Rudy Giuliani thinks that Obama doesn’t love America. There are a lot of articles talking about it, and Giuliani himself is going everywhere to make sure no one misunderstood that he’s absolutely right and not a racist. I think Jonathan Chait has written the best summary of the whole thing, If Giuliani’s Obama Smear Wasn’t Racist, What Was It? He’s very charitable to Giuliani and does a deep dive into the former mayor’s comments. And he finds: nothing. So if Giuliani’s comments were not racist, they were nothing at all. And we all know they were something. The logic ain’t hard.

Ramona Grigg wrote, Yes, Rudy, It Was a Horrible Thing To Say. Thank You. Her point is that the comments were so over the top offensive that he’s done a great favor for Obama. Now reporters will dig up video of Obama saying things like, “I think that we have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional.” Of course, Rush Limbaugh was quick to jump on board, “I’m the guy who’s been saying for six plus years now… Obama does not like this country.” Brian Powell at Media Matters pointed out, most Republicans politicians will just avoid the subject because among the base, this kind of talk is commonplace.

I’m not especially interested in the controversy. It may be a tired cliche, but it is also a fact that at least half of the Republican popular support is based upon racism. So this kind of racism and more generally the implication that liberals are not “real” Americans is forever spilling over in conservative comments when they don’t think anyone is listening. What I’m more interested in here is how exactly it is that Obama is supposed to “love” this thing called “America.” I agree with what Rudy Giuliani said: I don’t think Obama loves America. I don’t think that Rudy Giuliani loves America. I know that I don’t love America because I don’t even know what it is I’m supposed to be loving.

Traditionally, the phrase “love of country” is just an expression of jingoism. It is the idea that country is always right, regardless of what it does. It’s the old Stephen Decatur toast, “Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but right or wrong, our country!” If we lived in a democracy, I might be tempted to go along with that. But we don’t. When we go to war, it is usually the government doing it against the wishes of the people. So what Decatur’s toast means in practice is fascism, “Right or wrong, our government!” I’ve never met a liberal or conservative who would go along with that. And given that even the most powerful person doesn’t always get what she wants, I can’t imagine anyone at all agreeing to that.

I remember Bill O’Reilly claiming, “And it is our duty as loyal Americans to shut up once the fighting begins.” But even he added “unless facts prove the operation wrong, as was the case in Vietnam.” The truth is that O’Reilly, like demagogues everywhere thinks people should shut up whenever they are saying things he disagrees with. But if he agrees, it is patriotic to protest. So it is pretty clear that when people talk about loving the country, they don’t mean the government.

But if not that, then what? Really! The people? Given that many conservatives seem to think that President Obama hates the country, I find it hard to believe that they love the American people any more than they love the government. Are we supposed to love Charles Manson? Or are we supposed to think that the American people in aggregate are somehow lovable? Or is it the geography? The climate? The economic system? None of those are specific to America.

What I think the America is that we are supposed to love is some idea of America. And this is dangerous, because none of us has the same idea of what America is. I’ve written a lot about this in the area of economics. Liberals like to complain when Republicans talk about creating jobs. The liberals rightly point out that all Republicans mean by this is, “Cut taxes on the rich! Allow more oil spills!” While it’s true that these things actually will not, in general, create jobs, this is what Republicans think they will do. So when a poll comes out that says that 90% of the American people think the government should do more to create jobs, it doesn’t mean anything.

And similarly, the fact that I love Thomas Paine’s idea of America means something to me. But John McCain’s idea of America is that we should have the biggest military and go to war at every opportunity. And with ideas as divergent as that, there is no “America” that we love. And this is why when conservatives start to talk about the issue, they always fall back on “American exceptionalism.”

But I still don’t understand what is exceptional about America. It is a country — just like 195 other countries. We are an enormously powerful country, but if the rest of the world decided to work together to take us down, it would have no problem doing it. There are great things about America. And there are awful things about America. So this whole matter of loving America is just a stupid game. It means nothing. When Rudy Giuliani and Rush Limbaugh say that Obama doesn’t love America, they are just saying that Obama is a doody pants. And that’s about as deep as American politics goes. And that, my friends, is one of the awful things about America.

Kevin D Williamson wrote a really pathetic apologia for Rudy Giuliani, Rudy Is Right. As I will write in a later article, I agree: Obama doesn’t not love America. But I have something actually interesting to say in that article. As far as what Giuliani meant when he talked about Obama not loving America, Williamson perfectly encapsulated it by way of refutation. You know, the way huge numbers of conservatives will believe something truly outrageous and someone who writes for National Review brushes it aside as though mentioning it means that that it isn’t a real thing.

Williamson wrote, “To ask the question is not the same as venting the familiar swamp gasses: that he’s a foreigner, at heart if not in fact; that he’s a Manchurian candidate sent to undermine the republic; that he’s a secret Marxist or secret jihadist sympathizer; etc.” Well actually, yes it is. His argument is basically that well, maybe the Fox News hicks believe that nonsense, but not a “respectable” man like Rudy Giuliani. There is no other way to put it: Giuliani doesn’t think that Obama loves America because Giuliani either believes and just wants to push the idea that Obama is some foreign other. Is it that he’s black? Yes. But not just that. Obviously, Giuliani would never say the same thing of a black conservative.

But what really blew my mind was how Williamson managed to lump all progressives into one tight knit group who, like Holden Caulfield (Really!) just hate all those phonies of American history:

Now this is pretty much the way I see these discrete things. Just look at what I wrote the last three years on George Washington’s birthday. But the fact is that the Constitution was a racist document and even the Revolutionary War was largely a racist war. But we get better. America is a better place now than it was then. But what is it that America is for conservatives? As Williamson himself talks about, they aren’t without their criticisms. So the real difference is that liberals tend to be proud of America in an aspirational way, “Look how far we’ve come!” But the conservative take on America is one of decay, “Look how far we’ve gone!”

So the conservative ideal is some lost long ago. But of course they won’t tell you when that was. They won’t say the 1960s because that was probably the greatest triumph of liberalism. So they generally have to go back further. But the further you go back, the worse it gets. This leads to the kind of stuff I discussed in, More Libertarian Economic Hokum. In the article I was addressing, the writer argued that we didn’t need child labor laws because the market would take care of it. The same argument is more commonly made about how slavery was dying — if it weren’t for Lincoln and his Civil War, the free market would have ended slavery!

Thus, as I’ve discussed before, conservatives don’t believe in the America of today or the America of any given time. They believe in “America” — some mythical place that never existed. So if Williamson thinks that we liberals are all a bunch of discontented adolescents, what exactly are the conservatives? I think David Cross has it right: conservatives hate this country. They just love a myth they’ve created:

And that’s not love. I’ve had a surprising number of women who loved some idea they had about who I was. And there have been a fair share of women about whom I loved some idea rather than the actual woman. But that isn’t love. That’s the immature crap of, “I love her, but I don’t really like her.” Yeah, that means you don’t love her. It means she treats you like dirt and you “love” the idea that maybe some day she might treat you like a human being.

So it is pretty funny that Kevin D Williamson calls liberals Holden Caulfield, when the liberal approach to America is nuanced, and I dare say mature. It’s the conservative who believes in clear myths that blind her to whatever it is that “America” is. Which is what I’ll be writing about later.

I was talking to my father the other day and he told that this “Walker fellow” seemed like he might be reasonable. It wasn’t my father talking; it was the Charles Krauthammer talking. My father doesn’t really drink. Like kids spinning in circles, my father gets loopy listening to Krauthammer’s calm monotone. Dad’s always been a sucker for people who put forward an air calm rationality. But I am not similarly fooled. Krauthammer is a joke. I’ve called him on his anti-science global warming denial. And his hypocrisy. And his general stupidity. But dad hears him say that Scott Walker is just the kind of reasonable politician America has been looking for, and dad follows along.

I didn’t shout. I just pointed out two things that I knew my father would bristle at. First, Scott Walker is a major union buster. Although in years past, my father was anti-union, in his middle years he became part of union and found that it was very nice. It wasn’t the leading the edge of communism as conservatives have been arguing since, well, since unions came into being. The second thing that I told him was that Scott Walker was a total supply sider — trickle down economics! Well, in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was pushing trickle down economics, my father was totally on board. A lot of people were. It sounded plausible. But over the following decade, he learned what a con it was.

So my father’s enthusiasm has waned for Walker. But sadly, it isn’t just Krauthammer who is going to cram Scott Walker down our throats for the next year or more. Yesterday, Media Matters reported, CNBC Host Demonstrates How Not to Interview Scott Walker About His Weak Economic Record. You see, Walker doesn’t have a good economic record. He has a great record as far as the power elite are concerned: funneling money to the top and destroying unions. But as Eric Hananoki pointed out in the article:

But what does any of that matter? For the CNBC set, making the economy better has nothing to do with economic growth and new and better jobs. It is about making the economy better for the people for whom the economy is already working really well. That’s the Republican Party platform. It’s all they really believe in. But they aren’t going to put it that way, because almost no one would vote for them. So they talk about how great economic grow is under Republicans like Ronald Reagan, even though it wasn’t that good under Reagan. And they needn’t worry. No television commentator is ever going to challenge them on their lies.

As expected, Germany has balked at the new Greek government’s quite reasonable request for changes in its austerity plan. Paul Krugman has the main details, Insert German Curse Word Here. I think two words are necessary: verdammte arschlöcher. (Look it up; I don’t do English curse words here anymore.) Basically, Germany is trying to force Greece out of the euro. And that makes sense, because the oh so moral Germans have never had economic problems and have never started a world war and never staged a genocide. So it just makes sense that they would want to divorce themselves from a country that spent beyond its means a decade ago.

What the Germans seem to want to do to the Greeks is what the French and British did to the Germans after World War I. The mistakes are different, but Germany wants to punish the Greeks just as they were punished just short of a century ago. I’ll be honest, I’m not fond of Germany. It is the country most like the United States: absolutely convinced of its moral superiority. And it is the big dog in the European Union. And it doesn’t just use that power; it abuses that power.

What Greece absolutely must do is stand strong. They have to be willing to leave the euro. Although as Dean Baker has previously suggested, maybe it would be best if Germany left the euro. But if Greece left the euro, big deal. It would certainly cause some disruption. The next year would be marginally worse than it would otherwise be. But it would be marginally worse — not a lot worse. And then things would get better — and fast. The German prescription for Greece is Khan’s to Captain Kirk, “I’ve hurt you. And I wish to go on hurting you.” Does Greece really want to live through another five years like the last five years? Because that’s what Germany’s plan for them will provide.

So Greece needs to say, “You won’t yield? Fine. We’re gone.” I doubt seriously that Germany, much less the rest of the euro countries, are going to go for this. As many other observers have noted: if Greece exits the euro and it goes well, there will be enormous pressure on Spain and Italy to exit it as well. And at that point, how exactly is the euro a shared currency?

Although I have to wonder what good the shared currency is anyway. I understand that a shared currency makes trading easier. But it doesn’t make it that much easier. And the down side is that when there is a recession and a country like Greece needs to reduce labor costs, it can only do it with great difficulty. As it is, when the euro was first being discussed, many economists recommended against it for this very reason. And history has born this out.

It isn’t just in Greece’s interest to play hardball with the Germans. It may be what saves the European Union itself. As it is, the euro gives the large German economy far too much power. And as we know from at least a century, a Germany with too much power is not a good thing.

I went outside to get the mail earlier and I looked at the house across the way. They recently painted it and it is now a beautiful shade of green. I think it is the prettiest house in the neighborhood. But I remember talking to Bob, the husband of the house, a couple of months ago. He said they needed to paint it. He said his wife wanted to paint it green. We agreed that this was nonsense. Why not just paint it the same color? It looked fine. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Blah, blah, blah. But Bob’s wife got her way as she usually does. And not surprisingly, she was totally right. The house looks great.

It doesn’t bother me that I am this way. When it comes to stuff that matters, I am very conservative. Why risk painting your house a new color when you know the current color works just fine? Sure, in this particular case, it worked out great. But why risk it? There were far more ways for it to go wrong than for it to go right. I feel like Jean-René in Romantics Anonymous, “Let’s hope nothing happens to us.” Because change is hard and almost always for the worse.

The question is, why is it that such a conservative person such as myself believes in liberal and even radical politics. Over the years, I’ve come to see that the problem is not with me. My politics are very much conservative. The “conservatives” are the radicals. They are the ones who believe in gambling. Look at one of the great Republican canards, that people must be rewarded for “taking risks.” Of course, they don’t mean actual risks. Look at the obsession of our society about repaying debts. When people couldn’t afford their mortgages after the 2008 financial crisis, the government stepped in to save the banks. What did the banks risk in loaning out money to people they knew couldn’t pay it back? Nothing. But still, “conservatives” fetishize the idea of gambling. As I’ve written before, I’m a Five Dollar Man — I’m not a gambler at all.

To the true conservative, life is not a game. There are resources. We need to use them to feed and clothe and house ourselves. Beyond that, everything else should be used to live as pleasantly and meaningfully as possible. But instead, we are stuck in a system that is dominated by radicals — gamblers — people who see the world as nothing but a game. And that game is all about how much power you can gain. They are the ones who came up with the idea that you could own land. And this is not owning land because you are making use of it. It is ultimately — and millions of native peoples can attest to this — “might makes right.” One man owns a piece of property because he has the ability to kill (or simply imprison) anyone who doesn’t agree with his contention. This is, interestingly, a form of theft that one never hears modern libertarians complain about.

The fallback position for these radicals is that we have all these great innovations because of inequality. The logic is something like this: Koch brothers have gobs of money; magic of the marketplace; Einstein discovers relativity while working in a patent office. Or we get to the moon. Or something. But that logic doesn’t make any sense. And as David Graeber discussed in, Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit, it is probably the case that all this inequality is what is holding us back technologically. Why invent an intelligent robot that can clean your whole house when the people with all the money can hire some recent immigrant for peanuts?

I am the conservative. I am the one who cares about the greater good. The so called conservatives of this country are the ones who want to treat the very serious topics of living and dying as games. They are the ones who think that the quality of a person’s life should depend upon who their parents happen to be. Calling these people conservatives just plays along with their game. All they conserve is their own stolen wealth and power.

As for the pretty green house, there will be plenty of those. If it weren’t for the wealth game that we are all forced to play, there would be more time to experiment with different colors and different houses. Clearly, I wouldn’t be one of those experimenters. But there are perhaps more important things that I could be doing to subvert the status quo within the framework of my general, vanilla ice cream loving, conservatism.

For some reason, Martin Longman watched Hardball with Chris Matthews recently. Is he suffering from a savior complex? Is he intentionally suffering for the sins of cable news? I cannot say. But he highlighted an interesting exchange between Chris “Blowin’ in the Political Winds” Matthews and Deputy State Department spokesperson Marie Harf about the Islamic State. And Matthews, who is always and forever looking for ways to raise the level of public discourse asked, “Are we killing enough of them?” And because she works for the American government, which actually has quite a lot more blood on its hands than the Roman Empire ever did, responded, “We’re killing a lot of them and we’re going to keep killing more of them.”

Ye-ha! We gots us a good old fashioned reason for bombing the hell out of huge areas — killing mostly people whose only sin is that they live in the wrong place. First they were oppressed by Saddam Hussein. Then they were oppressed by the Shiite run Iraqi government. Now they are oppressed by the Islamic State. And to top it off, the American government and its allies are killing “a lot of them and we’re going to keep killing more of them.” Well, that ought to set Chris Mattews’ mind at ease. The talentless multimillionaire must know all about how your life prospects depend upon luck. So kill them all! They don’t matter! They weren’t born in America! They don’t have their own television shows! Kill them all!

Unfortunately, Marie Harf had to go and spoil the whole episode by adding, “But we cannot win this war by killing them. We cannot kill our way out of this war.” And then she said the thing that must never be said: that this was about opportunity and jobs and food and stuff like that. But Matthews was too clever for her. He noted that we won’t be able to do that in “fifty lifetimes.” You see, there will always be poor people. Of course there will! That’s because people like Chris Matthews, who I wouldn’t hire to copy edit a blog post, is worth $16 million after being wrong about every foreign policy question he’s ever expressed an opinion on.

Indeed, the rich are more than happy to tell you that there will always be poor. They state it as an established fact. But it is actually an aspirational claim: there will always be poor people as long as I have something to say about it! The whole thing must bring fond memories for Matthews of the good old days when he was pushing for war in Iraq and getting Phil Donahue fired from MSNBC because the network didn’t want to stand out as a media outlet that allowed anyone who would say anything against that Just War™.[1]

You would think that after the total catastrophe that was the Iraq War, that Matthews would be slightly circumspect. But you would only think that if you’d lived in a cave the last thirty years. Matthews wasn’t held accountable for his cheerleading for the Iraq War. In a sane world, he would have been fired long ago and gone off to play the “liberal” on The McLaughlin Group. But no. Let’s just suppose Matthews got his way and there was a full scale war with the Islamic State and it erupted into a regional conflict with millions dead including more than a hundred thousand Americans. What would the response be of American media? First MSNBC would give Matthews a raise. And then he’d get some kind of award for great journalism, which today just means good ratings.

How far can an empire sink before it crumbles to bits?

[1] Note how clueless media executives are. There was a huge audience out there that was against the Iraq War and not a single cable news network was willing to go after it. I see this again and again in corporate culture where they insist upon going for the largest market, even though it is already crowded with competitors. Corporate executives are generally cowards.

Political science models of presidential elections can bite my shiny metal ass. This statement may come as a bit of a shock to regular readers who know that I have my own political science model of presidential elections that I think is the only thing that anyone should pay attention to. I’ll get to my model in a moment, but let me explain my current annoyance. I just read Alex Roarty’s new National Journal article, Predictive Intelligence. It is subtitled, “Think Hillary Clinton is likely to win? Think again.” I’m fine with that. I’ve been saying that under the right economic conditions, Louie Gohmert could be the next president of the United States. Anyone claiming that the Democrats are sure to win the presidency in 2016 — much less Clinton — is an idiot.

The problem with Roarty’s article is that it focuses on the absolutely stupidest predictive index: the number of years that a party has been in office. Why? Well, because this far ahead of the election, there really isn’t anything else you can base a prediction on. It’s kind of like the drunk looking for his keys under the street the lamp. “Where did you drop them?” “Oh, a half block south.” “Why are you looking here?” “Because the light’s better!” This is just madness.

Let’s look at just what a great predictor length of time in office is. First, there is Franklin Delano Roosevelt followed by Harry Truman. Together these presidents managed to win the White House five consecutive terms. When the Democrats lost, it was to war hero Dwight Eisenhower against anemic uncharismatic Adlai Stevenson. After two terms with Eisenhower, the Republicans only barely lost to Kennedy in the the closest presidential race in history: 49.7%-49.6%. But okay, that’s old news.

What about George Bush winning in 1988, giving the Republicans three straight terms? What about Al Gore winning in 2000, giving the Democrats three straight terms? Looking at the number of terms that one party holds the White House, I see randomness. And this is the problem with political science models. Designers throw in every possible parameter they can think of, do a linear regression and find out what fits bests. This is very lazy — most especially because there just haven’t been that many presidential elections on which to perform the regression.

Consider Alan Abramowitz’s “Time for Change” model that uses three parameters: “the incumbent’s approval rating, economic growth in the second quarter of the election year, and the number of terms the candidate’s party has held the White House.” Well, that strikes me as a little to a lot stupid. The current president’s approval rating and the state of the economy are themselves correlated. And the number of terms the party has been in office is probably just a fluke. Take a coin and flip it a hundred times and perform a correlation. You will find lots of correlations. And Abramowitz doesn’t have close to a hundred coin flips!

My model is simplicity itself: it is based entirely on unemployment. But it only works from the early 1970s onward. But unlike most of the political science models, mine actually has a good justification for that. Before the 1970s, economic gains were reasonably well shared. What’s more, the working class didn’t spend their whole lives worrying about losing their jobs. But since the 1970s, economics has been the defining issue for Americans. The fact that it has been used against them (as during the Reagan years) hardly matters.

I’ve never seen a political science model that was based on unemployment. They prefer the indirect measures of GDP and GNP. This is interesting because everyone knows that the economy can be doing well while the workers can be doing very badly. Just look at the last six years. The stock market is doing well; economic growth is reasonable; corporate profits are sky high. But the employment to population ration of prime age workers is still quite low compared to the anemic economy of the George W Bush years.

My model looks at the unemployment rate for the first nine months of the election year. If the trend is positive, then the candidate of the party currently in the White House wins. If the trend is negative, then the candidate of the party currently in the White House loses. Very simple. And it doesn’t just predict the win; it predicts the magnitude (although not as well). It even shows that the 2000 election between Bush and Gore was almost a dead heat, with Gore having a slight advantage.

The most common way that political science models look at the economy is by looking at the GDP growth in the three full quarters leading up to the election. I think this is a mistake. Voters don’t care what’s going on with the economy’s GDP. They notice if people are getting laid off or if people without jobs are getting hired. Now clearly, the rate of GDP growth is correlated with the growth of employment. But it isn’t correlated that well! So why use it? I think it is because the concerns of the power elite poison everyone’s thinking.

Regardless, it is clear that in a close election, candidates matter. But in 1980 and 2008, the economics were such that the party in the White House was going to lose. But in 1976, Ford had a slight advantage. If it hadn’t been for Watergate, I suspect he would have won. Gore could have lost in 2000, but he was no worse a candidate than Bush was. And Clinton was almost certain to win in 1992, but without Ross Perot running, the race would have been a whole lot closer.

It is madness to try to predict the 2016 election at this point. Even Alan Abramowitz’s model requires waiting until the party conventions before he can make a prediction. The best we can say now is what I always say: if the economy continues to grow jobs through most of 2016, the Democratic candidate will win; if the economy starts to lose jobs, the Republican candidate will win. And not to put too fine a point on it: Democrats should learn from Republicans in the past and nominate candidates they really like rather than candidates they think are “electable.” Because it was the economy and not great political skill that made Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama presidents of the United States.

Afterword

None of this should be taken as a criticism of Alan Abramowitz or any other political scientist. They are doing careful work trying to figure things out about the nature of politics. But there is no doubt that these models are underdetermined: there are so many variable and so little data that an endless number of solutions would fall within the error bounds. My model is very simple, but I haven’t seen anything to indicate that it is any worse than any other more complex model. And my simple model goes along with what I take to be the psychology of voters. Abramowitz might be onto something about people getting tired of the same old party. But I suspect that was more true in the 1960s and 1970s than it is now in our highly polarized political environment. The main thing is that people like Abramowitz are professionals and I’m just a tinkerer. I will be the first to admit that their models predict past elections better than my model does. But here’s the ultimate question: do they have a model that uses a single parameter to predict elections that works any better? And for the record: I’m sure that many people before me have done exactly what I’m doing now. I am simply skeptical that anyone has improved on this idea.