To observe the Jewish New Year and the Sabbath immediately following, there will be no new Contentions posting until Sunday. While you wait, go back to our home page and read some of the great stuff there, like Kenneth Marcus’s eye-opening article on the way anti-Semitism is dealt with on college campuses and Daniel Gordis’s stunning evisceration of Time magazine’s anti-Semitic cover story. May you have a sweet New Year.
In his remarks in Cleveland today, President Obama said so many things that are so misleading that it will take time to sort through the entire mess. But some claims — like “I’m committed to fiscal responsibility” — belong in a remake of The Twilight Zone.
What Obama said is not only untrue; it is the very opposite of the truth. And for the president to warn that “if we don’t get a handle on [the long-term deficit] soon, it can endanger our future” is particularly ludicrous, given that in 20 months, he has done so much to make our fiscal situation worse, from wasteful and expensive stimulus legislation to double-digit increases in non-defense discretionary spending to a huge new health-care entitlement. It is as if the president takes particular delight in not only saying things that are misleading but in saying things that are audaciously misleading.
Obama also has a habit of deriding not just the policies but also the motivations of his opponents. He almost never acknowledges the good faith of his critics; they are people to be mocked, ridiculed, derided. The only reason they oppose Obama is “politics pure and simple.” Republicans “prey on people’s fears and anxieties,” he said today. There is no room for genuine philosophical differences. It is as if Obama believes his ideas are so transparently brilliant and wise and beyond challenge that only the malicious and malevolent can oppose him.
And what is striking is how Obama, under growing political pressure, increasingly feels sorry for himself. “They talk about me like a dog,” the president told a crowd in Wisconsin earlier this week. “That’s not in my prepared remarks, it’s just — but it’s true.” And echoing the remarks made this morning by his top aide David Axelrod — who insisted “we didn’t create the mess we’re in” — Obama in his Cleveland speech said, “When I walked in [to the White House], wrapped in a nice bow, was a $1.3 trillion deficit sitting on my door step — a welcoming present.”
What’s so revealing about Obama is that comments about how terribly unfair life has been for him since he assumed office are extemporaneous, off the cuff, from the heart. For example, neither Obama’s claim that “they talk about me like a dog” nor his statement in Cleveland about his “welcoming present” were in the prepared text. (Here’s the “As Prepared for Delivery” version of the Cleveland remarks.)
What we are seeing, then, is Barack Obama unplugged. He is a man used to being cosseted and who believes negative comments about him are a violation of an unwritten moral code.
“This is more than an inconvenience,” David Axelrod wrote in a memo to Obama on November 28, 2006, in raising concerns about Obama’s thin skin. “It goes to your willingness and ability to put up with something you have never experienced on a sustained basis: criticism. At the risk of triggering the very reaction that concerns me, I don’t know if you are Muhammad Ali or Floyd Patterson when it comes to taking a punch. You care far too much what is written and said about you. … When the largely irrelevant Alan Keyes attacked you, you flinched.”
He did then, and he still does to this day.
It turns out that the president is more like Floyd Patterson than Muhammad Ali.
In Cleveland today, in a remarkably bitter and partisan speech, President Obama ruled out allowing the Bush tax cuts for those earning more than $250,000 a year to continue because of the recession. Even his former budget director, Peter Orzsag, recommended continuing them in a New York Times op-ed article. If the president gets his way, there will be a sharp increase in taxation on the affluent and on small businesses, many of which are sub-chapter-S corporations, which are taxed via the personal income tax rather than the corporate one.
The president argues that we simply cannot afford the $700 billion that extending the tax cuts for all would cost the government in foregone revenue. That estimate is based, I assume, on the static models that both the OMB and the CBO rely on to forecast revenues and which are always wrong, because the economy is highly dynamic, not static.
We tried raising taxes, especially on the rich, in the teeth of a recession once before in order to narrow the gap between federal revenues and expenditures. That was in 1932. The results were not pretty, to put it mildly. Both houses of Congress passed Hoover’s proposed tax increases by wide margins, and John Nance Gardner, the speaker of the House (and FDR’s first vice president), even wanted to add on a national sales tax, which would have impacted the poor far more than the rich, in order to balance the budget. It didn’t work and the economic decline sharply accelerated. Government revenues in 1932 were $1.9 billion, despite the tax increases. Expenditures that year were $4.6 billion. The deficit, in other words, was 132 percent of revenues, by far the worst peacetime deficit in the nation’s history. Ever since, the idea that taxes should be raised in a recession has been an off-the-table idea. That, after all, was what Herbert Hoover did, not a model later presidents have chosen to emulate. At least until President Obama, that is.
Of course, what Obama wants and what he will get are not necessarily the same thing right now. All the Bush tax cuts will expire on January 1, 2011, not just those on higher incomes. So legislation will be needed. With the politicians in a hurry to go home and campaign, and Democrats in a gathering panic about losing their majorities, who knows what will happen?
It’s hard to know how to interpret this news report in the Washington Times claiming that one of the agencies that may receive a budget cut as a result of the Obama administration’s cost-cutting (an attitude reserved, I note, for one department only) is the Pentagon’s Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO). This may very well be an example of what some call the “Washington Monument strategy” — the tendency of government agencies, when facing the loss of funds, to threaten closing the Washington Monument. But I think a budget cut is perfectly justifiable on the merits.
JIEDDO has done valuable work since it was formed in 2004 — it better have, considering that it has spent more than $20 billion. No doubt, the jammers and armored vehicles it has rushed first to Iraq and then to Afghanistan have saved some soldiers’ lives and limbs, and that, it goes without saying, is a real blessing. But if we have learned anything since 2003, it is that there is no technological fix to the insidious problem of roadside bombs. Every defensive measure will prompt insurgents to think of some new way to set off their explosives. And, at the end of the day, no perfect defense is possible; even an Abrams tanks can be stopped by a powerful enough bomb. (I remember in Iraq seeing one tank flipped over on its back in a ravine like a helpless turtle.)
The answer is to be found not in the realm of gee-whiz technology but in old-fashioned counterinsurgency tactics, which safeguard the population, flush out the insurgents, and prevent them from wreaking mayhem — whether with IEDs or with other methods. That is precisely what General David Petraeus is trying to do in Afghanistan. The support of the JIEDDO can be valuable but often only indirectly, if its funds are used, for example, to fund intelligence collectors and analysts who will track down the IED cells and other insurgents. In the end, the best way to defend the troops is to win the war and, sadly, there is no way to do that without putting them in harm’s way. That is the brutal logic of war — even in the Internet age.
The big news in all the polls is the astounding gap in electoral enthusiasm between voters intending to vote Republican and voters intending to vote Democratic — Gallup has it as a 25 point difference, it appears. Rich Lowry explains in a fine column today that the president is trying to close the gap by appealing to his base:
While most people want less of Obama’s program, his base wants more. Obama could ease off his spending to try to take the edge off the brewing backlash, but that would anger his supporters. Instead, he promises his union-member allies yet more infrastructure projects. His new proposals for business-tax breaks are paid for not with spending cuts, but with countervailing business-tax increases, lest the Left throw a fit.
Obama is in a peculiar position here. The trick for him is getting the ideological word out to those who are profiting from his policies (public sector workers primarily) and unvarnished Leftists — without worsening the picture among independent voters, who seem driven almost entirely by their disgust with excessive spending. But how can a president fly under the radar? Obama apparently believes he can attack Republicans, and do so vociferously, without cost because independents don’t like the GOP much either and deeply partisan Democrats hate them. But what is the effect of a president describing his opponents, as he did in Milwaukee, in patently sophomoric ways? “If I said the sky was blue, they’d say no,” he said. “If I said fish live in the sea, they’d say no.”
I could be wrong, but I very much doubt this is the kind of tone Americans want from a president. This is the president we’re talking about here, not some shlepper running for city council. It’s understandable that the president and the Democrats believe they need to get hard-hitting to draw distinctions, that this is their only hope. It is, however, hard to fathom how the White House and partisan Democrats can believe they can close the enthusiasm gap by making such pedestrian use of the bully pulpit. Rhetoric like this may only increase the sense among people who are paying attention that he is not handling this job well. And that might even include some of his own base, who really fell in love with High Obama, the natural aristocrat who spoke in front of those fake Greek columns at the Democratic convention and acted as though he were the second coming of Pericles.
Americans seldom think of Israel in the conventional terms of “alliance,” but Israelis must, perforce, think of America that way. In the most fundamental sense, alliances are formed for security benefits. We don’t have allies because we need them; we have allies because they need us. This works both ways. The benefit is inherently mutual in any alliance that two or more parties take the trouble to form.
When allies begin shopping for defense-cooperation agreements elsewhere, moreover, it always means something. Our pursuit of abstract multilateralism over the last two decades has blinded us to that reality. American diplomacy has tended to behave as if all bilateral developments were benign — a mere natural outgrowth of upbeat nations getting in touch with each other. But in the case of Israel in 2010, the meaning is specific and conventional.
Israel signed a framework agreement for defense cooperation with Russia on September 6 — the first ever between these two nations — and has been at work this year resurrecting its defense-cooperation agreement with China. The rapprochement with China is informative because Israel agreed in 2005, at the behest of the Bush administration, to back off from its military-related projects with Beijing. The U.S. concern at the time was technology proliferation, which is what the news and opinion media tend to focus on, particularly in America. (The new agreement with Russia is being discussed, in its turn, as a means for Russia to obtain cutting-edge UAVs from Israeli manufacturers.)
But Israel has bigger concerns than markets for military hardware. “Defense cooperation” portends more than military sales; it can mean conferences, intelligence and personnel exchanges, joint training, and shared weapons development. It’s a field of agreement with inherent implications for regional relations and security. And Israel’s defense-cooperation outreach this year is hardly random. Binyamin Netanyahu typically handles national security like a statesman in the Western classical mold, and it appears he is doing so here. Warming up ties with Russia and China is a way to gain leverage with the major outside powers that are putting down stakes in the Middle East as Obama’s America loses energy and presence.
The Netanyahu leadership has no illusions about the character of either Russia or China. But courting Russia gives Israel an entrée with a member of the Quartet other than the U.S. Rejuvenating cooperation with China creates the potential for leverage with one of Iran’s chief patrons; the link with Russia offers a similar benefit regarding not only Iran but also Syria, Turkey, Libya, and Algeria as well.
The impetus for Israel to do this now comes from the persistent inertia of the Obama administration. As painful as it is to say it, the potential is obvious for Obama’s role in the Quartet to produce disadvantages for Israel. There is no rational basis for assuming Obama will take effective action against Iran or revise his approach to Syria. Exclusive alignment with the policy trend of Obama’s America promises nothing but disaster for Israel. In the absence of American strength — across the whole Middle Eastern region — Israel’s security situation will change. Although it means inviting Russia further into the Middle East, Netanyahu must work with reality in 2010: he must look for support — for a balancing agent with the region’s radical regimes — where he can find it.
“Messaging” has gotten a bad name in politics. It denotes sloganeering, the sort of bumper-sticker politics that the elites disdain. But a coherent message suggests a coherent vision. The opposite is also true.
Less than eight weeks before the election, the Republicans, as Bill Kristol points out, have a nice, sharp message: stop spending so much and stop raising taxes. You might not agree with it, but you know what they stand for. This was, after all, the media and the Obami’s complaint — “no ideas” from Republicans.
What’s Obama got? Cut some taxes, but raise others. We’re on the road to recovery, but really not. The deficit is strangling us but here’s another $50B for some government-bank idea to build the roads which I had told you the $800B stimulus plan would pay for. It’s not only not working, it’s a jumble — and it’s magnifying the problem: businesses are racked with uncertainty.
It reminds me of watching the McCain campaign. Try this, roll out that, stop — no, restart — the campaign. What was next — juggling knives? All it did was convince voters that he didn’t understand their concerns and didn’t have a coherent economic message. And you know what? McCain really doesn’t. (Climate-control legislation and small government don’t really go together, do they?)
Obama had a coherent vision — lots of government, spending, and tax hikes. The voters hated it and it didn’t work. But you knew what he stood for. Now he’s throwing everything up against the wall in the hope that the public will be impressed with his “focus” on the economy. But he seems harried, out of his depth. Albeit unintended, the message he is sending is: “I haven’t got a clue what to do.” Yeah, we noticed.
And meanwhile, beleaguered Democrats have a message for Obama: forget it. Expect to see more of this:
Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) broke with President Obama on Wednesday, saying he would not support any additional stimulus spending.
Bennet, who was endorsed by the president in Colorado but is facing a tough reelection, rejected the $50 billion public works program proposed by Obama earlier this week.
“I will not support additional spending in a second stimulus package,” Bennet said in a statement.
Perhaps if he had shown some independence with respect to health care and the spend-athon earlier on, he wouldn’t be so beleaguered now.
Hillary Clinton delivered a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations. The text can be read in full here. A few observations.
She, unlike the president, seems rhetorically willing to fly the banner of American exceptionalism:
The United States can, must, and will lead in this new century.
Indeed, the complexities and connections of today’s world have yielded a new American Moment. A moment when our global leadership is essential, even if we must often lead in new ways. A moment when those things that make us who we are as a nation — our openness and innovation, our determination, and devotion to core values — have never been needed more.
Her argument, however, that she and the Obama team have furthered American influence and power is belied by the facts. But this does not deter her from offering disingenuous platitudes. (”From Europe and North America to East Asia and the Pacific, we are renewing and deepening the alliances that are the cornerstone of global security and prosperity.” Apparently Britain, Honduras, Israel, India, Eastern Europe, and others don’t understand that their relationship with us has “deepened.”) She touts progress with China, but one is left wondering where this has manifested itself. China has grown more aggressive, not less, and its human-rights abuses have not abated.
Second, the aversion to hard power is obvious. The cornerstones of American leadership according to Clinton are domestic economic strength and “diplomacy.” She has a single line, a throw-away to mollify the easily mollified (”This administration is also committed to maintaining the greatest military in the history of the world and, if needed, to vigorously defending our friends and ourselves.”) But in paragraph after paragraph of blather (I spare you the extract) about global architecture and centers of influence, she makes it clear that her idea of foreign policy is: talk, talk, and more talk. And her sole mention of the two wars is this: “Long after our troops come home from Iraq and Afghanistan, our diplomatic and development assistance and support for the Afghan security forces will continue.” So much for projecting American power and values.
Most troubling, however, is the placement of Iran in the speech and the content. It comes at the very end, suggesting that it really is not at the top of her to-do list. She gives no indication that this is the most pressing issue we face. And she dispenses with even the formulaic “all options are on the table.” None of this suggests that the administration is serious — gone is even the term ”unacceptable”:
First, we began by making the United States a full partner and active participant in international diplomatic efforts regarding Iran. Through our continued willingness to engage Iran directly, we have re-energized the conversation with our allies and are removing easy excuses for lack of progress.
Second, we have sought to frame this issue within the global non-proliferation regime in which the rules of the road are clearly defined for all parties. To lead by example, we have renewed our own disarmament efforts. Our deepened support for global institutions such as the IAEA underscores the authority of the international system of rights and responsibilities. Iran, on the other hand, continues to single itself out through its own actions. Its intransigence represents a challenge to the rules to which all countries must adhere.
Third, we continue to strengthen relationships with those countries whose help we need if diplomacy is to be successful. Through classic shoe-leather diplomacy, we have built a broad consensus that will welcome Iran back into the community of nations if it meets its obligations and likewise will hold Iran accountable to its obligations if it continues its defiance.
This spring, the UN Security Council passed the strongest and most comprehensive set of sanctions ever on Iran. The European Union has followed up with robust implementation of that resolution. Many other nations are implementing their own additional measures, including Australia, Canada, Norway and most recently Japan. We believe Iran is only just beginning to feel the full impact of sanctions. Beyond what governments are doing, the international financial and commercial sectors are also starting to recognize the risks of doing business with Iran.
Sanctions and pressure are not ends in themselves. They are the building blocks of leverage for a negotiated solution, to which we and our partners remain committed. The choice for Iran’s leaders is clear, even if they attempt to obfuscate and avoid it: Meet the responsibilities incumbent upon all nations and enjoy the benefits of integration into the international community, or continue to flout your obligations and accept increasing isolation and costs. Iran now must decide for itself.
That is it. The whole thing. It is a shocking, even for them, signal of the nonchalance with which the Obami view the most pressing national-security concern of our time. And much of what she says is simply gibberish. For example: “Through our continued willingness to engage Iran directly, we have re-energized the conversation with our allies and are removing easy excuses for lack of progress.” What is she talking about? Iran made excuses before, they make them now, and we’ve lost 18 months in fruitless negotiations.
Israelis, I am sure, are listening carefully. While they go through the motions at the save-face-for-Obama Middle East peace talks, they must surely be coming to terms with the fact that their military is all that stands between the West and a nuclear-armed Iran. If Hillary is any indication, they will get no help from us.
The discussion over the past week stimulated by Jay Cost’s claim that health-care reform must be accounted a major part of the desperate woes of Obama and the Democrats led me to go back and look at some of my own posts at the time the bill was passed in the spring. I do this not to claim prescience but to show that the deep damage the bill would do to the president and his party was already in the mix of the public discussion and obvious at the time to anyone who was not deluding himself with hope born from passion for the bill’s goals. The same delusions appear to be at work today in some quarters.
Three weeks before the bill passed, on February 26, in a post called “The Charge of the Democratic Light Brigade,” I wrote: “If the health-care bill collapses, the Obama presidency will be dealt a staggering blow from which it could recover, I would guess, only with a really extraordinary economic turnaround. The political calamity for Democrats in November will still take place; the president will lose the entirety of his capital with elected officials in his party; the media, sniffing a loser, will turn slowly but surely on him; and the conviction inside his own camp that he can work wonders with his silver-tongued patter will dissipate, causing a complete crisis of confidence inside the White House. It would be better for him, unquestionably, for the legislation to pass, as a practical political matter. One could argue that the fate of his party really does rest on Obama’s shoulders, so it would be better for Democrats as well. But not for individual Democrats. So what happens if the Obama-Pelosi-Reid strategy for health-care passage is an order to House Democrats to carry out a suicide mission?…I don’t think there’s ever been a situation like this in American political history. Every way you look at it, Democrats are boxed in, forced to choose between extraordinarily unattractive options. What makes it especially noteworthy is that this was a calamity they summoned entirely upon themselves.”
Thus, on the evening the House approved the bill with 219 votes in favor, I wrote: “The passage tonight in the House of Representatives of the Senate’s health-care bill is indeed a historic moment. It draws the brightest ideological and political line between the two parties since the end of the Cold War — which featured a profound conflict of visions about the question of confronting the Soviet Union or accommodating it — and revivifies the Republican party’s role in opposition to the state’s growing encroachment on the particulars of American life. The fighting has only just begun.”
The next day, I wrote a post called Obama’s Pseudo-Achievement: “He and his advisers surveyed the political field after the election of Scott Brown and they saw their own potential epitaph — not in the rejection of his ideas but in the potential exposure of his weakness. A president cannot seem politically weak; much if not most of his ability to act is predicated on the notion that he is the strongest public official in the country. They determined that they had to push health care or die, and they worked their will relentlessly, and they got what they wanted….And yet one must not get carried away. The story here is not that he succeeded against all odds and with the winds against him to push through historic legislation, even though that is what the media would have you believe. The story is that a party holding a 75-seat margin in the House of Representatives was barely able to squeak by with its greatest legislative priority and most devoutly desired policy. That is the salient fact here. What Obama pulled off was a textbook example of raw intra-party discipline; the unpopularity of the measure and its political consequences remain exactly as they were before the vote.”
That is the essence of the message from Obama’s closest political guru:
President Obama’s top political guru said Tuesday that he believes 70 House races and 15 Senate races are in play this fall. … Plouffe painted a picture of a dire electoral landscape in which, if Democrats were to lose the majority of those races, their losses would be massive.
Robert Gibbs’s admission in July that the House could be lost is now becoming conventional wisdom. The best Plouffe can do, it seems, is manage expectations.
But there is no spinning this one. There will be plenty of finger-pointing, but the Democrats who blindly followed the White House and their House and Senate leadership, pooh-poohed the Tea Party movement, ignored the polling on ObamaCare, and convinced themselves that the left’s time had come have no one to blame but themselves.
As for the White House, it will no doubt declare that, however severe the thumping in November, none of this is a reflection on Obama. It is a “tough environment” and the “economy is bad” — as if these were weather phenomena, unrelated to the president’s agenda and leadership. There may be some reshuffling of the White House team, but it remains to be seen whether there will be any self-reflection. Heck, this crew can’t even admit they got the quote on the White House rug wrong. Alas, they seem more unintelligible than usual:
President Barack Obama’s spokesman said Tuesday the White House was correct to attribute a famous quotation in the rug’s pattern to Martin Luther King Jr., even though the civil rights leader acknowledged being inspired by a 19th-century abolitionist, Thomas Parker. “It was not us that thought he said it, it was many people that believed — rightly so — that he said it,” press secretary Robert Gibbs said.
At some point the “Will Hillary run?” buzz will start. But only if she starts boosting her profile and making the case that her record is something to be proud of.
The Palestinian Authority is itching to get out the talks. The settlement freeze is the excuse, while the reason is its inability to make and enforce a peace deal. This report tells us that the PA is pre-empting a potential compromise:
The agreement beginning to take shape on the settlement construction freeze is based on an “unspoken understanding” that security authorities will not sign new building permits, but the government will not issue a formal resolution extending the freeze. Furthermore, a review found that the building moratorium is due to expire on September 30, not September 26, as previously thought.
A source close to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas told Haaretz on Tuesday that from the PA’s perspective, what mattered was not Israel’s declarations but the moratorium’s implementation on the ground.
In sum, nothing other than the impossible — a formal extension of the freeze — will do. So presto, the PA “gets out” of the direct peace talks they avoided for so long. But just in case, they have a new impossible position: “The same source told Haaretz that the PA intends to make clear in the direct negotiations with Israel that it will not agree to complete demilitarization of the territories, as this was a condition no sovereign state could accept.” As you can see, the “moment of opportunity” Obama waxed lyrically about is simply another in the unending tales of Palestinian rejectionism.
That the Obami invested so much time and credibility in this fruitless effort is a sign of both hubris (their predecessors weren’t “smart” enough diplomats, you see) and naivete. As with so much else in this administration, it is the conjunction of bad ideas and inept execution. In this context, the “peace process” has already claimed five lives. All so Obama would not have what is left of his credibility pulverized. In the end, one fears, more innocents will be hurt or killed, and the blow to Obama’s ego will have only been delayed.
Those who keep advising Obama to fire people miss a key point: the replacements could be worse than the current crew. No, it really is possible. Mayor Daley of Chicago won’t run for another term, and Washington is abuzz with speculation that Rahm Emanuel will leave (flee?) the administration to run for the job. Ben Smith reports: “Emanuel has told Chicago associates, a source tells me, who he believes will likely succeed him: senior Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett.”
Obama will be trading one Chicago pol (who at least understood how to elect Democrats from places that weren’t deep Blue) for a liberal Chicago pol whose instincts seem to mirror David Axelrod’s: when in doubt, go left. This was the gal who thought Obama’s defense of the Ground Zero mosque was a swell idea. She also remains a potential witness in the Blago retrial. She also led the vendetta against Fox News. And of course, 9/11 truther Van Jones was her hire.
In short, if the Obami are looking for a far-left chief of staff with bad political instincts and a Chicago-machine outlook, they couldn’t do “better” than Valerie Jarrett.
Obama’s election-eve conversion (akin to a deathbed one) to the benefit of tax cuts seems to have come too little too late.
Business leaders were unimpressed:
Business executives said Tuesday that the measure might deliver a temporary lift to business spending. But several said a more enduring way to spur demand would be to extend the Bush administration income-tax cuts—which expire in January—for higher earners. Some also called for more permanent changes to corporate-tax rules.
It reminds some of cash for clunkers. (”Many executives … compared the speeded-up tax deduction to earlier Obama tax breaks for buyers of cars and houses. Those breaks stimulated a rush of buying that was followed by a big drop in sales once the incentives ended.”)
Nor is it clear there is support in Congress to pass the president’s proposal or time to do it. Congress returns next week and has three weeks before recessing to head for the campaign trail. I don’t think Democrats are going to be open to staying in Washington beyond that date, leaving the trail to their challengers.
The sure sign the plan is a dud? The White House is talking nonsense. Robert Gibbs says the stimulus plan is not a stimulus plan. Because it’s too small to make any difference, presumably. If this is giving you a headache, imagine how House Democrats feel.
Not working. Greg Sargent warns: “What if voters are simply not buying the central Dem message that a vote for the GOP is a vote to return to the Bush policies that ran the economy into the ground? What if the GOP has already achieved separation from the former president? The internals of the two national polls out this morning strongly suggest that this may be the case.”
Not-Obama is very popular. “Sixty-eight percent (68%) of U.S. voters prefer a smaller government with fewer services and lower taxes to a more active one that offers more services and higher taxes.”
Not even this would help: “Here’s the only way the Democratic Party can turn it around before Election Day: Spend the remaining $200 billion of the failed $800 billion ’stimulus’ package to hire Superman to reverse the rotation of the Earth, so the Democrats can go back about two years and start anew with the historic mandate the electorate handed them in 2008.” After all, Obama says we’re turning the economy around, and Tim Kaine says it’s swell to run on the Obama agenda.
Not my fault, says Harry Reid. “It would take a real stretch to think I caused the problems with the economy.”
Not to be overlooked: “Republicans are within reach of gaining control of eight or more chambers in statehouses around the country this fall, according to interviews with Republicans, Democrats and independent political analysts. That would give Republicans the power to draw more Congressional districts in their favor, since the expected gains come just as many legislatures will play a major role in the once-a-decade process of redrawing the boundaries of those districts.”
Not sure why anyone would watch them.
Not surprising!? “It’s not surprising that Democrats would lose independent voters, or that Republicans would be wildly enthusiastic, when they control the government and push aggressive reforms during an economic calamity.”
At the end of August, the Royal Navy gave the UK Telegraph a rare glimpse of what’s going on today in the arcane world of the submariner, under the Northern Atlantic’s restless surface. The report includes the nugget that “British submariners … are experiencing the highest number of ‘contacts’ with Russian submarines since 1987.”
It’s no surprise that Russian attack submarines are trying to trail British ballistic-missile submarines, as the Telegraph reports. But the reference to 1987 is informative. In the annals of the Cold War, 1987 was the last year the Soviet Navy maintained the very active global profile it assumed in the early 1970s. The Royal Navy’s disclosures last month indicate that the reversal of a two-decade trend is gathering steam — and more so than was evident when Russian submarines were reported off the U.S. east coast a year ago.
The Royal Navy had 38 submarines in 1987, compared with its 12 today. The U.S. force of attack submarines — “hunter-killer” submarines — has declined in the same period, from 98 to 53, with a target number of 48 being argued by budget cutters. But numbers are only one aspect of the issue. Equally important, as suggested by the Royal Navy’s recent encounters with Russian submarines, is how our would-be rivals are behaving on the seas.
In that regard, China’s profile constitutes a steadily expanding challenge, particularly to regional stability in the Far East. Tuesday morning, a Chinese fishing vessel was challenged by the Japanese coast guard in the waters of the Senkaku Islands, a chain disputed by Beijing and Tokyo. The Chinese vessel proceeded to collide with not one but two Japanese patrol ships — something that, given the Japanese military’s exemplary tradition of seamanship, had to be deliberate and was probably sanctioned by authorities in China.
China has operated through maritime provocation and bullying in recent years, but usually with smaller nations like Vietnam and the Philippines; very rarely in confrontations with Japan. In the wake of China’s most aggressive naval exercise ever, which penetrated the Japanese islands this past spring, as well as Beijing’s securing of rights to use a North Korean port on the Sea of Japan, the latest incident looks more like part of a trend than an isolated, strategically meaningless event.
This is how maritime dominance is lost: incrementally and off the public’s radar. The U.S. Navy, as an oceangoing sea-control force, has shrunk from 568 ships and submarines in 1987 to 285 today. Our NATO allies’ navies have shrunk significantly as well, some of them by greater percentages. Among our key allies, only Japan and Australia are investing in larger and more diverse naval forces. The U.S. military, under Defense Secretary Gates, is looking at reducing further the inventory of warships — aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, submarines — that perform sea-control missions and maintain maritime dominance. Equally troubling, DoD proposes to eliminate entirely the two major U.S. commands most closely linked with NATO and maritime power in the Atlantic: Joint Forces Command and the U.S. Second Fleet. Events, on the other hand, continue to warn us against this irresponsible course. We can expect more of them.
This National Republican Senatorial Committee ad about President Obama’s much-ballyhooed “Recovery Summer” is a fairly effective one. Of course, Obama has given the GOP a whole lot of material to work with.
The “Recovery Summer” is rapidly on its way to becoming one of the worst public-relations disasters in modern American politics. As Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey points out, even Gerald Ford’s Whip Inflation Now (WIN) buttons “didn’t promise 500,000 new jobs a month if people wore buttons on their shirts.”
John Podesta, of the leftist Center for American Progress (and Obama’s transition-team leader), is trying to assure voters that after November, Obama really will listen to them. Honest. Podesta says (my comments in brackets):
“After November, you’ll see some soul-searching and some changes particularly in the way that he’s talked to the American people and really communicated [because a "communication" failure sounds so much better than a policy failure], particularly, I think, with the business community [which the Center for American Progress is more than happy to bash],” Podesta said Tuesday morning on MSNBC.
“You’ll see, I think, at least a willingness to kind of listen to ideas to move forward with people,” he added. “And you know, I think that the president does level with people [well, except for the sort of howlers like "ObamaCare will save money"]. He’s pretty straightforward about what he thinks works, what he thinks doesn’t [it's just that his judgment is so off-kilter, I guess].” …
“After the election, there’s no question … that the public mood, the public spirit is asking for a conversation around kitchen tables and boardrooms about how the country can get together to move forward,” Podesta said.
Didn’t Obama run on this promise – in 2008? Well, now he really means it, we are told. Maybe Podesta, who I don’t recall opposing any part of Obama’s agenda, is telling the Obami they won’t have any choice but to listen to voters. Or maybe Podesta is jockeying for Rahm Emanuel’s job, given that he’s assuring the president that all he needs is a better “message” and some platitudes.
Nevertheless, if you have one of the party’s most influential liberals saying it’s time for a makeover of more than the furniture in the White House, then it’s time for Democrats to start planning ahead for the electoral avalanche.
Confirming the polling we have seen and the analysis of independent analysts such as Larry Sabato, the Cook Report (subscription required) tells us:
For the first time, our internal race-by-race model estimates a GOP gain of over 40 seats. We are revising our House forecast to a Republican gain of at least 40 seats, the minimum to give them majority status, and very possibly substantially more. …
Even Democrats in districts that gave President Obama 50 to 60 percent of the vote can’t be considered safe; in fact, as Obama’s approval has slid disproportionately in swing seats, many are in tough predicaments. By the time we release new House ratings this week, eight Democratic open seats will be in the Lean or Likely Republican columns, 45 Democratic seats will be in the Toss Up column, and 30 seats will be in the Lean Democratic column, for a total of over 80 Democratic seats at substantial risk.
This should come as no surprise, actually, if you have been following the generic congressional polling. With the addition of Rasmussen (GOP +12) and CNN (GOP +7), the RealClearPolitics.com average now shows an 8.4-percent advantage for the Republicans. Get out your thesaurus (wave, a tsunami, deluge) — there are a lot of Democrats who are about to get swept out of Congress.
In his excellent memoir, A Journey: My Political Life, Tony Blair writes about his electoral victory in 1997:
We were very quickly appreciating the daunting revelation of the gap between saying and doing. In Opposition, the gap is nothing because “saying” is all you can do; in government, where “doing” is what it’s all about, the gap is suddenly revealed as a chasm of bureaucracy, frustration and disappointment … I was afraid because, at that instant, suddenly I thought of myself no longer as the up-and-coming, the challenger, the prophet, but the owner of the responsibility, the person not explaining why things were wrong but taking the decisions to put them right.
Blair’s words touch on a truth which those of us who have served in government, and especially in different administrations and in the White House, can attest:
A president’s capacity to control and influence events is often more limited than it’s imagined. It’s not unusual for presidential directives to be ignored or undermined by the bureaucracy. Thousands of personnel decisions, some seemingly insignificant, can come back to bite you. An administration is held responsible for what happens on its watch, whether or not that’s justified. Urgent, complex problems demand a response even if the information needed to act on them is incomplete. The political culture is unforgiving. And all presidents and their aides, like all people, are flawed and fallible.
When you’re out of power and in the opposition, these truths are quickly tossed aside or simply forgotten. Governing seems much easier when all one is doing is critiquing others in columns and blogs, in speeches and on television. Position papers are simpler to write than policies are to enact. This tendency is particularly pronounced among political commentators, many of whom have no first-hand experience at what it means to govern.
The appropriate role of the opposition party, as well as of the commentariat, is to hold those in power accountable. Some presidential decisions deserve criticism – at times scathing. So to argue that there should be a moratorium on expressing disapprobation would be unwise as well as unrealistic.
What is required, however, is perspective — the realization that being chief executive is more challenging than being a commentator on Hardball with Chris Matthews. And from time to time, it’s worth showing understanding and even some sympathy toward those who have, in Blair’s words, gone from “scaling the walls of the citadel, to sitting in the ruler’s palace in charge of all we surveyed.”
The Obama administration, which came to office after having set expectations at stratospheric levels, is now learning the wisdom of Blair’s words. There is some rough justice in seeing brought low by events a president bestowed with an unusual degree of vanity and who has been so unfair and unforgiving in his critique of others. Still, the truth is that Republicans, once they begin to take the reins of power again in November, will experience something similar. What Henry Kissinger called the “moment of charmed innocence” and the “exhilaration of imminent authority” is soon buffeted by events. And so all us, myself included, need to temper our judgments with the realization that explaining why things are wrong will always be a far easier task than putting them right.
In addition to Republicans and business leaders, Obama’s recently departed head of the Office of Management and Budget also argues, in the New York Times, for a two year extension of the Bush tax cuts:
Higher taxes now would crimp consumer spending, further depressing the already inadequate demand for what firms are capable of producing at full tilt. And since financial markets don’t seem at the moment to view the budget deficit as a problem — take a look at the remarkably low 10-year Treasury bond yield — there is little reason not to extend the tax cuts temporarily.
Not only is there little reason not to — there is every reason to do so. Unless one is so locked into a “soak the rich” mentality that ideology trumps common sense.
In keeping with his tradition of trying to stay behind the pack on all issues, Peter Beinart has put his finger into the air and decided that Barack Obama is a lousy president. That isn’t news for the majority of Americans, who believe Obama is not doing a good job, but makes sense for a guy who supported the war in Iraq until it became unpopular.
Of course, unlike the rest of America, Beinart has a beef with the president not because he ran as a centrist and has tried to govern from the left. Rather, Beinart’s evaluation of the administration’s foreign policy is that it is too much like that of George W. Bush, since Obama rightly refused to immediately cut and run from Afghanistan.
But, like any blind liberal squirrel, Beinart is bound to find an acorn every now and then. In a column in the Daily Beast, while bashing Obama for being too much like Bush with regard to the Middle East for not appeasing Hamas, Beinart stumbles across a couple of obvious truths about the peace process:
Given his lack of democratic legitimacy, it is delusional to imagine that Abbas can carry out the brutally painful concessions a final peace deal would require. And it is delusional to imagine that Hamas will permit the success of a peace process meant to further marginalize it; indeed, it has already greeted the start of direct talks with terrorist attacks.
Beinart is right about that. Obama’s decision to strong-arm Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas into talks is an invitation to disaster. And he’s right to call Abbas’s government a “Potemkin Palestinian leadership.”
But that’s as much wisdom as Beinart is capable of, since his advice for Obama is to try engagement with Hamas. Beinart’s conviction that the only thing that prevents Obama from further empowering these murderers is “a political debate in Washington that dramatically constrains his ability to respond” — code words for the pro-Israel consensus in the United States that Beinart so deplores. But the only word to describe his belief that Hamas, an Islamist terrorist group closely allied with Iran, will make peace with Israel is the same one Beinart uses to describe Obama’s trust in Abbas: “delusional.”
The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait continues his indefatigable political defense of ObmamCare. One of his recent efforts, “Health Care as Political Scapegoat,” can be found here. He writes, as proof of his thesis, that “a recent Gallup poll shows that Democrats fare about evenly (+1) versus Republicans on health care — it’s one of the only issues where they don’t have a disadvantage.”
Now what might be missing from Chait’s analysis? Context.
As I pointed out here, in October 2006, the Democrats held a 64-percent v. 25-percent advantage over Republicans regarding health care. Today the lead is 44 percent v. 43 percent — a 38-point swing in favor of the GOP. That is a substantially larger swing than we’ve seen on combating terrorism (29 points), the economy (27 points), and handling corruption in government (26 points).
There is no other issue, in fact, over which Democrats have lost as much ground as quickly as over health care. What was once the strongest issue in the Democratic arsenal — an issue on which Democrats enjoyed public support for generations — has now turned politically neutral with respect to the support each party enjoys on it. Politico reports that it appears as though no Democratic incumbent in the House or in the Senate has run a pro-health-care reform TV ad since April, while a handful of House Democrats are making health-care reform an election-year issue – by running against it. Senator Ron Wyden, one of the Democratic Party’s leading experts on health care, recently wrote a letter to Bruce Goldberg, the director of the Oregon health authority, encouraging Oregon to seek a waiver from the individual mandate, which is a fundamental feature of Obama’s health-care overhaul (Wyden is running for reelection). And last month more than 70 percent of Missouri primary voters rejected ObamaCare’s individual mandate. It’s no wonder that Charlie Cook declared that pushing ObamaCare was a “colossal miscalculation” for Democrats.
Given the weight of the evidence, it is bordering on delusional to argue that ObamaCare hasn’t damaged Obama or the Democrats politically.
Dogmatists such as Chait seem unable to rethink their views in light of reality; instead, they are contorting their arguments to defend flawed premises (ObamaCare would be a success and viewed by the public as a success). Mr. Chait wouldn’t be the first to do such a thing. But it is a transparent effort – and, at this stage, a discrediting one.
Among the left in particular, Paul Krugman is an influential writer on economics and politics. Fortunately there are reasonable and informed voices to counter his arguments, his economic theories, and his version of economic history. One such voice is Amity Shlaes, who deconstructs Krugman’s most recent column (“1938 in 2010”) over at the excellent (and increasingly influential) website e21.
Shlaes’s posting can be found here.
According to the Wall Street Journal:
The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said the planned burning of Qurans on Sept. 11 by a Florida church could put the lives of American troops in danger and damage the war effort.
Gen. David Petraeus said the Taliban would exploit the demonstration for propaganda purposes, drumming up anger toward the U.S. and making it harder for allied troops to carry out their mission of protecting Afghan civilians.
“It could endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort,” Gen. Petraeus said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “It is precisely the kind of action the Taliban uses and could cause significant problems. Not just here, but everywhere in the world we are engaged with the Islamic community.”
General Petraeus points out that hundreds of Afghans attended a demonstration in Kabul on Monday simply in anticipation of the plans of Florida pastor Terry Jones, who has said he will burn the Koran on September 11. Afghan protesters chanted “death to America” and speakers called on the U.S. to withdraw its military convoy. Military officials fear the protests are likely to spread beyond Kabul to other Afghan cities.
Some people may believe this is all overdone. Jones, after all, leads a church of just 50 people. He clearly does not speak for the overwhelming number of Christians in America. And of course, in a nation of more than 300 million people, there are a handful who can be found supporting every imaginable crazed cause.
But this incident has the capacity to be different. General Petraeus is a careful and cautious man; for him to speak out as he did means the danger is real enough. And there is precedent. As the Journal story reminds us, reports in Newsweek, later retracted, that a U.S. interrogator at the Guantanamo Bay prison had flushed a Koran down a toilet set off riots in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world.
If he carries through on his plan, then, the actions by Jones may undermine our mission in Afghanistan and threaten the lives of those serving in that theater. People with standing in Jones’s life need to stop him, in part because his actions are deeply antithetical to our founding principles. The Third Reich burned books; those who are citizens of the United States should not.
Jones’s actions would also be an offense against the Christian faith. From what we know, Jesus not only wasn’t an advocate of book-burning; he was a lover of them, most especially the Hebrew Bible, which he often quoted. Beyond that, Christianity is premised on evangelism, on spreading what the faithful believe to be truth about God, history, and the human person. There is nothing that would lead one to embrace coercion or to stoke (literally) the flames of hatred.
Whatever differences the Christian faith has with Islam, they are ones that followers of Jesus need to articulate with reason, with measured words, and with a spirit of grace and understanding. And whatever purpose Jones thinks he’s serving, it is not the purpose of the Prince of Peace. It is, in fact, very nearly its antithesis. We can only hope that this deeply misguided pastor is stopped before he does significant damage to his country, its gallant warriors, and the faith Jones claims as his own.
Obama, eight weeks before the election, has decided to adopt one of many ideas the Republicans put forth in February 2009: a tax break for businesses. As this report explains:
Companies can now deduct new investment expenses, but over a longer period of time—three to 20 years. The proposed change, which would let companies keep more cash now, is meant to give companies who may be hesitant to invest an incentive to expand, acting as a spur to the overall economy. …
Under current law, if a company spends $10 million on a new factory, it gets to deduct the full amount of the cost over a period of between three and 20 years, depending on the investment. So it cuts its stated pre-tax profits by a varying amount each year, thus reducing taxes until the cost of the investment has been written off.
Under the new proposal, the company would get to deduct the full $10 million in the first year. That would give it an immediate cash infusion to offset the costs of investment. It would also give certainty that the full tax benefit would be realized. Companies often don’t get to write off the full cost of an investment over an extended time.
It is not a bad idea, but it simply isn’t as critical as an extension of the Bush tax cuts. Republicans and business leaders were quick to point this out:
“The White House is missing the big picture. These aren’t necessarily bad proposals, but they don’t address the two big problems that are hurting our economy—excessive government spending, and the uncertainty that Washington Democrats’ policies, especially their massive tax hike, are creating for small businesses,” said House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R, Ohio). …
The best thing to do is to get rid of uncertainty, and that includes the cliff we’re falling off with all these [tax] provisions that are expiring,” said Bill Rys, tax counsel for the National Federation of Independent Business, a small-business group.
Many NFIB members also are concerned about a new requirement for reporting purchases of more than $600 to the Internal Revenue Service, he added. He questioned whether many business owners would choose to buy more equipment, at least until sales pick up.
It is, on the one hand, a giant concession that tax cuts matter. On the other hand, it leaves the Obama team without any reasoned defense for letting the Bush tax cuts expire — or, for that matter, loading up employers with new mandates. (”Many NFIB members also are concerned about a new requirement for reporting purchases of more than $600 to the Internal Revenue Service.”) As one businesswoman put it, “If this will be offered as a tradeoff for raising the top two rates, it’s a non-starter.”
Nor is it even clear that this is all that helpful at this point:
N. Gregory Mankiw, of Harvard University, and another former CEA chairman under President Bush, questioned whether the Obama proposal would have a big impact. Businesses can already take out a bank loan at extremely low interest rates to pay for new investments in plants and equipment, but they are not doing so, he said. It’s unclear why they would make those investments for a tax break.
And it is even less clear why we should be giving with one hand and taking away with the other. (Jay Timmons, executive vice president of the National Association of Manufacturers: ”The good news [is that] the administration recognizes that manufacturing is key to getting the economy back on track and ensuring we are able to sustain economic growth and job creation. But you can’t do that if you’re penalizing one sector of manufacturing while trying to incent another.”)
The most principled position for conservatives is to accept the president’s tax cut (on the Milton Friedman theory that we should support any tax cut, any time) and demand that the Bush tax cuts be retained. Really, if tax cuts are good and the economy is in the tank, why not?
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