So a brief pause while I moved halfway across the country ended up expanding into a half-year absence from the good work of my idle mumbling.
Such now comes to an end! I’m working on two pieces I hope to have up tonight or tomorrow. First, a discussion of what it means for Revolutions to “fail”, and secondly a few thoughts on Ukraine, electoral systems, and ‘ethnic’ divisions.
The internets are aflutter about the revival of fortunes for disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner. Not too long ago, his long clear ambitions of becoming Mayor of New York seemed to have gone up in the flames of a sex scandal. In the Viking Dutchman’s opinion, it wasn’t the sexting, but the breathtaking stupidity of how he handled it that displayed poor judgement. Yet now he’s leading the pack in polling for the Democratic Primary, and with no real GOP contenders in the wing, the Primary is all but a proxy general election.
But I think the real story is not Weiner, but his chief opponent, Christine Quinn. Quinn is currently City Council Speaker, and is closely tied to the Bloomberg administration. She was pivotal in getting city laws changed to allow Bloomberg to serve a third term.
The Viking Dutchman doesn’t much care for Bloomberg. He used to, back before he caught the Urbanism bug and gained a real appreciation for just what impact Bloomberg was really having. Any number of things in his record have contributed to Bloomberg’s poor reputation among city Democrats.
But it’s the fiddling the electoral laws to suit a specific politicians advantage that pisses me off most, so I’m choosing to interpret this situation as a voter revolt against electoral law abuse.
This piece, hits one of my buttons. McArdle tries to make the argument that 2016 will very likely be a poor year for Democrats. There are very sound reasons why someone might think that. Personally my opinion is we don’t yet have the kind of data we’d need to make any remotely useful predictions, especially with the unusually large number of variables at stake (economic recovery, ideological friction in the GOP, etc…). I have long been a devotee of the unpopular theory that a Hillary Clinton nomination, even an unsuccessful Hillary ATTEMPT at the nomination, would be a disaster for the party, but that’s a different post for a different day.
But what bugs me is the history argument:
Since the Civil War, only two Democratic presidents have been succeeded by another Democrat. Both of them–FDR and JFK–accomplished this by dying in office.
These kinds of arguments always remind me of this xkcd comic. The fact is that there have only been 43 presidents*. Only 14 of those Presidents were Democrats, and two of them, as McArdle helpfully points out, died in office and so are arguably not really comparable for analyzing transition questions. Which leaves us with 12. And since the party system has changed so thoroughly over time (unless you believe the party is under some kind of curse, which I guess cannot be entirely excluded), it’s really only fair to start counting at the end of WWII, which leaves us with… six. Oh, and since we’re talking about the end of Obama’s turn and that hasn’t happened yet, we really should be at five.
You know what you can do with a sample of five? Nothing. Nothing much at all.
On the same note, McArdle also observes that only four presidents since WW2 of either party have been succeeded by co-partisans. The problem with this is of course that since WW2 there have only been 13 Presidents (including FDR, who really shouldnt be included, but McArdle seems to have counted him so I will here). 30% of Presidents being succeeded by members of their own parties sounds like a good number for her point, until you think about it as 4 vs 9. It doesn’t take much tinkering to shift those numbers significantly either: A full-Florida recount in 2000 may well have given the Presidency to Al Gore, and those numbers would be 5 and 8, for example.
There really are some meaningful statistical things you can do with US election results. See Nate Silver. But these kinds of simple precedent-bases analyses fall down repeatedly, as the xkcd comic details, because even if your analysis counts every President, you’re still dealing with a sample so small that in any other field all noses would be instantly thumbed in its direction.
*Those playing the home game will remember that Obama is the 44th President. But that’s because Grover Cleveland served non-consecutive terms and so the official enumeration counts him twice.
The Viking Dutchman doesn’t ordinarily read the National Journal, but he found himself over there today after an associate linked him a piece from there.
In the sidebar, he came across two vaguely contradictory articles about next year’s midterms. The first covered GOP optimism about reclaiming the Senate in the 2014 midterms, and the second suggested those same elections would be ruinous for GOP governors.
The seemingly odd juxtaposition is easily explained by the fact that Governors serve 4 year terms and Senators 6. Which means the Governors up for re-election next year last faced the ballot in the extremely GOP-favorable 2010 election. That election gave a raft of moderate swing states staunchly conservative governors and legislatures, including Ohio, Michigan, Florida and Pennsylvania. Those state governments have gone on to extremely controversial terms in all those states, raising the threat of mass public backlash next year. Favorable 2010 redistricting will likely shield GOP legislatures at least partially, but governors are elected statewide and enjoy no such protection.
To understand the Senate situation, you need to understand both the 2008 and 2010 elections. The seats up for election in 2014 were last elected in the 2008 election. 2008 was, in related but still distinct ways, both a terrible year for Republicans and a great year for Democrats. While Democratic gains that year were mostly in moderate states (such as New Mexico and Minnesota), the favorable conditions also allowed the party to hold onto seats in a few conservative states, like Louisiana and Montana, originally acquired by members of the party’s now mostly defunct conservative wing. Those seats will be extremely difficult to hold in 2014, especially in Montana, where the top Democratic potential candidate, former Governor Brian Schweitzer, has opted not to run.
The other piece of the problem for the the Dems is the 2010 election. That election handed the GOP a raft of seats in states ordinarily unfavorable to the Democrats, including Obama’s own former seat in Illinois. The continuing presence of those senators gives the GOP a tremendous structural advantage in building a Senate majority.
Electoral rules matter people! Nobody wants to talk about them, but they’re actually very very important, often the most important thing in determining political outcomes in democratic states.
So I was reading this earlier, which try to explain a rationale for how rapid gentrification of Manhattan (really a kind of ULTRA-gentrification, since in many areas it is now the professional classes being driven out by the financial-international elite) has actually been beneficial to the city.
I don’t see much of value in the argument really. But it did get me thinking about the ways in which cities are hostage to things outside their controls. Sure zoning policy, and the failure to adequately expand housing stock, have contributed to New York’s rental problems (Don’t worry though! Surely the rush of massive luxury condos in Midtown will alleviate the problem!), but there’s also a lot that’s beyond the capabilities of even the most pro-growth New York administration (and Bloomberg is far from that..). New York cannot alone resist the tide of rapidly rising income inequality in the West since 1980, of which New York’s banker billionaires are symptom, not disease.
More importantly, I’ve often wondered if demand for Manhattan was artificially inflated because there’s only one. At least in the United States, there is no substantial urban space with a density level and city tone of Manhattan. Only Manhattan has Manhattan’s amenities, cultural institutions, etc…
But what if it wasn’t alone? One way to increase residential options in Manhattan to build more units there. But, you could also achieve that goal by building MORE MANHATTANS. We could have five or six major hyper-dense high-amenity large urban spaces.
Which, with any luck, might bring down rents.
The Viking Dutchman is mulling over recent events, wanting to wait things out a little longer before posting more…
In the meantime, he recommends interested readers keep their eyes on Ahram English, an Egyptian website that offers varied coverage of the issues, including a wide array of reaction-pieces detailing how various political factions are reacting to events, giving you a wider view than you’ll get over at Al Jazeera, and certainly far wider than the nonsense being peddled by most Western MSM.
The fascinating thing about Egypt since the 2011 revolution, is how at every possible step, every single actor has made the stupidest decisions possible. The left-liberal opposition makes stupid decisions. The MB makes stupid decisions. The Salafists make stupid decisions. The army makes stupid decisions. The courts make stupid stupid decisions. Every single chance for a peaceful successful transition has been bungled by actors who do everything in the worst manner possible. And now we have this.
Army and police forces massacred over 50 Morsi supporters who were protesting in the capital. Here’s a hint: You know what you shouldn’t give to a group primarily composed of religious fanatics?
MARTYRS.
Ask the Shah of Iran how that worked out for him.
I do believe there is a very real possibility that the MB will find a way back to power through this crisis. If they do, Egypt will be in for grim times. For however bad they were under Morsi I, just imagine how they’ll react if they successfully beat the deep state and get back in again.
This transition was supposed to be about removing an authoritarian, scarcely competent lout, who had made a mess of every challenge he’d been offered. A man whose political popularity had crashed in the last few months, with even many Islamists turning against him.
The military’s actions are doing everything possible to turn him into a cult figure, restore his popularity, and give him a viable path back to power instead of letting him wither into insignificance.
So it turns out that the widely reported comment I posted yesterday that Mohammed Elbaradei had been appointed Prime Minister is not true.
Given the high levels from which the reports were coming, including state TV, something fishy clearly happened here. That something appears to be that the main Salafist party, Al Nour, which has backed Morsi’s ouster despite its ideological distance from the Kemalist military and the left-liberal protestors, complained at the thought of Elbaradei taking the reins. Elbaradei is not only a secular liberal, but also has close ties to the West (from his past life as head of the IAEA), and is generally a nuisance and an asshat. I’m inclined to take their point on this issue. To be successful, this coup-revolution must not simply become an excuse for the most politically incompetent, least popular (some, including the Viking Dutchman, have long suspect Elbaradei’s tendency to boycott elections results from his fear of being proven to lack any real constituency if he actually competed) to be airlifted into power.
It is unclear whether Elbaradei was offered the position, and then had that offer taken back, or if the Salafist complaints preceded any official offer. At any rate, Al Nour are probably one of the most important actors for the new regime to keep on side, since they have a large popular base, and help bring some cross-ideological coverage to the transition. If they were to turn rejectionist and join the Morsi stalwarts, it would spell disaster for hopes of a democratic transition. The need to show Islamists they have a place in a truly democratic Egypt is vital, and will be the subject of an upcoming post.
The new rumor, which must be treated with approximately 1/3 of a cup of salt, is that the PM job has now been offered to Ziad Bahaa El-Din, a lawyer and founding member of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, one of the small left-liberal parties that emerged after the 2011 revolution. As such parties go, it has proven fairly competent, acquiring 16 seats in that year’s parliamentary election, more than the 14 won by its ally the Free Egyptians Party, who had drastically more money and press ahead of the election but which ultimately became a cipher for Copts (it’s leader is a Copt) and liberal-inclined members of the upper class.
It is also being suggested that Elbaradei will become Vice President.
But where is Sabahi? Where is Fotouh? Even Moussa?
Where are any of the opposition leaders who have actually demonstrated any ability to win real votes in a real election?
Mohammed Elbaradei, the most incompetent, fumbling and wrong-headed opposition leader (he’s repeatedly pushed a series of election boycotts that have been disastrous for the opposition) has been appointed interim Prime Minister of Egypt.
Hopefully this will at least distract him from the work of strategizing for the upcoming elections, which perhaps now will fall to someone like the Nasserist Hamdeen Sabahi, who after being ignored by all Western observers came a close third in last year’s Presidential vote (and swept Cairo and Alexandria), and has a substantial constituency among the poor (who are likely to be most susceptible to rejectionist rhetoric from the MB).
Thousands of Morsi supporters rallied in Cairo today. Far smaller than the anti-Morsi protests of earlier in the week, but a clear demonstration that he retains a popular constituency.
The protests were harassed by the military, including live fire. This appears to have triggered a violent standoff between pro- and anti-Morsi civilians, who are now brawling on the 6th of October Bridge on the Nile
Not a good sign for things to come.
The Viking Dutchman 