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IN yesterday's election in New York's 23rd district, the Republican Party lost a seat it has owned for 120 years. This was because the GOP candidate, Dede Scozzafava, was excommunicated by the Tea Party conservatives and forced out of the race, paving the way for a contest between Democrat Bill Owens and Conservative Party Doug Hoffman. Hoffman was the darling of the Tea Party crowd, Rush Limbagh, and Sarah Palin - and he got crushed.

Wasn't the conservatives' argument always supposed to be that running a "real conservative" would mean victory? If that's the case, then why didn't Hoffman win in NY-23 over the liberal Democrat?

The wins by Republicans McDonnell and Chris Christie as Governor for VA and NJ, respectively are also being spun as a victory for conservatives, but they ran as pragmatic problem solvers, not Hoffman-style conservative fire-breathers. Overall, yesterday's elections provide some solid empirical evidence that the basic conservative thesis of purity above pragmatism is false.

There are numerous post-mortems about NY-23 rolling in this morning. For example, Max Blumenthal points out how Hoffman was just a Tea Party empty suit relative to the concerns of the district itself:

With endorsements from the National Rifle Association, the National Republican Congressional Committee and Republican Party elders Newt Gingrich and New York Rep. Peter King, Scozzafava was assured an easy victory. Then Hoffman declared his candidacy on the Conservative Party line. Hoffman was a lawyer and Tea Party activist who did not live in the district and, according to the local Watertown Daily-Times, "showed no grasp of the bread-and-butter issues pertinent to district residents." Offered as his only selling point: ideological purity.

Hoffman instantly became the point man for the national conservative movement, dedicating himself to fulfilling the right's dream of a complete purge of moderate elements in the GOP. Campaigning in a local constituency of mostly Republican regulars, Hoffman behaved as though he were running in a presidential primary. He slammed Scozzafava for supporting abortion rights and gay marriage, substituting the hot button issues that had electrified the national Tea Party movement rather than the bread and butter concerns of the working class district he campaigned to represent.

That's hardly unsurprising, though because the primary point of the modern conservative movement is to enforce ideological purity, not actcually be concerned with paltry things like "governance" or "representation".

The actual cognitive dissonance from the scions of the Right - such as Erick Erickson at RedState, who proclaimed that Owens' win was a "victory for conservatives" (rightly mocked elsewhere). The Democrat won, the Republican was excommunicated, and the "pure" conservative solidly thumped, and this is a victory? What would a defeat have looked like? Erickson goes on to argue, incomprehensibly,

First, the GOP now must recognize it will either lose without conservatives or will win with conservatives. In 2008, many conservatives sat home instead of voting for John McCain. Now, in NY-23, conservatives rallied and destroyed the Republican candidate the establishment chose.

Wait, didn't the conservative lose in NY-23? Wouldn't the moderate Republican have won? Isn't 2+2=5? Are there four lights? If the conservatives in NY-23 really "rallied" then presumably they'd have voted. For the conservative.

Erickson also tries to argue that "Were we to combine Scozzafava and Hoffman's votes, Hoffman would have won." Sure, but wouldn't it also be true that if you were to combine Scozzafava and Hoffman's votes, Scozzafava would have won?

Erick closes with a warning:

For all intents and purposes, NY-23 is a trial run for Florida. And in Florida, the conservative candidate is operating inside the GOP. If John Cornyn and the NRSC do not want to see Florida go the way of NY-23, they better stand down.

I think he's going to find that the NRSC derives exactly the opposite conclusion from the events of last night. And rightly so. The evidence from last night spoke volumes about ideological purity - and if anything, it's liberals who are validated, not conservatives. Blue Dogs, take note.

Related reading from yesterday, prior to the election outcome but rather predictive: Larison wondered why the conservatives think that nationalizing elections will help them. And at Open Left, plenty of evidence and data to suggest Republicans should be quite terrified of 2010. The thing that these critics don't seem to understand is that we aren't dealing with rational actors, but instead "mad mullahs" of conservatism. Just listen to conservative blogger Rick Moran, who strayed outside the reservation, lambasting "anti-reason conservatives". He was proven right, and will be proven right again:

In truth, the gloating being done on the far right over the ravaging of Scozzafava has led to a belief that the template used to stick it to the establishment in NY23 can be grafted on to other districts where "RINO's" are running - GOP incumbents be damned.

inshallah!

UPDATE: My Belieffnet colleague Rod Dreher puts it succinctly:

We've been told over and over these past couple of weeks that Hoffman, the Palin-Beck candidate, was giving NY23 voters "a choice, not an echo." Well, guess what? Voters chose Democrat Bill Owens -- which is to say, they rejected Hoffman. Blaming the New York GOP for Hoffman's loss strikes me as an attempt to dismiss evidence that challenges the dogma that running to the Tea Party right is a winning strategy.

UPDATE 2: Sarah Palin was a big supporter of Hoffman. The outcome in NY23 is a major black eye for her.

Aside from the August recess of Congress, there has been strong support for the so-called public option all along:

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that support for a government-run health-care plan to compete with private insurers has rebounded from its summertime lows and wins clear majority support from the public.

Americans remain sharply divided about the overall packages moving closer to votes in Congress and President Obama's leadership on the issue, reflecting the partisan battle that has raged for months over the administration's top legislative priority. But sizable majorities back two key and controversial provisions: both the so-called public option and a new mandate that would require all Americans to carry health insurance.

Independents and senior citizens, two groups crucial to the debate, have warmed to the idea of a public option, and are particularly supportive if it would be administered by the states and limited to those without access to affordable private coverage.

It was a high of 62% in favor back in September, a low of 52% in August, and now up to 57% in October. So, clear majorities all along.

I am still not clear on what the point is of the public option is if it is indeed "limited to those without access to affordable private coverage" - it certainly won't be a cost-competitive check on the private industry in such a case. Seems to me the better hobbyhorse for the progressive movement would have been to argue for Medicare-for-all at guaranteed +5% rates, but what do I know?

President Obama is now a Laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize. There's enough in that statement alone to drive rightwing conservatives insane. And insane they certainly are, as others are ably and gleefully documenting. The general gist of the response by the Right is twofold, and predictably schizophrenic: 1. Obama has not accomplished enough in office to deserve the NPP, and 2. the NPP only awarded it to Obama because he is a. not-Bush and b. he is African-American. In essence, this means that they are arguing that the Nobel Peace Prize is both a farce and sacred at the same time. Of course, conservatives' enmity for the Peace prize is longstanding, given that it was awarded to Yasser Arafat, Jimmy Carter, and Al Gore, even as they pine for it's omission to George W. Bush.

While the conservatives' newfound concern for the integrity of the NPP is certainly touching, the same critique coming from the Left carries more weight. But to address this, you have to consider the intention of the Peace Prize. And for that, we can look to the wishes of Alfred Nobel himself. In his will, he stipulated that the Nobel Peace Prize shall be awarded to

"to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

Now, there's nothing in there about solving the Middle East conflict or riding the world of nuclear weapons, though certainly progress towards these goals would count. But the secific language used to define the concept of "peace" itself is interesting. The NPP is to be awarded for 1. doing work towardds fraternity of nations, and promotion of peace congresses. These are process, not end-result, statements. The sole end-result qualification listed in "reduction of armies" which I don't think any winner has ever managed to achieve, though President Obama's renewed attention to nuclear non-proliferation is relevant here (and explicitly quoted by the Nobel Committee as part of their justification for awarding it to him).

First, consider the process-oriented criteria. What has Obama achieved along these lines? Glenn Greenwald offers a summary of how Obama has "promoted peace" and "fraternity between nations":

Obama has changed the tone America uses to speak to the world generally and the Muslim world specifically. His speech in Cairo, his first-week interview on al-Arabiya, and the extraordinarily conciliatory holiday video he sent to Iran are all substantial illustrations of that. His willingness to sit down and negotiate with Iran -- rather than threaten and berate them -- has already produced tangible results. He has at least preliminarily broken from Bush's full-scale subservience to Israel and has applied steadfast pressure on the Israelis to cease settlement activities, even though it's subjected him to the sorts of domestic political risks and vicious smears that have made prior Presidents afraid to do so. His decision to use his first full day in office to issue Executive Orders to close Guantanamo, ostensibly ban torture, and bar CIA black sites was an important symbol offered to the world (even though it's been followed by actions that make those commitments little more than empty symbols). He refused to reflexively support the right-wing, civil-liberty-crushing coup leaders in Honduras merely because they were "pro-American" and "anti-Chavez," thus siding with the vast bulk of Latin America's governments -- a move George Bush, or John McCain, never would have made. And as a result of all of that, the U.S. -- in a worldwide survey released just this week -- rose from seventh to first on the list of "most admired countries."

That's an impressive list, though the caveats about rendition are noted. Some righties argue Obama should only be "eligble" for his actions as President in the 11 days he was in office prior to the NPP nomination deadline of Feb 1st - which is silly, since the actual deliberations took seven months. Why wouuldn't Obama's actions over that time be relevant to the decision? But it's still worth pointing out that Obama's executive orders on his very first day in office about torture and Guantanamo alone represent as significant an ideological change in direction for America as Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika did (earning him a NPP in 1990, even though the actual and unanticipated breakup of the Soviet Union didn't happen until the following year).

It's clear that Obama meets the process-oriented criteria. But what about "reduction of standing armies" and its nuke proxy? The Nobel Committee explicitly lauded Obama's commitment to nuclear non-proliferation, especially recently at the United Nations. However, the truth is that Obama remains wedded to the double standard on nuclear power, holding Iran and India to one standard while looking the other way when it comes to Israel's obsolete "strategic ambiguity". A genuine commitment to "zero nuke" policy would entail no favoritism, and insisting all nuclear-capable nations sign the NPT, Israel included. The hypocrisy on this does not go unnoticed and the threat of Israeli nuclear power is what drives the nuclear arms race in the middle east.

However, all of this is really beside the point, since it assumes that the Nobel Prize remains an "award" when in fact it is no such thing. It is actually a shrewd vehicle for influencing the power elite, and as such represents an attempt to lobby Obama and influence him over the course of his next term(s). The decsion of who gets a Nobel Peace Prize, and just as importantly who doesn't, is an explicit editorial statement. That President Bush was not awarded one* was a rebuke of the unilateral, pre-emptive, diplomacy-averse doctrine that bears his name. But with Obama, it is an attempt to shape the doctrine yet to be.

Richard Silverstein makes much the same point:

I think this award is really a shot in the dark. A big gamble. They're telling Obama and the world that they have enormous hopes for him. They're also telling us what deep straits the world is in. From Gaza to Teheran to Kabul to Baghdad, things are a mess. A military attack against Iran hangs like a question mark over the Middle East. The committee is essentially saying that tough times demand risk and this award is a risk. It could be that Obama will merit it over time. It could be that the award will make it that much easier for him to achieve some of his agenda. If so, the Swedes are telling us that's all to the good.

Lately, Obama has taken hits both at home and abroad. This award is meant as a shot in the arm, a bit of courage for the tough times ahead. He'll need it.

I hope against hope that this award will encourage the realist camp in dealing with Iran. I hope it will give pause to the Israeli adventurists gunning for a fight with Iran. I do think it will make it that much harder for Obama himself to turn hawkish, as he has intimated he might do if negotiations fail. So maybe there's some shrewdness to this award as well.

Indeed. Liberal critics like Greenwald** point to the Afghanistan War as evidence Obama doesn't "deserve" the prize, but General McChrystal's public call for more troops seems to have influenced Obama to take a troop reduction off the table. This represents a success for McChrystal, who may not (probably won't) get his full requested 40,000 troops, but also won't face the Biden-advocated strategy of reducing troops still further in favor of purely couunter-terrorism operations. The Nobel Peace Prize applies pressure on Obama from the opposite end. Like it or not, Obama has to factor the potential of headlines like "Obama wins Peace Prize, extends War" into his political calculus; the Afghanistan people themselves are making the case already.

I think that the best interpretation of the Nobel Peace Prize is the single word response from Barack Obama's official Twitter account: "Humbled." In his public response, President Obama said, "I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments. But rather as an affirmation of American leadership. ... I will accept this award as a call to action."

Indeed, recognition that the award represents global aspirations for peace and an expectation of American leadership should be a heavy burden that weighs on Obama's soul as he occupies the most powerful office in the world, at a time when the world is arguably at its most uncertain and strife-laden. Let's hope that the intentions of the Nobel Committee, if not their specific agenda, come true. As Obama charts the way forward in Afghanistan, pursues non-proliferation, engages Iran and North Korea, promotes a two-state solution, and more, the heavy weight NPP around his neck will hopefully inure him to short-term political distractions and focus him on the end goals, and question whether the conventional wisdoms he so far has largely hewn to will indeed be sufficient for the task.

Related: Mixed responses to Obama's Peace Prize from the streets of Iran, Iraq and Gaza. Also, see the usual lively discussion at Talk Islam. Also, I found Al Gore's comments of interest.

==

*For what it's worth, if I were eligible to nominate, I'd have nominated Bush, for the sole reason of deposing Saddam. That doesn't mean he'd have won, of course.

**Arguably, though Greenwald won't agree, Obama's decision to send 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan in March has actually lessened the need for aerial strikes. The truth behind the troops debate is that the fewer troops we have, the heavier reliance on drone attacks will be and thus the more civilian casualties. This is a fact that lefty critics of Obama's war must accept.

This is the second part of my series in anticipation of the upcoming Copenhagen conference. The previous post in this series was a defense of the scientific method.

So, what do I think about global warming? The consensus is a powerful one, and it's not built upon one tree ring or one temperature reconstruction, it's been built upon thousands of independent studies by thousands of different authors. That said, there are some valid critiques on methodological issues. Even if those critiques are fully accurate, that isn't enough by itself to warrant throwing out the entire body of literature, which over the years of reading both Climate Audit and Real Climate I've seen extends far beyond just one paper by Mann et al or one set of trees at Yamal. The very fact that there is a controversy, and both sides are able to endlessly rebut the other in a seemingly-never ending cycle of rebuttal, proves that there is indeed more to the story. Like blind men in a room with an elephant, the dissenters and the keepers of orthodoxy have valid observations and methods. Reconciling them requires moving forward, not standing still.

I've watched An Inconvenient Truth and I've seen A Convenient Fiction. I've read the Wegman Report and the RealClimate folks' highly-convincing response on the technical merits. I read Climate Audit and now, thanks to suggestions from others here, will also check out Watt's Up With That, but I also cross-check dissenters' arguments against the RC Archive and RC Index. I think I am doing due diligence here. The consensus for global warming remains robust, despite the dissenters' well-publicized arguments. Until the dissenters repudiate their partisan political fellow-travelers who engage in irresponsible rhetoric about GW being a "massive lie" or the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people" they will never attain the credibility they require to persuade and influence the concensus the way it has always been done.

Fundamentally, however, the basic goal of those who advocate anthropogenic global warming is simple: to reduce carbon emissions worldwide. The single best route to doing that is to make our civilization more energy efficient and less polluting. Technologies to make this so represent as much of an immense, industry-creating opportunity as the semiconductor industry or the space program. One of Al Gore's maxims is that you should never underestimate human ingenuity; to this, I would also add the corollary, never underestimate the ability of Americans to make a profit off it, either. Those who argue that the Kyoto Protocol or the upcoming Copenhagen treaty would bankrupt the business world sound to me like Malthusian alarmists, without faith in the genius of men like Norman Borlaug to find ways of escaping the constraints. The business world itself is on board with the opportunity ahead. In that sense, the scientific world has fallen behind. It's time to catch up... to the Chinese and the Indians. Far from being an obstacle to change, the developing nations see the writing on the wall - in terms of existential threat to their own territory and populations from increased sea levels, but also from the basic security/economic perspectives of needing less oil imports and having greater energy to fuel their growing societies.

So, count me as convinced that GW is real and requires action. The dissenters are important, as they provide a needed critique from within. But they cannot and should not be the cause for holding back on moving ahead full speed.

Ryan Lizza has a superb profile of Larry Summers, President Obama's brilliant economic adviser, in The New Yorker. Lizza is one of my favorite political writers and he uses the profile on Summers as a backdrop for the larger story of how the major economic decisions in the Obama Administration have been made. In a nutshell, Obama's economic team is comprised on incredibly brilliant people with a lot of ideas - and they disagree vociferously. The end result has been policies that have been run through the wringer in terms of skepticism and evaluation, ensuring that the risks of potential disaster were well-understood and the practical constraints preventing idealistic action were also abided by in favor of gettings omething rather than nothing done.

The size of the economic stimulus is an excellent example. Republicans have long argued that the stimulus shoudl have been smaller, and more heavily reliant on tax cuts. Liberal economists like Paul Krugman meanwhile have argued that the stimulus was too small. So how did the Obama team decide how big to make it?

The most important question facing Obama that day was how large the stimulus should be. Since the election, as the economy continued to worsen, the consensus among economists kept rising. A hundred-billion-dollar stimulus had seemed prudent earlier in the year. Congress now appeared receptive to something on the order of five hundred billion. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate, was calling for a trillion. Romer had run simulations of the effects of stimulus packages of varying sizes: six hundred billion dollars, eight hundred billion dollars, and $1.2 trillion. The best estimate for the output gap was some two trillion dollars over 2009 and 2010. Because of the multiplier effect, filling that gap didn't require two trillion dollars of government spending, but Romer's analysis, deeply informed by her work on the Depression, suggested that the package should probably be more than $1.2 trillion. The memo to Obama, however, detailed only two packages: a five-hundred-and-fifty-billion-dollar stimulus and an eight-hundred-and-ninety-billion-dollar stimulus. Summers did not include Romer's $1.2-trillion projection. The memo argued that the stimulus should not be used to fill the entire output gap; rather, it was "an insurance package against catastrophic failure." At the meeting, according to one participant, "there was no serious discussion to going above a trillion dollars."

There were sound arguments why the $1.2-trillion figure was too high. First, Emanuel and the legislative-affairs team thought that it would be impossible to move legislation of that size, and dismissed the idea out of hand. Congress was "a big constraint," Axelrod said. "If we asked for $1.2 trillion, it probably would have created such a case of sticker shock that the system would have locked up there." He pointed east, toward Capitol Hill. "And the world was watching us, the market was watching us. If we failed to produce a stimulus bill, that in and of itself could have had deleterious effects."
There was also a mechanical argument against a stimulus of that size. Peter Orszag, who was celebrating his fortieth birthday that day, said that, while the argument for a bigger stimulus was sound theoretically, there were limits to how much money the government could practically spend in the near future.

Summers brought a third argument to the debate, one that echoed his advice to Bill Clinton sixteen years earlier, when his Administration was facing persistent budget deficits that Summers believed were suppressing economic growth. He, like Romer, was guided by an understanding that in financial crises the risk of doing too little is greater than doing too much. He believed that filling the output gap through deficit spending was important, but that a package that was too large could potentially shift fears from the current crisis to the long-term budget deficit, which would have an unwelcome effect on the bond market. In the end, Summers made the case for the eight-hundred-and-ninety-billion-dollar option.

When the meeting broke up, after four hours of discussion, interrupted only briefly when the President brought out a cake and led the group in singing "Happy Birthday" to Orszag, there was still indecision about how big a stimulus Obama would recommend to Congress. Summers, Romer, Geithner, Orszag, Emanuel, and Jason Furman huddled in the corner to lock down the number. Emanuel made the final call: six hundred and seventy-five to seven hundred and seventy-five billion dollars, with the understanding that, as the bill made its way through Congress, it was more likely to grow than to shrink. The final legislation was for seven hundred and eighty-seven billion dollars.

"A lot of my research has been figuring out what policymakers did, why they did it," Romer told me. "I have a whole new level of sympathy. Until you've experienced it, you don't realize how hard it is. It's humbling."

Later in the article, Lizza explains the similar internal dissent and discussion that preceded the Obama Administration's decision about the future of the auto industry (again, with Summers providing a key skeptical role). As any PhD student who has had to defend their dissertation can tell you, a severly critical and rigorous environment always leads to better, more robust ideas. Larry Summers plays a key role in bringing that intellecctual and pragmatic rigorousness to the Obama White House. for As one of the other economic advisers (Austan Goolsbee, whose opinion was overridden by Summers in the debate) told Lizza for the article, "History has not been kind to Administrations where everybody agreed with each other and all they ever had to say was, Good idea, boss."

The whole article is well-worth a read (I admit I skipped over some of the childhood biographical bits, though). I think that the ending paragraph is worth excerpting, though:

So far, none of the worst fears of those who believed that the stimulus was too small or that nationalization was the only option or that taking over car companies would destroy the fabric of capitalism have materialized. Indeed, several private forecasters have credited the stimulus with blunting the impact of the recession-it probably added around three points to the G.D.P. last quarter-and the banking system has dramatically stabilized since the stress tests were completed. But competence has its limits as a source of inspiration. Paul Krugman said, "The stimulus helped, but the question is, 'Is that enough?' " With unemployment at around ten per cent and still on an upward trajectory, the Administration is left arguing not that jobs are being created but that without Obama's policies things would be worse. It's not a very pithy slogan. And, undoubtedly, the huge government interventions laid the groundwork for the political backlash against Obama that was unleashed this past August and which has jeopardized his larger agenda on health care, global warming, and financial regulation. Obama and his team have pulled the economy back from the abyss, but they will get credit only when it has been rebuilt.

And for that, we need more than just 10 months, but more on the order of 5 years, to really know for sure.