Respones and further discussion..

This post is a response to issues raised by Mr. Klein to my last post  on equipping revolutionaries with satellite modems.

Mr. Klein's response:

Interesting idea, but there are a lot of problems with it:

1) Non-Interference/Reciprocity: A whack load of international law is based on the idea of non-interference, i.e. that countries don't mess with events inside other countries' borders. That would be a pretty clear violation of that principle (although under R2P, you could probably justify it if the UNSC approved the action and the leader of the target country were attacking his own people). If you did it anyway, what's to stop other countries from messing with your internal affairs? I mean, Congress even prevented DP World from buying Long Beach's port. How could you complain if Iran started handing out bomb-making manuals in Penn Station?

2) Recipients' risk: People who start/join a revolution are betting on its success to prevent reprisals. Even if you could hand them out secretly, and only to the right people, the recipients would be putting themselves at risk of treason *before* a revolution had even started, so they'd be holding evidence against them without even having a revolution to bet on. It's like depositing your life savings with a bookie before you even know when the race is gonna be or which horses are gonna be in it. You gonna take that bet?

3) Legitimacy: Although I get that it would just be facilitating what people would want to do anyway, that kind of support would make it very easy to portray a revolutionary movement as a foreign puppet show. That never goes down well.

4) Micro-Blowback: Let's drop the assumption that you hand them out only to the 'right' people and those people are able to keep them and stay on the 'right' side. Wouldn't the Taliban in Afghanistan just love to have a (bigger and cheaper) satellite comms network? Even if you hadn't given it to them directly, they could just go house by house and nab the devices from those who did have them, as they already do with cds.

5) International blowback: While distributing the devices would certainly sell better at home than arming them, it's not like the oil rich BFFs and panicky Israel would just stand there impotently cursing your resourcefulness a la Mentos commercial. They're gonna be effin pissed.

From the perspective of the powerful, it's pretty much never a good policy to arm the Helots. It's not always easy to identify what counts as a weapon and who counts as a helot. Discretion is the better part of valor.


Mr. Klein,

While your Mentos reference put a smile on my face (and made me go watch the foo fighters video again), I think I can (relatively easily) sidestep most of your concerns.

First of all, if undertaken by a government, such an operation would obviously have to be covert and risky by nature; points 1, 3 and 5 are totally valid if a government is stupid enough to get caught doing something like this. Perhaps it would be better (as I suggested) to let multinational media conglomerates try something like this. I think that would, at least to a certain extent, eliminate 1, 3, and 5 as issues: it’s not the British government, but rather a BBC reporter handing the things out to protest leaders. While this may influence point 3 the least, Israel and the Saudis would certainly understand they were dealing with a different beast.

This brings up a topic of particular interest to me: How does International Relations Theory deal with the "fourth estate" role of mass media? One thing that has been interesting for me to see is the zeal with which journalists have been charging into these places trying to get a story or an interview (often at great danger to themselves). While these people may just be acting out of careerist self interest (nothing like warzone reporting to boost your stature as a journalist), many seem to feel a responsibility to get images out and help people gain their right of expression. I could totally see a reporter doing something like I proposed spontaneously themselves...or an ambitious news editor coming up with the idea...

I have a few counterarguments for individual points of contention as well:

1) In addition to what I said above, I'm not sure I agree with the non-interference/reciprocity argument at all as it applies to what we might call rouge regimes (outlaw states?). Doing something like this in China would be dangerous for sure, but in almost any other country I can think that we could want to do this in, I don’t really care that they might get pissed off...in fact, those governments have already proven to oppress their people and have often shown official and direct contempt towards democratic values. If the US government gets caught handing out these kinds of devices in Iran, that’s bad, but they're developing nuclear weapons and funding our enemies anyway, so I don’t see how that changes things much. In an already deteriorating place like Libya I'm even less worried about territorial borders (apparently neither are the British or the Germans, as they landed a few warplanes in the desert a few days ago to airlift people out).

Also, I don't much care about an Iranian passing out bomb making material in New York...that kind of information is available online and in thousands of other places, even if it might be harder to get at since 2001 (glad I printed out my copy of the Jolly Roger Cookbook). And its not like the guys in militias are going to have a problem getting guns or explosives in the US. This might be made part of a larger point of democracies that have freedom of expression need to worry less about fringe views than those that heavily restrict access to information.

2) I guess I was more envisioning this as a tool to be given to revolutionaries in actio. The risk in trying to establish sleeper cells of these things is high. In fact, I think the most difficult logistical issue here is to identify who to give the things to: if you give it to an established protester (who might be able to use it most effectively) he's also the one that's going to get arrested first. If you give it to just any old guy, you might not get any quality images.

In cases like Libya or Bahrain(and Iran as well), however, people have already shown that they are willing to risk their lives even without these things; you have an already established revolutionary movement who is going to be hanged anyway. This strategyis designed to make it easier for the condemned to get their message out, not be the reason they get hanged.

3) I'm not sure how powerful arguments from leaders who have already been de-legitimized by their people claiming outside influence have on popular opinion within the country. While I grant you the point, I don’t think I can give it much weight, especially if we modify my proposal as in point 2 above. And again, while the argument of outside influence can still be made if a media organization is handing these things out, such a situation gives western governments at least a sheen of plausible deniability and complicates the sales job of an embattled regime significantly.

4) Two points here. One, I don’t think there is an application for this in places like Afghanistan in the sense that I'm saying. I'm not trying to get poor people internet to help them build a new life, I'm trying to get the pictures of revolution out. And though the Taliban is leading a revolution, it’s not a democratic one: the images or video they would be posting to the net would appeal to a much smaller audience and not affect international public opinion in their direction. Video of decapitating prisoners and cutting off women’s noses isn't exactly going to win them any friends in the world community.

More specifically, I would be surprised if Taliban and Al Qaida leaders (in particular) don’t already have satellite phones, if not versions of exactly these devices.

5) I think I covered this point mostly at the beginning of this post. Again, if a government got caught doing this it would certainly be bad for them...the idea is to not get caught...

How to get the pictures out

So, it seems this whole democratic revolution thing is getting out of hand. First we had Tunisia. Then there was Egypt, which I wrote about here. Now Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Oman, Iraq and other countries are having what we might call civil unrest, ranging from protests to days of rage.

Oh yea, and lets not forget about China and Iran.

It seems that one of the great equalizers between autocratic power and democratic reformer has been the power of the internet to somewhat level the PR and organizational playing field. The point has been made so many times already I feel like I'm beating a dead horse, but sites like Facebook and Twitter have made organizing and publicizing events much easier, even in the face of censorship, disruptions of service (as in Egypt), and journalist brutality. The images (and raw video) that world citizens are now shown on a daily basis have put significant pressure on democratically elected leaders to DO SOMETHING. Individual people are being shown brutal images (and video) of police crackdowns on peaceful demonstrators on their evening news. During dinner. With their kids watching.

The pressure on elected officials to make strong statements, both in condemnation of dictators and in support of revolutionary/resistance movements has been heavy. John McCain and Joe Liebermann (reporting from Cairo) called on Obama to institute a no-fly zone and to provide the resistance "with the arms to defend themselves" in Libya this last weekend. This has obviously put western leaders in a bit of a bind, seeing as how they've been dealing with (or tolerating) these same autocratic regimes for a while now...and that they are still heavily dependent on and working with others (Saudi Arabia in particular). If Obama really were to arm the resistance of Libya, what about the protesters (rebels) in Oman, Bahrain (where the 5th Fleet is stationed), Iraq (really? arm rebels in IRAQ?!), or Saudi Arabia (our oil rich BFFs?).

Being able to post a picture or image online, get it out in circulation without censorship, has not only caused stronger responses by elected leaders and helped protesters organize, it has spawned the copycat phenomenon we see now. Without the spread of pictures of a burning man in a square, and of millions assembling in Tahrir Square just weeks later, the anger and hope of other oppressed peoples (not a big fan of that category, but we'll go with it here) have been awakened. One of the reasons the situation in Libya is so vague is that we are getting few real images or news at all (although we are getting more and more as rebellion forces establish control). One of the first things that Egypt did was shut off the net, and china has been proactively censoring the internet and proactively arresting people posting to blogs trying to organize protests.

Publishing images also strengthens the resolve of protesters as people begin to sense that the world is behind them, that their fight is just and approved of, and that others are paying attention. Protesters in Bahrain, for instance, are worried that the unrest in Libya will "steal their thunder", so to speak. Revolutions are now competing for air time (this puts a grim new spin on the old television journalism addage "if it bleeds, it leads").

This poses the question: How do we get the pictures (and video) out of the country in the face of governmental control of communication networks and the internet?

Answer: Why not pass out some of these? This could be a fun exercise for our intelligence communities: find journalists (or maybe just random people) and give them these things, teach them to use them. Tell them, that when the internet and cell phones (and maybe even landlines) go down, to bust the thing out and start sending pics. Maybe this isn’t a job for the government; maybe news corporations should do it instead. Imagine BBC or CNN or Al Jazeera handing these things out to activists they come across; the company could pay for the transmission and device, but gets the content provided to them by citizen journalists. The things only cost $2,700 a piece, and I'll bet we could get a bulk discount. Obviously the quality of journalism isn’t the issue here: it’s the images we want!

The images of everyday people risking their lives to stand up to authoritarian systems they find unjust in the name of democratic freedom. In your (and everyone's) living room, at dinner time, in front of your kids.

Egypt, Revolution, International Democracy and American Interests

While reading this article I returned to a thought that has been reccuring recently in regard to the current unrest/revolution/democratic freedom movement that has taken place in Egypt over the last 3 weeks. The article gives a brief biography of the new vice-president of Egypt, Omar Suleiman, and how he seems to not only be Mubarak's guy, he's also the CIA's, the state department's, Europe's, the Saudi's AND the Israeli's guy. He's also not very popular with the protesters, seeing as how he has run the intelligence and spy agency since 1993 has has been accused by multiple international organizations of torturing prisoners (including on behalf of the US).

So it seems to me that this isnt really the guy that those who are "pro-democracy" should want. If you are for representative democracy that heeds the will of the people, the last few weeks are about as clear a demonstration that this country wants its leader(s) sacked (I think the images of people fighting with stones, kitchen knives, and pieces of re-bar ripped out of the street are powerful enough).

Unfortunately (or interestingly, from a more objective perspective), Mubarak and Sulieman have entrenched themselves heavily in regional politics and have been major recipients of US and European aid. The Israeli peace process has been based on heavy assistance from Egypt (and thus from Mubarak and his government), and the government there is dependent on Egypt if their blockade of Gaza (and Hamas) is to continue. The Israeli government is heavily invested in the political outcome in Egypt. Let's be clear: the Israeli blockade of Gaza is ridiculous and their government has been acting very badly over the last couple of years. All the more reason for them to prefer the dictator and understudy-to-the-dictator that they know (and can hide behind) to the angry, democratic, and generally anti-isreali mob they don't.

And now we come to the heart of the matter. The fact is, that if the Egyptian people really get a representative democracy, the government of one of the biggest economies, cultural centers, and strongest western allies will become significantly more anti-Isreal and anti-US. One of the main complaints of the protesters is the complicity of Mubarak in the Israeli occupation and the American funding of an oppressive government. And they have every right to be upset! We have been funding an opressive dictator for 30 years! Isreal has been horribly oppressing Palestinians with the help of their government! The situation is reminiscint of the Iranian Revolution (where we had backed the Shah) or a series of Central and South American regimes (where we had also propped up dictators).

So. Morally (ideally), I want to say that the protesters are right, Mubarak and his whole regime need to go, and a real representative democracy should be instated in Egypt. If such a government could become stable we could no longer say that there is only one democracy in the middle east. Given the fact that the military has taken almost a neutral role and kept the security situation reltively stable, and given the relatively strong Egyptian economy, a new regime might get back on its feet sooner than we expect.

Will it be hostile towards Isreal (thus challenging the notion that democracies never go to war) or will it become a second pillar of peaceful secular democracy in the middle east (does Turkey count?) How close will such a government deal with governments like Syria's "president-with emergency powers" and Jordan and Saudi Arabia's "Autocratic Monarchies"? What if we begin to see such revolutions in other countries around the region? How will modern political and philosophical models hold up (of particluar interest to me: John Rawl's non-ideal theory)?

How close will the new Egyptian government want to openly associate itself with the US and Europe? How will the emergence of a representative democracy in one of the most culturally influential countries in the arab speaking world change US foriegn policy? Will congress authorize aid money to a government that is openly or believed to be hostile to Israel and US interests? How stable IS the Egyptian state without the billions of dollars we give them each year?

What about the 2012 presidential elections? I can't wait for someone to accuse Obama of being anti-American for supporting a democratic revolution in Egypt that has endangered the Israeli peace process and embarrassed the Israeli regime.

Still, are the major political and economic powers with interest in the area going to allow a government to form that dramatically changes any of these dynamics? I truly believe that a democratic Egypt will be beneficial in the long run, but I can imagine a very rocky road there. What if a democratic government fails miserably and the security situation in Egypt becomes significantly worse? Again, given the self control and professionalism of the military shown in the last few weeks, I doubt such a situation would happen. But what if the conservative Israeli Government refuses to lift the blockade from their side? Gazan refugees pouring over the Suez? Egyptian tanks in Gaza?

I'm not saying I think this is going to happen, and again I am firmly of the belief that in the case of expanding democracy, short term pain (or chaos) is worth it for long term gain (and stability). But it's certainly an interesting situation that raises a lot of questions, both realpolitikal and philosophical. I guess all we can do is watch and wait.



One thing I do know: if Egypt returns to (relative) stability after elections in september, its going to be a great place to visit by spring next year!

"Buy all the opium in Afghanistan, you say?!"..."Brilliant!"

I once sat on a bus coming back from Strasbourg with a good buddy of mine and we got into a difficult conversation with another American there about the war in Afghanistan. He began his argument with the idea that the US just needed to buy the opium from the farmers in Afghanistan to limit the flow of illicit drug money to the Taliban. So far, so good. It got difficult when he began arguing that the US would then just need to decriminalize opium, could sell it and tax it, thus creating a market for Afghan farmers and funding redevelopment efforts.

An elegant plan, I must say, but one that my friend and I pointed out had a few political hurdles (legalizing opium for one..) and that maybe a more practical plan could be thought of. He was having nothing of it, and insisted that if the US government were to just buy, legalize, and distribute opium, then the war in Afghanistan could be won.

I hadn't thought about this incident for a few months when i came across this article. Seems like there are a few thoughts along the lines of buying the opium from the farmers, and even a pretty good suggestion of what to do with it (hint: not pimping it to Americans). Theres a much more detailed argument here, which also lays out some of the UN hurdles that would have to be jumped if such a plan were to work.

I will say though, that i question the government's ability to control the flow of money between the farmers and the Taliban. Even if we buy the crop the, the Taliban is going to see a percentage of the money we give them as a part of bribery, extortion, and some good old fashioned bullying. Until we can offer the afghan farmers physical protection, i think its going to be hard for them to do business with us legitimately. That being said, it may well be in our interested to buy the opium, accept the inefficiencies and the fact that we're giving the Taliban money, and find a legitimate world market for Afghanistan's major crop.

Small Goverment, No Government

I just read this article on the Beeb about the possibility that protests against the democrats' health care plans might be phoney, staged events put on by "birthers" and bitter republicans. I confess, I don't really care. What did bother me is this line:

...'small government good, big government bad' is the Republican motto.

Are you sure? Lazily, I'm going to take some figures from the Wikipedia to show that this is profoundly misleading. Let's have a look at deficits as a percentage of GDP. Negative numbers indicate surpluses and positive ones indicate new debt. Generally speaking, a number under 3% (the EU's allowable limit) is pretty respectable. Let's eliminate the figures for Roosevelt/Truman because winding down WWII was bound to save a lot of money, and that trend continues through Eisenhower, so let's start with Kennedy/Johnson. The average deficit as percentage of GDP for democratic presidential terms since Kennedy is -5.7, for republicans in the same period, it's 7.0. In recent history, republican presidents lose slightly more money than democrat ones save. If we look at just the most recent two-termers for the most recent trend, we get -4.4 for Bubba and 9.3 for Dubya. You can give Clinton a handicap because he inherited a big deficit from Bush senior that he was able to turn around, whereas GWB inherited a handsome surplus from Clinton that he managed to run into the ground.

The so-called Blue Dogs have been getting a lot of press lately, and their message of fiscal conservatism is music to my liberal ears (though I do support universal health care for fiscal and normative reasons). I would like to submit, though, that even the reddest (as in "most commie") democrat would have a hard time beating a republican in terms of fiscal profligacy. There is an old idea in American foreign policy analysis that republicans can be more dovish because other countries expect them to be the toughest hawks, and democrats have to be more hawkish than they would like, because nobody will take them seriously otherwise, assuming they're a bunch of softies. The same seems to be the case in fiscal policy: people assume republicans will save, so they have the freedom to spend and bloat government. It's perverse. Don't buy it.

Other news that caught my eye (for the anarchically and totalitarian-inclined):
Living human rights advocates in Chechnya are becoming about as common as Aung San Suu Kyi's days at the beach.

There also seems to be a growing movement to have children-free zones in public places in Germany. Thank goodness! There was a smoking law in my hometown for a while that allowed restaurants and bars to admit minors or smokers. Being a childless smoker at the time, I was very satisfied. Even after having quit, I'd still prefer second-hand smoke to first-hand brattiness!

Quick Link

Image via Wikipedia

Interesting book link I got from Matthew Yglesias on Plato's dialogues (with comics!).

The whole book is available for free online, and if you register (for free) you can download it and many others as a .pdf!

Stand by Your Macro

The financial crisis has certainly unleashed fits of apoplectic wrath and disappointment. The bankers seem to get most of the wrath for botching the system, and the economists seem to reap most of the disappointment for 1) promoting a system that made a crash inevitable, 2) failing to see the crash coming, 3) failing to prevent the crash, 4) failing to interrupt the crash, or 5) all of the above. A recent piece in the Economist does a fairly good job at sifting through the diversity of opinion among economists, but it makes the same mistake as everybody else has so far in analyzing the crash and economists' role in it. Specifically, it overestimates the state of social science.

An old international law prof. of mine once told me, "A good lawyer doesn't tell you what you can and can't do. A good lawyer tells you how to do what you want to do legally." This phrase picks out two of three good reasons why economics couldn't have foreseen nor prevented the crash: a lack of empirical knowledge and a lack of theoretical knowledge, to which I would also add the inability to determine social goals autonomously.

By empirical knowledge, I mean brute facts about the world, like how many cars were sold, how much money is in circulation, how many people are working where and for how much money, etc. Although statistics (as a branch of math) helps a lot to count accurately, there are many things the economists can hardly know in principle. If a German economist wants to know how much money German consumers have in readily accessible accounts, they can ask the banks to provide them aggregate figures. They won't, however, be able to see the nest egg I have squirrelled away in the Motherland, and which I can draw upon if my finances here get tight. A trifling example to be sure, but aggregate these blindspots in an economy the size of Germany's, and you could well have an economy the size of Ecuador's hiding under the mattress. More significantly, the fancy financial vehicles that have made the headlines recently all have the purpose of yielding better rates of interest than what boring mortgages or operating lines of credit can offer. If you have some solid debts, slice them up, mix them with some riskier stuff, sell the package at a higher rate than either alone would have brought or borrow against their putative value. Either way, this gives private financial institutions the means to create a multiplier effect on the amount of cash floating around. If you think money is printed by the central bank, you're right in the sense that the Bow River is filling the oceans. Economists in one country can hardly tell how much money their own compatriots have, let alone how much is being pumped out of a globalized financial system. An educated guess is better than nothing, but counting units of value that can be created out of thin air (well, out of bytes, Mbits, and contracts - close enough) is not an exact science.

The second problem is that, even if economists knew all about what is out there, they don't know how it all fits together, which is what I mean by theoretical knowledge. The subcordial debates among economists are evidence of this as are divergent prognoses. In general, economists would do well to remember Darwin's quip that "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" or Bertrand Russell's that "The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." They should be honest about what they can and can't reasonably say, what they do and don't know. Instead, they are often concerned with producing as many forecasts as possible to make the news, get politicians' ears, and divert funding in their own direction. This is a perfectly human strategy, and they've brought much of the opprobrium on themselves through hubris, but they couldn't make these claims credibly if they wanted to. Also a part of theoretical knowledge, I would say a big part, is to know what makes people tick. The received wisdom is that, if you just assume people will act rationally, that assumption will approximate aggregate behaviour "well enough" and "most of the time". The alternative is Keynes' (pretty empty) concept of "animal spirits". Both of these sound to me like fudge factor assumptions about human nature and how people make decisions. My bet is that behavioural economics and neuro-cognitive science will be able to give us a better idea of how people actually make decisions, and then it will be for economists to rebuild their models with facts instead of hunches or fudges. I'm just putting that out there for now, but it might deserve a long post of its own one of these days.

Empirical knowledge is about what's out there, and theoretical knowledge is about how it all fits together, but shortages of both aren't the source of the disappointment with economics. I think the biggest problem is that economists can't determine our social goals on their own, but we tend to blame them for it anyway. Before the proverbial lawyer can tell you how to do what you want, you have to know what you want. Most people seem not to want stagflation, but they get confused about what they want when the choice is between high employment and high inflation (good for income, bad for wealth) or low employment and low inflation (bad for income, good for wealth). There's no good economic way out of that decision, though, and most people seem to expect economists to be able to tell us what would make us all happier, collectively and as individuals, and then to make it happen, dammit! You can't tell the economist that he should figure out a way for you to have your cake and eat it too, because he can't, and most of the time, they don't even have that (pitiful) degree of guidance.

I guess that this raises a bigger question of what the social sciences can do for society, and what society can reasonably expect from social scientists. We can't fix Darfur (certainly not on the cheap), we can't sprinke pixie dust on the economy, and we can't necessarily help you with your addiction to Cool Ranch Doritos. Does that imply malpractice or irrelevance? As for malpractice, it doesn't as long as we act in good faith, as long as we don't sell snake oil and profit off others' gullibility. Irrelevance? Well, if it were irrelevant, you wouldn't be wringing your hands over Darfur or job losses in the first place, now would you?

Framing the Debate postscript

Not much from me here, but a great article from Nate Silver on the polling data that supports my position that the Administration is botching the framing of the healthcare debate. I am particularly proud of the fact that he comes to pretty much the same conclusions that I did: That Obama and the democrats have failed so far in selling this to the public, that they need to emphasize what it's going to do for Americans in general, and that Obama can probably only do so much at this point without over exposing himself.

Silver is a better writer than me though, and he's got data. So it's worth a read :-)

New Media and Politics: Danger ahead

I followed a link from Ben Smith this morning to a peice about a potential Senate candidate posting information about his candidacy on facebook. It got me thinking about the effects of new online media and perception of status in our politicians.

As we've seen over the last few months, social networks like Twitter and Facebook are slowly (or maybe quickly) evolving into media and message delivery devices. I need only mention the twittering of Iran's protests to demosntrate the power that these new forms of communication have to disseminate information to interested readers. An interesting aspect brought up by Bill Simmons at ESPN recently has been the use of Twitter and Facebook by NBA players to break news of trades and firings before journalists even find out. Senators and Congresspeople have been taking Twitter by storm recently. And now we have the case of a potential Senatorial candidate correcting a false news report (which was apparently posted on a Blog based on a text message he sent to them while driving) on his facebook page! Then, his facebook entry is picked up by a few OTHER blogs and it becomes news as well.

Let's set aside the issue of the dangers of texting while driving (which was the topic Ben Smith focused on) and talk about the ways that new media are morphing traditional journalism and reporting. If this kind of trend keeps up, a large part of future journalists jobs will have to be searching through these social networks looking for news straight from the source. Not a lot of investigatvie journalism there, and the fact that any reader who is interested can just log on to Facebook or Twitter or whatever and get the news "straight from the horse's mouth" doesn't really speak volumes about the nessescity of print media and traditional newspapers. How can the New York Times or The Oregonian (for that matter) hope to keep up? Thier only out seems to be to invest heavily in online media themselves (which the NYT has certainly done).

Another point here connects to Mr. Shackleford's comments about responisbility for what your write online. The more news is created by the original source, the more responsibility that source bears. After reading this short Blog entry and Mr. Dumezich's Facebook profile update, we know that he's a dangerous driver, has some freinds that are pumped about him running for senate, and that he gave some misleading (or poorly worded) information to a Blog about his future electoral plans. Is this what i need to know about my candidates for Senate? Being a dangerous driver might not be too bad as far as crimes go, but i could see it coming up in oppo research for Evan Bayh should the election get to that point. One of his friends even asks him his opinion of another potential candidate: "What do you think of Martin Stutzman, who has already announced?"... if he's not careful, Mr. Dumezich is going to be talking campaign strategy right out in the open...and the rest of us (and bloggers) can read right along.

A third aspect that interests me here is the level of professionality that we expect of our elected officials, and whether things like Twitter, Facebook, Blogging and the like are compatible with this. I at least still have an image of sentators as aloof, professional, and relatively responisble parties. Although I know this isn't the case by a long shot (I mean, c'mon, we now have a senator Al Franken) I wonder if this is the kind of behaviour that the public will see as somehow amatuer. If Mr. Dumezich were to be interveiwed by a traditional newspaper or TV station about his plans to run for senate, it would seem legitimate and even professional. By him texting something to a blog, and then correcting it with an entry on his facebook page, some part of his authority as a speaker (as a german rhetoritican would say, his "ethos") seems to be lost. To me he seems to be just another guy writing on his Facebook page. While this might be good for a more populist candidate, it just doesn't seem all that senatorial. So while I might still vote for the guy if he were running for the house of represenatatives, I think this while exchange might have lost him my vote (if I were from Ohio and a republican) for Senate..

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The best or worst side of American democracy?

An article today by Nate Silver discusses Arlen Specter's voting patterns and the question of self interest in the actions of senators related to the danger of possible primary challengers. The article isn't long, so go ahead and read it.

The basic question (or comment i guess) that Silver poses is whether Arlen Specter's party switching and predicatable voting patterns (siding with Republicans when he has a republican challenger and with Democrats when hes up against a democrat) are necessarily a bad thing. The money quote is, "Arlen Specter is either just about the best reflection or the worst reflection on the state of our Democracy -- it's just hard to say which one."

I guess I'll leave the obvious comment aside that one would hope that senators act in the interests of voters as opposed to following the political winds, but i do wonder if there is a problem here at a deeper level of democracy. If the point is to give the voters what they want as a representative, Specter has seemed to do a pretty good job of it; he's been in office for a long time and sits on fairly important committees. He keeps getting reelected as well, and the way he's done it seems to be to protect his right and left flanks with votes for a short period of time (we'll see if his new found liberalism sticks around after his primary challenger is wiped from the field). This voting on both sides of the issue, however, makes Specter a fairly moderate voice in the Senate, something that has gotten rarer over the past few years (especially when he was still in the republican party). Some might say that there are already too many moderate democrats in the senate, but I tend to prefer moderation to the extremes on both ends. He's also seemed to have chosen the right side of a lot of issues over the years for his constituents, regardless of his party affiliation. He doesn't seem to pander to either side too much (unless we count his voting pattern itself as pandering). He's not wedded to a specific ideology, except maybe getting Arlen Specter reelected.

So I guess the question stands: is Arlen Specter a good or bad example?

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