The danger of negative strategizing

In elections, in addition to hoping that your party ends up with the candidate whom you think has the best ideas and also the best chance of winning, you also hope that the other side ends up with the candidate with the best chance of losing. Hence each side has an incentive to boost the other side’s weaker candidate and cheer on the decline of the candidate that may be the strongest. Some people go beyond that and actually try to bring about the worst result for the opponents. But is such negative strategizing wise?
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A lively and informative Democratic debate

The second Democratic debate yesterday, this time involving only Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Martin O’Malley, was once again spirited and substantive. Given that it occurred in the immediate aftermath of the horrendous events in Paris, it was not surprising that the first quarter or so was devoted to the whole issue of ISIS and terrorism. To their credit, none of the candidates used the occasion to indulge in excessive saber rattling or xenophobia against Muslims or call for the shutting down of moves to take in refugees fleeing the chaos in the Middle East. One can only shudder at what the Republican candidates would have said if it had been their debate last night. We would have seen a competition to see who could take the most extreme anti-Muslim position and they would have tied it to anti-Mexican immigrant bashing.

boring_dem_debate

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Will ridicule succeed where all else fails?

We have seen in the current Republican presidential race that there seems to be nothing that can bring a candidate down once they have captured the allegiance of a significant portion of the party’s large and nutty base. Donald Trump and Ben Carson exemplify this. They can flat out lie, make the most idiotic and unrealistic policy proposals, exhibit xenophobia and race-baiting, and their poll numbers stay up month after month despite predictions from the pundits that this time, they have gone too far and their numbers will come down.
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The US media provides cover for the US government, again

The US government still continues to defy calls for an independent investigation into the attacks on the MSF hospital in Kunduz that destroyed the main facility and killed so many, and the US media are not putting any pressure on them to do so. What is worse, as Glenn Greenwald points out, some in the media are pre-emptively exonerating the government by declaring that the attack was an ‘accident’ or ‘mistake’ when there are many indications that the attack on the hospital was deliberate.
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The curious case of Benjamin Carson

While I was traveling, I read various foreign newspapers and many of them had articles about Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson. While they were generally baffled by the rise of Donald Trump as a leading presidential contender, Carson’s rise to the top seemed to leave them utterly astounded. There is no question that he is the most fascinating candidate in the field because there is something really weird about him, and I am not just talking about the way he speaks, with his eyes often closed and giving the impression of one who is either sedated or stoned.
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Giving criminals a second chance

Take a look at a graph created by Dara Lind using official prison statistics about the number of prisoners in the US per 100,000 adult US residents. The rates now are nearly seven times what they were for nearly an entire century, from 1880 to 1970, when it suddenly shot up when ‘law and order’ and ‘get tough on crime’ became the way to win votes.
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