David Trinh

Fresh off of new polling that Rep. Mark Kirk is leading Illinois State Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias in the race for President Obama’s former Senate seat comes even more devastating news for Illinois Democrats:

Gov. Pat Quinn (D-IL) has now declared that the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, businessman Scott Lee Cohen, should consider withdrawing from the race in the wake of publicity surrounding a 2005 arrest for domestic violence…

The big problem Quinn has here is that while Cohen is technically his “running mate,” in the sense that they will be listed together on the general election ballot in the same way that we vote for president and vice president, Quinn did not pick him. Candidates for governor and lieutenant governor in Illinois are nominated in separate primaries, but then run together as a ticket.

I have to say, the system that Illinois uses to select lieutenant governors is completely insane.  It’s one thing to expect people to actually pay attention to a down-ballot race for an office that has little-to-no real power, but if you’re going to insist that the people select the candidates individually in the primary, you should probably let them make the same choice during the general election.  These sort of mandated shotgun political weddings are a disaster in governance waiting to happen.

On a broader note, I think this story only emphasizes an element of American democracy that Matt Yglesias is rightly fond of harping on—namely the fact that our electoral system forces voters to select way too many candidates.  The fact that Scott Cohen was able to slip through the scrutiny of the media and the voters to earn a spot on the ballot line of a major party to potentially become the Lt. Governor of the nation’s fifth most populace state is absolutely astounding.

It’s not like Illinois voters are particularly inept either.  This sort of miscarriage of democracy happens all the time.  My favorite example from Minnesotan politics is the 1994 Attorney General’s race when Sharon Anderson, a very crazy self-proclaimed witch and pagan worshipper, managed to win the Republican primary.  Republicans ended up having to endorse the Democratic nominee; I’m a pretty partisan Democrat, but I’ll concede that the process was hurt by a lack of real electoral competition for the office.

Voters don’t want to make these types of terrible choices but when they’re forced to choose candidates for upwards of sixteen different offices, they prioritize some races and vote solely on the basis of Scandinavian last names in others.   This is a bad way to run a democracy and until we fix it we’re going to keep seeing more Scott Cohens and Sharon Andersons.

I’m currently slogging my way through summer internship applications and I can’t help thinking that it would be awfully nice if some organization were to develop a “common app” for summer internships à la the college common app.  The amount of time I waste sorting through various applications, converting forms into PDFs and so forth is really astounding.  Seems to me that if there was some sort of universal application, which you could just attach a custom cover letter to,  it would save everyone–employers and applicants–quite a bit of time.  All the while this would increase the number of positions an average college student could apply to and would also give employers more qualified applicants from which to choose from.  Win win all around.

I’ve secretly been an admirer of Tim Pawlenty for a long time.  Not because any of his politics resonate with my own beliefs, far from it in fact, but because I was under the impression that he belonged to the ‘grownup wing’ of the Republican Party.  As a strong proponent of a competitive two-party system, I thought our good ‘ol boy from Minnesota was poised to become a leading figure in the effort to remake the Republican Party.  Oh boy, was I wrong.  Recently Governor Pawlenty sat down for an interview with the Washington Post and gave some pretty devastating answers on a wide variety of questions:

After starting off with a pretty weak self-deprecating joke, Pawlenty tried to pivot to typical conservative budget fluff:

FINEMAN: How would you propose to balance the federal budget?

PAWLENTY: Rather than looking to raise taxes, we should pass an amendment to require a balanced budget with exceptions for war, natural disasters, and other emergencies. Congress should reduce discretionary spending, with exceptions for key programs such as the military, veterans, and public safety. (Bold mine, DT)

Err, nevermind the fact that outside of such ‘key programs,’ there isn’t really much discretionary spending left to cut.  Few things annoy me more than when politicians treat defense spending as if it belongs in some magical realm where dollars for extravagant weapons programs materialize out of thin air.  Contrary to this line of reasoning, a dollar spent on an unnecessary plane is a dollar that can’t be spent in some other portion of the budget.  What’s more, there’s plenty of fat to cut in the defense budget!

FINEMAN: How do we pay for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?

PAWLENTY: We have to push for more fiscal responsibility elsewhere. Congress should cut current domestic spending and reject costly new proposals like a government takeover of health care. (Bold mine, DT)

Said ‘government takeover of health care’ reduces the deficit– ’nuff said.

FINEMAN: Was the TARP a good idea?

PAWLENTY: No. I had numerous problems with it. The goal was to ensure that we didn’t have a lending freeze. [But] there was no requirement that lending would occur, and it hasn’t. No. 2, there were no criteria for who would get the money and under what circumstances and for what. I also thought it was too large. (Bold mine, DT)

Excessively generous lending by financial institutions is what caused the financial crisis!  Pawlenty would have preferred a recovery plan that required banks to make the same risky investments which precipitated the crisis to begin with– really?  The key objective of TARP was to provide the banking system with enough capital to restore balance sheets back to relatively sane levels– not to permit the same kind of foolhardy lending to continue unabated.

FINEMAN: Let me ask you about social issues your party has been dealing with. In her book, Palin claims that McCain’s handlers wanted her to be silent about her belief in creationism. How would you describe your view?

PAWLENTY: I can tell you how we handle it in Minnesota. We leave it to the local school districts. We don’t mandate a curriculum or an approach. We allow for something called “intelligent design” to be discussed as a comparative theory. It doesn’t have to be in science class. (Bold mine, DT)

Uh… that’s actually not how the Minnesota school system operates.  I dunno what state Pawlenty has been running for the past seven years but I am reasonably confident that evolution is mandated at the state level and that teachers don’t have the power to teach intelligent design.  After all, if they did have this flexibility, I would have learned nothing but intelligent design in my hometown.

Tim, what happened?  You’re turning into a joke.

I have to say that the most underrated political story in Minnesota this week is Paul Thissen’s massive fundraising haul in the governor’s race.  Honestly, a little-known State Rep. who is able to bank as much as the Speaker of the MN State House should be taken very seriously.  Money is, of course, an imperfect metric to measure political success but, as it’s one of the only indicators that DFL delegates have to go off of, it’s an incredibly important one.  Thissen’s impressive warchest and his tireless campaign swings through greater Minnesota are going to make him a top-tier competitor at the state convention April.

Although I can attest this was not a problem at my school in rural MN, there is apparently a glut of honors programs in many American high schools.  Overall, I agree with the thrust of this article; it’s important to keep honors programs selective so that they actually mean something besides another tassel at graduation.  I would only add that there is an even further harm from the proliferation of honors programs at top-tier high schools that the piece fails to mention, namely, that because many lower-tier schools, like the one I attended, have only NHS, applicants from these lesser schools are at a serious disadvantage during the college admissions process. It’s awfully difficult to compete against students who can spruce up their resumes by choosing from a smorgasbord of honors programs.

Now I’ll concede that I was never in an honors society at my high school–there’s a long tale here to be told, but the short of it is that my name was vetoed by a faculty member who took issue with some of my political opinions–and still managed to make it through the college admission gauntlet relatively unscathed; however, I do remember my lack of departmental awards (non-existent at my high school) and my complete lack of honor society membership cards did cause my interviewer to raise his eyebrows while he was paging through my papers.  This is, of course, just one more advantage that students who go to comparatively better high schools have over others but it seems like one that could be eliminated relatively easily by imposing more stringent requirements on membership or by actually making an effort to introduce these programs in lower-tier schools.

1. Too Big To Fail (Andrew Ross Sorkin): Sorkin does a superb job of providing an entertaining narrative of the financial crisis.  Honestly, while the subject matter itself might be a little dry to some and the acronyms and last names a little overwhelming, this is an extremely well constructed account, filled with reconstructed dialogue, of the crash.  Don’t miss the scene where Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson dry heaves into a trash can in Nancy Pelosi’s office.  Priceless.

My only criticism of the work is that there is little in the way of analysis or explanation of exactly what contributed to the crisis.  Save for a brief overview of CDS and sub-prime mortgages, Sorkin largely leaves it up to the reader to figure out the intricacies of the investment banking and mortgage trading realms on their lonesome.  This is fine if you have a decent understanding of the crisis to begin with (and honestly, if you’re willing to page through a 550 page tome on the subject you probably already have a passing interest in the US financial system) but if not I highly recommend that you take a listen to this excellent This American Life episode as a primer.

2. Transforming America’s Israel Lobby (Dan Fleshler): Overall an excellent read. Fleshler does a good job providing a relatively even-handed account of the power of the Israel Lobby inside the United States and provides a solid plan for strengthening the left in the debate over the future of Palestine and Israel. Further, Fleshler manages to do this while avoiding many of the cliches (he even does a good job of lampooning many of them) that one frequently hears bandied about during discussions of the Middle East.

The only problem I had with Fleshler’s work is that he repeatedly cites random bloggers, or, even worse, random commentators on random blogs to score points against the far-left. I know that Fleshler needs to keep up appearances and criticize some lefties to avoid appearing entirely one-sided but the strawmanning becomes extremely obvious at the point where he’s citing a comment by “Cogit8″ on the “Mondoweiss” blog. I read a ton of blogs and I can assure you that I have never heard of Mondoweiss, nevermind Cogit8. If Fleshler wanted to criticize the left for supposedly over-the-top rhetoric it would have does his credibility to mention some names that actually command some respect in the academic community.

3. Lost in the Meritocracy (Walter Kirn): I was really excited to read this autobiographical work by Walter Kirn that details his journey from small town Minnesota to the Ivy League–albeit a school that doesn’t really matter.  Unfortunately, my excitement was sorely misplaced.  Kirn spends most of the book either bitching about Minnesota or castigating Princeton for teaching him how to test well and act smart instead of instructing him on how to understand the ideas of others.  I can sympathize with this to a point.  After all, as a former denizen of rural Minnesota, I can appreciate how some of the people there can be painfully stupid (Marx didn’t complain about the idiocy of rural life for nothing); however, I really would stop short of characterizing everyone as a rube, a distinction that Kirn doesn’t seem to quite grasp.  I can also see where Kirn is coming from when he lambasts the Ivy Tower for its approach to education.  (It doesn’t help that Kirn was a comp lit major– a particularly useless and vapid field of study.)  Sadly, it gets a bit tedious to listen to Kirn complain page after page about his classes considering (1) there are other, more meaningful, majors he could have pursued and (2) he was getting access to some of the best educational resources in the country.  Other people had it worse than you Kirn, get over it.

Moreover, Kirn genuinely comes off as a bit unstable and bratty.  There is one instance in particular where he appears to be legitimately deranged.  Three of his suitemates buy a new set of furtiture and expect him to contribute towards the cost.  Not being from means and not having been consulted about the purchase in the first place, Kirn declines only to be told by his suitemates that he will not be allowed to touch any of the furniture in the common room for the rest of the year.  Obviously, this is a dick move on their part but Kirn unfortunately chooses to reply to this provocation by cutting the wires of his suitemate’s Steinway, pouring champagne on the rugs, and generally destroying the entire suite before he leaves for winter break.  Not only is this totally unproportional to the offense but it betrays a lack of maturity in Kirn’s character that makes it nearly impossible for a reader to sympathize with the author for the duration of the book.

I wanted to like Kirn, as we hail from similar places and ended up at similar schools.  I dunno what went wrong for Kirn (maybe Princeton is just that bad) but I can attest that I am capable of mustering up much more joy and appreciation for the Ivy League (and Minnesota) than Kirn.

4. Taking Rights Seriously (Ronald Dworkin): Wonderful.  Impossible to describe.  If you’re interested in human rights, constitutional law, or social contract theory (particularly as applied to Rawls) I highly recommend it.  In other words, this is a book for debaters.

5. Castles, Battles, and Bombs: How Economics Explains Military History (Brauer and Tuyll): One of the worst books I have ever read.  I thought Castles, Battles and Bombs would provide me with a good opportunity to use some of my newly acquired econ knowledge to better understand military history.  Instead I got to read a series of essays explaining how ‘there’s opportunity costs associated with building castles’ and why ‘an asymmetry of information can influence warfare!’  All of this, of course, is painfully obvious and could probably be summarized in a few short phrases (err, sort of like I just did).  I’m generally a big fan of Marginal Revolution and Tyler Cowen but I can’t for the life of me figure out why he recommended this book.

As a future law-school student, scholarships like this should make me swoon:

Costs are rising rapidly throughout the University of California system, but its newest law school, at Irvine, announced this week that the 80 students chosen for the second entering class will get privately financed scholarships covering at least half their tuition for all three years…

Most of the scholarship money, Mr. Chemerinsky said, comes from Southern California lawyers. Just last week, Mark Robinson, an Orange County trial lawyer who had donated $1 million for the inaugural class, made an additional $400,000 contribution.

However, I can’t help wondering if it’s a good idea to so aggressively subsidize legal education.  By all indications, there’s currently a glut of lawyers in the United States, a surplus that’s only expected to swell as more and more people enter law school to escape the economic downturn.  Further, it’s not entirely clear to me what the marginal benefit of adding another lawyer to our society is.  Do we really need more litigation in our society, our worthy cases being missed because of a dearth of lawyers?  If the marginal benefit is low and if there are few jobs for newly minted lawyers to take, then it seems as if we’d want to encourage fewer people to attend law school rather than providing a huge incentive to pursue a legal education.

After all, if the status-quo holds, most of these new lawyers are going to have wasted three years of their lives and thousands of dollars on tuition (if they go to a conventional law school, unlike UC: Irvine) by the time they discover that they can’t find a job.  Even worse, a surplus of lawyers means that the cost of litigation will fall and a whole host of marginal lawsuits that would otherwise be unprofitable to launch will enter the legal system, further gumming up our legal system. I think SoCo lawyers could find a better cause with which to commit their dollars.

I just got back from a quick two day vacation to Montreal.  A few thoughts:

1. The food was good.  The service was excellent.  Surprisingly enough I was more impressed by the service in Montreal than the food.  Don’t get me wrong, the restaurants were all quite good (Au Pied de Cochon, in particular was a real treat) but there are certainly places in Minneapolis that more than surpass what Montreal has to offer.  While the food wasn’t mind-blowing though, the level of service was incredible.  No snootiness, no French attitude (something I was prepared for after hosting two French cousins this past summer), and no sass.  I was impressed.
2. Businesses in Montreal have a strange aversion to accepting credit cards—only about one in three shops that I visited accepted plastic.
3. The subway in Montreal is one of the better mass transit systems that I’ve seen.  By American standards it was incredibly clean and I never waited more than five minutes for a train.  Evidentially nationalized transportation works in Canada.
4. Hotwire saved the day again by furnishing an incredibly nice room for a stunningly low price.  I highly recommend it.  Use betterbidding.com if you want a better idea of which hotel you’ll be landing before you commit.
5. Tim Horton’s is nothing special.

Glad to see that some grownups are getting real about nuclear energy:

Ramping up the pressure to repeal a 15-year-old ban on building more nuclear power plants in Minnesota, union officials, business leaders and politicians — including U.S. Reps. Tim Walz, a Democrat, and Erik Paulsen, a Republican — urged the Legislature on Tuesday to lift the moratorium.

“Everything must be on the table,” Walz said.

Hear hear.  Honestly, one of the most nonsensical positions taken by the environmentalist crowd has been their rigid opposition to any expansion of nuclear energy in Minnesota.  It’s all well and good to talk about harnessing wind power (a la Matt Entenza) but if we’re actually going to take real measures to curb global warming—without knocking our standard of living down a few decades in the process—nuclear power is really our only option.  I’m not a huge fan of Erik Paulsen for obvious reasons, but I have to commend both Representative Walz and him for taking this sound policy position.

I’m getting sort of sick of Tim Pawlenty’s new-found affinity for stupid gimmicks:

The state’s general fund budget would be frozen in line with revenue received during the previous budget period under a constitutional amendment proposed today by Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

The amendment, if placed on next year’s ballot by legislators and approved by voters, would limit government spending and force legislators to set firmer priorities, Pawlenty said.

This is really stupid idea.  For one, any sort of policy that forces the government to slash spending during an economic downturn is necessarily going to lead to some pretty perverse cyclical consequences. Further, on a more philosophical note, I’m extremely uncomfortable with putting checks in the State Constitution that are not needed to ensure a functioning democracy.  What I mean by this is that Pawlenty’s proposal, while debatable on its meager merits, is a policy proposal, not a constitutional matter.  It’s important to constrain the powers of the legislature when it comes to issues like freedom of speech and other fundamental rights which are necessarily to ensure a healthy democracy; it is very dangerous, and frankly a little bizarre, to limit the power of legislature when it comes to policy measures.

Policy should be debated and voted on by the state legislature, not by the voters.  Let too many referendums pass and too many constitutional constraints slip into place and you’re looking at the prospect of Minnesota devolving into a Californiaesque quagmire.  I think that’s something we would all like to avoid.  Pawlenty’s silly constitutional amendment should fall on that point alone.