Live-blogging the final presidential debate of 2012

I'll say anything I have to say about tonight's presidential debate, which you can watch live online, in this post.

I'll be writing down any quotes on the fly, without the aid of a transcript or pause/rewind button. So they might not be 100% verbatim, but I'll try to keep them as accurate as possible.

9:07 - Jill Stein (Green Party) wants to "bail out the students, not the banks." I'm not so sure. Stein makes it sound like of course we should bail out someone, and the question is who to bail out. Maybe the real problem is the very idea of bailouts.

9:09 - Stein criticizes President Obama for "expanding free-trade agreements," which will "continue to offshore our jobs" and "undermine American sovereignty." She wants a "fair-trade agreement" to protect workers and the environment. Isn't supporting "fair trade" really a euphemism for opposing free trade?

9:12 - Gary Johnson (Libertarian Party) unsurprisingly starts out by expressing his support for free trade, pointing out that it makes goods and services cheaper for us as consumers. The problem is when free trade turns into "crony capitalism." Instead of creating loopholes, government should "get out of the way" and "create a level playing field for everybody." He'd eliminate the corporate tax.

9:16 - Stein describes a scenario where 100 loaves of bread are distributed to 100 people, and says that 1 person would get 40 loaves, while 50 people would get just 1 loaf. The bread is all of America's wealth, and the 100 people are the American people. She then says she supports a "living wage," which presumably means dramatically increasing the minimum wage. She doesn't explain how forbidding employers and employees from entering into mutually beneficial arrangements would equalize the distribution of wealth, rather than increasing unemployment.

9:20 - Johnson lambastes Stein for her support of increasing corporate taxes: "Why not increase the corporate tax rate to 70%? Why not 100%?" He argues: "Whatever we tax, we get less of" — raising corporate taxes causes businesses and jobs to leave the United States.

9:22 - Johnson warns of a "monetary collapse" resulting from government-backed inflation. "I am livid over the fact that we bail out Wall Street from making incredibly bad decisions — that they don't lose their money. . . . Capitalism on the way up, communism on the way down!"

9:26 - Stein is also against the fact that banks are considered "too big to fail." It seems like everyone is.

9:28 - Stein: "After a decade of war, over $5 trillion spent, and thousands of American lives lost, what have we accomplished?" Not stable allies or women's rights. Unlike in the Obama/Romney debate on foreign policy, she raises criticisms of Obama's drone war.

9:32 - Johnson: "Drone attacks potentially take out the target, but only 2% of its effectiveness is on the target. The rest is unintended consequences."

9:33 - Johnson flatly says that foreign aid "should stop." "Contrary to what we were brought up to believe, foreign aid does not go to poor people. It goes to prop up dictatorships. But it goes to dictatorships that are supposedly in America's best interests. . . . It's poor people in this country giving money to rich people in foreign countries."

9:35 - Stein seems to support foreign aid in principle, but says we need to "end the predominant form of foreign aid, and that is military aid." But even if our foreign aid didn't include any military aid, wouldn't it effectively make it easier for the recipient countries to spend more on their militaries?

9:39 - Johnson: "There are unintended consequences to our military interventions — always worse rather than better!"

9:40 - Stein says that "there are countries in the Middle East that do have nuclear weapons now, and that includes Israel." That's not officially public knowledge, so it appears unpresidential for a candidate to state it explicitly.

9:42 - Stein connects anthropogenic climate change to currently displaced people in New York. She pins the blame on "fossil-fuel politics," which she says Obama has participated in as much as Republicans.

9:45 - Johnson says he believes climate change is anthropogenic, but he doesn't think he as president could stop it. As always, his solution is economic growth spurred by free markets: consumers will demand that their products somehow reduce carbon emissions.

9:48 - Johnson bravely supports price gouging. $7 per gallon gasoline would lead to shorter car lines at the pump, and would attract entrepreneurs.

9:51 - Johnson says that all government action is "well-intentioned"; of course, the problem is unintended consequences. He describes his efforts as Governor of New Mexico to respond to a forest fire — which itself was caused by government. (Wikipedia has information on this episode.)

9:53 - Stein says climate change is an "emergency." "It's as if we've been attacked." She says it's a bigger emergency than Pearl Harbor.

9:57 - Johnson says that Stein seems to think government is the answer to all our problems, and he asks Stein what she thinks about net neutrality. Stein says she's for it, and adds that she doesn't assume government is the answer to every problem. "I'm not an ideologue. I'm a doctor. I don't actually know much about ideology. As a doctor, I look for practical solutions."

9:59 - Both candidates say that they're not aware of any way that Wikileaks is a threat to national security. Stein goes further and says that secrecy is the greatest threat to security.

10:03 - Stein warns that President Obama has "reinterpreted" the 2001 Authorization of the Use of Military Force to authorize himself to "assassinate anyone, including American citizens."

10:05 - When asked about police brutality and excesses, Stein brings up a recent experience when she showed up at a presidential debate to insist on being included. She was arrested and "cuffed tightly to a chair for 8 hours."

10:07 - Johnson's response to the police question focuses on drugs: "I am going to do everything I possibly can to bring an end to the drug war. I would like to see the legalization of marijuana now."

10:08 - Johnson calls the TSA a "Constitution-free zone."

10:09 - Johnson says that if either Obama or Romney wins, we'll have "a heightened police state," "a continued state of war," and "unsustainable spending."

10:12 - Johnson does an extended impression of Obama giving a press conference where he started out saying that European countries that practiced austerity avoided the problems of countries that spent more money than they had — Obama then went on to say (according to Johnson) that the United States is different because we can print more money and use "leverage."

10:14 - Stein disagrees with Johnson, saying that the track record of "austerity" in Europe and the United States is abysmal. Johnson: "I think that's just baloney!" He says we need to stop spending more money than we have, or we'll have a "national collapse."

10:21 - Stein and Johnson both support labeling of genetically modified foods. Johnson connects this to the idea of a free market: consumers should make choices based on accurate information. He says he wouldn't be able to function if not for food labels, since he has Celiac disease and can't eat gluten.

10:23 - In her closing statement, Stein says she'll "put an end to student debt." She calls students "indentured servants."

10:24 - Johnson says in his closing statement: "Vote for the person you believe in. That's how you change this country for the better. I'm more liberal than Obama when it comes to civil liberties. I'm more conservative than Romney when it comes to dollars and cents. . . . I made a name for myself [as governor] by being a penny-pincher. . . . I don't know if there's a more important vote right now if you want to register your distaste with what's happening in this country." Johnson ends by asking for 5% of the vote, which will let the Libertarian Party get more ballot access and receive federal matching funds. So, the libertarian's slam-dunk argument for why you should vote for him is that it will let him receive federal-government benefits.

Live-blogging CNN's Las Vegas Republican presidential debate

I'll be live-blogging the debate starting soon. There will also be live-blogging on TalkingPointsMemo, National Review, and the New York Times.

Feel free to post any comments about the debate (or the election) in the comments.

[ADDED: Here's the transcript, and here's the video:]



7:58 - This seems to be online only: we see someone warming up the audience, encouraging them to applaud as wildly as possible. He introduces Anderson Cooper (who I walked by on the street the other day). Cooper tells the audience we're going to start with the National Anthem, which he'll sing very quietly because he has a terrible voice. Good, this will give me time to make a salad before the actual debate starts.

8:02 - The opening sequence has majestic music (to conjure up the West), and an announcer gives us a basic run-down of who has what at stake. After summing up Mitt Romney (holding steady in the top tier), Rick Perry ("trying to get back on track after a meteoric rise"), and Herman Cain (surging), the announcer says that Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul are still trying to break through, while Rick Santorum is described as trying to "beat the odds." Santorum fans (if they exist) had to cringe that he was placed in a lower tier than everyone else including Ron Paul.

8:07 - An aggressively masculine rendition of the Star Spangled Banner.

8:08 - Fortunately, this is the second debate in a row with no bells to signal when a candidate's time is up.

8:09 - Everyone is giving an opening statement. Santorum includes a sweet message to his daughter, who had surgery today and is doing fine.

8:10 - In Cain's opening statement, he says he's "a businessman, which means I solve problems for a living." Romney goes next and awkwardly echoes Cain's intro.

8:10 - In his opening statement, Perry forcefully says he's "an authentic conservative, not a conservative of convenience." A heavy-handed swipe at Romney.

As always, I'm writing down quotes on the fly, so they may not be verbatim.

8:14 - Santorum: "Herman's well-meaning." But 84% of Americans will pay more in taxes under Cain's 9/9/9 plan.

8:16 - Cain denies that he's proposing a value added tax. Bachmann insists that he is proposing a VAT. (I recently blogged about this.) The VAT just tricks people into thinking businesses, instead of government, are making them pay more.

8:17 - Perry calls Cain "brother" twice in his answer on why the 9/9/9 plan won't work. [Here's the video, which also shows that he uses a different word for Romney:]



8:19 - Paul makes a crucial, surprisingly overlooked, point: any time you increase spending, you're effectively raising taxes (I would add: especially as long as we're in debt). The taxes will have to go up sooner or later. The fact that we don't experience the tax increases right away doesn't change this fact.

8:21 - So far it's almost all been about 9/9/9. There's a lively exchange between Cain and Romney. Cain says Romney and Perry are "mixing apples and oranges" by equating his proposed federal sales tax with the current state sales taxes. Romney retorts: "I'll have a bushel of apples and oranges, because I'll be paying both taxes."

8:24 - Bachmann says "every American should pay something" in taxes. Well that's good, because that's already true.

8:25 - Perry says he's finally released his economic plan. His plan is to extract our own energy, which would "create 1.2 million jobs." How long a period of time do you think he's referring to? A quarter? A year? Nope. 7 years.

8:29 - Santorum uses his favorite strategy of interrupting another candidate, and Romney responds very sharply, repeatedly saying: "Rick, you've had your chance — let me speak." That might be the most heated moment Romney has had in any of these debates. Santorum eventually announces that Romney's time is up before he's gotten a chance to say one sentence! The audience boos.

8:33 - Romney gets Gingrich to admit that Romney got the idea for his health-care plan's individual mandate from Gingrich and the Heritage Foundation.

8:42 - Perry says "Mitt loses all standing" on illegal immigration because Romney hired an illegal immigrant and knew about it for a year. Once Romney starts answering, Perry uses an uncannily similar strategy to Santorum's, jabbering over Romney for the whole time he's talking. Romney (who's right next to Perry) puts his hand on Perry's shoulder and leaves it there for a long time. Romney: "You have a problem with allowing someone to finish speaking. And I'd suggest that if you want to be President of the United States, you ought to let both people speak." Have Perry and Santorum privately agreed to the same line of attack against Romney — talking over him throughout his whole time — or did Perry spontaneously decide to emulate Santorum? Either way, Perry and Santorum are using a cowardly tactic and creating the impression that they're afraid of letting Americans hear the whole debate.

8:46 - Anderson Cooper asks Cain why he said he supported an electrified fence along the southern border, then said it was a joke, then said he stood by the statement and just didn't want to offend anyone! Cain starts out saying he's finally going to be serious, but he doesn't clarify whether he still supports an electrified fence.

8:52 - I just noticed this is the first debate without Jon Huntsman. [ADDED: He's boycotting Nevada. That'll do him a lot of good.]

8:52 - Perry brings back his attack against Romney for supposedly hiring illegal immigrants. The audience boos very loudly for a long time. Romney says: "We've been down that road sufficiently, and it sounds like the audience agrees with me." Once Romney says that, the audience immediately switches to cheering. That was Perry's big attempt to offset the charges that he himself is soft on illegal immigration, and the attempt failed miserably.

9:01 - I'm adding the "free speech" tag to this post, since the candidates seem to disagree on whether they should all get a chance to speak.

9:11 - Cain stands by his past statement about Occupy Wall Street: that if you're not rich, blame yourself. Ron Paul: "Cain is blaming the victims."

9:21 - Santorum makes a smart statement on the relevance of religion in a presidential race. The candidate's faith has to do with their values, and that's relevant for voters to consider. In contrast, whether the candidate is right or wrong about "the road to salvation" shouldn't be part of the political arena.

9:22 - Gingrich tries to outdo Santorum by saying that the idea that we were "created by a loving God" defines the boundaries of . . . what? (I'm having trouble paraphrasing him because I found this so incoherent.)

9:23 - Perry has been pausing a lot throughout the debate.

9:33 - Paul: "We have enough weapons to blow up the world 20, 25 times."

9:37 - Paul would "cut all foreign aid," which is "taking money from poor people in this country and giving it to rich people in poor countries." He emphasizes that this includes Israel.

9:41 - Gingrich, answering a question by Paul, says that the Iranian "arms for hostages" deal in the '80s was "a terrible mistake."

9:46 - Santorum says Romney in Massachusetts "ran as a liberal, to the left of Ted Kennedy." Romney laughs on cue.

9:48 - Romney: 40% of the jobs created in the last several years in Texas have gone to illegal immigrants. Perry says this is wrong, and adds: "You failed as the governor of Massachusetts." Romney responds that his unemployment rate in Massachusetts was lower than Perry's in Texas during the same time period.

9:49 - Romney: We need "someone who's created jobs, not just watched them being created by others."

9:50 - Cooper asks Cain a dumb question: Should either Romney or Perry be President? "No, I should be President!"

That's all. Now, here's the moment this debate will be remembered for:



Jonah Goldberg says:

I don’t think anyone left the debate more likable than they were when they went in, with the possible exception of Newt.

Maybe he was reading Jason (the Commenter)'s Twitter feed:

My scoring of the debates: Cain -1, Romney -2, Perry -5, Bachmann -1, Santorum -2, Newt (my new favorite)

Goldberg elaborates:

I thought Perry had his best performance so far, but it was awfully shaky at times and he struck me as unlikable at times. If this had been his first debate, he might still be the frontrunner, albeit with a lot of chatter about how he needs to get better.

Romney still won the debate but I think he finally got bloodied on RomneyCare in a way he hadn’t in the past. He also looked angry and flustered for the first time ever. It might humanize him for some people. Or it might make him look weak.

Cain wilted under the pressure, but didn’t fold. He needs to learn how to talk about 9-9-9 in a granular way without asserting ignorance, laziness or dishonesty on the part of its critics. He remains a mess on foreign policy.

Santorum was the winner on points in almost all of his exchanges but he simply cannot stop sounding whiney, angry or aggrieved. . . . [H]is tone is so unpresidential you want him to stop talking even when he’s winning.

Bachmann’s simply a diminished candidate who thinks saying Obama is a one-term president is an argument for her.

All in all, an exhausting debate.

Live-blogging the Republican presidential primary debate on FoxNews, September 22

Feel free to post any comments on the debate, whether or not they're relevant to what I said.

You can see more live-blogging at Althouse (my mom's blog), TalkingPointsMemo, Politico, and National Review.

Any quotations in this post will be whatever I write down on the fly. I'll try to keep these reasonably accurate, but they might not be exactly word-for-word.

9:03 - Rick Perry seems weary, disoriented, and halting, just one minute into the debate.

9:04 - Perry, where's your specific jobs plan? Perry says he'll show it to us . . . eventually. In other words, he doesn't have a specific jobs plan.

9:05 - The moderator tells Romney his 59-point jobs plan is very specific, but perhaps too timid. Romney gets off to an awkward start, asking if the microphone is on. "In order to create jobs, it helps if you've had a job. And I have."

9:07 - Romney refuses to answer the question how he defines "rich." He wants everyone to be rich. Sounds like a great plan.

9:08 - Bachmann is re-asked a question from the last debate (which was originally asked by an audience member): How much of his money does he deserve to keep? Of course, Bachmann says you deserve to keep all of your money. It's the wrong question. It implies that there's some bureaucrat somewhere who just loves taking people's money because they think people don't deserve all their money; so we have to debate with that person about what the right percentage is.

9:12 - The debates this year have had more discussion of welfare than we've heard in presidential debates since before 2000. Everyone seemed to decide it was no longer a salient issue at some point. Notably, the welfare reform law of 1996 needs to be reauthorized on September 30.

9:15 - Herman Cain is asked if his "9/9/9 plan" of eliminating many taxes and creating three new flat taxes will just lead to tax increases in the future. Don't worry, says Cain: there's no chance of that! Well, that's a relief!

9:18 - Ron Paul is asked what he'll do to protect the 10th Amendment. He concisely says he'll veto any bill that violates the 10th Amendment. In an unprecedented move, the moderator complains that Paul hasn't used enough of his time.

9:21 - During a commercial break, a FoxNews anchor tells us they asked viewers to answer the question of what counts as rich. The most common answer (to rephrase it in negative terms) is that anyone who makes $999,999 or less is not rich. Wow.

9:27 - Romney to Perry: "You better find that Rick Perry and get him to stop saying" that Social Security is unconstitutional and so on. In other words, Perry has watered down his talking points about Social Security, and Romney isn't going to let him get away with it.

9:29 - Perry unilaterally shifts the debate to health care, retorting that Romney said in his book that his health care reform would be a good model for the country. I'm not clear on what Romney's point was in rebutting this.

9:30 - Does Romney believe that President Barack Obama is a socialist? Romney says: (1) The better title for him would be "Former President Barack Obama." (2) He's a big-spending liberal who's going down the path of Europe.

9:31 - Romney, apropos of nothing: "I didn't inhale." [Added: I didn't catch his setup, which made this make a bit more sense. My mom transcribes the full comment: "I spent 4 years as governor. I didn't inhale." She notes that Romney says this while glancing at Perry.]

9:34 - The candidates are asked which federal department they'd eliminate if they were forced to do so. Cain says the Environmental Protection Agency, but he emphasizes that this presupposes he'd be forced to eliminate one. Republicans seem to have softened from the old days, when they would boast of their willingness to "abolish" federal agencies.

9:36 - My mom points out that 3 of the 9 candidates are wearing yellow ties (of course, that's 3 of the 8 candidates who are wearing ties at all): Jon Huntsman, Cain, and Paul.

9:38 - Libertarian Gary Johnson (in his first debate of the race) says he'll abolish the Department of Education — and this was not in response to the question about which department he'd abolish if forced to.

9:40 - Paul repeats his "care" theme from past debates: "If you care about children, you'll want to get the federal government out of the business of educating them."

9:42 - Perry goes even more negative than he's gone before, sternly calling Romney "not conservative" on education. Perry is apparently saying this only because Romney has praised elements of Obama's education policy. Romney laughs this off: "Nice try!" He agrees with Obama's policy goal of making it easier to fire teachers. This was an odd move by Perry. I thought it was conventional wisdom that Obama has challenged the standard Democratic teacher's union orthodoxy.

9:46 - Josh Marshall said (half an hour into the debate):

I'm curious how it will play. But Romney's just running circles around Perry. He's a very different candidate than he was four years ago, let alone back in '94 when he ran against Ted Kennedy. Tight, on message.

9:50 - Romney attacks Perry for giving more money to illegal immigrants than citizens to go to the University of Texas. "It makes no sense." In fact, it makes so little sense that it's hard to believe that's even the real policy. [Added: I understand now: as this TNR article explains, Romney was referring to the fact that in-state UT students who happened to be illegal immigrants got the same discount on their tuition as other in-state students, so they paid $22,000 a year less than out-of-state students.]

9:52 - Question to Perry: How do you feel, being criticized by many of the candidates for being soft on illegal immigration? "I feel pretty normal." Perry adds that if you make arguments like the one Romney made about education for illegal immigrants, "I don't think you have a heart."

9:53 - Moderator Chris Wallace: "Senator Santorum, you don't need to butt in, because I'm about to ask you a question." Santorum sheepishly responds: "OK."

10:03 - Romney says Obama has gone wrong by publicly criticizing Israel. It's OK to disagree with an ally, but make the criticism privately.

10:04 - Romney: "It is unacceptable — and I use that word carefully — it is unacceptable for Iran to become a nuclear power."

10:10 - Gingrich says (reasonably, in my opinion) that he'd get rid of almost all direct government-to-government foreign aid since it leads to corruption.

10:11 - Johnson: It's "crazy" for us to be giving money to any countries when we have to borrow money to do it.

10:12 - Like Romney, Huntsman can't tell if his microphone is working even though we can hear him. FoxNews seems to have some problems with its debate infrastructure.

10:13 - Huntsman: "People are ready to bring our troops home from Afghanistan."

10:14 - Bachmann is asked about a comment she made saying "separation between church and state" is a "myth." In response, she says all "separation of church and state" means is that there isn't a United States-sponsored church. "We should have freedom for all people to express their belief in God."

10:16 - A self-proclaimed "gay soldier," serving in Iraq, asks if the candidates would allow him to serve. The audience loudly boos the soldier. Santorum responds that he doesn't want gays to have "special privileges." The moderator re-asks the question since Santorum didn't answer it. Santorum incoherently says he would reinstitute the old policy so that "sex would not be an issue." But it was precisely under the old policy ("Don't Ask, Don't Tell") that sex was an issue. It's the repeal of DADT that takes sexuality off the table as an issue. I thought conservatives were supposed to be attuned to the fact that government policies lead to unintended consequences.



[Added: GOProud is asking Santorum to apologize to the soldier, saying:]

It is telling that Rick Santorum is so blinded by his anti-gay bigotry that he couldn’t even bring himself to thank that gay soldier for his service.

10:19 - Paul doesn't support a law against the "day-after pill." He makes the important point that you don't always need law to make people behave well.

10:21 - Cain says he would be dead today if Obamacare had been the law back in 2006 when he was diagnosed with cancer. His reason is vague: Obamacare would have provided a "bureaucrat's timetable" for when he could get treatment.

10:27 - Bachmann attacks Perry for being influenced by a campaign contribution to support a law requiring that girls in Texas receive a vaccination for the sexually transmitted disease HPV, which can lead to cervical cancer. Perry dramatically responds: "I was lobbied on this issue. I was lobbied by a 31-year-old woman with cervical cancer."

10:31 - Romney says his health care reform was "different than Obamacare" because it was "market-based." It didn't create some new government health insurance. Does Romney not realize that the public option failed?

10:33 - The sniping between Romney and Perry has started to feel worn-out. Perry is incapable of getting through his litany of issues on which Romney has flip-flopped; he stumbles over his words so much he's incomprehensible ("You were for it before you were before it . . ."). [Added later: TalkingPointsMemo seizes on this as the moment when conservative pundits turned against Perry. TPM aptly says that Perry "attempted to deliver a knockout blow against Mitt Romney’s various changes of position — only to trip over all his words as he tried to keep track of them." Here's the video, with Perry's bumbling starting after 1:25:]



10:39 - Cain: "Ronald Reagan said we were a shining city on a hill. We've slid down the bottom of that hill." Overall tonight, the candidates have been mercifully restrained in mentioning Reagan.

10:41 - Paul: "Government destroys jobs; the market creates jobs."

10:44 - Johnson: "My next-door neighbor's 2 dogs have created more shovel-ready jobs than this administration."

10:47 - Who on the stage would you choose as a running mate? Johnson, of course, says Paul, the only other libertarian on the stage. Santorum would pick Gingrich. Gingrich: "I couldn't imagine hurting the rest of their feelings by picking one of them."

10:49 - Paul points out that he's the #3 candidate in the polls. He'll wait until he's one of the top 2 before picking his running mate.

10:49 - Perry: "If you could take Herman Cain and mate him up with Newt Gingrich, I think you'd have a really interesting candidate." Romney: "There are a couple images I'm going to have a really hard time getting out of my mind."

10:50 - Romney says he'd be happy with anyone on the stage as a running mate. He's asked how can he say that about Perry, whom he's attacked as unelectable. Romney doesn't take the bait to lob yet another attack on Perry. He simply says everyone on the stage has problems that would be obstacles for them in getting elected.

10:52 - Huntsman makes my mom's point about his and Cain's yellow ties, while saying he'd pick Cain as a running mate.

10:54 - Almost everyone picked Gingrich as a running mate. Reminds me of the 2008 Democratic primary debates, when Joe Biden was able to get a whole ad out of running together all the times the other candidates said during debates that they agreed with him. If you're getting lots of praise from everyone in the debates, it means you have no chance.

Post-debate

Dana Loesch says on Twitter (via Jonah Goldberg):

That Gary Johnson's line is most discussed tells you how badly some of the other candidates performed.

She's also, like Romney, thinking about the image of Perry wanting to have Cain "mate up" with Gingrich:

Brangelina ... Caingrich?

My mom gives Romney the "quote of the night" award, for saying this:

I'm going to stand by my positions. I'm proud of them. There are a lot of reasons not to elect me. There are a lot of reasons not to elect other people on this stage. But one reason to elect me is that I know what I stand for, I've written it down, words have meaning, and I have the experience to get this country going again.

(You can see Romney saying this at the end of the video I embedded between 10:33 and 10:39.)

Huntsman says the audience's booing of the gay soldier was "unfortunate." "We all salute the same flag."

Frank Luntz's focus group on FoxNews is saying Romney won the debate. TPM says the focus group is calling Romney

“Presidential,” “decisive,” and “elegant.” Perry, meanwhile, is being called “too much of a waffler” by one woman in the group. The crowd also seem angry about the moment when he turned on his immigration critics and accused them (and Bachmann in particular) of not having a heart.

A new Gallup poll shows that Romney has a distinct lead over Perry and Obama in a hypothetical general election.

So, can we stop calling Perry "the frontrunner" yet?

Depressing anecdote of the day: Zimbabwe food truck

This is the kind of thing that I see in the news, and for a split-second, I think, "Oh, good, I can totally blog that!" But then I think, "Oh, yet another example of adults the world would be better off without, considering how they think it's acceptable to treat children."

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the dilemma of sending humanitarian aid to foreign countries that might not go to good use. It's not clear that foreign aid sent to evil regimes is worthwhile even if it is used appropriately, let alone if it gets siphoned off by dictators.

That post was about Burma, but then I saw this more recent instance of the same general problem in Zimbabwe:

Zimbabwean authorities confiscated a truck loaded with 20 tons of American food aid for poor schoolchildren and ordered that the wheat and pinto beans aboard be handed out to supporters of President Robert Mugabe at a political rally instead....

As background: "agricultural production has collapsed over the past decade and millions of people would go hungry each year without emergency aid."

It's hard to imagine a more descipable handling of a humanitarian crisis ... but the Zimbabwe government has come up with a way. You see, they didn't just divert food earmarked for the hungry to use as political bribes. No, they went the extra mile and claimed they had to stop the humanitarian aid because Mugabe's opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, was using the aid as bribes!

That happened a couple weeks ago. Just yesterday, Tsvangirai withdrew from the election, saying that Mugabe was rendering it impossible to remove him from power.

In the end, the food-truck incident is probably a negligible piece of the overall problem. The immediate factor in cutting short the election seemed to be more overt violence. At a rally yesterday (right before the opposition withdrew), "rowdy youths, armed with iron bars and sticks, beat up people who had come to cheer for Mr. Tsvangirai." (See that link for a photo.) It's a war, not an election, the opposition leader said.

Marwick Khumalo, the leader of a watchdog group, helpfully explained: “How can you have an election where people are killed and hacked to death as the sun goes down? How can you have an election where the leader of one party is not even allowed to conduct rallies?”

A bit of perspective for Americans, with our endless back-and-forth whining about which side is suffering from worse media bias. For all the outrage over supposed unfairness, the fact is that we're free to say and do whatever we want in political campaigns. Our hair-trigger reactions to trumped-up injustices do a disservice to people in the world whose liberties are actually being curtailed.

And if you think that's pointing out such an obvious distinction that it goes without saying, well, remember that Hillary Clinton had a hard time seeing the difference between our elections and Zimbabwe's. Oh, that reminds me -- Hillary Clinton -- I'll get back to her soon...

(Photo of children in Zimbabwe by Steve Evans.)

Layers of tragedy in Burma

I jotted down some notes to myself about what I could blog about the aftermath of the cyclone in Burma while I was sitting in NYC's most august jazz club, the Village Vanguard. Charlie Haden, Ethan Iverson, and Paul Motian were playing their rarefied, cerebral brand of jazz. Oh, this is a perfect illustration of Peter Singer's famous ethical argument, I thought. I could have had an enjoyable evening some other way that didn't cost as much, and donated the savings to some charity that would step in to the rescue.

But no, that's not quite how the world works. Peter Singer says that it's immoral to dine at an expensive restaurant since you could instead stay home and give the money you'd save to a charity that would save people's lives. (According to Singer, you could save a life for every month you avoided eating out.) Now, there are a bunch of problems with this argument, and I hope to talk about them in a later post. But for now, the relevant problem is that it's really hard to try to go out in the world and find lives to save on the cheap.

It's tempting to think that we have the resources to end world suffering, if only we had the willpower. But the American public doesn't seem too upset about its tax dollars being used foreign aid even though Americans believe, on average, that we spend more than 100 times as much of our GDP on foreign aid as we actually do. There's some occasional grumbling about foreign aid, of course, but this misperception hasn't sparked an outcry. In fact, most Americans either have no opinion or would prefer that we spend more on foreign aid than we do. So the willingness is there; the bigger stumbling block is how effective our assistance would be.

Even if you can somehow make sure the money gets earmarked for purely beneficent purposes, the aid you send might only strengthen an autocracy. Money is fungible, so a government that receives $X to spend on food for its people suddenly has $X more of its old money that it doesn't need to spend on food but can instead use for _________. And even this is idealistic, since it's hard to make sure that a corrupt government is going to scrupulously honor the earmarks.

Burma seems to be a case in point. The US and the UN are desperately trying to help, but the Burmese government is playing hard to get. In the past, Burma has not been embarrassed to throw out aid workers. Now that the situation is so dire that dead bodies are literally piling up all over the place, however, the government is going a step further. This time, they've barred UN aid workers from even entering their country in the first place. They'll accept only outside resources; they won't accept foreign workers physically in their country to coordinate the aid. Why? Because help from outsiders would be "a potential threat to their two-decade hold on power." (They've started to accept aid from the US, but with the same restriction.)

And to top it all off, the government isn't even putting the cyclone response as its current top priority. They're too busy drafting a road map to a fake democracy.

All of this behavior implies that they specifically want to exploit the inherent shortcomings of foreign aid for their own benefit. Meanwhile, there's no telling how many new deaths are being caused each day as a result of this obstinacy: as many as 100,000 people died as a direct result of the cyclone (even the Burmese government's early estimate of the death toll, excluding "missing" people, was over 20,000). And one-and-a-half million people have been left homeless. (I wouldn't be surprised if these numbers have proven to be significant understatements by the time you read this.) The potential for outbreaks of disease in this unsanitary environment is overwhelming. Assuming that things are going to continue on this path, Burma is committing a passive genocide against its own people.

[UPDATE, May 31: U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has now confirmed this in an "emotional" speech: Burma's obstruction of foreign assistance has cost "tens of thousands of lives." Also, "U.S., British and French Navy ships off the coast of Myanmar are poised to leave because the government has blocked them from delivering assistance."]

If you ever doubt that evil is a real, objective phenomenon in the world, just remember the Burmese government's response to the cyclone in 2008.

Back to Peter Singer's ethical theory. If he's right that your restaurant expenditures should be judged based on the missed opportunity to donate to charity, then foreign aid should be judged all the more harshly if it fails to help people. We need to face the reality that sometimes there might just not be much we can do to alleviate the suffering, and the money would be better spent elsewhere. At this point, it's hard to see how we could possibly rescue the Burmese except through military force, but the failure of the United States and its international coalition in the Iraq war renders another nation-building adventure unlikely in the near future. To the extent that there are longer-term foreign policies or global trends that tend to promote liberal democracy and erode dictatorships, those might be more fruitful than a policy of "Oh, a headline-worthy disaster just happened, so we need to fix it."