Asymmetrical Information

True to a very large degree, but two side comments:

(1) That newspaper recount doesn't show that Gore was the definitive winner. What it DOES show is the magnificently ironic conclusion that if the recount had been held according to the rules Bush wanted, Gore would have won -- while if it had been held according to the rules Gore wanted, Bush would have won. (See Mickey Kaus for the explanation of this strange phenomenon.)If it had been held according to the rules I wanted -- that is, an attempt to count every single vote in which the actual intent of the voter was physically absolutely clear even if he didn't follow the formal rules precisely (don't count dimpled chads, for instance) -- Gore would have won by a lesser margin.

Quite a few people who are not kneejerk Democrats -- including Bush's court nominee Michael McConnell, and his former advisor John DiIulio -- think the Supreme Court's decision stunk legally, but then the Court wouldn't have had the chance to execute that you're-out-of-time-just-because-we-say-so decision if Gore hadn't decided to get cute by trying to get recounts in just those counties likely to be favorable to him rather than demanding a proper statewide recount. My real grudges in that election are with the Electoral College and Ralph Nader -- but Gore was in no position to attack the Electoral College for declaring the actual loser of the election to be the winner, having announced solemnly on TV six weeks earlier than he would regard such a victory as "morally legitimate" if HE happened to win it because his advisors and virtually all observers thought this outcome was far more likely than what actually happened. Having written a letter to my local paper before the election calling any defense of the Electoral College garbage, I have no such qualms -- it just further confirms my belief (and Robert Dahl's) that in some respects the Constitution is godawful. Reapportion the US Senate! Up the rebels!

(2) The problem the Democrats have electorally is simply that -- since they've been working energetically since Vietnam to define themselves as the "dove" party -- the voters actually take them seriously on this subject, and don't trust them to be furiously enough opposed to external enemies after 9-11. (It still boggles the mind to read about the 1960 campaign and realize that John Kennedy won largely by accusing the GOP of excessive dovishness.) John Kerry or Wesley Clark might be able to correct this impression; Howard Dean certainly cannot -- since as Kevin Drum and William Saletan in "Slate" have both pointed out, his foreign-policy views really ARE dangerously shallow and thoughtless. Any sucessful campaign against Bush will have to point out that in many ways his anti-terrorism campaign is actually too flaccid, and that it also now appears he deliberately led us on a disastrous wild-goose chase where Iraq is concerned because of his own stupid belief that the country could be occupied and reformed on a shoestring. But Dean can't make that latter criticism because he was opposed to the Iraq war -- on unconvincing grounds -- BEFORE it became clear both that the Bushites had deliberately exaggerated the evidence of Saddam's WMDs and that they were going to disastrously underspend on the war's aftermath.

"Whenever I hear anyone of a particular persuasion begin bloviating about how the reason that people of other political persuasions believe what they believe is that they are, as a group, much more [stupid/ greedy/ mean/ venal/ dishonest/ selfish/ hateful/ bigoted/ power-mad/ narrow-minded/ cruel/ careless/ hypocritical/ violent] than the blessed elite who share the views held by the speaker, I tune out."

This badly needs a qualifier. A vast majority of Democratic voters, like Republican voters, are motivated by plain old self-interest (hell, Marx said that his socialist utopia would be motivatd by self-interest on the part of the average man). But when you see the much-scorned Prosperous Liberal actually come out in favor of increasing taxes on HIMSELF for the benefit of less wealthy people, you really are seeing an degree of political unselfishness that has no analog on the Republican side -- there are no (sane) lower or middle-income people who favor decreased benefits for themselves out of concern for the cruelly abused, overworked upper class. To this extent, there really IS an element of morality on the Democratic side of the aisle that's missing on the GOP side.

That's quite simply not true, Bruce. At a bare minimum, there are plenty of people who aren't rich now but want to become so, and realize that soaking the rich isn't going to make that happen.

"But when you see the much-scorned Prosperous Liberal actually come out in favor of increasing taxes on HIMSELF for the benefit of less wealthy people, you really are seeing an degree of political unselfishness--"

You're implicitly assuming that because that position cost the Rich Liberal money, his position is therefore unselfish, rather than a means of providing funding for big government of various flavors. Let's not forget that any number of those same rich liberals also back taxes that *won't* impact them noticeably, but *will* hammer lower-middle class and poor people rather thoroughly when they are enacted; namely, cigarette and alcohol taxes. Conservative rich people and liberal rich people both believe in spending their money to promote societal change as they would have it--the difference is that the left is more inclined to enlist the government to collect funds from people who aren't interested in supporting a particular type of social engineering, thank you very much. If the Rich Liberal was truly an unselfish advocate of the less fortunate among us, he'd donate his own money, try to persuade others to do so, and stop trying to enlist the IRS for an annual shakedown of those who don't share his beliefs.

"..they are clearly struck insensible by the blinding power of our intellects." The people who become leftists are usually people who are good at manipulating symbols; usually words but sometimes images. They fail to understand that this kind of symbol-manipulation is only one small part of the universe of intelligence. And, since they usually only know other people of the same type, they tend to think that they're all brilliant...

Eiland manages to miss the point completely. No, Virginia, I'm not saying that those people who believe in covering the needs of lower-income people with a tax on cigarettes and alcohol are automatically unselfish -- I'm saying that those people who believe in doing so with a hike on income taxes on their own economic class are such.

And if you insist that any taxation of the more prosperous to aid the needy is "social engineering", then three cheers for social engineering. (Lest we forget, all human progess of any sort is "social engineering".) Adam Smith realized that, paradoxically, vicious selfishness often produces net benefits for society as a whole through encouraging useful new inventions (technological or institutional), but he never made the mistake of not recognizing that it was still vicious selfishness. To the extent that we can transfer income from the relatively wealthy to the less wealthy without discouraging overall productivity enough to do more harm than good, we have a moral obligation to try to do so, no matter how much the relatively wealthy object to the process.

"You're implicitly assuming that because that position cost the Rich Liberal money, his position is therefore unselfish, rather than a means of providing funding for big government of various flavors."

Actually that liberal claim falls to pieces before you ever reach the first comma, for merely having a position costs no one anything at all. Political talk is cheap even compared to ordinary talk; and of course a really unselfish person doesn't need to wait for the IRS to come around before opening his pocketbook. Our liberals, as James Lileks has pointed out, have adapted for their own use the good old Protestant doctrine of "salvation through faith, not works": being unselfish isn't a question of what you yourself do for the less fortunate, but only a question of having the right sort of beliefs about what other people ought to be doing.

Sigh. Bruce, you're an example of what Jane was talking about. There was not one Florida recount by the news sevices, not one, that Gore won. Bush won every one.

Bruce, it may seem altruistic for someone to favor tax increases that will affect him. But what if he favors those increases as *part* of a political package which is, overall, to his great benefit? There are many people who benefit financially from the policies of the Democratic Party, such as trial lawyers. If you stand to make millions of $$$ from class-action suits, a slightly higher income tax rate is a small price to pay.

Jane,

As a lifelong Republican I have been truly amazed at the paucity of original thought coming from the Dem’s (not disappointed – just amazed). Your identification of them as living in a closed information loop is as good a rationale as any, but do you feel that it is complete? I think another element may be extensive sclerosis among their commentators – where is the new blood that could bring new ideas? There is more original commentary appearing on NRO in a week than you will find in the NYT in a year. Perhaps that is just part of the closed loop.

I have watched the Dem’s identify and purchase every conceivable interest group for forty years in their bid to retain majority status. The loss of the Greens and the death of the Yellow Dogs has finally put them in true minority status. Having self-identified as champions of every conceivable left leaning special interest group – where else can they go? Do you feel that the Democratic party can be resuscitated? Is it time for libertarians to put more effort into developing platforms that could be successful at the local level?

I don’t mind the disappearance of a party but I certainly hope that a new one has been and is quietly growing.

PS Great parody, Bruce

"To this extent, there really IS an element of morality on the Democratic side of the aisle that's missing on the GOP side. "

What you're describing, the rich voluntarily giving to the poor, is called CHARITY. And charity, while morally praise-worthy is never regarded as a duty. Were charity a requirement, it would cease to be charity altogether. The Dems want to REQUIRE the giving to promote their social goals. The existence of an ulterior motive (the social goals of just one group) casts their "element of morality" in doubt for many. Even further than this, the possible moral praiseworthiness of the Dems on the tax issue is counterbalanced by the possible moral praiseworthiness of the preservation of the right to property on the Republican side. The comment that an "element of morality" does not exist for the Republicans is a snide, simple expression of the kind of ignorance of the opposing viewpoint that was the originator of this entire thread.

Zrimsek: "Being unselfish isn't a question of what you yourself do for the less fortunate, but only a question of having the right sort of beliefs about what other people ought to be doing." Rubbish, of course; it's both. (By the way, anyone who actually takes Likeks seriously as a social commentator is working at a serious disadvantage to begin with.)

Foster: "There are many people who benefit financially from the policies of the Democratic Party, such as trial lawyers. If you stand to make millions of $$$ from class-action suits, a slightly higher income tax rate is a small price to pay." Are you seriously telling us that income redistribution from the wealthy to the less wealthy benefits primarily trial lawyers?

RDB: Incompetent sneer. Tell me what's actually wrong with my reasoning, please. Meanwhile, you yourself seem to be a Grade A example of the fact that there is, as McArdle also said, an impressive amount of "sealed information-loop thinking" on the Right.

Rob: If the poor don't need money more than the rich, why is charity by the rich a virtue at all? If the poor do need money more than the rich, then why does "the right to property" trump the moral obligation to transfer some income from the rich to the poor, voluntarily or not? Extend your reasoning to its logical conclusion and you'll end up saying that the richest and the poorest American should pay exactly the same total dollar amount in taxes -- after all, they'd receive exactly the same amount of public benefit from the government's actions in a libertarian utopia (the military, law enforcement, road maintenance, etc.)

Let's go through this yet again: the only reason anyone ever wants to become rich is so that he can make more money with the same amount of work effort. If he has managed that, exactly what is immoral in transferring a significant amount of that extra income he's making to the less wealthy? At the point that such income redistribution starts producing enough Laffer-curve harmful effects on total productivity that extending it further would start doing more total harm than good to society and should therefore be avoided, the relatively wealthy are still making more (sometimes FAR more) money for the same amount of work effort than the non-wealthy -- so what the hell is "immoral" about transferring income away from them up to that point? Are you arguing, with a straight face, that the average millionnaire earns his income by working 40 times harder each day than the average $25,000/year earner? Or are you repeating the Randians' insane line that harming someone through "physical force" (such as by taking money away from them) is immoral, but harming someone through neglect -- for some totally mysterious reason -- isn't?

Let me add that McArdle herself doesn't make any of the utterly loony elementary-level economic and philosphical mistakes you guys do -- she advocates a considerable amount of downward income redistribution and favors at least some degree of progressive income tax. To the extent that she and I have any disagreement, it's only a disagreement as to proper degree.

Paul: I'm going to have to scrounge out the details on that newspaper recount, which the Washington Post covered in by far the most detail (including a whole interactive page on which you could plug in various ground rules as to the outcome if different kinds of ballots were or weren't counted). I repeat: if the recount had gone according to the rules Gore wanted (which was what most of the newspapers reported), Bush would indeed have won. If the recount had gone according to the rules Bush wanted -- or the somewhat different rules I wanted -- Gore would have won. The reason for all this (as pointed out by Mickey Kaus) is that Gore would actually have gained very few net votes from the famous chadded ballots -- but there was a big and unexpected additional potential reservoir of votes for Gore in counties that Bush carried big, because there was a major flood of first-time black voters statewide, and some of them mistakenly thought they were supposed to write in a candidate's name IN ADDITION TO coloring in the blank circle next to his name on those small-county ballots. Some pro-Bush counties actually counted such votes as valid, and they were in fact duly certified by Katherine Harris. Most counties, however, didn't. What is beyond question is that the intent of the voters in this particular case is beyond question, and Gore shot himself in the foot by failing to request that they be counted and focusing instead on his much more dubious chadded ballots. Sometimes the honest thing to do actually is the successful thing to do.

> you're-out-of-time-just-because-we-say-so decision

Ah, yes, screw the law--we have an outcome we need!

And thanks too, Bruce, for calling me insane. It spares me the need to take you seriously in turn.

Bruce,

"Let's go through this yet again: the only reason anyone ever wants to become rich is so that he can make more money with the same amount of work effort."

You've got that totally backwards. People don't become rich *so* they can make more money with the same work -- they become rich *by* making more money with the same work.

"Are you arguing, with a straight face, that the average millionnaire earns his income by working 40 times harder each day than the average $25,000/year earner?"

No, the millionaire earns a higher income because his work is more valuable than that of others.

(Unless you're an adherent of the labor theory of value, which has holes big enough to drive celestial bodies through.)

"If he has managed that, exactly what is immoral in transferring a significant amount of that extra income he's making to the less wealthy?"

Because that's *stealing*. Heard of it?

"Or are you repeating the Randians' insane line that harming someone through "physical force" (such as by taking money away from them) is immoral, but harming someone through neglect -- for some totally mysterious reason -- isn't?"

Bruce's riff here is a demonstration of the merit of an opinion I've held for a while; namely, that the main difference between leftist economic theory and Willie Sutton's famous explanation of why he robbed banks ("because that's where the money is") is that Willie Sutton wasn't self-righteous about it when he robbed banks.

"Let's go through this yet again: the only reason anyone ever wants to become rich is so that he can make more money with the same amount of work effort."

So, the only reason that one wants to become rich. . .is to make more money?

Real deep understanding of human motivations you've got there, Bruce--it's almost a match for your grasp of economics.

Ah. So then taxing the richest American any more whatsoever than the poorest American is stealing? Because -- to repeat -- the richest American has to work just as hard for each individual dollar he earns as the working poor? (The obvious fact that he actually earns more because his work is more "valuable" does not in itself give him any moral right whatsoever to retain every bit of that additional money he earns through doing "more valuable" work; it merely proves again that when you tax high-income workers beyond a certain level, you start discouraging their productivity enough to do more total harm than good to society. Which of course is Ms. McArdle's -- and Adam Smith's -- Laffer-Curve point, and which of course does absolutely nothing to prove that it's immoral to tax the rich more up to that point. It's a remarkable experience to find oneself debating economics with people very, very far to the Right of Adam Smith.)

To Kirk Parker: Bush's appointees Malcolm McConnell and John DiIulio disagree entirely with your belief in the logical correctness of the Supreme Court's deciion -- and, no, if you actually bothered to read what I said, you would have noticed that I did not automatically favor any decision that would have given Florida to Gore, and that my primary grudge in this election is against the Electoral College (and would also have been such if it had been Gore who "won" while losing the popular vote). I am willing to say, though, that you may not be insane. Just stupid.

To Scott Eiland: OK. So you think that harming people through neglect is NOT immoral? And that charging the richest man in America one cent more in taxes than the poorest worker in America is the moral equivalent of Willie Sutton robbing banks (which, lest we forget, was immoral because he was sponging with a minimum of work effort off money produced by other people's hard work)? I figured this particular thread of Ms. McArdle's would flush her strangest readers out of the woodwork, and I was right.

Incidentally, Scott, I wasn't saying that "the reason people want to get rich is to make more money" -- I was saying that "the reason people want to get rich is to make more money with the same amount of work effort". Which, of course, is the basis of the central moral principle I'm talking about -- a moral principle which most people have figured out by the time they hit kindergarten.

"Incidentally, Scott, I wasn't saying that "the reason people want to get rich is to make more money" -- I was saying that "the reason people want to get rich is to make more money with the same amount of work effort"."

Have you ever considered suing your high school English teacher for educational malpractice? Read the sentence quoted above again, and consider a refresher course on writing coherently. Then, if you actually have an intelligible point to make, I would suggest rewording the sentence and trying again.

"OK. So you think that harming people through neglect is NOT immoral? And that charging the richest man in America one cent more in taxes than the poorest worker in America is the moral equivalent of Willie Sutton robbing banks (which, lest we forget, was immoral because he was sponging with a minimum of work effort off money produced by other people's hard work)?"

Willie Sutton's actions were immoral because he took money that didn't belong to him, with the implied motive that he thought he needed the money more than its owners did--a sentiment that Teddy Kennedy would find quite familiar. Willie Sutton needed to eat too. You're the only one I've seen flogging the straw man of a per capita taxation system--the most radical flat tax systems I've seen proposed have had a substantial personal deduction that would leave the poor paying little or no federal taxes, and which--doing the math--would leave the wealthy paying the lion's share of income taxes, as they do now. As for "harming people through neglect," the fact that people may wish to help others in need does not create a positive obligation to help them that should be enforced by the full force of the federal government. Other than incoherent babbling, you're not doing a particular convincing job of explaining how one gets from "it's a good thing to help people" to "the government has a right to force people to help others, and rich people have less of an inherent right to keep what they have earned than non-rich people." Remind me never to buy a road map from you--I suspect that it would be hard to read and would inevitably end up leading nowhere.

Jane Galt: "But not until they get in touch with the rest of the population. Find out what they're thinking, explain why they should think something else -- you can't do either if you're sitting around congratulating yourself on how gosh darn superior you are."

Bruce Moocow: "Rubbish, of course; it's both. (By the way, anyone who actually takes Likeks seriously as a social commentator is working at a serious disadvantage to begin with.)"

Q.E.D.

Bruce

"A vast majority of Democratic voters, like Republican voters, are motivated by plain old self-interest (hell, Marx said that his socialist utopia would be motivatd by self-interest on the part of the average man). But when you see the much-scorned Prosperous Liberal actually come out in favor of increasing taxes on HIMSELF for the benefit of less wealthy people, you really are seeing an degree of political unselfishness that has no analog on the Republican side "

Completely, 100% untrue. There are plenty of conservatives who benefit from policies they nevertheless oppose. I love hearing these simplistic, completely unfounded charges from the self-described party of "nuance".

Why don't you guys just realize that we generally believe the best way to improve the economic situation for everyone is to set up a system that fosters growth? This isn't a difficult concept. You remember that give a fish vs teach to fish concept? Apply it here.

Your silly Republican / conservative = selfish idea may help you sleep at night, but it's also why you're sleeping on the outside.

"I figured this particular thread of Ms. McArdle's would flush her strangest readers out of the woodwork, and I was right."

Yes, where did you come from?

Bruce...surely my point wasn't that obscure. A trial lawyer may choose to vote for a Democrat because he favors legislation (or lack of same) that benefits trial lawyers. The tax increases are part of the same package.

Bruce...surely my point wasn't that obscure. A trial lawyer may choose to vote for a Democrat because he favors legislation (or lack of same) that benefits trial lawyers. The tax increases are part of the same package; ie, there are only 2 viable parties, and he votes for the one that benefits him, on balance, the most.

It bothers me that Dean is considered to be the Jerry Brown or the Pat Buchanan of this campaign, both of whom were challenging the elites of their own parties, as well as harnessing national anger.

I'm a Democrat who has gotten over the 2000 miscount, but is quite angry about Iraq and our abandonment of Afghanistan to the Taliban. So, it seems appropriate to me for an opposition candidate to show a little aggravation regarding Bush's foreign policies.

But merely referring to him as an "insurgent" or as "angry" misses the point entirely that he is a mainstream, centrist politician who is proposing mainstream, centrist policies. He is the perfect antidote to what I feel is an administration beholden to and run by ideologues.

I think what Dean is doing is solidifying the "angry" Democrat vote, which is a sensible thing to do, while also keeping one arm around the nation's centrists. This doesn't seem to me to be losing strategy, necessarily. But the press is doing what it always does, pidgeon-holing politicians (e.g., Bush is the stupid candidate, Gore is the lying one) so it doesn't have to work so hard on its news pieces. Dean is not a radical or a revolutionary in any way.

Bruce,

"The obvious fact that he actually earns more because his work is more "valuable" does not in itself give him any moral right whatsoever to retain every bit of that additional money he earns through doing "more valuable" work"

I disagree vehemently. But since you clearly aren't interested in an honest discussion of the matter, I'll leave it at that.

Amitava, you are welcome to your opinion. But the people I'm citing are not journalists busy pigeon-holing Dean for convenience, or ideological enemies bent on stereotyping. They are Democratic party professionals whose business is getting Democrats elected. Believe me, right now, they'll be happy to jump on the bandwagon of any candidate who can return the party to power. Their considered judgement is that Dean will be a disaster for their party. They may be wrong. But they are not biased.

Why the continual rehashing of the 2000 vote counting and never a discussion of how hard the Democrats worked to lose that election? Bush was IMO the weakest Republican candidate in decades. I myself was considering a vote for Gore until he pulled that populist attitude shortly before the election.

Credit where credit is due...The Democratic Party put Bush in the White House!

Bruce Moomaw,

Nice analysis of the irony of the Florida recount.

I think you're right that if a person votes to raise taxes on himself (even if taxes are also raised on other people), it shows a certain selflessness. However....

That is mitigated if the person then structures his finances to minimize his taxes. Especially if he then opposes closing the "loopholes," "tax preferences," whatever you want to call them that allow him to do so.

If the selfless voter works in an academic institution and expects the increased revenue to flow back to colleges and universities, his tax raising has a significant element of selfishness.

If he works in a non-profit and he expects the wealthier government to spend more on non-profits like his, his vote has elements of selfishness.

If he owns a road-paving company and he expects the extra money he pays to flow back to him in the form of "infrastructure improvement" contracts, his is not an unselfish vote.

" This is why the Democrats at that luncheon were so shocked and hurt. Not because they are stupid, or venal, or arrogant."

Those Democrats were Sydney Blumenthal and Gary Hart. Both are arrogant One is stupid. One or both may be venal.

And, Howard Dean is George McGovern. If you ever get the chance to see a tape of the finale of the 72 Dem convention, look for the expression on the face of Henry "Scoop" Jackson during the "hold hands and smile for unity" bit.

Many people who favor limited government also believe in taxing rich people more than poor people.

The idea is that, even with a limited state, they get more from the government than poor people. E.g., the more property you own, the more important it is to you that it not be stolen, or that someone not invade and screw up your life.

>Are you arguing, with a straight face, that the average
>millionnaire earns his income by working 40 times harder
>each day than the average $25,000/year earner?

Oh, oh! Pick me! I'll argue with any face you like!

I'm going to use, for my example, a friend of mine named Mike, who is a millionare (although, I'm afraid, a low-end millionare, not a Bill Gates). I know about Mike's story because I worked with him while he got there and saw a lot of it first hand (unfortunately, *I* did not become rich in the process, but I have the intellectual honesty to deal with it).

Mike started out selling computers back in the early eighties. He made squat, but he learned a lot about selling. Later, he got together with a software guy and started a software consulting company. Mike did sales, the other guy (and some folks they hired) did the programming. This went on for a couple of years and they prospered in a small way. Sometimes, though, money was really tight while they waited for job to start or someone delayed paying them for a few months. At least once they "made payroll" by using their personal credit cards (something I can't imagine doing myself).

Then, around 1988, someone who owed them money asked if they could pay in computer memory chips (which were very expensive at the time) instead of money. The idea was that they would get the chips pretty cheap and could actually make more than what they were owed by making them into memory cards and selling them. So, they did. It took every cent of available cash to get the boards made up (they had to contract everything, they didn't really know what they were doing), but, pretty soon, they had about 500 memory sticks worth about $500 each. They gulped and took out a small ad in a computer magazine and hoped that the phone would ring.

There were a few nerve-racking days, but the phone started to ring and ring and ring. They sold out in a few days. Before you could say, "new business model", they had turned around, bought more memory and made more boards and they were off to the races.

Within about five years, they were doing $100M a year in computer memory (and still a little in software development). They weren't an easy five years, though. Lots of crazy stuff happened and the work was indeed tough. Lots of travel (ever do a two-day visit to Japan? It's not fun at all), lots of times where the wrong decision would cost everything. They started up their own factory and hired their own board designers, sales people and phone support people.

Then, as memory became a cheap commodity, things got REALLY hard. Margins were razor-thin. The business became more a job of guessing the futures market for chips than a job of manufacturing. Still, the company hung on. Some days, a blip in the market would make a fortune, other days you would have to sell at a loss just to get rid of some chips you bought to expensively.

Finally, after about ten years at it, Mike sold out for seven figures. He got a job of CEO at another tech company with some prospects and did the whole thing over again (although in fewer years).

Over the years he has employed hundreds of people and contributed both time and money to many charities. He treats his employees well and is generous with salaries and bonuses.

So, Mike's a millionare and I think he deserves every cent of it. He made the big bucks and I didn't because he took the risks and he went through the tough shit. It nearly killed him once when he had to lay off a dozen or so people, most of them good friends. He almost had to be hospitalized once in Taiwan because he forgot and brushed his teeth with tap water. A supplier once threatened to kill him and his family over a deal that went bad. He spent a year fending off a hostile take over by some venture capitalists.

I didn't get rich because I sat in my comfy office and had a ball writing software. I worked normal hours and slept well at home every night and made a very nice salary. I'm perfectly happy with the way it turned out. I don't WANT to do the things it takes to become rich and that's the case with most people who aren't rich. It's a lot of work and worry to make big money and, really, unless you enjoy that kind of thing (and few of us really do), it's simply not worth it. It's just money, after all.

So, Mr Smarty Pants, of course it's NOT about working harder. It's about taking chances and generating value. If it was the hardness of the work that made money, ditch diggers would be the rich ones. Please, please, pick up an economics text (I recommend Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell, it's very good).

Jane, just wanted to let you know many of us Dems agree that Dean will be a disaster on the campaign trail and if elected an even worse desaster. Where's a moderate (of ANY party) when you need them. I'm tired of zelots of any party, Republican or Democrat, and what I can't fathom is why more people aren't tired of these nut-jobs.

Otherwise I'm staying out of this mud-slinging fest.

May I address libertarians?

My perception - and it might be wrong - is that libertarians are political pragmatists, which is to say MANY of them (not all) appear to be unprincipled drifters in an ideological no man's land.

While good conservatives and good liberals ostensibly argue from first principles to the particular case, many who call themselves libertarians seem to me to construct or adhere to principles inductively from particulars. In other words, opinions first, principles last.

Here is a taxonomy of libertarians, in my view:

1. Hedonists i.e. narcissists who embrace freedom as a means to an end. They like sex, or money, or whatever, so they embrace the principle that they interpret as granting permission to do "whatever I want." I fear there are A LOT of these kinds of libertarians.

And before you even think it: yes I CAN judge them because my identifying their view as shallow imposes no restriction or harm on them.

2. Fiscal conservatives but social liberals. Which is a complete oxymoron because social liberals want to take OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY to fund their social agenda. This is not fiscally conservative.

Examples include pro-choice conservatives who can't stand the idea of being affiliated even remotely with pro-life conservatives. The ones I know are libertarians out of spite, and they would find conservative principles appealing if they could get past the sociology of the conservative movement.

3. Legalize marijuana, anti-motorcycle helmet, etc. - the one-issue wonders. Useless.

4. Philosophical libertarians, mainly intellectuals educated in political philosophy and economics, and who believe in the principles of self-determination, individual liberty, and free markets e.g. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, etc.

Types 1, 2, and 3 seem to have boarded the libertarian bus because it beats walking in the rain. But trust me, they stink up the bus.

Bruce,

I think the "neglect" argument is a lot more complex and potentially dangerous than it first seems.

Often, neutralizing "neglect" involves not just providing extra opportunities but in forcing people to do different things.

Take a hyothetical: There is a country in which success in life is fairly strongly correlated with success in school. Assume that this country has two identifiable groups of people and that one does substantially worse than the other. Call the more successful "whites" and the less successful "blacks." Assume further that "black" parents are less likely to push their children to do well in school and to help them do well. And assume that a substantial number of school age "blacks" actively try to keep their peers from doing well in school, by e.g., accusing them of "acting white" if they try to do well.

In this hypothetial country, neglect by the government may well allow this dynamic to continue. To change it may require a lot of social engineering, not just changing physical things but also changing "hearts and minds." And ironically, avoiding neglect by, say, providing no-strings-attached income may actually in the long run make things worse by "neglecting" deeper, more important (and more coercive and intrusive) changes.

To expand the argument, modern liberal society frequently makes a virtue of neglect. Government is expected to neglect a citizen's chances of getting into heaven or incurring eternal damnation. It is supposed to neglect a person's sexual life, their taste in music or movies or video games. We think that it is important that people make their own choices--create their own lives--even if we think they are making the wrong choices.

Jeff says:

My perception - and it might be wrong - is that libertarians are political pragmatists, which is to say MANY of them (not all) appear to be unprincipled drifters in an ideological no man's land.

While good conservatives and good liberals ostensibly argue from first principles to the particular case, many who call themselves libertarians seem to me to construct or adhere to principles inductively from particulars. In other words, opinions first, principles last.

Actually, the reason I am not a libertarian is that too many who label themselves such are, like many liberals and conservatives, rigid idealogues.

Those you speak of as "principled" believe the world works in a certain way, or at least it would, if there weren't certain Dark Forces which conspire to keep it from doing so. When those with "principles" get into power, they implement policies that fit their principles (naturally).

And when it turns out that their policies fail spectacularly, it's only because they've not managed to eradicate the Dark Forces. They very rarely re-evaluate the supposed eternal verity of their principles. Therefore they spend more money and effort trying to fix the unfixable, until they become so unpopular that people of another ideology are voted into power, and the natural cycle of life begins anew.

This staunch embrace of "principles" is what leads (many) liberals to insist that if we all sit down together and sing "Kumbaya", then we'll have Peace on Earth; and leads (many) conservatives to insist that if only we get back to God's Laws then "the country can be great again"; and leads (many) libertarians to insist that if only the government would get the hell out of everybody's way then we'd all have a lot more freedom.

To my mind, having "principles" means you never have to make a hard decision. What's my opinion on such-and-such an issue? Ah, my "principles" dictate that it shall be this. No thinking required. Now all I have to do is paint people who disagree with me as stupid or evil, and my work is done.

Feh.

(However, this does not negate your point that libertarians seem to be a very mixed bag.)

I read Bruce' analysis of the Florida election with interest--to see if it would conform to the theory set forth. I was not disappointed.

Bush's criteria was to count all VALID votes--not invalid ones.

The ballots with two names on them for president--even if they be the same name--are not valid. Like the gods-know-how-many other spoiled ballots that occur in every election, they should not be counted

Democrats acted, in the 2000 election, as if spoiled ballots had never occurred before. They are a fact of life in elections.

The sad part of this is that Bruce says that there were hordes of first time black voters who were apparently incapable of reading the instructions on how to complete a ballot--so many, in fact, that had they filled out their ballots correctly they would have turned the tide for Gore.

And Bruce says all this without realizing, even once, that he sits, firmly ensconced, in the same bubble that was the point of Jane's post.

People read Op-Eds to be massaged, not to be informed.

For Kaus's explanation of why Gore might have won if the Supreme Court had not stopped the vote counting, see

http://slate.msn.com/id/2058603/

I've always thought that the key issue is not whether Gore would have won under the recount he requested (which he didn't get), but whether he would have won under the recount order by the Florida Supreme Court: a statewide recount in which a > The Florida Supreme Court's opinion stating this standard is available at http://news.findlaw.com/cnn/docs/election2000/fscgoreharrisop1208.pdf.

Jack asserts that > This may or may not be a good policy choice, but it is likely contrary to the instruction of the Florida Supreme Court. I think that the "clear intent of the voter" could be discerned from overvotes in which the voter both checked the box for a candidate and wrote in the same candidate's name. Moreover, if Kaus's reporting is to be credited, the judge charged with carrying out the Florida Supreme Court's order seems to have been sympathetic to this argument as well. Thus, had a recount gone forward, Gore had a good chance of winning.

"Because there are five million or so other people around who constantly tell each other that the Supreme Court stole the election for Bush."

The newspaper recounts aren't what we're talking about.

Kausfiles dug up the fact that the judge would probably would have counted the overvotes (you know, if the election had proceeded without the SC jumping in to derail the whole thing), and that would have put Gore on top.

http://slate.msn.com/?id=1006758
http://www.kausfiles.com/archive/index.11.13.01.html

You're also mistaking anger that Bush won with the (much more common) anger at the SC stopping the process, *regardless of result*. If the recount had completed and Gore didn't win, you wouldn't hear such invective. The anger on the left is chiefly process based (it wasn't followed), not outcome based.

"So, Mr Smarty Pants, of course it's NOT about working harder. It's about taking chances and generating value."

If you think risk and innovation are the chief generator of cash at the individual level in the United States, I've got a bridge I'd like to sell you. Maybe 3rd or 4th down the list, though.....

Fine, perhaps, if SCOFL had anything whatever to do with state electoral law. It's when SCOFL starts contradicting state electoral law that things start to get dicey. Fine, if they'd determined the law to be unconstitutional, and rejected it. Not fine, if they make one-time-only rulings in violation of it.

"I've always thought that the key issue is not whether Gore would have won under the recount he requested (which he didn't get), but whether he would have won under the recount order by the Florida Supreme Court: a statewide recount in which a > "

That would be interesting, but didn't the Florida court agree solely to recount the counties Gore questioned? In that case even using the standard you mentioned, Bush wins. (Your link only brought up the current findlaw news).

I found this relating to the December 8 decision, which correlates to my memory:

"The Florida Supreme Court, splitting 4 to 3, yesterday ordered immediate manual recounts of tens of thousands of ballots from Miami-Dade and many other counties across the state,"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A45987-2000Dec8¬Found=true

Which I found through this: http://www.failureisimpossible.com/floridafollies/courtrulings.htm

I found the above through google, so I can't vouch for its completeness, but the links are to the Washington Post so I presume they are legitimate.

Note the "many other counties". I don't remember a single instance where either Gore or a court requested or directed a statewide recount under any standard.

I've always ignored lefties on this issue for two reasons. First, they didn't request a recount in all counties, so they were perfectly willing to violate the equal protection clause. Under their plan a partial chad in Dade county counts but a partial chad in the panhandle doesn't. I was never concerned about the standard, but the standard has to be the same across the state.

Second, Gore's attempt to disqualify the military absentee votes due to a lack of a postmark. After all that populist posing, "count every vote", there he was "disenfranchising" the men and women defending our country.

Disgusting.

And for goodness sake, the only way advocating a tax increase could be considered "unselfish" is if the tax increase proponent is the only one whose taxes will be increased. Your demand that I pay more taxes can hardly be characterized as "unselfish."

Bruce; you say conservatives have no moral counterpart to rich liberals who favor raising their own taxes. How about conservatives who are morally opposed to estate taxes, even though they share in the benefit from the tax revenue and do not benefit at all from the tax repeal? Since the vast majority of people pay no estate taxes, the vast majority of those opposed to them do not stand to benefit from their repeal.

The Slate articles on the recount are interesting, but the way I remember the WaPost articles on the recount is that only one possible recount strategy lead to a Gore win, and it was one that neither Bush nor Gore proposed.

As far as Kaus's article, there are a lot of ifs and mays in it; it is hardly a definitive statement that Gore would have won. In particular, relying on ballots with Gore selected and Lieberman written in as valid votes for Gore strikes me as very iffy.

Matt

In reference to Bruce and the "element of morality":

I'm middle-income, grew up in a lower-middle income family, have no great likelihood of being or desire to be "rich," and yet somehow have managed to hold on to my sanity while still voting regularly AGAINST policies and politicians that offer me largesse.

Why? Admittedly not because of concern for a "cruelly abused" upper class. Frankly, saying some rich guy is altruistic just because he's willing to pay a little more in taxes is as ridiculous as saying another rich guy is greedy because he's not. To them, the cost of one policy or the other may be marginal. But to America as a whole, including most of those middle-class folk who vote for fiscal conservatives, there's more at stake: The idealism of the American experiment.

And it's not just idealism, is it? It's not infallible, but it works. Yes, we may have more income disparity here than in much of the developed world, but we're more productive, more economically mobile, and our lower and middle classes are generally better off as a result. Individually, we may never get rich, but together we are.

So I guess I'm motivated by both morality and self-interest, but of the sort that sees opportunity as a greater gift than a monthly check.

mj states: >

My link to the Florida Supreme Court opinion does not work with a period on the end. Try

http://news.findlaw.com/cnn/docs/election2000/fscgoreharrisop1208.pdf

But in answer to your question, the Florida Supreme Court order a recount of ALL counties based on the clear intent of the voter, not just the ones requested by Gore. See pages 38-40 in the referenced PDF opinion.

In particular, the Florida Supreme Court stated: >

I think the Florida Supreme Court did not like Gore's shake-the-vote-trees-in-Democratic-counties approach, and it was trying to fashion a fair statewide remedy in compliance with the fundamental principle that all votes should be counted based on the clear intent of the voter. And I think that had the U.S. Supreme Court not stepped in and stopped the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court, the evidence suggests that there is a good possibility that the overvotes would have been counted, and that Gore would have won.

jpn

Any evidence at all for that last claim, jpn?

That little thing aside, here's the meat of the recount statute:

102.166(6) Procedures for a manual recount are as follows:

(a) The county canvassing board shall appoint as many counting teams of at least two electors as is necessary to manually recount the ballots. A counting team must have, when possible, members of at least two political parties. A candidate involved in the race shall not be a member of the counting team.

(b) Each duplicate ballot prepared pursuant to s. 101.5614(5) or s. 102.141(6) shall be compared with the original ballot to ensure the correctness of the duplicate.

(c) If a counting team is unable to determine whether the ballot contains a clear indication that the voter has made a definite choice, the ballot shall be presented to the county canvassing board for a determination.

(d) The Department of State shall adopt detailed rules prescribing additional recount procedures for each certified voting system which shall be uniform to the extent practicable. The rules shall address, at a minimum, the following areas:

1. Security of ballots during the recount process;

2. Time and place of recounts;

3. Public observance of recounts;

4. Objections to ballot determinations;

5. Record of recount proceedings; and

6. Procedures relating to candidate and petitioner representatives.

If a clear determination can't be made by the canvassing board, I'm at a loss for how overvotes can all be assigned to Gore. Furthermore, Gore made a tactical error in requesting recounts only in certain counties. Since, per 102.166(2)(a)...any such candidate, the political party of such candidate, or any political committee that supports or opposes such ballot measure is entitled to a manual recount of the overvotes and undervotes cast in the entire geographic jurisdiction of such office or ballot measure, provided that a request for a manual recount is made by 5 p.m. on the third day after the election.

Given that the geographical jurisdiction of the office of President (as applied to the state of Florida) covers the entire state, his request was improper, IMO. Not being a lawyer, though, probably puts me at a disadvantage in divining the intent of the Legislature.

>And for goodness sake, the only way advocating a tax increase could be considered "unselfish" is if the tax
>increase proponent is the only one whose taxes will be increased. Your demand that I pay more taxes can hardly
>be characterized as "unselfish."

Exactly. Here's the part about the tax-the-hell-out-of-the-rich in the name of morality part that I don't get:

Go back a 100 years. Before the income tax. Imagine you're a wealthy person in an average community in the US. Imagine that you continuously donate 10% of your gross income to some worthy cause, say a home for the elderly or a hospital or something.

Well, well, you're the toast of the town. You're respected; occasionally, there's probably a dinner in your honor. When you die, everyone says wonderful things about you and you probably get a hospital wing or something named after your.

Fast forward 100 years and somehow morality has changed. Giving 10% of your gross income to a worthy cause is automatic (for rich people, it's more like 20% - remembering that roughly half of the federal government's expenditures are for benefits to one group or another). Everyone has to do it. Not only are you not a pillar of the community for donating your share and not given any sort of thanks by the recipients, but you're called mean names by Democrats when you complain about your tax burden.

Funny how much can change in 100 years...

" The anger on the left is chiefly process based (it wasn't followed), not outcome based."

Gore is the one who violated the process set down, democratically, before the election. When he got the Florida Supreme Ct to overturn the seven day certification requirement, that didn't leave enough time for the challenge process to play out before the "safe harbor" date (Dec 12, iirc). Justly ironic.

" 'So, Mr Smarty Pants, of course it's NOT about working harder. It's about taking chances and generating value.'

" If you think risk and innovation are the chief generator of cash at the individual level in the United States, I've got a bridge I'd like to sell you."

Jason, you couldn't sell thermal underwear to Eskimos. The story Rob told is EXACTLY how it works. What he didn't tell you is that most people who do what his friend did, go bankrupt.

"Not being a lawyer, though, probably puts me at a disadvantage in divining the intent of the Legislature."

On the bright side, at least you're interested in what the intent of the Legislature was--it was rather obvious that SCOFLA couldn't have cared less.

Yeah Rob, 100 year ago the poor were dying in the streets, living in filth and squaller, often time their children were hungry and uneduacted which lead to roving gangs of street thugs who killed people. It's just a sham that we don't go back to those altruistic days.

"Gore is the one who violated the process set down, democratically, before the election. When he got the Florida Supreme Ct to overturn the seven day certification requirement, that didn't leave enough time for the challenge process to play out before the "safe harbor" date (Dec 12, iirc). Justly ironic."

Yep. SCOFLA was acting like the officials in the famous 1972 Olympic men's basketball final, trying to give Gore enough more time on the clock to score the winning basket (and ignoring fouls along the way) before letting the clock run out. The USSC took the ball away and let the clock reach zero (as it should have long before)--and Eric Alterman and his fellow whiners haven't shut up about it since.

"shame" obviously.

Here's a place to read another millionaire's story (he's one of the most valued contributors to these discussions):

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0738207748/qid=1060033008/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-5834798-2089438?v=glance&s=books

David Perron states: >

Not all overvotes would have been assigned to Gore. However, if all overvotes in which the clear intent of the voter could be determined were counted, Gore would have been the net beneficiary by hundreds of votes, probably enough to carry Florida. For example, the following link in the Washington Post states that the net benefit to Gore from counting overvotes would have been 885 votes.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15443-2001Nov12.html

And what are these overvotes in which the clear intent of the voter is can be determinted? It is not, for example, the poor unfortunate Jews for Buchanan, who voted for Gore on one page of their ballot and Buchanan on another. Instead, it is those who voted for Bush (or Gore) and then also wrote-in their vote for Bush (or Gore). Had these ballots ever been reviewed by hand, as I think the evidence suggests would have been done under the order of the Florida Supreme Court, I think it would not have been difficult to discern the clear intent of the voters. As Jason McCullough points out, Kaus describes all this very well at http://slate.msn.com/?id=1006758

Finally, I agree that Gore made a tactical error in requesting a recount only in certain counties. However, the Florida Supreme Court rejected Gore's request and ordered a statewide recount.

jpn

Perhaps that is true, jpn, if there had been months to finish the recount. But there were seven days -- fourteen, if you ignore safe harbor. It would not have been remotely possible for every ballot in Florida to have been uncrated and reviewed in that time.

That, of course, was one of the many reasons that Republicans justifiably suspected SCOFLA was trying to throw the race -- the only counties in which such a count could likely have been completed were the counties in which Gore had requested a recount.

It's not clear to me how undervotes or overvotes recounted could result in either candidate getting a gain in votes, unless those were initially incorrectly attributed to be a valid vote for a candidate.

Jane Galt says: >

I'm not sure the problem was so unmanageable. I think that, in conducting the statewide recount, the ballots should have been run through the machines, and then each ballot which registered as an undervote or overvote should have been reviewed by hand. I think this approach would have been consistent with the Florida Supreme Court's order, and I don't think it would have taken too long.

In any case, I hope this argument shows that it is possible both to be reasonably sane and to believe that it is quite possible that the U.S. Supreme Court took the Presidency from Gore.

jpn

As I recall, the Florida Supreme court liked Gore's "shake the tree" strategy enough to throw out the statutory deadline for finishing it, in favor of one of their own creation. It was only after some of the Gore counties failed to meet THEIR deadline, and it became obvious that there weren't enough new votes to be found in those counties anyway, that they went for the partial statewide count.

It was that "keep recounting until it comes out right" element that lost me.

jpn: I suppose you can call Gore calling for recounts only in exactly those counties he expected to pick up votes a "tactical error." I might have other names for it.

And going waaay back to the beginning of this thread, where Bruce Moomaw said that the real problem was the Electoral College: the mind reels. Imagine the 2000 election *without* the EC, please. In such a close race, there would have been recounts in fifty states, not two. There would have been wrangling about the standards for a "valid" vote in every one of them. (No, worse, in every US county.) It might have gone on for months, as one party or another petitioned for changes in the counting procedure or the deadlines or what have you in every state. All in favor of expanding the 2000 mayhem many-fold, please raise your hands.

Mmmm. . . no, JPN, because the SCOFLA still ruled out overvotes, according to the legal experts (both Dem and GOP) in the books I've read on the Florida election. They're simply illegal, no two ways about it. "The clear intent of the voter" referred to chads, not overvotes, which were simply never going to be counted under any interpretation even if the SCOTUS had done nothing. And your opinion about what should have happened with the rejected ballots is neither in the SCOFLA ruling, nor any of the other arrangements that were proposed, so it's nice but irrelevant. Nor in the equipment; the tallying machines are of ancient vintange and not likely to be equipped to run the sorts of detailed sorting procedures you're postulating. You might be able to get your hands on just the rejected ballots, but just the overvotes? From one of 15 or so races? The machines don't have 77 bins and a configurable LED panel. They run on punch cards, fer goshsakes.

"It's about taking chances and generating value."

Not always. A lot of times it's about being born into a wealthy (or at least well-off) family and having a huge-ass (or at least moderate) head start. It's a lot easier to take chances if you know daddy's going to make your rent payment if things don't work out.

I understand the value of hard work and risk-taking, but please do not argue anything like that wealth and merit necessarily correlate.

OTOH, Bruce's morality argument for raising taxes to redistribute to lower income persons is very interesting. Can I assume that Bruce thinks it is always proper to legislate morality?

also, with paper ballots, running them through the machines damages them (more and more votes came up each time the machines were run)

the whole recount debacle s a result of the balloting process in the US

the only accurate way of recording votes is a paper ballot that is filled in by voters: either for physical human counting (as in UK, Canada, etc) or by using optical scanning ballots (like multiple choice tests such as the SAT)

"Not always. A lot of times it's about being born into a wealthy (or at least well-off) family and having a huge-ass (or at least moderate) head start. It's a lot easier to take chances if you know daddy's going to make your rent payment if things don't work out.

I understand the value of hard work and risk-taking, but please do not argue anything like that wealth and merit necessarily correlate."

I think you'll find a pretty strong correlation between merit and the ability to produce more wealth than one started with. Bill Gates started out with money--that doesn't mean that increasing it by a few orders of magnitude didn't require some substantial ability on his part. Someone who starts out wealthy always has the option to sit on his or her laurels and live a life of comfort without taking any risks--it would behoove us to respect the ones willing to take those risks and create businesses that employ many, many people.

Bruce said: "Having written a letter to my local paper before the election calling any defense of the Electoral College garbage, I have no such qualms -- it just further confirms my belief (and Robert Dahl's) that in some respects the Constitution is godawful."

ANY defense of the Electoral College? Like it's in the Constitution??

There's the Democratic elite position in a nutshell: "We don't like the rules, and we want them changed to meet our ends."

Here's a Clue, Bruce: There's also in the Constitution a mechanism for changing the Constitution - it's the amendment process.

The problem I have with the modern Democratic party and its adherents is that they don't seem to believe that the rules should apply to them when it means that they don't get what they want. (Gun control? That pesky 2nd Amendment.)

Gore attempted to change the rules of the election in the middle of the contest, and the Florida Supreme Court tried to help. No one seems to remember that the Supreme Court of the U.S. bitch-slapped the Florida Supreme Court with a UNANIMOUS decision for doing that prior to the 5-4 Bush v. Gore outcome.

If you don't like blanket statements, I'm sorry, but that's the behavior I've witnessed - avoiding, bending or breaking the rules, so long as it achieves their ends. (Depends on your definition of "is," I guess. No "controlling legal authority," y'know.)

The Constitution of the United States has made this the most prosperous, poweful nation this world has ever seen. We CHANGE it at our risk. We IGNORE it at our peril. If we REVILE it, it will be our destruction.

That, too, seems to be the desired outcome.

Jane Galt: >

If you can provide any references, I'd be happy to take a look at them. However, I don't see anything in the Florida Supreme Court opinion ordering the statewide recount which rules out counting overvotes. Certainly, the court states (p. 23 of the pdf reference above) that "Section 101.5614(5), Florida Statutes (2000), provides that '[n]o vote shall be declared invalid or void if there is a clear indication of the intent of the voter as determined by the canvassing board.'" It is true that the Court (like the litigants) was focused on undervotes. But the issue was going to be addressed by Judge Lewis as he oversaw the recount. As Kaus notes, "Lewis had apparently planned a hearing for later that Saturday, at which the overvote issue was going to be discussed." (See http://slate.msn.com/id/2058603/ ) And in my view, the principles elsewhere articulated by the Florida Supreme Court would have strongly favored including redundant overvotes, in which the voter voted for a candidate and then wrote in the candidates name.

I suspect that when you say that experts agree that counting overvotes is illegal, what the experts were actually saying is that counting the votes of those like the Jews for Bucnanan (e.g. those who voted for Gore and Buchanan) is illegal. But this is different from the redundant overvotes, which apparently would have provided a large net benefit for Gore.

jpn

jpn: I think the "Jews for Buchanan" phenomenon in Palm Beach had little to do with "overvotes." What is conjectured to have happened is that a lot of voters misunderstood the "butterfly ballot" and punched the second hole down the ballot meaning to vote for Gore, but actually voting for Buchanan instead. Bush and Gore were the two top names on the left side of the ballot, corresponding to the first & third holes. Buchanan was the top name on the right side, and the arrow from his name went to the second hole.

There were some "spoiled" ballots — overvotes — with both Gore & Buchanan punched, but the much bigger problem was an improbably high number of ballots punched only for Buchanan.

Uhhh...jpn, just what makes you think an overvote is a vote for Gore? Do you think people too stupid to follow the instructions only vote on the (D) ticket?

And, to quote your reference (and mine) the canvassing board decided whether an overvote goes to one side or another. Given that it's the LAW that the canvassing board is composed equally of Democrats and Republicans, just how do you think that decision will pan out? I'm thinking all but a few of the overvotes would be tossed on the dustbin of history, just as they were in actuality.

Michelle Dulak: >

I think there were likely lots of accidental Buchanan votes in Palm Beach, but there were also lots of overvotes for Gore/Buchanan. In a March 11, 2001 story (authors Engelhardt and McCabe), the Palm Beach Post reported that in Palm Beach County, 5,330 residents voted Gore/Buchanan. (I found this through hometown.aol.com/SteveFJong/rant/rant04.html , but I verified this figure on the Palm Beach Post website at www.palmbeachpost.com ). Apparently, this number compares with 2,908 Palm Beach voters punched for both Gore and McReynolds, and 1,631 voters voted for both Bush and Buchanan. (These numbers come from Jong citing the same Palm Beach Post article, but I wasn't about to pay $5.95 to see the PBP's full archive. My devotion to original sources has its limits.)

To be clear, I don't think anyone believes that these votes should have been counted for Gore, and Gore did not need these split overvotes to win. As I have already stated, the evidence suggests that Gore could have won if the redundant overvotes (that is, the ones where the voter wrote in the same candidate as he voted for) were counted.

David Perron: >

The overvotes which would have counted for Gore would be the ones in which the voter both voted directly for Gore and also wrote in Gore's name in the place for write-in votes. The overvotes which would have counted for Bush would be the ones in which the voter voted directly for Bush and also wrote in Bush's name in the place for write-in votes. When a machine reads such a ballot, it sees two votes and rejects the ballot as an overvote. But humans can clearly discern the voter's intent in either case. And I suspect the canvassing boards would have had little trouble with these cases, as voter intent seems plain.

jpn

Just thought I'd point out the following:
Jane writes: "Randy Barnett wrote something to the effect that liberals live in a "culture of lies" while guest-blogging for Glenn Reynolds. Such statements set my teeth on edge."

Then she writes: "What is true is that Democrats, right now, have more ability to insulate themselves from being confronted with the views of the other side."

Then she writes that Democrats "live in a bubble, and thus are genuinely not aware that the other side may occasionally have the better of the argument."

Then: "It is even now common at gatherings of New Yorkers to hear bitter recriminations about the Supreme Court stealing the election for Bush, even though the recount seems to have shown, as conclusively as anything can, that Bush would have won even if the Supreme Court had mandated the exact recount Gore's team wanted. It isn't disingenuous; they do not know this fact. And how do they not know it? Because there are five million or so other people around who constantly tell each other that the Supreme Court stole the election for Bush. And like anything that one hears over and over from sympathetic sources, it becomes true to them..."

Jane, please re-read Prof. Barnett's column and I think you'll find you are basically in agreement. And btw, if you read any of Barnett's writing on the Ninth Amendment, I believe you would find that his politics are not what you think they are.

"Yeah Rob, 100 year ago the poor were dying in the streets, living in filth and squaller, often time their children were hungry and uneduacted which lead to roving gangs of street thugs who killed people. It's just a sham that we don't go back to those altruistic days."

Yes, we're a hell of a lot better off than we were 100 years ago. That simply tells us that the intervening policies didn't manage to completely halt the march of progress.

Progress was humming along merrily 100 years ago. People were generally better off 100 years ago than they were 110 years, and better off 110 years ago than they were 120 years ago. I don't see any reason why that wouldn't have continued by keeping the same policies in place, nor any reason to suppose that we wouldn't be even better off today if we'd stayed that course.

"2. Fiscal conservatives but social liberals. Which is a complete oxymoron because social liberals want to take OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY to fund their social agenda. This is not fiscally conservative."

No, fiscal liberals want to take other people's money to fund their agenda. "Social liberal" simply describes a social agenda, not how one intend to fund it; it doesn't even imply that "funding" is necessary for the social agenda.

"The idea is that, even with a limited state, they get more from the government than poor people. E.g., the more property you own, the more important it is to you that it not be stolen, or that someone not invade and screw up your life."

For a rich person, the importance of protecting each dollar goes down, not up. If Bill Gates was robbed of $10,000, he wouldn't even notice; if I were robbed of $10,000, I'd definitely notice. The value per dollar of government protection of assets is higher for me than for Bill Gates, yet he's supposed to pay more per dollar than I do?

Also, the wealthy can protect themselves far better than the rest of us can.

Anybody who thinks that the Florida legislature would have meekly stood by, while the FL SC went through the machinations required to have more votes counted for Gore than Bush, really is underestimating the degree to which this would have been fought until the last dog died. The Florida legislators would have sent their slate of electors to compete for recognition with the slate sent by the FL SC, and the whole contest would have then been tossed into the U.S. House of Representatives. There have been times when I think that is what should have happened, but prior to have my third whiskey of the evening, I think it more likely that, one hundred years from now, most knowledgeable observers will conclude the the USSC made a pragmatic decision that delivered the ultimate result that was most likely, but short-circuited an even more drawn out political crisis that may have been quite damaging to the nation and the world if it had extended another four to six weeks, or even longer.

"I'm not saying that those people who believe in covering the needs of lower-income people with a tax on cigarettes and alcohol are automatically unselfish -- I'm saying that those people who believe in doing so with a hike on income taxes on their own economic class are such."

That's not at all clear. It may simply mean they get a payoff that isn't money. There are lots of other kinds of payoffs and once you have more than enough money to be comfortable on, money becomes of litle value in and of itself. It's nothing more than tokens to keep score of the game. Every additional million becaomes a reaffirmation of your superiority over your competitors. It stops being so much an issue of greed as it starts being an issue of egoism.

If you happen to begin playing a different game where the tokens are ideological or psychological or political or social or whatever, you're still angling for a pay-off, just in a different coin that is no less selfish than money. Money shifts from being an end to being a means to a different end; power, glory, winning in a different game.

Wise men understand, like Gandolph and like Lord Acton, that regardless of the reason power is pursued power will tend to corrupt and the more power you posess the more it will corrupt you. Soon the end you originally pursued power to acheive will become but a rationalization of why you need more ever power to acheieve ever greater ends.

Good Grief. Our hostess has a rant on what's goin' on re the '04 Election & a critical mass of the replies involve whether "The US Supremes gave the '00 Election to Bush". (W/o that decision, The FL Supremes would've given that election to Gore? Nevermind.)

Hey, let's talk about the 1876 Election, which the Commission gave to the GOP. That'll help us understand how the 2004 Election is shaping up.

Try to stay focused, people.

TomCom

PS Not one of you ever quoted Posner's masterpiece on Election 2000!

"The Florida legislators would have sent their slate of electors to compete for recognition with the slate sent by the FL SC, and the whole contest would have then been tossed into the U.S. House of Representatives."

Well, uh, not quite. Bush wins and it's perfectly legal. SCOFL has no legal standing to order anything of the sort. If they tried, any slate of electors in competition with the state legislature would surely lose in the GOP controlled House. Exactly as the Constitution spells out.

Per the Federal Constitution the state legislature has *exclusive* power to determine how the electors shall be selected. It does NOT spell out any role for the state judiciary. (SCOTUS noted this in its decisions.) The state legislature could as easily vote to auction seats off to the highest bidder or draw names out of the phone book.

Given that there has been no huge backlash against Jeb Bush or the GOP controlled state legislature, one can only assume that the state's voting citizens are not terribly unhappy with the results.

Was most curious about your comment concerning FOX NEWS. Have you watched it? While I do note that there is a conservative bias, I also note that, for example on Hannity and Colms, pits conservatives and democrats against each other head to head. Sometimes these exchanges can get heated, but what I notice is that invariably it is the liberal democrat that comes off sounding like a lunatic, ranting and raving at the top of their lungs.

I am not awed nor stunned by the power of liberal intellect. I am still looking for it. What I see is that conservatives will argue and debate an issue, while democrats will attack the messenger, yell, bulldoze (talking over the other person such that their views are effectively silenced) and use other illogical and irrational rhetorical tricks. The voting populace is getting wise to this.

Every time I watch a Democratic candidate make some statement that gets me to thinking "What planet is he from?" it is not good for the Democrats.

But getting back to Jane's main point. There is a difference of fact between the two parties. The Democrats will say that the Republicans stole the election. The Republicans will say they did not. Due to the nature of the issue at hand, both statements cannot be true. Someone is wrong, making a statement that is inconsistent with reality.

But it is impossible to have any kind of rational discourse on the subject, because both sides accept different versions of the facts, different histories. It is left to the voters to make up their own mind as to which side has a firmer grasp of reality. Whether it is really that tax cuts spur economic growth and thereby increase federal revenues or not, or whether we should go after Saddam or not, these are the issues that are going to be decided by the voters.

And they are going to have to do it based not on the debate presented, because a debate requires some common ground between the two parties. And there ain't one.

I'm sure it's convenient to believe that the FLSC consists of a bunch of partisan hacks. That may be true, but what is also true is that FLSC precedent pretty much demanded a result at least similar to the FLSC's. In Florida, it is unconstitutional not to count a vote that is discernible. The Bush campaign suspected the counting all the discernible votes would result in losing the presidency, that's why it sued.

The truth is that Florida jurisprudence being what it is, and the safeharbor not being a hard deadline, the law pretty much demanded a good-faith attempt to count all discernible votes. That's why Bush "stole" the election.

And just for the record, after all was said and done, the only votes illegally counted at the insistence of either campaign was ... you guessed it ... military absentee ballots which were pre-completed, improperly completed, late, or lacking a postmark. The Gore campaign complained for all of 24 hours before fire and brimstone rained down on it. At that point I knew that Democrats would be better off if Gore lost. A Gore presidency would either be plagued by right-wing dirty politics, worse than the Clinton years, and/or ended by a Freeper with a rifle.

And for those of you Republican partisans who seem to be having an equally difficult time getting over the 2000 campaign, would you really be making the same arguments if the tables were turned?

Don't you find it interesting that "power hungry" Richard Nixon chose not to contest the 1960 election, because he felt it was not good for the country? He had a lot stronger case for voter fraud than Gore and had both the Republican party & Ike urging him to contest it. Nixon said it would take a year and a half to recount and that there were too many important issues to deal with. They couldn't be handled with the country divided. (And the investigation into the election was handled by Bobby Kennedy. Gee, wonder why they said there weren't any problems.)

I don't care who the Dems run. I've voted for every Dem candidate starting with McGovern and ending with Gore. I will not be voting Democratic again, any time in the forseeable future (except possibly in a local election). They have no idea how to run the country and they have no one who shows any leadership. It's the same old crap, year after year.

Perhaps Nixon didn't demand a recount because he was more of a patriot than is Gore. But he also didn't demand one because he also stole votes, namely in southern Illinois. Politics wasn't as clean back then as it is now.

Will Allen: >

I understand that vilification of the Florida Supreme Court is essential to rationalizing the theft of the election, but I have always found it hard to square with what the court did. It ordered a statewide recount based on the clear intent of the voter. This was fundamentally consistent with the overriding principle of Florida election law that every vote be counted. And to me it seems basically fair.

And perhaps if counting all the votes showed that Gore had won the election, the Republican state legislature would have stepped in and tried to appoint a different slate of electors. Had this scheme ultimately worked, it would just have meant that the Republicans had stolen the election by another means.

But I suspect that if there had been a statewide recount of every vote based on the clearly expressed intent of the voter, and if Gore had won based on the apparent abundance of redundant overvotes for Gore, the public pressure on Bush to concede would have been too great for him to try to subvert the result of the election. However, this area of discussion seems too hypothetical to be terribly fruitful.

*****

Finally, on the allegations that Nixon refused to challenge the 1960 election "for the good of the country,"it is best not to believe everything Nixon claimed. See http://slate.msn.com/id/91350/

jpn -- presidential elections are not held under Florida election law, but under federal election law, which specifies that the state legislature is solely responsible. That's why term limits on Senators are unconstitutional. SCOFLA got slapped down the first time by SCOTUS for citing Florida's constitution and told to find a rational in Florida's election law, which they didn't.

And I am in favor of standards which are set prior to the parties involved knowing how they are likely to effect the outcome. You seem to be under the misimpression that I voted for Bush -- I didn't. But once the SCOFLA started making up new standards, which both had the effect of confirming Al Gore's lopsided recount effect while pretending to be neutral, and which clearly contravened some rather clearly written laws on the subject, I thought they were trying to throw the election to Gore. Democratic partisans are arguing that the Supreme Court had a duty to let SCOFLA throw the election. But since SCOFLA had at least an equal duty to let Harris call it for Bush, I'm unmoved.

>>presidential elections are not held under Florida election law, but under federal election law, which specifies that the state legislature is solely responsible.

This is a gimicky loophole. The federal constitution doesn't grant the Florida legislature the right to act in violation of the Florida consitution in areas where there is no federal supremacy or preemption. How to count votes is not a matter of federal law; it is a matter of state law. As such, the legislature must comport with state consitutional requirements.

Heh.

Yesterday Tim Graham asked on The Corner "Why is it a secular media's, well, article of faith, that social conservatives are only a tension headache away from being assassins?"

And, sure enough, today Amitava Mazumdar writes "A Gore presidency would either be plagued by right-wing dirty politics, worse than the Clinton years, and/or ended by a Freeper with a rifle."

Thing is, I can't recall a single conservative assassin. A commie shot Kennedy, a lengthy queue of hippies took shots at Ford, even the 'tard who tried to plug Roosevelt in '32 was some kind of anarchist I think. Hinkley was just a nut. Then there's the recent Fortuyn guy.

So very few right-wing "angry white male" assassins. Then why the myth?

Amitava, it is unclear whether what you call a "gimmicky loophole" is not, after all, what the Constitution mandates as far as sending electors to select a President; this may be an area where state legislators reign supreme, even to the detriment of a state supreme court that believes differently. If you find it intolerably offensive, I suggest you work on an Amendment tossing out the electoral college. The reality is that the margin of victory in Florida was well within the margin of error in counting 6 million plus votes, no matter what "objective" standard was used, so no one will ever be able to say definitiely who "won" Forida, and for the record, I am not a Bush supporter either.

>>So very few right-wing "angry white male" assassins. Then why the myth?

Fair enough. A cheap shot on my part. But the violent, gun-filled language among the Freepers and their like only encourage the fears of people like me.

Ben, re Fox News:

Sometimes these exchanges can get heated, but what I notice is that invariably it is the liberal democrat that comes off sounding like a lunatic...

I think this is what Jane is talking about at the end of her post. It's dangerous to get your ideas on liberal views from conservative media outlets. They don't pick the rational, intelligent liberals, the ones with good ideas that make you think, as guests on their shows. They pick the ones they can trample. Same goes for, say, NPR. Diane Rehm is more "fair and balanced" than most of the NPR crowd, but even she had a woman on this morning opposing gay marriage who was patently incapable of holding up her end of the debate. And who was invited to defend gay marriage? Andrew Sullivan. He walked all over her.

I suppose John Wilkes Boothe might be considered a "conservative", as useless as that term is, since he opposed the institution of slavery being outlawed. James Earl Ray (what's with three names for so many of these creeps?) I guess could be considered a "racial conservative", to coin an unfortunate phrase. I can't remember Sirhan Sirhan's motives, and I don't know what the politics were, if any, of George Wallace's attempted murderer. The idea that Gore would have been any more likely target than any other President, howver, seems to be the by-product of the noxious, fevered, imaginations that was the original point of Jane's post.

Amitava, that's a ridiculous statement. The primacy of the US constitution over state election law for federal elections is well established. And the constitution laid out the procedures by which the electors were to be chosen quite carefully: the legislators get to pick how it's done. It's no more of a gimmicky loophole than the SCOTUS overturning term limits on senators that were duly passed by the state supreme courts and, I believe, in at least one case written into the state constitution. Or, for that matter, the supreme court rulings overturning literacy tests aimed at blacks. The fact that you don't like the result does not make it illegal, and if you simply declare a priori that any rationale which produces a result you dislike is illegitimate, you're not going to win any hearts and minds outside the Faithful.

Theory : what's spoken about is dealt with. What's repressed ultimately causes problems.

People may rant and rave and blow of steam, but it's all sound and fury, signifying nothing. It's the ones that refuse to confront issues and prevent speech about certain topics that are fostering the psychoses.

And for those of you Republican partisans who seem to be having an equally difficult time getting over the 2000 campaign, would you really be making the same arguments if the tables were turned?

Probably some would be continuing to make the same arguments, 3 years later. I'd think those people were whiners who couldn't get over losing, the same as I think it about those who are still carping about the last election.

Jane Galt: >

This is not the best description of the federalism issues in place here. The U.S. Constitution (Art. II, paragraph 1, clause 2) states that "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors . . . ." Thus federal law (which is supreme) directs that electors be selected according to state law, as set by the state legislature. But when laws passed by the state legislature are confusing, contradictory, or ambiguous, whose job is it to interpret what the legislature said? The judiciary.

Now, it is true that some Republicans argued that the cited constitutional provision eliminated any role for the judiciary in the Florida conflict. But the Supreme Court never endorsed that position (I seem to recall Justice O'Connor explicitly rejecting it in the final oral argument, though comments in oral argument lack great significance.) Instead, the Supreme Court wanted to be sure that the Florida Supreme Court was interpreting Florida statutes, as opposed, for example, to the Florida Constitution. See Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board, 531 U.S. 70, 77 (2000) (noting that "we are unclear as to the extent which the Florida Supreme Court saw the Florida Constitution as circumscribing the legislature's authority under [the U.S. Constitution Article II, paragraph 1, clause 2]" and remanding to the Florida Supreme Court for clarification.) (This is the first Bush v. Gore case.)

Thus in the Florida Supreme Court's subsequent decision to order a statewide recount, it was careful to stay close to statutory language: for example, that that "Section 101.5614(5), Florida Statutes (2000), provides that '[n]o vote shall be declared invalid or void if there is a clear indication of the intent of the voter as determined by the canvassing board.'"

In my view, a routine application of existing legal doctrine would have led the U.S. Supreme Court to stay out of the Florida case. But we are now moving into a potential swamp of legal issues: the balance of power between a state's executive, judicial, and legislative branches; federalism; the equal protection clause; the right to vote; etc. Books can be, have been, and will be written on all these subjects. What got me to start writing on this thread was the claim that, even if the U.S. Supreme Court had stayed out of the case, Bush would have won the recount. I believe that the available evidence suggests that this claim is likely false.

jpn

Here's what I picked out for comment:

"...they are, as a group, much more ... dishonest..."

"...even though the recount seems to have shown, as conclusively as anything can, that Bush would have won even if the Supreme Court had mandated the exact recount Gore's team wanted. It isn't disingenuous; they do not know this fact."

"I'm actually worried by the rise of Fox.... Such insularity is awfully dangerous. .. Any ideology must generally confront uncomfortable facts."

In such arenas, facts are not used to derive positions but to selectively buttress them. That is a "fact" of life. Regrettably, life's a bitch.

I see no reason to argue that either the Dems or the Repubs are MORE dishonest than the other. But the following ditty that I try passing around illustrates the widespread nature of dishonesty; it's widely undiscussed dishonesty. The ditty - -
In 2000, an outright lawbreaking endeavor that received too little attention was the Gore-Nader Vote Swap Initiative.
A consistent pattern could be seen on several Vote Swap Initiative websites, presumably set up by these criminally inclined persons. Some FAQ sections carefully described how it was that the national electoral vote count, NOT national popular vote count, constituted the essential factor determining the presidency. After all, the Vote Swap was ABSOLUTELY dependent upon the setup of the Electoral College. Then after election day this position of The Criminally Inclined miraculously reversed.
In the week prior to election day, most if not all of these groups stated that they shut down(under protest!) after receiving affidavits from certain states(including CA and NY) pointing out that since(those states) had election laws identifying the illegality of buying selling or trading of votes, continuing groups would be prosecuted for election law violation. The CRIMINAL nature of that Vote Swap Initiative has received too little attention.

A finishing comment: A group that resorts to criminal acts will correspondingly be rather willing to engage in lying(which is NONcriminal) both to others and to ONESELF. Facts become a distraction. Life's a bitch

"Thing is, I can't recall a single conservative assassin. A commie shot Kennedy, a lengthy queue of hippies took shots at Ford, even the 'tard who tried to plug Roosevelt in '32 was some kind of anarchist I think. Hinkley was just a nut. Then there's the recent Fortuyn guy."

More leftist assassins of note:

President McKinley's assassin, Leon Czolgosz, was a left-wing anarchist. The assassin of President Garfield, Charles Julius Guiteau, was a member of the Oneida Community and a Noyesian "millennial communist."

Well, jpn, all the Democratic legal commenters who I read writing before the newspaper count disagreed with you. None of them thought the overvotes would ever have been counted, as there were clear passages you're not citing that specifically excluded them. Or so they said. No conflict; the statute allegedly said, in black and white, no overvotes, nohow. (I'm going from memory; the books are in storage). For the SCOFLA to have "interpreted" that to mean that overvotes were okay would have been gross abuse, not "reconciliation of conflicting statutes". Hearings were scheduled on any number of unlikely issues; both sides were pressing their case By Any Means Necessary. That does not mean that it was remotely likely, much less probable, that they would have been allowed, since they had been specifically disallowed (again, I am going from memory) in other Florida elections. But no legal commenter that I saw who wrote BEFORE they knew that overvotes were the only way that Gore could have won said anything but that overvotes would have been excluded. Moreover, you have still not accounted for the fact that such a count could never have been completed in the time allowed. There is a wide range of books, completed before the newspaper count was released, on the topic; go look at them and see if you can come up with any commenter who says that overvotes were going to get in.

As for your assertion that I am wrong on the federalism issue, I didn't claim that the Florida judiciary had no role. But the constitution of Florida is not allowed a role in interpreting the state legislature's will, which they did. Whether or not you think that the SCOTUS should have intervened, it's hard to avoid that the SCOFLA essentially gave the supremes the finger; they basically re-issued the same opinion with a different rationale, which indicates to those of us who did not vote for Bush, but were turned off by the legal antics of the court, that the result had been pre-determined independent of the law.

jpn, if you think that determining the "clear intent of the voter", in a situation in which only a change of a few hundred out of 6 million would switch the outcome, would be an objective or "fair" process, you have an entirely too optimistic view of human nature. Our tools for measurement in this instance provide inadequate accuracy for the task at hand, and given people with a high motivation to prefer one outcome to another, to speak one side seeking to "steal" the election is simply an attempt to cast aspersions in a one-sided manner.

re: The harangues about being unselfish...
Can anybody stear me to either an urban legends site or a political candidate documentation site, that can resolve this claim? It's been said that in the mid-80's the Gore family IRS forms showed gross income of a few million dollars with charitable contributions of a few hundred dollars($350 seems preposterous for any politician!!) Although there might be a big-government perspective which conceivably leads to the conclusion that charitable donations from one's own funds is significantly inferior to distributions by government agencies.
So is this urban legend -- being both an advocate of minimal personal aid and an advocate of significant governmental aid?

Jane Galt: >

Again, I agree that split overvotes (e.g. Gore/Buchanan) cannot be counted. But what about when a voter writes in the name of the candidate he voted for? Here, you haven't bothered to look up any relevant statutes, and I'm confronted with trying to argue against vague memories. But what do the statutes actually say? I did some research, and here is what I found:

"If the elector marks more names than there are persons to be elected to an office, or if it is impossible to determine the elector's choice, his or her ballot shall not be counted for that office . . . ." Fl St. Section 101.011(4) (West 2001).

In my view, this simply does not mean that redundant overvotes cannot be counted when the voter's intent is clear: marking the same name twice does not mean the voter has marked more names than the number of persons on the ballot. It does, however, mean that ballots which include votes for Gore and Buchanan are invalid. And when the above statute is read along with the statute commanding that "[n]o vote shall be declared invalid or void if there is a clear indication of the intent of the voter as determined by the canvassing board," I really see no reason why counting redundant overvotes is impermissible. In fact, I think it is mandatory.

I still suspect your memory is confusing you regarding the difference between split overvotes and redundant overvotes. But if you can provide any citations to contrary authority, I am happy to take a look.

jpn

Shorter Jane Galt: Generalizations are always bad, and the people who make them are stupid. People don't know things that are written in newspapers they don't read. ;)

Seriously, the federalist balance tips decidedly towards an active role for the federal government when it's the president being elected, precisely because he's the president of all the people. The problem with Bush v. Gore had more to do with an excess of judicial involvement in elections than with upsetting of the federal/state balance, and that problem was created by SCOFLA, not SCOTUS.

The one commentator who did argue all along that overvotes should have been counted was Mickey Kaus.

Oops, I was reading the thread from the bottom up and didn't see that somebody'd linked to Kaus's theory already. Sorry.

I think that this is one of the very best blogs out there. One could argue that this is because I am ideologically sympathetic to the author - to quote one of the preceding posts: I read to be massaged, not informed.

If I deny this (I don't completely, but if I did), then I am open to criticism that I seek (perhaps unconciously) the same intellectual homogeneity that Jane/Megan writes about originally.

Damn, it's hard to be an independent thinker.

So I have to ask myself why I spend my lunch reading this blog (and others). And the answer is because it's thoughtful, and I just don't think that there is much in the way of thoughtful commentary these days.

Today's commentary is dead on, and is a useful warning for the both the Dems and the GOP. They won't heed it, of course, just like so many of posters above didn't.

WHY IN THE HELL DON'T YOU HAVE A TV SHOW OR A COLUMN IN THE NYT?

>>The primacy of the US constitution over state election law for federal elections is well established. And the constitution laid out the procedures by which the electors were to be chosen quite carefully: the legislators get to pick how it's done

Jane, I'm not disregarding apriori any argument whose results I disagree with. It's just that your argument is difficult for me to swallow. Your viewpoint suggests that the federal grant of authority to the legislature to come up with voting procedures short circuits the state's balance of powers. This makes no sense to me. This would mean that no governor of any state would have to sign any federal-election-related bill for it to become law. But that -- as far as I know -- isn't true. If a state legislature passes a bill, it must be signed by the governor before it becomes law. Once it becomes law, it must pass muster under the state consitution as interpreted by the state supreme court. (Think also have the battles between governors and legislatures of the opposing party over redrawing federal districts).

(Now, if it turns out that governors don't have to sign such bills, that puts a big hole in my argument. But I would be surprised.)

As such, a scheme to count votes -- by any objective understanding of our laws, a purely state matter -- must comport with the state constitution.

That the federal government decides that federal Senators must be chosen by popular vote has nothing to do with voting procedures.

Oh, and not that I agree with Kaus -- Kaus argues that the Florida Supreme Court-ordered recount actually did cover overvotes and not just undervotes -- contrary to what the litigants argued, contrary to what each of the Justices of the US Supreme Court concluded in their various opinions, contrary to the fact that the Florida Supreme Court referred repeatedly in its opinion to undervotes and not overvotes as what it was ordering should be counted. The fact that the lower court judge was apparently intending to order something different from that, which is Kaus' sole item of evidence, just goes to show why the entire process was so arbitrary, ad hoc, standardless and subject to abuse that the US Supreme Court really had no choice but to find that it lacked the rational basis necessary to support state action (I still maintain that the legal "scholars" who rip this decision are wrong -- the case makes perfect sense when you view it as applying a rational basis standard to a judicially ordered remedy and as distinguishing that case from any vote-counting scheme that is established in advance of the election).

As a corollary to Amitava's musings above, I wonder if the collective Left would have been as much, or more incensed had Gore been declared the winner in Florida, and then the electors went ahead and voted for Bush (counter to custom, but not, curiously, state law).

Re: Democratic inability to get over 2000

Question: How to make a buck off of it?

>>As a corollary to Amitava's musings above, I wonder if the collective Left would have been as much, or more incensed had Gore been declared the winner in Florida, and then the electors went ahead and voted for Bush (counter to custom, but not, curiously, state law).

Well, yes, the Left, by which I assume you mean Democrats, would probably be incensed.

Still, however anti-democratic that would have been, at least the legal authority for the electoral college to do so would have been much clearer than the USSC's authority to do what it did.

(That is, putting aside whatever obligations the electors may have under state law to vote for the candidate that won their respective states.)

Still, however anti-democratic that would have been, at least the legal authority for the electoral college to do so would have been much clearer than the USSC's authority to do what it did.

Which, in turn, was cleaner than what SCOFL attempted to do.

jpn, I'm not misremembering; it was the unified, not the split overvotes. I don't know what the legal reasoning was, but apparently it was very settled, because even the Democratic commenters were largely in agreement that it would be impossible for the SCOFLA to have allowed the counting of overvotes due to both the law and earlier reasoning. Moreover, as other commenters have pointed out, the SCOFLA ruling specifically directed them to count only the undervotes.

Now I'm done arguing about the topic, because it's stupid. The election happened. You are welcome to dwell on it, but I don't really care now, just as I really didn't care then. I thought the SCOFLA deserved the smackdown that they got and I'm unlikely to change my mind. Nor have I ever seen anyone on the other side swayed. The point of this post was not the legitimacy of the election; it was that those who had argued the validity of the Gore recount to the bitter end immediately forgot about it when proof was offered that it wouldn't work. That's a problem. If the Democrats want to refight 2000 in 2004, y'all are welcome to. But you won't get my vote, and I seriously doubt you'll get anyone else's who is not a devout party member. But it's your party, and you should do what you want with it.

"Gore is the one who violated the process set down, democratically, before the election."

I don't agree on the "Gore violating process thing", but I can just see your hypothetical SC discussion: "Shit, let's violate the established judicial process because Gore violated did!"

I seem to remember the "safe harbor" thing being bunk, but let's assume that the recounts take too long. What procedure does the Constitution specify for resolving it? *Throw it to the House of Representatives*. I'd be fine with Bush elected that way. Again, process, not results.

"Jason, you couldn't sell thermal underwear to Eskimos."

The plural of "anecdote" isn't "data."

"There have been times when I think that is what should have happened, but prior to have my third whiskey of the evening, I think it more likely that, one hundred years from now, most knowledgeable observers will conclude the the USSC made a pragmatic decision that delivered the ultimate result that was most likely, but short-circuited an even more drawn out political crisis that may have been quite damaging to the nation and the world if it had extended another four to six weeks, or even longer."

Yes, because otherwise there'd have been tanks in the streets! Give me a break.

I would like for tax cuts to raise tax revenue, but it is not so.

Generally, a good argument, but this one is short-sighted.

No one (with a shred of intelligence) doubts the reality of the laffer curve.

The laffer curve - Tax revenue will be lowest at a rate of 0% and 100%, it will rise from both ends of the curve and meet at a maximum somewhere between them.

That tax cuts "never" increase revenue is as asinine as stating that lowering a consumer price will never increase revenue. To say that tax cuts never increase revenue would require that you also believe that pricing gum at $100 a pack will raise 100 times more revenue than if you price it at $1 per pack. (Time is the biggest difference in the two arguments - buying gum is optional, thus pricing effects will be quick. Paying taxes, in the short-run, is required and will respond more slowly to rate changes.)

Saying that tax cuts NEVER increase revenue is as misinformed as saying that that they ALWAYS do.

Jason, if the only extremely damaging outcome you can imagine involves tanks in the streets, you need to think harder. Like I said, I have some sympathy for tossing the entire thing into the U.S. House of Representatives, but sometimes pragmatism is underrated, and since the results would have been the same, and it is far from clear that the lower Florida Court should have been overturned by the FL SC, I seriously doubt whether SCOTUS' decision will be viewed all that poorly in a hundred years. Geez, previous Supreme Courts have read the Commerce Clause in such a way that basically renders the 10th Amendment null and void. How does this compare in terms of overreaching?

The overvotes which would have counted for Gore would be the ones in which the voter both voted directly for Gore and also wrote in Gore's name in the place for write-in votes. The overvotes which would have counted for Bush would be the ones in which the voter voted directly for Bush and also wrote in Bush's name in the place for write-in votes.

Literacy tests of the past had some actual value (mostly for denying the vote to minorities, but some actual value!) I don't think we want our leaders to be chosen by people who cannot successfully follow the instructions to vote. How well do these people follow the issues confronting our nation? How informed are their decisions?

We also don't allow children (or toddlers and infants) to vote. It is assumed that they don't have a grasp of the issues.

Jane Galt wrote:

If the Democrats want to refight 2000 in 2004, y'all are welcome to. But you won't get my vote, and I seriously doubt you'll get anyone else's who is not a devout party member. But it's your party, and you should do what you want with it.

On the other hand, if Democrats persist in trying to refight the 2000 elections, it may just remind voters of how they attempted to disenfranchise members of the military in the last presidential election.

Probably not a good thing to do post-9/11 and Operation: Iraqi Freedom especially when their presidential wannabes are having to deal with their party’s deficit when it comes to dealing with national security issues while trying to appease a base that is still largely protesting the Vietnam War.

I should qualify the tax cut statement: they demonstrably do not produce revenue increases at the current levels of taxation in America. They certainly would at higher levels, but I doubt that level is much below 50%.

So, Jane, are you saying there's a marked decrease in revenue, a tiny decrease, or that the curve effectively has a big flat spot between current rates and 50% (not necessarily encompassing 50%)?

Or is it just a guess? I'm thinking if anyone truly knew, the question of whether the tax cuts were a good idea or not would long since have been put to rest.

"Jason, if the only extremely damaging outcome you can imagine involves tanks in the streets, you need to think harder."

Name one that had a reasonable chance of occuring. And maybe we should update "a nation of laws, not men" to a "a nation of pragmatic outcomes, not laws."

Hell, just scrap the laws altogether, and see where pragmatism leads us. Is that what you have in mind, Jason?

Jane: Great essay. I loved it. So True.

Bruce: "To this extent, there really IS an element of morality on the Democratic side of the aisle that's missing on the GOP side."

Jane was right. QED

Democrats: You have 14 months to get over it. Do yourselves a favor, bores do not get invited over for dinner.

jane,

I read somewhere recently that a possible interpretation of today's politics is that moderates and independents matter less and less, that what really counts is keeping your base happy.

If so, the dems need to make sure their base is motivated, just like the GOP. That's why Dems attack Bush and Bush passes tax cuts and nominates judicial conservatives. None of these issues resonate with the middle but they keep the base happy.

I love this essay, Jane. I made it my link of the day.

Nice to see that Jason has become a strict constructionist. I await his stinging denunciation of the intimidated Supreme Court's reveral and capitulation on New Deal legislation during the 1930s. I can speculate on any number of scenarios, you will call them unlikely, and neither of us can be proven right. Given that an election tossed into the House would have produced the same result, it doesn't seem to have been the most worthwhile action to take, or the most ornerous action by the court even if one would have preferred that it had been tossed into the House.

"Given that an election tossed into the House would have produced the same result, it doesn't seem to have been the most worthwhile action to take, or the most ornerous action by the court even if one would have preferred that it had been tossed into the House."

Well, instead of having a factually challenged hissy fit about the USSC, Jason and his fellow travellers would have been able to have factually challenged hissy fits about the Republican House and the Republican-run Florida Legislature, who need to face the voters. Of course, given the stellar success of Terry McAuliffe's master plan to make Jeb Bush pay for the loss of Florida (what was the name of the Janet Reno trouncing non-entity who got spanked by Jeb again?), one might think that the Democrats would be grateful that this scenario did not take place, as it would have simply made it even more clear that most of the electorate isn't moved by their ongoing temper tantrum.

David P.,

Nobody knows the answer to your question. Nobody even knows what you assume: that there is only one relative maximum between 0 and 100%.

Martin Gardner (of Scientific American) correctly pointed out that knowing that f(0)=f(100%)=0 tells us absolutely nothing about the shape of the function between 0 and 100%.

From Bruce Moomaw:

"Let's go through this yet again: the only reason anyone ever wants to become rich is so that he can make more money with the same amount of work effort. If he has managed that, exactly what is immoral in transferring a significant amount of that extra income he's making to the less wealthy? "

Forgive me all, but this pushes my button.

What is immoral about transferring the money is that it's not your money. Feel free to give all of your money to the poor--leave my money alone.

Great piece and very interesting comment thread. Here's my question re: the insularity issue. I was a Far Left Liberal for almost 35 years and never voted (or would have been caught dead voting) for a Republican, until 1998. I am now hardcore Conservative (neoCon or whatever). I will watch only Fox News and read only conservative and libertarian websites and blogs, and the only leftwing stuff I see is filtered thru same, by choice. I know (and have made) every leftwing argument ad nauseum. There are MANY, MANY conservatives just like me. We call ourselves Recovered Liberals.

Do we have a duty to pay attention to the raw merde coming from the other side, that we ourselves spewed for so long? I refuse to believe so. I could write leftwing manuals; why on earth, now that I'm conservative, would I want to hear or read any of it? I REJECTED IT. That is WHY I watch Fox News (which ain't nearly conservative enough for me most of the time), listen to Rush, and read what I read. I feel well educated in the ideologies and arguments of both sides. I know other people who believe they are also.

How many knee-jerk or insular, lifelong conservatives do you actually know? Everyone I knew, growing up, was liberal. For me, liberalism was the unthinking road of least resistance. I had to grow up, seriously think about all my dogma and undergo a true paradigm shift to give it all up, and it was painful. But for the first time in my life, cognitive dissonance is a thing of the past and I feel like I'm "home."

What's so bad about Fox News again?

"I'm thinking if anyone truly knew, the question of whether the tax cuts were a good idea or not would long since have been put to rest."

Only if one accepts the notion that taxes should only be cut to stimulate growth and/or achieve greater tax receipts as a result of that growth.

Sweet Lou asks:

Re: Democratic inability to get over 2000

Question: How to make a buck off of it?

answer: be a campaign consultant.

Regarding the body of Jane's argument, conservatives and libertarians don't need to seek out liberal arguments - it's a bit of a trick to avoid them. As was pointed out, Hannity will get Democrats on yelling at him. Rush has liberal callers. The WSJ's reporters are generally liberal, and most other papers are more so. TV is, aside from Fox, a vast liberal wasteland.

However, even insulating oneself inside a right-wing intellectual ghetto will result in being exposed to quite a significant amount of political argument. Today's NRO has a piece about the idiocy of the drug laws. Andrew Sullivan, no liberal, has been beating the drum in favor of gay marriage. There is lots of discussion of the wisdom of tax cuts with spending increases.

What similar discussion exists on the liberal side of the aisle? Debate whether the 9/11 attacks were engineered by Mosa'ad, or whether they're understandable expressions of rage by Sa'udi billionaires?

Jane,

I'd like to propose a slightly different reason for the Democrat's problems -- and it is this, if you compare the factions that comprise the Democratic party with that of your average European parliment, you'll see that the Democrats have about twice the number of competing interest.

In a sense, the Democrats are nothing more than a political "roll-up." Personally, I think this aspect of the Democratic party is a good thing. For one, it provides yet another way for people of all persuasions to stay engaged with the mainstream. The downside of this system is the belief that Democrats "own" minorities.

I don't believe for an instant that Democrats by and large live in a bubble more so than Republicans. To suggest this is really no more of an argument than saying that Democrats are compulsive liars. It's a simple fact of how their internal politics work that gives Democrats their personality, their strengths, and as we're seeing in the face of a strong Republican front, their weaknesses.

Additionally, I would suggest that the allegations that Fox is the lone conservative channel, while perhaps relevant pre-2002 mid-terms, is now passe. Watch Fox for an hour, then flip to Headline News. Can you tell a difference? I can't. What bothers me about Fox more than anything is not the so-called conservative slant but the Enquirerization of the news. Do I really care that [insert celebrity name here] walked around LA today with their fly down? Do I need constant Fox alerts? And what really baffles me is that CNN thinks this is what got Fox it's popularity. No, I watched Fox because of the quality of most of its programming -- watch Brit Hume sometime, he's definitely on par with Jennings and Brokaw. I watch McNeil/Lehrer and Brit Hume and I'm done with the news for the day. The primetime stuff on Fox is BS, but so is CNN and MSNBC's lineup.

But getting back to my point -- the difference between Dem's and Republican's is about the same as the difference between Methodists and Presbyterians. Cut from the same cloth, they just do things a little bit different than each other.

Bernard:

I didn't assume it; I just neglected to give it as an option. If the maxima are not significantly different from each other, and the intervening minima aren't significantly lower than the maxima, I'd say you can count it all as a fairly flat spot. My point is that you see a lot of argument invoking the Laffer curve, but no description of what the curve actually looks like. If revenue is fairly insensitive to taxation rates (and I'm making up a ridiculous range here) between 15% and 60%, I'm going to go with the lower end.

"Not, mind you, that I think Republicans are more aware of Democratic arguments because they are naturally more intellectually curious. They are more exposed to alternative viewpoints only because they haven't got a choice."

Wait a minute: that implies something that is also true, which is that Democrats do have a choice.

Somewhere, in one of the books by Radosh ("Commies", perhaps) or Horowitz, there is a remarkable confession that the author -- in his lefty days -- had never read people like Hayek or Mises. Take that datapoint and compare with this: how many times have you seen lefties sneering at Ayn Rand without the least evidence that they ever read a single word she wrote? I don't know about you, but that whole attitude (and that's all it is) has, in my experience, gone far beyond cliche into positive shibboleth.

We're talking about a cultured ignorance -- a manifest bigotry -- that refuses to face facts. Do you really believe that "the entire City of New York" did not get the word on the results of the newspapers' recount? What... did everybody go blind and deaf in one fell swoop?

This is ridiculous. You know it, yourself. You pointed out that "all those people didn't just stop talking about it, but seemingly wiped the results from their mind", and I say you're correct: they all knew it, and they nonetheless engaged the primitive depravity of ignoring it.

You can protest identifications of some people "as a group" if you want to, but we all know that such identifications certainly can be valid. (This fact is what "concepts" are all about.) And I, for one, am convinced that people who are interested in freedom know their opponents, the latter of whom deliberately ignore facts.

This must be the part where you tune me out.

Definition of irony. Read the comments of a clueless jane post on "what's wrong with democrats" and find an echo chamber.

News flash Jane, you think Democrats live in an echo chamber because the ones around you DO. You are in the chamber with them, and it informs your biases and blind spots just as surely as it does theirs. It's just that you reflexively believe the opposite of what your local echo chamber says.

Your problem with understanding democrats in general (rather than the NY echo chamber flavor) is that you live in NY, and NY is entirely unprepresentative of the rest of the USA.

You notice that Dems in NY are sloppy and intellectually lazy about their political opinions, and you take that to mean that all Dem's are. But you are wrong. What's really happening is that wherever people people live in a political echo chamber and believe the local CW, they are sloppy about their beliefs because they never have to defend them seriously. That doesn't mean that they are necessarily wrong, just that they are not reasoning through to their own conclusions, but rather, taking the word of people that they trust. In Texas is the Republican's who do this, and the Dems who have to be thoughful, in NY it's the other way around.

Take, for example, "when will Dems get over 2000". It may not have occurred to you, but you actually bring it up MORE often than other, more liberal, commentators I read. It's pretty clear that you havn't gotten over it either, which I why, I think, I see you rationalizing the result so often.

For the record. It doesn't matter a whit whether Bush or Gore was going to get the recount that the requested. They may have had an interest in the outcome, but they had no rights for the courts to protect.

IT's the PEOPLE who had rights that the courts should have been protecting, and their right was to have every valid vote counted and to get, as a result, the President that they actually elected.

The paper's recount settled the answer to that question difinitively. Gore had the most valid votes. He also had a poor strategy that would have resulted in a Bush win if Gore had been in charge of the recount, but so what? He wasn't in charge, and he shouldn't have been.

The court's job was to protect the rights of the voters to honest elections, The Fla Supreme Court did a fair to poor job of this, but the USSC did a completely incompetent job, behaving as if Bush or Gore were the parties with rights to be protected rather than the people who were voting.

I think what infurates you most about 'democrats' not getting over this is that you actually know that they are right to still be angry, but can't let yourself ever admit that a dem holds a correct opinion.

You know, Bones, if you want to convince us that Gore should have prevailed in his legal challenge to the certifed result in Florida, arguing that he had no standing to bring the challenge in the first place is not an especially promising way to begin.

Look's like paul was whooosed.

Let's try again. Gore won the election, he had the most valid votes That is why Dems are angry with the outcome. Not because he lost the legal challenges, but because the courts subverted rather than protected the people's rights.

Whether or not he would have prevailed in his legal chaallenges is asking the wrong question.

He should have been made President because the courts should have acted to protect the people's right to have their votes counted. Bush should have not gone to court to try and prevent that in the first place. Bush SHOULD have gone to court to argue that Gore's attempt to recount less than the whole state was unfair, and that the only correct solution was to recount the whole state.

Instead, he took the most anti-fair-elections action he could possibly have taken. He argued to leave the counting incomplete while he was ahead. That action alone proved him to be unfit for office, however the legal challenges turned out.

"Instead, he took the most anti-fair-elections action he could possibly have taken. He argued to leave the counting incomplete while he was ahead. That action alone proved him to be unfit for office, however the legal challenges turned out."

Since Al Gore was arguing for an incomplete count for the manifestly obvious purpose of scrounging up enough votes to take the lead, he is also unfit for office by your argument.

Next!

No, Gore asking to improve the completion of the count. If there had been a way for Gore to ask for a full statewide recount, and he had passed, he would be guilty as you claim.

but there is no provision in Florida law to ask for a statewide recount.

That request was simply unavailable to him. So he can hardly be faulted for not taking it.

If you recall, rather late in the process he spoke to the press, saying that he was confident that if He and Bush both requested a full state-wide recount that it would be granted.

Bush declined to do so.

"That request was simply unavailable to him. So he can hardly be faulted for not taking it."

He could have asked for recounts in every individual county. He didn't, for reasons that were manifestly obvious and commented on at the time. The request for a full recount was only made after the negative public reaction to his request was obvious, and also after it was clear that he wasn't going to get the votes needed with his tactic. Furthermore, it was against the law as written (or interpreted by anyone who was *not* one of the hacks on SCOFLA).

Nice try--GWB had no obligation to assist Gore in extricating himself from the mess he had created by trying to game the system.

No, but Bush DID have an obligaion to put the weight of his word behind having the result of the election be based on a full and fair count of all the votes.

Gore didn't exactly cover himself with glory in this respect. Be he came around to it eventually.

Bush covered himself with shame from start to finish.

"Whether or not he would [you mean "should"--PZ] have prevailed in his legal chaallenges is asking the wrong question."

Not if you're complaining about the legal outcome, it isn't! All the more so since what is or isn't a valid vote is inherently a legal question. Gore himself said something to this effect within a few days of the election.

All that aside, if you're going to take the view that machine tabulation is inherently defective compared to hand tabulation, then you can't draw any definitive conclusions at all based on the newspaper recount, which examined only a small fraction of the ballots cast-- trusting blindly in the perfection of those stumblebum machines when it came to counting the rest.

Speaking as one of those people who would like to be one of those totally insular Republicans if given 1/8 of a chance, I have to admit (kicking and screaming and damning the facts with extreme profanity) that you have got one very good point. Insulating yourself from other points of view is not just dumb, but dangerous, and darn near unpatriotic and treasonous. I mean, why have the right to a free press if all you do with it is create your own intellectual konzentratinlager.

One of my great fears, as a rabidly partisan Republican, is that most of the Democrats I know are a lot more rational than the people in the paper or the frothing at the mouth types you see on the newsnet posting areas. As long as these people remain the soul of the party, the election will be close.

If you want to see what Jane is talking about in full flight check this:
Introduction: why progressives need a TOE (Theory of Everything) Progresives are Nurturing Parents and conservatives are Strict Fatherists.

Will Allen says he can't remember what Sirhan Sirhan's motivations were. Ingoddamcredible, excuse me. Sirhan Bishara Sirhan was a Palestinian radical fanatic who shot Bobby Kennedy because Kennedy had adopted a strongly pro-Israel position during the 1968 presidential primary elections. As Sirhan himself stated, this was all the more galling as Kennedy had been lukewarm on Israel before the campaign season. To sum up, Jack Kennedy was killed by a pro-Cuban activist Communist sympathizer who'd defected to the Soviet Union, Bobby Kennedy was the victim of the first Palestinian hit on American soil, and Teddy went on to be about eight times farther left than either of them.

As a liberal myself, I'm always entertained to hear people who *aren't* liberals weigh in on "what liberals think" and then cite the Democratic party as a representative of "liberalism". What malarky!

What this essay and most of the subsequent commentary fails spectacularly to notice is that the Democratic party has alienated actual liberals with its pseudo-intellectual wealthy posturing and its abandonment of actual liberal ideas -- including freedom of speech (political correctness) Kenysian economics (the Democrats supported the first round of tax cuts for the rich Bush proposed) protection for labor and the poor (welfare reform and NAFTA -- both enacted under Clinton) progressive taxation (the cigarette and alcohol tax). Their support even for the environment and abortion rights is tepid and the Defense of Marriage Act was enacted under Clinton, not Bush.

The Democratic party has fallen over itself to define itself as the party of big business and has moved to the right of where Richard Nixon was in the early 70s. They lost 2000 in part to the Green party, its true, and thats because for 8 years they thumbed their noses at their liberal base -- whom they themselves see as a bunch of quasi-socialist hippie losers, unlike their brilliant slicked-up selves.

What many people don't get about Howard Dean is that he's managed to reach out to the Nader contingent early on and secure them as Democrats in 04. If the DLC were smart, I'd predict Dean ends up running mate to some more conservative Democrat, like Kerry or Clark or Joe Biden. That will create a coalition of conservative Democrats, that portion of the military who are disaffected by the Iraq mess, and the angry young liberals who might otherwise back a Green candidate or not vote at all. Plus those moderate Republicans who worry about civil liberties and fiscal irresponsibility under Bush. A coalition like this shouldn't be underestimated.

On the other hand, there's no saying the DLC is nearly this smart.

But let's be clear here ... what the rest of America has to decide between the conservative Democrats and the neoconservative Republicans. Liberalism is so out of fashion that it isn't even a player except as a spoiler.

Do I really have to say it again, that neoconservatives are simply conservatives that happen to be former liberals?

I know what you should have meant by "neoconservative"; what is it you thought you meant?

Another example: George W. Bush Means Nothing Note to self: The demons of sour conservatism cannot touch anything that truly matters. A sample:

Go ahead, ya smirkin' Texas lug, stumble around all scrunched and blank eyed and pseudo-manly, shove this country into a bloody unwinnable war and lie about all the reasons why, gouge the economy and ruin the schools and embarrass the nation every single day as you mangle grammar and meaning and truth. It doesn't really matter.

Go ahead, toss those useless $400 rebate checks to the depressed and jobless populace as some sort of bogus humanitarian gesture as you quietly force an increase in their property taxes to pay for your record-breaking deficit brought on by the tax cut no one wants. Ha. You are so cute.

There is so much more going on than you know. There is so much deeper understanding and wider knowledge and higher winking and you can't touch any of it. Do you know this? You need to know this.

===

Whoof!

Go ahead, toss those useless $400 rebate checks to the depressed and jobless populace as some sort of bogus humanitarian gesture as you quietly force an increase in their property taxes to pay for your record-breaking deficit brought on by the tax cut no one wants. Ha. You are so cute.

Really? I wasn't aware that we had any federal property taxes or that President Bush was raising them.

This is the first recession in memory, I think, where the federal government hasn't provided recession assistance to the states. Since states send a lot of that back to cities, then yes, Bush is effectly shifting cash around.

What I mean by neoconservative:

a) fiscal irresponsibility, see also the tax cuts, which will only *increase* our financial expenses because we will have to take on more debt and pay more interest on said debt. Meanwhile, it really only shifts the tax burden to the states and local municipalities. Federal income tax will go down, but property tax and sales tax and state income tax will all go up.

Do I need to explain what is not paleoconservative about this?

b) a policy of humanitarian and idealistic military action, ie the real (not WMD) justification for Iraq. In theory we were going to establish a free democratic society in Iraq which was going to have a domino effect on the rest of the Middle East. Some of the more out there folks want to establish a Pax Americana and think our committment overseas should be very broad.

Do I need to explain what is not paleoconservative about this? (to anyone who believes that Iraq was a pragmatic not idealistic war, I refer you to www.hackworth.com.)

c) a certain disdain for traditionally conservative small government regarding civil liberties. Sometimes, *though not always*, a willingness to use government to enforce religious/social conservatism.

Do I need to explain what is not paleoconservative about this?

d) the desire to do military operations on the cheap, outsourcing lots of non-combat operations to civilian contractors, like for example, the construction contractors who took their sweet time getting around to building barracks in Iraq.

Do I need to explain what is not paleoconservative about this?

To my mind, the current administration is *not* conservative. Conservative, as far as I understand it from the Reagan-era included being strong on defense spending, fiscally responsible, militarily pragmatic and might support traditional religious values but were leery of using the government as a tool to enforce said values.

For lack of a better term, I've been calling them neoconservatives. This may not be the best word for them. It might be better to refer to them as imperialists or even (on a more paranoid note) the f-word.

I resist using the f-word, because calling people the f-word doesn't so much clarify as confuse the issue. When you bring up facism (or communism), conversations have a regretable tendency to shut down because they've both been used as smear terms throughout the cold war.

However, I know a lot of liberals-turned-conservatives do *not* fit the mold of whatever- the-current-administration-is, and are really simply more traditional conservatives who used to be liberals as you said.

Ah. So, by "neoconservative", you mean Republicans that aren't paleoconservative. Thanks for that, Angeli. It was so much more of an explanation than I've been able to pry out of the likes of Kevin Drum, for instance. And it explains a lot, even though I'm really not sure what a paleoconservative is.

For what it's worth, I've used a more convenient f-word in private, myself. To me, it more thoroughly expresses my dislike for the rhetorical two-step we've been getting. It'd be ever so much more acceptable, to me, if Bush were simply to point out that the economy will recover when it's good and ready to, and that there's little the government can do (short of another world war) to kick it back into gear.

By your yardstick, I'd probably find the "paleo" label a better fit. Not that I feel a sudden need to be categorized.

Thanks again for the response.

Since my TOE was mentioned, I thought I'd comment. If Robert's point is that my post is illustrative of progressives being out of touch, I'd urge him to get past the labels, which are those of cognitive scientist George Lakoff not mine, and investigate the substance of what was discussed. Lakoff, who has helped explain our understanding of everything from morality through mathematics by means of "conceptual metaphors, hypothesizes that most Amercians see the nation as a family. Of those who do, there are two main groups. The Strict Fatherites, who operate by conceptual metaphors of reward/punishment, moral order and moral purity, are found in pure type in a John Ashcroft or Tom DeLay. Nurturant Parentites understand the world through metaphors that understand morality as empathy, nurturance and fair distribution. Hilary's book about it taking a village to raise a child is close to a pure type here. I have suggested a third group who do not see the nation as a family and called them the "Islanders." Their central metaphor is "don't invade my space" and their pure type is represented in the views of the Cato Institute.

Lakoff, and I, believe that Republican strategists understand their Strict Fatherite base very well, and their supportive institutions like the Heritage Foundation and their spokespeople present a coherent message that appeals to those who understand politics and morality in that way. Democrats are still operating, as Jane and other critics note, by the more primitive political paradign of interest groups. That's why their message seems so disconnected and even incoherent.

The Islanders, well-represented in this group, are very interesting. They like the Republicans' pledges to stay out of their wallets, but they're not crazy about Ashcroft breaking into their bedrooms.

If the labels sound value-laden to you, Robert, it may only be your own ambivalence about where you're committed.

"...It's nice to have an alternative viewpoint out there, no matter how pugnacious. But Fox represents an opportunity for conservatives to wall themselves off in their own intellectual ghetto so they won't ever have to ask themselves uncomfortable questions..."

As long as FoxNews spends more time discussing the Crime Of The Week (Kobe, Laci, Chandra etc.) than giving air time to Brit Hume and Neil Cavuto, I think your fears are misplaced.

If I had to give a one line summary of the theme that started this thread, it is that it is fallacious and reductionist to attribute ideas to personal characteristics. I linked to Mr. Brill's theory of everything because I thought, and still think, that it is a particullary egregious use of pop-psychology to "market" political ideas. In doing that it commits the same sins as the person who says that liberals are idiots or conservatives are violent.

Even if some yet unkown science were able to establish that certain personality types were limited by some biochemical mechanism to understanding or holding certain classes of idea (e.g. A strict fatherist is biologically incapable of believing that it takes a village), it would not prove or disprove the validity of ideas.

However there is no such science. There are a multitude of personality types and a multitude of ideas. There is no a priori reason to believe that any one personality type is limited, ipso facto, to any class or type of ideas. Furthermore, using ideas to type personalities is purely ad hoc and does not resemble science, although it does greatly resemble marketing. (Nurturing Parents prefer mini-vans). From what Mr. Brill said Lakoff is engaged in just such an enterprise and Mr. Brill extends it to libertarians by labeling them as Islanders (Do they all drink Pina-Coladas?). (An aside to Mr. Brill, no I will not spend my valuable time studying Lakoff, you have not demonstrated that he has said anything of interest.)

Mr. Brill really sheds his bona fides when he concludes: "If the labels sound value-laden to you, Robert, it may only be your own ambivalence about where you're committed."

The Miss Manners reply to this line is: "I do not believe that I have previously had the honor of making your acquaintance." Or, I could be churlish and say "where do you get off with that crap, you don't even know me." In any event it is reductionist, falacious and insulting to attribute an argument to an internal psychological state. That said, your categories do not sound value laden, they sound ad hoc and like bad marketroid pop-psychology.

I conclude with a quote from a recent George Will column: "Professors have reasons for their beliefs. Other people, particularly conservatives, have social and psychological explanations for their beliefs."

Robert was nice enough to send me his follow-up post because I had ceased checking. It would be better, Robert, to have followed my suggestion and the plethora of links on my site to some original Lakoff sources. The source of the Strict Father and Nurturant Parent worldviews is not "pop psychology" but cognitive science, a discipline that has grown out of linguistics. It studies how people use words and, as Wittgenstein observed, the word is all that is the case.

I do not know how to respond to Robert's assertion that there is no such science. There certainly is. Admittedly, it's rather tricky because the observer is commenting on the very processes he/she uses to observe, but even physics has analogous problems as Heisenberg pointed out. If Robert means that such science is useless, marketers, including politicians, do not think so.

I have no choice but to return to the question of why Robert finds the names for these categories so disturbing. There are many conservatives who would encounter the "Strict Father" nomenclature and shout "Hurrah. That's what this country needs: more strict fathers." They would feel no attraction at all to the term Nurturant Parent. Robert's initial post indicated that he felt that characterizing conservatives as "Strict Father" types was derogatory. That's why I sensed ambivalence.

George Will's point is made in response to the Berkeley study of conservatives from the standpoint of psychology, not Lakoff's from the perspective of linguistics and cognitive science. He concludes ironically:

"Liberals, you see, embrace liberalism for an obvious and uncomplicated reason -- liberalism is self-evidently true. But conservatives embrace conservatism for reasons that must be excavated from their inner turmoils, many of them pitiable or disreputable."

The opposite is Lakoff's point. Liberals are liberals because they perceive the world through "liberal" metaphors that emphasize empathy, fairness and diversity. There is no such thing as "pure" reason. Every human being operates out of a worldview shaped by a few central, conceptual metaphors.

Robert's last concern is that he is hard-wired to be way he is. Moving past this additional sign of ambivalence, I can reassure him that Lakoff, as I understand him, does not claim that worldviews are an unalterable product of biochemistry. They are point-in-time descriptions only. I would suggest that the research of Kohlberg and Fowler suggests that in fact worldviews evolve in individuals over time. I will abstain from discussing which view evolves to which for fear of exacerbating Robert's concern.

Self-examination and observation are marks of maturity. Sometimes it's shocking to discover more about who we are. Most of the time, it's amusing. The more we undergo the process, the less we are eligible to be "true believers."

If anyone were pay attention I would give Mr. Brill a righteous fisking. However as this thread is pretty dead and Mr. Brill seems to respond to my arguments by repeating himself, I will conclude by repeating myself:

"In any event it is reductionist, falacious and insulting to attribute an argument to an internal psychological state. That said, your categories do not sound value laden, they sound ad hoc and like bad marketroid pop-psychology."

Nuff said.

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