Amplifying Kevin Drum's remarks, Ezra Klein points out:

You hear a lot about "countercyclical policy" amidst deep recessions. You don't hear much about it amidst periods of joyously fast growth. Instead, our thumb is always on the same side of the scale: We have counter-recessionary policy and pro-expansionary policy.

The problem, as Kevin puts it, is both human and political. "How do you ensure that [countercyclical policy] happens not just during downturns, when everyone is eager for it, but also during upturns?" he asks.... "After all, no one wants to spoil a party when everyone is having a good time."

The answer to this, in part, was supposed to be that the Federal Reserve chairman is insulated from congressional meddling and popular opprobrium. He can do what must be done. But that didn't work out in the latter years of Greenspan's tenure and he was, in part, considered a hero for permitting such an awesome economy.

This is all true. It's worth noting, though, that during the 1980s, when Greenspan was doing exactly what Drum calls for, his strongest critics were on the left. I remember William Greider arguing that wages at the bottom of the income distribution only start to rise when the economy's really booming and we're close to full employment. By cutting off the highs, as Greenspan did by raising interest rates when things got too hot, he eliminated the part of the cycle when the poor get theirs.

So why have the sides switched, to the point where it's now progressives like Drum and Klein who are calling for counter-expansionary monetary policy? Perhaps it's the economic history of the Bush years, in which economic growth was decoupled from rising income not just for the poor but for the middle class too: liberals just don't root for robust growth in the way they used to.

Weird NYT front-pager on a decision confronting President Obama: "whether the government must provide health insurance benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees."

As a presidential candidate, Mr. Obama said he would “fight hard” for the rights of gay couples. As a senator, he sponsored legislation that would have provided health benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees.

Now, Mr. Obama is in a tough spot. If he supports the personnel office on denying benefits to the San Francisco court employees, he risks agitating liberal groups that helped him win election. If he supports the judges and challenges the marriage act, he risks alienating Republicans with whom he is seeking to work on economic, health care and numerous other matters.

Is it just me, or is this in fact not a particularly tough spot at all? The situation is apparently as follows: Obama supports same-sex-partner benefits. His base supports same-sex-partner benefits. And a clear majority of the American people (73 percent, according to a Newsweek poll from three months ago) support same-sex-partner benefits. (The Times story doesn't mention this last point for some reason.) The only people who don't support it are members of the minority party. And Obama is supposed to capitulate to them because he needs their support on health care? How is that going to work? Are the Republicans going to explicitly agree to vote for health care reform as long as the gays don't get benefits? Or is Obama going to fold in the hope that folding will in some intangible way make the Republians more tractable on big economic issues? What's the percentage in capitulating, for Obama?

Behind this Times piece, I suspect, is the present media consensus that Obama's change-the-tone rhetoric somehow means that any kind of confrontation will be disastrous for him. So far, there is little evidence to support this.

Surowiecki:

First of all, we don’t want policymakers to assume the worst about the future when shaping economic policy. Nor do we want them to assume the best. Actually, we don’t want them to assume anything. Instead, we want them to come up with the most accurate forecast of the future they can, and to adopt the economic policies that make the most sense given that forecast.

Unfortunately, it's more complicated than that. Surowiecki's proposal would have us ignore unlikely-but-still-possible events -- "black swans," as we're now learning to call them -- because they don't fit into our "most accurate forecast of the future."

Rather, we want politicians to forecast the entire range of reasonable possibilities, estimate the probability of each of those forecasts coming to pass, and then adopt the economic policies that best optimize outcomes across that range of possibilities, taking into account the estimated probabilities and constantly adjusting the forecasts, the probability estimates, and the policies themselves in the light of new events and information. Plus also we'd like a pony.

Update: One might imagine that Surowiecki would be too busy to post a response in the comments section of this post. One would be wrong. In case it's not clear: the difference here is semantic and hinges on the definition of "forecast," which I had taken to mean "single predicted outcome" where J.S. was using it to to mean "predicted range of possible outcomes."

Link rodeo:

• Adam Gopnik remembers Saul Steinberg.
• The real progenitors of modern Republicanism are not Goldwater and Reagan but McCarthy and Nixon.
• Terry Gross interviews the great Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, of Philadelphia International Records [web, iTunes].

Gay marriage: The database engineering perspective.

Wait ... Jeff Tweedy is friends with Barack Obama?

Harold Meyerson: "Second, Waxman is a legislative genius."

Ezra Klein: "You don't tap the former Senate Majority Leader to run your health care bureaucracy. That's not his skill set. You tap him to get your health care plan through Congress."

These past few days I've been crying at odd intervals, prompted sometimes by pieces of music -- James Carter's version of "Summer Babe" coming up on shuffle, Sam Cooke's version of "A Change Is Gonna Come" coming up in my head -- and sometimes by the sight of children in strollers, although when the children are black I try to hide my emotion because I bet the black parents of Fort Greene are already sick of white people's faces creasing up at the sight of them going about their lives.

Judith Warner has a good piece up about all this crying and what it means.

I love Fort Greene.

For the past two decades, a core set of "cultural conservative" opinions has served as a theoretical dividing line between "red" (Republican/conservative) and "blue" (Democratic/liberal) America. These incude attitudes toward sex roles, the centrality of Christianity in culture, and a social traditionalism focused on patriotism and the family. If you were to translate that divide into baby names it might place a name like Peter—classic, Christian, masculine—on one side, staring down an androgynous pagan newcomer like Dakota on the other. In fact, that does describe the political baby name divide quite accurately. But it describes it backwards.

OMG, I'd forgotten like 65 percent of these, and the rest are permanently burned into my brain.

Andrew Sullivan:

If you place a map of the states that favoured the proslavery south over a map of the states that are now showing a trend for John McCain, you will get an almost perfect match. The only differences: Virginia has switched sides, and West Virginia has too. (It is now for McCain.) Florida, once part of the Confederacy, is also now prone to vote Democrat because of a massive influx from the north. The rest is essentially unchanged since the 1860s. Even in America, the past controls the present. [Emphasis mine]

It would be foolish to deny that slavery and the Civil War exert their influence over present-day politics. But it's also foolish to suggest that the electoral map is "essentially unchanged since the 1860s."

In fact, the south wasn't a unified conservative bloc even in the 1860s. (In 1869, Georgia, Kentucky, and Louisiana voted for Horatio Seymour while the rest of the south backed Union war hero Ulysses Grant.) In the '30s and '40s, FDR swept the south twice, along with the rest of the country. In 1952 and 1956 the former Confederacy (and nowhere else) threw its electoral votes to that good ol' boy Adlai Stevenson. In 1960 and 1964 the region's votes split down the middle; in 1976 every southern state but Virginia backed native son Jimmy Carter. In 1992 and 1996, Bill Clinton won many southern states. (Fascinating historical maps here.)

In the last two elections, of course, the south has been homogeneously conservative. But that's an anomaly, and the idea of the former Confederacy as a unified and consistently reactionary voting bloc is an unwarranted capitulation to the fantasies of Karl Rove.

Mark Danner's "Obama and Sweet Potato Pie": Probably the best non-newsy belles-lettristic thing I've read about the campaign, maybe the closest we're going to get to a full-scale Joan Didion Obama/McCain piece.

Why blogs are good: Today I learned two things I didn't know. From Matt Yglesias:

Probably the greatest blow Ronald Reagan struck against American liberalism was changing tax law so as to index income tax brackets to the Consumer Price Index. Before that, each and every year inflation created a small tax hike. Consequently, the default scenario was for revenue to grow. That created a situation where for three decades following the end of World War II, politicians steadily increased the volume of public services while also offering the occasional tax cut. And until the economic malaise of the 1970s, voters liked the outcomes just fine. But by seizing the opportunity provided by the 1980 election to change this, Reagan was able to shift the structure of American politics in a fairly significant way.

And from James Surowiecki, whose new blog is a bit less hand-holdy than his "Financial Page" columns:

Felix [Salmon] argues that Japan’s experience should make U.S.investors wary of buying stocks now ... because “the lesson of Japan is that even cheap stocks can continue to decline for decades." Actually, that’s not the lesson of Japan. The lesson of Japan is that a country’s stock market is not going to rise over time if, over time, its companies fail to create economic value for their shareholders. Felix says that “Japanese companies are well-run.” But in fact they’re not well run, at least by the standards that are relevant to shareholders—return on equity, profitability, growth, and managing cash flow in a shareholder-friendly way. By these standards, Japanese companies have historically been run badly, and while they’ve improved some in recent years, they’re still far behind American firms on all of these metrics.

Nate Silver, yesterday:

The closest recent parallel I can find to the Ted Stevens situation is that of former Ohio governor Bob Taft, who in August, 2005 was convicted on misdemeanor charges of failing to disclose gifts and golf trips paid for by lobbyists... He went from a 34-55 (-21) in a University of Cincinnati poll taken in April 2005 to a 26-65 (-39) in the same poll in August 2006, a net decline of 18 points.

Let's assume that Stevens will also suffer a decline in his net approval score of 18 points. Since he's at roughly 50/50 now, that would put him in the range of 40 percent approve, 60 percent disapprove. Our regression model uses approval ratings for incumbent senators as one of its inputs, and thinks a decline of this magnitude would cost a senator about 6 points in the polls ... actually, 5.8 points. So what we're going to do is apply a 5.8 point penalty to Stevens' numbers in Alaska.

Eric Kleefeld, today:

The first public poll of Alaska conducted entirely after GOP Sen. Ted Stevens was convicted on all counts in his corruption trial shows a probable Democratic pickup in this deep-red state -- but Stevens is doing surprisingly well for a newly-minted convicted felon.

The new numbers from Rasmussen: Dem candidate Mark Begich 52%, Stevens 44%, with a ±4.5% margin of error. Three weeks ago, Uncle Ted had taken a 49%-48% edge over Begich. So apparently getting convicted of a felony a week before the election can be quantified as taking five points off of a candidate's poll numbers.

Upshot: Nate Silver is a genius, with a margin of error of +/-1%.

I have long advocated federal control of the election system. Now election law expert Richard Hasen makes the case in Slate. He doesn't mention my suggestion that the whole thing be run by the Postal Service, which is generally efficient (it's the only federal agency that makes a profit) and has offices and employees in every zip code in the country.

I'm not sure if Hasen is being coy or naive when he writes:

There's something in this for both Democrats and Republicans. Democrats talk about wanting to expand the franchise, and there's no better way to do it than the way most mature democracies do it: by having the government register voters. For Republicans serious about ballot integrity, this should be a winner as well. No more ACORN registration drives, and no more concerns about Democratic secretaries of state not aggressively matching voters enough to motor vehicle databases.

The trouble is, there is no such thing as a Republican serious about ballot integrity. It's like being worried about elephant attacks in large cities: it's not a serious concern. In fact, nationalized voting has something to offer Democrats, and something to offer people serious about democracy, but nothing to offer Republicans who use "ballot integrity" as a cover to pass laws that make it harder to vote.

John Heilemann's election coverage for NYMag has been all-star, and this week's cover story's his best yet: informed (and deeply reported) speculation on the character of the forthcoming Obama administration.

Yglesias says the NYT's speculations on the composition of the Obama administration are ill-founded: "the Fed Chairman is more important than the Treausury Secretary," so there's no reason Paul Volcker, Robert Rubin, or Larry Summers would want to run Treasury.

But isn't the Treasury Secretary more important now that: (a) s/he's in charge of a big chunk of the banking industry; and (b) the economy's in too deep a hole to be rescued by monetary policy? The next administration's response to the recession is going to have to involve substantial fiscal stimulus (unless the next administration is staffed by lunatics), and you'd imagine the Treasury Secretary would be heavily involved in that.

In a way the Treasury Secretary is like one of those hammers kept behind a thin pane of glass -- most of the time it's just sitting there, but it's really important in an emergency.

(Perhaps RoBros legal advisor and former Treasury intern Ty Alper could weigh in.)

Goofy post by the usually-acute Noam Scheiber, arguing that Obama's position in the polls is more tenuous than it appears.

I can imagine a losing scenario that doesn't involve outside events. It goes something like this: Obama wins all the Kerry states plus Iowa and New Mexico, giving him 264 electoral votes, then narrowly loses the rest of the red states where he's currently competitive. According to the latest RCP averages, the next most competitive red states, in descending order of favorability to Obama, are: Virginia, Colorado, Ohio, Missouri, Nevada, Florida. Let's focus on Virginia, since it represents the knife-edge between winning and losing--the potentially decisive red state where Obama's currently got the biggest lead.

And then Scheiber lists a bunch of reasons why Virginia might diverge from the rosy national trend: McCain could throw a lot of resources at it; state polls are a few days behind national polls; maybe there's a Bradley effect. "There's no reason to think [McCain] couldn't lose the popular vote by 2-3 points but still win Virginia by 1." He calls this list "the caveats that keep me up at night."

Noam, dude, get some sleep. It's true that Virginia -- or any of the six borderline states that Scheiber lists -- could be a few points off the national average in either direction. Polling is an inexact science, and things change in two weeks. But Scheiber acts as though, once Virginia falls, every other swing state must fall in the same direction. But of course, if Virginia is a few points off the national average, that makes it the exception. And if Virginia goes to McCain, Obama only needs one of the other states on Scheiber's list. (Nevada makes it a tie, which likely goes to the Democrats.)

Put it another way: given Scheiber's starting scenario (Obama wins the Kerry states plus Iowa and New Mexico), McCain needs to win Virginia, Colorado, Ohio, Missouri, Nevada, and Florida. If he does that, it won't be thanks to a flukey dice roll and some bad polling; it'll be a palpable, dramatic, nationwide turnaround.