At one level, this film is something of a “bromance”; the relationship of Clinton and Blair is a mix of genuine affection and political calculation, on both sides. But, at least to me, the film is really about Blair, and an attempt to hint at an answer to the great mystery of his time in office: why did a center-left progressive British politician drag his country – and the world – into a disastrous war initiated by a bunch of lunatics from the American hard right? Why did Blair go bad?

There are, as is almost inevitable in such a film, a few clunky attempts to simplify the narrative to squeeze into a reasonable running time. Australian viewers might be particularly amused to learn, for instance, that Blair’s centrist political style emerged immediately after a study trip to the United States in 1992, for instance. But in its depiction of Blair’s relationship with a good president, the film offers some great pointers to how things might have gone so wrong with George W. Bush. And the conclusion features some of the most effective use of archive footage in a feature film since Good Night, and Good Luck.

But (if you’ll pardon the geek analogy) I couldn’t help feeling a little of the same frustration I felt watching Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. Not to compare, for a moment, the script, performances, and direction of the two – Sheen is again good as Blair, as is Quaid as Bill Clinton; perhaps the most noticeable turn, however, is Hope Davis as a very convincing Hillary Clinton. However, in that both stories are primarily about well-intentioned leaders who end up joining the dark side, both films have a “mid-point” feel to them – hints of how things might go wrong are all very well, but the real guts of the story is still to come.

All that said, it was an entertaining evening out for a political junkie – immensely better than Hawke, for instance – and we can only hope that Morgan will revisit his favourite character one more time.

Kevin Rudd is real too. He really is a wonky, nerdy bureaucrat. Perish the thought that we would want to vote for someone who knew something about policy?

But why is it assumed that the persona doesn’t mask something else? Could Tony Abbott be the one spinning a web of symbolism? Wasn’t George W. Bush the candidate we’d rather have a beer with?

[Rhetorical questions in the mode of KRudd.]

Now, I haven’t read Tony’s tome. Be interested to hear from anyone who has. But, Geoffrey Barker has, and he wrote this in the Fin Review today:

… we will have entered the age of bogan politics for a bogan nation: vulgar, simplistic, and focused on aggression, and extremist and alarmist claims. It will be politics to appeal to a dumbed-down electorate, attracted to tattoos and leaders who wear Speedos and fluorescent Lycra cycling outfits.

Yet behind his populist and athletic facade, Abbott is a throne-and-altar conservative with a deeply pessimistic view of human nature and its capacity for improvement. His manifesto, Battlelines, stresses how hard it is for humans to reconcile carnal appetites with their spiritual yearnings, and he acknowledges that dilemma in his life.

Hence, despite Abbott’s “trust the people” populism, he stresses the importance of the secular authority of the monarchy or the church to control frail humanity. When he removes the public mask, the commitments to monarch and pope define the real Abbott. They do not sit easily with his bogan politics, but that does not appear to worry him.

It would appear that the Nobel committee at least partially picked Obama for his renewed faith in public discourse to bring about peace and change in the world. Tim Rutten argues in the Los Angeles Times that the award was rightly given to the President for “words” rather than “deeds.” I would further argue the prize most appropriately went to Obama for finding a midway through Weber’s predicament in the above passage. Obama’s rhetoric has sought to enchant the political realm through sublime values that no human being can live without—for example, through the trope of “hope”. At the same time, these are values that are grounded in direct and personal human relations, or in abductive intersubjectivity rather than deductive, non-contextual assertion. There is much to critique in Obama’s administration, but it has at least evidenced an empirical concern for active listening and diplomacy as consequential in politics.

I think that’s a very consequential set of observations. It also makes me wonder if there’s not a continuity between Bush and Obama’s administration (beyond the obvious maintenance of core aspects of the US’ war-imperial machine, which is at the heart of the left objection to his acceptance of the award). Thinking back to the infamous comments from a Bush administration official about remaking reality, it strikes me that both administrations are fundamentally postmodern in their use of rhetorical discourse to reshape facts. That’s about as far as you can get from Weber’s modern government as “administration of things”.

There’s a paradox here. On one hand, it’s very US-centric – as if the US really were the ‘leader of the free world’. On the other, it’s most unlikely to do the President any domestic good.

Update: Maria explains at Crooked Timber:

But this isn’t about domestic politics, or about what he’s done yet. President Obama has changed how the world feels about America. He’s lifted the planet’s mood. This guy is global Prozac.

Lordy. I think a lot of people in the world would quite like America not to think it was the centre of it. Perhaps, in particular, people in those countries currently occupied by US troops. I thought Crooked Timber was supposed to be some sort of high falutin’ academic blog.

Update: Here’s the Nobel Committee press release; Michael Tomasky asks whether Obama should accept the award.

Update: Glenn Greenwald is worth reading, and has a number of interesting links.

Elsewhere: Legal Eagle.

The former British prime minister, Tony Blair, and the Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, were also honoured at the ceremony.

So, whaddaya reckon?

*back to holiday lurking mode*

The issue is not going to go away, regardless of the short-term success or failure of attempts to reach a global agreement to stabilise the climate. The more clearly the political right is identified with the anti-science side of this debate, the harder it will be to salvage any of its existing institutions.

Kevin Rudd’s rhetoric in 2007 recognised that Australian politics deals particularly badly with long term issues. Our statist political culture means that interest groups of all kinds seek to cut deals for whatever their short term interests require, and the veneer of “ideas” – particularly neo-liberal ones – is particularly thin, hardly sufficing to pave over the cracks of corporate self-interest. Rudd, of course, has hardly fulfilled the hopes he himself aroused. But surely it’s worth wondering what long term costs the right will bear after the time passes when denialism loses any patina of plausibility.

Anyway, this might be an opportune time to link to a post from Possum – wherein he has crunched some polling data comparing the first year of Howard’s first term with the first year of Kevin Rudd’s. As is his wont, Possum has provided some nifty graphs. A comparison of their respective performances is worth filing away next time the “one term” stuff pops up in the media.

But perhaps, although he presumably wouldn’t welcome the Bishop meltdown, Malcolm Turnbull isn’t too worried about the level of triviality in the great economic management debate. The budget deficit yardstick went missing yesterday (that was so… last week) and Turnbull might not like to be reminded of his inconsistency and constant contradiction – whatever happened to that “economic narrative” we apparently were awaiting from him? Anyway, Malcolm Turnbull doesn’t think there’s much of a global financial crisis any more – because he hasn’t heard of any “big events”. Presumably events only happen if they’re on the front page of Australian newspapers. He might like to check out the leading indicators of the credit crisis which suggest we’re not exactly back to normality. But so parochial are our political leaders and media that debates about the restructuring of global finance and the dangerous leadership interregnum in the United States are apparently off our radar.

But there’s another disconnect happening in the economic sphere too. The 7 30 Report last night made much of the “grim summer of 2008″. Yet pundits were somewhat taken aback that retail spending actually increased in October. What could this mean? Here we need to remember one of the big lessons from the 2007 election campaign – political traction is gained through focusing on the lived economy rather than the sorts of numbers that excite economists. There’s a dialectic at work of bits and pieces of news and impressions being filtered through personal experience and anecdote. Most folks are also not going to be crying tears about big losses by bankers. If employment holds up reasonably, and the Rudd government can continue to shape public perceptions that times are difficult but everything that can be done is being done, confidence in the consumer sector may be more resilient than anticipated. Interest rates led stimulus of $600 a month over three months for those with a 300k mortgage won’t hurt, and neither will tax cuts and the Christmas fiscal package.

Current events are underlining the fact that economies rely on the creation of shared realities and that the “laws” of economic behaviour are shaped and varied through perception and sentiment. The Rudd government will be hoping that the retail figures are also an index of how those perceptions are being constructed among voters and consumers in Australia now.

The first thing to note is that the NASA budget is essentially lost in the overall budget noise, and Obama has already promised extra funding. So it’s unlikely that the space program is going to go away. But it’s at a rather delicate stage. One of the few things that George W. Bush got right (and Al Gore got mostly wrong, incidentally) was the general thrust of the US human spaceflight program. The Space Shuttle failed to achieve its (overambitious and constantly stretched) goals as a cheap, reusable, and safe launch vehicle. The International Space Station has showed that low earth orbit is not a particularly useful place to put humans for months on end. And multi-national government-funded multi-decade engineering projects, good diplomacy as they might be, are prone to add extra cost and complication.

So back in 2004, in the wake of the Columbia crash, Dubya announced the Vision for Space Exploration. This proposed to finish off the Space Station by 2010, and retire the shuttle once that was complete. To replace it, a new family of spacecraft were to be built more along the lines of the Apollo capsules, first as a replacement bus to the Space Station, then to the Moon, where a series of long-duration missions and ultimately a station would be constructed, and then on to Mars with the experience gained some time in the 2020s or so.

There are two problems with this plan, one short-term logistical one, another more fundamental. The short-term problem is that it will leave the US without a (public) capability to reach the Space Station until at 2013 or so. That would leave the Space Station dependent on the continued availability of Russian Soyuz rockets. So there are a number of people and organizations advocating that the Space Shuttle’s life be extended until the replacement capsules come online. However, there are forces pushing back the other way; the shuttle remains a high-risk launch vehicle, it will be very expensive to crank up the supply chain to keep a 30-year-old vehicle flying, and there’s a belief that the best way to ensure that the Shuttle’s replacement actually flies on time is to concentrate the mind by killing the shuttle program.

The longer-term issue is that there a lot of people who aren’t terribly excited by the prospect of spending years base-building on the moon. There’s a view that the Moon isn’t a high priority, either as a scientific destination or as a testbed for further afield. The moon appears to be a largely geologically dead world with a uniform crust, little in the way of useful resources (notably accessible water) and awful conditions. It’s also, arguably, less like Mars (pretty much seen as the long-term goal by all with an interest in human spaceflight) than parts of Earth are. So there are groups – notably the Planetary Society – arguing that going back to the moon is actually a fairly low priority, and should be a priority only if it can be clearly demonstrated to help with missions to places like near-Earth asteroids. In addition, uncrewed missions to assist preparing for crewed Mars mission, such as a mission to retrieve rocks from Mars and bring them back to Earth, should be a high priority.

There are contrary views, both on the Shuttle retirement and on the steps beyond it. As this article in The Space Review mentions, here’s a position paper advocating strongly for the Shuttle to be kept running until the new-generation launcher can be finished. Their argument – and it’s got some logic behind it – is that it would be lunacy to reduce access to the Space Station now that the damn thing is finally built.

On top of that, there’s the uncrewed scientific program, worthy of a post in itself. Bush thoroughly neglected that side of things; a more science-oriented President Obama will probably look to revive that. And then there’s the possibility that SpaceX, the new startup space launch company mentioned here a couple of times, might have their crew vehicle ready by 2011 or 2012.

In any case, this is another chance for Obama, if he’s wise, to help push the USA out of its rut.

But, anyway, the lame duck President made his ritual obeisance to the virtues of American leadership and the glories of the free market. One imagines there’s some personal and political imperative there, but the reality of his governance is better disclosed in the fate of the TARP funds which Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was given by Congress – it appears that crony capitalism and socialism for the rich is the name of the game according to American blogs such as naked capitalism, Obsidian Wings, firedoglake and naked capitalism again.

But Bush will soon be fading into history, and Barack Obama sensibly declined to act at the summit without executive authority, so what emerged from the G20 is more in the nature of a directions statement for the way forward, as The Big Picture foresaw:

Hopefully, a long term agenda for regulatory cooperation and communication can be set with the next meeting’s agenda decided upon. Far better to talk then not, but no real decisions will come out of this meeting. There will be gnashing of teeth and venting of rage at the mess that excess securitization has created, and the international regulation of and accounting for such derivatives will probably be a focus.

Planet Money looks at what transpired, and links to the text of the communique here. SocProf is right, in my judgement, that we’re seeing the eclipse of the Washington consensus, but the shape of what will replace it is still a work in progress, and some yardsticks to measure the work of the G20 have been provided by the Guardian. Bretton Woods itself was the culmination of some years of intellectual work and economic diplomacy, and if there is to emerge something we might call Bretton Woods II, it isn’t a bad thing that the interregnum in the US presidency implies that decisions won’t be made on the run.

In forming a judgement on what does emerge, I think we as global citizens could do worse than to keep in mind the choice posed by one of FDR’s brains trust in 1932, Adolf Berle:

Between a political organization of society and an economic organization of society, which will be the dominant form?

Elsewhere: Peter Martin has helpfully posted a link to John Quiggin‘s presentation on how the global financial crisis transpired, which should provide some necessary context.