More Popular Overall Than They Actually Are

This Byron York post is being linked everywhere because it contains one of the most fascinating comments I've ever heard on race. It's not a throwaway line -- it's standing right there in thesis-statement position at the end of the first paragraph:

On his 100th day in office, Barack Obama enjoys high job approval ratings, no matter what poll you consult. But if a new survey by the New York Times is accurate, the president and some of his policies are significantly less popular with white Americans than with black Americans, and his sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are.

"more popular overall than they actually are"? Usually, racism doesn't push people to say things that are flatly contradictory. Though we might be able to make it consistent if we take a racialized version of Brian Weatherson's view and assume that black people have non-actual modal parts while white people are wholly actual. It'll be hard to reliably poll people's non-actual modal parts, but that's never stopped Zogby before.

The real issue here is that York doesn't regard black people's input in the political process as having the same legitimacy as white people's. That's the only way you end up saying crazy stuff like that.

Swine Flu And Smithfield's Pig Shit Lagoons

The fact that factory farming creates large "lagoons" of hog waste always seemed like a pretty bad thing from a public health point of view. You wonder when some kind of awful disease is going to emerge from the big lakes of pig crap.

Until I read litbrit's post on this, I didn't realize that the current swine flu could be just that. She links to Tom Philpott's article in Grist, which describes how the outbreak originated in a part of Mexico where Smithfield has big hog farms and the waste apparently isn't being properly disposed of. This link is being picked up in the Mexican press (litbrit helpfully translates some stuff). In the American press, not so much.

Specter, The Primary, and The Benjamins

There are noises out there on the blogoblags—noises with which I have some sympathy—that Arlen Specter's party switch has made it difficult or impossible for a mainline Democrat to represent Pennsylvania, and that he ought to face a robust primary challenge. At present, Specter enjoys high approval ratings from Democrats, but it's unclear how long that will hold.

I think it's worth considering that, should Specter face Pat Toomey in the general, Democrats will not have to spend quite as much money in Pennsylvania as they will if Joe Torsella is the candidate. Or Joe Sestak. That has value, since it means the DSCC and major national donors can move money elsewhere. Less money for Arlen Specter means more money for Paul Hodes in New Hampshire, or Chris Dodd in Connecticut, or whatever challengers emerge to Richard Burr, David Vitter, and the curiously unfunded Tom Coburn. In otherwords, having Specter as a "More Democrat" may mean that elsewhere Dems can fund a "Better Democrat" to make Specter's vote that much less essential.

I don't think this is a open-and-shut-cut case. I think there are real reasons to be frustrated at the Pennsylvania machine's decision to try to clear the field. I also think that the threat of a robust primary challenge will help ensure Specter maintains a progressive voting record (though I note that the notoriously pro-choice-except-when-it-matters Specter voted for the Sebelius confirmation). But Philadelphia is a huge media market, and Pittsburgh isn't exactly small. It's a lot of dough that could go to other states.

200,000 Pennsylvanians Under The "D"

I like Publius' point that the Specter switch may have been a happy result of Hillary Clinton keeping the primary going several months after astute observers knew she was going to lose. The desire to vote in the ongoing Democratic primary gave people an incentive to register, and the primary itself gave the Obama and Clinton campaigns a reason to register every voter they could within each of their preferred demographics. These processes turned 200,000 Republicans into Democrats in 2008, and they've turned at least one Republican into a Democrat in 2009.

There's an interesting theoretical issue here about how large you want your party to be in a state like Pennsylvania with closed primaries. When your party gets bigger, you're more likely to pick a winning candidate, even if you get bigger in a way that doesn't involve anybody agreeing with you more than they did before. Assume for the moment that none of the 200,000 people who left the Pennsylvania GOP left because their ideological views had moved leftward, and they just switched for the fun of voting in the Democratic primary. Also assume that their voting behavior in a general election stays exactly the same as they were when they were Republicans, so they're just as likely to vote for Specter in a general election as they were before.

Even under these assumptions where we don't convince anybody of anything, the Republican Party's chances of winning general elections decline. A smaller party is less likely to match the sentiments of the general Pennsylvania electorate -- it'll just be a bunch of people with idiosyncratic views. Candidates selected by the Growths who remain in the Pennsylvania GOP are less likely to match the views of the state as a whole and be competitive in a general election. The Growths are going to pick Pat Toomey, and he's going to lose.

There are some disadvantages to your party getting bigger in this way. If for some reason a lot of religious conservatives moved into the Democratic Party without changing their views, we might end up with more homophobic candidates. Some of them would win general elections that pro-equality candidates would also have won, and we'd end up with more homophobic Senators. There's some point at which you might want to shoo people who don't share your values out of the party, because you can win without their support. If you're a Pennsylvania Democrat and you were really optimistic about Joe Sestak or whoever winning the Democratic nomination and beating Specter or Toomey, maybe you feel this way right now.

But I'm pretty sure Pennsylvania is competitive enough that you want to be bigger rather than smaller.

Frank And Mill

Barney Frank's view of what should be legal (via Glenn Thrush) could've come from John Stuart Mill. Frank says that marijuana and internet poker should be legal, as any harms they generate are harms to the user, and it's not the business of government to address self-regarding harms. However, banning various kinds of financial transactions make sense, because as we've seen, these transactions can pose major risks to parties who aren't involved.

I haven't found anything on this specific issue in Mill, probably because he wasn't thinking about a society where a few banks could blow up the global economy by pursuing profit in ways that generated massive systemic risk. And as far as I know, the economy of his day didn't allow for that sort of thing to happen. But consequentialist defenses of liberty need to be updated for dramatic changes in the way the world operates, and I'm guessing that careful study of the issues that arise in a huge and interconnected global financial system would get him behind a reasonably aggressive system of regulation.