I have a theory that the most corrupt places are those where one party is dominant, but not to the extent that party members are comfortable with the idea of taking on incumbent office-holders.

When parties are closely matched, they can serve as a check on each other. If Wisconsin Democrats nominated for governor a man as corrupt and feckless as Blagojevich, the Republicans would win. As a result, we tend to nominate good people instead. (*)

And in places like Illinois, where GOP has destroyed itself (**), the parties are becomning so unevenly matched that there’s no danger for downstate Democrats in asking their governor to “do the right thing” and resign. It’s highly unlikely that Blagojevich will be replaced by a Republican. He’s be replaced by a much better Democrat.

The problem lies when the balance of power falls into that middle ground — New Jersey or Florida might be good examples — where politicians from the majority party are unlikely to lose re-election campaigns unless they lose the support of their party. And the party, in general, is unwilling to countenance challenges to incumbents, because they don’t want to risk throwing the election to the other guys.

So as Illinois moves from a state that leans Democratic, to a solid Democratic stronghold, it’s not surprising that the state party is increasingly willing to demand more of its leaders. That’s good news for everyone.

(*) The same metric works the other way, as well; whatever one thought of Mark Green’s political agenda (”not much” being the only answer that comes to mind), he certainly seemed like a honest public servant at the time, and since he’s now living halfway around the world in the apparently thankless job of ambassador to Tanzania, there’s no reason for me to reevaluate that judgment.

(**) E.g., their previous governor is currently doing time in a federal prison, and their most recent Senate candidate was Alan Keyes.

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A more illuminating explanation — “over the last decade Madison, responding to requests from residents and neighborhoods, has added traffic circles to some roads, at an average annual cost of ‘over’ 43 cents per resident” — just doesn’t have the same punch. And of course, it’s expected that an article in this vein appeal to the resentment industry by pitting an elite bureaucracy of, er, civil engineers — against us ordinary folks (”But if traffic engineers have embraced TCDs, the public and other city departments are far less admiring.”)

It’s not until paragraph 19 that we find out that the program only exists because people do, in fact, like traffic circles on some streets:

“The way the program’s set up is it’s all grass roots,” Winter said, meaning that if residents don’t ask for traffic-calming devices, they don’t get them, even if the street they live on is arguably more dangerous than a street where the devices have been installed.”

It certainly sounds like an outrageous boondoggle foisted upon us by bitter and elitist city planners to me.

According to ABC News, I’m supposed to think the other guy is an elitist.
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I stopped in for the first time over lunch today, looking to buy a pair of pants (Bills Khakis, made in Pennsylvania and by far the best khakis I’ve seen). The customer service is terrific (free hemming and cuffs), the quality is excellent, and mirabile dictu, the dressing rooms were provisioned with shoe horns.

Woldenberg’s is a fixture on the annual Best of Madison surveys, so in some sense I’m just late to the party, but I wanted to add my voice to the chorus anyways. Our city is a better place because of small businesses like this one.

I’m sure that there’s no actual Fourth Amendment protection in these circumstances, but it does seem rather rude for the police to search stuff without probable cause.

The argument seems to be that the campaign run by Mike Gableman and his third-party surrogates spent too much money, was too negative, and was largely based on lies and distortions. This is an extremely rare phenomenon known as “convincing people to vote for you instead of the other guy”, and it’s obviously very dangerous. If only we could get the money out of politics, then our civil discourse would be magically elevated to the level of a university debate (*).

It always sounds like sour grapes when the losing side proposes to change the rules. That’s true even when the rules should be changed. Did Al Gore get more votes than the guy who won? Let’s replace the electoral college with the popular vote. Did Franklin Roosevelt win too many elections? Let’s have term limits. Did the Senate not like President Bush’s judicial nominees? Let’s abolish the filibuster. Did WMC buy themselves two supreme court justices in one year? Let’s appoint the supreme court.

In the case of the Wisconsin supreme court, however, the rules change seems unnecessary. Unlike Annette Ziegler, for example, Gableman does not appear to be corrupt. I’d rather he wasn’t on the court, but whatever. You have elections, and sometimes the other side wins.

There are two problems above and beyond the “the other side has too much money, and is too mean” argument, and neither of them will be solved by appointing justices.

The first is the pretense that Supreme Court justices are neutral arbiters of the law with no ideological convictions. Giving the governor the authority to appoint judges will merely change the way in which this charade is played out. Justices will still have their own ideologies, conservative governors will appoint conservative judges, and liberal governors will appoint liberal judges.

Instead of accusing the liberal candidate of being a werewolf, WMC will run commercials warning us that Governor Doyle will appoint werewolves to the court. This does not seem likely to improve anything.

The second, and more important, problem, is the persistent inability of liberals to challenge the conservative argument, now almost universally accepted, that conservatives “uphold the constitution” while liberals “make up laws”.

No number of studies pointing out that conservative judges strike down more laws, overturn more precedents, and rule more predictably along partisan lines, will change this framework if liberals are unwilling to talk about civil rights versus majority rule (soft on crime!), or about the freedom of action available to the legislature (activist judges!), or about the rights of citizens to petition the government (frivolous lawsuits!).

In the meantime, “it’s difficult for my side to win” is not a very good reason for getting rid of an election.

On the other hand, I have a lot of sympathy for moving judicial elections to the fall. It’s relatively easy for interest groups to pour tons of money into off-season “non-partisan” elections with low turnout. When only one voter in five bothers to show up, it’s easy for WMC’s machine-gun approach to politics to make a big difference. It’s somewhat harder when they’re only one player among many.

During a general election, turnout is higher, more people are paying attention, and the process is more likely to generate a result in accordance with the majoritarian opinion of the state, even if, as seems likely, that opinion currently prefers conservative judges to liberal ones.

(*) That might be a misnomer, inasmuch as I seem to remember that a common form of university debate was standing in a group and hectoring passers-by with signs, a bullhorn, and sidewalk chalk.

The snowbank in front of the mailbox is down to a couple feet, the daffodils are poking out of the ground, the robins have been here for a while, and tomorrow is Opening Day.

When did “nice place to live” became synonymous with “X square miles surrounded by reality”? It’s almost as if there’s been a decades-long attempt by right-wing voices in the media to portray conservatism as some kind of heartland value, and to disparage American liberalism as elitist.

It’s the strategy of the drug czar, the health care czar, the terrorism czar, and David Petraeus, and irrespective of what the details are, the Federal Reserve czar is not going to succeed any more than the rest of them.

Plus, when I read about “in effect allowing [the Fed] to send SWAT teams into any corner of the industry or any institution that might pose a risk to the overall system”, I get a vaguely creepy feeling, notwithstanding the fact that the language literally has no meaning.

Buried at the heart of this kind of thinking is a contempt for participatory democracy. The back and forth of a legislature is messy, and it’s often hard to do something. Instead of realizing that it’s hard to do things because 300 million people have a lot of different ideas and opinions and needs, the czar brigade sees public opinion as an obstacle to be overcome. It makes me think we could use a president with a background in community organizing and an understanding of how to build a majoritarian consensus.

They envision a doctrine that first ends the politics of fear and then moves beyond a hollow, sloganeering “democracy promotion” agenda in favor of “dignity promotion,” to fix the conditions of misery that breed anti-Americanism and prevent liberty, justice, and prosperity from taking root. An inextricable part of that doctrine is a relentless and thorough destruction of al-Qaeda. Is this hawkish? Is this dovish? It’s both and neither — an overhaul not just of our foreign policy but of how we think about foreign policy.

The details obviously matter, but I think this is quite good, especially when judged by the standards of a typical presidential campaign’s foreign policy rhetoric, which is nine parts boasting about being the coolest country in the history of the world ever (*), and one part lies (cf. George Bush’s expressed belief in being a “humble nation” opposed to nation-building).

Daniel Larison at The American Conservative misses the point almost completely by arguing that Obama’s foreign policy would be more meddlesome than that of Mr. Bush:

Certainly, the idea that it is the U.S. government’s job to promote “dignity,” which is potentially even more nebulous and manipulable a concept than democracy, can lead to an endless number of pledges of support and funding. It represents not so much a recognition that democracy promotion is inherently flawed, destabilising and counterproductive as it does a belief that Mr. Bush and company have been too limited in their willingness to intervene in other countries at every level.

The thing is, it’s not possible to “promote democracy” in another country in any non-trivial way without some kind of pseudo-colonial intervention. We’re all Westphalians at heart, so the zeal with which policy-makers in both parties rhetorically agreed to take up the white man’s burden in the late 1990s was cause for more than a little unease. In the aftermath of Iraq, a rethinking of this paradigm is clearly necessary.

No matter how many times you tell people that it’s for their own good, they stubbornly refuse to appreciate it when you declare war on them.

But “promoting dignity” doesn’t require this sort of thing. It just requires that you treat people with decency and respect, and stop patronizing them. The rest you can deal with later.

(*) Not that I disagree, but it’s rather ungentlemanly to keep banging on about it. Plus, if I had been born someplace else, I would have a different opinion, so it’s not surprising that foreigners react badly to this sort of thing. George Bush has been particularly stupid about figuring this out, with his continuous and petulant demands that people “must” do this, and “understand” that.

Like stockpiling nuclear weapons, constructing roadside billboards works best if you’re the only one doing it. Fortunately, today’s Capital Times brings good news for everyone who wants to live in a city that looks nice:

The effort to ease Madison’s 40-year ban on erecting new billboards has apparently run out of steam — although officials with Adams Outdoor Advertising said today they won’t give up.

My libertarian instinct to say “businesses can put up whatever signs they want to on their own land” is overridden by my liberal belief in the existence of public spaces, and in our right to protect those spaces. There’s no reason for large stretches of the beltline to look like an urban slum.

Billboards are obnoxious, garish, and intrusive, and the idea behind the proposed ordinance seems to be that, instead of allowing old billboards to go slowly but surely into the unlamented past of teepee motels and Burma Shave signs, owners can replace them with new billboards that add flashing lights and blinking plasma displays. Thank you, but no.

Things apparently not considered include the possibility that the presence of big shiny things deliberately designed to attract as much attention as possible could in any way distract drivers who are passing by at 65 mph; or the possibility that the primary social utility of billboards is as visual pollution, and that their continued presence is yet another tragedy of the commons.

Can the Clinton campaign and the GOP continue to insinuate that Obama is a Muslim, while simultaneously painting the former minister of his church as anti-American for his belief — shared with many pastors on the far right of the conservative movement, but relatively rare in the canons of traditional Protestant thought — that God judges nations instead of individuals, and that he visits temporal punishment upon them via the weather and/or their geopolitical enemies?