Friday, August 22, 2008

Was Gorbachev right?

On August 19, the New York Times published an essay by former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev on the West's—and particularly the Western media's—reaction to the Georgian crisis. He writes:
The news coverage has been far from fair and balanced, especially during the first days of the crisis. Tskhinvali was in smoking ruins and thousands of people were fleeing—before any Russian troops arrived. Yet Russia was already being accused of aggression; news reports were often an embarrassing recitation of the Georgian leader’s deceptive statements.

It is still not quite clear whether the West was aware of Mr. Saakashvili’s plans to invade South Ossetia, and this is a serious matter. What is clear is that Western assistance in training Georgian troops and shipping large supplies of arms had been pushing the region toward war rather than peace.
Of course, these are controversial words, and given what seemed to be the grossly disproportionate nature of the Russian response to the Georgian situation, Gorbachev seems at some level to be defending the indefensible. But judging from the reactions on the New York Times's website, the biggest problem with Gorbachev's argument from the American perspective is that he actually has a point.

While the Russian response indeed presents a variety of ethical problems from the perspective of just war theory, the fact remains that the Georgian government and its president, Mikheil Saakashvili, precipitated the conflict by attacking first. One can certainly argue that the Georgians could have been goaded or tricked by Russia into attacking, and this may have been the case. Nevertheless, it is the responsibility of any government to avoid senseless wars that it cannot ever hope to win, and even Georgia's allies in Europe are increasingly seeing Saakashvili's misadventure in South Ossetia as either grossly misinformed or galactically incompetent. The reluctance of American media to broach this topic is profoundly problematic, and Gorbachev is right in pointing it out.

Moreover, Gorbachev's column also reiterates the point that the American policy toward Russia has not gotten over the Cold War, ranging from being blatantly patronizing on the one hand (e.g., forcing American missile defense down the Russian's throats as if they didn't exist) to being unreflectively alarmist on the other (e.g., seeing Russia as a rogue nation bent on destabilizing the world). The New York Times today reports that the Russian bear is once again keeping Washington policy-makers up at nights.

Again, the United States may be perfectly warranted in responding as it has. Nevertheless, making Russia into a pariah state and placing it into the category of Iran, Syria, and others also seems to be something of a self-fulfilling prophecy that doesn't give us many constructive policy options.
“Outrage is not a policy,” said Strobe Talbott, who was deputy secretary of state under President Clinton and is now the president of the Brookings Institution. “Worry is not a policy. Indignation is not a policy. Even though outrage, worry and indignation are all appropriate in this situation, they shouldn’t be mistaken for policy and they shouldn’t be mistaken for strategy.”

Thursday, August 21, 2008

College education vs. certification

College is expensive, and many students, educated at an ever-expanding network of traditional colleges, technical schools, online programs, and diploma mills, don't receive an education worth the extravagant amount of money that they pay. At least, this is what Charles Murray wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week.

Murray's solution: Certification exams to level the playing field, allowing students from a variety of educational backgrounds to verify that they have achieved the standard set of knowledge and skills necessary to participate in the economy.

For a neoliberal like Murray, who researches for the American Enterprise Institute, this is a shocking admission. No less than Milton Friedman rejected the idea of certification barriers as being economically inefficient, because they artificially restrict the supply of certified workers (e.g., lawyers) to a select few who have the wherewithal to cross the certification barriers. And by restricting supply, certification both raises the costs of those services and often forces those who are have not been certified but who are otherwise perfectly able to provide those services out of the market altogether.

Murray's point, of course, is not that certification is perfectly efficient but rather that it is more efficient than the experience of earning—or failing to earn—a bachelor's degree, which now serves as a highly variable (and, for Murray, often misleading) basic qualification for the job market.

Higher education does vary in quality, as do students. But does that mean that we need a certification system? Should the certification process be company-specific, industry-specific, or somehow controlled by the state? And what constitutes "certification" in the first place? Murray favors a nationalized approach:
No technical barriers stand in the way of evolving toward a system where certification tests would replace the BA. Hundreds of certification tests already exist, for everything from building code inspectors to advanced medical specialties. The problem is a shortage of tests that are nationally accepted, like the CPA exam.

But when so many of the players would benefit, a market opportunity exists. If a high-profile testing company such as the Educational Testing Service were to reach a strategic decision to create definitive certification tests, it could coordinate with major employers, professional groups and nontraditional universities to make its tests the gold standard. A handful of key decisions could produce a tipping effect. Imagine if Microsoft announced it would henceforth require scores on a certain battery of certification tests from all of its programming applicants. Scores on that battery would acquire instant credibility for programming job applicants throughout the industry.
Yet, in making a proposal for nationalization, Murray is violating his own neoliberal logic. The strength of neoliberal economics is its recognition that the marketplace, not the state, needs to be in control of a people's economic destiny. Creating a series of nationalized tests would not reduce the educational bureaucracy but merely re-create it under a national banner. What is more, the decision as to what constitutes certification and education is removed from the hands of individuals and companies, and this presents significant problems in a diverse country that can't decide whether or not something like evolution should be taught.

What if one group objects to a particular body of knowledge as being immoral? What if a company's needs are different from the rest of the industry, requiring a more complex set of examinations? How will certification standards change? What would this mean for education itself, once it is pursued merely as a set of "skills" instead of an intrinsic pursuit of a well-rounded life? And how can we quantify "transferable skills" like organizational abilities, the ability to learn, or interpersonal sensitivity?

In addition, in citing Microsoft as an example, he ignores the ways that many companies, particularly in the technology sector, already police themselves through arduous interview processes and certification standards for their own products. This is the grassroots effort that a neoliberal would admire, because it preserves the freedom of individuals to choose how—or whether—to prepare themselves for work and of companies to decide what those qualifications should be.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Drafting Caroline Kennedy?

Yesterday, Michael Moore published an open letter to Caroline Kennedy, daughter of the late president and chair of Barack Obama's vice presidential search committee, beseeching her to "pull a Cheney" by tapping herself as veep.

For Moore, an Obama-Kennedy ticket is a deeply emotional issue, tied to his own populist vision of America. The other candidates—Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, and Governor Tim Kaine of Virginia—are too old school, and too responsible for voting for "that war," to be worthy of Obama's idealistic potential. In contrast, Kennedy, the last surviving link to the Camelot that was the Kennedy years, gives the ticket the idealistic power-punch Moore believes it needs.
What Obama needs is a vice presidential candidate who is NOT a professional politician, but someone who is well-known and beloved by people across the political spectrum; someone who, like Obama, spoke out against the war; someone who has a good and generous heart, who will be cheered by the rest of the world; someone whom we've known and loved and admired all our lives and who has dedicated her life to public service and to the greater good for all.
But there are several concerns with Moore's proposal:
  1. Kennedy has to want to be vice president, and as Moore acknowledges, she has scrupulously avoided political life.
  2. Obama is running for the presidency of the United States of America, not the United States of Michael Moore, which means that he is going to need to find a way to broaden his ticket. Of course, Moore's appeal may also reflect the concerns of the American Left, who have become worried that Obama may not be the liberal messiah they have been hoping for.
  3. The Obama campaign is already a "dream ticket," regardless of whom he puts on the ballot. Putting Kennedy on a ticket that is already laden with the hopes and ideals of a generation would push it over the edge and run the risk of transforming Obama into another Adlai Stevenson. (Who, as the Clintons think, he may already be.)
  4. Obama's choice should be a pragmatic decision that helps address his weaknesses.
All of these concerns are why the Vegas odds-makers aren't even mentioning Kennedy on their lists.

Personally, I think that the top three are all weak, though Tim Kaine—a change-oriented, moderate Catholic with some (but not much) executive experience—is probably the best of the three.

Though, I'm biased: My pick, since February, has been Bill Richardson.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Obama and McCain on a debate

After a marathon session in which he viewed all 47 debates from both the Democratic and Republican primaries, the Atlantic's James Fallows has handicapped the fall debating season. In a general sense, here are the important conclusions one can draw from the piece:

First, the candidates' desire for exposure and the news media's desire for ratings created a viscious circle that created a carnivalesque atmosphere. Because neither party had an incumbent or an "heir apparent"—who would have both the incentive and the authority to keep primary debates to a minimum—all of the candidates in both parties were scrambling to get into as many forums as possible, both on network and cable news and on less traditional stages like Logo. And because there were so many competing programs, the journalists who served as debate moderators constantly had to push the envelope in their questions. Money quote:
The amazing part of this process was the sheer indignity of it. All eight of these people [the Democratic candidates] had been public officials. Odds were that one among them would be the next president of the United States. Yet they compliantly held up their hands like grade-schoolers or contestants on Fear Factor. While candidates are subjected to almost everything during a long primary season and are used to skepticism and outright hostility from the press, serving as game-show props represented something new.
Second, while Obama is a far weaker debater than he is an orator—“You’ve got to remember, he is a constitutional-law professor” says Newton Minow, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission who had once hired Obama as a summer associate while a partner at the law firm Sidley Austin—he can get better and sharper given enough time. Indeed, Fallows points to 2004, in which Obama was relaxed and sharp during his Senate race against Alan Keyes, as showing Obama's potential. Money quote:
The Obama of 2004 didn’t spend much time on his now-familiar “new age of politics” theme (or need to). If asked about steel-industry jobs, tax rates, or the death penalty, he would address the specifics of those issues, without bothering to stress the need for Americans to bridge their partisan divides. Every now and then, he would make those larger points—after all, this was six weeks after his famous speech at the Democratic convention about moving past red states and blue states, to the United States of America. But they seemed incidental rather than central.

That previous Obama also sounded very little like a professor. With dismissive ease, he reeled off rebuttal points and identified errors as if he had been working in a courtroom rather than a classroom all his life. Keyes had said that Jesus Christ would not have voted for Obama. Obama was asked for his response: “Well, you know, my first reaction was, I actually wanted to find out who Mr. Keyes’s pollster was, because if I had the opportunity to talk to Jesus Christ, I’d be asking something much more important than this Senate race. I’d want to know whether I was going up, or down.”

All in all, Obama seemed in his element and having fun—two things no one has detected about his debate performances this past year.
Third, the presidential debates seem to be as much about style as they are about the ability to make arguments. This is a subtle point that Fallows seems to miss. Both George W. Bush and Obama made significant changes to their debating style when they entered the presidential race. Fallows notes that Bush was a "silver-tongued Texas politician" as governor who, as president, seemed to be afflicted by some sort of aphasia, in which he seemed to be consciously dumbing-down his debating style, perhaps to make his far-more skilled opponents look arrogant and elitist in the eyes of his working-class, Christian base. Similarly, Obama's debating has become much more serious as a presidential candidate, perhaps because he has framed his candidacy in such a serious, civic republican way.

Fallows believes that Obama has to come out like the relaxed firebrand that he was in 2004 to succeed in this year's debates, but this may backfire because it would play against his "brand." It may be better for him to play it cool, find ways to sharpen his answers, and rely on the fact that McCain is probably going to fare worse in the debates than he will.

Monday, August 18, 2008

The Daily Show

This weekend, the New York Times ran an article by Michiko Kakutani on Jon Stewart and "The Daily Show," noting a 2007 survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press that found he was tied with Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Brian Williams, and Anderson Cooper as the fourth most admired newscaster in America.

Which should come as a surprise, since he isn't technically a newscaster, or even a journalist.

One can see the success and cultural importance of "The Daily Show" as signaling the death of serious journalism and the death of the American public discourse. Of course, there's some merit to these concerns, and Stewart would probably share them. But one can also see "The Daily Show" as reflective of a broader trend in cultural production and engagement. The state of American public discourse, in this view, isn't any worse than it has been in the past, but is merely changing, and in many ways "The Daily Show" can be viewed as a constructive response to these changes.

I say this for three reasons:

First, "The Daily Show," unlike the emotivistic exchanges that often dominate American popular culture, can be seen as operating from the same standpoint of humane cultural criticism that has been central to Western intellectual life since Montaigne. For example, "for all its eviscerations of the administration, 'The Daily Show' is animated not by partisanship but by a deep mistrust of all ideology," Kakutani writes. "A sane voice in a noisy red-blue echo chamber, Mr. Stewart displays an impatience with the platitudes of both the right and the left and a disdain for commentators who, as he made clear in a famous 2004 appearance on CNN’s 'Crossfire,' parrot party-line talking points and engage in knee-jerk shouting matches."

Stewart's commitment to constructive discourse—a commitment that allows him to say "why I grieve but why I don’t despair"—reflects a sentiment that Montaigne would share.

Second, "The Daily Show" reflects the ways that information needs are changing. "The Daily Show" is not a news program but a program in which information is discussed and made understandable. That "The Daily Show" is understood to be the only news source of many young Americans is a problem. But the program assumes that people already know the basic headlines; it fact, it wouldn't succeed as a comedy show if it didn't. Rather, it makes its money by condensing the echo chamber of contemporary media—from 15 TiVos, no less—into an intelligible, meaningful half-hour.

Third, "The Daily Show" shows that humor is a tool for the constructive engagement of social problems. Of course, laughter can sometimes be deconstructive and cynical, designed to humiliate the other or mask a sense of destructive bitterness. But Stewart's program works because it uses humor to ask questions about the constant stream of cultural production in which American life is situated. But Stewart's questions are more subtle and are interested in finding a place to stand within the confusion. Cynical humor laughs at the darkness, constructive humor seeks to find a foothold to climb out of it.