Effective Leadership
Obviously, this is a serious issue, but I just read Spencer Ackerman explain:
President Obama’s ordering up a province-by-province study to “determine which regions are being managed effectively by local leaders and which require international help.”
Mississippi 2008 Presidential Exit Poll
And looking that over, it seems to me that a province-by-province study to “determine which regions are being managed effectively by local leaders and which require international help” would be a good idea right here in the USA. Someone can finally do something about, say, Mississippi. It persistently lags on human development indexes, its governor is dogged by corruption allegations, and election results simply break down along ethnic lines and re-enforce entrenched divisions.
A joke, yes. But it’s a reminder that state-building involves a lot of large assumptions about the capabilities of our own public sector institutions. Providing good government is difficult, and providing it in a foreign country can be very difficult.
20 Responses to “Effective Leadership”
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October 29th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Well, I did wonder why Obama was so concerned with Canadian governance.
October 29th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
The criteria for EU development funding might be a good place to look, too.
(I remember when the Ole Perfesser argued with a straight face that Mississippi was richer than Sweden. What a maroon.)
October 29th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
The Afghanistan strategy assumes that we can do in Afghanistan what we can’t do in Detroit or East L.A.
October 29th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Finally an acknowledgment that you need to disaggregate government in Afghanistan. Sure, there is corruption in many places, as well as ineffectiveness. There are also plenty of effective administrators and anti-corruption activists in the Afghan government. Don’t throw out the babies with the bathwater.
October 29th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
I would be more interested in an analysis of who benefits financially from the Afghanistan action.
October 29th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
To be serious for a moment, though, I think this sort of province-by-province thinking re: Afghanistan is the best thing the Obama Admin has done (and better than anything Bush’s team did) to shift our objectives in that country from the impossible to the possible.
Simply put, “Afghanistan” is not a real nation-state, just like “Iraq” isn’t either. Opening up the door to varied tactics, strategies, and military / political involvement between the seperate entities that actually make up these areas on the map is probably the best way for us to ultimately draw down our forces in the region without opening up the door to increased control by anti-American forces.
October 29th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
I hate to miss an opportunity to bag on Mississippi, but the principles of Federalism that allow Mississippi to govern itself so poorly should really count double for Afghanistan.
October 29th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
if you think afganistan is poorly governed just look at most of our cities. newark nj…..last 3 mayors [not counting the current one] were in jail, 1 still in. 104 local politicians, both republicans and democrats in jail, thanks to chris christie , who is running for governor but will lose to the democrat corzine because new jersey is a ‘blue state’. so the greed, coruption, and nepotism will continue. sounds like afganistan to me……….and alot worse then mississipi. someone should turn those stats around and start asking why 98% of blacks in mississippi voted for obama. could it be because of his race? hard to believe its because 98% of blacks agreed with him. its like one of those old soviet union elections, where 98% voted for krushchev. fact is that without the white vote obama loses.stop picking on mississippi, unless you want to compare all the stats. i don’t think you do, because you will find more racist voting patterns in the black community then in any other.
October 29th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Replying to jimmydave may be like beating one’s head against the wall, but I have a few spare minutes at work, so…
Criticizing “corruption” in New Jersey without bringing any attention to Chris Christie himself is pretty silly. Christie has been accused of giving political positions to supporters and family, steering contracts to his political allies and former boss, using his political power to get out of traffic and other violations, lying under oath, using excessive amounts of public funds for his trips to Las Vegas…and now I’m bored of Googling.
jimmydave also suggests while 98% of black MS voters supported Obama due to racial loyalty, 88% of white MS voters supported McCain purely out of rational loyalty to Republican principles.
As someone living in AL, another fine mess, I will still be happy to “pick on” MS since it ranks 50th in almost every quality of life category imaginable. “At least we’re not Mississippi” is the unofficial slogan of every other state from the former Confederacy.
October 29th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
never said the whites in ms. were not bigots, just pointed out the blacks are too. as for christie, well he isn’t winning anyway. as for you living in alabama, you have have my sympathy.
October 29th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
JimmyDave:
Of course, you might have a point RE blacks’ overwhelming support of Obama, except for the nagging fact that John Kerry enjoyed nigh-monolithic support from Mississippi’s African-American community. So did Al Gore. And Bill Clinton. And Mike Dukakis. And Walter Mondale. And Jimmy Carter (this last, despite the right attacking him for a long-since-repudiated membership in the KKK). It’s not blind racial solidarity, it’s the simple fact that, since the Johnson administration, the Democratic Party has been the champion of the rights (both social and economic) of minorities. There’s nothing nefarious about someone voting their pocket-book, and there’s certainly no call for comparing such interest-driven voting patterns to the sham elections of a Totalitarian state.
October 29th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
[...] Matthew Yglesias observes that it wouldn’t be such a bad idea if we determined which regions of the U.S. are targets [...]
October 29th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
the plight of the black people has had very little improvement since LBJ. they were discriminated against then, they are now. some made it out of poverty. however for the vast majority the democratic party is responsible for their poor educations, healthcare, crime, drugs, housing, and advancement in society. those that made it out of the ‘hood’ are to be admired, they had to overcome many obstacles. but in most cases i think our government and in particular the democrats have just enabled them to stay at the bottom of society. the dems are just the new overseers. by the way, the blacks started voting en masse for the dems when FDR was president, before that they only voted republican, for obvious reasons. [those that could vote].now, certainly the republicans are not the answer, but just as certainly the dems aren’t either. i have no solution to this problem, maybe in 100 years it won’t matter.
October 29th, 2009 at 11:32 pm
the plight of the black people has had very little improvement since LBJ.
Why what’s that? It’s a table of poverty rates for black Americans?
1959: 55.1%
1966: 41.8%
1969: 32.2%
2001: 21.7%
Gosh, it sure looks like LBJ knocked at least 9.6% off the black poverty rate. The numbers from 1963 aren’t on the table, so I don’t know how much LBJ alone helped, but he and JFK together seem to have brought the poverty rate down, oh, 22.9%. And it stayed around that level, for about twenty-four years of almost entirely Republican administrations, until under Bill Clinton’s administration it dropped another 10% or so.
Perhaps it makes sense for black people to vote Democratic after all.
October 30th, 2009 at 12:31 am
@Matt W:
If you look at the poverty rate history that Matt W links to, that’s not so wrong, except for the Clinton era: the black poverty rate has been pretty stable since 1969 (32.2%) until 1992 (33.4%), falling to 22.5% by 2000. Now back up to 24.7% in 2008. Not that poverty rates are the only criteria — incarceration rates have soared almost threefold since 1968.
October 30th, 2009 at 3:00 am
and clinton changed the way poverty was calculated, you forgot to add that. look, it may very well be sensible that blacks vote democratic, but 98% ??? you can’t get 98% of any group to agree on anything. plus, they still go to bad schools, have shorter lifespans, have high crime rates etc…walk the streets of newark nj, gary ind., camden nj., or any city and you will see that the gangs control our cities. this has to stop. and congress has been controlled by democrats from the 1950s to ‘94. and from 2006 to the present. and yet the future of the blackman in america is dim. most are raised by women and do not know their father. over 70% are born out of wedlock.and the cycle continues.no sir, being born black in america is no advantage, no matter how you read the statistics, they were at the bottom of society in ‘64 and are still at the bottom today, no matter who they vote dor, they don’t get a fair chance.
October 30th, 2009 at 8:53 am
@jimmydave
Do you have a credible source that substantiates your implied claim that a significant fraction of the decline in black poverty under Clinton is due the changes in the calculation of poverty? That would be news to me.
October 30th, 2009 at 9:05 am
Stefan, since jimmydave was responding to the claim that “since the Johnson administration, the Democratic Party has been the champion of the rights (both social and economic) of minorities,” and that claim includes the Johnson administration in its scope, I assumed that he also meant to include the Johnson administration in its scope. If not, his claim is rather a non sequitur. It is true that the black poverty rate showed almost no improvement between LBJ and Clinton; but, as I mentioned, Republicans held the presidency for all but four of those years, so that just reinforces the point that black people should vote Democratic for economic reasons alone.
You’re right that poverty is a very crude statistic, and rising incarceration is a massive problem, but we shouldn’t forget how bad things were before the Democrats decided to become the party of civil rights and the war on poverty. A 55.1% poverty rate is just astonishing.
Of course there are factors beyond the economic in the black vote in Mississippi. This is a state whose Republican governor won office after appearing with a white supremacist group and ostentatiously refusing to ask them to take his picture off their website. That’s how you get 98% of black Mississippians to vote Democratic.
October 30th, 2009 at 9:13 am
…the Mississippi GOP continues to be down with the white supremacists.
October 30th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
I tend to feel that any individual black person is better qualified to decide his or her reasons for voting than is JimmyDave.