Super Tuesday

It’s Super Tuesday; if you can vote, I encourage you to do so.

If you’re voting in the Democratic primary, I’d also like to encourage you to vote for Barack Obama, but before I get into exactly why I think he deserves your vote, I’d like to say a word or two about the remarkably ineffective way supporters of Obama and Clinton alike have been going about persuading people to vote for their candidate.

I start with this piece, which I came to on Matt Yglesias’ blog at the Atlantic. He says it “does a great job … of highlighting both the arguments and the underlying dynamics in play.” I disagree; I think it does a great job of highlighting bad arguments for just about anything. In the piece, Son tries to convince Mother to vote for Obama because, essentially, she’s only voting for Clinton because she’s a middle-aged white woman who identifies with Clinton. Mother responds that Son is only voting for Obama because of illogical and emotionally grounded assumptions about Clinton (and, in the end, Mother). The piece does touch on some of the experience-related issues that the campaigns have been using to distinguish themselves from each other, but the main argument consists of Mother and Son telling the other that he or she is behaving irrationally.

This is something that, if you’re reading this now, you’ve probably seen a lot of over the past month or so. It’s not just on the Web, either; it shows up in op-ed pieces in prestigious papers and on the talking-head shows on the teevee. It’s not effective; the only people persuaded by the argument that supporting Kang is logical and supporting Kodos is irrational already support Kang. The people who support Kodos are only confirmed in their belief that supporting Kang is totally ridiculous. Kang supporters “just don’t get it” and can be dismissed as dumb or irrational partisans.

This mirrors the debate style used to deepen the conservative/liberal divide in the country, a phenomenon that’s been aided and abetted by Karl Rove-style politics over the last seven years. You can see, I hope, how counterproductive it really is. Telling someone that their opinion is dumb or irrational and if they really knew what they were doing they’d do things your way is most likely to get them to tell you to go piss up a rope. And that’s true even if it’s true that the Other Dude is actually being totally irrational and/or stupid by voting for Kodos. He’s got to figure that out himself. He’s not going to engage in a thorough self-examination about his real motives and his real interests because someone tells him he’s an idiot.

He might, though, be persuaded by someone making a convincing, reasonable case for the candidate that doesn’t insult people who take the opposite view. That’s obviously more difficult and time-consuming than coming up with clever putdowns, which is probably a lot of the reason why you don’t see it done much in comments on blogs. It’s much more effective at making a case for the candidate, though.

In this case, the candidate I’d like to make a case for is Barack Obama. This year’s Democratic contenders do not have extreme policy differences, for the most part. Their policy goals are similar or identical in most respects. Where they do have differences – whether a universal health care plan should include a mandate, whether it’s a Good Idea to talk with the leaders of countries we’ve shunned over the past seven years, whether we should issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, whether we should set a timetable for removing troops from Iraq – it’s very hard to say who has the better argument, and they are really questions of means, not ends.

That doesn’t mean the discussions about those issues aren’t worth having, just that there aren’t clear-cut policy differences from which it’s possible to make a call for Obama or Clinton. If you disagree – if you think that a mandate for insurance coverage is absolutely essential, for example – then probably you’ve already made your choice. Even if you think that Clinton’s position on these issues is better, though, I think it’s worth wondering whether she’ll be able to deliver on those policy promises. I think the decision about which candidate to vote for in this year’s Democratic primaries comes down to questions about which candidate is most likely to be elected, and which one, if elected, could deliver on the issues that Democratic voters care about. The answer to those questions is, in my opinion, clearly Obama.

Clinton’s strongest arguments for her candidacy come down to experience. She means a couple of different things by that, and it’s worthwhile unpacking her argument a bit.

First, she says she’ll be “ready on Day One” because she was First Lady when Bill Clinton was President and therefore she understands both how to run the government and how to deal with the kinds of issues that a President has to address more or less daily. To the extent that this is true, it’s definitely a point in her favor. Bill Clinton’s first year as President was rocky, in part precisely because he had to learn on the job, and it would be good to avoid that kind of thing in 2009.

The questions, though, are how much of that experience Hillary Clinton actually has, and whether anything really prepares you to be President. She has not been forthcoming about what her role was in her husband’s Administration. She took charge of the attempt to provide universal health care in 1993 and 1994, and it was a spectacular fiasco. Maybe she learned from that. We don’t really know, because for the remainder of her husband’s term she largely kept out of the spotlight. Did she have some input in policy decisions? Almost certainly. But what was that influence? How did it affect what Bill Clinton accomplished in office? We don’t really know, and they’ve been reluctant to tell us. So while it’s probably true that she understands the problems a President faces better than any of the other candidates, we don’t know how significant that understanding is.

It’s an open question, for me at least, whether any experience is relevant to being President. Either candidate would be surrounded by people with years of experience in government, so it’s unclear exactly how much the new President’s personal experience matters on a day-to-day basis. As a matter of big-picture policy background, the Democratic primary featured several candidates with far more experience in government than either Obama or Clinton, and none of them attracted significant support. In 2000, Al Gore had eight years of Vice-Presidential experience under his belt, and lost a tight race to a man whose only experience in government was as Governor of Texas – a state whose Governor is not unduly burdened with duties and whose legislature only meets every other year. Nonetheless, George W. Bush’s first nine months in office went by fairly smoothly. It’s worth noting, too, that the architects of many of W.’s least successful policies – Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz – all had decades of experience in government – including, in some cases, having argued convincingly against precisely the policies they later advocated. Experience is something, sure, but it’s awfully hard to say exactly what it is, or how much weight it should be given.

Clinton’s experience also includes eight years in the Senate. That’s something, too, arguably more important than her eight years as the wife of the President. Obama has four years in the Senate, though; is an extra four years in the Senate a significant edge? I’m not convinced. Clinton, after all, voted as a Senator in favor of giving Bush the authority to go to war, and she’s never said that vote was a mistake. She’s apparently done a good job for the people of New York, and it’s true that she’s been able to work with Republican Senators to get legislation passed. Obama has also been an effective legislator, working well on specific issues with Republican colleagues. It’s not clear that Clinton’s legislative experience gives her an edge over Obama, either as a demonstration of effective leadership or of good judgment.

Of course, the other thing Clinton means by her experience is that of being the target of 16 years of conservative vitriol. “I’m still here,” she says, and it’s true. She is. What she doesn’t say, perhaps because it’s obvious, is that so are they. She alludes frequently to her experience fighting conservative smears and claims that that experience makes her better able to fight for Democratic policies as President. She also claims that, although Obama hasn’t yet had the same level of venom directed at him, if elected, he will. The inference is that either candidate will have to deal with the same kind of attacks, and that she’s uniquely qualified to respond to them.

This may be true, but I think it’s fair to wonder about how effective she’s really been at responding to the attacks. After 16 years, conservatives still loathe her. She hasn’t defanged their attacks so much as endured them. It speaks well of her that she’s had the courage to continue her political career under what I think we can all concede have been pretty much relentless attacks. But the fact remains that even if we grant her unique experience dealing with Republican attacks, she also attracts them. She unifies conservatives in a way no other figure – not even her husband – is able to do. The attacks she endures aren’t simply because she’s a prominent Democrat (there are plenty of others, none of whom have inspired conservative anger on the same scale) or that she’s a liberal (which, depending on the issue, she’s not at all). It’s personal.

That means that, although Obama will surely have a tough road ahead of him as the nominee, it almost by definition cannot be as bad as what she has gone through and will go through as the nominee. He's got 16 years of catching up to do on that score. It’s certainly possible that dirt could be dug up against Obama, but so far the worst we know about is a somewhat shady deal to buy part of a vacant lot and Obama’s own admission that as a younger man he did some blow. It’s small potatoes compared to the Whitewater investigation that sprawled across both of Bill Clinton’s terms in office, or McCain’s involvement in the late-80s savings-and-loan scandals.

There is another side to Clinton’s experience that she doesn’t bring up, and of which she may be unaware. Judging by her own comments and her husband’s, they have survived increasingly vicious, hostile political environments. Those circumstances forced them to become defensive, suspicious, and secretive. The recent New Yorker profile of Hillary suggested that she has not simply shrugged off the years of political warfare that she was exposed to in Arkansas and Washington. She’s been changed by them. Probably that was inevitable, and unfortunate. I do think it’s reasonable to wonder whether we want or need another President after the current one whose political instincts are toward secrecy and paranoia. It’s true that just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean people aren’t really out to get you; while the “vast right-wing conspiracy” may not have been as vast as the Clintons think, it was and is real enough. I just don’t know that we’re best served by a President whose political instincts have been shaped by fighting it.


Nonetheless, even if Clinton isn’t the obviously better candidate on policy grounds, and doesn’t have a clear edge in experience, and has some unfortunate if understandable political habits, she might still be the better candidate on electability grounds. If Clinton was able to unite the Democratic party behind her agenda and attract widespread support, she would be the more convincing candidate, particularly if she could help get more Democratic Congressmen and Senators elected. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Partly as a result of her long exposure to the nation, there are relatively few people who don’t already like and admire her to whom she can appeal. Republicans, particularly conservatives, despise her. There will be very few “Clinton Republicans” if she is the nominee, and she does not significantly expand the reach of the party. At best, I think an election with Hillary as the candidate will have record turnout for both parties, but I don’t think such an election will attract many new or undecided voters. She might pull out a win – the last two Presidential elections have been very, very close and McCain is a flawed candidate himself. I don’t think she’s likely to increase the Democratic majority in Congress by much, and if elected I think she’ll have a hard time persuading Republicans to get her agenda passed.

In contrast, consider Obama. His policy positions are very close to hers. He can’t claim to have spend eight years living with the President, it’s true, but his legislative accomplishments, both in Illinois and in Washington, demonstrate that he can be effective in getting legislation passed with votes from Republicans. Many Democrats I know feel queasy about “bipartisanship” – particularly with the example the Congress has set over the past year. If I thought Obama’s rhetoric about inclusion and working with Republicans meant that kind of “bipartisanship” – that is, passing the Republican agenda with the briefest resistance – I would share those doubts. What his record demonstrates is an ability to find common ground with particular Republicans on specific issues, and that’s a skill any Democratic President will need to get any legislation passed. Because of the reaction she inspires in the conservative base of the Republican party, I think it’s doubtful that Hillary Clinton will be able to do that.

Obama has demonstrated in every state in which he’s campaigned so far an unusual (as far as I know, unprecedented) ability to get younger voters and independents to the polls. He expands the pool of votes available to the Democrats if he’s the nominee. That’s nice for him, but it will probably be even better for other Democrats on the ticket with him. In close races for open seats – of which there are an unusual number this year – the extra votes could determine whether the seat goes to a Democrat or a Republican. Even a few extra seats in the House or the Senate would make it much easier for President Obama to get his agenda passed. Since the two candidates are largely in accord on their policies, I think Obama is more likely to get Clinton’s agenda passed than Clinton is.

I don’t think Obama will be able to transcend partisan politics the way some of his more enthusiastic admirers do, and I’m not convinced that, if elected, he will be transformative in the way FDR and Reagan were. I just think he presents the best possible chance for the nation to have a better, more effective government with a sober foreign policy. If you’re voting in the Democratic primaries today, I hope you’ll give him your vote.

Torture's Bad, Mmmmkay?

I had thought that most people were pretty much in agreement with the idea that torture was bad. Evil, even. That's why the revelations about what happened at Abu Ghraib got so much attention; why the three-year detention and abuse of Jose Padilla generated so much controversy; why the American Bar Association and American Psychological Association recently condemned the practice and the participation of any of their members in it. It appears, however, that I was mistaken. Professional blogger Megan McArdle yesterday posed what she seems to think is a very difficult question: why shouldn't we torture people?

One of the most facile dismissals of torture is that it doesn't work, so
why bother? That's tempting, but it's too easy.

To be fair, she's not actually advocating torture. So she's got that going for her. However, we should note that, from the beginning, she gets things backwards. The argument that torture is ineffective only arises if you happen to be discussing torture with someone who already thinks it's morally acceptable. The theoretical argument is logically prior to the practical argument.

Torture seems to me very likely to work provided that you can verify the
information, which I assume interrogators can in at least some circumstances.

If the information can be verified, what's the point of the torture? The usual justification for the use of torture is that the information that the torture is intended to reveal can't be obtained any other way. This, at least, has been Alan Dershowitz's argument, and he remains the most prominent advocate of legalizing torture in the United States.

Nor is it obvious to me that the quality of information is likely to be
lower than that obtained by other means: yes, people will say anything to avoid
torture, but they'll also say anything to avoid imprisonment. Maybe the lies
will be vivider or more voluble under torture, but it doesn't seem necessarily
so that the ratio of lies to truth will increase.

I admit that I'm not entirely sure that I follow McArdle's thought here. It seems to be that torture is no less reliable than other ways of getting information from someone (interrogation, for example, seems to work reasonably well for the police). But that's not really to the point; what she ought to be arguing is that information that is obtained through the use of torture is more reliable, and the enhanced reliability justifies the extreme measures. I don't know what evidence she could use to support the argument, but what she's actually saying here doesn't help her out at all.

I'd rather see people take the hard stance and say "Yeah, torture may still
work, but we still shouldn't use it because it's wrong."

Well, OK. Torture may work, but we still shouldn't use it because it's wrong.

I note here that she herself is unwilling to "take the hard stance" - she just wants "people" to do it. Why she's unwilling to make the incredibly bold statement that torture is wrong remains unclear.

Otherwise, you're kind of stuck if someone comes up with a way to make it
effective. I've been thinking about this in relation to the much vaunted lie detecting brain scans.

Huh. I've been thinking about this in relation to our own government's documented abuse of "enemy combatants" (and, indeed, its own citizens) but I guess freaky mind-reading devices are also a threat. Judging by the Wired article she cites, the "lie detecting brain scans" would be an alternative to torture rather than an accessory for it, which makes her concern here speculative at best.

Most people have talked about the implications for the criminal justice
system--does the fifth amendment still apply? But what I wonder is, what does
this mean for torturers?

Weird that she's concerned not with the potential invasion of the civil liberties of innocent people posed by lie-detecting machines, but with how said apparatus will affect people who are engaged in criminal activity.

If you can actually tell accurately when someone is lying, torture suddenly
becomes very, very effective, doesn't it?

Or, you know, unnecessary, because presumably you'd know if they were lying even without torture. I think she wants to say that this lie-detection stuff will justify using more extreme measures to induce people to tell the truth, but she's not saying it and I'm not sure how she'd get there.

And yet, it would still be wrong. So make the case on those grounds.
Efficiency is a dangerous red herring.

As a consequence of starting from the wrong end of the argument against torture, she ends where she should have begun. She throws out a challenge to her reader to make the case that she's either unwilling or unable to make: that torture is wrong. Her entire post comes down to: "Torture's wrong because it doesn't work, but what if it did? Would it still be wrong?"

And this woman is paid well by the Atlantic Monthly for this.

But it's not just her filling the tubes with this lazy, poorly thought out stuff. Her Atlantic colleague Matt Yglesias responds thusly:

For some sense of "necessarily" this may be true, but this flies in the face of
historical practice. It seems unlikely to me that torture's most famous
systematic applications almost all come in the context of regimes specifically
looking to generate spurious confessions. Stalin's Russia, North Vietnamese POW
camps, the Spanish Inquisition, it's always the same story. It's not the case,
however, that torture "doesn't work" -- Nikolai Bukharin and others confesses to all
sorts of preposterous crimes exactly as Stalin wanted them to. The question
is whether routinized torture of al-Qaeda suspects is a useful method of
advancing any public purpose.

Yglesias gets a point for noticing that most torturers are less interested in the truth of the confessions they get than the fact of the confession (I'm guessing the "unlikely" in the second sentence shouldn't be there). But then he loses it for missing the moral question McArdle attempted to bring up. The question isn't the utilitarian one of "whether routinized torture of al-Qaeda suspects is a useful method of advancing any public purpose." That's just the effectiveness argument in a different dress. The question is whether torture is morally acceptable at all.

Megan counterproses that "people take the hard stance and say 'Yeah, torture may
still work, but we still shouldn't use it because it's wrong.'" I think Megan
thinks that people from the "torture doesn't work" camp are arguing in bad
faith, but I'm really not.

Well, maybe he just doesn't read very carefully. For one thing, there's no reason I can't think both that torture is morally unacceptable and also ineffective as a practical matter, so there's no reason to suppose someone has to be in one "camp" or the other. Nor does McArdle imply that the argument that torture doesn't work is being made in bad faith; she's saying she finds it unconvincing because she can imagine a situation where it could work, and wonders what the objection to torture could be in that situation. (Hint: it's moral!)

I don't think it makes any sense at all to say that there's a categorical moral
against smashing people's fingers with a hammer or whatever other depraved acts
of torture you may care to imagine.

Oh. Well. I suppose I'm being nonsensical when I say that, morally speaking, Yglesias' opinion here is troglodytic.

After all, I believe (as most people believe) that it's sometimes morally
praiseworthy for the state to have its agents kill people with bullets, bombs,
mortar shells, etc. so there's surely some end such that torturing someone
would, if effective, be a just method of achieving that end.

I'm going to have to disagree with your police work here, Matt. War, and violence generally, is not the same thing as torture. Let's see if you can spot the difference:

The difference is that despite the horrors of war, there's a very strong
argument to be made that if good people systematically disavowed war-making as a
practice that bad guys would run roughshod over us. When Hitler's tanks start
rolling across Europe, someone's got to shoot back. By contrast, I don't see any
examples of societies using routinized legal torture to gain a decisive
advantage over their foes or any evidence that the current era of torture has
been a net positive in fighting al-Qaeda.

Ah. No, he can't. For Matt Yglesias, the only real argument against torturing people is that it hasn't been a "net positive." If it were, he'd presumably be first in line to work the rack and smash some fingers with sledgehammers. Or maybe he'd just leave the dirty business to other people and enjoy the "net positives."

To say that a method of investigation works "provided that you can verify the
information" is, after all, merely to beg the question. Consulting a psychic
works provided that you can verify the information, but spending person-hours
chasing down the psychic's "leads" isn't going to make the country safer.

Oooh, "person-hours." How very enlightened. Matt Yglesias, in favor of "net positive" torture, but not of hurting the tender sensibilities of people who might be offended by the term "man-hours." On the other hand, he did notice that "verifying the information" is a problem for McArdle's original post. So, kudos, I guess.

McArdle's not the type to take that kind of thing quietly, so she responded as follows:

I don't think that Matt &c are arguing from bad faith. Indeed, I agree with
them that torture in most cases isn't very effective. I don't agree with what we
might call the "strong case" against the efficacy of torture, which is that it
never works. If I have, say, a kidnapper from whom I want to get the location of
his victim, and I can credibly promise to shoot out his kneecap if the victim
isn't where he says she is, then I think I have a reasonable chance of finding
out where the victim is by torturing him. If he knows, it is clearly in his best
interest to tell me rather than a) playing dumb or b) giving me false
information.

Unless he really doesn't know or has some even more powerful motivation for not telling you. But, sure, it might work. So might other methods that don't involve shooting his kneecap off. Police use them all the time.

Now, those cases might be rare. Which is why many people, I assume Matt
included, make what we could call the "weak case" against torture, which is that
it generally isn't that effective. But I don't think that this is a very good
argument to deploy if your goal is, as mine is, a legal ban on torture by the US
government. The weak case doesn't prove we shouldn't use torture; it just proves
that we should limit it to cases, such as the above hypothetical, where there is
a reasonable likelihood that it will be effective. I doubt the rules for doing
so would be as complicated as, say, the New York City building code.

Which is basically Alan Dershowitz's argument for "torture warrants." Except the part about her goal being a legal ban on torture. I'm pretty sure Alan's not in favor of that. I'm not too sure about Matt, either.

The other problem with the weak case is that torture can theoretically be made
more effective. Those brain scans are real; a workable machine might be less
than a decade away. (It also might well not; the history of science journalism
is littered with the corpses of "next big things" that turned out not to,
y'know, actually work.)

I really wish she'd left the scary mind-reading devices out of this. I think even she realizes it doesn't do anything for her argument.

If you cannot make the case against legal torture without resorting to efficacy
arguments, what the hell do you do if it becomes pretty damn effective?

Well, exactly. What's your argument, Megan?

My position is that even if it is 100% effective--in the sense of producing only
true information--we should ban it. I don't trust anyone, not myself and
certainly not the state, with the power implied by sanctioned torture. I don't
want to live in a state that tortures people. And I don't think you need an
efficacy argument to make that case.

So, still kind of kicking it to someone else to do the work, then? I mean, I agree: we shouldn't torture people. I don't understand why McArdle is uncomfortable making a moral argument against it, though. And I really don't understand why the Atlantic is paying her good money to ask other people to make her arguments for her; surely they could find someone who's willing to take a position and support it. For example, here's one way:

First, to address Yglesias' idea that since he supports war in some circumstances, he must also support torture in some circumstances. Fighting is different from torture. If you're in a fight, you can fight back, or you can run away. You have options. Torture is a fundamentally different thing; the essence of torture is that the victim can't get away. The relation between the torturer and the victim of the torture is one of total dominance and total powerlessness. The point of torture is to break down the victim as thoroughly as possible until the torturer gets whatever it is he wants. Combat is different. A soldier may want to kill the enemy, but he runs the risk of being killed himself - neither side is utterly at the mercy of the other. It's possible to fight and die with dignity, but it's impossible - for either the torturer or the victim - to emerge from torture with human dignity intact. So, no, Matt - you can say that in some circumstances, it's right to fight and die without being forced to agree that sometimes, pulling out fingernails is OK.

Torture is immoral because the practice of torture is the most profound violation of a person that we can practice. Torture deprives its victims of any control over their persons. Indeed, whether it's inflicting physical or psychological damage to the victim, it's actively using the person's body and mind against him. Furthermore, assuming the victim survives, he bears the scars - mental and physical - for the rest of his life; in that sense, torture doesn't "end." If you think that there is a basic human right to control of your own mind and body, torture is immoral.

That is an argument against torture that has nothing to do with how useful it might be to the depraved people who would engage in its practice.