Okay, since the NYT decided to hire Bill Kristol over me, I'll have to restrict my punditication to this space.

You may have noticed that I've had basically squat to say about the presidential campaign. I did point out that of the three Dem contenders, Edwards has the best health care plan, and Obama has the worst, but who cares, really? It's not as if an Edwards presidency -- which seems unlikely at this point anyway -- will result in the legislation he has posted on his web site becoming reality. In the best case, a Democratic president and a somewhat more Democratic congress in 2009 will result in some marginal changes around the edges. Big Pharma and Big Insurance aren't going to get rolled no matter who is elected.

If there is one thing that is clear about contemporary America, it is that "democracy" scarcely describes our approach to politics. No, I'm not going to do another attack on our Constitution. Instead, I continue to be interested in the widespread belief that the Democratic primary has gone on "too long" and that something needs to be done to wrap it all up (and, in fact, that it should have been wrapped up weeks ago). As a committed Obamaite, I've not been above such thoughts, but as a slightly more detached analyst, I wonder what exactly is wrong about the current imbroglio, at least if one believes in democracy.

Consider the following: Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama actually have had to visit states like Texas, Wyoming, and Mississippi, which they will certainly not do for the general election. They will also find themselves in North Carolina and South Dakota before too very long. This means, among other things, that they are actually forced to become familiar with issues that might matter to people in those states and address them as, gasp, the equal of Democrats in safe states or the fabled swing voters in the few "battleground states." I'm opposed, of course,

Last July, I published a piece in the Boston Globe, entitled "No Vice," arguing that we would be better off either without a Vice President at all--we got along without one for 45 of our first 180 years)--or, perhaps more plausibly, waiting until after the election and having the winner, a la the 25th Amendment, nominate a vice president, subject to congressional confirmation. I would, incidentally, also allow the President or Congress to fire the Vice President, but that's another matter for another thread.

I can't help but wonder if John McCain might not find some real merit in the suggestion. Consider his dilemma. It is clear that Mike Huckabee isn't going to be the nominee for president, but his followers might (legitimately?) feel dissed if he isn't chosen for Veep. At best, they might stay home; at worst, they might vote for Obama and actually put some of the Red States in play, especially if Obama chooses, say, James Webb or Wesley Clark as his Veep. On the other hand,

The Democratic Party has just stripped Michigan of its votes at the national convention because, in violation of Party rules, Michigan is holding a primary before February 1. The Party has also done the same to Florida. Under party rules, only Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina are allowed to hold primaries before February 1.

Losing both New Hampshire and Iowa can destroy a candidacy. Winning both is a sure path to the nomination.

The current situation in the Democratic and Republican parties is almost entirely a function of the fact that they operate under two strikingly different election systems. It is "natural experiment" that has much to teach us about institutional design. The Democrats are operating under a classic system of proportional representation. The only real surprise is that it so quickly was reduced to a two-person contest, probably a function of the enormous amounts of money needed to finance a modern campaign. The Republicans, on the other hand, have chosen to operate, in many states, under a classic first-past-the-post winner-take-all system. This means that John McCain was able to get all of Missouri's delegates by getting, I believe, 34% of the total vote in that state. I haven't done the numbers to know what would be happening in the Democratic race if states operated on a first-past-the-post winner take all system. At the very least, Clinton would have hundreds of additional delegates from New York, New Jersey, and California, for starters, not to mention similar possibilities in Texas and Ohio, should she win either by even one vote. If Republicans had adopted a p.r. system similar to the Democrats, then John McCain would by no means have the nomination locked up, and we could all look forward to a circus at the Republican convention in Minneapolis.

It appears that John McCain is the anointed (at least by the press) nominee of the Republican Party, not least becasue he carried a number of Northeastern states in which he basically stands no chance of winning in November and because he won 33% of the vote in Missouri and, apparently, 44% of the Republican vote in California. As to the former, the winner-take-all feature had been engineered to slingshot Rudy Giuliani into the lead. Obviously, things changed. (California is not winner-take-all for the Republicans.) Missouri is also a winner-take-all state, which means, by definition, that a candidate rejected by 67% of the relevant electorate can nonetheless "win" because of being first-past-the-post. Perhaps McCain might have won in a run-off or alternative transferrable vote, but there is certainly reason to doubt this in Missouri.

Is there anyway to setup in advance some neutral principals for deciding how many candidates to invite to a presidential debate? Last night 7 Republicans debated. But instead of thinking about the specifics of whether Ron Paul should be allowed to debated, I'm looking for rules that might not be articulated now to decide which candidates would be invited 4 or more years hence.

It's a hard question to answer because the debates serve multiple goals. They are both a platform for us to get know relatively unknown candidates and a platform for front runners to articulate their differences.

One approach would be to let the voters (or at least poll responders) decide the question.

The New York Times reports that "28 retired generals and admirals plan to release a letter on Friday urging Congress to repeal" the law requring the military's don't ask don't tell policy. This is an unjust policy that is on its way to repeal. The only question is when.

Apologies to my hordes of disappointed readers for the lacuna. My Intertubes were blocked on Tuesday -- or, to put it in less technical terms, our ISP had an all-day, city-wide outage. I had the chance to post from elsewhere in the evening but I said to heck with it. Yesterday, the problem was in the wetware. I think I was just so depressed and disgusted by the completely idiotic and repulsive coverage of politics on TV that my neural circuits were sputtering fecklessly. The link is to Glenn Greenwald, writing coherently.

Anyhow, both the ISP and I have rebooted, so before I do a public health post later today, let me just put in my two cents on the presidential campaign. Nothing terribly original, just the same open letter to Hillary Clinton I know you would write as well.

Dear Senator Clinton: You have already made history as the first woman to run a truly credible campaign for the presidency. You have staked out substantive positions on many issues, and your campaign has simultaneously transcended gender and championed gender equality. Good for you. The next woman to run for president will find the way smoothed by your precedent. Chris Matthews has been chastened (to some extent) and it won't be a novelty, it will just be a presidential campaign.

In explaining John McCain's rise to front runner status, Matthew Yglesias notes that for the past decade and a half, successful Republican presidential campaigns have emphasized issues of character:
In particular, character arguments were central to George W. Bush's critique of Al Gore and John Kerry and, indeed, were about all there was to Bob Dole's 1996 campaign. This has tended to work well as a tactic because the press is a great venue for transmitting character attacks but a terrible venue for transmitting issue attacks because reporters mostly don't understand issues and even when they do they pretend not to.I think that Yglesias's point is essentially correct, but I would lay the blame not with the press per se but rather with the dominant media of political communication that the press uses (along with everyone else).

As many of you who regularly read my blog know, I'm not big into politics here. (It's a fascinating, but dirty business.) I've written the rare column about it, but I watched the returns on Thursday's Iowa caucuses with some interest, and I thought I'd write something about it, as the 2008 presidential campaigns got officially underway.

As you all know, Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee were the winners on the Democratic and Republican sides, respectively. Obviously both candidates got a huge boost from winning the first major political contest of the 2008 presidential campaign. But I thought some pundits went a little overboard with the pronounciations they were making, especially about Obama.

Without endorsing either of the three Presidential candidates in the US, and without suggesting any underhanded shenanigans, let me propose a thought about USA '08.

It occurred to me last week while having drinks with a dozen or so industry peers - almost all democrats, mind you. The subject of the conversation somehow shifted to politics and the candidates... and I fully expected the group to be happy about Sen. Obama's advantage over Sen. Clinton. That, however, wasn't the case: No one at the table endorsed Obama.

Today's Washington Post has an article that discusses "The Downside of Obama Strategy," i.e., that he actually has the audacity to believe that every Democrat's (and, perhaps, every American's) vote should count equally. The article notes (accurately) that Clinton has done better in large, electoral-vote-rich states than has Obama, which has ostensibly provoked fears about the prospects of his winning in November. It doesn't matter that he has received more popular votes than Clinton in contested elections--which allows us to omit Michigan and Florida--and, of course, that he has won more delegates. All that matters, according to a number of quoted Clinton supporters, is the vote in large states. So what we have is an attempt to apply to the nominating process the Electoral College's effective disenfranchisement of those unlucky enough to live in states where they are the political minority and the insane emphasis on a relatively few "battleground" states . One gather that Clinton will lose to Obama in today's caucuses in Wyoming. But, hey, it doesn't matter what Wyoming Democrats think, because they live in a Republican state.

Needless to say, many pundits are now commenting on the rules of the Democratic Party re the selection of its presidential candidate. See, e.g., E.J. Dionne's column in today's Washington Post, where he writes that "Democrats have contrived a nominating contest that even Rube Goldberg would have considered too convoluted, too dysfunctional and too improbable to name as his own." Save for the certainly peculiar way by which Texas names its delegates--I had the pleasure of voting twice for Barack Obama, once in early voting (in a secret ballot) and then several days later at my local caucus (which is definitely not secret)--I don't share the hostility to a preference-sensitive proportional representation system that does not negate the votes of everyone who doesn't vote for "the winner" (who may, as with McCain in a number of states, get distinctly less than a majority of the vote). But I've already made such arguments, and I won't rehearse them again. My current grumpiness is about something else, though regular readings of Balkinization shouldn't be surprised by what I'm about to write.

Voting on whether or not to lift the restraining order (legal jargon for calling off the strike) will take place in person at two meetings, one in NYC and one in LA.

If you cannot attend the meetings, you may vote by proxy. Today, there has been some confusion on what "voting by proxy" means. Faxing in a proxy vote form is NOT the same as voting. You are designating a fellow WGA member to vote

The headlines -- most of them, anyway -- are saying that Senator Clinton beat Senator Obama 51% to 45% in the Nevada caucus contest today. Except that some reports say Senator Obama "won," 13 delegates to 12. What's up? There's a debate going on over at Matt Yglesias's blog (and elsewhere, too, I venture to guess -- especially among the spinners).

Well, there are at least three different metrics by which today's contests could be evaluated.

For clarity -- and because not everyone could get to one of the meetings last night in NY or LA -- here's a handy little FAQ for some of the questions we're hearing.

What's the 48 hour vote for again?

It's a vote on whether or not to lift the strike (which in the Constitution is called "the restraining order".) If the vote passes, writers can go back to work.

It's not a vote on the contract,

Can this really be true?

The Air Force is tightening restrictions on which blogs its troops can read, cutting off access to just about any independent site with the word "blog" in its web address. It's the latest move in a larger struggle within the military over the value -- and hazards -- of the sites. At least one senior Air Force official calls the squeeze so "utterly stupid, it makes me want to scream."
Shachtman's story on Wired suggests that there is some dispute about which blogs are actually being blocked. If any readers at Air Force bases have access to this blog, or know more about the policy, please let us know in the comments.

Yes, another political post. Tomorrow is the Super Tuesday to end all Super Tuesdays, so I don't feel too bad about it. For a political junkie, this has been the most fascinating 6 weeks I've ever seen. Results wildly out of line with the polls, huge lead changes, the death of "momentum" as a meaningful gauge of a candidate's chances, debates more wonkish than I've ever seen, and two candidates I'm super enthusiastic about...

And that's just on the Democratic side. With the Republicans we've got Giuliani's 50 million dollar delegate, Huckabee's shock win in Iowa and all-too-predictable collapse, Romney remembering too late that he had a far better case as a smart business guy than he ever did as the cultural warrior, and the resurgence of McCain (which I'm not enthusiastic about in a strategic sense, but which does make me feel smart for predicting that he would win the nomination way back in November when he looked DOA).

Anyways, I got an e-mail today from a friend in California leaning toward Hillary asking me to make the case for Obama. I ended up with a fairly lengthy response and figured it wouldn't hurt to post it here. Yesterday I made the emotional case. This is the strategic one:

Mike Huckabee is the latest Republican candidate to call for amending the Constitution, though Mitt Romney has led the way. It was "flip-flop" Mitt who in recently told the Family Values Research Council's Values Voter Summit, "I will work with the people in this room, as I have for the past four years, to champion a federal marriage amendment to protect marriage as the union of a man and a woman. ... Make no mistake: a federal amendment is the only way we can protect marriage from liberal, unelected judges" [who may, of course, be interpreting the Equal Protection Clause accurately, a possibility that Romney presumably doesn't recognize].

This article by Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe, which Marty discussed last week, describes the positions of many of the major presidential candidates.

Like you, I really don't have a clue what exactly TF Hillary Clinton thinks she's been doing for the past couple of months, or why she's been doing whatever it is, but in any event, no matter what she says tonight, starting right now Barack Obama and the Democratic Party -- with the possible exception of Hillary and 182 fervent supporters who will continue to hold out in caves on some remote Pacific islands -- will start to run against John McCain for the office of prezneh unigh stay, as Sen. McCain pronounces it. That means that if we are very lucky, we just might hvae some conversations about public policy.

So here's my list of public health priorities. It's difficult to put them in order, and I might change my mind five minutes from now, but as of 1:42 pm eastern time they are:

No, not really. It's highly unlikely I'll end up at Disneyland, but I will be in Anaheim next week, arriving Sunday night and staying through the morning of Friday, the 7th. I'll be attending a meeting of the National Child Traumatic Stress Initiative. I hope to have some interesting things to report from there, and if any of my friends are in the area and want to connect, let me know. (E-mail is on the side bar.) Later in March I'll be at the meeting of the International Association of Physicians in AIDS Care in Jersey City, and then at the Joint Meeting on Adolescent Treatment Effectiveness in D.C. What all this will do to blogging is unclear, but I hope it will just make it bigger and better.

And now for a couple of comments about politics. It so happens I worked for Ralph Nader, in a menial capacity, back while my frontal cortex was still undergoing myelination (i.e., in my early 20s for those of you not up on the latest developments in neuroscience). Ralph was the real deal -- he lived ascetically, and plowed the money he made from his books back into the Public Citizen organization. He used to call the office on Saturdays just to see who was there, and I have to confess I answered the phone more than once.

This email was just sent to strike captains. It contains info on the NegCom vote, the Board and Council votes, the pending vote to lift the strike, and the pending vote to ratify the contract.

DEAR STRIKE CAPTAINS,

This morning, the WGA Negotiating Committee unanimously and unconditionally recommended the terms of the proposed 2008 MBA to the WGAW Board and WGAE Council. The Board and Council

Hillary Clinton is evidently running for the Republican nomination for president. Monday, she met with Richard Mellon Scaife -- yes, the very architect and financier of the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy, the man behind the Whitewater hoax, the man who spent millions of dollars promoting the story that Hillary Rodham Clinton had Vince Foster murdered -- now the publisher of a commercially non-viable far right-wing vanity newspaper, and used the occasion to denounce Barack Obama for being a member of Jermiah Wright's church.

Today, I read this in the Washington Post: "[Like John McCain] Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign has also started slapping the L-word on Obama, warning that his appeal among moderate voters will diminish as they become more aware of liberal positions he has taken in the past, such as calling for single-payer health care . . . ."

It's not very surprising that a recent poll finds that 28% of Clinton supporters would vote for John McCain if Obama is the nominee, since it has been the Clinton strategy for several weeks now to endorse John McCain over Obama.

Flying is only slightly less unpleasant than being waterboarded, and I'm going to have to depart the east coast in the evening, to arrive in LA in what the people there think is the evening but is the middle of the night to me, and then find may way to a hotel 35 miles away. Should be a true test of character. Then I have to spend Monday in a meeting, presumably awake. So if I don't post tomorrow, you'll know why.

Today, I've been thinking -- inescapably -- about our corporate news media and the profound harm they do to our culture and our national interest. Lots of people in the blogosphere are on the case -- which is pretty much the only place we have to criticize them since they are incapable of insight or self-criticism, and do not allow substantial criticism from the outside to make it onto their letter pages, op-ed columns, or TV gab fests. Oh, you'll see some faux media criticism, but it's guaranteed to miss the target.

Future Majority, a blog that reports on youth voting, put together a set of tips for reporting on "the youth vote."

Tip #1 is my favorite:
The youth vote is not synonymous with students. In fact, students make up only a small part of the eligible youth vote. Only 21% of all 18-29 year olds are currently attending a college or university. That means that when you report on "students", you are leaving out the other 79% of all the individuals that make up the "youth vote." These people serve in our military, are struggling to raise families - and yes, have very different concerns from college students. I understand that makes it difficult for you to cram them into a cookie-cutter story about student aid activism and tuition costs, but you do them and your readers and our democracy a disservice when you limit your coverage to students.

From tonight's captains' bulletin:

To cast your ballot in person: Vote at the Writers Guild Theater, 135 S. Doheny Drive 90211. Tuesday, February 12, 2008 from 2:00 pm - 6:00 pm.

If members can't cast a ballot in person: Proxy ballots are available. To vote by proxy, download this form and fax to 323-421-9177. Proxies must be faxed in by Tuesday February 12, by 2 pm, or dropped off at the WGAW