Professor DeLong weighs in on the prospects of a Rodham Clinton presidency:
My two cents' worth--and I think it is the two cents' worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 1993-1994--is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life. Heading up health-care reform was the only major administrative job she has ever tried to do. And she was a complete flop at it. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given. And she wasn't smart enough to realize that she was in over her head and had to get out of the Health Care Czar role quickly.
So when senior members of the economic team said that key senators like Daniel Patrick Moynihan would have this-and-that objection, she told them they were disloyal. When junior members of the economic team told her that the Congressional Budget Office would say such-and-such, she told them (wrongly) that her conversations with CBO head Robert Reischauer had already fixed that. When long-time senior hill staffers told her that she was making a dreadful mistake by fighting with rather than reaching out to John Breaux and Jim Cooper, she told them that they did not understand the wave of popular political support the bill would generate. And when substantive objections were raised to the plan by analysts calculating the moral hazard and adverse selection pressures it would put on the nation's health-care system...
Hillary Rodham Clinton has already flopped as a senior administrative official in the executive branch--the equivalent of an Undersecretary. Perhaps she will make a good senator. But there is no reason to think that she would be anything but an abysmal president.
I've always thought Hillary too smart--and too risk-averse--to give up the respectable security of a Senate seat for the possible humiliation of a presidential run (not to mention a presidential term), but you never know. If she ever does run, you can expect to hear more of this sort of thing from her Democratic opponents.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 08, 2003 • Comments
What kind of people run bookstores and publishing houses? One man's report from Book Expo America suggests they aren't exactly a diverse lot--not that he's complaining.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 08, 2003 • Comments
Dan Drezner corrects Hugh Hewitt's blogosphere-boosting Weekly Standard piece, noting especially the central role of Josh Marshall in the Lott affair and the Big Four's lack of influence on Rick Santorum's career. (The permalink isn't working, but this item is currently at the top of the page, dated Saturday, June 6.)
The post points up two aspects of the role of blogs and blog-loving online writers. First, exaggeration and overstatement pay. They get attention. Second, somebody will eventually come along and correct the exaggeration. That someone will probably not get quite as much attention, but at least the correction will exist.
Come to think of it, blogs have no monopoly on these two phenomena. They're pretty much the rule in most media. The influence of the generally nuanced Volokh Conspiracy suggests that blogs may, if anything, have the edge.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 08, 2003 • Comments
In response to the aside at the end of my post below, Rocky Mountain News editorialist and syndicated columnist Linda Seebach (another former Angeleno and self-described "refugee from the linguistics department"), writes:
Yes, "media are," in isolation. But there are other grammatical patterns pushing it to become, like "opera," an English word construed as singular.
One is its frequent use as an adjective, e.g., "media bashing." English adjuectives don't inflect, so when a noun is used in an adjective slot, it is used in the singular. We say, "most journalists are college graduates" rather then "most journalists are colleges graduates" even though there are obviously multiple colleges involved. But there's an exception to the rule, for English nouns with irregular plurals, such as "woman." People write, "women entrepreneurs," not "woman entrepreneurs," although they are quite likely to opt instead for "female" because neither the singular nor the plural sounds quite right.
Over time, languages tend to flatten out irregularities. "Media" is very commonly used as an adjective. Furthermore, the singular is really quite impossible: "Bloggers indulge in a lot of medium-bashing" (too many other possibilities - psychics? a fondness for extremes?). So people are constantly hearing "media" in a slot they know (not consciously) is reserved for singular words, and after a while it starts to sound singular.
I don't believe I've yet seen "medias" (as an English plural, not the Latin word) but I could see it happening, first as a neologism in a context where many different kinds of media were being discussed (as with fish and fishes). "To win an election, you must master all the different medias" and eventually without notice, as with operas.
Oddly enough, all the educrats seem to have settled on "criterion-referenced" for their favorite kind of test, even though few of them seem to know in other contexts that "criteria" even has a singular.
I have indeed seen "medias" used as the plural. To read Linda's column on blogs, click here.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 07, 2003 • Comments
I've updated the webpages for The Substance of Style. You can now see the jacket copy, an up-to-date (but very preliminary) tour schedule, and advance comments on the book. I've also improved the list of related articles, adding particularly relevant columns from D Magazine.
Those of you who really can't wait can now order a copy from Amazon. (I'd recommend waiting unless you think you'll forget. Amazon has a list price that's a dollar too high. It's supposed to be $24.95.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 05, 2003 • Comments
With an assist from Jeff Greenfield, Ken Layne nails it: The NYT turned into a national joke.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 05, 2003 • Comments
Mickey Kaus is right about Howell Raines:
If this had happened 10 years ago, when the Internet didn't exist, Raines would still be running the place. The Times staff would be just as unhappy, but they'd be unable to instantaneously organize and vent their displeasure on Romenesko and elsewhere. It was this suddenly-transparent internal opposition, more than the constant pummeling from bloggers, that brought Raines down.
Andrew Sullivan, on the other hand, is too, and too predictably, self-aggrandizing.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 05, 2003 • Comments
Engineering News-Record has a fascinating report on U.S. Army-led efforts organizing locals to fix up one of Baghdad's poorest neighborhoods. An excerpt:
On Monday evening, May 12, Col. Gregg Martin, commander of the 130th Engineer Brigade, had received an assignment. Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, commander of V Corps, in charge of Army operations in Iraq, wanted to make an immediate difference in the lives of the people in Baghdad's poorest neighborhoods. Long neglected or actively repressed by Saddam's regime, they now were despairing because their trash was gathering uncollected in the streets, their police force had vanished, or was powerless to protect them from crime, drains were backing up, pure water was impossible to find and many other things were just going wrong while the governing occupation authorities promised much, but delivered little improvement. Wallace's assignment was for Martin, as the corp's engineer, to apply the Army's engineering capabilities to help solve some of the people's problems.
"I want this to be a neighborhood strike force," Wallace said. To counter the impression that the authorities favored talking over doing, "we need to get Americans working with the Iraqi people. This an offensive action. We have the maneuverability to go anywhere we want to go in Baghdad. We want to exploit that." He wanted the project to start Thursday, May 15.
A meeting was quickly scheduled for Tuesday to plan the first task-force action. Wednesday was devoted to further refinement and rehearsal of the plan with V Corps staff members.
"Everyone wanted to say, "we're moving too fast; we need more reconnaissance and planning," says Martin. He answered that the operation would suffer paralysis by analysis, and offered what he calls the example of Legos.
"If you give a set of Lego blocks to a group of engineers and another to a group of kids, the engineers will draw up plans and designs and spend a lot of time preparing to do the job. The kids will just jump in and start building things. We need to be like those kids," he said. Armed with that logic and reinforced by the corps commanding general's order for quick action, Martin carried the day.
Lots of detail follows. Read the whole thing.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 05, 2003 • Comments
Todd Seavey warns the New Atlantis crowd of the danger of vague rhetoric:
I wonder if the anti-biotech conservatives--by wallowing in vague, moralistic language about human nature and society in order to guilt-trip us all into agreeing with their policy recommendations--aren't risking becoming the victims of a hoax like the one that physicist Alan Sokal pulled on leftists in 1996, when he wrote a nonsensical article and got it published in Social Text by larding it with jargon from fashionable literary criticism? A hoax conservative anti-biotech argument would require references to the ancient Greeks and the Pope instead of Lacan and Derrida, but it shouldn't be hard to whip up, perhaps with a title like "Retaining the Fundamental: Cystic Fibrosis as an Essential Human Travail."
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 05, 2003 • Comments
Elaborating on my post below, reader James Ingram writes:
What is particularly pernicious is that the feds would have been very hard put to convict [Martha] Stewart of criminal securities fraud. Dumping your stock on another unsuspecting member of the public (remember, there was a buyer, even if he or she is anonymous) based on a tip may be a sleazy think to do, but that does not make it a crime. To be a crime the "tipper" (securities law slang for the person passing on the inside information) must have received the information under a fiduciary duty not to disclose it, must have passed it along in knowing violation of that fiduciary duty and the "tippee" must have known that the "tipper" was acting in violation of a fiduciary duty. This sort of knowledge and intent is very, very hard to prove, particularly in a case where the only written evidence (an e-mail) said something to the effect that "your broker thinks the stock is trending down and you should sell." Much easier to nail her for lying. Easier to nail you and me too.
The worst case of this in public memory was Henry Cisneros. In his background investigation he disclosed the whole sordid tale: the extramarital fling, the dumping of his wife and family, his moving in with his mistress, their breakup, the humiliating return to his long-suffering wife, the pay-off to the mistress. How humiliating it must have been to tell this story to two suits from the FBI. For some reason he just couldn't bear to tell them just how much he had paid his mistress. Perhaps that was just too embarrassing. Perhaps he was afraid to let his wife know how much of their family savings he had given to a woman she must have regarded as a home-wrecker and hated like poison. In any event, he lied. And they crucified the poor bastard for it.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 05, 2003 • Comments