What-If Navel Gazing, Clinton v. Obama Edition

I’ve seen a lot of “if only we’d elected Hillary” whining lately, so it is good to see someone who supported Senator Clinton for the nomination in 2008 admit that’s a stupid argument. Rebecca Traister writes,

The empirical choice between Clinton and Obama was never as direct as those on either side made it out to be; neither was obviously more equipped or more progressive than the other. The maddening part, then and now, is that they were utterly comparable candidates. The visions — in 2008, of Obama as a progressive redeemer who would restore enlightened democracy to our land and Hillary as a crypto-Republican company man; or, in 2011, of Obama as an appeasement-happy crypto-Republican and Hillary as a leftist John Wayne who would have whipped those Congressional outlaws into shape — they were all invented. These are fictional characters shaped by the predilections, prejudices and short memories of the media and the electorate. They’re not actual politicians between whom we choose here on earth.

If she had won her party’s nomination and then the general election, Hillary Clinton’s presidency would probably not have looked so different from Obama’s. She was, after all, a senator who, for a variety of structural and strategic reasons, often crossed party lines to co-sponsor legislation with Republicans, who voted to go to war in Iraq, who moved to the center on everything from Israel to violent video games. You think Obama’s advisers are bad? Hillary Clinton hired, and then took far too long to get rid of, Mark Penn. And her economic team probably would have looked an awful lot like Obama’s.

Thank you. I would add, to those who believe a President Hillary Clinton would have been “tougher,” take a look at her senatorial career. If you can identify a single piece of unambiguously progressive legislation that she sponsored, fought for, and won, do let me know. And she spent eight years in the Senate.

And I’ll say one more time, if we want a more progressive president after 2012, stop navel gazing over President Obama and work to elect a more progressive Congress.

Baggers Versus Business

An editorial in the New York Times (“Surely They Can Read a Spreadsheet“) appeals to Big Business — and Small Business, for that matter — to support raising tax revenues. It would be not just the responsible thing to do; it would be in their own fiscal interest.

“A responsible argument by business for a balanced approach to reviving the economy and reducing the deficit could change the debate in Washington,” the editorial says. Maybe.

Steve Benen says,

Corporate leaders may love their Republican allies, but do they love the GOP more than their own profits? Is the business community willing to gamble its earnings on the preferences of a radicalized party that nearly pushed the nation into voluntary default, even when private-sector leaders begged them not to play the game?

Private-sector leaders did speak out on the default, and while the establishment Republicans probably listened, the Tea Party element did not. My sense of things is that the baggers, in and out of office, are beyond worrying about the real effects of baggerism on the economy.

It’s a bit like Rick Perry’s weird defense of abstinence education. In the bagger mind, the inherent virtue they perceive in the “cuts only” approach outweighs any empirical evidence that it doesn’t actually work. So they are perfectly capable of seeing themselves as pro-business even as they ignore what business actually thinks about anything.

For a variation on this phenomenon, see Faux Nooz’s re-casting of Warren Buffett as a socialist after the billionaire’s call for higher taxes. That Buffett was arguing for the best policies to stimulate the economy — and thereby his own fiscal interests — flew right over their heads.

On the other hand, Steve M. argues that business isn’t hurting nearly enough to pry it loose from demands for tax cuts and deregulation.

Survival of the Stupid

In “Nature Without the Nanny State,” Timothy Egan writes about the record number of fatalities in national parks this year. The parks are receiving record numbers of visitors — it’s a cheaper vacation than Disney World, I assume — and also record numbers of people who lack the sense to not fall off cliffs or over waterfalls.

I’ve already written about the three damnfools in Yosemite who climbed over a guardrail to wade in rapids just a few feet above a 317-foot waterfall, and surprise! They lost their footing on slippery rocks and were swept to their deaths.

I mean, it’s one thing to be killed by something unexpected. Egan discussed one hiker who was aggressively stalked and gored by a mountain goat, which is unusual behavior for a mountain goat. Stuff does happen. But people are doing things that anyone with the sense God gave igneous rocks would not do. The Forest Service is responding by putting up more warning signs and guard rails, but as one Yosemite park ranger said, “We’ve got more than 800 trails and 3,000-foot cliffs in this park. You can’t put guardrails around the whole thing.”

Nor should you, I say. And, anyway, several of the fatalities have occurred in places that were already guardrailed and warning signed. I don’t know what else the Park Service could do.

Egan writes, “My experience, purely anecdotal, is that the more rangers try to bring the nanny state to public lands, the more careless, and dependent, people become.” I suspect, however, that people are not becoming more careless because the rangers are trying to nanny them. I suspect it’s a combination of people with no experience with wilderness who also have no respect for government warning them to not be damnfools and try to pet the bears.

And from here I’d like to go into a rant on how a generation of people who have enjoyed consumer and workplace and other safety regulations have been bamboozled into thinking they don’t need those regulations, but I have to go somewhere now. I may take this up again when I get back.

Update: OK, I”m back. Buckyblue said in the comments that you don’t find as many warning signs and guard rails outside of the United States. That squares with what I observed in my trip to Britain a few years ago. I noticed a widespread assumption that people had the sense to not plunge out of castle turrets to their deaths on the rocks below, and that they didn’t need to be warned, for example. And I suspect Buckyblue is right that the signs and guard rails are as much about limiting liability as anything else.

Which leads me to wonder if signs and guard rails actually do any good, if people dumb enough to wade in rapids just above a waterfall don’t heed the warnings anyway. My suspicions are that the signs and guard do some good. There are people who may not be all that bright, but neither are they risk takers.

Perhaps I shouldn’t draw too many conclusions about our crazy times without knowing if the ratio of deaths to visitors in National Parks is going up, or whether it’s about what it has been for years. However, I’d be willing to pay money if someone could do psychological autopsies of people who do damnfool things in National Parks and get themselves killed, to see if there are any commonalities to explain the phenomenon. And why do I suspect a disproportionate number of them may be teabaggers?