Just Above Sunset

They say love is blind. They say that for a reason. No one figured out why sensible Cynthia married feckless Reginald, or why the fetching Norma Sue married that no-account loser, Billy Bob - or mix and match as you will. In such matters rational judgment seems to play no part. Sure there are calculating gold-diggers who look at the guy’s balance sheet and do a cost-benefit analysis, and on the male side, the Arizona senator who remarried, to a stunning and uncertain woman worth a hundred million or more, and then ran for president - an arrangement that seems to have benefited them both. But those are the exceptions. Most people follow their heart, not their reluctant and careful head. Sometimes it works out, and sometimes it leads to decades of unhappiness and then divorce. You ask yourself just what you were thinking. You weren’t thinking. 

And some people marry a second time - what Samuel Johnson famously called “the triumph of hope over experience.” Johnson was, of course, pointing out that the second time around there has been no change. The decision to marry again will probably not be a considered decision, based on lessons learned and the logic of it all. It will just be what seems like a good idea at the time. Experience doesn’t really matter – many marry again knowing full well things will end badly, but they hope they won’t. They really know they will. But there’s always hope.

Many try to rationalize the process - there’s eHarmony (personality matching of couples on twenty-nine dimensions that determine long-term success, as they say) and Match.Com (browse self-descriptions and photos and try to guess who is lying about what) - but such services are for the delusional. Things don’t work that way - at best they offer a place to start, with their patina of cold and considered judgment. You know you’ll make a decision to hook up with someone on a hunch, or on hope. You watched Hollywood movies - Sabrina, the chauffeur’s daughter, finally sails to Paris with Linus, the far older and fabulously wealthy owner of everything, and melts his cold heart, as Billy Wilder showed us. Linus realizes the world of cost-benefit analyses and logically projected outcomes is not the world he wants to inhabit any longer. He makes an impulsive decision. Hollywood built an industry based on that premise - that the best decisions are impulsive. It’s no wonder that conservatives hate Hollywood. There’s the surface decadence - the sex and violence and all that - but this is a bigger thing. Hollywood is always attacking the basis of free-market capitalism - the idea people will decide things on the basis of profit and loss, on what will logically benefit them.

But perhaps all of life’s decisions are like that - the small used Ford sedan makes more sense but the Mini Cooper makes you happy, or the SUV or Porsche you can’t really afford makes you feel like someone you want to be. And on a larger scale there’s the matter of what they call your career path. Those who make money writing career books and holding career seminars will ask you where you want to be five years, and then in ten years, and try to get you to develop a plan to get you to that very place, with precisely defined objectives and scheduled milestones. You put the plan on the wall and stare at it, motivating yourself, month after month, year after year, to get your ass in gear - at least that’s the idea. Do that and you will probably just get massively depressed.

You know better. You know successful people, and happy people, who fell into their careers - your friend from high school who was going to be a doctor and now runs a charter boat service, or the one who was going to be a jazz musician who ended up running a software company, or the doctor who quit and writes poetry, and so on. It’s like surfing - most people catch the wave as it comes and ride it as far as they can. The five-year-plan and ten-year-plan don’t account to the ocean and those damned waves. The world is changing all the time - no kid growing up in the fifties carefully planned to grow up to eventually run a thriving internet search-engine corporation. Who knew? It seems no one is what they said, long ago, that they would be. You make big decisions on impulse. You watch the waves and try to catch a good one. If you’re lucky you do, and ride it carefully.

So maybe we all make it up as we go along. We say we think things through, and believe we do, but do so, usually, after the fact. It’s a joke we play on ourselves. Our decisions are irrational.

Politicians know this. That seems to be what the current campaigns are all about, offering us what feels right - and perhaps it has always been so. We don’t decide who should be the next president on carefully weighing qualifications as much as we try to get a sense of who feels right to us - the noble but dim war hero, the tough-as-nails and nasty policy wonk, or the eminently decent and honorable and stunningly thoughtful younger fellow. And we don’t consider policy positions that carefully.

Elsewhere, in Fighting the Noble Battle against the Inevitable Stupid, you’ll find a detailed discussion of one policy now in the news - McCain and Clinton proposing that the federal gasoline tax be suspended for the summer, and Obama saying that’s a dumb idea that would do more harm than good. It’s one of those things that feels right. But it’s like that second marriage. You know things will end badly. But then it feels so good. Ah, love is blind.

Why would we fall for this? Ezra Klein here argues that the media is feeding our irrational side, maybe because the media simply dislikes policy:

Policy is hard. Lots of people come to different conclusions. Unanimity is rare. Except on this gas tax holiday. Just about no one thinks it a good idea. Conservative economists loathe it, liberal economists loathe it, energy experts loathe it… it is shameless pandering of the worst sort. So is the media going to create a scandal around McCain’s pander? Around Clinton’s copy-pander? Will they hound them at press conferences, run segments about the derailed “Straight Talk Express,” bring on pollsters to ask whether Americans are tired of being lied to?

No. That won’t happen. They know their audience.

David Corn’s has some thoughts on that:

…we’re back to the perennial question: how mature are voters? Do they fall for the no-pain, quick-fix? Can they see through transparent pandering?

They can, but they’d rather not. It’s not a question of maturity, however. It’s a matter of the nature of how people really make judgments.

Kevin Drum from his perch at the Washington Monthly adds this:

Yes, it would be nice if the press spent less time on inanities and more time on how candidates planned to actually run the country. But this view of the media is just too simplistic.

Like it or not, virtually every mini-dustup in a presidential campaign - Wrightgate, Tuzlagate, bittergate, Judigate, etc. - has one thing in common: it lends itself to a simple moral judgment. It helps a lot if there’s also video available (or photos in a pinch), but the really important part is the simple moral judgment. That’s what people react to. Cable news amplifies this tendency and makes it worse, but they didn’t invent it.

Yes, we all make quick and simple moral judgments - off to Paris with Sabrina. And Drum says this happens where you wouldn’t natural expect it to happen, in the world of political junkies and policy wonks, the political blogs (like this one you’re now reading):

Take a look at the comment section of most political blogs and check out which posts get the most activity. Learned discussions of the history of the Earned Income Tax Credit? Analysis of which Shiite faction is up or down in Iraq’s civil war? Nope. It’s Wrightgate and Tuzlagate and bittergate and Judigate and any other post that provides an opportunity to express a simple moral judgment. Republicans suck. Dems are spineless. The media is corrupt.

And this is true even though blog readers tend to be far more wonky than the average politically lethargic American.

But he notes that the gas tax holiday thing just isn’t getting much play:

It’s just hard to get too worked up over a minor political pander when we all know that responding to interest groups is what politicians do every day. It’s practically in their job description.

Now, dig up a video of John McCain having dinner with some blonde bombshell oil industry lobbyist coyly telling him how much she wants to show her appreciation for his bold gas tax holiday proposal, and you’ve got yourself a story. Until then, CNN can put this on a 24/7 loop and it’s just not going to catch on. You can’t blame the media for everything.

He knows us.

Take a glance at Sam Stein in the Huffington Post with Expert Support For Gas Tax Holiday Appears Nonexistent and then see Matthew Yglesias’ comment:

By getting on board the holiday bandwagon, John McCain mostly reinforces one’s impression of him as someone who doesn’t have real ideas, principles, interest in, etc. domestic policy issues. I think that, by contrast, Hillary Clinton is managing to undermine the perception - something she’d embedded in even a lot of people who aren’t hugely sympathetic to her campaign - that she’s the candidate of substance, the earnest policy wonk type who really knows how to fix America’s problems.

It’s a reminder that Bill Clinton, who certainly stands out among presidents for his wonkishness and interest in policy detail, also wound up gravitating toward a political strategy that leaned heavily on what you might call “policy gimmicks” rather than a serious effort to grapple with national problems.

We like gimmicks. It’s a wave one can ride. Elsewhere, reacting to Hillary Clinton’s other proposal to release crude from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, Yglesias says this:

It’s not at all clear to me that ordinary voters understand that the underlying supply and demand trends make it overwhelmingly likely that the cost of gasoline will continue, on the whole, to move upwards in the future. But that’s the reality - the market will fluctuate and it’s possible that policy choices about the SPR can influence those fluctuations, but we’re not finding new sources of cheap oil at the same rate that global economic growth is making people want to burn more oil.

Both as a country, and as individuals, we need to plan accordingly. Not everyone will agree with my preferred policy prescriptions, which tend toward denser land use and more transit, but we need some long-term policy response. And people need to respond in their own lives when they make decisions about which car to buy and where to live. But when national leaders act as if they believe current fuel costs are a passing phenomenon to be weathered with short-term measures, then at least some voters are going to believe them and make bad personal and political decisions that we can ill afford. A lot of electoral gambits are nonsense without being actually harmful, but McCain and Clinton are making problems worse just with their rhetoric.

No, they understand people. As a country, and as individuals, we may need to plan accordingly, as he says. Why would we start now? We never have before.

One should note that ABC News, who ran that Philadelphia debate that avoided policy issues pretty much entirely, seems to be going the other way. On Good Morning America they rip into the gas tax holiday idea, actually explaining one reason why it’s a bad idea. That’s odd. CNN and the others have also done a bit of that. Perhaps reporting that candidates are jerking us around will become a trend.

At the site Same Facts, Robert Frank suggests that Obama should ride that wave:

…this combination of events provides Obama with a golden opportunity to turn the issue to his advantage. He can do this by scheduling a high-profile public speech whose announced purpose is to explain why McCain’s gas tax holiday is such bad idea. The arguments are simple and persuasive. If Obama cannot make them seem compelling, he is not the brilliant orator we all believe him to be. This speech would challenge McCain’s perceived strength as a straight-talker, because the proposal is the polar opposite of straight talk. After explaining why, Obama should challenge members of the press to find a single reputable energy expert or economist who believes otherwise. There aren’t any.

That would be cool, if anyone cared.

Still, it would win over a few people, even if not many. Obama is winning some conservatives, like Ross Douthat, the man whose new book is Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream (Doubleday, June 24, 2008). He says this:

Obviously I’m not rooting for Barack Obama to win the Presidency, but if he does take the election this fall, there will be some compensating pleasures - not only the thrill that will accompany seeing a man ascend to the Oval Office who could have been bought and sold in a different, more unjust America, but the pleasure of knowing that Jeremiah Wright’s attempt at self-aggrandizing sabotage fell flat on its face.

That’s not based in reason, or maybe it is. It may be one of Drum’s quick moral judgments.

People make those. Andrew Sullivan says this reader is not alone:

I’ll just put that out there. If Obama is done in by this whole Wright thing I am done with politics. I can’t invest myself in something that is so sure to disappoint me time and time and time again. If the Democratic Party decides that it cannot risk nominating a great and decent African American man because his pastor is a scary African American man, it does not deserve power because it will have caved to what is worst about America. Racists on both sides of the divide will rejoice at having taking down the biggest threat to their belief system since Martin Luther King… and young people like me will burrow deeper into to the holes we were in before Barack Obama dug us out.

That is not a critique of policy. It’s one of Drum’s quick moral judgments.

But Obama is black. And that is a problem. See James Baldwin in “Many Thousands Gone” from 1955″

In our image of the Negro breathes the past we deny, not dead but living yet and powerful, the beast in our jungle of statistics. It is this which defeats us, which continues to defeat us, which lends to interracial cocktail parties their rattling, genteel, nervously smiling air: in any drawing room at such a gathering the beast may spring, filling the air with flying things and an unenlightened wailing. Wherever the problem touches there is confusion, there is danger. Wherever the Negro face appears a tension is created, the tension of a silence filled with things unutterable. It is a sentimental error, therefore, to believe that the past is dead: it means nothing to say that it is all forgotten, that the Negro himself has forgotten it. It is not a question of memory. Oedipus did not remember the thongs that bound his feet; nevertheless the marks they left testified to that doom toward which his feet were leading him.

There’s something primal there, beyond logic.

But all sorts of illogical things are afoot. Hillary Clinton appears on Fox News, interviewed by Bill O’Reilly himself on his No Spin Zone. Talking Points Memo has the key video clip:

O’Reilly: “Can you believe this Rev. Wright guy? Can you believe this guy?”

Clinton: “Well, I’m going to leave it up to voters to decide.”

O’Reilly: “Well, what do you think as an American?”

Clinton: “Well, what I said when I was asked directly is that I would not have stayed in the church.”

O’Reilly: “You’re an American citizen, I’m an American citizen, he’s an American citizen, Rev. Wright. What do you think when you hear a fellow American citizen say that kind of stuff about America.”

Clinton: “Well, I take offense. I think it’s offensive and outrageous. I’m going to express my opinion, others can express theirs. It is part of just, you know, an atmosphere we’re in today.”

She plays to the irrational, and seems to be letting the Fox News viewers know she’d be a better Republican than John McCain, or something. She was a Goldwater Girl way back when, after all.

It seems atavistic. On the other hand, it could be calculating, as one comment at the link suggests:

I’ve always thought Hillary was pretty much unelectable, but I’m about to change my mind on that. She’s got Ann Coulter’s endorsement, she’s chummy with O’Reilly, and the wingnuts really hate McCain. If Hillary manages to steal the nomination she won’t get the progressive vote or the black vote, but she’ll more than make up for it by taking the wingnut vote away from McCain. Nader will get the progressive vote, but who cares?

Suddenly her support for the AUMA [the congressional authorization to use military force against Iraq], her cheerleading for the surge, her vote to take us closer to preemptive war against Iran, supporting (for a while) legalizing torture, sponsoring a bill to ban flag burning, talking about totally obliterating Iran, endorsing McCain, antagonizing the netroots … the whole thing starts to make sense. Her plan is nothing less than a hostile takeover of the GOP. It’s so crazy it just might work.

Just don’t think about it. Of course we seldom do think things through. That may be the whole point.

Tuesday, April 29, didn’t seem like a good day for throwing anyone under the bus. The bus probably wasn’t moving. The Washington Post explains why: 

In every state, the average price of diesel fuel was more than $4 a gallon. Diesel fuel cost $4.35 a gallon in the District, $4.30 in Maryland and $4.10 in Virginia, according to the survey. Diesel costs were highest in New York, averaging $4.59 a gallon.

But of course the busses were running – out here they run on liquefied petroleum gas or compresses natural gas, and in some places on biodiesel from restaurant deep fryers or manure, and smell as you would expect. They were running, and the day was for throwing someone under the bus.

Some say that is what Barack Obama did. The Politico headline says it all. Obama Breaks With Former Pastor:

Sen. Barack Obama coolly denounced the Rev. Jeremiah Wright for his “appalling” words and for his personal and political betrayal Tuesday, a day after Wright seized center stage in the race for the White House and six weeks after Obama said he could no more “disown” his former pastor than he could his own grandmother.

He had to do it, wasn’t happy doing it, but was glad to do it. Does that make sense?

You can watch all seven minutes (6:57 actually) of his statement here (MSNBC) and find the transcript of that and the question-and-answer that followed here (Salon). It was a model of clarity, and he remain who he seems to be:

I have spent my entire adult life trying to bridge the gap between different kinds of people. That’s in my DNA, trying to promote mutual understanding to insist that we all share common hopes and common dreams as Americans and as human beings. That’s who I am. That’s what I believe. That’s what this campaign has been about.

Yesterday we saw a very different vision of America.

He pretty much said that a man who speculates that our government might have created AIDS to rid the nation of pesky minorities, and who says our military practices terrorism and all the rest, is full of crap – that sort of thing makes him angry, and from this particular man makes him sad, but although earlier he had given the man the benefit of the doubt, he was walking away from such foolishness. One got the impression he felt betrayed, and knew the only thing to do was refuse to defend such nonsense in any way at all. Some of those who disagree with him might have a point, but Jeremiah Wright had, by amplifying his earlier peculiar comments, forfeited any right to be taken seriously.

And Obama did his usual shift-to-the-larger-issue pirouettes, reminding everyone of what they must know is far more important:

I’m particularly distressed that this has caused such a distraction from what this campaign should be about, which is the American people. Their situation is getting worse. And this campaign has never been about me. It’s never been about Senator Clinton or John McCain. It’s not about Reverend Wright. People want some help in stabilizing their lives and securing a better future for themselves and their children, and that’s what we should be talking about. And the fact that Reverend Wright would think that somehow it was appropriate to command the stage for three or four consecutive days in the midst of this major debate is something that not only makes me angry but also saddens me.

It was a mild sort of in-your-face challenge. You want to talk about issues? Then let’s talk about the issues, damn it – not this nonsense.

Will this work? At Outside the Beltway, James Joyner thinks so:

I’m not sure what more Obama could say, to be honest. He’ll be tarred somewhat for having spent 20 years in Wright’s congregation and touting him so heavily as his mentor. But this should stop the bleeding.

Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly doesn’t buy it:

You betcha. I’m sure Sean Hannity and John McCain will take this straight to heart.

Drum is a realist, but Brendan Loy makes a rather obvious point:

The truth is that Obama is speaking to black people, too - he’s speaking to everyone - and he is sending a very clear message: enough with the bullshit. Haven’t conservatives been waiting for a black leader to do that for, like, forever?

This is the promise of the Obama candidacy, encapsulated and made real. Obama is urging blacks to leave behind, once and for all, the politics of conspiratorial victimhood - the politics of Jeremiah Wright and, although Obama can’t afford politically to say so explicitly, of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton - and embrace the politics of unity and hope and, ultimately, self-empowerment.

Well, self-empowerment is what the conservatives love. But, as Andrew Sullivan notes, that won’t work in this case:

It’s extremely depressing that the first major national black politician who takes on the victimology of Sharpton and Jackson is greeted by the right with the kind of cynicism you see at Malkin or the Corner or Reynolds. It reveals, I think, the deeper truth: the Republican right only wants a black Republican to do this. They are not as interested in getting beyond the racial question, in changing the hopes and dreams of black America, as they are in exploiting it for partisan advantage. Their response to the first major black candidate for president tackling the old racial politics? “We don’t believe him.”

Of course they don’t. Obama consorts with madmen and terrorists, don’t you know? They will keep this alive.

Richard Einhorn, in a long piece at Hullabaloo, says it’s long past time to fight them on this:

Of course, there is much I don’t like about Wright - you can start with his defense of Farrakhan and go from there - but that is hardly the point. He was made into a campaign issue - and thereby given a national voice - by Republicans and a media who deliberately distorted his words. These are the very same people who had no trouble excusing Huckabee’s enthusiastic effort to release a serial rapist and his anti-science initiatives as governor. And who, right now, are burying McCain’s actively sought support of a Catholic-hating pastor.

Some of Wright’s ideas are rotten, but hardly more so than those preached at Bob Jones. What’s different is the way those ideas are portrayed and that portrayal - which seeks to link Wright to Obama - stinks of bigotry. This is an unavoidable issue and shame on those who think it shouldn’t be raised in this context or can be finessed in general. It will be raised again and again and Obama will lose ground until liberals fight back tooth and nail rather than try to distance themselves.

And you know what? They may be assholes, or jerks, or whatever term you want to use, but they sure as hell didn’t run this economy into the ground. They aren’t responsible for turning a huge surplus into a several hundred billion dollar deficit. I have yet to read any memos from Barbra Streisand detailing how we should spy on American citizens.

… Maybe it is because I am totally and unrepentantly in the tank for Obama, but I just can’t get worked up over what his pastor said. Maybe it is because I am not religious, and I am used to religious people saying things that sound crazy. Or maybe I just refuse to spend any more time and energy getting worked up over and denouncing, distancing, and rejecting the wrong people - people who really don’t matter in the big scheme of things. If you have a memo from Jeremiah Wright to John Yoo showing how we should become a rogue nation, let me know. If you have pictures of Jeremiah Wright voting against the GI Bill, send it to me. If you have evidence of Jeremiah Wright training junior soldiers on the finer aspects of stacking and torturing naked Iraqi captives, pass them on.

Until then, I just can’t seem to get all worked up about the crazy scary black preacher that Obama has to “throw under the bus.”

Or maybe the last word comes from Duncan Black:

This election is going to be much, much stupider than the last time. Last time much of the stupid was at least nominally about serious issues, this time it’s just all about the stupid.

But it doesn’t have to be. See Andrew Sullivan:

That was a very impressive, clear and constructive re-framing of the core message of his candidacy; and a moment given to him by Wright. No one will ever be able to say that Obama threw his father-figure and pastor under the bus. We all know that the reverse happened. We also know that this clear repudiation of Wright’s toxic, indeed “ridiculous” views on AIDS, 9/11 and permanent immiseration [sic] of people of color could not have happened unless Wright had made it necessary. Skeptics may wonder whether Wright actually deliberately did Obama a favor. I doubt it. But a favor it unintentionally is.

He suggests that maybe some good will come of this:

Maybe these racial and cultural divides can help us understand how better to move beyond them. Cynics may scoff - and certainly will. They will parse every nuance and try to paint Obama as another cynical, positioning pol. I don’t believe it. He has more sincerity and integrity than the vast majority of politicians, more honesty, and more resilience in a very tough spot.

And today, we found that he can fight back, and take a stand, without calculation and in what is clearly a great amount of personal difficulty and political pain. It’s what anyone should want in a president. It makes me want to see him succeed more than ever. It’s why this country needs to see him succeed more than ever.

Of course, one of his readers has a vastly different take:

The point has been made before, but we need a reminder. Obama did not have a strong model of masculinity, a father figure to know intimately and revere, in his earliest years. He yearned desperately for it; somehow, finding the patriarch would make him whole and normal in a way he thought others felt.

So he found Wright a few decades ago. But he’s flying blind. If we’re lucky enough, and our fathers live long enough, we can see them for the humans they are. We don’t love them less, but in the process of maturing we begin to grow independent by seeing them with new eyes. We separate, and in doing so, enter a new ambivalence about what the father-son role means as it transforms. We might be watching a limnal process for Obama in real-time here. The sad thing is that (and I believe Obama is sincere) I don’t think any of us could know the inner turmoil this causing Obama. Sometimes it’s easy to forget how privileged those of us who know well the father-son dynamic are; it’s just too easy to yell “throw Wright under the bus.” Obama is human, too.

That’s interesting. It’s also not particularly useful. Things will only get nastier, in spite of family dynamics.

And there are other issues, where one certainly has to fight the inevitable stupid:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton lined up with Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, in endorsing a plan to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for the summer travel season. But Senator Barack Obama, Mrs. Clinton’s Democratic rival, spoke out firmly against the proposal, saying it would save consumers little and do nothing to curtail oil consumption and imports.

While Mr. Obama’s view is shared by environmentalists and many independent energy analysts, his position allowed Mrs. Clinton to draw a contrast with her opponent in appealing to the hard-hit middle-class families and older Americans who have proven to be the bedrock of her support. She has accused Mr. Obama of being out of touch with ordinary Americans who are struggling to meet their mortgages and gas up their cars and trucks.

See Kevin Drum on this matter:

I’d say there’s approximately a zero percent chance that Hillary Clinton or John McCain actually believe this is good policy. It would increase oil company profits, it would make hardly a dent in the price of gasoline, it would encourage more summertime driving, and it would deprive states of money for transit projects. Their staff economists know this perfectly well, and so do they.

But they don’t care. It’s a way to engage in some good, healthy demagoguery, and if there’s anything that the past couple of months have reinforced, it’s the notion that demagoguery sells. Boy does it sell.

Of course it does, but Obama stands his ground – lose those tax funds and highway construction stops, and hundreds of thousands lose their jobs, for a minimal individual savings. What’s the point?

Also see the economist Dean Baker:

Almost all economists would agree that the tax cut proposed by Senators Clinton and McCain would save consumers nothing. With the supply of gas largely fixed by the capacity of the oil industry (they claim to be running their refineries at full capacity), the price will not change in response to the elimination of the tax. The only difference will be that money that used to go to the government in tax revenues will instead go to the oil industry as higher profits. If Senator Clinton is able to use this proposal to draw a contrast with Senator Obama in expressing concern for middle-class families it could only be attributable to the extraordinary incompetence of the reporters who are covering the campaign.

But watch her new television ad – Obama never cared about working-class people and never will, as you see he won’t even give you a few pennies. She knows it’s nonsense, but it works.

See also the long discussion of all this from Alex Koppelman in Salon:

The federal gas tax currently stands at 18.4 cents a gallon — 24.4 cents for diesel — and the money collected from it goes into a highway trust fund that helps state and local governments pay for various road-related expenses.

The merits of the suspension proposal are, at best, debatable. First, McCain’s formulation of the idea would increase the federal deficit, as he supports shifting other federal monies into the trust fund to make up for the difference. (Clinton’s is supposed to be revenue neutral, as she’s also calling for a windfall profits tax on oil companies to make up for the lost tax dollars.)

Then there’s the question of what a gas tax holiday would actually accomplish.

To that end he cites Princeton economics professor and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman in this blog post, one that the Obama campaign is now sending out to reporters:

John McCain has a really bad idea on gasoline, Hillary Clinton is emulating him (but with a twist that makes her plan pointless rather than evil), and Barack Obama, to his credit, says no.

Why doesn’t cutting the gas tax this summer make sense? It’s Econ 101 tax incidence theory: if the supply of a good is more or less unresponsive to the price, the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount. The McCain gas tax plan is a giveaway to oil companies, disguised as a gift to consumers.

Is the supply of gasoline really fixed? For this coming summer, it is. Refineries normally run flat out in the summer, the season of peak driving. Any elasticity in the supply comes earlier in the year, when refiners decide how much to put in inventories. The McCain/Clinton gas tax proposal comes too late for that…

The Clinton twist is that she proposes paying for the revenue loss with an excess profits tax on oil companies. In one pocket, out the other.

He then cites this interview with Christopher Knittel, professor of economics at the University of California at Davis:

The U.S. is just now starting to get on board with the idea that we need to fight climate change, and this is just reversing that fight. Basically we’re going to reduce the price of gasoline, which means consumers are going to respond by either driving more in the short term or changing how they make vehicle purchases and buying less fuel-efficient cars, because fuel efficiency won’t be as important.

Well, duh – the fix makes things worse.

In North Carolina, Obama said this:

This isn’t an idea designed to get you through the summer, it’s designed to get them through an election. The easiest thing in the world for a politician to do is to tell you what they think you want to hear. But if we’re gonna solve our challenges right now, then we’ve gotta start telling the American people what they need to hear. Tell ‘em the truth.

Now that’s a novel idea.

Over at Same Facts you can find the thorny truth from Michael O’Hara:

The ease with which politicians say “gas prices are too high” combines their cowardice (or cynicism and irresponsibility, or maybe just ignorance) with a widespread confusion of price with cost in the public mind, one for which we educators probably have to answer though a supine and feckless press isn’t helping at all. The distinction is no piece of technical arcana, but one of the most fundamental keys to getting policy right, and in this case, a very big batch of policy with enormous consequences. If you don’t understand the difference, you do what Hugo Chavez does and suppress the price by enormous public subsidies. Unfortunately, the cost of anything is quite independent of what we want it to be, or the price at which it is offered, because cost is a reality sort of thing, the value of the economic resources consumed in providing it. If you call a dog’s tail a leg, it still has four legs, because calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one. If you lie about the cost of gasoline, or anything, by offering it for sale at an arbitrary price, the cost doesn’t change, but the behavior of everyone gets crazy with very bad consequences.

Okay – cost and price are two different things. But why?

Here’s the key:

Price and cost can drift apart for many reasons, of which direct meddling by incompetent authority is only one. Sometimes the cost of goods includes resources that the producer doesn’t have to pay for, or that aren’t traded in markets, so their price misrepresents their real value in the way market goods prices usually don’t. The global warming and local pollution costs of burning gasoline are not reflected in what refiners pay to get gas to the pump (even including the tax intended to build the roads that make cars worth having), so the US price of gasoline is not too high but too low, probably about half what it should be. “Should be”, meaning “what would tell consumers the real cost of using it.” “Should be”, not meaning “what people want it to be, as long as they can pretend reality will be suspended.”

So O’Hara is with Obama:

When a candidate takes risks that position him to be a better official if elected, and tells voters the truth instead of enabling our worst habits of magical thinking, he gets props in my book and should in yours.

But, the same day, the president had a news conference – things are tough all over and none of it is his fault. Congress just wouldn’t do what he wanted them to do, like approve drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

You find a run-down and a video clip of this here (Talking Points Memo) but that links to a Reuters item on what seems like magical thinking:

The Bush administration says the United States would be less addicted to foreign oil and fuel prices would be lower if Congress had only opened up Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.

But that claim doesn’t reflect the long lead time to develop the refuge’s huge oil reserves, which would not be available for several more years and initial volumes would still be small if Congress in 2002 had approved the administration’s plan to drill in ANWR, energy experts say.

And if he had had his way it would have meant little:

The extra supplies would have cut dependence on foreign oil, but only slightly. With ANWR crude, imports would have met 60 percent of U.S. oil demand in 2020, down from 62 percent without the refuge’s supplies.

All three leading presidential candidates, Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and Republican John McCain, are against oil drilling in the refuge.

But all we got was the usual not-my-fault puerile whining.

And that was rather awful, as you can see in this video clip – for some reason Martha Raddatz decided to ask about the quickly deteriorating conditions in Afghanistan. He didn’t like that and went off on “an impassioned diatribe” about how important it is to keep fighting hard there.

But the key exchange was this:

Q: Can I just add to that, a couple weeks ago -

THE PRESIDENT: No, you can’t. This is the second follow-up. You usually get one follow-up, and I was nice enough to give you one. I didn’t give anybody on this side a follow-up, and now you are trying to take a second follow-up.

Q: Can I just say -

THE PRESIDENT: They just cut off your mic. You can’t, no.

Q: A couple weeks ago you said -

THE PRESIDENT: Now she’s going to go without the mic. This is awesome.

Ah, you cannot fight the inevitable stupid.

And it’s what we can easily get more of. See Steve Benen summarizing John McCain’s inability to make up his mind about whether we should have a long term presence in Iraq, just like we have in South Korea. That goes like this – 1) in 2005, McCain decided Iraqis resent our military presence, so we should reject a Korea-like model for long-term troop deployment. He insisted that “U.S. ‘visibility’ was detrimental to the Iraq mission and that Iraqis were responding negatively to America’s presence — positions held by both Obama and Clinton.” Then 2) in 2006, McCain reversed course, and embraced the Korea model for a long-term military presence. Then 3) in 2007, McCain reversed course again, saying the Korean analogy doesn’t work and shouldn’t be followed. “[E]ventually I think because of the nature of the society in Iraq and the religious aspects of it that America eventually withdraws,” McCain told Charlie Rose last fall. Then 4) in 2008, McCain reversed course yet again, deciding that we should be prepared to leave troops in Iraq, even if it means 100 years or more.

Kevin Drum was amused by all this – “Foreign policy is easy when you just make it up as you go along!”

Ah, you cannot fight the inevitable stupid. It’s time to look for another bus.