Jens 'n' Frens

Bernie Sanders said something I really liked the other day (don't get used to reading that string of words on this blog). A journalist noted that he was in a good position to win more delegates than Clinton tonight and that this would boost his chances of winning the nomination, and she asked whether it would be a big problem if he didn't. He scoffed — the following quote is from memory, so is actually a close paraphrase — "you mean if I get two delegates fewer than she does, is it a disaster? No."

Some of the reporting around the Iowa caucuses seems to suggest that it is a winner-take-all race or at least as though rank is of utmost importance. Four years ago, the Iowa GOP reported that — this is from memory, too, so is also a close paraphrase — Romney had won about a dozen votes more than Santorum. It turned out that some precinct organizer had misreported his totals, and that Santorum had actually won by about a dozen more than Romney, and some political commentators lost their minds over the fact that the Iowa GOP hadn't produced the correct result. All that had happened was that someone, most likely a volunteer, had misreported a precinct-level number and had corrected it quickly enough that even if he had misreported something important, like who had been elected to be delegates at the county convention, no harm would have been done. But because it changed the rankings in the state-wide straw poll results, people flipped out.

On the other hand, Iowa is not a huge, delegate-rich state for either party, and what matters, ultimately, is what people decide matters. Candidates who campaigned hard in Iowa and didn't go anywhere are generally going to figure out that they aren't going to be getting the nomination; if they don't figure it out, the voters and donors and volunteers in later states will figure that out and decide among the more successful candidates. The fact that a Senator from Iowa won the 1992 Democratic caucuses in a landslide didn't matter because everyone knew that this didn't indicate that he was the only viable candidate, it just meant that he was from Iowa. Generally, though, I think it's most important not to end up on the bottom in Iowa than to end up in first, and the margin matters — any interpretation that puts much weight on a rounding error ought to be ruled out.

As I write this, it looks like Cruz came out on top, with Trump and Rubio a bit below him, with a substantial drop to Carson, then Paul around 5%, and then the rest. I have read the argument that Trump needed an outright win because being a winner is a fair part of his brand, and maybe there's something to that, but what this really means is that those top three keep going and anyone below Paul will have to make an argument that Iowa wasn't a fair indicator for them and that voters in the rest of the country should give them a close look anyway. I assume it is clear to everyone including Rand Paul that Rand Paul will not get the nomination, but he might well keep making his arguments and winning a vote here or there (possibly including mine).

On the Democratic side, Clinton and Sanders seems to have tied; whoever ends up on the better side of the tie gets a nice headline tomorrow and not much more.

Eugene Volokh wrote a blog entry on accusing people you disagree with of hypocrisy based on their holding positions that seem inconsistent under the framework you attribute to them, encouraging his readers to understand that their political opponents probably have a political framework with some complexity to it. I'm paraphrasing quite heavily - I encourage you to read the beginning and skim the whole thing; the point should be clear to every 13-year-old but probably isn't to most adults, and even the other adults could use an occasional reminder. It evokes from me two related thoughts:

One of the tropes that bothers me in political discourse follows the form "this person whom I categorize in a particular political category says something which conflicts with something another person whom I categorize the same way, therefore people in that category are hypocrites." I, too, however, am often too lazy to go find the same actual person, preferably not a random crank who has never run for city council, making both conflicting statements, and certainly wonder about things I hear. I'm therefore going to make an observation that might imply that some people are hypocritical, without making the accusation about anyone in particular.

Let's put forth four statements:

God Bless America	God Bless Everyone, No Exceptions
Black Lives Matter	All Lives Matter

I agree with all four; if your response to any of the statements is that it negates or strongly calls into question your support for the other statement in the same row, but do not feel approximately the same way about the other row, I ask you to evaluate your consistency.

I certainly don't begrudge people chanting "Black Lives Matter", though I do object to implications that police violence against black people — or, construing it about as broadly as I think it gets construed, racial disparities in the administration of criminal justice in general — is the only thing anyone is ever allowed to talk about, which is at least very nearly a position some on the left have been taking recently. I do think it's a mistake for them to push back against "All Lives Matter", not only because, let's be honest, it's offensive to object to the idea that someone's life matters if he's of the wrong race, but because, let's be honest, it's very problematic for these people to object to the idea that someone's life matters if he's of the wrong race. As with the people calling for Darren Wilson not to receive due process, you are stepping very hard on the very heart of the message you are trying to convey (unless the message really is that some people should be privileged on the basis of race, and that it's just the wrong people being so privileged right now, in which case I ask you to move to Latin America or some pocket of Africa where democracy operates that way. Actually, Latin America probably isn't even as bad as it was in the middle of the twentieth century.)

I don't know the etymology of the term "White Privilege"; I hope it was intentionally sardonic, at least at first, in which case it's the sort of sardonicism I traditionally support, but it seems to be used straight an awful lot these days. If I got to choose its origins, and it wasn't sardonic, my next choice would be that somebody didn't know what "privilege" means; "Institutions aren't treating black people as well as white people; that's terrible; we should treat white people much worse, to bring them in line with the way we treat black people" is my very bottom choice. Just as with objecting to "All lives matter", this locution implies that black people are asking for special privileges; the language of rights used by our grandparents was much more compelling.