Big Ideas in Politics: The NPR Debate for Democratic Presidential Candidates

[This comes highly recommended by Big Ideas Stream Member Michael Atkins]

For the audio-only debate, NPR's hosts restricted the discussion to three main topics: Iran and the lessons of Iraq, relations with China, and the Immigration issue.

Listen here. Or check the transcript here.

Big Ideas in Politics: Electability (That "Wishy-washy, Squishy-squashy Pseudoscience"

From New York Magazine:

It must have come as something of a shock to the political professionals to pick up the New York Times in mid-November and find a front-page story about a couple of polls of Iowa and New Hampshire voters. Headlined “Polls Find Voters Weighing Issues vs. Electability,” the article reaffirmed the conventional wisdom that electability will heavily influence primary and caucus voters. But the shock came when these voters considered who is the most electable: 47 percent of Iowa Democrats and 68 percent of New Hampshire Democrats named Clinton, and a plurality of Republicans in both states gave the nod to Giuliani. In less than a year, the two candidates had managed to turn what was thought to be their Achilles’ heel into one of their greatest strengths.

Which just goes to show how squishy and even bankrupt “electability” is as a political concept. Unlike political judgments that are based on concrete assessments of, say, a candidate’s record or even something as grubby as his fund-raising prowess, those that are based on a candidate’s supposed electability can change on a moment’s notice. And then change again. Electability is completely ephemeral. Even those hoary and maddeningly indefinable political qualities like “character” and “authenticity” have more meat on their bones.

More...

Big Ideas Events: George Packer on Iraq

New Yorker staff writer George Packer will be talking with Clyde Haberman, NYC columnist for the New York Times at the Center for Global Affairs in the Woolworth Building.

Here is Packer's official bio in the New Yorker:

George Packer became a staff writer for The New Yorker in 2003 and has covered the Iraq War for the magazine. His book “The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq,” was named one of the ten best books of 2005 by the New York Times and won the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award and an Overseas Press Club’s book award. He has also written about the atrocities committed in Sierra Leone, civil unrest in the Ivory Coast, the megacity of Lagos, and global counterinsurgency. In 2003, Packer was awarded two Overseas Press Club awards, one for his twenty-thousand-word examination of the difficulties faced during the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq, which appeared in November, 2003, and the other for his coverage of the civil war in Sierra Leone, which appeared in January, 2003. . . .

Links to Packer's articles via Wikipedia.

Wednesday, December 5th
6:30PM - 7:45PM

The Center for Global Affairs
Woolworth Building
15 Barclay Street, 4th Floor (Between Broadway and Church Street)


The event is being hosted by the Center for Global Affairs, so you'll have to register with them.

(212) 992-8380
scps.global.affairs@nyu.edu

Please send me a quick email at Eric.Ozawa at NYU to let me know if you'll be coming.

-Eric

George Packer on Iraq

From George Packer's blog for the New Yorker, Interesting Times:

With all the necessary qualifications and disclaimers, here are a few points. First, the reports of a new breathing space for civilians in Baghdad and other cities are accurate—not a return to “normal life,” since Iraq hasn’t been normal for more than a quarter century and won’t be for a long time, but a degree of security that has allowed some brave families to pretend that they can live the way normal people do. (Earlier in the war, this was the single most commonly expressed desire among the Iraqis I interviewed.) But this security goes only so far. The large-scale sectarian cleansing by militias, much of which was completed in 2006 and 2007, has halted or paused. The days of dozens of bodies turning up every morning in Baghdad’s garbage dumps and side streets are over, at least for now. But most Iraqis live under the rule of some armed group or another, enforced by teen-agers with Kalashnikovs, and, to survive, ordinary people have to comply with the code of what amounts to a fundamentalist gangland. The violence persists on a smaller scale, not with roving bands of militiamen purging whole districts but inside the walled sectarian enclaves that used to be Iraq’s urban neighborhoods.

More Analysis here.

Packer recommends these articles to understand recent events in Iraq:

• Damien Cave and Alissa Rubin, of the Times, on the stirrings of a return to normal life in Baghdad
• Tom Ricks, of the Post, on the failure of the Iraqi government to take advantage of these stirrings
• Jon Lee Anderson, of The New Yorker, on the Americans’ dubious new allies in Baghdad
• Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, of The Guardian, on the same
• Steven Lee Myers and Alissa Rubin, of the Times, on Washington’s scaled-back plans for political unity in Iraq
• Patrick Healy, of the Times, on how the Democrats are responding to better news out of Iraq
• Alissa Rubin, of the Times, on the beginning of the end of the surge
• Michael Gordon, of the Times, on military strategy after the surge
• Marc Lynch, of the blog Abu Aardvark; Brian Katulis, of the Center for American Progress; and Colin Kahl, of the Center for a New American Security, debate post-surge strategy

Big Ideas in Facebook: Privacy vs. Marketing

From the Financial Times:

Privacy advocates declared victory yesterday after Facebook, the social networking website, moved to placate users concerned about the intrusiveness of its new Beacon advertising system.

Changes to Beacon, announced late on Thursday, will allow users to "opt-in" to sharing information through the service, which broadcasts purchases made on outside websites to Facebook users' friends.

This is the second time in a little more than a year that Facebook has been forced to change a new technology after a backlash over privacy. MoveOn.org, the online advocacy group that last week joined critics of the Beacon service, called Facebook's move a "big step in the right direction".

Beacon has proved the most controversial of several new money-making technologies unveiled last month by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's 23-year-old founder.

The technologies represented its most ambitious attempt yet to cash in on the social connections between the site's 50m users.

Under the service, friends of a Facebook user who buys a book on Amazon.com, for example, may see the Amazon logo next to a message about the purchase when they log into the Facebook site. The changes mean that users will now be asked to explicitly authorise the publication of each Beacon message, according to Facebook.

Previously, messages would publish automatically unless a user said "no" to a publication request within a certain amount of time.
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Or listen to the coverage on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show.

Big Ideas in Politics: Democracy in Russia and Venezuela

Big Ideas in Politics; Former-Bush-speechwriter Michael Gerson on the Role of Religion in Politics

Big Ideas in Politics: NYU's Brennan Center for Justice on the Indiana Voter ID Case

From the Brennan Center Website:

The Indiana voter ID case is the most important voting rights case since Bush v. Gore. Due to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court on January 9, 2008, Crawford v. Marion County Election Board will determine which American citizens are able to exercise their right to vote and which Americans are not. The Indiana law is the most restrictive ID law in America and will exclude many eligible voters from participating in our democratic process.

The Brennan Center filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit challenging the constitutionality of an Indiana law requiring citizens to present photo ID as a condition of voting. In its amicus brief, the Brennan Center argued that impersonation fraud is an extremely unlikely and unsubstantiated occurrence that can be prevented without requiring a photo ID, and that the Indiana law fails to address more common forms of voter fraud. The Center's brief marshalled the best evidence on individual voter fraud and catalogued the practices in other states for preventing voter fraud without resorting to photo ID. On January 4, 2007, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in an opinion authored by Judge Posner, upheld the lower court decision and found that the state law did not unduly burden the right to vote. Plaintiffs were denied a rehearing en banc on April 5, 2007.

Big Ideas in Politics: Adam Nagourney on the Candidates' Strategies for Iowa and New Hampshire

From the Times today:

There has probably never been a presidential campaign quite as challenging to track as the 2008 race, given the sheer number of candidates and the shifting calendar of nominating contests. But with less than a month to go before the voting starts, it’s becoming clear that Iowa has become the prime battle ground for Democrats, while New Hampshire has become the main stage for Republicans.

More.

The Times 2008 Election Guide