The Backchannel

There was really quite a stunning development in the Senate this afternoon. Schumer went to the floor to call for new elections in Israel, calling Netanyahu “an obstacle to peace” and going on to say he is pursuing “dangerous and inflammatory policies that test existing standards for assistance.” If Netanyahu remains in power after the war, the U.S. should “play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy by using our leverage to change the present course.”

These words require some context and deconstruction.

I just noticed a write up on Trump stumbling into saying there’s lots you can do in terms of cutting Social Security and Medicare. The Biden campaign and other Democrats were promptly all over those comments, as you’d expect. But it raises a point that is too little discussed in the campaign dialog. Trump has two big advantages right now. The first is simply that he’s not Joe Biden and Biden’s approval has been low since the fall of 2021. The other is a general sense that things were better before the pandemic. You might say, wait, the pandemic happened on his watch and the worst of it took place during his presidency. But that’s not really the public memory. In any case, those are his two big advantages. And they could get him elected.

What this has tended to obscure, however, is that politically he is very, very rusty. Even in Trumpian terms his speeches these days are disjointed, weird, discordant. And again — not by the standard of who you might want within a mile of the Oval Office. I mean even in terms of Trumpian politics. He’s not the same.

I find it very hard to make sense of what the likely outcomes are. But I wanted to point your attention to a series of developments in the Biden-Netanyahu relationship and the U.S.-Israel relationship that could escalate dramatically very soon. First there’s this article in Haartez which says the U.S. might suspend the sale of offensive weaponry to Israel by later this month. (Unfortunately the piece is paywalled.) The tripwire is a national security memorandum Biden signed last month which gives Israel until March 25th to provide the U.S. with written assurances that weapons sales from the U.S. will only be used in accord with international law and that it will pledge to facilitate and not obstruct aid deliveries into Gaza.

That’s the calendar tripwire.

With a day’s reflection my thoughts on last night’s State of the Union are pretty similar to what they were right afterwards. As I was telling my sons this morning, there are all sorts of objective standards about what counts as a good speech, good communication, good organization, etc. But those aren’t usually that relevant in a political context. It’s better to be a good public speaker than not, of course. But what’s good or not good really only has any meaning in a specific political context and as it relates to trying to achieve a certain goal.

No, really. That’s pretty much what the Alabama legislature just did with a new law, hastily passed and now signed by the state’s governor.

As you know, Alabama created a firestorm last month when the state’s Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos in IVF clinics are the legal equivalent of minor children. This ruling sent shockwaves through the United States, pushed a new dimension of the Dobbs/abortion debate to the top of the national election debate and temporarily shuttered the state’s IVF fertility clinics. In response Alabama has now passed a law which appears to have created enough legal assurance to allow the state’s clinics to reopen. This is not just a win for reproductive rights in the state. Numerous couples had their ongoing fertility treatment halted by the ruling.

But as in-state critics have made clear, the new legislation is at best a band-aid rather than a solution.

Over the years I’ve written about structural problems in the digital news industry, often driven by the growth of platform monopolies and other issues. Just in the last few months and even in the last few weeks we’ve seen a new round of publications shuttering or pivoting to publication zombiehood. So why is this happening? Why is your favorite news site suddenly going under? If you’re listening you’ve probably heard the story in general. But I wanted to share some numbers with you that I think will make it much more concrete.

(I think we can add something to the equation here because for a mix of business and personality reasons, we’re willing to share very granular dollar figures that very, very few other publications are willing to share.)

This chart which I just made shows the exact dollar amounts TPM brought in over the previous eight years through programmatic or “third party” advertising. As I think is pretty clear, if this is your business, you’re dead. You don’t have a business.

Over the weekend, Democrats or Dem-adjacent persons watching polling of the 2024 presidential election got knocked over the head with a metaphorical anvil: a batch of polls collectively showing Joe Biden 2 to 4 points behind Donald Trump. I’ve gotten a lot of questions about these polls and polling generally, ranging from the technical, to the what does it mean, to please talk me off the ledge. So I wanted to try to address them here.

First: Are these polls accurate? In an age when no one answers their cell phones let alone landlines, how do we know whether these polls are representative. Who has a landline? etc.

This is a complicated question. Without getting into deep technical details, yes, the pollsters definitely get that landlines are old news and most people don’t even answer unknown numbers on their cell phones. The same applies to text requests for political surveys. Response rates — or, rather, non-response rates — are awful. But pollsters know all of that and they’ve come up with pretty smart ways to deal with it. Without getting too far into the weeds, it comes down to increasingly sophisticated ways of modeling the electorate, using those models to weight the results, and in so doing backing out a representative sample from the data.

Living in 2024, one of the big questions we have to ask ourselves is: why aren’t there flying cars? And where’s our colony on Mars? If I wanted to break the moment of levity I could ask: why do people still die of cancer? There’s actually a whole debate about whether and why the pace of invention — or, relatedly, scientific breakthroughs — has slowed compared to the first half of the 20^th century. But let me not get ahead of myself. 

These questions occurred me because I’ve been working on a project that requires some research on family history. And yesterday as I was putting my iPhone in a locker at my gym, this occurred to me: how would I explain the iPhone to my mother, who died in 1981?

When I thought of this I was thinking about photos and social media and a third, really big thing that is made up of many other, little things — not huge individually but vast and ubiquitous taken together — that we do with this small device. What analogues would I use to explain it?

In my post yesterday, I said Israel’s campaign in Gaza has reached a point of diminishing returns, even on its own terms, and that the U.S. needs to help Israel, even in spite of itself or at least in spite of the current government, to bring it to a halt. A friend of mine got in touch with me and asked basically, how precisely can the U.S. do that? He meant this not in a challenging way but literally, what power does the U.S. have to make this happen? This led to an interchange that helped me think through why the U.S. has been doing what it has been doing, what it can do and what it can’t.

First, why is the U.S. sending arms and munitions to Israel at all? Israel has an incredibly powerful military and huge stockpiles of weapons of all sorts. Set aside the policy or moral questions. Why is it even necessary? At the very beginning of the conflict the U.S. provided fulsome support and arms in part simply to signal support, that the U.S. was backing Israel to the hilt after October 7th. But beneath that messaging and symbolism there was something much more concrete.

Mitch McConnell is one of those perhaps historic figures for whom the greatness of his skill and impact are matched only in inverse by the malignity of his impact on our politics. To put it more brashly, McConnell was great at doing political evil. There is now a kind of rearguard effort to remake McConnell as an institutionalist, a last vestige of the pre-Trumpian GOP. And on that last point, being a vestige, there’s some truth. On being an institutionalist, not at all.

Mitch McConnell’s great legacy is the thorough institutionalization of minority rule in U.S. politics, especially at the federal level. The first and most obvious part of that is that McConnell, more than anyone else, is the man who broke the United States Senate, largely by domesticating the filibuster. No more a wild bull kept out in the stockade for ugly moments but now living within the household, almost a family member, though no less dangerous and wild.