That is to say, it’s been two months since you last updated your website’s news page.
Even though I’m on the other side of the political aisle, I thought I would offer you a “protip” for running for the Senate: Most people running a campaign for a high elected office actually, you know, campaign.
Just an FYI…
I think Perry will jump in, will win the primary, and will beat Obama, primarily because I think he’s sharp enough and mean enough to win. Perry looks as good as Romney, has as much Tea Party support as Bachmann, and has record as Governor that puts both in the shade. He dismantled Kay Baily Hutchison in the 2010 Governor’s race, and then mopped the floor with Bill White. Also, I think there’s a better than 50% chance that Sarah Palin with endorse his candidacy.
And of course, Perry’s record on jobs and budgets blows Obama’s away. It’s like the difference between Peyton Manning and Ryan Leaf.
Hopefully more on Perry later in the week.
The Moody’s downgrade of Portuguese debt link was a quick blipvert for a current event, but I wanted to do a somewhat longer roundup of pieces on the Euro debt crises and the potential for more shocks down the line. Unfortunately for both me and pretty much everyone in the world, things have been moving too fast to get a good handle on before the next crisis erupts. And after the Obama downgrade, things are moving faster than ever.
Which is pretty fast indeed. The Eurocrats, in best shoot-the-messenger style, have decided to start ignoring bond rating services in the wake of Moody’s downgrade of Portugal. If that weren’t enough, Italian police raided the offices of Standard & Poors following their downgrade of Italian credit ratings.
How did Greece get in the position of being the first domino to fall in the Euro crisis? The election of Andreas Papandreou as Prime Minister helped start the ball rolling:
On October 18, 1981, a charismatic academic with rather limited government experience and with a one-word slogan, “Change,” was elected prime minister of Greece. His name was Andreas Papandreou. Greeks may now wish that 30 years ago they had had a Tea Party movement. Things could have turned out differently.
Thirty years ago, Greece was in an enviable position on the matter of national debt, with its debt just 28.6 percent of GDP. Few advanced countries can manage that kind of debt-to-GDP ratio. By the end of Papandreou’s first term in office, that ratio had nearly doubled, with debt at 54.7 percent of GDP. By the end of his second term, the figure was in the mid 80s.
But that was just the first step. The second was letting Greece join the Eurozone in 1999 despite their patent unwillingness to get their financial house in order. “Repeatedly, and for 30 years, the Greeks have played Europe like a harp.”
June’s European Union summit illustrated the chaos perfectly: a last-minute deal with Athens to raise the Greek income-tax threshold and increase levies on heating oil was hailed as a breakthrough even though everyone involved knows that this will buy, at best, a few months’ respite from Greece’s creditors. Thus are deck chairs rearranged, as the Greek pleasure yacht (classified, of course, as a fishing boat to escape taxes) sinks below the waves. The markets duly marked up the five-year probability of a Greek default to 80 percent.
The advice to Margaret Thatcher decades ago from the Foreign Office mandarin charged with European policy was clear: Greece was unfit to join what was then known as the European Community. The backward, chaotic archipelago would be an enduring drain on European coffers. Not only that: once through the door, Athens would bring nothing but trouble.
That foolish decision to allow Greece to join lies at the root of the crisis engulfing the euro zone and lapping America’s shores. Consciously, among its pampered political elite — and subliminally in society at large — Greeks got the idea that being Europe’s backward, indulged delinquent was a highly profitable game.
A piece quoting and summarizing two different Financial Times pieces (behind their paywall, alas), both of which predict a bad end to the Greek debt crises, albeit partially from differing reasons.
Andrew Butter makes parallels with Weimar Germany. Don’t agree with everything the author says, although you I do admire this sentence: “It’s getting harder to do the austerity thing these days, now that it’s considered politically incorrect to shoot at rioters with live ammunition, which wasn’t an issue in 1923.”
So if pretty much everyone agrees that Greek default is inevitable, why keep shuffling the deck chairs? Simple: So they can stick taxpayers with the bill. “Foreign financial institutions currently own 42 per cent of Greek debts, and foreign governments 26 per cent, the rest being owed domestically. By 2014, those figures will be 12 per cent and 64 per cent respectively. European banks, in other words, will have shuffled off their losses onto European taxpayers.”
So an effort to shield Euroelites from the worst effects of the debt crisis may end up destroying the Euro entirely.
Given the already considerable length of this post, I doubt I have time to address some of the ramifications of the Obama Downgrade, so that will have to wait for another post…
The last six days of blogging have been pretty packed, so here’s a LinikSwarm for a lazy (and very hot) Friday:
Everyone and their blogging dog have linked to this Walter Russell Mead essay on “The Progressive Crisis”, mainly because it’s a really good essay, at least until the last few paragraphs. (It is, in turn, partially a critique of Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg’s piece on the puzzle of just why voters don’t think liberal policies are totally awesome.) After critiquing Greenberg’s suggestion that campaign finance reform is just the tonic to cure progressive ills, we get to the real meat of Mead’s juicy argument:
Greenberg has not yet come to grips with the deepest and most difficult aspect of the crisis of liberal legitimacy. He roots the dangerous and corrupting special interests outside the state: with their money and their lobbying the corporations and the fat cats influence and pervert the state. But the state and its servants do not, in Greenberg’s story, constitute a special interest of their own.
This is not how voters see it. For large numbers of voters the professional classes who staff the bureaucracies, foundations and policy institutes in and around government are themselves a special interest. It is not that evil plutocrats control innocent bureaucrats; many voters believe that the progressive administrative class is a social order that has its own special interests. Bureaucrats, think these voters, are like oil companies and Enron executives: they act only to protect their turf and fatten their purses.
At this point Your Humble Blogger will now make the universal gesture of tapping his pointer finger to his nose, thus.
It gets better:
The problem goes even deeper than hostility toward perceived featherbedding and life tenure for government workers. The professionals and administrators who make up the progressive state are seen as a hostile power with an agenda of their own that they seek to impose on the nation.
This perception, also, is rooted in truth. The progressive state has never seen its job as simply to check the excesses of the rich. It has also sought to correct the vices of the poor and to uplift the masses. From the Prohibition and eugenics movements of the early twentieth century to various improvement and uplift projects in our own day, well educated people have seen it as their simple duty to use the powers of government to make the people do what is right: to express the correct racial ideas, to eschew bad child rearing technique like corporal punishment, to eat nutritionally appropriate foods, to quit smoking, to use the right light bulbs and so on and so on.
Progressives want and need to believe that the voters are tuning them out because they aren’t progressive enough. But it’s impossible to grasp the crisis of the progressive enterprise unless one grasps the degree to which voters resent the condescension and arrogance of know-it-all progressive intellectuals and administrators. They don’t just distrust and fear the bureaucratic state because of its failure to live up to progressive ideals (thanks to the power of corporate special interests); they fear and resent upper middle class ideology. Progressives scare off many voters most precisely when they are least restrained by special interests. Many voters feel that special interests can be a healthy restraint on the idealism and will to power of the upper middle class.
The progressive ideal of administrative cadres leading the masses toward the light has its roots in a time when many Americans had an eighth grade education or less. It always had its down side, and the arrogance and tin-eared obtuseness of self assured American liberal progressives has infuriated generations of Americans and foreigners who for one reason or another have the misfortune to fall under the power of a class still in the grip of a secularized version of the Puritan ideal. But in the conditions of late nineteenth and twentieth century America, the progressive vanguard fulfilled a vital and necessary social role.
The deep crisis of the progressive ideal today is that it is no longer clear that the American clerisy is wanted or needed in that role.
At bottom, that is what the populist revolt against establishments of all kinds is about. A growing section of the American population wants to think and act for itself, without the guidance of the graduates of ivy league colleges and blue chip graduate programs.
The fight for limited government that animates so many Americans today isn’t a reaction against the abuses and failures of government. It is a fight to break the power of a credentialed elite that believe themselves entitled by talent and hard work to a greater say in the nation’s affairs than people who scored lower on standardized tests and studied business administration in cheap colleges rather than political science in expensive ones.
There are a few things to quibble with in those paragraphs. Saying that people “fear and resent upper middle class ideology” muddles two separate issues, namely the imposition of politically correct, anti-religious, environmentalist etc. ideology on the unwilling through government coercion favored by liberal coastal urban atheist elites vs. the inspirational upper middle class values of working for a living, getting (and staying) married, raising children, owning a house etc., which cannot be imposed. Also, a large portion of the Tea Party is indeed animated by the failures and abuses of Big Government, not to mention the corruption and self-dealing of Democratic elites who funnel taxpayer money to liberal constituencies (ACORN, unions, etc.), who then turn around and give it back to those same Democratic elite in the form of campaign contributions and cushy post-electoral sinecures. But those are relatively minor points.
But the next paragraph in Mead’s essay is where the whole thing goes careening off the rails, thanks to his trotting out that most hoary and unwise cliche, comparing national politics to high school cliques. This is almost always a bad idea, and best left to the Maureen Dowds of the world. It’s a simplistic, reductio ad absurdum argument that will make it all too easy for liberals to dismiss the entire essay in toto rather than grappling with the real problems the American public has with them and their policies.
As a commenter on the blog notes, “It is unfortunate that an article that is so insightful ends in an utter train-wreck of stupidity.”
Here’s the video edit of my interview with Ted Cruz (click for a larger version on YouTube):
(I think I should have sucked in my gut more.)
After the interview, Cruz said that he reads the blog (which I believe, as I’ve interacted with several members of his campaign who read the blog over the past few months). I said that I started covering the race so closely mainly because the MSM was doing such a poor job of it. He agreed, and said that people wouldn’t start paying attention until the last week. I think he’s right.
Honestly, I have no real issue or ideological concerns with Cruz. If elected, I think he would easily be the best senator Texas has had since Phil Gramm. I do have some small minor concerns with him as a candidate (see this post for some context on the below points). A lot of the things I quibble over is Cruz following standard “How to Campaign 101.” However, I think they may not work as well as in the past for this year, and this particular race.
Again, keep in mind this is coming from someone who’s observing Cruz more closely than 99.9% of primary voters ever will. I think Cruz is still far and away the candidate that most closely fits William F. Buckley’s definition of who people should vote for, namely “the most conservative viable candidate.”
Thanks again to Ted Cruz (and his campaign) for allowing me the opportunity to interview him.
I have a longer audio version of this interview, covering more topics, I hope to put up later this week
My entire weekend was quite booked, for both political and non-political reasons:
Given the packed schedule, I haven’t had time to jot down some additional observations until now. Expect these to be slightly disjointed.
The Cruz campaign volunteered to film the interview with their A/V guy (and given the flakiness of my Flip Mino, I readily agreed), so the interview will go up shortly after they send me the file. Here’s a pic I snapped of Cruz right after the interview and before we all hustled over to the capitol annex auditorium for the forum:
Cruz himself seems like a bright, articulate, and very likable guy, which is exactly what you would expect from someone who regularly presents arguments before the Supreme Court. He’s a solid ideological conservative, and I think he has a very good chance of being the next Senator from Texas. However, I do have some minor concerns about his presentation, some of which may be real, some of which stem from the differences between early and late primary campaigns, and some of which may simply be the product of watching Cruz more closely than 99.9% of the Texas electorate ever will. Some of those judgment are below, and others I’ll put up when I run the interview.
One guideline to remember when interacting with serious political figures (and well-funded candidate for the United States Senate is very serious indeed) is “nothing personnel,” in both the positive and negative senses of that phrase. The scheduling and attention demands on a candidate’s time are all but overwhelming, resulting in coping strategies for dealing effectively with people when 12-16 hours of a candidate’s day, every day, are spoken for from the moment they get up in the morning.
As such, when a politician firmly shakes your hand, looks you in the eye, and calls you by your first name, you should neither be impressed (“Wow! He knows my name!”) or disgruntled because you know he does the same for everyone he meets. Likewise, you can’t take offense when they segue from your question to one of their stock talking points.
Thanks to a SNAFU in communication, I arrived at the capitol annex auditorium (which is under the Capitol), but when I called Cruz campaign manager John Drogin, he apologized and said we were doing the interview at a meeting room in the Cruz campaign headquarters (in an office building a short walk from the capitol). Which was just as well, since the echoing acoustics outside the the auditorium would have sounded horrible on tape. So I trekked over there.
Before the interview, I hung out in the hallway with several Cruz staffers (whose names I don’t trust my memory get exactly right) and fellow blogger Matt S. Dowling (who, I see on his site, also has an interview with Cruz coming up). Drogin was in constant motion doing this and that.
I don’t think anything we discussed was privileged insider information. We talked some about our backgrounds in politics, the way the race developed, etc. We talked about the mysterious silence of The Race to Replace Kay Baily Hutchison (which seemed to go silent right about the time Michael Williams started to think about switching races), various skeletons in Tom Leppert’s closest (“If he met with ACORN and the SEIU, who else did he meet with?”), and other sundry political topics.
By the time Cruz finished his meeting, there was only about 25 minutes left to do the interview, so I didn’t get to as many questions as I would like. I’m not complaining, since I’ve been trying to interview Cruz for a while, and would have been content with an email interview.
While Cruz is the first to agree to an interview, he’s not the first I’ve asked. I actually started asking for interviews with all the candidates, in the order they declared their candidacy, months ago. I never heard back from the Elizabeth Ames Jones, Roger Williams, or Michael Williams campaigns. I did hear back from the Cruz campaign early on, but it was a matter of finding the time for the interview. The Cruz and Leppert campaigns have consistently seemed the most organized and professional throughout the race. (With his late start, I haven’t had a chance to observe the quality of the Dewhurst campaign yet.)
Speaking of Dewhurst, I chatted briefly with Drogin about his chances. He pointed out how other high spending Senate campaigns, like those of Carly Fiorina and Linda McMahon, couldn’t close the deal. But I’m not sure how applicable those two candidates are, since both were political newcomers and neither had run a successful statewide race before.
The interview went well (with the caveats above), and I’ll talk more about that when I put up the video. Afterwords all of us hustled over to the capitol for the candidates forum, which started a little late.
The most interesting non-interview tidbit I learned from Cruz is that he’s a Robert A. Heinlein fan, which naturally warmed the cockles of my science fiction writer’s heart.
There was a distinct anti-Dewhurst sentiment to the event, even before the forum started, as these protesters outside the auditorium show:
There was even a blank seat at the table with a Dewhurst placard, and a few times during the forum the MC would ask a question of the absent Dewhurst for comic effect.
Somehow I get the impression that Texas Tea Party members are not wild about Mr. Dewhurst.
A few random impressions of the forum:
After dinner, I grabbed a ride back to the capitol visitors parking lot to get my car after eating at an Italian place on Congress. In there I ran into candidate Glenn Addison. I introduced myself and my blog, and snapped this picture of him:
We talked for a few minutes. I told him he was doing well in fundraising.
Addison: Well, I don’t know about that.
Me: For a longshot candidate.
Given that, I asked why he was running for the Senate we he might do very well in a county or state level race. He said that he wasn’t called to those races, but was called to this one, citing Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and saying that the Senate was one place an ordinary American could have a powerful effect. Then we went our separate ways.
I hope to do a post on Addison and his campaign later this week.
And that was the end of my (political) day.
In addition to the Ted Cruz interview, I have a longish post on a very packed political Saturday that I’m still fleshing out. Unfortunately, today has been too busy to either finish that or to comment on any of a dozen storylines (the debt ceiling vote, Syria, the impotent fury of the MSM over the power of the Tea Party, etc.) begging for comment.
So instead of actual content, here’s a random video (not mine) of Golden Retriever puppies (also not mine, though I do have one Golden I’ll be walking right after I post this…):
Syrian Major General Riad El As’ad has defected along with a group of senior officers, announcing they’ll “fight the army of oppression headed by President Bashar Assad.”
This is huge news, far more so in Syria than just about any other repressive Middle Eastern regime. Assad is a member of the minority Alawite group, which makes up perhaps 10-15% of the country, in a country where the overwhelmingly Sunni majority (about 71%) has long chaffed under Assad rule. Without the army behind him, Assad is toast.
If only the Obama Administration had concentrated on turning Syrian generals a few months ago, when unrest first broke out, instead of pursuing it’s thus-far-ineffective drone attack strategy against the less dangerous Gadhafi regime in Libya, thousands of innocent Syrian civilians might still be alive today, and more democratic Syrian regime might be already be in place.
In other Syrian news, a regime tank assault just killed another 121 people in the city of Hama. If the name sounds familiar, it should; Assad the elder slaughtered some 10,000-40,000 Sunnis there to stop an Islamist revolt in 1982.
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
