Obama in Ankara

Front pages of Turkey's major daily newspapers, Nov. 6, 2008

I picked up copies of a few Turkish newspapers the day after the presidential election, including a couple high circulation tabloids, the papers of record for left- and right-wing Turks, and one of Turkey’s two major English dailies. I’m still not so great at reading beyond the headlines, but one thing is clear: Turkish photo editors dig the Arringatore look. Closeups of each front page with headline translations after the jump.

Breakfast

Fresh orange juice, cheese omelettes, home fries, grilled tomatoes. After twelve hours spent guzzling fake suspense, shiny hyperbole, and black coffee, a few of the survivors seriously considered skipping the beginning of Obama’s victory speech to hit up the buffet. But as the crowd in Chicago started screaming and the Kenyans started dancing and the Americans around me started crying, I couldn’t help but get caught up too. That’s right: even I was teary and proud and full of hope, and I kind of liked it. I’m still cynical about an Obama presidency, but tonight (today, tomorrow? I have lost my sense of time) the Senator earned the election and accomplished something great.

We watched both McCain’s concession and Obama’s victory address in sleep-deprived silence. Both were elegant, fitting bits of rhetoric. Both were also foreboding. Watching McCain choke back emotion and exit gracefully among the jeers of a hateful crowd was painful and frightening. So were Obama’s words about a “new spirit of service” and “new spirit of sacrifice”—and the sight of my friends and colleagues eagerly cheering them on. But all this was outweighed by the joy of knowing that this endless election is over.

At 7am, I headed back to the auditorium for a conference call with former Ambassador Marc Grossman. I managed to spew up an incoherent question on the magnitude of Obama’s soft power bump in Turkey, and got an interesting answer: “I don’t really like the term ’soft power.’ I prefer smart power.” He defused another question, regarding a potential Armenian resolution, with diplomatic delicacy: Turks, Grossman argued, should accept that Obama’s support for a resolution as fact, and work on improving relations with modern Armenia. Fair enough—but he downplayed the destructive impact of such a measure.

On my way out of the auditorium, I grabbed a quick cup of coffee before running out the door. After 25 wakeful hours of incessant election coverage, I had to get to class. An hour ago, I turned in my Turkish final.

The view from Turkey

Obama on the left, McCain on the right.

It’s currently 2:20 AM in Turkey, and I’m watching election results from a party sponsored by the U.S. embassy and the Turkish-American Association. There’s free coffee, reliable internet, and a big screen streaming CNN, so I’ll be spasmodically blogging into the wee hours.

With a full zero percent of precints reporting, I’m calling Turkey and awarding its zero electoral votes to Barack Obama. The crowd here is about 60 strong, split between Turks of all sorts, Anglophile expats, and college kids, huddled like Wright’s philosophers around a projector throwing the fleeting, frantic visage of Wolf Blitzer up on a big screen. Everyone cheered moments ago when the networks called Vermont for Obama, but for a better barometer of the mood here, see the above image. John McCain buttons have gone untouched all night, save for a few foreign service officers wearing one of each in the spirit of professional nonpartisanship. As for the Obama buttons, a staffer just refilled the basket and folks are passing them around for the second time.

Of course, there’s no Barr, Nader, or McKinney schwag, but I did get a chance to stuff a Bob Barr ballot into the party’s mock election box. I am much more likely to cast the marginal vote, but in the end, my fake vote will doubtless have as much significance as my real one.

Great moments in amateur punditry: My prediction

Based on information futures, common sense, and haphazard conjecture:

Obama 364, winning FL, CO, NC, VA, PA, and barely squeaking by in MO. McCain 174, winning GA and IN. Dems win 9 ^[1] more seats in the Senate, which means no cloture, inşallah. I swear I didn’t steal this one from Evan, who eldritch came to the same conclusions, but I’ll cop to stealing his map because boy howdy it’s handsome.

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[Back]I can’t add. This should have been an 8. See my comment below.

I voted early in Pima County

Look, Mom! I voted!

I did it. It took two trips to the consular section and a couple months of apprehensive faith in the Pima County Recorder and the Turkish postal system, but this morning, I irrationaly exercised my “most important right” as an American citizen by voting in my first presidential election.

I try to take seriously the economic and mathematical reality of voting, and moral and philosophical arguments for not voting, not voting badly, and voluntarily voting. Although this year’s Presidential election is a Crest-Colgate matchup as usual, several Arizona initiatives persuaded me to participate. I find this interesting: ballot initiatives are essentially an unbundled set of policies, which, at least in this case, increased my perceived utility from voting because I could more precisely express my preferences. But they are also the sort of direct democracy our constitution was rightly designed to curtail.

I don’t find the argument that voting legitimizes the rules of an unfair game very persuasive, but neither do I see it as a civic duty. I try not to vote strategically, or for lesser evils, but simply to reflect my policy preferences as accurately as possible. Admittedly, this left a quite a few blank spots on the ballot this year. I’ll echo my friend Evan’s praise for absentee ballots, which allow for informed consideration and lower the opportunity cost of casting a vote (at least, if you don’t have to drag it down to the U.S. embassy and wait in line for an hour to mail it). Plus, even though my brain is pickled in the dismal truths of public choice, I still kind of like filling in the bubbles. I even put on the little sticker in the privacy of my own room.

What about Turkey? According to Gallup, 70 percent of Turks are indifferent regarding the Presidential election, but those who have a preference favor Obama by almost three to one. As far as I can tell, this is pretty accurate, though I think the Turkish threshold for rational ignorance is much higher than the American one. Few Turks are aware of Obama’s position on the issue they euphemistically call “the Armenian question,” and I’ve twice been asked to explain Obama’s religious beliefs. My summaries left both interlocutors puzzled and frustrated, but I think it’s very probable that this is just because my Turkish is hopeless, especially when it comes to theology.^[1]

Among American students abroad, the question is not whether one will vote for Obama, but how emphatically one will. When I let slip to one friend that my Presidential vote was a toss-up between Bob Barr, “lumberjacks,” and Paris-Rihanna, I got the kind of concerned-and-horrified look a mother gives when her son tells her he has “something very important” to share. To refuse to pick a side, especially this year, is to sit out a great momentous Miltonian War in Heaven, doomed to suffer all the eternal bummers of the neutral angels.^[2]

Well, suffer I will. But I plan to minimize it by spending the next week with a bottle of rakı and a copy of “Calculus of Consent,” as far from the last few days of delirious campaign coverage as possible. I’ll see you on November 5th.

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[Back] ¹Although one evening at the dinner table, I did manage to explain the Great Schism via the art of mime.

[Back] ²Okay, fine. Milton doesn’t have neutral angels, but “The Inferno” does, and boy howdy did Virgil make their fate sound sucky: “they have no hope of death / and so abject is their blind life / that they are envious of every other lot. / The world suffers no report of them to live. / Pity and justice despise them” (III: 46-50).

Clearing up campaign word clouds

Graphics known as tag clouds, which summarize chunks of text by weighting the font size of words based on frequency of use, have long been used to navigate the Web. Now they’re gaining traction as tools for armchair analysis of political rhetoric, thanks to Wordle, a tool that generates elegant word clouds from websites and blog feeds.

The Washington Post took word-cloud geekery mainstream this weekend, printing a pair of word clouds generated from the campaign blogs of John McCain and Barack Obama. The results:

Washington Post word clouds

As the mystery bloggers at Democracy In America note, it’s evidence that the presidential race is squarely focused on Barack Obama — “from afar both blogs look like they could belong to Obama girl.”

That’s a safe conclusion, considering the two biggest, bluest data points in the graphic. But are there other insights further down the size scale? One might be tempted to conclude that McCain’s big purple “Pentagon” is evidence of his emphasis on national security (or, on closer reading, that it’s more likely a reference to the campaign’s latest attack ads). A look at Obama’s cloud shows a curiously big “president” after the standard trope-trio of “hope,” “change,” “can.” Proof that he really is the “presumptuous nominee?“

Not quite. As with any visualization of a complicated data set, attention to detail is critical. Are the inputs being compared completely equal? Is the visual representation unbiased? Does the graphic quickly convey useful information?

The above clouds aren’t too bad, but they could be better. Each shows the top 150 words, which is Wordle’s default setting. But the number of words represented could be a bit bigger. Half the words are horizontal and half vertical, arranged in no particular order. Any bias created by this arrangement is probably random, but it does mean finding words of interest is a bit of a scavenger hunt. (Quick, where’s “Iraq?”)

Most important, although the author of the article in the Post does link to the two blogs used as data sources, there’s no indication of the range of dates used to generate the clouds. This is a problem, at least if one wants to use the clouds to analyze the rhetorical current of the presidential debate. A quick look at the two blogs shows that McCain’s is infrequently updated by a few staffers, whereas Obama’s is frequently refreshed by a variety of contributors (perhaps not a surprise in a race between a Blackberry addict and an analog candidate). Thus, Obama’s feed ends July 26, and McCain’s concludes a full month earlier. Comparing them directly is an exercise in apples and oranges (although to be fair, it’s not clear whether the Post considered this, and it’s difficult to tell now that the campaign blogs have moved on to the week’s latest inanity).

Below, I’ve regenerated the clouds with a few improvements. Each contains 250 words, displayed horizontally and arranged alphabetically from left to right. The color schemes are identical, and I’ve tried to ensure that the graphics are roughly congruent. Finally, I used Yahoo Pipes to ensure that they both cover the same timespan — posts after July 27. That’s not a lot of time, but short of scraping both blogs with unscrupulous Internet tools, I’m not sure there’s a better way to get an equal data set. The results:

Obama

McCain

(visualizations via Wordle)

Even equalized, it appears that the argument that it’s all about Obama is still sound, although this time McCain does show up as a tiny red squiggle at the top of Obama’s cloud. It’s clear that this week’s debate is all about “drilling” for “oil” versus how to “make” “new” “energy.” And it looks like Obama’s blog covers more topics with more words than McCain. Beyond that, readers will have to draw their own conclusions.

Tag clouds are great tools, but in order to convey useful information, their parameters must be correctly aligned. Consider them critically, lest they mislead.

Here comes the nanny Net

Today’s FCC ruling slamming Comcast for throttling BitTorrent traffic over their network is an indicator that more extensive government regulation lies ahead for that wild, anarchic thing we used to call the Internet. But college students across the United States may be logging onto a series of terrible dystopian future-tubes far sooner than everyone else, thanks to the 1,158-page Higher Education Act, which Congress approved yesterday and President Bush will soon sign into law.

Among the slew of new regulations in the bill is a provision originally inserted by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that requires all universities to develop “plans to effectively combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material,” including technological tools like network monitoring and packet shaping, and to “offer alternatives to illegal downloading” like the industry approved, DRM infected services from Napster and Ruckus.

That’s right — universities have now been deputized as copyright cops, and the alternative services (which happen to pay big licensing fees to the record industry) have just received a subsidy by fiat. Public choice pressures, anyone?

The law is ambiguous on actually requiring colleges to implement any sort of network surveillance or traffic management tools, although as Will Patry notes, “there is likely to be an effort in the next Congress to mandate these technologies.” That means that although campus networks might not yet be monitored, students should expect more of the fun creative solutions designed by schools like the Missouri University of Science and Technology, which requires students to take an inane “copyright quiz” before allowing limited access to peer-to-peer network connections. Or the slew of schools that now give students a crash course in copyright law at freshman orientation — a complicated subject usually covered in, um, law school.

Shoot me now. In fact, I think I’d actually prefer school snooping to some of the awful anti-piracy programs designed by the academy. After all, our lovable federal government is already listening, so what’s another set of prying eyes?

Copyright is a deeply flawed system, but individuals ought to reasonably respect it, as they do with any other law. What deserves no respect, however, are efforts by media lobbyists to strongarm schools into doing their dirty work with the power of the state.

The markets of Dr. Moreau

Now that the bailout bill for beleaguered semipublic mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has been approved by the House and the President alike, the Senate is all that stands in the way of the federal government’s latest attempt to double down on moral hazard by rescuing firms deemed “too big to fail.”

There is no doubt about the first part of that description. Fannie and Freddie, which own or guarantee about half of all U.S. mortgages, are far too big. Thanks to special privileges and tax exemptions along with an implicit guarantee on their debt from government, the companies swelled from firms intended to encourage home ownership and ensure liquidity into leviathans accountable for $5.2 trillion in American housing debt. The second part is probably accurate as well. A Fannie-Freddie failure is a devastating prospect for the economy — but a well-designed rescue plan could provide an opportunity not only to shore up a shaky housing market but to dismantle two of its biggest sources of systemic risk.

Unfortunately, that’s not what the American public will get. With the exception of more rigorous capital requirements and a possible amendment offered by Sen. Jim DeMint that would prohibit the firms from lobbying legislators, the bill is little more than a blank check from the Treasury attached to an even bigger bailout for homeowners. It may tide the twins over for another day, but it won’t fix the massive problem of private gains and socialized risk, the crowding-out effect of F&F in the market for safe home loans, or the regulatory capture that enabled the firms to keep shoddy books and operate with a tiny amount of capital on hand. If there is a fate worse than nationalization, Congress has found it.

Most free-marketeers, myself included, have a natural reflex to shun government intervention of any kind. But against my instincts, I found myself agreeing with a leader in this week’s Economist, proposing that a proper policy response ought to “secure the gains for taxpayers and treat Fannie and Freddie like one of their own mortgages, by nationalizing them, breaking them up and selling them on.” A failure would be very, very, bad. In the long run, a bailout that solidifies moral hazard and fails to fix incentives will probably be worse. Thus, it seems the most responsible solution would be to take over the firms for a brief while and immediately dismantle them.

Of course, following the dirty deed of nationalization, there would be a natural tendency for government to attempt to hold onto the power to guarantee home loans. Thus, any such scheme would have to have rigid rules requiring a sell-off as soon as possible. But if a nationalization-privatization plan is the quickest, safest way to get rid of F&F without hugely screwing both taxpayers and homeowners, I might be able to get behind it.

This leads to a more interesting question. Hands down, I prefer market institutions to government ones, because they will almost always have fewer unintended consequences and better overall outcomes. I also prefer markets to the weird government-market hybrids that account for much of the “byzantine amalgam of market and state institutions enmeshed in a thicket of regulation” that we call “the economy.” But under what conditions are the somewhat predictable problems of government ownership preferable to the less discernible difficulties of frankenmarkets like Fannie Mae? In many cases, combining the awesome power of capitalism with the awesome stupidity of government seems like a sure path to disaster.

I can think of a few examples where this is the case. Credit rating agencies, which were allowed to become de facto regulators responsible for some of the subprime mess. The bizarro-world of U.S. health insurance, mired in principal-agent problems and distorted price signals that prevent providers from profiting and consumers from bearing costs. Defense, where wasteful contracting practices on the part of big firms like KBR have helped fuel a trillion-dollar war. But there are plenty of examples on the other hand — school vouchers, for one — where the evidence supports success.

There’s certainly no template for a perfect hybrid beyond designing institutions that aggregate as much local knowledge as effectively as possible. But the worst consequence of frankenmarkets is that they are too often conflated with real free enterprise, which simply isn’t true. In the eyes of many, however, the failure of Fannie Mae is no doubt a failure of finance at large, the waste from contracting in Iraq a rebuttal of “privatization,” and expensive healthcare proof that capitalism is broken. Perhaps it’s time to grab a pitchfork, storm the castle, and get rid of the frankenmarkets for good.

Globalization 1, crappy beer 0

Now that Budweiser has been officially acquired by Belgian firm Inbev, the last of America’s most iconic beers is now owned by a foreign beverage behemoth. That leaves Pabst Brewing Company, makers of inexpensive swill for dockworkers and ironic hipsters alike, as the biggest brewer in the United States. But as Travis Daub notes at FP Passport: “Pabst doesn’t even brew its own beer anymore. All 29 Pabst beers, from Schlitz, to Lone Star to Colt 45 to the legendary Pabst Blue Ribbon are outsourced to SAB Miller, based in South Africa.” Don’t be fooled by the red white and blue colors on the can: Pabst is a globalist turncoat!

So who are the remaining True Patriot Brewers? Daub offers this list, from the Brewer’s Associaton:

Pabst Brewing Co.

Boston Beer Co.

D.G. Yuengling and Son Inc.

Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.

New Belgium Brewing Co. Inc.

High Falls Brewing Co.

Spoetzl Brewery

Widmer Brothers Brewing Group

Redhook Ale Brewery

Pyramid Breweries Inc.

(Strikethrough mine, since PBR isn’t sufficiently ‘Merican)

What’s most notable isn’t that all these brewers are relatively small, but that they all make pretty darn good beer. If our national character must be distilled down into a six pack, I’d much rather it be Sam Adams than the watery mediocrity pushed by the big three brewers. Who says globalization destroys culture? It’s sure not happening in the beer aisle.

A message maligned

Dave Weigel at reason also picks up on the narrowing message of the Ron Paul revolution:

The message of the march, according to the official literature, was to be “Ron Paul’s message of peace, prosperity and freedom through adherence to the Constitution.” But the accepted version of that message implied that all three of those things were only possible with rigid national sovereignty, controlled borders, and a narrow vision of trade. The final speech before Paul’s came from Chuck Baldwin, the Pensacola, Florida pastor and Constitution Party candidate, who used the little time he had (graciously having given some of his minutes to Paul) to make a concise national sovereignty pitch. “You’re either a globalist or you’re an American,” Baldwin said. “And I… am an American!” Some of the Baldwin boosters in the crowd (many from Florida) started chanting “USA! USA!”

Some of the people I talked to at the march wondered why Bob Barr had no presence there, ceding all the ground to Chuck Baldwin. I can’t speak for Barr, but I don’t think he lost anything by going to Freedom Fest instead of the Revolution March. Both events were aimed at different segments of the Paul movement choir.

A little piece of me was hoping for a Barr endorsement, which didn’t happen, to say the least. But the idea that there are two factions — one sticking with Baldwin and one that has perhaps already jumped to Barr — is both perceptive and encouraging.