The New York Times has a good piece that actually looks at John McCain’s record in the post-9/11 world instead of just gazingly lovingly at his credentials. Highlight:

Within a month he made clear his priority. “Very obviously Iraq is the first country,” he declared on CNN. By Jan. 2, Mr. McCain was on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea, yelling to a crowd of sailors and airmen: “Next up, Baghdad!”

Meanwhile, nobody ever talks about this, but I promise you that back in 1999, McCain was calling for a land invasion of Serbia.

When last we checked, Phil Gramm felt the United States of America was experiencing no real economic problems, only a “mental recession” and he was concerned that we’d become a “nation of whiners”:

At this point, John McCain decided to throw his longtime friend under the bus, joking that rather than a high-level administration post, Senator Gramm “would be in serious consideration for Ambassador to Belarus.” As it happens, I think that might be a fun job, but the point was clear enough. Now, though, Jackie Calmes reports that “associates say the senator still dials up former Senator Phil Gramm of Texas . . . [c]urrent and former advisers say they still consider Mr. Gramm, now UBS investment bank vice chairman, a top prospect for treasury secretary in a McCain administration.”

Every time I see beach volleyball or regular volleyball featured on television during the Olympics, I keep yearning for a behind-the-scenes feature in which we see beach volleyballers badmouthing the conventional volleyballers and vice-versa. I’m sure there are all kinds of invidious — and hilarious! — stereotypes that each breed has of the other, but I have no idea what those stereotypes might be. Any volleyball fanatics in the audience who want to clue me in?

I’m a bit late on this, but not only did Team USA basketball beat Spain, we beat that badly. I was a bit skeptical that the “Redeem Team” had really solved the problems that plagued USA basketball during the Athens Olympics and the 2002 & 2006 World Championships, but after these games against Spain and Greece, I’m a believer. America is back!

Via Brad DeLong and Oliver Willis, The Washington Post‘s Alec MacGillis explains that one important contrast between John McCain and Barack Obama, is that Obama has lived in some different places:

McCain hails from an America that exalted service to country, and he is the scion of a military family who endured five years in enemy captivity and who preaches a mantra of personal honor and of the nation over the individual — “Country First,” as his campaign slogan declares. His wife is conspicuously reserved at his side; he does not communicate by e-mail and only recently learned to use the Internet; even his roguish sense of humor carries echoes of the more chauvinistic 1950s of his youth.

Obama’s embodiment of a newer America begins but hardly ends with the fact that he would be the first black president. In a country where people liked to know where you were from, Obama lacks a ready answer — he is part Hawaii, part Kansas, part Chicago. In a recent speech in Berlin, he declared himself a “citizen of the world.”

This would be in contrast, I guess, with the famous stability associated with military families. Except, I guess, for the fact that he was born in Panama and:

For his first ten years, ‘Johnny’ McCain (the family nickname he was given) was frequently uprooted as his family, including older sister Sandy and younger brother Joe, followed his father to New London, Connecticut, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and other stations in the Pacific Ocean [...] mother who took advantage of the family’s many long-distance travels to expose him to historical and cultural sites [...] two years as a naval aviator in training, first at Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida through September 1959, and then at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi in Texas [...] Starting in November 1960, McCain flew A-1 Skyraiders with the VA-65 “World Famous Fighting Tigers” squadron on the aircraft carriers USS Intrepid and USS Enterprise.

Then, of course, came Vietnam and years of captivity. Upon his return he lived in Washington, DC and then Jacksonville. “In 1976, he briefly thought of running for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida,” but instead he went back to DC and became a lobbyist for the Navy. Then, though still married to another woman, he began commuting back-and-forth to Arizona to have an affair with Cindy Lou Hensley. Hensley was from Arizona, and he took advantage of his eventual marriage to her to move to Arizona and run for congress as something of a carpetbagger.

There’s a lot that you can say about this story — military upbringing, war heroism, bad marital conduct — but clearly just like Barack Obama (and for that matter millions of Americans) this is someone who moved around a lot and lacks deep roots in any particular place. He was in his mid-forties before he first moved to the state he currently represents in the Senate.

Robert Farley makes a lot of sense on the past and future of NATO expansion. As he says, we have no reason to apologize for past NATO expansion, but simply because past expansions have been beneficial doesn’t mean that “NATO expansion” as such is a good thing that needs to be pressed forward. A point I would add is that there’s a difference between extending security guarantees so as to protect countries from Russian coercion and extending security guarantees in order to encourage countries to engage in risky anti-Russian behaviors. There was no sign that Hungary or the Czech Republic ever had any desire to actually pick a fight with Russia the way Georgia did (and has) or that Ukraine with its messy situation including actual Russian military bases on Russian soil plausibly might in the future.

I would recommend both Larry Bartels’ book Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age and Theda Skocpol’s review of the book. Bartels’ main point is that contrary to what many believe, partisan politics has a large impact on the course of economic change, with Republican presidents leading to strong income growth for rich people, and Democratic presidents being better than anyone else. Bartels further argues that Republican politician succeed in spite of this fact not because voters are “distracted” by other concerns, but instead primarily because:

– Voters tend to behave only as if election year economic performance matters, not performance across the entirety of a term.

– Fundraising impacts election outcomes in a way that puts a thumb on the scales for politicians with pro-rich-people policies.

– Voters have trouble fully understanding the choices in front of them.

One way of summing it up is simply with reference to Bartels’ first point partisan politics has a bigger impact on economic performance than most people believe, and minoritarian policies can succeed politically precisely because most people don’t understand how important partisan politics are to these kind of outcomes.

What this book made me wish for was more economics: Bartels gives us a lot of empirical political science data that seems to indicate that partisan control of the White House is more economically important than you would think. Contrary to this, there’s substantial economic theory that seems to argue that this can’t possibly be the case. What would be really fantastic would be for Bartels to team up with an economist to attempt a more thorough treatment of the causal mechanism issues than Unequal Democracy offers — a Bartels/Krugman All-Princeton Crossover Spectacular or something.