Matt Yglesias

Education Policy on the Moon

Revisiting Barack Obama’s education speech, this bit near the beginning touched on some interesting themes:

I know there are some who believe we can only handle one challenge at a time. They forget that Lincoln helped lay down the transcontinental railroad, passed the Homestead Act, and created the National Academy of Sciences in the midst of Civil War. Likewise, President Roosevelt didn’t have the luxury of choosing between ending a depression and fighting a war. President Kennedy didn’t have the luxury of choosing between civil rights and sending us to the moon. And we don’t have the luxury of choosing between getting our economy moving now and rebuilding it over the long term.

I agree with Obama’s conclusion, but this Moon analogy seems terrible. It’s true that there was no zero-sum tradeoff between civil rights and the moon, but at the same time we obviously did have the luxury of just not going to the moon. The point I would make about education is that the quality of the education the current generation of children receive is critical to the economic well-being of the country 20, 30, and 40 years from now and if screw it up, you can’t get the kids back in school. We really don’t have the luxury of choosing, but Kennedy did.

The Lincoln business, meanwhile, is one of congress’ great untold stories. People generally don’t think about this very much, but one important consequence of secession was to radically shift the balance of power in Congress since almost every southern member was gone. Suddenly, the super-empowered northern-based Republican majority could pass all sorts of legislation on all sorts of topics. And legislate they did—Homestead Act, all kinds of trade protections, railroad schemes, etc. Just imagine would happen in congress today if the South seceded? It would change everything! And, obviously, it’s not as if there was less regional polarization back then. Conversely, what if Southern Democrats hadn’t seceded back in 1860-61 and had just instead decided to mount a ton of filibusters of all Lincoln’s key legislative priorities? Of course back then we didn’t have the present-day understanding that routine filibusters are okay. But just for fun, project today’s alleged supermajority requirement back to the election of 1860 and a Southern decision that obstructionism was a better path to the preservation of slavery than secession.

The Kids Love Lincoln

Here’s some Gallup findings that are fun to think about:

Young people, like people who know what they’re talking about, rate Lincoln as Top President. Middle-aged people, meanwhile, are hard-core rightwingers—they put Reagan at the top and have an unusual aversion to FDR. Old people, by contrast, love FDR. The really weird thing here, that you also see in a lot of other polls, is a truly bizarre level of Kennedy-love. If conservatives want to say that Ronald Reagan was a better president than Lincoln or Roosevelt or the oddly underrated George Washington, then we’ll just need to agree to disagree. But I can’t imagine a coherent ideological viewpoint that would justify the high ratings Americans over-35 give to Kennedy.

Now of course if you could take the Kennedy-Johnson years as a whole, then divide them up into one presidency that was dominated by Vietnam and another one that’s responsible for Civil Rights and the Great Society, then you’d have one shitty president and one great president. A lot of people seem to have basically decided to divide things up this way and call the shitty president “Johnson” while the good president is called “Kennedy.” That, however, doesn’t have a great deal to do with reality.

Hertzberg on History’s Greatest RINO

Rick Herztberg almost destroyed my laptop as I spit out soda laughing at this joke:

The President-elect’s performance can’t fully explain the public’s welcoming view of him. Part of it, surely, reflects an eagerness to be rid of the incumbent. A gangly Illinois politician whom “the base” would today label a RINO—a Republican in Name Only—once pointed out that you can fool some of the people all of the time. We now know how many “some” is: twenty-seven per cent. That’s the proportion of Americans who, according to CNN, cling to the belief that George W. Bush has done a good job. The wonder is that this number is still in the double digits, given his comprehensively disastrous record. During the eight years of the second President Bush, the unemployment rate went from 4.2 per cent to 7.2 per cent and climbing; consumer confidence dropped to an all-time low; a budget surplus of two hundred billion dollars became a deficit of that plus a trillion; more than a million families fell into poverty; the ranks of those without health insurance rose by six million; and the fruits of the nation’s economic growth went almost entirely to the rich, while family incomes in the middle and below declined. What role the Bush Administration’s downgrading of terrorism as a foreign-policy priority played in the success of the 9/11 attacks cannot be known, but there is no doubting its responsibility for the launching and mismanagement of the unprovoked war in Iraq, with all its attendant suffering; for allowing the justified war in Afghanistan to slide to the edge of defeat; and for the vertiginous worldwide decline of America’s influence, prestige, power, and moral standing.

Say what you will about Bush, but him being such a horrible president has been good for the field of liberal political commentary. I think Hertzberg at least owes him that much.