Something very much in the air among right-of-center German political elites that I haven’t seen much represented in the (scant) American coverage of the German election campaign is the idea that Angela Merkel is only pretending to want to ditch the Grand Coalition in favor of a center-right coalition with the Free Democrats:

This line of thought has it that basically a grand coalition is the best possible outcome for her, since it lets her avoid the pressure to enact controversial economic reforms that could prove unpopular. But it’s not tenable for a CDU leader to say that she prefers a grand coalition, lest she wind up ousted by true believing colleagues.

Here’s my photo of yesterday’s SPD rally by the Brandenberg Gate:

The crowd seemed rather small and unenthusiastic, which I’m told is typically of rallies from all parties throughout this campaign. The speeches were of course in German, but sources say Frank-Walter Steinmeier mostly focused on the threat of a Black-Yellow coalition and that the efforts to maintain the pretense that he’s running for Chancellor rather than Vice-Chancellor seemed half-hearted. Was interested to see some German members of Avaaz and the One Campaign, two excellent global organizations, on hand giving out some information about their key causes.

Kevin Drum writes:

I mean, suppose you accepted that climate change was both real and catastrophic. What options would you have if you insisted on sticking solely to free market principles? Beats me. Hell, it’s hard enough to address even if you don’t. But that’s where we are these days: an awful lot of our most pressing problems simply can’t be solved unless you accept that the government has to be involved. So conservatives are stuck.

I think this is far too kind to the behavior of right-of-center institutions—Heritage, AEI, Cato, National Review, Weekly Standard, the Chamber of Commerce, Rush Limbaugh, etc.—on the issue of climate change. It implies that there’s some genuine ideological dilemma that makes it impossible for a committed free marketer to propose constructive policies to avert catastrophic climate change. But how about reductions in subsidies for fossil fuel production and consumption? The free market credentials seem impeccable. Or how about a “green tax shift” in which carbon is taxes or carbon emission permits are auctioned and the revenue is used to finance deficit-neutral reductions in other taxes? Again, it surely can’t be that free market principles commit people to the precise series of revenue streams currently used in the United States.

Now of course in the real world it’s going to be impossible to legislate a pure free market “tax shift” policy just as it’s going to be impossible to legislate a pure “tax polluters to subsidize clean energy” approach or a pure “cap and rebate” or a pure anything. But if people started from the premise that emissions need to be reduced, and then debated the extent to which this needs to be done in a free market way versus some other kind of way, then compromise would be easy to reach and a solution could be within reach. But that’s not what we have. Not because market-oriented approaches are inadequate to the challenge but because too many of the key institutions that espouse market-oriented approaches are run by people who are too corrupt, incompetent, immoral, stupid, or cowardly to get their side to take the problem seriously.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The German Federation of Industry had a bunch to say, not all of it sensible on the merits, about making German climate policy friendly to export-oriented manufacturers, but none of it involved ranting about “cap and tax” or denouncing “socialism” or pretending that the whole problem was made up by Al Gore.

There’s a lot going on in David Brooks’ brief for an ambitious campaign in Afghanistan but there’s one piece that I think really needs to be taken apart, namely his contention that “A Taliban conquest in Afghanistan would endanger the Pakistani regime at best, create a regional crisis for certain and lead to a nuclear-armed Al Qaeda at worst.” Justin Logan retorts:

This is really cranking it up to 11 on the hyperbole meter. We may recall that in the 1990s when the Taliban was running Afghanistan, Pakistan was arguably more stable than it is today.

I think this deserves a more detailed treatment. It seems to me that one of our big issues in Afghanistan is that it’s not clear that the Pakistan government wants our side—i.e., Hamid Karzai—to win the war at all. Back before 9/11, they wanted the Taliban to run Afghanistan and saw the Northern Alliance as too tied in with Russia and India to serve Pakistani interests. Robert Kaplan wrote about a year ago:

The Karzai government has openly and brazenly strengthened its ties with India, and allowed Indian consulates in Jalalabad, Kandahar, Herat, and Mazar-e-Sharif. It has kept alive the possibility of inviting India to help train the new Afghan army, and to help in dam construction in the northeastern Afghan province of Kunar, abutting Pakistan. All this has driven the ISI wild with fear and anger.

[…] In the mind of the ISI, India uses its new consulates in Afghanistan to back rebels in Pakistan’s southwestern province of Baluchistan, whose capital, Quetta, is only a few hours’ drive from Kandahar. When India talks of building dams in Kunar, the ISI thinks that India wants to help Afghanistan steal Pakistan’s water. Karzai’s open alliance with India is nearly a casus belli for the ISI. So elements of the ISI have responded in kind; they likely helped in the recent assassination attempt against the Afghan president.

A lot of this reaction seems like ISI paranoia. But the main point is just about the alignment of forces. If Brooks wants us to believe that ensuring a Karzai victory is necessary for the stability of the Pakistan government, he needs to offer some explanation of why the government of Pakistan doesn’t see it that way. Ehsan Ahrari wrote a good primer on this problem in 2006. For a more up-to-date look at this, I highly recommend the Wall Street Journal’s “India Befriends Afghanistan, Irking Pakistan.” Just note that by “Afghanistan” they mean “Hamid Karzai’s government.” Pakistan, “irked,” doesn’t want to see a pro-Indian regime secure control of southern Afghanistan.

The “Af-Pak” linkage is real, but that’s the direction it runs—Pakistan’s regional concerns about India and Russia undermine our efforts to create a united “pro-American” front against Islamist radicalism in the area. That’s a real issue, but it’s totally different from the alleged theory that Taliban wins against northern-based warlords undermine Pakistan’s stability.

With my Kindle broken and the Socialism World Tour still having several legs left, I thought I would Google to see what kind of English-language bookstores there are in Berlin. That led me to read this paragraph:

english-bookshops-berlin.jpgFor some travelers, half the fun in finding an English-language bookstore in a foreign country is in the quest, following one’s intuition down a small side street and reveling in the discovery. For others — travelers with control issues — finding an English-language bookstore requires research, an action plan, and a complete printout paper-clipped to your travel map. So while this post is naturally of interest to both types of English-language book lovers, it is clearly directed at the latter category. Rest assured, whatever neighborhood you’ve chosen to explore, we’ve just the right Berlin bookstore to set your Apollonian mind at ease.

The fact that one can manage to generalize about looking for English-language bookstores in foreign countries is a reminder of what a privilege those of us who are native speakers of the English language have thanks to the fact that a couple hundred years of Anglo-American geopolitical hegemony have made our language globally dominant. A traveler from South Korea looking to buy a book in Berlin to read on his flight to Stockholm is going to be out of luck. And there isn’t going to be any flight information or airport signs in Korean either.

Greg Sargent notes a public opinion paradox:

The new CBS/New York Times poll drives this point home as starkly as you could want — and suggests that Dems have failed at one of their core political missions.

The poll finds that an overwhelming majority of 64% think Republicans are opposing Obama’s health care plans mostly for political reasons. But it also finds that an equally large number, 65%, say Democrats shouldn’t pass a bill without Republicans — even if they think it’s right for the country — and should instead compromise to win over some GOPers.

I don’t know that I think this shows Democrats have failed at anything. I think it mostly re-demonstrates the familiar result that outside a fairly narrow band of questions the public doesn’t necessarily have detailed, stable, and coherent opinions. That these two views don’t really make much sense together suggests that a substantial swathe of the population just hasn’t thought these questions through very thoroughly. Which is to be expected—why would everyone have strongly-held opinions about obscure in-the-weeds process issues?

As Steve Benen says the bigger issue is going to be whether or not people like what they see after a new program is implemented. Nobody is going to say “this bill sucks, but I appreciate that the reason it sucks is compromises made in order to please George Voinovich which was a course of action I approved of at the time, so therefore I can’t complain.” How many people even know who George Voinovich is?

A bill that’s bipartisan enough to be supported by the opposition party leadership (like TARP or to some extent the Iraq authorizing vote) probably does buy you some political cover by actively compromising your potential critics. But it’s hard to see what difference one diffident minority legislator or four or zero or two is going to make.