Wednesday, December 25, 2019

$10,000 for poor people through GiveWell

If you're looking for a last-minute Christmas gift for humanity, my #1 pick is the GiveWell recommended charity fund. I just gave $10,000. They've researched the most cost-effective ways of helping people, and settled on basically four things:

Deworming: Parasitic worms are a huge health problem in developing countries, causing problems from malnutrition to blindness. Fortunately, a year's supply of worm pills costs only 25 cents. That makes deworming one of the most cost-effective educational improvements -- kids go to school more often and do better when they aren't sick with worms.

Malaria prevention: Partly because of good work by aid groups, the malaria death toll has been halved to around half a million people per year over the last decade. Pills and mosquito nets are about the cheapest way we have to save lives. We just need more of them.

Nutrition: In places where a limited food supply prevents people from getting essential nutrients, a simple solution is to just add them to flour at grain mills. Rich countries are already doing this, and it's easy enough to set up in poorer countries with a little money.

Direct cash transfers: A simple and scalable solution to poverty is to just give the poorest people money. GiveDirectly can do that with great efficiency. Research detects substantial improvements in children's health, and in adults' earning capacity five years later.

In the past I'd donate to the specific charities involved here -- for example -- Deworm the World, SCI, the Against Malaria Foundation. Now I donate through GiveWell's fund because it keeps in touch with the charities to see who's in best position to use money. This avoids inefficiencies where one charity got more than it can use and another got less.

At this link, you can donate as I did, pick individual charities, or click "GiveWell" at the top to find out more about the organization. The depth and detail of their research into the effects of giving to various organizations is better than anything I've seen anywhere else, and it makes sure that your money is really helping people.




Thursday, December 19, 2019

Trump is impeached, McConnell is sidelined, Pelosi is in control

Trump may never get an impeachment trial in the Senate. And that's just wonderful.

The House impeachment vote went well, as expected. Nearly every Democrat voted for both articles. It was a firm rebuke of Trump, and a good sign for Democrats hoping to move major legislation in 2021.

(Tulsi Gabbard surprised me by voting present in what she called "a stand for the center". I suppose she has to briefly take up centrism in her spiritual journey through all human ideologies. She's done pacifism, homophobia, and Hindu nationalism. Maybe next month it'll be feudalism!)

Pelosi's masterstroke came after the vote. She won't name impeachment managers or send the articles to the Senate until it's clear that McConnell will set up a fair trial.

Legal theorist Laurence Tribe had floated the idea of not even going to the Senate, which I thought would look silly and negate the impact of the House's impeachment vote. But Pelosi timed it perfectly. She held the vote, let the media put up the large-font impeachment headlines, and then revealed her move in a press conference afterwards.

I opposed impeachment until late September of this year when Pelosi went forward with it, because I was worried about what would happen in the Senate. I knew the House part would go well. But I expected McConnell's Senate to deliver a majority-vote acquittal that resembled a Trump birthday party more than a trial.

Now we've had the House vote. Trump is howling on Twitter for his Senate acquittal. But McConnell can't give it to him. Pelosi still controls whether things move forward.

Maybe McConnell will agree to a trial that satisfies Pelosi. But maybe he won't, and the issue will dissolve into partisan bickering over whose fault that is. Then House Democrats will have had their moment in the spotlight to accuse Trump, and Senate Republicans won't have had their moment to absolve him. Trump will go into the election besmirched by impeachment, with his corrupt extortion of an ally revealed to all, and without the closure of an acquittal.

After 14 years of faith in Pelosi's leadership, I trusted her again on impeachment in September. It wasn't exactly blind trust, but I didn't see what could be done about the Senate. Turns out she had tactics for everything.

Saturday, December 14, 2019

UK election postmortem

Feeling terrible for my UK friends. Some worked hard campaigning for Labour; many will be harmed by the policies of the victorious Tories.

Jeremy Corbyn and Hillary Clinton don't have a lot in common. But the common lesson of their defeats is: don't run a candidate with net favorability polling deeply in the negative. Corbyn is at -30 while Johnson is at -14; Clinton and Trump both were around -13 on election day. I don't trust unmoored electability speculation, but poll results are good at simulating election outcomes.

A great deal of this isn't Corbyn or Clinton's fault. The media deserves plenty of blame. But part of winning modern elections is interacting well with whatever twisted media dynamics haunt your era. When that isn't going well for a candidate, as measured by polling averages, the party needs to find someone else.

Thursday, December 12, 2019

How primaries go

16 years ago, eventual Democratic primary winner John Kerry was at 6% nationally, behind four other candidates. Howard Dean and Dick Gephardt led him in Iowa. They attacked each other for the next month, letting Kerry and Edwards emerge. I see this data (Nov-Dec 2003 from Pew) as a caution against making too much of small differences in current primary polls.

This year it's been hard for anyone to take a lasting lead, partly because other candidates attack the leaders to prevent a runaway victory. We might see a minor candidate rise or a major candidate fall, but otherwise I expect things to remain basically stable until Iowa. Then there's a wild media frenzy with losers dropping out and their support rushing to winners.

Sunday, December 8, 2019

Narwhal facts

After hearing about the heroic chef from the London fishmarket fending off the knife guy with a narwhal tusk, I've been looking up narwhal facts. So here are narwhal facts:

"The tusk is an innervated sensory organ with millions of nerve endings connecting seawater stimuli in the external ocean environment with the brain. The rubbing of tusks together by male narwhals is thought to be a method of communicating information about characteristics of the water each has traveled through, rather than the previously assumed posturing display of aggressive male-to-male rivalry. In August 2016, drone videos of narwhals surface-feeding in Tremblay Sound, Nunavut showed that the tusk was used to tap and stun small Arctic cod, making them easier to catch for feeding."

Wednesday, December 4, 2019

Deflationism about the Harris campaign

This was from before Kamala Harris dropped out of the race. I'm doing the political commentary, Matthew Yglesias of Vox makes the philosophy jokes, and replies invoke the t-schema and formalizing claims in predicate logic.

As this implies, I'm on Twitter and you're invited to follow me there.


Friday, November 29, 2019

Elijah Moore, urine trouble

The story of yesterday’s “Piss and Miss” game may entertain even people who don’t care about college football.

Mississippi’s Elijah Moore scored a touchdown and celebrated by mimicking a urinating dog. He went down on all fours in the end zone and lifted one leg to the side. This was to mock the rival Mississippi State Bulldogs.

Pantomiming canine urination was not a novel way to celebrate scoring against the Bulldogs. Another Mississippi player had done similarly in 2017. Referees gave Mississippi a 15-yard unsportmanlike conduct penalty for Moore’s obscene and unoriginal display.

The ensuing extra point would tie the game. Kickers nearly always score extra points, and can usually kick them from 15 yards back. But this time, penalized 15 yards, the kicker missed to the right. Mississippi lost 21-20. Moore had pissed away the game.

Thursday, November 28, 2019

Big big poll average says Democrats are fine

I'm thankful for the highest quality favorability polling I've seen this primary. It shows that people like the plausible Democratic nominees well enough. Here are favorability, unfavorability, and net scores (which are negative for all politicians polled):

Warren: +39.4% 41% (-1.6%)
Buttigieg: +32% 33.7%  (-1.7%)
Sanders: +41.1% 44.3% (-3.1%)
D Party: +42.8% 46.9%(-4.1%)
Biden: +39.2% 45.5% (-6.3%)
Trump: +40.7% 53.1% (-12.3%)
R Party: +36.8% 52.2% (-15.4%)
Bloomberg: 21.7% 40.8% (-19.1%)

There's more below, averaged from the last month and a half of Economist / YouGov polls. 538 thinks they typically underestimate Dems by 1 and the GOP by 2, so maybe best to add those corrections. The sample size is much bigger than typical 3-day polls that get their own news stories. And it's a better measure than the outlier polls that typically get shared by gleeful or terrified social media friends.

If I had to predict the candidates' favorability numbers on Election Day, I'd guess these (and guess that undecided voters follow decided ones). Opinion of Trump doesn't change much. The Democratic nominee will probably get pulled down during the primary, spring up during the healing unityfest of the convention, and get pulled back down by messy general-election campaigning.

For reference, at this point four years ago, Hillary Clinton was around -10 and Donald Trump was around -12. And this time, our nominee won't have been the target of a 25-year smear campaign! Obviously the next year will be full of unpredictable events. But I expect we'll do better.

Monday, November 25, 2019

Bloomberg is icumen in, lhude sing cuccu

Steyer and now Bloomberg running for President are an argument against the sort of capitalism practiced in America.

They're badly misjudging the primary. Steyer blew $20 million making barely a ripple in the polls, which I expect will be precedent for Bloomberg doing the same. Most Democratic primary voters have at least one option they like already and will scowl at you for trying to buy the nomination. If you want to stop Warren / Sanders, you should donate to Pete or whoever rather than fragmenting the moderate vote further. It's a dumb plan, on any plausible construal of what they might want.

So letting billionaires who make plans like this have the vast power over society and the economy that American capitalism does -- are we expecting that to turn out well?

Sunday, November 24, 2019

Ukraine and impeachment: where we stand

The Ukraine quid pro quo may not be Trump's worst misdeed, but it's wonderfully suited for an impeachment case.

Trump's guilt is clear. He and several others have more or less confessed, even if he now pretends the confessions didn't happen. And unlike the Russia scandal where the dealings were between Trump cronies and Russians, none of whom would testify, this scandal involved many State Department employees who respect Congressional subpoenas.

The chances of Trump being removed from office were always vanishingly low. They still are. Republicans are afraid to impeach their primary voters' hero. I'm not confident that we'll get a single Republican vote to impeach Trump in the House or convict him in the Senate.

But two worthwhile goals are being achieved. The first is persuading a very small fraction of Trump voters to turn against him. It's hard to measure these things even with poll averages, but impeachment seems to be dropping his approval ratings around 1%. As the cloud hangs over Trump, Democrats have beaten Republicans in tough Southern states. We won the Kentucky Governor's race by 0.4% against a Republican who tried to bring Trump into the race as much as possible.

Second, impeachment seems to be disruptive within the Republican Party. McConnell seems not to have the votes to simply twist the proceedings in arbitrarily silly ways (like going straight to a party-line vote with no real trial). Republican Senators have learned how to accept arbitrary cruelties against brown people, but many of them haven't gotten into the headspace where they're fine with Trump using defense appropriations to allies as extortion bait.

I hope Pelosi delays the House impeachment vote as long as possible. After the vote, control of the situation passes to McConnell, and he's dangerous, whatever tensions there may be in his caucus. The new revelations that Rep. Devin Nunes himself is implicated in the scandal might lead to some unusually good C-SPAN.

Pelosi annoys my friends when she dismisses good left-wing ideas, often to manage pressure from red-district members. But legislative leaders from safe districts are unusually free to shift their official views in unprincipled ways. Notably: Mitch McConnell on proper procedures for handling judicial nominations.

Giving her moderates cover until it's time to move is a solid way for Pelosi to make sure the votes are there. And when it's time to change positions and commit to the winning moves, her affect shifts. Her language becomes elevated and she smiles like checkmate. It was sort of unnerving the week before she got Obamacare through the House. I'm more used to it now.

Wednesday, November 20, 2019

Donating $1000 to Stacey Abrams' Fair Fight

Stacey Abrams is managing an effort to protect democracy in the 2020 elections. It's called "Fair Fight". I just gave her $1000.

Abrams was the Democratic leader in the Georgia state House before running for Governor in 2018. Her Republican opponent, Brian Kemp, was the state Secretary of State. This meant he was in charge of managing his own election against her. With black voters being inexplicably declared ineligible and and unusual levels of undervotes in majority-black precincts, it seems that he made full use of his power.

Fair Fight is about stopping such offenses against democracy. Right now the organization is pursuing a legal case against the Georgia state government to ensure that the same offenses don't get repeated in 2020. Getting to work on these issues a year in advance is very important, and it's part of why I wanted to donate now rather than later.

Much may depend on Georgia. The Presidential polling is close, and because of a retirement there are two Senate races at once. While Fair Fight operates in other states, I'm quite happy for Abrams to take a Georgia-centric view. I think Republicans are more likely to win all these races, but Democrats have a fighting chance, and the Senate races especially are what you might need to pass Medicare for All.

Stacey Abrams is veteran of the battle against Deep South vote suppression, and she knows how state-level politics works. After all, she was at the very center of it in a deeply contested state. She's the person I'd want running a hugely consequential effort to defend democracy from its enemies.

Thursday, November 7, 2019

Katie Hobbs improves Arizona elections

I just had a chat on the phone with Katie Hobbs, Arizona's state Secretary of State!

Her office administers elections. She's implementing automatic updates to people's voter registration when they update their drivers' licenses. When she was the ranking Democrat on the Elections Committee in the State Senate, Republicans blocked legislation to do this. Her new position lets her just go ahead and set that up at the administrative level.

The Republican she defeated in 2018 to win her office had a very different attitude towards voter access. He planned to eliminate Spanish-language ballots and voting materials. (At some level, he understood that Spanish is useful in Arizona. Journalists who visited his mansion noted that he had 'No Trespassing' signs in Spanish outside.) On the call, I thanked Katie for fighting Republican attempts to recreate a racial aristocracy where some races can vote and other races can't.

Katie won her election by a margin of under 1%. Her campaign was funded in part by thousands of dollars from my Facebook friends, back when I was promoting her campaign and donating money myself. Thanks to you, she'll be the one running elections during Arizona's upcoming Senate race and Presidential campaign.

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

Democrats take Virginia, evil defeated in Kentucky

Last night, Democrats took control of the Virginia state legislature and won the Kentucky Governor's race. (More good news: New York City adopted ranked-choice voting for municipal elections.)

Virginia Republicans hadn't won a statewide race for ten years, but had gerrymandered state legislative districts to keep themselves in power. A court ruled against the gerrymander before the 2019 elections. That was enough for Democrats to win what looks like a 55-45 majority in the state House and a 21-19 majority in the state Senate. The agenda includes a minimum wage increase, various health care improvements, and gun control.

If you enjoy the defeat of evil, enjoy the defeat of Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin. He tried to cut teachers' pensions, and when they responded with a work stoppage, he called them "ignorant" "selfish" "thugs" who were exposing students to child molesters by not operating the schools. (This is not a single remark, but a series of disgusting utterances on different occasions.) After a previous Governor enacted one of the nation's best-run Obamacare-linked Medicaid expansions, Bevin tried to shut down the health care website and impose work requirements for Medicaid eligibility that cost hundreds of millions of dollars in additional administrative fees.

Bevin tried to win the election by tying himself to Trump, who won Kentucky by a 62-32 margin in 2016. With 100% of precincts reporting, pro-choice Democrat Andy Beshear has 49.2% of the vote, and Bevin has 48.8%. Bevin refuses to concede. But all major news organizations agree that he's the Republican Governor who somehow managed to lose re-election in deeply red Kentucky.

Sunday, November 3, 2019

Nancy has the votes

This week, the House voted 232-196 to formalize procedures for impeaching Donald Trump.

On the morning of the vote, Kellyanne Conway went on TV saying that Democrats didn't have the votes to pass the resolution. I liked DC political journalist Dave Weigel's comment: "You don't have to be a 'yaaas kween' Pelosi fan to know that 'I bet Pelosi won't have counted the votes' is a prelude to being embarrassed".

Despite being a "yaaas kween" Pelosi fan of 14 years, I didn't expect such a large margin of victory. But I can tell you a little about what made it happen. It requires a lot of trust between Nancy Pelosi and Democratic Congresscritters* from Republican-leaning districts. There are 36 of them, 34 of whom voted for the impeachment resolution.

Congress has long operated with an economy of favor-trading. Sometimes the favors are tangible things, like voting to fund a highway your district wants. Sometimes they're intangible things, like having the Speaker make it clear that you're not committed to something that Fox News might otherwise blast you for in the next election.

Earlier this year, vulnerable Democratic Congresscritters wanted that sort of clarity about not being committed to impeachment. I expect that they still want it on things like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. Pelosi gave them the clear uncommitted positioning they wanted by looking negative on impeachment. She maintained that up until September, when the Ukraine scandal emerged and she saw the opportunity.

What does Pelosi ask in return? That they vote her way if the time comes to do so. The time came, and they held up their end of the deal.

Back in 2010 when Pelosi was trying to pass Obamacare through the House and betting markets had it at a 1 in 3 chance of passage, she was beaming at cameras and talking about what a historic event it would be. She knew she had the votes. The moderates owed her. The media didn't know how many votes she had. But she did.

*A gender-neutral and species-neutral term favored by mid-2000s lefty bloggers.

Sunday, October 27, 2019

Mixed economy is best economy

The Cold War is often described as a struggle between capitalism and communism. The winner, though, was the mixed economy.

That's how it had to be. How to organize human productive activity is too complex and contingent a question to be answered by any grand theory. We do things in many ways, as we should.

Markets are good for producing consumer goods like smartphones. Government is good for building infrastructure and redistributing wealth so that the poor aren't doomed. Families operate to satisfy all kinds of human needs. Charity isn't as strong a force as others above but it's usually pointed at doing very nice things. And sometimes, somehow, groups of people spontaneously generate Wikipedia.

Depending on the conditions, any of these systems may be optimal for organizing some sphere of activity. I doubt any economic theory that unduly constrains our options, so that we can't use all these systems or invent others. And I doubt any theory of rights so proprietary to one of these systems that it would treat the others as unjust.

Saturday, October 26, 2019

Last Dance With Mayor Pete (Indiana Boys On An Indiana Night)

Pete Buttigieg has started attacking Medicare for All and talking up Anthony Kennedy as a model Supreme Court Justice. I used to have him behind Warren and Sanders as a serviceable third choice. I'd still take him over Biden, and of course I'll vote for any Democrat against Trump, but this makes him a much worse option for the primary.


What explains his abrupt shift? The most obvious answer is that with Biden fading in the polls, fundraising poorly, and looking less electable, Pete is trying to become the top centrist option. It might be his best strategy for winning the nomination, even if the crass opportunism is obvious.

I see another reason. If Mayor Pete loses, his political future is in Indiana. All nine statewide offices in Indiana are controlled by Republicans, testifying to the state's conservatism and leaving Democrats with a weak candidate pool. I don't know if Pete would have time to jump into this year's Governor's race, but there's also a Senate race in 2022. Both are against undistinguished Republicans who won their last races with barely over 50% of the vote.

Those are races where we could use an ambitious, media-savvy small-town mayor with centrist credentials and a military record. If selling out in the primary improves his fundraising connections with corrupt interests, that may help too. And if he's a skilled opportunist, so much the better! So let's use our primary votes to send Mayor Pete where he'll be best for maximizing aggregate utility -- his home state of Indiana.

Wednesday, October 23, 2019

The quid pro quo scandal ends the Biden electability argument

I'm a Biden electability skeptic of long standing, and recent events have only deepened my skepticism.

My old argument was that Biden was just enjoying the reflected glory of Obama, and his mediocrity would emerge as soon as he had to be his own man. He lost Democratic primaries a couple times because he's bad at campaigning. The passage of time would not make him better at this.

Now there's a big new problem. Through no great fault of his own, the right-wing smear machine has its biggest guns pointed straight at him. They have to defend Trump from the quid pro quo scandal, and the best way to do it is to shoot at Biden.

(I like calling this the 'quid pro quo' scandal. Say we discover more quid pro quos. With the Saudis? With Erdogan? With Uncle Vladimir? The name rightly weaves them into the scandal. And it supports an obviously important rule: No trading public stuff for private favors!)

If I were in charge of defending Trump, and Biden was my general-election opponent, I'd go for the 2-for-1 that defends Trump as it attacks Biden: Deep Biden skulduggery was going on in Ukraine, and Trump was heroically fighting it.

Obviously this involves making up nonsense. But Fox News can easily push made-up stories about Ukraine. Americans are not knowledgeable about matters in Ukraine. And Putin might be of assistance.

So. The right-wing noise machine getting an early start against an establishment democrat? On nonsense that Uncle Vladimir is in good position to help push? And we chose the candidate for electability! Do you know how this story ended last time?

If you don't, I can send you some emails.

Thursday, October 17, 2019

How did Mark Milley feel when Pelosi said, "All roads with you lead to Putin"?

Donald Trump tweeted this photo with the caption "Nervous Nancy's unhinged meltdown." Pelosi then maximized utility by making it her Twitter cover image.

Mark Milley is the Army general next to Trump -- one of the many men on Trump's side of the table wishing they were somewhere else. He's serving his first month as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff after being confirmed by the Senate in an 89-1 vote. I think it's most interesting to imagine the meeting from his perspective.

Early in the meeting, Trump handed out copies of the blustery letter he had written to Erdogan, which begins "Let's work out a good deal! You don't want to be responsible for slaughtering thousands of people, and I don't want to be responsible for destroying the Turkish economy -- and I will." Apparently Erdogan put the letter in the trash. Milley has a Masters in International Relations from Columbia, and he knows that this is utterly ridiculous.

Trump then called former general James Mattis "The most overrated general in the world. You know why? He wasn’t tough enough. I captured ISIS. Mattis said it would take two years. I captured them in one month." Milley has been in the military for 39 years, and I doubt he enjoys hearing this language from a man who claimed bone spurs to avoid military service.

Milley had warned during the meeting that ISIS was "not destroyed" and could "reconstitute" if Erdogan's attack on the Kurds freed captured ISIS fighters. Trump then claimed that only the least dangerous ISIS fighters had escaped. When Chuck Schumer asked Defense Secretary Mark Esper if any intelligence confirmed this, Esper said there was no such intelligence.

Schumer then asked Trump, “Is your plan to rely on the Syrians and the Turks?” Trump replied, “Our plan is to keep the American people safe.” Pelosi told him, “That’s not a plan. That’s a goal.”

Trump then complained about Obama and started insulting Pelosi. She told Trump that he gave Moscow a foothold in the Middle East. As far as I can tell, the photo is taken as she says, "All roads with you lead to Putin."

There are many other ashen-faced men on Trump's side of the table. But it's Milley's torment that seems the most exquisite to me. His boss has just been arrogantly stupid on issues his entire career has trained him to understand. Now he is forced to contemplate working for a President who has been compromised by the enemy.

If he thought Pelosi's remark was unfair or wrong, he might be glaring back at her, or at least sitting with a straight-necked military bearing. But he isn't. His head is bowed, his hands are clasped, and his eyes are squeezed shut.

The marble bust of Benjamin Franklin stares sternly over his shoulder. Behind Pelosi in the photo is a statue of George Washington. I wonder if he tried not to meet their eyes when he left the Cabinet Room.

Monday, October 7, 2019

Legislative leadership

I often make boasts like like "I've been a Nancy Pelosi superfan ever since the Ice Age." Just for verification / trivia purposes, here's me blogging in the Washington Monthly back in 2008 about how she had defeated Social Security Privatization three years before. You might have heard me tell this story before.

Most people understand politics in terms of Presidential elections, probably because those are the most-publicized political events. But for determining policy, legislative politics is no less important. Good legislative leadership is about counting votes, trading favors, and having a good sense of political possibilities. Speechmaking and PR are secondary considerations.

Presidents are outdoor politicians. Speakers and Majority / Minority Leaders are indoor politicians, operating from their proverbial smoke-filled rooms. If you watch legislative politics for a while and try to grasp what's driving the outcomes, you start to learn what makes a good indoor politician.

In the case of my recent conversion on impeachment, the issue was just thinking I can trust Pelosi on when coordination is likely to break down with Republican Senators. It's a matter of understanding when votes might move around -- not necessarily to remove, but to get a worthwhile outcome. Understanding instabilities in the other side's caucus is part of what she did to beat privatization. I trust she can do that again.

Wednesday, September 25, 2019

Pelosi supports impeachment, so I do too

Nancy Pelosi has initiated a formal impeachment inquiry. I've been an impeachment naysayer all year. But when Pelosi changes positions, I change too. I'll explain.

I opposed impeachment because the Senate trial looked like a disaster. Several Senate Democrats (Manchin, Tester, Jones) seemed ready to vote for acquittal. This would marginalize the charges against Trump going into the 2020 election and make it harder to put pressure on Republicans.

Moreover, most of the rules for conducting an impeachment trial can be changed by a Senate majority vote. This lets Mitch McConnell turn the trial into whatever he wants, if he can hold a majority. After the Kavanaugh confirmation, I anticipated the horror of my Democratic friends when the impeachment trial became whatever celebration of Trump's innocence McConnell wanted. It would be a hideous mockery of accountability.

All of this comes down to Senate vote totals. Get 4 Republicans to join united Democrats, and you have a majority that takes control out of McConnell's hands. And a bipartisan majority vote against Trump -- while insufficient for removing him -- would at least send the right message rather than the wrong one.

Pelosi counts votes better than any politician in my lifetime. Remember McConnell losing Obamacare repeal on the Senate floor after John McCain gave him the thumbs down? Pelosi doesn't let that happen. What she does is governed by her knowledge of the vote totals -- what they are, and what they'll become in a variety of possible future situations.

I think she's moving now because the Ukraine scandal has finally loosened things up in the Senate to where we have a shot at winning over Republicans. Senate Republicans are more fractured over this scandal than anything else, with Burr, Sasse, Romney, and Toomey cited in the media as alarmed. If this doesn't hold up for some reason, Pelosi might wait for a better setup in the future. But this as good an opportunity as anything we've seen.

This scandal hits close to home for Republican Senators. They don't want a future Democratic President using federal money to bribe foreign rulers for dirt on them. If only they cared so much about brown children in cages! But if this is what will make them turn on Trump, it's what we go with. It's how to get an impeachment process that really damages him and his party.

I've been actively following Congressional politics for 15 years now. It's been 15 years of watching Pelosi make the right move on every big issue, because she could see how the votes would go. It's how she stopped Bush from privatizing Social Security, how she turned the Democratic Party to favor withdrawal from Iraq, and how she passed Obamacare when everyone thought it was doomed.

Now she's on the march. I march with her.

Saturday, September 7, 2019

Veggie mutton biryani

Apparently I have the Buddhists to thank for fake mutton, one of the best veggie meats I’ve encountered in Singapore. This biryani plate and a cheap mango lassi went for $5 SGD ($3.62 USD) at a university cafeteria.

Monday, September 2, 2019

Ibid

In my first year of college, I encountered "Ibid" in a footnote. I had heard of an ancient poet named Ovid, so I assumed that Ibid was one of his contemporaries. As the footnotes continued, I was impressed by how significant Ibid's work had been -- he was getting cited again and again!

Friday, August 30, 2019

Elizabeth Warren is favored in Iowa

Elizabeth Warren is leading in the favorability averages of the historically best Iowa pollsters, compiled by Nate Silver. Biden still leads the national polls. But I think these Iowa numbers are underrated in contemporary internet speculation. If you're worried that Biden might coast to the nomination, let me render Optimism Guy services in my new Elizabeth Warren Fan Club uniform.

First, some history about Iowa and why it's historically such a big deal. It's the first actual election in the primary, so it's a huge focus of media coverage, and plays a major role in winnowing the field. That's the point at which the primaries become more a mass-media story rather than an inside story for activist types. And with the national primary coming on, lots of people are starting to seriously decide how to vote. It's the moment when you want the media to treat you as the popular candidate on an upswing. You do this... by winning Iowa! It's the place where Obama became the front-runner in 2008. There are changes of various sorts that probably dampen this effect a little relative to history, but I think it's still significant.

Now for our polls. Among Iowa Democrats, Warren's favorable-unfavorables lead the pack at 80-11, followed by Harris at 73-10 and Mayor Pete at 72-7. Bernie is at 68-24, and only then do we see Biden at 67-24.

We're in the stage where candidates start to drop out. Because these polls register information about how you might vote if your first choice drops out, they're better for predicting the direction of consolidation than polls that just ask you about your first choice. And that direction of consolidation favors Warren.

Nicely, it also favors Harris, Pete, and Bernie (MoE tho) over Biden. They each have a decent electability case -- Harris with minority turnout, Bernie with good general-election poll numbers, and Pete with skillful navigation of the media environment. I think they'd all make much better presidents than Biden, who really has the full versions of bad traits that people attack the other three for in overheated primary debates.

In summary: Warren is on top in a highly consequential polling average. If she falters, some alternative superior to Biden gets a serious shot. If you're a Warren fan or an anybody-but-Biden type (I'm both), Iowa favors you.

Thursday, August 15, 2019

China policy: Hong Kong heroism and American uselessness

The right China policy for the West seems to be something like this: We'd like to maintain good trade relations, expand immigration, and sign treaties to reduce our militaries. But human rights abuses will be met with trade sanctions, and we'll promote a NATO-like regional security alliance with China's democratically governed Pacific Rim neighbors who don't want to be invaded.

The hope is to set the right incentives and keep things in China from getting worse. The threat of sanctions for human rights abuses will get economic interests to push against those abuses. Well-coordinated defense will prevent China from invading its neighbors and get it to sign the arms treaties. If all goes well, China moves towards liberal democracy through the gentle slow process of cultural engagement. It works -- it's a big part of how Communism fell in Eastern Europe.

America's China policy is not on that track right now. Donald Trump is starting trade wars not to punish repression, but because he likes trade wars. Relations between Japan and South Korea are falling apart, and where diplomats of any previous Administration would be mending things between top regional allies, we're not seeing that right now.

That brings us to Hong Kong. The Chinese-approved government supported legislation to make it easier to extradite people from Hong Kong to China, using a recent sensational murder as a pretext. Public outcry in Hong Kong was intense. The government says that the legislation is dead, but hasn’t formally withdrawn it. Protestors are calling for further reforms, including genuinely democratic elections. The protests have been amazing, with over a million people sometimes coming out. Recently they shut down the airport. This photo shows protestors surrounding police headquarters.


At a time when America is being useless, the protestors in Hong Kong are making an amazing display of nonviolent force. They aren't getting any cover from America's erratic trade policy, and they can't count on much in the way of outside support. They're just asserting their own control over Hong Kong for Beijing to see, and demanding democracy. I hope we can set them up to receive the support they deserve around about January of 2021.

Monday, August 5, 2019

Trump's trade war

This is a chart of the S&P 500 over the last five days. If you're not a stock market person, but you're curious about the weird effects of Donald Trump on the economy, I'd like to tell you about it.

At first we're on a plateau for a while, and then there's that quick jagged shock from which we recover. That's the Federal Reserve's decision to make a single interest rate cut, but not suggest more. The market seems to have more or less expected this. The economy has continued the upward trend that began in the early Obama administration, so the Fed didn't want to give more.

Trump has been feuding with Jerome Powell, the Fed chair. Trump wants more economy-boosting interest rate cuts as he goes up for re-election. He's unhappy that the Fed gave him only one.

In his statements afterwards, Powell said that he would cut rates again if things looked worse for the economy. He also said that trade wars were bad for the economy. Trump likes trade wars. And he likes pushing people around. So why not push Powell around with a trade war?

So then we fall off a cliff, and we don't get back up, and then slide down further. That's Trump tweeting surprise 10% tariffs on Chinese goods. (Into Christmas season! Think of the poor retailers!) The market understood interest rates, but so far, it's acting like it didn't understand Trump.

In the last part (today) we fall off another cliff. That's today's 3% decline, off the weekend's news that China devalued its currency. The Chinese are saying, "You want to make our goods more expensive? Well we can undo that by making them cheaper to you! Also forget about exporting to us, nobody can afford dollars here go away."

On a scale of zero to trade war, we're past the talking phase and into the action phase. It's just small actions now, but it's actions. Also Trump is having what has become a dominance fight with Powell on the side, and it pushes US-China towards further intimidation.

A moral of the story: Trump is less controlled by Wall Street than most Republicans. Instead, he's controlled by ego and racism. At least on the tariff issue, I think this is worse.

I think there can be good reasons for trade restrictions. Don't buy stuff made by slave labor, or stuff that destroys the environment. (In general, explore Pigouvian strategies).

But these aren't Trump's reasons. And in general, it's good for everyone to get the best deals in the world on stuff. If not, there's some interesting explanation of why not. What's going on inside Donald Trump doesn't correspond to any such interesting explanation.

Saturday, August 3, 2019

Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax is a great plan

As Vox has described, she'll tax wealth above $50 million at a 2% rate, and wealth above $1 billion at a 3% rate. Emmanuel Saez (Piketty's frequent collaborator) "estimates this tax would hit approximately 75,000 families and raise $2.75 trillion over a 10-year period."

The Vox article also notes that the tax would reduce private investment, since that's what it's taxing. This is fine. Private investment has bad returns these days. Look at what Apple did with its Trump tax cut: it bought back shares of its own stock. The greatest consumer technology innovator of recent decades couldn't find a new innovative business to assemble. So it just spent the money on raising its stock price and not building anything socially productive.

Low interest rates on bonds are a further sign that private capital can't find any productive place to invest itself. Aaa-rated corporate bonds returned 8% in the mid-90s, but only 3.29% today. In other words, there's so little good stuff for private capital to invest in that investors are accepting annual returns of only 3.29%. This is what a future of increasing income inequality will look like -- the increasingly vast wealth of the rich chasing a range of investment opportunities that doesn't grow as fast. Since 1980, inequality has widened as bond rates have fallen.

We're likely to get better social returns on investment in infrastructure, child care, science, and education. Many of these things don't work as private-sector investments because there's no way for private investors to reap the social good that they've sown. The benefits of making more scientists are distributed among the many beneficiaries of their discoveries in a way that won't come back as profit to a private investor.

Great utility is achieved if the government takes the money away from private investors and makes more scientists, which profit-driven private investment doesn't do very well. Excessive focus on private investment over recent decades has led us to neglect public investment. The wealth tax removes investment capital from the low-return private sector and puts it in the more promising public sector.

There are all sorts of implementation issues to be resolved, but they're worth resolving. For example, to stop the wealthy from hiding wealth overseas, we'll need to beef up the ability of the IRS to chase down vast investments, and set up international frameworks for tracking wealth. So let's do these things!

In general, I don't recommend donating to Presidential campaigns. Definitely not general-election campaigns, but probably not primaries either. Your money has much more impact on lower-level races. Jeff Merkley's Leadership PAC, which helps us retake the Senate and put it in the hands of its most skilled progressive legislator, is my #1 pick.

But I've given $100 to Elizabeth Warren's campaign. It's a token amount, but she'll have one more small donor to boast of. Perhaps it'll help in some small way to make her plans reality.

Wednesday, July 31, 2019

Warren and Sanders win the debate

In last night's debate, the moderators set John Delaney to attack Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. He did so by calling Sanders and Warren's plans "fairy tale economics." (Plans like theirs have been successful in Europe, which is a real place and not just a location from fairy tales. I actually went there recently and it was very nice.)

Warren's counterattack won the night: "I don't understand why anybody goes to the trouble of running for President of the United States, just to talk about what we can't do and shouldn't fight for." I don't understand why Delaney ran either, but I'm glad he did, as footage of Warren annihilating dim-bulb centrists was something the world needed.

There was also a nice moment when Tim Ryan interrupted Sanders to question whether Medicare for All would cover the things he claimed. Sanders' reply that it would -- "I wrote the damn bill!" -- had the audience applauding and Ryan silently seething on the split screen.

(In 2009, Tim Ryan initially voted to prevent Obamacare from covering abortion. Nancy Pelosi did something -- I don't know what -- to make him back down and support abortion coverage on final passage through the House. Then in 2015, he tried and failed to organize a centrist campaign against Pelosi as Democratic leader. As I'm probably the internet's biggest Pelosi fan, seeing Bernie give Ryan a good whacking was deeply gratifying for me.)

Both Sanders and Warren need to solidify their positions as second choices for each others' voters. Attacking boring moderates who are polling near zero is a good way to do it, as they have few fans for you to alienate. From what I can tell, Sanders and Warren genuinely like each other, as makes sense for ideological people who share an ideology. And it totally works as strategy.

After the debate lineups were announced, I remember Kathleen Geier wishing that Sanders and Warren would join forces against various annoying centrists. It sounded too good to hope for, so I tried not to hope for it. But it really does make sense, and it actually happened! What a wonderful night.

Tuesday, July 30, 2019

Brexit in Poundland

With Boris Johnson as Britain's new Prime Minister and no-deal Brexit a serious possibility, the British pound is collapsing. A dozen years ago, I visited Britain when the pound was worth $2. The Brexit vote knocked it to $1.35. It rose when people thought they saw ways out of the problem, but right now it's down to $1.22.

This could add to the ugliness of Brexit. Just at the moment when trade disruptions make imported goods hard to get, they become even harder to get because the currency you use to buy them has lost value.

There's a chain called "Poundland" that runs a British equivalent of American dollar stores. The name also seems to me like good slang for post-Brexit Britain. And if bad things happen to the pound, things could get bad in Poundland.


Wednesday, July 17, 2019

The House rebukes Trump


House Democrats unanimously voted to condemn Trump's racist attacks on four minority Congresswomen. The resolution passed, with four Republicans and newly independent Rep. Amash also voting yes. I'm glad to see this, for many different reasons that I'll tell you about.

 -The moderates did their part. There are 36 Democratic representatives from Republican-leaning districts. (Because of gerrymandering, Democrats need to hold at least 17 Republican districts to keep a House majority.) I wouldn't have been confident that freshman Democrats from South Carolina and Oklahoma districts 10 points more Republican than the national average would vote to rebuke Trump's racism. But they did. It speaks well of them and bodes well for future votes, including House passage of major legislation in 2021.

 -The House works. Democrats have been frustrated with the lack of action against Trump from the House. But in general, the problems aren't coming from inside the House. Impeachment accomplishes nothing while McConnell runs the Senate. Trump's new lawyers (Bill Barr, Emmet Flood) have deflected House subpoena attempts into court battles. Senate Democrats have let the House down when they need to work together, as on the border funding bill. But this is something House Democrats could do themselves, and they did it unanimously.

 -The Pelosi-AOC relationship is weird, but it's working. To pass anything in 2021, Pelosi has to cultivate relationships with Dems from Republican districts. These relationships are fraught, because the moderates are all afraid of attack ads tying them to Pelosi. Pelosi can reduce the burden on them by looking more moderate, which she now can do by making grouchy noises at AOC occasionally. But later when the focus is on Trump's racism and Pelosi won't mess up her position, she'll defend AOC against Trump. If all goes well, Pelosi uses AOC to keep the moderates happy and in office, and then squeezes votes out of them in 2021 like she did in 2009-2010 and 2005, this time to pass AOC's priorities. It's a good way for a parliamentary leader and a forward-thinking policy intellectual to play off each other.

 -This was important for America. In telling four minority Congresspeople, three of whom were born in the US, to go back to where they came from, Trump was trying to elevate racial divisions over our common bonds as fellow citizens. Any good future for America depends on us not doing this. Our worst crimes -- slavery and the genocide of Native Americans -- resulted from the dominance of the forces that Trump is trying to normalize again. Having the House formally push back against Trump's racism was an important defense of the only values under which America can flourish.

Saturday, June 29, 2019

Defeating Republican gerrymanders in 2020

Exactly one year after Anthony Kennedy submitted his letter of resignation from the Supreme Court, his replacement was part of a 5-4 majority decision to stop the Supreme Court from overturning partisan gerrymanders. Today we move further towards an America where most people support Democrats, but vote suppression, gerrymandering, the structure of the Senate, and the Electoral College together result in permanent Republican rule.

This probably would've happened whether Trump or some other Republican (Ted Cruz, say) was President. The force behind this decision came from Republicans as an institution. It keeps them in office and helps them achieve their ideological goals, so it's what they're going to do. When Mitch McConnell stole Merrick Garland's Supreme Court nomination, this is one of the things he was hoping for.

The best way forward now is simply to focus on winning in 2020 as much as possible. It's a redistricting election, so whoever controls state legislatures and governorships gets to decide how districts are drawn, without the Supreme Court getting involved. This Sam Wang tweetstorm has a bunch of good ideas.

State legislative races can be good entry-level offices to run for. Conventional wisdom is that you need $20,000 to be competitive as a candidate in Kansas, and $50,000 would be great. Obviously many people won't have that much money lying around, but it's within the means of people who have had some career success. This article has four profiles of first-time candidates, three of whom ran for state House.

Some states have public financing programs for state legislative campaigns. If you're not in a state with public financing, and you're interested in running, send me a message! I might have money for you.

If you're not cut out to be a candidate but you know someone who is, maybe talk to them about it. Encouraging your friend to run for state legislature might be the deed that prevents Republicans from strangling American democracy.

Monday, June 24, 2019

The illusion of Joe Biden's electability

The Vice President doesn't do much, so the office suited Joe Biden well. Our calm determined overachieving President needed a warm-hearted goofball sidekick, and Biden was a perfect fit for the role. Republicans didn't really care to attack him either -- much better to go after Obama. So his poll numbers rose, and pundits praised his electability.

Biden isn't nearly as good at being a Presidential candidate. He lost in 1988 despite having the most early money, and lost in 2008 when he was one of the more experienced Senators. Message discipline and generally avoiding sloppy campaign mistakes are not his strengths.

One aspect of electability is: how good is the candidate at running for President? It's one you can emphasize a little less in making decisions, because a candidate who's really bad at running will usually crash and burn before the voting even starts, and you won't have to think about them.

But it may help to explain why the two successful Democratic Presidential candidates I've seen were the young upstarts of their times. If Bill Clinton and Barack Obama weren't good at running, they wouldn't have made it through the primary. Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton got their nominations more through institutional support than on the campaign trail -- and they lost general elections.

(I also wonder if it helps to fake out the right-wing media. National Republicans had been smearing Hillary for 15 years before the 2008 election, and they were all locked and loaded to do it again, and then... that's not Hillary! That's... some black guy? When you nominate someone they didn't expect and haven't propagandized against, they might not be able to get their work done in the few months they have.)

But this is all to say -- the idea of Biden as especially electable is probably an illusion. His numbers were inflated by being in a role that turned his weaknesses into strengths, and now they're going back to being weaknesses. Better to have someone who does things right during the election and moves upwards than the person who came in at the top.

Sunday, June 23, 2019

Different parties

Under Hillary Clinton (or Bernie Sanders), we'd still have Obama's Iran deal. There's more disagreement here among Republicans. Under Ted Cruz, I'm pretty sure war would have begun. Donald Trump backed out of war at the last moment.

The old Republican establishment liked the far cruelty. Trump overthrew them, so now we get the near cruelty instead. One would blow people up far away, the other would tear children from their parents and throw them into dungeons here in America.

This is why it's easy for me to devote so much attention to partisan electoral politics. The consequences of Republican victory are that bad, and even if they're sometimes different across Republicans, they're always really bad. So it's worth discovering what you can about how to help Democrats beat them.

Thursday, June 20, 2019

Warren could work out well

Apparently Democratic centrists are seeing Elizabeth Warren as an acceptable candidate. If "Warren as compromise nominee" is defeat for Bernie the candidate, it's a victory for Bernie the movement. He moves the Overton Window for her; she moves the party to him.

She's just better, in lots of ways. As has been noticed, the best at plans. And better at procedural reform.

She wants to get rid of the filibuster. Bernie doesn't -- a common position among the more senior Senators. This is vexing because it'll block his agenda. You won't get 60 Senators for Green New Deal and Medicare for All. You need to pass them with 50. The filibuster doesn't do much to impede Republicans, because they can just rip out the funding from our programs with 50 in the budget (which is immune to filibusters).

Some of my friends on the left side of the Democratic Party may dream of crushing their rivals on its right side in a primary. Having them compromise behind Warren is probably better. Having your intraparty rivals reconciled and falling in behind you makes it easier to defeat Republicans and enact policy.

Tuesday, June 18, 2019

Remembering Duke Cunningham's bribe menu

It might get topped by Trump Administration revelations in the near future. But before it does, I thought I might let tell you the wildest corruption story of my time following American politics.

Back in 2005, Duke Cunningham was a Republican Congressman from California. Mitchell Wade was a defense contractor who found every chance to bribe him. When Cunningham was selling his house, Wade bought it for $1.675 million. Shortly afterwards, Wade's firm started getting tens of millions of dollars in contracts. The house was back on the market for $975,000 months later. That amounts to a $700,000 bribe.

The smaller bribes were more garish. In DC, Cunningham lived on Wade's docked 42-foot yacht. Cunningham would shop for expensive stuff he liked (Persian rugs, a used Rolls-Royce), and Wade would pay for it. Prosecutors uncovering the corruption found a strange memo on Cunningham's office stationery, in his handwriting:
What is this? My friends, it's a bribe menu. To complete the bribe for $16 million in contracts, Wade gave Cunningham control of the boat, which cost $140,000. For each further million in contracts, Wade would have to bribe Cunningham $50K. But after getting to $20 million in contracts, Wade would have to pay only $25K for each million. If you didn't know that you could get volume discounts in bribing corrupt politicians, well, that's the sort of information I'm happy to provide.

The prosecutors' document described it as "malversation unprecedented in the long history of Congress" which is some pretty serious... malversation? I've never heard that word before. Anyway, Cunningham was sentenced to 8 years in prison. 

Thursday, June 13, 2019

But is he a blue whale or a right whale?

While it would be pretty neat if Trump were colluding with the Prince of Whales, I’ve never believed these deep state conspiracy theories.

Saturday, May 25, 2019

Ethnic nationalism before and after the Cold War

I wonder if the rise of ethnic nationalism in recent years is simply a reversion to what was historically normal up until the Cold War.

This history is extreme in its horrors. Ethnic nationalist conflict in the first half of the 20th century included World Wars and genocides that killed tens of millions. For centuries before that, colonial empires enslaved and committed genocides against native peoples. The greatest slaughter occurred under governments whose ideologies were those of peoples with one blood -- the Third Reich, the Belgian monarchy, the British Empire, and everyone who sent their young men to die in the trenches of World War I.

With the Cold War came more universal, abstract ideologies. One might fight for communism against capitalism, or for democracy against dictatorship. These ideologies suited the purposes of decision-makers in Moscow and Washington, and made for better advertising to Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans who were rising in power after the end of colonialism. For obvious reasons, developing-country folk were an implausible market for Russian or American nationalism. But you could get them interested in communism or democracy.

When the Cold War ended and its banners were put away, the strongest political units in the world were still national rather than international. So it was easy for the old flags of ethnic nationalism to come out again, for whatever reasons people had flown them before. That's what we're seeing now.

Will new versions of the old horrors come back with them? This may be the great and terrible question of our time. I hope that global economic changes will help to dampen conflict -- for example, the rise in prosperity after the end of colonialism and the necessity of international cooperation in the modern economy. But there are reasons for pessimism too, as technology lets us harm each other much more easily than we could before, whether through war or climate change. And if the past is any guide, we can fall very far.

My role models for such times tend to be the old scientists -- in philosophy, I guess the flavor would be sort of Vienna Circle. They enjoyed the clever weird ideas of their smart friends from different countries, and faced their collapsing world more with public-spirited Enlightenment optimism than cynical postmodern world-weariness. I think their sort of liberal internationalism wins in the end -- well, there's optimism for you. But win or lose, those are the people I identify with in times like these.

Sunday, May 19, 2019

How we got here on abortion

I just looked through the last 15-25 years of of polling on abortion. Depending on which questions you ask -- and Gallup asked a lot of them -- you can get opinions moving slightly in either direction over time. I'd say this means that opinions have stayed more or less the same.

The abortion bans we're seeing in Alabama and other places aren't the result of a change in public opinion. They're effects of Republican electoral success over the past few decades. Republicans pass these laws now because they expect Republican-appointed anti-abortion judges to approve them. The judges were confirmed because Republicans won elections. (Some people say the judges probably won't approve these extreme laws. But the laws they will approve will soon be forthcoming.)

I think Republicans won the key elections largely because of weird stuff involving electoral maps. Their party has become more rural and less urban, giving it increasing structural advantages in Congress and the Electoral College. If not for these advantages, Democrats would have won 6 of the past 7 Presidential elections and they'd have a solid Senate majority. (The Republican state legislators passing these bills are often in gerrymandered districts, so they made their own luck.)

Anyway, as far as I can tell, people didn't change their minds that much one way or the other. Republicans got stronger because we have a badly designed system that was established as a compromise with powerful slaveowners. They manipulated that system for their own purposes. Fixing the system so that it doesn't give Republicans constant partisan advantages is how you stop abortion bans, protect refugees from brutal mistreatment, and save the planet from climate change. So it's something I really focus on.

Tuesday, May 14, 2019

Getting electability right

It's important to win Presidential elections and not lose them. So it makes sense for Democrats to care about which primary candidates are more likely to win than others. Unfortunately, Democratic thinking on electability has followed a bad strategy: choosing the candidate with the most salient Republican cultural signifiers.

Today those are the whiteness and maleness of Joe Biden. But in late 2003, deep in the shadow of 9/11, it was John Kerry's record as a decorated war veteran. Unfortunately, a Republican smear campaign cast doubt on Kerry's reputation (some will recall the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth). Because of that and other things, Bush was re-elected in the depths of the Iraq War.

In 2007, still in 9/11's long shadow, probably nobody theorized that Democrats had to nominate an African-American whose dad was from Kenya, whose middle name was "Hussein", and whose surname rhymed with "Osama". But we nominated him, and he won the election and the next election.

The point here is that having Republican cultural signifiers just doesn't predict that much about how likely you are to win the general election. Maybe it helps a little in winning over persuadable Republican voters, which I guess is the whole idea. But that effect is mediated by big random things and can't be relied on.

Some people say that you should just vote for whoever you prefer, and that'll guide you to the most electable candidate. That's probably better than the Republican cultural signifier method. But we want to go beyond our own idiosyncracies, and I think we can do that.

My main method is to look at polling data. In particular, I like looking at candidates' national favorability ratings in a good selection of national polls, right when it's time to vote. In early 2008, Obama was pretty consistently getting net favorability numbers over +20 and occasionally over +30 (the best was 61 favorable, 27 unfavorable). This doesn't predict everything. The campaign can go badly, as it did for Kerry. But if a candidate is scoring high without exhibiting the Republican cultural signifiers, it's a sign of political talent, which Obama definitely had.

(Democrats also seem to do better when nominating relative neophytes like Obama and Bill Clinton than when nominating old party hands like Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, and Hillary Clinton. Maybe a shorter record just has less bad stuff. I count inexperience as a slight plus for electability, which is weird but fits the data too well. Maybe the favorability thing encompasses the whole effect? I want more data.)

Anyway, don't worry too much about electability now. There's a big campaign ahead of us. There's plenty of time for Elizabeth Warren to build a national reputation for having awesome ideas about how to give you more money, and put that weird Native American scandal behind her.

But if you want to think about it when the time comes, look at polls. They're a survey of the voters, and the voters decide. The information you want is there.

Friday, May 3, 2019

NUS hires Fatema Amijee and Ethan Jerzak!

NUS Philosophy is proud to announce the hiring of two young philosophers with prolific research achievements: Fatema Amijee and Ethan Jerzak!

Fatema's research has focused on metaphysics and the history of philosophy. Her forthcoming papers include "Explaining Contingent Facts" in Philosophical Studies, "Neo-Rationalist Metaphysics" in an Oxford volume on the Principle of Sufficient Reason that she is co-editing, "Metaphysical Explanation in Spinoza and Leibniz" in the Routledge Handbook of Metaphysical Grounding, and "Russell's Commitment to the Principle of Acquaintance" in the Oxford Handbook of Bertrand Russell. She got her PhD from the University of Texas in 2017, four years after publishing "The Role of Attention in Russell's Theory of Knowledge" in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy.

Ethan's research is primarily on philosophy of language, epistemology, and logic. He will receive his PhD this year from the University of California at Berkeley. Two of his papers have already come out -- "Non-Classical Knowledge" in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and "Two Ways to Want" in the Journal of Philosophy, for which he won a Sanders Graduate Award. He is also author of "Paradoxical Desires", forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.

One of the best things about working at NUS is the constant stream of stellar junior colleagues who keep appearing around me. Adding Fatema and Ethan is a great success for our department, and I look forward to having them around in the coming academic year.

Sunday, April 21, 2019

Impeachment leads to Trump acquittal. Take it to the people!

Mueller Time has come. Some writers characterize his report as an "impeachment referral", which seems like the correct read of his intentions. The by-the-book move was to refer questions of collusion and obstruction to Congress, and Mueller is a by-the-book guy.

Unfortunately, some things in the Constitution don't actually work. Impeachment is one of them. Here we run into the unfortunate fact that the founders didn't see political parties coming.

In a less partisan time, 67 independent-minded Senators might have been able to agree to convict. It won't happen now, because Republicans have a majority and their Senators aren't independent-minded. Republican primary voters love Trump, and their Senators often worry more about their primaries than about the general election. Moreover, Trump has satisfied Republicans' core commitments on judicial nominations and taxes. So the Senators aren't in any hurry to impeach.

Nancy Pelosi counts votes as well as anyone ever has, and she knows we won't have the numbers. This isn't a lack of boldness -- she's willing to make bold moves when Senate passage is possible but uncertain. I remember when she got major climate change legislation through the House in 2009. That time we needed 60 Senators, and we had that many Democrats until Ted Kennedy died. This time we need 67 Senators, and we have 47 Democrats. With Mitch McConnell's accursed ability to hold his caucus together behind Trump, there's no way impeachment is happening, at least on the current Mueller Report.

So if you're going to support impeaching Trump in the House, you have to face the consequences of his acquittal in the Senate. When Russia issues come up in the 2020 campaign, I don't want Trump to be able to boast that he was acquitted, and say that the issue is behind us. Starting impeachment proceedings is supposed to be a punishment, but here it may just give Trump the gift of acquittal. It's too bad that the founders didn't build us something that actually worked.

The way to get rid of Trump always was the 2020 election. There's stuff in the present report to help with that. Further investigations from other prosecutors who are currently following up on the redacted parts of the report will help even more.

Russia probably shouldn't be the main thing we run on, but it'll be among the things worth bringing up. "Elizabeth Warren cares about you; Donald Trump cares about Vladimir Putin" will be a nice kind of subsidiary message. I look forward to using it in to win a vote where we don't need to get 67%, and which isn't held in Mitch McConnell's lair. 

Wednesday, April 17, 2019

The strategic power of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Since I like to tell my political friends about insidery Pelosi-type stuff where I feel I can provide new information, I don't end up discussing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez much. She plays the outside game. And she plays it so well.

She has an amazingly varied political skillset that we don't have anywhere else -- social media ability, strategic acumen in asking questions during congressional investigations, and a sense for how to move the Overton window leftward. Her early advocacy for higher taxes helped to bring Sanders' similarly large income tax increase and Warren's especially interesting wealth tax within the frame of legitimate discourse.

She can do this because she's in a district where Democrats win 75%-80% of the presidential vote share. Republicans can depress her poll numbers nationally -- which they're doing with constant Fox News attacks -- and she'll still win her district comfortably every time.

I like the fact that she's taking so much right-wing lightning and not running for President. Having a Congressional lightning rod sticking up to where Presidential candidates are getting zapped less often is nice!

It's the same way I like seeing Republican media still shooting at Hillary. She won't be running again! Gentlemen, keep wasting your ammunition on a non-candidate. And perhaps when you're beaten in 2020 by someone you should've been shooting at instead, that will be Hillary's strange revenge against those who hated her.

Rumor has it that AOC has attracted a Republican challenger for 2020, who wants to run on a pro-ICE line in the 50% Hispanic district. I hope Republicans donate heavily. Waste your money too, gentlemen. Maybe we'll beat the Senators you should've donated to, and pass the wealth tax. Don't worry, it'll cost you a little less after you wasted that money.

It seems that right-wing media has made its people hate her, while left-wing media still hasn't gotten the message all the way out to its people yet. So to all those of you sharing AOC memes: thanks for helping. 

Thursday, March 28, 2019

Some SDNY speculation after Mueller

Plausible-optimistic speculation is that instead of indicting Trump himself, Mueller simply passed the investigations on to other prosecutors. If one of them is SDNY, the office that got Michael Cohen, this could really have the feel of a movie script.

SDNY is where Preet Bharara used to work (and where he won 85 consecutive insider trading cases). He was prosecuting Prevezon, a Russian mafia-linked corporation, for a $200 million money-laundering fine under the Magnitsky Act. Then the Trump Administration fired him. With the prosecution disrupted, Prevezon settled for a mere $6 million fine, as their attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya was delighted to announce.

It was Veselnitskaya, a former Soviet counterintelligence officer, and a translator who met with Manafort, Kushner, and Donald Jr in Trump Tower during the campaign to talk about the Magnitsky Act and about "dirt on Clinton". Trump Tower is geographically within the Southern District of New York.

So, that's a lot to absorb if you haven't heard it before. But here's the upshot. SDNY is famous for being ferocious. How do you think they feel about having Bharara knocked off a case against the Russian mafia, and having to settle for $6M out of $200M? I can't imagine they're too happy about it.

As it happens, the apparent quid pro quo that got their superstar fired and lost them the case was negotiated within their jurisdiction. So maybe it's for the best that Mueller didn't bring any indictments. Someone less constrained and more furious might have said to him, "This one is ours."

Thursday, February 28, 2019

Eulogy for my father

My father died in January of this year. This is the eulogy I read at his funeral, about a month ago.

Achintya Kumar Sinhababu was born in a tiny village called Kadakuli, in the Indian province of West Bengal. The name translates to “Muddy Road”, and the total population was probably under a hundred. Much of his family still lives there – we’re the only ones who live in America. They’re having a funeral for him there too now, with hundreds of people from surrounding villages in attendance.

Apart from knowing that he was born in the early 1950s, we aren’t sure about the date or even the year of his birth. Back in those days, people used to write down inaccurate birthdates to get extra rations from the government. But the modern world is full of forms that require you to claim a birthdate, so April 3 1951 is what he used.

If you met my father in the last few years, you probably knew him simply as a sweet old retired man, which is indeed who he was. But since you might not know as much about his journey from that poor village in India to being a top research scientist in America, that’s what I want to spend some time telling you about.

Those of us who are born in the US take it for granted that we’ll be able to go to high school. But many people on the village didn’t have any education beyond elementary school, and India was poor enough back then that high school had to be paid for privately. Fortunately, my dad had stellar test scores in junior high, and my grandfather used those scores to convince the headmaster of a boarding school some distance away to admit him for free.

Despite coming from a poorer background than many of his fellow students, Dad kept doing well academically and soon got a reputation as the smartest kid in the class. Only two meals a day were provided at the high school, and during hard times back home he had trouble getting enough money from the family for a third. But because of how well he was doing in class, wealthier students were happy to trade their food to him for tutoring.

In high school, Dad discovered chemistry, the focus of his work for the rest of his life. He told me a month before he died that the one thing he always had was that he understood the atom better than anyone else. And that’s how he achieved success in life – understanding chemistry from the atoms up.

He did well enough on the exams at the end of high school to win a scholarship to Presidency College – the most prestigious university in the state and one of the most prestigious in all of India. From there, he was accepted to do his Masters degree at IIT Kanpur, a top Indian science and engineering school. At the next level, American universities started to get interested. After sending out applications to places that didn’t insist on charging application fees, because he didn’t have the money to pay, he was invited to do a PhD at the University of Iowa.

Right before he went to Iowa, he married a girl from a village a short distance away.  Mom’s mom had been going to the temple and praying that Dad would marry her daughter. Grandma was delighted, and it also turned out very well for my brother, my sister, and I that they got married.

So after setting up in Des Moines, Dad went home to bring his wife along with with him. It must have been bewildering for Mom – a girl from an Indian village, going straight into an Iowa winter. She had to learn her English in America. We don't really have any pictures from back then, because Mom and Dad didn’t have enough money for a camera.

In 1980, Dad got his PhD and was offered a postdoc at the University of Kansas. He would finally have enough money to start a family, so that’s when I come into existence. It’s also when there’s enough money to buy a camera, so we have more pictures starting around then. Robin is born in 1983.

Dad raised us with an immigrant’s sense of the amazing possibility ahead of us in America. To him, America was the land of opportunity, the place where he could rise to levels of success that weren’t really possible in India. He wanted us to work hard and succeed in the amazing new world ahead of us. He still tried to teach us some of the best things of the old country – we watched the 94-part Indian TV series of the Mahabharat, the great Indian epic. But the overall cultural direction was forward into America. We learned baseball, not cricket. Dad was a big fan of Westerns. He really liked High Noon and its iconic theme song.

When he wasn’t at home, Dad was off in the lab doing science. Since Dad being amazing at chemistry is what’s driving this whole story, I want to tell a little science story to help you understand that.

This is from when Dad was a postdoc, working in the lab at the University of Kansas, trying to answer the questions chemistry researchers are supposed to answer. He was researching a reaction that was important to industrial chemists, who were trying to set it up in factories to make a lot of some useful molecule. A problem they often run into is that their reactions only make a small amount of the molecule, and make a lot of waste. With the reaction Dad was researching, Kansas, an input molecule kept reacting with itself, leading to lots of waste products which happened to smell terrible.

Dad got the idea that the surface of silica gel had the right structure to hold the input molecule apart from other molecules of its kind when the reaction was started. Separated from each other, the input molecules woldn’t react with themselves. Then the reaction would proceed efficiently, without the bad-smelling waste products. I think he could just see this in his scientific imagination as he thought about the molecules. So he put some silica gel in when he did the reaction, and got very little waste. He published a paper on this in the September 1983 volume of the Journal of Organic Chemistry. The title is "Silica gel assisted reductive cyclization of alkoxy-2, .beta.-dinitrostyrenes to alkoxyindoles."

After the paper came out, he went to a conference where two chemists working in industry publicly thanked him for figuring out how to do a clean synthesis of the desired product. One expressed wonder that silica gel, of all things, was the way to make it work. If I understand how Dad figured that out, it’s basically a matter of understanding the atom, working your way up from there to how atoms come together form the surface of silica gel, and then understanding what that surface will do to affect a chemical reaction.

While the actual science was going well, Dad still wasn’t finding the job openings to become a professor like he’d always wanted. So in 1988, he and Mom took me and Robin to Raleigh, North Carolina, where Supriya would soon be born. That’s where he would start working in the pharmaceutical industry for Glaxo, which eventually became Glaxo Wellcome, which eventually became GlaxoSmithKline, which is now called GSK.

Once he got to industry, Dad’s career really took off. He turned his understanding of atoms and molecules to a new and important topic: Drug metabolism, or how to make sure pharmaceuticals do what they’re supposed to in your body. When you take some medicine, it has to be swallowed, survive the stomach acid, get absorbed in the intestine, not be toxic to something else in your body, and then actually do the thing it’s supposed to do. Shaping a molecule so that it could dodge all the stomach enzymes and get absorbed and not be toxic and do its job was the order of business. Dad started out working on that as a pharmaceutical chemist, and later in his career was hired to manage teams of scientists working on those issues for major pharmaceutical and biotech companies.

Those management responsibilities are what brought him from North Carolina to Philadelphia with GlaxoSmithKline, and Philadelphia to the San Francisco Bay area with Genentech. They brought him in to build new groups of scientists working on drug metabolism. And that’s what he did, hiring fast and building big teams of scientists.

After his work with Genentech was finished, Dad retired to Roseville, where many of you know him from. After five decades of hard work, he was finally free to relax. Nature and science were never far away – he’d spend the evenings watching YouTube videos about the animal kingdom and space exploration. I wish he could’ve had many more years of contented evenings like that – it would’ve been a fitting reward for decades of contributing to scientific knowledge. But I don’t think he felt he really needed a reward for that. Figuring out the answers is what a scientist wants to do, for its own sake, and that’s what he did.  

Thursday, January 3, 2019

The Pelosi chronicles

Back in November, I posted a series of stories about Nancy Pelosi's amazing legislative achievements for my Facebook friends. Today Pelosi returns as Speaker. So I thought it would be good to share these stories publicly.

The first of my Nancy Pelosi stories, chronologically speaking, was from the worst time I’ve ever lived through in politics.

It was late 2004. George W. Bush had just been re-elected. Having launched a pointless war that would kill a million people, he turned his attention to privatizing Social Security. As he said two days after winning re-election, “I earned capital in this campaign, political capital. And now I intend to spend it.” Nothing had stopped him before, and what would stop him now?

Pelosi had become House Democratic Leader. Republicans had a 233-202 House majority and unified control of government. Dick Gephardt, the previous Democratic Leader, had sponsored the 2002 Iraq War Resolution, hoping that a forceful pro-war position would help his Presidential campaign. (There’s a lot we need to fix about the Democratic Party. But believe me when I say that it is so much better than back then.) Having gotten their war from Gephardt, Republicans expected to get Social Security privatization from Pelosi.

Privatization would’ve been a policy design horror story. Social Security is one of the most efficiently administrated parts of the federal budget. Money comes in, checks go out, the computer does it, and there isn’t much overhead. Contrast this with the fees people would be paying if they each had to manage a personal Social Security account in the stock market through major financial corporations. And then there’s the large influx of naïve new investors for Wall Street to plunder. One of the lowest-overhead parts of the federal budget would be turned into a giant corporate welfare machine.

More importantly, the whole point of Social Security is to make sure you don’t end up in poverty when you’re an old person who can’t work. We don’t want you being miserable in your old age, no matter whether you’re bad at investing. Turning the program into personally managed investments is the end of that. (There were kludgy solutions like guaranteeing a minimum payout no matter how your stocks did. Economically minded friends will be able to describe and criticize the sort of investment behavior that encourages.)

Republicans weren’t unified on how to pay for the transition costs associated with privatization. Many refused to raise taxes, being Republicans. Some refused to cut benefits, as that was politically toxic with elderly voters. Some refused to run deficits, because back then a few Republicans were still like that.

So despite the Republican majority, any way of funding the plan would require some Democratic votes. Republican leaders knew this. Fortunately, Pelosi did too. Good vote-counting isn’t just knowing how the votes will go now, but how they’ll go if compromises go this way or events go that way. That’s what Pelosi does.

When Republican leaders tried to pressure Democrats into supplying the extra votes for privatization, Pelosi made sure they found united opposition and no willingness to negotiate. The ease with which Republicans got the Iraq War from Gephardt made them expect a Democratic version of Social Security Privatization that they could make slight concessions to for the necessary Democratic votes. Republicans and centrists kept asking Pelosi when the Democratic version of Social Security privatization was going to come out. Her answer from spring of 2005 was: “Never. Is never good enough for you?”

Privatization did have one Democratic supporter for a little while – Congressman Allen Boyd from Florida. I don’t know what Pelosi did to him to make him stop. But after he retired and became a lobbyist, he became a top source for quotes about how awful Pelosi is. This is why I get so frustrated with lefty types who dislike Pelosi. You don’t even know how much your enemies hate her for crushing them.

Pelosi’s strategy killed privatization. Republicans didn’t have the votes within their caucus because they couldn’t agree on the funding. Because Pelosi had held the caucus together, Republicans couldn’t get the votes from Democrats. Knowing they’d lose, Republican leaders didn’t even bring the bill to the House floor. Major initiatives usually die in the Senate because of a filibuster or the lower degree of control leadership has over Senators, but Pelosi killed Social Security Privatization so hard it couldn’t even be voted on in the House.

Many of my friends see Trump’s election in 2016 as the worst political event in their lives. For me, Bush’s re-election in 2004 was bigger. We were in the depths of a giant war, and Republicans had won an election on it. I’ve enjoyed being your Optimism Guy for the past two years. But I couldn’t have done it back then, as the only future I could see was war everywhere and American politics spiraling into endless horror. I can do it now partly because in that darkest moment, Nancy suddenly destroyed Social Security privatization.

***


It's occurred to me that the many folks who got into Democratic politics during the Trump Era may not sufficiently appreciate Nancy Pelosi because they don't know the old stories. I should tell you how Pelosi turned the Democrats into a party that favored withdrawal from Iraq.

Pelosi had always opposed the Iraq War. In 2002, she voted against the war resolution. In 2005, she wanted to push for withdrawal, while fellow Democrats Rahm Emanuel and Steny Hoyer thought it was a better strategy to continue with the "we support the war but don't like how Bush is doing it" line with which John Kerry had lost in 2004.

Pelosi turned to her political ally Jack Murtha, an ex-Marine with enough Vietnam medals to cover much of his barrel chest. Murtha had voted for the war, but had misgivings. So Pelosi asked him to sponsor the withdrawal resolution. He gave a big speech on the floor of the House and was attacked heavily by right-wing media... but in mainstream circles, it played well. Democrats who wanted withdrawal but were nervous about being tarred as unpatriotic were willing to fall in line behind the decorated war hero. It made withdrawal acceptable and shifted the whole party.

By the 2007-2008 primary, basically every Democrat wanted to get out of Iraq. We were far from 2003-2004 when Howard Dean was seen as extreme for criticizing the war. Iraq War opposition was actually more prominent on the Republican side (Ron Paul!) than Iraq War support on the Democratic side.

Pelosi has bad favorability ratings for the reasons that successful legislative leaders are going to have bad national ratings. They do the dirty legislative work of pulling mean tricks to pass and block things, and they need to win elections only in their own district. So it's easy to attack them and they can just take it. They get used in attack ads, but anyone you swap Pelosi for will get smeared by Fox News and Breitbart and used in attacks the same way.

The thing Pelosi is most amazing at is wrangling votes, and I have some good stories to share about that. But this story demonstrates the Pelosi approach to PR. She understands that the point is to generate good PR for people and causes who need it, not for herself.

***

The most triumphant of the Nancy Pelosi stories is about how she passed Obamacare for the second time, when everyone thought it was doomed.

The first time, she had to make concessions to Bart Stupak's bloc of anti-abortion House Democrats. She knew that the Senate would pass a more pro-choice bill, and it soon did. The plan was to compromise the bills in a relatively pro-choice way before pushing the final version back through both chambers. (America has trouble passing major social welfare programs largely because our system requires cumbersome stuff like this.)

But then Ted Kennedy died. A Republican won the election to replace him... in Massachusetts. This left too few Democrats to break the filibuster for the compromise version. So the House needed to pass the Senate bill. It differed from the House bill in all kinds of controversial ways including abortion. Nobody thought the votes were there.

Nobody except Pelosi. She said she'd find the votes, and she found them. Jonathan Cohn knows the story best, so I'll turn things over to him. It starts with the seemingly cataclysmic Massachusetts Senate election:

"On the night of the election, prominent House Democrats Barney Frank and Anthony Weiner told MSNBC they thought health care reform was effectively dead. According to senior Democratic aides, Pelosi figured that Massachusetts left her with a core of only about 180 Democrats sure to vote with her. She’d have to pick up the rest from a group that was divided among themselves.

One of Pelosi’s first moves was an appeal for calm. Take a breath, she told her members, and don’t say anything publicly that might set off a stampede. In caucus meetings, she listened—and then, ever so slowly, she started to push. “After Massachusetts, there was a big Democratic caucus, everybody was trashing health care, and you left the room thinking, ‘This is just never going to happen,’” one senior Democratic aide recalls. “And then, the next caucus, she’s talking about how we’re going to do it. ... I thought there was no way in hell.”

But, if Pelosi projected confidence, she had a major worry: Back at the White House, a debate over whether to proceed with comprehensive reform was playing out one more time. Rahm Emanuel was, once again, proposing to find a quick deal on a smaller bill that would insure just kids. And he wasn’t just talking it up internally. He’d discussed the idea with members of Congress, and, in February, The Wall Street Journal published a story about it. Whether Rahm was merely exploring the option or actively shopping it, Pelosi thought all the talk of an “eensy weensy bill,” as she called it, was undermining her efforts. She told the administration she needed Rahm to cease and desist.

The internal debate was no secret at the White House, and, particularly in the first two weeks after Massachusetts, many administration officials assumed that health reform really was “Dead, DEAD DEAD,” as one put it to me in an e-mail. Officials also had their own frustrations with Pelosi: Once the smoke had cleared, all sides realized the only way forward was to have the House pass the Senate bill, and then amend the Senate bill using the reconciliation process. But Pelosi kept insisting the Senate go first, something administration officials thought unworkable as politics and policy. Pelosi had asked Obama and Reid not to pressure her publicly, lest they alienate more members; they were complying. But, privately, many administration officials feared Pelosi wouldn’t budge because she couldn’t—that votes in the House would never materialize.

But, every time this debate reached the Oval Office, the president came down in the same place: He was elected to do the big things, and he wasn’t ready to give up. He told his cabinet, apparently referring to a Tom Toles cartoon in The Washington Post, that they were on the two-yard line—and he didn’t want to settle for a field goal. At a town-hall meeting, he gave an unscripted, 20-minute soliloquy on the importance of reform; at a House Republican retreat in Baltimore, he showcased Republican obstructionism and demonstrated the deep, intricate knowledge of policy that he memorably lacked three years before, at that Las Vegas SEIU forum... Pelosi used the time to work on her members, while House staff—coordinating with their White House and Senate counterparts—quietly figured out how to write a bill that would fix the Senate package within the intricate rules of reconciliation. Reid worked his caucus, urging them to give Pelosi time and making sure 51 members would be ready to approve the reconciliation bill when the time came.

There were familiar political hurdles, like the tax on benefits, which had become the critical piece for winning CBO validation of cost control. Obama agreed to scale it back, and then told the unions they'd have to take it. In the end, once again, it came down to abortion, because the Senate’s language was less restrictive than what Stupak had won. John Dingell reminded Stupak, to whom he’d been a mentor, how important reform was. Stupak relented, accepting an executive order that merely affirmed existing bans on taxpayer-funded abortions. By this time, House leadership and the White House were working as a team. Insiders from both camps observed that Obama and Pelosi seemed to be reinforcing one another—and, together, conjuring up a political miracle.

The final weekend played out like a microcosm of the debate: Conservative protesters descended upon Capitol Hill, marching on the lawn and through the House office buildings, hurling racial and homophobic epithets, and—in one case—saliva at Democrats. But the Democrats responded by closing ranks. When Pelosi gave her closing speech, the entire caucus rose in ovation. “We will be joining those who established Social Security, Medicare, and now, tonight, health care for all Americans,” she proclaimed. As Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of health and human services, watched from the speaker’s box and, nearby, Nancy-Ann DeParle hoisted her son onto her lap, electronic scoreboards tracked the vote—214, 215, and, finally, 216. A spontaneous cheer erupted from the House floor: “Yes we can! Yes we can!”