Jonathan V. Last's Blog, page 62
November 23, 2012
Black Friday Thanks
Once again, thanks to everyone who’s ordered Amazon stuff through the box over there on the right hand side. I very much appreciate it.
November 19, 2012
The Dark Knight Rises–Reconsidered
As promised, a long time ago. Full reconsideration under the break. Short version: It’s a flawed masterpiece.
My first blush take on The Dark Knight Rises meshed reasonably closely with my second-day reaction: That it was a sprawling, epic marred by some editing problems which pushed parts of the story off-kilter and kept it from being the movie it should have been.
Having revisited DKR a few more times again my overall view has shifted. All of the editing problems still bug me, but they’ve been overwhelmed by the power of everything else Christopher Nolan did with the film.
For starters, there’s the intellectual energy. Once again, Nolan has some very interesting things to say about our liberal order. It’s not just our decadence that concerns him, but the limitations inherent in the City of Man. Then there’s the enormous scope. By the time DKR rolls credits, you feel like you’ve finished a James Michener book on Gotham City. I think Nolan could have handled the pacing better–particularly in the first act. But once the train is on the tracks it’s incredibly powerful. Every time I’ve seen the movie I’m still (1) Totally captivated by the Talia al Ghul reveal and (2) Totally gut-punched by Batman’s farewell to Selina Kyle.
But what’s really grown on me over time is the movie’s thematic beauty. There’s the visual stuff–the idea of ascending (or descending) through holes, which recurs throughout. But at a more literary level is the thematic echoes between Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle which are the underpinnings of their romance.
We all understand why Selina Kyle eventually allows herself to fall for Bruce Wayne. (And the execution of that moment, done with nothing but Anne Hathaway staring into the camera for three beats, is wonderful.) But what does he see in her? At the masquerade ball, Selina tells him wearily, “Once you’ve done what you had to, they’ll never let you do what you want to.” Which is precisely the situation Bruce has been in with Batman since DKR. Bruce Wayne wants to be Bruce Wayne, but everyone around him (save Alfred) keeps begging him to put the cape back on. Everyone around him needs the Batman. And he’s so warped by this that, when he gives up being Batman, he doesn’t know what to do with himself. He sits in his mansion and waits. Either for death or to be called back into harness.
You know Jindal’s being a smart-ass because of the “many”
In this line from Bobby Jindal about Romney and last week’s “gifts” remark:
“Gov. Romney’s an honorable person that needs to be thanked for his many years of public service, but his campaign was largely about his biography and his experience,” he said. “And it’s a very impressive biography and very impressive set of experiences. But time and time again, biography and experience is not enough to win an election. You have to have a vision. You have to connect your policies to the aspirations of the American people. I don’t think the campaign did that, and as a result this became a contest between personalities. And you know what? Chicago won that.”
That “many years of public service” is so sarcastic you can practically hear Gruden’s “That’s awesome.”
November 16, 2012
Dept. of Are You F@&$!G Kidding?
I’m not familiar with Michael Tracy at the “Friendly Atheist” is, but here he is mounting a broad-based attack against Republicans, conservatism, et al with the following:
There are a number of reasons why U.S. “Conservative Movement” activists are suddenly declaringMitt Romney to be “the worst major-party nominee since World War II.”
The link, of course, is to me here.
“Suddenly declaring”? Honestly. (Don’t pull a muscle going through the full list, MichaelT. I’ll pull a highlight reel for you here and here and here and here and here and here and here. This is, of course, a partial list.)
Maybe Mollie Hemingway over at GetReligion should give the rest of the Patheos crew a talk about the dangers of parachuting in on subjects about which you know very little.
November 14, 2012
Dept. of Unintended Consequences
Whenever the subject of tax reform comes up, someone suggests eliminating (normally by phasing out over time) the mortgage-interest deduction. Mitt Romney suggested he might like to do that. Will Saletan suggests sunsetting it 30 years from now.
This strikes me as a potentially really, really big decision. The home-mortgage interest deduction has been part of American economic life for a really long time. (Before it was carved out explicitly in 1986, all personal interest payments had been deductible since 1894.)
I assume that a bunch of smart people have created models about what killing the mortgage-interest deduction would do–not just to home prices, but to the overall mix of renters vs. owners, and all of the social indicators that normally get tied up therein. Crime, stability, family formation, fertility, etc.
But I haven’t seen any of that research and I’d be really nervous about enacting such a foundational shift in social policy without doing a whole lot of rigorous analysis as to what the secondary and tertiary effects might be.
November 13, 2012
About Paula Broadwell
I find this piece at the Atlantic kind of mystifying. The central conceit is that Paula Broadwell was in part of a victim of the journalistic culture requiring writers to do whatever it takes to get the good stuff from their sources. The headline on the piece reads:
The Writer and the General: What the Petraeus affair exposed about D.C. Both Petraeus and Broadwell were good, maybe too good, at doing what it takes to succeed in this city.
I’m not familiar with Broadwell’s entire journalistic oeuvre. But I would ask the following: Look at the jacket for All In. See what’s just under Broadwell’s name? “With Vernon Loeb.”
How many talented journalists need a ghost writer on their books?
Exit Question: Whenever we have a politician caught in adultery there are thumb sucking pieces tut-tutting about how unsophisticated Americans are because the French expect all of their politicians to have mistresses. We haven’t seen any of those about French generals in the last week, have we?
November 12, 2012
Door #2
What I have always admired most about Ross Douthat as a writer is his innate charity. It’s possible that he’s never been more charitable than in this post, where he gently describes me as a “longtime Romney skeptic.” There’s a special place in heaven for writers who can manage such restraint.
Douthat’s post is an exercise in grappling with the question I posited last week in my Romney post mortem:
It’s December 2011 and I come back to you in a time machine from the future. I won’t tell you whether or not he wins, but I will tell you that if Mitt Romney is the nominee in 2012, he will get more than 2 million fewer votes than John McCain did in 2008. Then I leave it up to you: You can go with Romney and hope that’s good enough, or you can pick whoever’s behind Door #2–Perry, Santorum, Pawlenty, Gingrich, Huntsman, whoever. We can’t prove counterfactual history, but I suspect most people would have rolled the dice with Door #2 on the theory of how much worse could it get?
You should read his entire response, but the short version is, If Santorum or Gingrich had been the nominee it could have been very much worse in the popular vote, if not in the Electoral College.
As support, Douthat notes:
[Romney's] 48 percent of the vote wasn’t even close to the floor for Republican candidates this cycle: Out of eighteen high-profile Senate races,the Washington Post noted last week, Romney outperformed the party’s nominee in eleven of them, and was outperformed in only four — all in deep blue states he was never going to win anyway. “In five races,” the Post pointed out, “the GOP candidate under-performed Romney by at least nine points” — a number that includes not only Akin and Richard Mourdock, but also Republican candidates in Montana and North Dakota, “who both lost in states that Romney carried by at least 13 points.”
And describing the GOP nightmare scenario, Douthat adds:
If you think Rush Limbaugh’s “slut” sneer and Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” comments cost Republicans this year, imagine how the press would have covered the “war on women” debate if Santorum — who actually did speak out against birth control in the primary campaign — had been the top of the Republican ticket. If you think it was too easy for Obama to define Romney with a blizzard of negative ads over the summer, imagine how much material a Gingrich candidacy would have given the White House’s admakers to work with. If you think that Romney suffered from being perceived as too much like George W. Bush Part II, imagine if the Republican candidate in 2012 had been a yet more tongue-tied and more right-wing Texan governor whose debate performances made Obama’s Denver sleepwalk look Ciceronian.
I don’t disagree with any of this.
My point has never been to argue that any particular Republican candidate absolutely would have performed better than Romney, but merely to suggest that Romney’s electoral history suggested that his ceiling was so low that nearly any other candidate would have had a chance to perform better than he could.
In the market people talk about a stock’s “beta,” that is, the range of possible valuations it could reasonably be seen to hold. My theory throughout the entire race was that Romney’s long history of standing before a wide range of electorates, and facing a wide variety of candidates, and nearly always being turned away with support in the mid-40s suggested that there was a fundamental problem with him qua candidate. The range of probable outcomes for a Romney candidacy was reasonably small.
But just as Douthat paints the doomsday picture of an alternate candidate being crucified for war on women stuff, it doesn’t take a ton of imagination to picture a race where one of the other candidates dogs Obama by constantly making the case as to how Obamacare hampers the economy and how it can be rolled back while tying Obamacare to a larger moral critique about the size of government and freedom in a way which is not classically conservative, but rather quite populist.
All of which is why I suspect given the original Door #2 proposition, most disinterested observers would have been willing to gamble the downside of losing a couple million extra votes, North Carolina’s EC votes, and maybe an additional Senate seat for the chance of having a candidate whose appeal might have equaled the vote total of John McCain in 2008.
Dept. of Confusion
So after advocating(?) on behalf of the Republican candidate with the most restrictive view of immigration, Jen Rubin now has some advice about what Republicans ought to do concerning immigration reform:
The next election, if Republicans are to win, must be waged with this wise counsel: “[T]he GOP seems willfully clueless. There’s a reason there are so few minorities in the party. . . . Compassionate immigration reform, including a path to citizenship, should be the centerpiece of a conservative party’s agenda. Marginalize or banish those who in any way make African Americans, gays, single women or any other human being feel unwelcome in a party that cherishes the values of limited government, low taxes and freedom. A large swath of conservative-minded Americans are Democrats and independents by default.”
This should probably be filed under the general topic of ignoring immediate post-election policy advice. It’s weird how no one ever thinks the path to electoral salvation goes through policies they don’t like.
November 8, 2012
November 7, 2012
The Day After Tomorrow Thread (Will Be Updated Throughout the Day)
Mitt Romney accepted the nomination of his party for president with a speech that showed he can rise to an occasion, and let us see a side of him that was compelling and heartbreaking. . . .
When Romney arrived, dramatically walking through the hall, it was a reminder how determined some in the party had been not to like him. No more. . . .
The speech was succinct and clear, providing a contrast to the president, about whom Romney said had no real plan to revive the economy. It was a mirror image of the speaker: well organized, sentimental, reasoned and optimistic. The irony is the Mitt Romney we’ve seen on the trail is not complicated or “weird” or lacking warmth or even out of touch. He is, like many men of his generation, somewhat reserved and in a cultural time warp. Tonight, he also showed some mettle and spine.
After nearly four years of high-flying rhetoric, “coolness” and a failure by the chief executive to execute, Romney is hoping that the convention, followed by the debates, will be sufficient to reassure voters who have had it with Obama. Tonight he took a step in the right direction.
Until October it was the Perils of Pauline campaign. It moved in fits and starts on foreign policy. The message was rarely consistent from day to day. Gobs of ads were aired to no apparent effect. The convention speech was a huge missed opportunity.
(2) Some people think I’m exaggerating when I say that Romney was the worst candidate to win his party’s nomination since WWII. Can everyone agree that John McCain was a terrible candidate, or at least that he ran a terrible campaign? (I love McCain myself, but that doesn’t mean he was a great candidate.) Can we agree that McCain ran in one of the most challenging environments possible–two wars, financial crisis, opposing the historic first black nominee? And Romney’s environment has been quite favorable–can we agree on that?
If Romney had merely been able to hold onto all of the McCain ’08 vote–he would have won the popular vote . Other candidates that we think of as being weak–Dukakis, Gore, Dole, Stevenson–what they all have in common is that before losing the presidency they won a bunch of elections.
On the other hand the 48 percent of the vote Romney won last night was one of his better electoral showings.
The first duty of a politician is to win elections. Mitt Romney spent the last 18 years losing contests, to a variety of opponents ranging, in terms of ability, ideology, and resources, from Ted Kennedy to Rick Santorum.
