Friday Morning Politics (American Style)

I'd been meaning to link to Matt Yglesias's post a few days ago about executive power, simply to note that he identifies one of the more pressing flaws in the American system, the fixed four-year presidential term (for which even impeachment is no longer a practical limit). If Bush has taught us nothing else, he's taught us that democracy requires a recall function, ideally one that can be initiated by the people directly without the intervention of the legislature. (Not that he hasn't taught us other things; for instance, it's also quite clear that the Electoral College needs to be scrapped altogether.) I propose a Constitutional Convention, next Friday in the Lit grad student lounge.

Matt is also scrapping a bit with Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolutions over his "Angry Ape" theory of electoral politics, and I think Matt gets this absolutely right too, not that the Clinton camp will notice:

Yesterday, Tyler Cowen revealed his Angry Ape Theory of American politics: "Under this theory foreign policy disasters, no matter who caused them, will help the Republican candidate. We will demand An Angrier Ape." That theory may or may not be correct, but the last thing you need is for Democratic political strategy to be framed by people who think it's correct. That just guarantees loss. You need to find people who think they can persuade the public that an Angry Ape isn't the way to go and let those people have a crack at it.

Elsewhere in Left Blogistan, Kevin Drum links to The Nation's investigation into the source of all those right-wing chain-emails. My family knows me well enough not to send these along, so I've never really gotten them, except for the few months after 9/11 when they briefly went mainstream—but everyone I've ever seen has been painfully, painfully stupid.