Commentary Magazine

Posts For: August 15, 2012

Can Obama Admit Iran Diplomacy Failed?

| @tobincommentary 08.15.2012 - 5:15 PM

Earlier this week White House spokesman Jay Carney reiterated the administration’s mantra about Iran, saying there was still “time and space” for a diplomatic solution to be found to resolve the impasse over its nuclear threat. While no one, not even the president’s loyalists actually believe there is even the slightest hope for diplomacy or sanctions to work, the White House is publicly clinging to this position since the alternative is unthinkable. By that I don’t refer to how unthinkable it would be for the future of the world for the ayatollahs to get their hands on a nuclear weapon. From the point of view of the administration, what is truly unthinkable is the prospect of being forced to admit that it has been wrong all along about Iran and must change course in order to avoid a catastrophe.

The spectacle of the administration standing by its determination to keep talking with Iran long after Tehran effectively scuttled the P5+1 nuclear talks has to be discouraging to Israel’s government and can, in no small measure, be the reason why the Jewish state seems to be bubbling over with speculation about an attack on Iran sometime before the U.S. presidential election. With even U.S. intelligence now finally admitting that Iran is working on a bomb and with the Islamist regime making it clear it has no interest in agreeing to a compromise agreement on the issue, those trusted with defending Israel’s existence may be rapidly coming to the conclusion that they have no alternative but to strike soon before it is too late. Though foreign policy realists and other Israel critics are denouncing the Israeli threats, the only way to convince Jerusalem to stand down and follow America’s lead is for President Obama to start speaking honestly about the failure of his belated attempt to persuade Iran to give up its nuclear ambition. In the absence of such honesty, there is little reason for Prime Minister Netanyahu to go on waiting until the danger cannot be averted.

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Media Decry Attacks From “Both Sides”

| @alanagoodman 08.15.2012 - 4:30 PM

You have a Democratic campaign that’s painting its opponent as a felon, a tax-dodger, a dog-abuser, and a killer who will bring back slavery. On the other side, you have a Republican campaign that’s responding to these attacks as “hateful” and “inappropriate.” The media spin? Both sides need to tone down the “toxic rhetoric”:

“You thought last week was bad? Just when you thought last week’s third grade insults were as low as the campaign could go here, here we go again, the campaign has gotten even uglier,” MSNBC’s Chuck Todd said Wednesday. “It’s not faux outrage, it’s real outrage. Over the last 24 hours, the attacks from both sides have reached a new level of vitriol.”

CNN’s Soledad O’Brien said the campaigns struck a new note of negativity.

“Romney and Obama campaigns going on the offensive at the same time? What that means is nasty rhetoric, really nastier than ever,” she said this morning.

Seriously? Romney has basically stuck to attacks on Obama’s policy, it’s the Obama campaign that’s gone into the gutter. In fact, the only “negative” remarks from the Romney campaign cited in the Politico story were made in response to Democratic smears. Yes, Reince Priebus called Reid a liar — in response to Reid’s baseless accusations that Romney didn’t pay taxes for 10 years. The Washington Post gave Reid’s claim four Pinnochios, and Politifact rated it as “Pants on Fire.” Should they be criticized for toxic rhetoric as well?

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Will the Left Pause After DC Shooting?

| @tobincommentary 08.15.2012 - 3:30 PM

After virtually every shooting attack in which a gunman took the lives of innocents in this country, the instinct of the mainstream media and the liberal chattering classes has always been to look for a reason to blame conservatives. Whether it was the attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords or the Aurora, Colorado movie theater tragedy, the initial assumption by many has been that the violence was the result of incitement or direct involvement by members of the Tea Party movement or other conservative groups. In each instance, the accusations or insinuations have had to be quickly, though often grudgingly, withdrawn when the shooter turned out to be either mentally deranged or devoid of political intent. That leaves us wondering what those who have been so quick to use these tragedies as political soapboxes to denounce conservatives or to promote liberal patent nostrums will say after today’s incident in Washington.

Only the heroism of a security guard who was wounded prevented the shooting attack at the Family Research Council, a Washington think tank devoted to promoting social conservatism, from turning into a massacre. The shooter who barged into the group’s headquarters expressed disagreement with their policies and began shooting. Fortunately, the guard was able to disarm the perpetrator before he could do more harm. His avowal to police that he was there to oppose the FRC’s stands makes it clear that this is an open and shut case of domestic terrorism. The fact that he was carrying a bag from a Chick-fil-A restaurant — the chain that has come under intense fire from left-wingers because of its founder’s public opposition to gay marriage — should cause those who have been working overtime to demonize conservatives to do the same sort of soul-searching liberals ask the right to perform because of gun violence.

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Romney Making Inroads with Youth Vote?

| @alanagoodman 08.15.2012 - 2:10 PM

That’s according to the latest Zogby poll, which found Romney topping 40 percent with young voters for the first time since the race began. Meanwhile, Obama’s youth support still lags far behind 2008-levels. The Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard reports:

For the first time since he began running for president, Republican Mitt Romney has the support of over 40 percent of America’s youth vote, a troubling sign for President Obama who built his 2008 victory with the overwhelming support of younger, idealistic voters. …

In his latest poll, Obama receives just 49 percent of the youth vote when pitted against Romney, who received 41 percent. In another question, the independent candidacy of Gary Johnson is included, and here Obama wins 50 percent, Romney 38 percent and Johnson 5 percent.

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Democrats’ Convention of Hypocrisy

| @tobincommentary 08.15.2012 - 1:50 PM

The “hope and change” mantra that lifted Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008 raised unrealistic assumptions about his administration that were bound to be debunked after a few years in office. That’s why his re-election campaign strategy is based on demonizing his opponents rather than running on a record of all the “change” he effected. Yet there are some vestiges of the messianic tone of his 2008 run that remain, and one of them is a ban on corporate sponsors at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. The ban is a holdover from the rhetoric of four years ago that asserted the Obama candidacy would bring an end to the way lobbyists and big business attempt to influence politics. This was a joke even four years ago as the Democrat raked in record contributions from Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street titans and corporate giants. But the 2012 convention in Charlotte will be free of such sponsors, allowing the Democrats to claim they are faithful to their ideals.

However, as the New York Times reports today, the leading local booster and organizer of the Charlotte convention just happens to be the CEO of the nation’s largest energy company, which has been a major beneficiary of the president’s trillion-dollar stimulus boondoggle. Duke Energy CEO James E. Rogers claims that he and his company are going all out to help the Democratic jamboree as a matter of local pride. But the company’s costly contributions to the event have raised serious issues about the way it stands to benefit from Obama’s policies, making a mockery of the Democrats’ pose as the opponents of corporate influence. Rather than a tribute to the party’s stand against influence peddling, the lack of other corporate sponsors merely illustrates President Obama’s ongoing hypocrisy about big business and ethics.

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Ignored GOP “Strategists” Vent to Media

| @alanagoodman 08.15.2012 - 1:05 PM

The Wall Street Journal takes aim at the “bedwetter caucus,” its term for the anonymous “Republican strategists and campaign operatives” who were fretting over the Ryan pick in a Politico article yesterday:

Republicans who believe in something can console themselves in knowing that these “pros” are reflecting the Washington conventional wisdom. Nearly everyone in the Beltway thinks it’s impossible to reform entitlements like Medicare, and or even to restrain the size of government, so why would a candidate be foolish enough to try?

This crowd is good at forecasting the political future as a repetition of the past and present, but as Irving Kristol used to say, they aren’t very good at predicting the turns. We’ll see if this year is one of those turns.

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Democrat Ploy Fails as PA Voter ID Upheld

| @tobincommentary 08.15.2012 - 12:45 PM

Democrats who have been leading a campaign against voter ID laws had their sights set on Pennsylvania, where they felt they had a good chance to have legislation passed last year thrown out by the courts. Liberal activists held rallies in Philadelphia and have been asserting that the bill approved by the Republican-controlled legislature is nothing more than a recycled “Jim Crow” law. But the attempt to trash the Keystone State’s voter ID requirement failed today when a Commonwealth Court judge in the state capital threw out the challenge. Judge Robert E. Simpson, Jr. issued a 70-page decision this morning in Harrisburg that stated the plaintiffs failed to prove their case that asking voters to identify themselves with a government-issued photo card would mean disenfranchisement and therefore denied an injunction that would have meant the law could not be enforced this year.

Simpson ruled that the voter ID opponents had not established that “disenfranchisement was immediate or inevitable” and also made clear that trashing the law less than 90 days from the election would throw a monkey wrench into the state’s election system. While he expressed sympathy with those who said they would be prevented from voting, the voter ID law was constitutional. The decision creates a problem for state Democrats who have been counting on the courts to strike down the law and therefore absolve them from the task of seeing that their voters are legally registered and have proper identification when they go to the polls in November. Though liberals around the country have accused Pennsylvania Republicans of trying to steal the presidential election via the voter ID law, the law’s survival now puts the onus on the Democrats to mobilize their base without resorting to any of the tricks that helped the GOP pass the bill in the first place.

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The Choice Voters Wanted

| @SethAMandel 08.15.2012 - 12:25 PM

There are moments in political punditry when it’s clear the so-called experts are anything but. This seems to be the case with what was by far the most common analysis of Paul Ryan’s selection as Mitt Romney’s running mate: pundits said it was a risk because the election would no longer be simply a referendum on an unpopular incumbent. But when you ask the voters about this, you get the opposite reaction. The Washington Post reports on its interviews with voters like Charles Bonuccelli:

“It’s not that I have an unfavorable impression of him. It’s that I have no impression of him,” he said. “You’re always kind of wondering, behind the facade, what are we going to get?”

The next day, he figured it out.

“This is a man who is to be taken at his word,” Bonuccelli said this week, after learning that Romney had chosen as his running mate Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.), a man known for his laser focus on shrinking the government.

“The thing was that we didn’t understand who this guy [Romney] was — was he serious about these things? It was a confirmation that he is serious,” he added.

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Biden Won’t Back Down on “Chains” Gaffe

| @alanagoodman 08.15.2012 - 11:05 AM

Joe Biden isn’t apologizing for his “chains” blunder yesterday, but he is trying to downplay it — a sign that the Obama campaign realizes how bad this looks:

Speaking in Wytheville, Va., late this afternoon, Biden hit back at the Romney camp’s claims that his comments were outrageous, saying, “If you want to know what’s outrageous, it’s their policies.” …

Biden continued: “And I’m told when I made that comment earlier today in Danville, Virginia, the Romney Campaign put out a Tweet, you know Tweets, and went on the air, went on the airwaves saying ‘Biden’s outrageous in saying that – I think I said, instead of unshackled, unchained or – anyway, outrageous to say that, that’s what we meant. I’m using their own words. I got a message for them, if you want to know want to know what’s outrageous, it’s their policies, and the effects of their policies on middle class America, that’s what’s outrageous.”

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Obama Fails as Fundraiser in Chief Too

| @bethanyshondark 08.15.2012 - 10:40 AM

A first-term president running for re-election always has a certain time-deficit challenge to overcome–the president, unlike his opponent, has a job to do. Electioneering takes a backseat to being leader of the free world. The president’s opponent, if not currently in office himself, could theoretically spend all day, every day at rallies in swing states while the President remains in the Oval Office, making decisions that set the trajectory for the country. The president, at the very least, has the advantage of already appearing presidential.

At least, that’s how it used to be. Mother Jones reported yesterday that President Obama has attended more than 200 fundraisers since officially relaunching his reelection campaign in April of last year. “Put another way, that’s an average of one fundraiser roughly every 60 hours for Obama.”

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Whose Anti-Semitic Dog Whistling Now?

| @tobincommentary 08.15.2012 - 10:01 AM

Democrats have spent the last few days happily beginning their effort to demonize Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan. But yesterday, Ryan’s appearance at a Las Vegas gathering of GOP donors gave the left a chance to tie him to the man they really hate: billionaire philanthropist and political donor Sheldon Adelson. Adelson’s well publicized donations to first Newt Gingrich and now Mitt Romney have enraged liberals who think there’s something shady about a billionaire donating money to promote political causes as long as his name isn’t Soros and the ideas he supports aren’t liberal.

That rather unexceptional meeting between a candidate and his party’s donors was detailed in an article in the New York Times that rightly pointed out that it was likely that Adelson and other leading GOP givers probably wanted a chance to ask some questions about Ryan’s views on foreign policy and his stands on Israel. There’s little doubt that Adelson was probably satisfied with what he heard since although Ryan’s main focus is the economy and the budget, he’s also a strong supporter of the Jewish state. But the chance to link the left’s new favorite Republican demon to their old standby Adelson was irresistible. And as Ben Shapiro reported on Breitbart.com, Democrats were quick to make an issue of the meeting. The Obama campaign’s Julianna Smoot sent out an email blast saying Ryan was “making a pilgrimage” to the country’s sin capital to “kiss the ring” of Adelson. While both Ryan and Adelson are fair game for political criticism, the sort of imagery used in the email is a not too sublet attempt to use religious imagery that would depict the very Catholic Ryan as paying obeisance to a man who is a Jewish piñata for leftist attacks on the pro-Israel community. This is a classic anti-Semitic dog whistle signaling voters that Ryan is in the thrall of the “Israel Lobby.”

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Selective “Theocracy” from the Left

| @SethAMandel 08.15.2012 - 8:30 AM

Liberals who object to conservatives offering faith-based justifications for public policy proposals often do so under the guise of saving the country from a “theocracy.” It’s become increasingly clear, however, that many of these liberals object to a certain kind of religious governance, but in fact have their own version in mind.

The latest such example comes from Time’s Erika Christakis, who suggests that Paul Ryan’s budget—get ready to hear more of this—is “un-Christian” because “Jesus would advocate a tax rate somewhere between 50% (in the vein of ‘if you have two coats, give one to the man who has none’) and 100%.” Does this mean Christakis supports using Christian teachings as the basis for legislation? No, of course not. Here’s Christakis from February on the contraception controversy (emphasis mine):

People who cry moral indignation about government-mandated contraception coverage appear unwilling to concede that the exercise of their deeply held convictions might infringe on the rights of millions of people who are burdened by unplanned pregnancy or want to reduce abortion or would like to see their tax dollars committed to a different purpose.

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