Criteria for Treasury

By Christopher Hayes

One of the weird things about the transition period is that all of the speculation and editorializing tends to revolve around the actual personnel being floated or rumored as opposed to a broader discussion of what qualities characteristics and resume one would want to see in the various posts. So here's an op-ed I wrote trying to sketch out my thoughts on the main criteria for Treasury:

Starting with the very first secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, the office has, traditionally been held by a denizen of Wall Street. But at this moment, whatever the benefits of hands-on experience with finance brings, it comes at high cost: a tendency to believe that what's best for Wall Street is necessarily best for the country as a whole.

But the inescapable fact is that the interests of taxpayers and Wall Street firms will often be in direct conflict, and we need someone at Treasury whom we can trust to represent the former over the latter.

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November 19, 2008

You Go To Crisis With The Government You Have

By Christopher Hayes

My Swiss-junket-mate, Matt Yglesias makes a good point about the distance between the abstract ideal policy vis a vis GM and the auto-industry and the real-world one we're likely to get. This dovetails with the point I was trying to make in an earlier post, which is, more or less that though we're in a moment of what I tentatively believe to be fairly massive change in the operating ideology of the American federal government, we're equipped with a government that is, thanks largely to preceding dominant ideology hostile to its very existence, desperately ill-equipped to competently manage and execute something like, say, large-scale industrial management.

Now, a large part of the reason for this is that the conservative/libertarian critique of government is to a degree self-fulfilling, gut the public sector, create a degraded, corrupt, transactional economy of influence and crony capitalism and all of the most dystopian right-wing visions of the efficacy of government compared to the market look alarmingly true.

But I'm squarely in the camp that believes we need some fairly large scale changes in the relationship between the state and the market, much of forced by the magnitude of the crisis we now face. One of the major challenges, perhaps, in some senses, the major challenge for the Obama administration will be building a federal government capable and worthy of dispensing the many new responsibilities it will inherit.

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November 17, 2008

Socialism With a Withered State

By Christopher Hayes

Apologies for the week-long hiatus. I was on a trip in Switzerland (about which more in a bit) and trying amidst a heavy schedule to pay attention to developments back at home. Seems like the central news is the emerging debate over a GM/automaker bailout. I'm far from expert in these matters and still puzzling through the details, but Felix Salmon's comments on the false dichotomy of bailout v bankruptcy seem sensible.

But there's a broader point to make here: we're in totally uncharted waters right now. We've witnessed the intellectual collapse of the old neo-liberal orthodoxy, and yet its advocates retain tremendous real-world political, intellectual and elite influence. The public's attitudes towards state intervention have grown generally more friendly, but figuring out where the public is ideologically is a very tricky business. And on top of this we have this rolling crisis, which demands, or seems to demand consistent intervention, ideology be damned.

In this environment, we're seeing a lot of very ad-hoc policy-making, a case by case government intervention. I'm not sure what the massive wholistic alternative to this is, but it seems to be that we've now got a mismatch between the capacities of our deeply stripped down, subcontracted federal government, and the requirements of the moment. Amidst all the talk of the Bush Administration's penchant for increasing the size of the state, the measure invoked is the size of the federal budget as a percentage of GDP, which has indeed grown. But starting in the early Clinton years, the federal civilian workforce has shrunk [PDF]. Contractors make up the gap.

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November 17, 2008

Mr. President, May I Suggest A Book

By Christopher Hayes

Scott McLemee wrote a fantastic column in which he emailed a number of journalists, thinkers, and intellectuals and asked them what book they would have Barack Obama read if it could only be one.

Some of the suggestions:

Elvin Lim: The president-elect should read Preparing to be President: The Memos of Richard E. Neustadt (AEI Press, 2000), edited by Charles O. Jones. Richard Neustadt was a scholar-practitioner who advised Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Clinton, and, until his passing in 2003, also the dean of presidential studies. Most of the memos in this volume were written for president-elect John Kennedy, when the country was, as it is now, ready for change.

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November 11, 2008

The Occam's Razor Explanation

By Christopher Hayes

I'm working on a longer set of reflections on this remarkable election and its remarkable outcome. Sometimes as writer you can feel outclassed by the events you have to chronicle, and that's how I've been feeling the last two days. Such a moment calls for a Henry David Thoreau, or an Ida B. Wells. We work-a-day political reporters don't quite seem up to the task.

But two quick thoughts. One, the work of democracy never ends. I spent election night with much of the Obama campaign field staff of Virginia. When the networks called Virginia for Obama at 10:50pm everyone erupted into joy, and then ten minutes later the place went absolutely nuts when Obama was elected president. By 11:30 the entire staff was on an all-staff conference call getting their assignments for the next day. With two very close congressional races yet to be resolved in the state, the organizers would have to be up early the next day to start monitoring the count. The dedication exhibited by the hundreds of Obama organizers who've worked for this campaign (my brother among them) is just awe-inspiring.

Two, there'll be lots of explanations of why Obama won, but for my money the best analysis so far comes from political scientist Andrew Gelman. He's run lots of the data, and one of the most interesting results he's found is that there was a more-or-less uniform partisan swing towards the Democrats across the country of about 3 percent. While it might be the most unsatisfying explanation of a monumentally dramatic and riveting election, I think the single best explanation of what happened was this: the Republican party ran the economy into the ground, and independents trust the Democratic party to vouchsafe their economic interests more than they trust the Republicans.

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November 6, 2008

Tracking Voter Problems: Part Three

By Christopher Hayes

WASHINGTON, DC -- From Nation intern Emma Dumain, comes the final dispatch from the Election Protection command center:

In the second press briefing of the day here at the Election Protection command center in Washington, members of the media were greeted with more doleful assessments of the state of voter rights in America. Text messages, false e-mails and Facebook wall posts have been circulating with the same "clarification" as seen on the Hampton Roads, Virginia fliers: "Obama voters, vote on November 5." Overflow ballots are being piled on floors in precincts around Florida after hours of malfunctioning optical scanners. Students at Virginia Tech are being sent to vote at a precinct only reachable by car, on an unmarked road.

"Our American voting system is broken," said Barbara Arnwine, Executive Director of the Laywers' Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law, at the start of the briefing. "We must take action now. We can't wake up tomorrow when the question on our minds is, 'who won and who lost?' We need to ask, 'how do we go forward as a nation to the next election with a better election system?'"

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November 4, 2008

Final Push

By Christopher Hayes

RICHMOND, VA -- The office here just erupted into a flurry of activity as volunteers are being sent out to polling places in the city with long lines to make sure no one leaves. They've got sign up sheets on clipboards to create a record of who is on line at 7pm, since Virginia law allows anyone who is on line by 7pm to vote, no matter how long it takes. Off to check out one of these polling places.

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November 4, 2008

Virginia Turnout: High

By Christopher Hayes

According to the state board of elections. They're estimating 75% turnout by the end of the day. That's insane.

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November 4, 2008

An Obama Compendium

By Christopher Hayes

One of the most excruiating parts of election day is that it's an epistemic black hole. Not just for the public, for us reporters and even inside the campaign. The Obama campaign actually has a fairly sophisticated system for tracking turnout today, but good luck trying to get that information out of them. (Believe me. I tried) Which means for those who aren't out on line waiting to vote, and aren't out knocking on doors you have three hours and forty minutes of hitting refresh on your browser before polls close. So I thought as a time-passing service I'd post all the pieces I've ever written about Obama. You'd have to be pretty desperate for distraction to read them all, but the last three hours of election day can be desperation inducing.

Wanted: New Voters

Obama, Politics and the Pulpits

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November 4, 2008

Tracking Voter Problems Part Deux

By Christopher Hayes

Another dispatch from Emma. One thing to keep in mind. Today somewhere around 130 million people are going to cast votes. If there's, say, a 1% error rate, which would be tremendously low, that still means 1.3 million instances nationwide of problems. That is not at all to suggest that the way we run elections is anything but a disgrace, but just to keep in mind that even thousands of instances of screw-ups, long waits, etc does not necessarily (stress necessarily) indicate anything at all systematic, other than logistical failures. Andrew Gumbel is also following this story, right here n Virginia.

WASHINGTON, DC -- From Nation intern Emma Dumain, comes a second dispatch from the Election Protection command center:

WASHINGTON-DC Stresses are running high inside the Election Protection command center as it nears its double-digit hours of the day. There are some technical glitches, as to be expected with such a high volume of calls coming in (1-866-OUR-VOTE) and heavy traffic on the website (www.ourvotelive.com).

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November 4, 2008