(Me with two American diplomats and leaders of an Islmamic boarding school in Indonesia; August, 2010)

Rather than add to heap of analyses on Wikileaks, the soul of Julian Assange, privacy vs. transparency, and all the specific policy questions that have arisen — others are more qualified to comment there — I wish to react to these two sentences by Will Wilkinson:

The careerists scattered about the world in America's intelligence agencies, military, and consular offices largely operate behind a veil of secrecy executing policy which is itself largely secret. American citizens mostly have no idea what they are doing, or whether what they are doing is working out well.

It does seem like even informed, engaged Americans have no idea of the size and scope of the American diplomacy and intelligence apparatus overseas. And how should they? 22% of Americans have a passport. Some fraction of those people actually use their passport to travel overseas. And some (witheringly small) fraction of that number have needed the assistance of a U.S. consulate or embassy overseas — most likely for a quick visa/passport issue. Meanwhile, there are hardly ever reports state-side on the work of foreign service officers abroad. Add all this together, and I'm sure more than a few Americans were scratching their heads while reading the Wikileaks reports: Diplomatic cables? Political analyses? Ambassadors coming up with nicknames for foreign leaders? Who are these people and where do they come from?

This would have been me a couple years ago. I knew diddly squat about the U.S. State Department until I lost my passport in Switzerland in 2005. I went to Bern to get a new one and I had a positive impression of the Embassy there as very capable passport stampers.

Over the past year and a half, that's changed. I have enjoyed an up-close look at American public diplomacy in four countries. Partly this came from residing in another country for a period of time; partly this has come from working with a few embassies on some of their local economic development initiatives. Based on my (limited) experience, the stories we're reading about are the most salacious bits of a very large cache of documents (which itself is only a portion of the total communications of diplomats). The overwhelming majority of American diplomats' work around the world has little to do with advancing American self-interest and could better be described as charity work.

Yes, charity work. Almost entirely, diplomats engage in projects that aim to improve and enrich the local communities in which they work. They work towards democracy and economic advancement in the most general, agreeable ways. Despite being paid by the U.S. government (U.S. taxpayers), most of their work advances American self-interest only in the "peace and prosperity is better for everybody" kind of way.

A few examples. First, most embassies invite American citizens who are experts in their field to lead discussions on topics such as business, technology, education, dance, music, science, energy, and more. All the sessions are free for the local people. While working with embassies overseas, I saw one dance instructor lead classes for disabled children. I saw a New York jazz ensemble hold joint practice sessions and concerts with local musicians. I heard a green energy expert talking with local business leaders.

Second, the local staff themselves arrange on-going cultural and economic programs for locals. They'll facilitate roundtables on how to get a business off the ground. They'll organize events around the healing power of music. They put on events about higher education and how to get scholarships to attend universities abroad. Most of these programs are done in conjunction with the local staff of the embassies — citizens of the country who speak the language fluently and are employed full-time by the embassy.

Third, embassies fund an array of other programs for locals. In Cyprus, for example, the U.S. Embassy each year selects 15 high potential teenagers from the North and South side. (The country is divided.) They are flown to Denver, Colorado where a Cypriot facilitator leads a joint conversation about their respective cultures and the pursuit of peace. Even though the teens live just miles apart in Cyprus, for many it's their first time interacting with somebody on the other side of the U.N. dividing wall. It's also the first time many of them have been on an airplane.

Fourth, diplomats interface with the host government and offer assistance as requested. After the Chile earthquake, the U.S. Embassy spent millions of dollars and thousands of hours aiding the recovery.

None of this counts as traditional "foreign aid" — and yet, in many respects, it is. Of course, there will be skeptics who think American embassies are part of one grand conspiracy to spread American imperialism. There are indeed CIA agents in many embassies and there are diplomatic activities that directly support U.S. interests that may not be as warm and fuzzy as the aforementioned cultural programs. But as far as I can tell, that type of work is a small fraction of the overall activity set.

In fact, I suspect if Americans gained more familiarity with the work of foreign service officers and State Department missions overseas, many would ask, "Why are my tax dollars going to all those programs? How does it benefit me?" The answer: it doesn't, really. That's probably why you don't hear about their work too much.

One other point. As you can tell from reading some of the cables, America's diplomats are smart. They are some of the most talented people in the federal government. Although a life in the foreign service is not an easy one — all that moving around seriously narrows the pool of possible mates and friends, and the mandate to keep up appearances surely gets tiring — I have seen how it can be so rewarding. If you love travel, consider the foreign service.

Bottom Line: While headlines like "Diplomats Told to Spy at U.N." command attention, many American diplomats engage in work that could better be described as foreign aid.

Glenn Greenwald is just riffing informally, but man, he’s eloquent / persuasive in these five minutes on media bias:

In George Packer's scathing review of George W. Bush's memoir, there's this:

MoveOn.org, one of the most influential liberal organizations in American politics, tops its homepage today with this key issue: “Rescue government from corporations and lobbyists.”

Meanwhile, the United States is engaged in the longest war in U.S. history, costing billions of dollars, thousands of lives, and ironically “increasing and multiplying the terror threats we face”…and there is no end in sight.

If John McCain were president making the same decisions as Barack Obama on the war in Afghanistan — sending 30,000 more troops, backpedaling on withdrawal dates — my liberal friends would be in the streets protesting. Instead, liberals are peddling decades-old lines about corporate greed. Is the glamour of Barack Obama really so strong that they quietly accept his agenda even if they disagree?

I am not qualified to analyze Afghanistan in a serious way. I have never been there, I have never served in the military, I know little about the region. But from everything I read, it appears the counterinsurgency operation right now is a clusterfuck. If you read about the history of Afghanistan, perhaps this shouldn’t be a surprise. In George Friedman’s credible analysis, these sentences stood out: “The United States is trying to invent a national army where no nation exists, a task that assumes the primary loyalty of Afghans will shift from their clans to a national government, an unlikely proposition.”

Andrew Sullivan has been heating up the rhetoric on Obama:

This much we also know: Obama will run for re-election with far more troops in Afghanistan than Bush ever had – and a war and occupation stretching for ever into the future, with no realistic chance of success. Make no mistake: this is an imperialism of self-defense, a commitment to civilize even the least tractable culture on earth because Americans are too afraid of the consequences of withdrawal. And its deepest irony is that continuing this struggle will actually increase and multiply the terror threats we face – as it becomes once again a recruitment tool for Jihadists the world over.

Or here:

This is a war based on fear, premised on a contradiction, and doomed to carry on against reason and resources for the rest of our lives. Maybe this is why you supported Obama – to see the folly of nation-building extended indefinitely to the least promising wastelands on earth, as the US heads toward late-imperial bankruptcy. It is not a betrayal as such. But it is, in my view, a huge and metastasizing mistake.

So will Obama’s liberal base — the people he must listen to more than any other — speak up? Will they acknowledge that not actively opposing Obama’s insane escalation of the war in Afghanistan constitutes tacit support?

Totally depressing.

Meg Whitman doesn't vote for 28 years straight, spends $71 million dollars, and wins the Republican gubernatorial primary. In the U.S. Senate Republican primary, Carly Fiorina trails Tom Campbell, who I strongly supported, and so in the final weeks writes herself another $2 million check, floods the State with TV ads, and lands Sarah Palin's endorsement who robo-calls voters. Almost immediately, she takes a 14 point lead to the finish line.

In the Democratic Senate race, Barbara Boxer easily beat Mickey Kaus. No surprise there, but the fact that Kaus garnered nearly 100,000 votes on the platform "I'm a Democrat who will not be a whore to unions and will not let them bankrupt our State as they have been doing" is itself a depressing indictment of the Democratic mainstream.

There are other reasons to find a tall building and jump. The grotesque amount of personal wealth involved. The fact that Sarah Palin, a Great American Embarrassment, has sway with so many voters and remains such a fixture on the GOP stage. The fiscal recklessness of San Francisco voters who easily approved yet more bond packages for school facilities despite zero evidence from the last 20 years that the city government is at all capable of managing money.

There's more. There's Fiorina mocking global warming by calling it "the weather"; there's the New Yorker profile of Tom Campbell that spent several paragraphs on whether Campbell way back when voted against taking aid money from the neediest in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America and re-appropriating it as economic aid to Israel as was proposed, and whether that means AIPAC hates him forever; there's Steve Poizner's lockstep convictions that the way to solve California's fiscal problems is to lower taxes, lower taxes, lower taxes, because we all know that lowering taxes increases revenue!!!

There's politics for you.

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"So Ben, seriously, why do you vote? You know your vote doesn't change the outcome of the election, right? Voting is irrational," asks the economics undergraduate. Why yes, I respond, my single vote won't decide the election, but studies show that when I vote it increases the likelihood my friends and family vote, and they will likely vote the way I do because people imitate the other people they know. It's magnified in my case because of The Blog and The Twitter. When I say, "I'm voting for John Doe," many thousands of other people may vote for John Doe as a result. And dozens or hundreds or thousands of additional votes — the chances that that decides an election go way up.

Why are state and local governments so bankrupt? Public sector workers continue to enjoy pay raises, while private sector wages are stagnant. Mandel reports:

In times of crisis and economic struggle, government workers should not be getting bigger pay increases than the private sector. The domestic private sector has really been struggling for a decade, both in terms of job and pay.  But the public sector kept paying higher compensation.

The arithmetic is very clear. State and local governments can’t keep funding higher wages and better benefits for their workers, while the private sector struggles. As a wise man once said, you can’t wring blood from a stone.  And you can’t ask troubled taxpayers to pony up bigger pay gains for government workers than they are getting themselves.

A few months ago Alex Tabbarok reported:

Overall, federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,046 in 2008, the most recent data available.

That's a government worker getting paid 50% more than their private sector equivalent for doing the same job.

Bear in mind that the federal workers are paid by the private sector workers.  We can't all be insiders. 

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Paul Kedrosky notes John Mauldin's rightful anger over the Greek financing:

It now looks like almost 30% of the Greek financing will come from the IMF, rather than just a small portion. And since 40% of the IMF is funded by US taxpayers, and that debt will be JUNIOR to current bond holders (if the rumors are true) I can't tell you how outraged that makes me.

What that means is that US (and Canadian and British, etc.) tax payers will be giving money to Greece who will use a lot of it to roll over old bonds, letting European banks  and funds reduce their exposure to Greece while tax-payers all over the world who fund the IMF assume that risk. And does anyone really think that Greece will pay that debt back? IMF debt should be senior and no bank should be allowed to roll over debt and reduce their exposure to Greek debt on the back of foreign tax-payers.

I don't think I signed on for that duty. Why should my tax money go to help European banks? This is just wrong on so many levels and there is nothing seemingly we can do.

The elitism / populism issue is one of the richest themes right now in American politics.

1. David Brooks on Charlie Rose a few days ago touched on it, at around minute 10:14. Until 1964 college educated and non-college educated families were basically the same: voting rates were the same, divorce rates were the same, volunteer rates the same. That's changed. Now, college educated couples have half the divorce rates of high school graduate couples. College educated people trust government more. So in terms of lifestyle and social attitudes the differences are greater.

The economics differ too — educated folks make a lot more money now than before because there's a premium paid to those who can use their head over hands — but the promise of American democracy, according to Micky Kaus, was never economic equality but rather social equality. Douthat: "It's social equality, defined less by money than by manners and mores, that we're in danger of losing – social equality that's undercut both by the struggles of the working class and by the worship of success that defines too much of elite life." To be sure, the thickness of your wallet affects manners and mores.

Either way, America today can be sliced into two parts: the vast majority of citizens with high school diplomas or a little bit more, and then the 28% of the people who have bachelor's degrees. These two groups self-segregate in where they choose to live, who they choose to marry, what kind of media they consume, and how they relate to society's institutions. To enter either world from the other side is becoming an increasingly foreign experience.

2. Brooks says Obama needs to get out more and interact with "the people." (By that he means the non-coastal folks.) I'm never understood how this is supposed to happen, especially since it is a massive ordeal anytime the President physically travels somewhere. Does a two hour staged visit to a small town in South Dakota give him insight he doesn't otherwise have about their state of mind?

3. Michael Kinsley, who now writes for The Atlantic, writes a post in support of Jacob Weisberg's column blaming the country's problems on the "childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large." Kinsley says "the people" really are dumb and ignorant, and to have faith in their "bedrock of common sense" — as Charles Krauthammer would like — is actually more condescending than just calling a spade a spade. Arnold Kling analyzes the exchange.

Someone who works closely with Michelle Obama recently told me that Michelle is "a huge bitch."

In Lee Siegel's column about Elizabeth and John Edwards, which is stellar, he notes, "No matter how sophisticated we seem to get about social stereotypes, we fall right back into them as soon as their pleasure beckons. Elizabeth Edwards was a 'saint.' Now she’s a monstrous bitch. That’s how high-status women have been perceived for as long as anyone can remember."

Elizabeth Edwards is back in the headlines thanks to a new book about the 2008 presidential campaign where there's a chapter devoted to the Edwards' marriage. She comes off as…a monstrous bitch:

At one point during the 2004 presidential race, she “snarled” at the people who were scheduling her appearances: “Why the fuck do you think I’d want to go sit outside a Wal-Mart and hand out leaflets?”

To which Siegel offers the logical reply: Well, why the fuck would she?

Halperin and Heilemann [the authors] are veteran political reporters. Surely they know that such language and tantrums are as common in political campaigns as their opposite: sheer, calculated niceness.

Siegel says he doesn't defend Elizabeth's outbursts, but it's "appalling to tear her out of her context and turn on her now because we idealized her before."

What's more, deconstructing the dynamics of a relationship we have no part of is a fool's errand:

A friend of mine once said that the only two people who know what’s going on between a man and a woman are the man and the woman themselves. He was half right. The man and the woman—or man and man, woman and woman; it’s all the same—are the last to know. The idea that we can precisely fathom people’s emotions and motives is absurd. We can barely comprehend our own. Maybe pretending that we understand what makes our political figures tick is how we console ourselves for not understanding our politics at all.

California is the largest and most diverse state in America. If it were its own country, California would be in the G8. It is also the most important state: for the last 20 years, California has been home to groundbreaking innovation in semiconductors, the internet, and military manufacturing, and it is even more dominant in present-day innovation around biotech and cleantech.

But California is in trouble.

Over the past several months I spent 40 hours learning about the fiscal disaster that is Sacramento. I also talked to experts about this year's governor's race. Arnold Schwarzenegger is being termed out of office, and there are three Republican candidates and one Democratic candidate vying to take office to implement policies that will put the State back on the road to fiscal recovery.

I wrote a 3,500 word analysis of the governor's race for the California Recorder. If you are a California voter or interested in California politics, please read the whole thing.

I begin the piece by comparing Arnold Schwarzenegger to Barack Obama: two charismatic leaders who promised transformational change.

After electing a would-be transformational governor and president since mugged by reality, will chastened California voters seek a more tactical administrator? Can a bland policy wonk defeat dynamic, self-funded outsiders who talk about "leadership" and conducting "top down reviews" of government? Can a commensurate insider who's first a realist beat optimistic outsiders who "reject false choices" and think they can re-make a culture?

Then I recount a panel I attended on California's future:

The CEOs alternated in sounding alarm over the Golden State's dimming star. Ed Colligan, the former CEO of Palm, roused the crowd when he declared the state health care program and failing K-12 schools unacceptable. He was quick to add, however, that Silicon Valley is the "greatest place in the world for entrepreneurs and innovation" and went on to praise the region's weather, culture, and people. It is the California way when talking about its politics: with despair acknowledge the depth of darkness the State finds itself in, but conclude with near-delusional self-confidence that, gosh darn it, we're California, of course things will work out. The California Dream is a highly potent dose of Americanism, and nothing stirs a local audience more than playing directly to the bi-polar hot points which make up this shared imagination.

Then I introduce Tom Campbell, the best candidate in the race, but one whose academic approach may not inspire audiences:

Tom Campbell was the last of the four to speak. He spoke softly and deliberately. He carefully offered three specific policy prescriptions on health care, stressing the benefits of inter-state competition of insurers, anti-trust reform, and litigation reform. (He asked the audience to download his 15 page policy paper.) On immigration, he described the argument for more H-1B visas, and the counterargument. On education, he proposed vouchers for the most disadvantaged and vowed to exempt community college grants from cuts.

It was an impressive breakdown of policy. Absent were emotional pyrotechnics. Campbell served up no red meat. He never once denounced the system in sweeping terms, nor did he anchor his ideas in appeals of hope and optimism. He garnered only polite applause.

I go on to review Campbell's background and policy views. He is a pro-choice, pro-gay marriage fiscal conservative who supports a tax increase who's running in the Republican primary:

Suffice to say, Campbell is an unorthodox Republican with immense political courage. And those are just his economic views. He also supports gay marriage, when 82% of Republicans in the state oppose it, and the right to have an abortion. He and Andrew Sullivan would make good bedmates. Sullivan is a conservative in the wilderness and subtitles his blog "Of No Party or Clique."

Lest Campbell's ideas seem too random, here's one way to cohere them: The Economist. It is Campbell's favorite magazine — which he reads, along with the state's major newspapers, each morning on his Kindle — and his views approximate almost perfectly with the British editors' in charge.

His two opponents in the GOP primary are self-funded outsiders who each have their own serious problems. From Steve Poizner's delusional fiscal proposals, to Meg Whitman's relentless opportunism.

But can Tom Campbell win?

What makes Campbell's campaign so improbable is not just that he lacks personal wealth — that barrier's been surmounted in the past — but that he is positioning himself as a truth teller when there's little evidence truth telling is successful in politics…

Most savvy politicians hold an ends-justifies-the-means attitude toward campaigning. Economically literate Democrats say to themselves: I'll implement the right policies once in office, but first I need to get in office, and doing that requires appeasing unions with protectionist talk. When Obama the candidate dished populist rhetoric that worried America's trading partners, his economic advisor Austan Goolsbee notoriously quipped that Obama was playing domestic politics and that NAFTA was going to be fine. There wasn't a microphone around Goolsbee after that.

Campbell, by contrast, says exactly what he thinks on third rail issues. He's not hedging on politically risky positions. He's not obscuring the seriousness of the budget situation. Campbell's bet is that Californians will take the time to engage his ideas thoughtfully. They may not agree with him but at least they'll respect his courage, the thinking goes. If there were ever a time this strategy might work it would be now: a moment of a peril and one where 80% of Californians say the state is on the wrong track.

The bottom line:

The cold, hard bottom line is that California state government does not need "leadership" as it is often thought of. California does not need big personalities. We've seen how they fare. California does not need outsiders who think they can transform the most complex state in the union, transcend divisiveness, re-make a culture, and balance the budget by eradicating government waste. It needs, instead, someone who can negotiate among entrenched interest groups, a task with no analog in the private sector, and spend four years focused on cleaning up the State's balance sheet.