therese Murray has written and passed a bill on cost control, and next it'll go through the House. I haven't read it yet, but for those with some time, the legislation is here.

AUSTIN POLYTECHNICAL.

About a year ago, I did an article about the simultaneous decline of American manufacturing and the labor shortage in high-value manufacturing, using Austin Polytechnical Academy, an advanced manufacturing trade school opening in inner city Chicago, as a way to explore the mismatch. It was an interesting idea, but when I was out there, it hadn't even seen its first class. Now, it has, and Progress Illinois has an update.

THE OVERTON WINDOW AND ISRAEL.

I never get to say this, but Kaus is right: The rules have changed. Credit for this goes in no small measure to Walt and Mearsheimer, who made their statement aggressively enough and forthrightly enough that they shifted the acceptable window for conversation. It may still be that you're not supposed to agree with Walt and Mearsheimer, but so long as you don't mention them, you can echo their arguments and buy into pieces of their analysis.

This was largely the effect of bad strategy on the part of their detractors: By so cynically and aggressively calling them anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists, they compelled lots of other folks to defend them, work through their ideas, and prove that nothing happened when you voiced impolitic-yet-obvious statements like some Jewish neoconservatives view the containment and even destruction of Israel's adversaries as an important objective for American foreign policy. There was nothing intrinsically wrong with that perspective, nor even with the idea that zionists, like corn farmers, have a powerful political lobby, but you weren't supposed to say so before. Walt and Mearsheimer may have lost the public argument, but they won in creating the debate.

PARODY OR ACTUAL BOOK TITLE?

You decide:

Fleeced: How Barack Obama, Media Mockery of Terrorist Threats, Liberals Who Want To Kill Talk Radio, The Do-Nothing Congress, Companies That Help Iran, And Washington Lobbyists For Foreign Governments Are Scamming Us...And What To Do About It

GROUP DYNAMICS.

McMegan writes:

I've had about ten requests from men to explain the phrase "winning the cocktail party". None from women.

A male friend, who spends a not inconsiderable time cruising feminist sites, was one of those who asked what it meant. I find it odd to realize that most men don't observe something that is obvious to every woman I know: that there is a competitive male dynamic to groups that is completely different from the way female groups act. They don't know, of course, because unless the group is overwhelmingly female, the dynamic of any mixed group always defaults to male, with women fading back into supporting conversational roles. Maybe it's the kind of thing you can only observe by contrast to the extremely anti-competitive nature of female groups.

The easiest way to put it (and this is hardly original) is that men in groups are focused on their role within the group. Women in groups are focused on the group. Men gain status by standing out from the group; women gain status by submerging themselves into it--by strengthening the group, often at the expense of themselves.

It's not simply that mixed-gender groups revert to the male dynamic. Rather, they amplify it. Guys are more competitive, more interested in standing out, when there are women around. That's the situation for which those behaviors evolved. I imagine it's often annoying to be an attractive girl, as you walk into groups at parties and guy begin performing to make you laugh/think they're smart/make you like them. But Megan's point about female dynamics tracks with what lots of women have described to me, so I assume it's correct. But as I said, my sample size is small. What do you folks think?

AFTERNOON INTERLUDE.

Ferran Adrian recreates an olive out of olive puree. Molecular gastronomy is some amazing stuff:

Incidentally, thanks for this go to Josh, who has a cool food blog of his own. And if other folks want to suggest Afternoon Interludes, either in comments over e-mail, feel free. These things are hard to find!

Update: Incidentally, Matt went to Alinea the other day. Y'all should make him tell you how it was.

IN PRAISE OF SENATOR CARDIN.

I feel like I should do more to highlight Senator Cardin's remarks on transit, as this is the sort of thing we should reward politicians for:

We are in desperate need of significant transit improvements. We've got to have the facilities and we don't today, and then we need the fare-box and economic policies that reward people for taking public transportation. Some try to say that it should be "self-sufficient" or have a certain percentage return through the fare-box. We don't do that on our roads, and public transportation is much better for so many reasons -- not just the environment or the quality of life. We should be providing much stronger incentives for people to use public transportation, but first you need to have the facilities.

I'm a big, big supporter of dramatic change in public transportation. It includes more than just the bus and rail systems in our urban areas. It includes a commuter rail and inner-city rail -- the whole gamut of services that get people out of their personal vehicles. I don't want people driving their personal vehicles the way they are today...It starts with service. You have to have economical, convenient, mass transit service. At the national level there are interstate areas that the federal government needs to do a much more effective job on Amtrak and passenger rail. We know about all the controversy surrounding that. Everybody looks at the bottom-line. We shouldn't be looking at the bottom-line. We should be looking at whether adequate passenger rail service in this country so people have alternatives to using their cars. We don't have that today.

I would make the Northeast corridor much more convenient, much better serviced, and more reasonable. There are people who literally can't afford to use the corridor because it's so expensive on a train, even though in reality it's less expensive then driving your car. But it still could be made more convenient to get people out of passenger cars.

POOR CLARK.

Folks may wonder why I'm spending time defending Clark when it's an insignificant comment ripped out of context that will be forgotten in a day or two. Basically, the answer is because the furor over his comments has been nuts, and it's almost entirely cynical. It's the McCain campaign ginning up a helpful controversy, the Right jumping on-board because it's better to talk about McCain's service to this country rather than his unpopular and generally bad ideas for how to run it, and the media loving a good fight and having lots of time to fill up:

Clark isn't the world's best politician, but it was Schieffer who brought up McCain's plane crash in reply to Clark's comments on executive experience. It wasn't Clark who went their on his own. He's being unfairly pilloried for an entirely fair remark.

LINNER.

Apparently, fast food companies are frustrated that people only eat three meals a day, and so are contracting with ad agencies to push the idea of "linner," which is the meal they've made up between lunch and dinner. Obviously, the fast food companies can push whatever moronic ideas they want, but it's pretty clear that regulations should quietly be put into place to jail and reeducate anyone who ever refers to "linner" non-ironically/derisively. Also, "linner" is a really stupid word. They should take a page from my friend Beth and run a campaign against "hanger," which is when you get all irritable at your significant other because you're hungry and they're not ready for dinner yet. Men are from mars and women need some french fries at 4:30pm.

THE DEMOCRATS' NEW MONEY CLASS.

I think I'm not supposed to like David Brook's column on the composition of Obama's rich donor class, but actually, it's really interesting, and gets more than a little bit right. The fact that a number of ascendant industries (tech, investment banking, etc) lean Democratic is a pretty big story. As Brooks puts it:

The trends are pretty clear: rising economic sectors tend to favor Democrats while declining economic sectors are more likely to favor Republicans. The Democratic Party (not just Obama) has huge fund-raising advantages among people who work in electronics, communications, law and the catchall category of finance, insurance and real estate. Republicans have the advantage in agribusiness, oil and gas and transportation. Which set of sectors do you think are going to grow most quickly in this century’s service economy?

MORE ON CLARK.

Responding to my post on Wesley Clark, Alex Massie argues that the problem with Clark's comments is that they focused on the wrong part of John McCain's war experience. "The element of McCain's military service that earns - justifiably - the greatest respect, is that he was offered early release from the Hanoi Hilton and refused an early ticket home," says Massie. "Now, strictly speaking, this doesn't mean he's likely to be a better or worse President than the average politician either. But it does suggest that he was, in this instance, a braver man than you or I would be."

But John McCain's bravery is not under question. Let's go back to the tape:

CLARK: He has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee. And he has traveled all over the world. But he hasn't held executive responsibility. That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded — that wasn't a wartime squadron. He hasn't been there and ordered the bombs to fall. He hasn't seen what it's like when diplomats come in and say, "I don't know whether we're going to be able to get this point through or not, do you want to take the risk, what about your reputation, how do we handle this publicly? He hasn't made those calls, Bob.

SCHIEFFER: Can I just interrupt you? I have to say, Barack Obama hasn't had any of these experiences either, nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down.

CLARK: I don’t think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president.

Now, you can argue, as Alex says, that this is all true, but though "one may disapprove of the extent to which politics turns on questions of character and biography...it's pretty pointless to do so." But that's weirdly meta, and it's the mindset that justifies Schieffer and others continually letting John McCain's war experience serve as a substitute for, say, a detectable level of engagement with American social policy. The job of commentators like Massie and me, and the job of people like Clark who are brought on political talkshows to make good points, is to try and argue with elements of the political narrative that don't make sense and are just plain wrong. It's the McCain campaign's job to try and mine those comments for political advantage, and so be it. But no reason we need to help them. If Massie, like me, actually believes Clark's comments were correct, then the fact that they could be spun as offensive is not sufficient reason to spin them as offensive.

ASSIGNMENT DESK.

What do you want me to write about?

META!

Like Atrios, I feel the tension between Barack Obama being orders of magnitude better than John McCain and Barack Obama sometimes doing stuff I don't like and feel I should criticize. It's hard to balance the desire to not be totally in the tank with the need to not be dense about the central truth of the election.

In general, my rule is if I think of a critical post I want to write, I have to write it. I'm not part of Obama's campaign operation, and it's fairly important that the folks who are part of his campaign operation get criticized from the left and remain sensitive to those concerns. If they think they can take progressives for granted, they will. Also, I try to remember that I'm just some blogger and nobody cares what I think so I shouldn't sit around obsessing over meta questions which have no practical importance.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION VERSUS BIN LADEN.

From The New York Times today:

it is increasingly clear that the Bush administration will leave office with Al Qaeda having successfully relocated its base from Afghanistan to Pakistan’s tribal areas, where it has rebuilt much of its ability to attack from the region and broadcast its messages to militants across the world.

Image used under a Creative Commons license from the Soldier's Media Center.