THIS MODERN WORLD

Among the documents the New York Times pried loose from the Defense Department for their story on TV military analysts are the records from a December 12, 2006 meeting some of the analysts had with Donald Rumsfeld. It includes this Rumsfeld complaint:

RUMSFELD: [Iraqi militias] know the center of gravity of the thing is here in the United States. It isn’t out there. And they’re designing their attacks to have maximum effect politically, to weaken the will of the American people. Doing a pretty good job. Hell of a lot more skillful at it than we are. Have a lot greater flexibility. They can lie. Don’t have bureaucracy. They have media committees that they operate to manipulate the media. And they do it very skillfully.

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It would be wonderful enough for Rumsfeld to say this publicly, but it’s truly beautiful that he did so to his own media committee. The only thing missing is Rumsfeld angrily denouncing Iraqis for being named Donald Rumsfeld.

(The entire hour-long briefing is available as a wav sound file or a pdf transcript. This section is on page 3, and starts at about 5:50.)

PREVIOUSLY IN WORLD-WITHOUT-IRONY NEWS: Dick Cheney tells Larry King:

CHENEY: I think there’s a special obligation on major news organizations, when they’re dealing with what can sometimes be life-and-death matters, to get it right.

Who else is attacking their domestic political opponents for failing to wear a flag pin? Lawrence of Cyberia has the extremely enjoyable answer here.

Gillian Anderson’s “Doodle Day” charity auctions end on Sunday (my contribution is here).

If John McCain was hoping to use his speech at the Republican convention in September to try to woo working class voters away from Obama, he might have hit a snag. It seems that McCain’s speech (which traditionally happens on the final night of the convention) will be happening at the same time of the NFL season opener between the Superbowl champs NY Giants and the Washington Redskins. Whoops. I wonder how many people are going to want to skip the big game just to hear an old man give a patronizing speech about war?

The US political system has been completely broken my whole life. And for my whole life, nice liberals have been telling me the reason is that there’s too much money in politics. We need campaign finance reform to get the money out of politics, and all will be well.

I’m now convinced this is completely wrong. The problem isn’t that there’s much too much money in politics. It that there’s much too little.

Politics costs money. It always has and always will. Moreover, the money spent on elections may be the least important part. There’s also media, long-term party building, organizations outside of parties like MoveOn and the NRA, and “Impeach LBJ” buttons. Even if running for office cost nothing, progressives would still be at a profound disadvantage, because officeholders would be operating in an environment created by Big Money.

So what’s the answer? I’m convinced it’s for lots and lots of people to give little amounts of money—not just to candidates, but to the whole machinery of politics.

Getting people to do that, of course, is the trick. But there’s a plausible solution. In William Greider’s book Who Will Tell the People, he suggests every US adult should get a government voucher for a certain amount of money—say, $100—that they would be free to give to any political organization they want. This could be Mike Huckabee, or the ACLU, or a local soup kitchen, or even teeny-tiny websites named after something George Orwell said.

To put this in perspective, the 2008 presidential campaign will cost over $1 billion. That sounds like too much money in politics! But if all of America’s 200 million adults allocated their $100, that would be $20 billion spent on politics every year (not just every four). From that perspective, $1 billion sounds like much too little.

I’d welcome thoughts on this at my site, because I’m going to write a big piece soon about why this is important and how it might work. In the meantime, here’s an interesting paragraph from a new piece in the Atlantic about Barack Obama’s fearsome fundraising machinery:

In a sense, Obama represents a triumph of campaign-finance reform. He has not, of course, gotten the money out of politics, as many proponents of reform may have wished, and he will likely forgo public financing if he becomes the nominee. But he has realized the reformers’ other big goal of ending the system whereby a handful of rich donors control the political process. He has done this not by limiting money but by adding much, much more of it—democratizing the system by flooding it with so many new contributors that their combined effect dilutes the old guard to the point that it scarcely poses any threat. Goren berg says he’s still often asked who the biggest fund-raisers are. He replies that it is no longer possible to tell. “Any one of them could wind up being huge,” he says, “because it no longer matters how big a check you can write; it matters how motivated you are to reach out to others.”