MORE ON EISENHOWER

At the risk of being "presentist," it seems to me plausible that the best historical parallel for the current election is probably the controversy over the Korean war in 1952. President Truman had outlined an expansive national security strategy in NSC 68 (and later in NSC 141, just before he left office), one that defined American national commitments to fight Soviet communism in terms that were destined to be very expensive in the long term, much like President Bush. Truman's domestic policies had also left large deficits and had created worries about the fiscal stability of the country in the long term, much as President Bush has.

As Stephen Ambrose puts it, Eisenhower's political task was to be as ambiguous as possible on the issue of the war while persuading the public that he would do something about it. He had to appeal to that part of his hard-core Republican base who believed that Truman's policy of containment was not aggressive enough. He also had to appeal to that part of the public that wanted to pull out of Korea. Recall that many of the soldiers in Korea were national guardsmen who were quietly leading private lives before the outbreak of the war; criticisms abounded that the troops were not well armed or trained, and many critics of the administration worried that the war was unwinnable and should simply be abandoned. In 1951 and 1952, "the majority of Americans . . .considered entering the war a mistake, wanted to pull American troops out of Korea as rapidly as posisble, and supported numerous proposals to achieve a negotiated peace" (from Ralph Levering's The Public and American Foreign Policy 1918 - 1978, 102, quoted in Richard Melason, "The Foundations of Eisenhower's Foreign Policy: Continuity, Community and Consensus," in R. Melanson and D. Mayers, Reevaluating Eisenhower (1987), p.41).

Two weeks from election day, Eisenhower made a campaign promise that he would "go to Korea," a promise that Stephen Ambrose argues "practically guaranteed the result" in the election. Ambrose writes:

The response was enthusiastic. The nation's number-one hero, her greatest soldier and most experienced statesman, was promising to give his personal attention to the nation's number-one problem. It was reassuring, it was exciting, it was exactly what people wanted to hear. He had not, it is important to note, made any promises about what he would do in Korea.

(For the quote, and for references for the analysis in the first two paragraphs, see Ambrose, Eisenhower, 569-570, as well as the Melanson piece cited above.)

The war was a "divisive, increasingly partisan domestic political issue" (Melanson 41). Charges of treason and "appeasement" flew from the halls of the Senate and from the press. Senator Joseph McCarthy argued that the foreign policy of the Truman administration was part of a nefarious plot "to diminish the United States in world affairs, to weaken us military, to confuse our spirit with talk of surrender in the Far East, and to impair our will to resist evil" (America's Retreat from Victory (1951), 171). And recall that McCarthy had some electoral success during this period as well; I'm not sure if his book was as much of a best-seller as those of his contemporary heirs, but I suppose that that's beside the point.

Of course, John Kerry is no Dwight Eisenhower. But neither is George Bush. And public support for the war in Iraq is still stronger than support for the war in Korea was in 1952. At the very least, though, two lessons can be drawn from the 1952 campaign:

1) Arguing about war during presidential campaigns is what Americans do. Just as denunciations of war critics are part of the political landscape, so are the war critics themselves. It may be one of the disabilities of democracies during war time that they do not speak with a united voice, but any policy that presupposes a united voice is in reality an attempt to short-circuit the electoral process, or -- more likely -- to tilt it in favor of the incumbent. Any successful foreign policy in a democracy must reckon with domestic critics. According to Melanson and other standard accounts, after taking office Eisenhower's policy consisted in the "New Look" (a reduction in troop strength coupled with a reliance on American air power and atomic arsenal) combined with increased funding for CIA operations abroad. The virtue of the second was, of course, that it took place outside of the public eye and was relatively cheap and effective, at least in the short term. The conditions of publicity that obtain after Watergate and the Iran-contra scandals may preclude reliance on the second option for the next president, but it is possible that large-scale deployment of troops may be both counterproductive and unsustainable in the long run. This is clearly one of the major dilemmas for contemporary foreign-policy making.

2) A president or presidential candidate who can credibly claim that he will devote full attention to the war effort may, in fact, provide the public with something that they desire. President Bush has not done this. Both in the extent of his long periods away from the White House and in his unwillingness to engage the public directly, Bush has shown himself to be relatively aloof from the pressing issues of the war. A surprise trip to Iraq to serve Thanksgiving dinner is not going to cut it. Now it could be that the administration looks at the contemporary media landscape through the lens of the particular public relations difficulties of their incumbent and has decided that more exposure will only hurt Bush. If Kerry is smart, though, he will attempt to persuade the public that he will be more personally engaged in the pressing issue of the war, or at least that he will be an improvement over Bush.

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On Truman's national security strategy and Eisenhower's reactions to it, see Melanson, 51, and C. Pach and E. Richardson, The Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower (1991), 88-9.

NOTE: lightly edited for grammar, 4/10.

For the charge that the President is spending too much time away from the White House, see Josh Marshall here. For a response, see Pejman Yousefzadeh, here.

The fact that modern technology allows you to do your teaching and advising and most of your research from the beach at Waikiki, for example, is not a sufficient counter to critics who would accuse you of neglecting your duties if you were to do so for long periods of time. It's ironic, though, that the same communications revolution that allows for the President to govern from Crawford, in a minimal sense at least, also creates new kinds of constraints on the exercise of power itself. We have a twenty-four hour news cycle and the attendant availability of information, however abstract and unreliable. You might bemoan that fact and try to question the virtue and motives of the creators and transmitters of those news sources (see here, for example). But it strikes me that such complaints are about as effective as complaining that a particular hill creates tactical difficulties in a particular campaign. Yes, Afghanistan is mountainous with lots of caves. Yes, we have a hyperstimulated media culture. Welcome to the policy challenges of the contemporary world.

A BYGONE AGE

The scene is the early stages of the presidential election of 1952. From Stephen Ambrose's 1983 biography of Eisenhower:

[A]t a press conference a reporter asked Truman a loaded question designed to produce an anti-Eisenhower statement. The President refused to comment and sent a recording of the conference to Eisenhower. In thanking him, Eisenhower said he too would do all he could to avoid creating any 'irritation or mutual resentment between us.' Truman replied, 'You can rest assured that no matter what the professional liars and the pathological columnists have to say, you and I understand each other.' (521)

On the other hand, on the campaign trail, in an attempt to appeal to his base in the primaries, vice presidential candidate Richard Nixon "called Stevenson a graduate of Dean Acheson's 'cowardly college of communist containment'" (553).

OTTAWA BANS BABY-WALKERS

When I was about eleven years old, one evening I was sitting at the bottom of the basement stairs, and my little brother appeared in his walker at the top of the stairs. I probably should have closed the door to the stairwell. Todd was very happy to see me -- so happy, in fact, that he thought it would be a good idea to come meet me at the bottom of the stairs. I'll never forget the look of surprise and horror on his face after he took that first step, tumbled down the stairs, and landed head-first on the basement floor. I was stunned and could do nothing. My terrified mother rushed him to the hospital. Aside from some bruises he was fine, but if it weren't for Todd's thick skull (a trait that he seems to have lost in the metaphorical sense, at least), he might have been seriously injured, or worse.

Baby walkers are dangerous. Ottawa has banned them:

Health Canada said studies show baby walkers do not benefit children and "are inherently unsafe."

The department said babies can move at three feet per second in the walkers, and can easily run into furniture or pull appliance cords before parents can react. A U.S. study says that 23,000 children are injured each year in accidents caused by walkers.

The department concludes that baby walkers are regulated by the Hazardous Products Act and therefore may not be imported, sold or advertised in Canada. Inspectors will have the power to seize new or used walkers. Consumers and retailers could face fines of up to $100,000 or six months in jail if found in possession of baby walkers.

I suppose that in the U.S. the baby walker lobby would call such legislation "needless interference with the market in child care products," and pundits would argue that parents shouldn't need the arm of the state to protect them from this product; parents should take more responsibility for their children's welfare, after all. I'm only being slightly facetious. It's all well and good to rail against government regulation in the abstract, but if you're against the regulation of baby walkers, something is wrong with your approach. Or you don't have kids. Or younger brothers and sisters.

I say: thanks, Ottawa. Law can serve as a repository of knowledge. If that knowledge can help save children from injury, then sometimes the market must yield. Parents do not have perfect information about the safety of their children -- how could they? -- and it is unreasonable (and fundamentalist in a market-oriented sort of way) not to help out parents in this regard.

Obviously a much more sophisticated approach to the question of baby-walkers is possible, one that relates tort law (or the threat of lawsuits) to product safety standards and makes do without an outright ban. That's the tack taken in the U.S., I gather. See here, and the CPSC's 2002 termination of rulemaking here (PDF files). I would be a consequentialist here and choose the approach is likely to prevent the most harm. But I see no reason to be against a ban.

AS IF YOU NEEDED ANOTHER REASON

If you need another reason to doubt the credibility of the folks at National Review, look at the Curmudgeonly Clerk's take on their recent hit piece on Arlen Specter.

PRESIDENT PROPOSES TO GUT PERKINS EDUCATIONAL LOANS

This week President Bush proposed to drain the Perkins educational loan program of most of its funding, and no one seems to care. Granted, he plans to use the funds for a "new program," but we'll see what happens with that proposal. Given that he's willing to tank the fiscal outlook in order to give tax breaks to the wealthy, I don't see why he can't just propose adding more job training rather than just shifting funds around and killing existing programs. I suppose it's clear where the administration's priorities are. More later.

PERCY, (P-MONTCLAIR VILLIAGE)

Check it out. It looks like he was appointed, not elected, though. (Thanks to Anita for the link!)

REPLY TO THOMAS

Thomas Nephew responded to my post below with a typically thoughtful post, here. Here are some thoughts that run the risk of being banal, silly, or pedantic (take your pick).

If you're still reading, imagine the following argument:

Person D said statement S

Statement S is indicative of disposition H

Person D has disposition H

Person D is a member of class L

Members of class L have disposition H

Now imagine a political marketing campaign that is designed to reinforce and disseminate the idea expressed in line 5: “Members of class L have attribute H.” The existence of such a campaign gives a premium to the discovery of statements that can take the form found in the first line. I think that you can’t understand any actual example of the publication and dissemination of such arguments without understanding the dynamics of the political marketing campaign itself. By describing these dynamics, Stoller’s piece helps to provide the background context.

Now imagine a hypothetical empirical research program that attempts to categorize the typical kinds of arguments that are made on the web on any given stretch of time. Let’s call such arguments FAE’s, for “Fundamental Attribution Errors” (not to stack the deck or anything!) I would bet that FAE’s make up a large proportion of all arguments found in political blog postings. 15%? 25%? An additional prediction: the proportion of FAE’s will go up during the election season, for two reasons. First, circulating FAE’s is part of the branding effort of both campaigns. Second, as Ken Mehlman has noted recently, the political harnessing of blogs in a particular way -- top-down and focused on daily talking points -- is part of the Bush campaign. Particular FAE’s are likely to be circulated with increasing vigor. One might make the same point about the Kerry campaign, although my sense is that there are decentralizing forces at work on the Dem side to a greater degree than among the Bush / Cheney folks. I could be wrong, though.

As a side note, the same form of argument has been used by the Bush campaign in the context of fake “examinations” of Kerry’s voting record:

Candidate K cast vote C

Vote C is indicative of disposition U

Candidate K has disposition U

It’s pretty easy to unmask the errors in these kinds of statements, both of logic and of fact. Stoller’s piece helps to point out the errors by describing the process of abstraction that the web helps to create and that the political campaigns are helping to multiply on a massive scale. But the dilemma is this: in giving attention to such claims, you’re also part of the process of dissemination (in much the same way as you are part of a branding effort if you wear a Nike shirt while playing basketball). I hate being taken for a sucker, so I try to be careful about my participation in these kinds of communications strategies, although I admit that I’d much rather be a part of them for my side than for the other side.

As a side note, the best blog for descriptions of political branding campaigns is Seeing the Forest. Many of the things that I say above are inspired by posts on that site. Check it out.

TURN IT OFF, THROW IT AWAY

Toddler TV time can cause attention problems.

I feel for folks who find it hard to avoid using the TV as a babysitter. But, by God, the wisest course is still to throw the thing out the window.

Even if that means that you have to go to a neighbor's house (or a bar) to watch the Huskies rule the world.

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE?

Read Fafblog. Via Brad Delong, who, along with my econ-minded colleagues, will, I hope, make me smarter, more modern (in the social-science sort of way) and more well-rounded in general.

EMPIRE

American political institutions are not likely to survive the development of an American empire. This is essentially the warning of Henry Kissinger's final chapter in Does America Need a Foreign Policy?, and it is worth taking seriously. The argument has three elements, as I understand it.

First, empires create incentives for erstwhile allies to band together in opposition against the imperial power. This is partly national self-interest on the part of the would-be opponents. In the long term, then, imperial power creates the conditions for its own weakening on the international stage.

Second, empires suffer from a cognitive problem: they tend to interpret everything that happens at the periphery in the terms available at the center. As Kissinger puts it, foreign policy becomes driven by domestic interests, and this leads to bad foreign policy. (Think about this. One needs to be able to imagine -- to really imagine -- the aftermath of an invasion in order to plan well for war. Faults in planning had to do with an unwillingness to incur the domestic political costs of planning, fights between DOD and State, an ideological naivite about our being greeted as "liberators," and a partisan aversion to serious humanitarian thinking.)

Third, the erosion of foreign restraints on action causes an erosion of domestic restraints on action. It becomes hard to imagine citizen subjection to any law above the law of the stronger, or, its more morally appealing version, the law of harm to one's political enemies and help to one's political friends. And it becomes even harder to restrain one's political passions when they are directed against domestic political opponents. (Calls to nuke Fallujah are ringing in my ears right now, as is the constant barrage of vitriol aimed at "the left" and "leftists" that I struggle to read on a daily basis. If you come from the right, feel free to focus on attacks on "the right" as well. The phenomenon is much the same, although if you're measuring the volume and influence of such vitriol, I would bet that it is tilted against the left. Nothing serious hinges on that claim, though.)

The fact that the U.S. is not a traditional empire is irrelevant here. The question is whether or not the effects of empire are visible.

Collectively, we Americans have had this discussion before, when the U.S. was developing its first empire at the end of the nineteenth century. Then, much of the national discourse was cast in terms that we would find troubling today -- anglo-saxon superiority, the inferiority of darker races, the supposed incompatibility between catholicism and democracy. But one additional area of discussion was whether or not the Constitution "followed the flag," i.e., whether the constitution set limits on what Congress could do in administering the territories. Famously, in Downes v. Bidwell, Justice Harlan argued in dissent that it was dangerous to allow Congress to govern the territory of Puerto Rico in a way contrary to constitutional restraints on its conduct in dealing with states. The precise question had to do with a taxation scheme that Congress could not enact if Puerto Rico were treated as a state, but the general concern that Harlan is evident in the following passage:

This nation is under the control of a written constitution, the supreme law of the land and the only source of the powers which our government, or any branch or officer of it, may exert at any time or at any place. Monarchical and despotic governments, unrestrained by written constitutions, may do with newly acquired territories what this government may not do consistently with our fundamental law. To say otherwise is to concede that Congress may, by action taken outside of the Constitution, engraft upon our republican institutions a colonial system such as exists under monarchical governments. Surely such a result was never contemplated by the fathers of the Constitution. If that instrument had contained a word suggesting the possibility of a result of that character it would never have been adopted by the people of the United States. The idea that this country may acquire territories anywhere upon the earth, by conquest or treaty, and hold them as mere colonies or provinces,-the people inhabiting them to enjoy only such rights as Congress chooses to accord to them,-is wholly inconsistent with the spirit and genius, as well as with the words, of the Constitution. Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 244, 380 (Harlan, dissenting).

The problem for Harlan is that a lack of restraint in the territories will translate into a new form of government at home as well; the U.S. will go from being a country bound by law to being a country exercising imperial power. Lack of restraint abroad will lead to lack of restraint at home.

I don't think that we are at the point yet where our aggressive use of force abroad has engendered the internal weaknesses that lead to imperial downfall. I do think that the question is worth raising, however.

THANKS

Thanks to Jacob, Thomas, Mr. Poon, Venkat, Chris, Charles, and everyone else for their good wishes!

TIME-SHAVING

Thomas Nephew has issued a challenge: write the best letter protesting time-shaving, and he'll give you $25. Cool.

Does anyone know of any studies on the relationship between productivity gain statistics and time-shaving practices?

FILLING UP YOUR HEAD WITH NONSENSE

I sure hope that my memory is not finite, because I now know about more stupid things said, printed, or published in the past year than I ever wanted to know. I can't remember phone numbers, but I know who made what gaffe, when. This is the intellectual equivalent of all those advertising ditties that you absorbed watching countless hours of television during your childhood. double your pleasure, double your fun, with doublemint, doublemint, doublemint gum.

In the final chapter of Does America Need of Foreign Policy? (great book, btw), Kissinger notes that the next challenge with respect to information technology is education in analysis. We've solved the collection problem. Now we just need to know how to stand toward the information we've collected.

Here's one excellent bit of analysis. In some respects I agree with David Adesnik, though ("yeah, whatever").

My new rule for dealing with the on-line world:

The basic unit of analysis is not the isolated statement.

Statements are irrelevant outside of a) the arguments and b) dialogues of which they are a part. These dialogues include reactions, responses, retractions, apologies, and clarifications.

PS: Of course the rule is not "new" in any meaningful sense of the word. It's related to the concept of speech-acts as discussed, for example, by Habermas. Thank God that references to isolated silly statements haven't crowded out my (already dim) recollection of books that I read in college and grad school. . .

PPS: Well, post-update, I agree with David less, but, so what? Look: if you want to use an isolated comment to prove something broader than the fact that there was an isolated comment somewhere, you're overreaching and fundamentally silly, in my view. I have not been immune from the temptation to engage in this kind of facile criticism myself, but, frankly, after returning home from a wonderful weekend in SF and realizing that I had seven gazillion unread blog posts (according to Bloglines), and no desire to read any but a fraction of them, I have less tolerance for all of this stuff. And Matt Stoller's article is better than anything I'd say, anyway. Read it.