Isaac Laquedem

The 2008 races: a funny thing happened on the way to invincibility

Steve Duin, writing in the Oregonian yesterday, touched on a thought about this year's Democratic races that I've been playing with for a while.  Consider these three races:  Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the presidential nomination, Greg Macpherson and John Kroger for attorney general, and Jeff Merkley and Steve Novick for the senate.  In each case the political establishment heavily favored the first candidate.  In each case the public viewed the second candidate as talented, interesting, but ultimately not actually electable.

What a difference six months makes.  Senator Obama narrowly leads Senator Clinton in pledged delegates, and they have essentially tied in the popular vote so far.  Representative Macpherson still leads Professor Kroger, but the final vote will be close.  And Representative Merkley has fallen behind not only Mr. Novick, but (according to a KATU poll released last week) behind Candy Neville, a political unknown running as an anti-war activist.

Mr. Duin looked at these three races, and at the race between Kate Brown and Vicki Walker for secretary of state, and saw a pattern: the party is sending two messages.  The first group of candidates represents the establishment, and of them Mr. Duin trenchantly says, "They are running on experience, believing most voters mistake it for competence or prefer it to creativity." 

I like that line so much that I'm going to quote it again, in color.

"They are running on experience, believing most voters mistake it for competence or prefer it to creativity." -- Steve Duin

The second group of candidates represents impatience with business as usual. 

I go beyond Mr. Duin.  I believe that the second group of candidates (Obama, Novick, Kroger, and Walker) are doing well because their opponents are overselling their message.  Until she sent her husband to the bench for a few weeks, Senator Clinton was running on the strength of President Clinton's administration, which started 16 years ago.  (In terms of time warp, that's the same as if President Clinton had run in 1992 on the accomplishments of the Carter administration.)  Because her time in the White House is what she relies on for most of her experience in government, Senator Clinton can't run as the candidate of change, and every time we see President Clinton campaigning for her we are pulled backward in time, rather than pushed forward.

I see a second phenomenon here, one that Mr. Duin didn't mention.  The incumbent president has convincingly demonstrated the perils of a large republic adopting dynastic succession to the point that the voters are impelled to vote against any candidate who looks like -- and especially who campaigns as -- an heir apparent, whether by family relationship (Senator Clinton, Representative Macpherson) or by long service in elected office (Senator Brown, Representative Merkley).  Put another way, a large part of the Democratic electorate isn't out to reward candidates for what they've done in the past, but to pick people who have a chance of doing something differently in the future.

More old news on global warming

Some time ago I noted that, despite the current administration's apparent belief that global warming through greenhouse gases is a recent and unproven theory, the magisterial 1967 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica had described the phenomenon.

I came across this interesting passage in another textbook:

The water-vapor content of the atmosphere varies and cannot surpass a certain amount.  But carbon dioxide has the same absorbing properties as water vapor, and in spite of the fact that it makes up only a very small part of the earth's atmosphere, Arrhenius believes that it has important climatic effects.  He concluded that if the quantity of it in the air were doubled the climate would be appreciably warmer, and that if half of it were removed the average temperature of the earth would fall.  Chamberlin has shown that there are reasons for believing that the amount of carbon dioxide has varied in long oscillations, and he suggested that this may be the explanation of the ice ages, with intervening warm epochs, which the middle latitudes have experienced.

So far so good, as no serious scientist doubts that the CO2 content of the atmosphere influences the climate.  (Arrhenius was a Swedish scientist who lived from 1959 to 1927, and published his theory about the influence of carbon dioxide on climate in 1896.)  The question is whether our industrial activities appreciably affect that content.  So let's continue with this textbook:

If the effect of carbon dioxide on the climate has been correctly estimated, its production by the recent enormous consumption of coal raises the interesting question whether man at last is not in this way seriously interfering with the cosmic processes.  At the present time about 1,000,000,000 tons of coal are mined and burned annually.  In order to burn 12 pounds of coal 32 pounds of oxygen are required, and the result of this combustion is 12+32=44 pounds of carbon dioxide.  Consequently, by the combustion of coal there is now annually produced by man about 3,670,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide.  On referring to the total amount of carbon dioxide now in the air, it is seen that at the present rate of combustion of coal it will be doubled in 800 years.  Consequently, there are grounds for believing that modern industry may have sensible climatic effects in a few centuries.

Two observations:  first, this is from a source even older than the 1967 Britannica.  It comes from the new and revised edition of An Introduction to Astronomy by Forest Ray Moulton (1872-1952), professor of astronomy at the University of Chicago.  The new and revised edition from which I quote was published in 1925; the first edition came out in 1905.

Second, coal consumption in the United States is now only 1,120,000,000 tons per year, about the same figure quoted in 1925.   Professor Moulton's figure for 1925 is, however, a worldwide figure, and today the world consumes about 6,300,000,000 tons of coal a year, which is about six times the 1925 consumption. 

It was warm out today, and it should be warmer tomorrow.

I look forward to paying my taxes . . . like this

I emerge from hibernation at the behest of the Trusty Accountant, who tells me to get three envelopes in the mail today.  This means that it's again time for our annual celebration of Tax Day, marked as is customary with a selection from the works of A.P. Herbert.

In this case it's from his short story "The Negotiable Cow," featuring his protagonist Albert Haddock, a British author whose long-running battles with the Inland Revenue (Britain's counterpart to the Internal Revenue Service) are chronicled in many of Mr. Herbert's stories.  In the book version, the action starts in court with a witness being asked "Was the cow crossed?" "No, my lord, it was an open cow."  [In British commercial parlance, a "crossed cheque" is a check across which two parallel lines have been drawn, which instructs the bank on which it is drawn to pay only to a bank account and not to cash the check.]  It develops that the Crown is prosecuting Haddock for failing to pay his income tax.  He had offered to pay, by stenciling onto a cow the words "To the London & Literary Bank, Ltd., pay the Collector of Taxes, who is no gentleman, or order, the sum of 57/0/0 (and may he rot!)," signing the cow, and then leading the cow through central London into the office of the Inland Revenue.  The Collector eventually declined to accept the check (or, rather, the cow) and told Haddock to lead it away.  When he took it into the street, a crowd gathered, and Haddock was arrested for creating a nuisance.

The court, after a fine discussion, acquits Haddock of all the charges, after observing that "no thinking man can regard those parts of the Finance Acts which govern the income tax with anything but contempt."   It is not for that, however, that I remember the story (except on April 15), but for this little exchange between the prosecutor and the judge  The prosecutor, explaining why the Collector had declined the check, said that first he had tried to endorse the check.  "Really?  Where?" asks the judge.

"On the back of the cheque, Sir Basil, that is to say, on the abdomen of the cow," answers the prosecutor, who continues with my favorite line in all of Herbert: "The cow, however, appeared to resent endorsement, and adopted a menacing posture."

Here endeth our reading of Herbert.  We will return tomorrow with our usual jovial support for the social welfare state.