Lincoln Mitchell

Blog

This page contains links to recent blogs by Lincoln Mitchell

Thinking More than One Way on Egypt

The last three weeks or so in Egypt have been extraordinary and inspiring. Thousands of ordinary people joined together peacefully to demand the end to a despotic and corrupt regime. It is far from clear what will come next in Egypt, but even that uncertainty should not take away from the events the whole world has just witnessed. Understanding events in Egypt, and what they mean for the future of that country and the broader Middle East is a challenge which requires the ability to look at the issue from different angles and to consider multiple, often conflicting, ideas at the same time.

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Revolution and Democracy in Egypt

History has shown both that revolutions are rare and not the inevitable outcome of large, even massive street demonstrations, and that when most authoritarian regimes are overthrown, they are not replaced by democracies. Moreover, while some democracies, notably those in countries of Eastern Europe like Poland or the Czech Republic as well as the Baltic states arise out of events that could be described as revolutions, most democracies take a very long time to evolve. The American democratic revolution, for example, lasted roughly two centuries beginning with the American Revolution in 1776 which brought independence, followed a few years later by the creation and approval of the U.S. Constitution, and ending when apartheid in the American south was brought to an end with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 1964 and 1965. Some other democracies, Germany and Japan, for example, grew out of military defeat, occupation and enormous commitment of resources from other democratic countries.

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Why Henry Aaron is Still Overlooked

Henry Aaron turned 77 on Saturday. Somehow it seemed appropriate that Aaron’s birthday, as might be expected, was overshadowed by the centennial of Ronald Reagan’s birth. Aaron’s birthday receiving almost no attention demonstrates how the he remains bewilderingly underrated in his retirement, just as he was during his career. Aaron retired as the all time leader in home runs and RBIs and among the top three in hits. His career numbers of .305/.374/.555 were good for a career OPS+ of 155 which, while not in the same ballpark as Babe Ruth or Ted Williams, are still very good. These numbers are even more impressive because Aaron accumulated them over 23 seasons and 13,940 plate appearances. This latter number is the third most ever, but was good enough for first at the time Aaron retired. However, Aaron, who was overshadowed by Willie Mays for most of his career, is still oddly underrated by most casual students of baseball’s past.

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Remembering Reagan →

Much of what Democrats and progressives hate most about the Republican Party, including the class warfare that has shifted enormous amounts of wealth to the rich while economic conditions have gotten worse for most Americans, radical social conservatism and enormous defense budgets that both create massive debt problems and ensure an aggressive and often disastrous US foreign policy, have their origins in the Reagan years. However, Democrats understand that Reagan's enduring popularity means that Reagan can never be criticized and that the rather obvious point that the roots of many of today's problems lie in the Reagan presidency cannot be mentioned, without incurring significant political consequences.

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North Africa Through the Lens of the Color Revolutions

While civil society advocates all over the world should be happy to see Ben Ali and Mubarak depart from power, celebrating recent events in North Africa as a democratic breakthrough is premature. There is still a lot of hard work to be done. For the United States, viewed as the deus ex machina in the Color Revolutions and as the dictators’ patron in North Africa, the challenge will be to find a way to become part of this process, and to become relevant to political development in post-Mubarak Egypt and post-Ben Ali Tunisia.

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Maybe We Should Think About Benches as well as Bullpens

Constructing a good bench is in some respects more challenging than constructing a bullpen because teams need a broad collection of skills, but only have between three and six bench positions. An AL team with a full time DH and a 13 man pitching staff will only have three players on the bench, while an NL team with an 11 man pitching staff will have six players on the bench. Most teams will be somewhere in between. A good bench needs to have players who between them can play every position at about an average level, one pinch runner, one player who can get on base reasonably well, a player with power from the left side of the plate, and one with power from the right side. The challenge of gathering these players is made more difficult because the best players are usually starters so most bench players will have some of these skills, but also have significant weaknesses that prevent them from having starting roles.

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Supporting Democracy and Supporting Dictatorship in Egypt →

The massive demonstrations in Egypt against that country's authoritarian leader Hosni Mubarak have had some interesting effects on American politics as well. Some apologists for the administration of George W. Bush, notably Elliott Abrams in the pages of the Washington Post, have argued that the events in Egypt have vindicated former President Bush. Believing this assertion clearly requires a very charitable understanding of recent history. There is, of course, very little evidence to suggest that the people struggling in Egypt today are somehow influenced by either the former president's words regarding democracy or by events in Iraq. In some abstract way, Bush was right in that the Egyptian people, like all people, want their freedom, but this is a very tenuous reason for giving the former president any credit for what is happening in Egypt.

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Escaping from Our Escapism-Why We Care So Much About Baseball Prospects

There is a small minority of fans who seem to fetishize prospects, and would like their teams to essentially never play for the present, but to accumulate as many prospects or draft picks as possible. These fans are the baseball equivalent ofShel Silverstein’s Lester who used all his wished for more wishes and ended up dead surrounded by his wishes. Fans that always want to trade away players for prospects because the prospect or the draft pick might hold something better are like the guy at the party who is constantly looking over the shoulder of whoever he is talking to looking for somebody more attractive. The team that is run that way will never win anything, just as the guy at the party will always go home alone.

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The Deficit, Foreign Policy and Defunding USAID

Eliminating USAID would have a strong policy impact and all but negligible fiscal one and would not be a good idea. It is also unlikely to happen, at least in the near future. Nonetheless, this statement by many Republican members of congress should be taken seriously because it reflects two related developments in the U.S. that will have major impacts on foreign policy if they become more important.

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Misoverestimating China

China is clearly an economic power which can become the world’s major power if the U.S. continues to make mistakes and if China avoids some major economic, political and environmental crises that are on its own horizon. However, China’s rise to global supremacy is hardly an inevitability and should not be seen as one. For the U.S., therefore, it is important both not to underestimate China’s potential, but also not to overestimate it either. Recent media coverage of China seems to have clearly veered towards the latter mistake.

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The Right Tone for the State of the Union →

For President Obama, the path to victory in 2012 appeared to become more evident in recent weeks. Since last November's shellacking, Obama has done two things that could strengthen his reelection chances in 22 months. First, he has begun to successfully portray himself as charting a middle course between extremists in both parties. By forging compromises that have angered both the left of his Democratic Party and the far right of the Republican Party, Obama has contributed to this image. The lengthy list of legislative accomplishments, in spite of a confoundingly difficult political environment, to which he can point also contributes to this perception. Second, Obama has, for one of the few times since taking office, regained some of the communication skills that he demonstrated as a candidate. This was most apparent during his speech in Arizona following the tragic shooting in Tucson.

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Sarah Palin's Non-Candidacy Candidacy →

Palin, however, lives in a different political world than most politicians even within her party, primarily because she has a different set of incentives and motivations. While there is reason to believe that Palin has interest in the presidency, she does not treat it is not a quest that should be pursued rationally and systematically, as might be the case for Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and other possible Republican candidates for 2012. It seems that, for Palin, the presidency is something that she will pursue if it makes sense, but she will not permit that pursuit to distract from her broader agenda of generating as much money and attention for herself as possible.

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A New Voting System for the Hall of Fame

Every few years the Hall of Fame seeks to address some of these issues, usually by adjusting the process for electing people outside of the annual ballot through changes to the veteran’s committee and the like. However, the method for voting on the players in the annual ballot has remained largely unchanged since the early days of the Hall of Fame. The requirement that a player must get 75% of the votes cast to win induction is something of an unusual voting system which differs from the BBWAA voting system for baseball awards, which is done through rank order voting and the fan’s vote for the All Star Game which is based on a simple plurality.

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A Grim Report on Democracy

Freedom House’s finding should not come as a surprise to anybody who even casually consumes international news. Fraudulent election in Belarus, Iraq and Afghanistan being, at best, stuck in some kind of post-conflict semi-democratic morass, and the stubborn persistency of authoritarian regimes from Pyongyang to Havana all support these findings. Democracy is frequently spoken about in waves, with the third wave beginning in southern Europe in the 1970s. For the last few years, however, democracy has been in something of a trough with few advances or breakthroughs and a paucity of hope.

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Is This the Beginning? →

The shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, and several others including a nine year old girl, in Arizona is a tragedy. Jared Lee Loughner, the obviously disturbed and possibly politically motivated 22-year-old man, took the life of five people including a child and possibly made two other young children motherless. Some people lost their lives and others had their lives permanently changed. The parents of Christina-Taylor Green, the nine-year-old girl who was killed, will likely relive the horror of Saturday every day for the rest of their lives. Mark Kelly, Giffords' husband, has to explain to his two young children why their mother is not coming home tonight, or perhaps ever again.

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Passing the Steroid Buck-Major League Baseball and Hall of Fame Voting

The recent Hall of Fame balloting yielded some interesting results. First, for the first time in several years there were no false positives. The two players elected, Bert Blyleven and Roberto Alomar, were well deserving of the honor and in no way bring down the overall quality of players in the Hall of Fame. This is different than each of the last two years when the election of borderline candidates like Jim Rice and Andre Dawson troubled many because many clearly superior players, for example Tim Raines, did not get elected while other superior players, like Will Clark, who were contemporaries of these two received little or no support when they were on the ballot.

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Structural Dysfunction in Foreign Policy

It is, therefore, even more puzzling and upsetting that such a smart, large and vibrant community of foreign policy experts consistently produces such uncreative frequently, unsuccessful and often dysfunctional policies, leading to an expensive network of military bases, poorly thought out wars, diminished leverage will both allies and adversaries and failure to take meaningful leadership on issues of global import such as climate change. U.S. foreign policy is trapped by the illogic of its bureaucracy, an unwillingness to disaggregate what is desirable from what is possible and a view of the U.S. role in the world that is not only inaccurate, but so deeply held that it is rarely seriously challenged even in an otherwise very deliberative foreign policy community.

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Issa's Investigations →

In an alternate universe in which Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), the new Chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee were a rational person with his country's best interests at heart, the news that he was going toaggressively pursue investigations would be welcome. Issa is interested in investigating a range of issues including corruption in the war in Afghanistan, WikiLeaks, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Food and Drug Administration. The American people deserve to know whether or to what extent corruption has become a problem in the war in Afghanistan, how a security lapse allowed WikiLeaks to get the documents it recently leaked and just how government agencies contributed to the mortgage and economic crises. This kind of accountability in essential to the functioning of a democracy; and investigations of this kind can be an important means of ensuring that accountability.

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Joba to the Rotation-Yankees Have Nothing to Lose

If Chamberlain remains in the bullpen, the best case scenario for him will be that he emerges as the setup man pitching, at best between 70-100 innings, mostly during the seventh or eighth inning. He could also, however, be the fourth righty, and fifth pitcher overall, out of the Yankee bullpen, meaning he would pitch something like 50 innings, primarily in low leverage situations. He will most likely end up somewhere in between these two poles.

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Five Issues for 2011

It is likely that by the time 2011 winds down, the major international affairs questions dominating the news will include issues that seem distant in the first week of the year. Every year brings surprises, unforeseen wars, natural disasters and the like, but it is also possible to look with some confidence towards the New Year and identify some foreign policy issues, or questions, that are likely to become more important during the year.

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