The Danger of Providing Arms to Civil War Combatants

David Ignatius shares an update about the situation in Iraq,

ISIS forces have swept south along Highway 1 from Mosul, swelling their ranks by liberating 2,000 to 3,000 jihadist fighters from a prison in Nineveh province. The jihadists have captured so much U.S.-made equipment that it’s reportedly hard to distinguish friend from foe along the chaotic highway south.

Those who argue that we should throw powerful weapons to the "least worst" of the Syrian rebel factions had best keep in mind how quickly those arms can end up in the wrong hands.

Ignatius closes with an odd accusation,

Restitching the fabric of Iraq and Syria may be Mission Impossible. But with its focus on counterterrorism and weapons supplies, the Obama administration seems to have decided to treat the region simply as a shooting gallery.

As opposed to... doing what? Perhaps he's alluding to what had seemed to be a rhetorical question,

Can [the United States and its allies] convene a regional peace conference — which would seek to reconcile Sunni and Shiite forces and their key backers, Saudi Arabia and Iran — in some new security architecture?

Can they convene such a conference? I have every reason to believe that they can find a nice conference center, a printer who can engrave some attractive invitations, and a decent caterer. But the real question is, would such a conference accomplish anything? I suspect that, even at his most optimistic, Ignatius would admit that the odds of any material progress are vanishingly small.

Michael Gerson Plays His Part

I'll grant, when Gerson plays the part of a Republican shill he does so with far more dignity than Marc Thiessen, the rabid self-caricature who later filled Gerson's former role as G.W. Bush's chief speechwriter. Alas, I damn him with faint praise. What you rarely see from Gerson is any reflection on the Bush Administration's endless series of colossal blunders, and how they contributed to the continuing mess in the Middle East. Instead, per the latest memo, the index finger is extended to be wagged at President Obama.

In Gerson's latest column he scolds the President, in essence, for not finding a way to fix the mess in the Middle East. And why not? After all the President has has six years to fix a mess that was more than a century in the making, six years to put G.W. Bush's Humpty Dumpty mess back together again. Facts? Gerson doesn't need to concern himself too much with the facts and their well-known liberal bias.

Gerson gets started by stating the obvious,

For an American president, the world is a banquet of frustrations. But the collapse of much of the Middle East into civil war, sectarian conflict, war crimes and terrorist-exploited chaos should rank higher on the list.

Gerson proceeds to criticize the President for concluding that it would not be a wise move to intercede in Syria's civil war, characterizing the President's position as one of risk aversion. It has apparently never occurred to Gerson that staying out of a military conflict carries its own set of risks. Gerson lectures,

Because the United States refused to coordinate an effort to arm the responsible opposition in Syria, there has been no pressure for the regime to engage in serious peace negotiations. Bashar al-Assad has found barrel bombs more effective. In Geneva talks last November, American officials were left with no plan except to (pathetically) hope for Russian and Iranian diplomatic favors, which never came. Countries such as Turkey and the Gulf states, left leaderless in the region, have often funneled support to radicals. The United States has supplied weapons to the Iraqi government to fight militants in western Iraq while (incoherently) refusing to arm people fighting the same enemy 100 miles to the west in Syria. Now a few thousand militants, with roots in the Syrian conflict, threaten to destroy the Iraqi government, along with the remnants of U.S. credibility in the region.

Oh yes, the "responsible opposition parties".... that would apparently be the ones who are not winning. It remains unclear how people like Gerson expected that the U.S. (or any other nation) could identify and support enough factions that we would want to win the Syrian civil war such that they could take and hold the country. Frankly, the idea sounds like an opium dream. Perhaps Gerson should read his own newspaper, such that he might have at least some understanding of the complexity of trying to arm opposition groups while keeping western arms out of the hands of factions hostile to the west. One would think that Gerson would be able to look at the performance of the U.S.-trained, U.S.-armed Iraqi army, which turned tail and fled at the first sight of ISIS, and recognize that things aren't as simple as air dropping weapons into the hands of factions that we hope are neither hostile to the west nor likely to engage in brutal reprisals if they gain control over territory held by the the Assad regime or other armed factions.

Also, did it occur to Gerson that if "a few thousand militants, with roots in the Syrian conflict" threaten the post-war government of Iraq, the problems with that government quite obviously run deep? A few thousand militants who collectively are unable to topple the Assad regime are able to battle so effectively in Iraq that its army drops its weapons and runs away?

Iraqi officials told the Guardian that two divisions of Iraqi soldiers – roughly 30,000 men – simply turned and ran in the face of the assault by an insurgent force of just 800 fighters. Isis extremists roamed freely on Wednesday through the streets of Mosul, openly surprised at the ease with which they took Iraq's second largest city after three days of sporadic fighting.

If Iraqis won't fight for the unity of their own country, who does Gerson believe should fight the battles? Also, isn't this an important reminder of the complexity of the situation in Syria? What amount of U.S.-provided munitions just fell into the hands of those few hundred ISIS fighters?

Gerson carries on,

The mere containment of Syrian chaos would have required a more activist U.S. policy — coordinating Middle Eastern and European powers to create a balance of forces on the ground that might have encouraged a power-sharing agreement among less horrible regime elements and less horrible opposition groups. Some variant is still Syria’s best (but fading) hope.

The less horrible groups, presumably, being the ones who aren't explicitly promising bloody vengeance the moment they take power? And power-sharing... how well has that worked out in Iraq and Afghanistan following the two longest wars in U.S. history, both wrought by Gerson's former lord and master? In what fantasy world does Gerson live, where upon defeating Assad and the, well, more horrible groups, rival factions will join hands and unite Syria as opposed to battling amongst themselves for control of the nation? Is he truly comfortable with allowing the Assad regime's chemical weapons arsenal to fall into the hands of those "less horrible" factions?

As for doing something more than arming "less horrible" factions, there was the possibility of launching air strikes against Syria. But Gerson has apparently forgotten that his own political party opposed any such military action. Had the President ignored the Republican nay vote and proceeded to bomb Syria, would Gerson dispute that his party would have been screeching for Obama's impeachment? Did Gerson somehow overlook the words of Ted Cruz, published in Gerson's own paper?

Gerson continues,

Outside the administration, the unsentimental have sometimes argued that it is not a bad outcome for Assad’s forces and the Sunni Islamists to kill each other in a stalemate. Apart from being immoral — content with the slaughter of civilians — this also turns out to be stupid. It is only a stalemate until new battle-hardened extremists are produced who unravel neighboring countries or board planes to destinations unknown.

Perhaps, along with a host of other Republicans, Ted Cruz is among the "unsentimental"? Actually, that's probably a reasonable characterization of Cruz. But Gerson is largely hollow manning. Some have taken the position that a long-term stalemate may be the outcome most consistent with U.S. interests, a conclusion consistent with Cruz's arguments, but they typically have acknowledged the human cost:

Given this depressing state of affairs, a decisive outcome for either side would be unacceptable for the United States. An Iranian-backed restoration of the Assad regime would increase Iran’s power and status across the entire Middle East, while a victory by the extremist-dominated rebels would inaugurate another wave of Al Qaeda terrorism.

There is only one outcome that the United States can possibly favor: an indefinite draw.

By tying down Mr. Assad’s army and its Iranian and Hezbollah allies in a war against Al Qaeda-aligned extremist fighters, four of Washington’s enemies will be engaged in war among themselves and prevented from attacking Americans or America’s allies.

That this is now the best option is unfortunate, indeed tragic, but favoring it is not a cruel imposition on the people of Syria, because a great majority of them are facing exactly the same predicament.

Non-Sunni Syrians can expect only social exclusion or even outright massacre if the rebels win, while the nonfundamentalist Sunni majority would face renewed political oppression if Mr. Assad wins. And if the rebels win, moderate Sunnis would be politically marginalized under fundamentalist rulers, who would also impose draconian prohibitions.

Were Gerson to read that type of analysis, rather than huffing about its lack of sentimentality, he might recognize that there's no solution to the crisis in Syria that isn't going to result in large-scale oppression and suffering.

Gerson, quick to accuse his imagined opponents of being "stupid", has also apparently not noticed that the deaths and displacement of civilians that trouble him are occurring within the context of a Syrian civil war. Does he believe that western munitions have magical features that prevent them from killing civilians? Does he believe that when western powers back a civil war, civilian deaths cease, only armed combatants are killed, and no one becomes a refugee? Civilian suffering was significant under Assad, it is significant under civil war, it would remain significant under Gerson's escalated civil war, and it will continue even if the "less horrible" factions prevail. Why does Gerson pretend -- and he has to know that his position is a pretense -- that there's a good alternative? Probably for the same reason he pretends that those "less horrible" Syrian factions won't harm a hair on a civilian head if given western arms or control of the nation. It's an argument of convenience, offered for political purposes.

Gerson suggests,

After years of defining staying out of the Middle East as success, this may now involve saving the Iraqi government, actively coordinating support to the Syrian opposition and bolstering state institutions in Lebanon and other highly stressed countries.

Concluding, "President Obama has shown no appetite or aptitude for this role — but refusing it now would be a massive failure." Let's step back in history to 2001, when Gerson's former employer became President. Iraq was subject to a no fly zone, but was contained under Saddam Hussein and entirely hostile to al-Qaeda. Syria had recently come under the rule of Bashar al-Assad, who had not yet established himself as a tyrant in the model of his father. Egypt remained reasonably stable under Mubarek. Lebanon was a mess, but the mess was largely contained by Syrian occupation and the threat of another Israeli incursion or invasion. Under G.W.'s watch, Syria's penchant for oppression and torture was viewed as a virtue, and Syria was enlisted as a partner for the rendition and torture of terrorism suspects. Bush opposed the Syria Accountability Act. His invasion of Iraq, championed by Gerson, bogged the nation down in a long, extraordinarily expensive war. It was as a result of that war, and under G.W.'s watch, that Maliki government was formed, a government that eight years later cannot inspire the nation's armed forces to defend its cities. It's a shame nobody in the Bush Administration had the necessary stroke of genius, back in early 2001, to consider trying to press Assad into being a more progressive leader or, in the alternative, "actively coordinating support to the Syrian opposition", while "bolstering state institutions in Lebanon and other highly stressed countries". Sure, the Middle East of 2001 was a carton of fragile eggs, any one of which could be easily broken with consequences potentially spilling over into its neighbors. But after Bush made a hobby of tossing those eggs into the air and hitting them with a tennis racket, I again assert that the word for Gerson's finger-wagging at Obama is "chutzpah". Gerson's term, "massive failure", seems like a fair assessment of Bush's policy.

I don't particularly care for the argument that the hawkish elements of our society, people like Gerson who can't seem to even recall recent history, should send their kids off to fight the wars for which they openly yearn -- their kids should not suffer for their parents' hawkishness. But it's never a surprise to see that somebody like Gerson was never interested in pursuing a military career himself, and that it's other people's children whom he would eagerly dispatch to fight yet another war in the Middle East.

But the worst part of this sort of column is that it's generic. There's a single basic column with a number of blanks to be filled in with whatever President Obama does or does not do, a tepid suggestion that things might be better had something different been done -- but always short on specifics about what should have been done and why it would have resulted in a better outcome -- and a standard set of attacks that Obama's choices did not miraculously fix all that's wrong with the region or world. It's an astonishingly lazy form of analysis, and it speaks poorly of Fred Hiatt and his editorial pages that he is so happy to run this type of column. When you're dealing with a region where your typical choice is trying to figure out which of a number of bad solutions will be the least damaging, it's irresponsible to suggest that there are easy answers.

I Don't Remember President Rumsfeld

In a column that reminds me of David Brooks' efforts to put a nominally independent spin on right-wing talking points, Ross Douthat criticizes President Obama's second term foreign policy record. All sixteen months of it. Douthat isn't going to cut Obama any slack:

His foreign policy looked modestly successful when he was running for re-election. Now it stinks of failure....

But the absence of an Iraq-scale fiasco is not identical to success, and history shouldn’t grade this president on a curve set by Donald Rumsfeld.

Why should this President be graded "on a curve set by Donald Rumsfeld", as opposed to on a curve set by George W. Bush? The buck stops at the White House, unless you're a Republican in which case it stops with the Secretary of Defense?

Douthat's principal conceit is that, "balked by domestic opposition, turn to the world stage to secure their legacy". By "usually", he apparently means "recently", as his examples are Jimmy Carter ("the Camp David accords"), George W. Bush ("his AIDS-in-Africa initiative"), Bill Clinton ("chasing Middle Eastern peace") and Richard Nixon (opening doors to China) and... one-term President George H.W. Bush with something that's not really a foreign policy initiative as it is a matter of watching events unfold ("closing out the cold war"), although I suspect Douthat means to attribute that to Reagan. To the extent that you want to credit Reagan's foreign policy with helping to end the cold war, it's difficult to see how his second term policy was materially different from his first term policy. I can't help but notice, also, that Douthat makes no mention of the Clinton Administration's success facilitating the peace process in Northern Ireland, instead implying that Clinton is among those presidents who has no clear victory. He also makes no mention of Ronald Reagan's decision to intervene in Lebanon, or his rapid withdrawal after the barracks bombing, or of George W. Bush's inabilty to prevent Russia's invasion of Georgia, and its subsequent actions in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

One big problem with Douthat's conceit is that he looks only at what he sees as the "big accomplishment", even if it relative terms it's a small one or a failure, while ignoring the lists of horribles that can be found in the choices of pretty much every president on his implied list. There's no reason to believe that, a decade or so from now, a pundit as generous as Douthat is toward Republican presidents won't be able to find a second term accomplishment by President Obama that's at least as impressive as Bush's AIDS initiative. Further, why is it a good thing that presidents, frustrated by their inability to achieve their domestic agenda, shift their focus to the international scene? If it's possible to attend to both the domestic and the international, go for it. But if it's not, or if focus on domestic issues is "too hard", a President should nonetheless buckle down and do his primary job before trying to build a legacy on foreign policy issues.

In listing what he describes as Obama's foreign policy failures, it's no surprise that Douthat wants to limit our consideration of G.W.'s fingerprints. Even granting that Douthat recites, "His predecessor’s invasion of Iraq still looms as the largest American blunder of the post-Vietnam era", and concedes that "many current problems can be traced back to errors made in 2003", to put it mildly that's a remarkable understatement.

• Libya - Douthat implies that the so-called Benghazi scandal is a Republican confabulation, but complains, "The consuming Republican focus on Benghazi has tended to obscure the fact that post-Qaddafi Libya is generally a disaster area". That's not an unfair assessment, but the question becomes, "What should we do about it". The chaos is not considered a sufficient threat to U.S. or European foreign policy interests that any western nation is interested in intervening. Is Douthat arguing that Obama should have left Qaddafi in power, better to keep the humanitarian disaster we know than to risk one we don't know? He does not seem to be arguing that the U.S. should send enough troops to occupy and pacify the region, for however many years that would take. What's left? Also, how does Obama's Libya record and its fallout compare to that of Ronald Reagan, who unsuccessfully tried to kill Qaddafi, or George W. Bush, who along with Tony Blair spent years promoting Qaddafi as a poster child for the success of the "War on Terror"?

• Syria - Douthat complains, again not without justification, that the Obama Administration has not kept its implied promise to use military force to remove Assad from power, upon it being established with reasonable certainty that he used chemical weapons. Except Douthat is not endorsing the prevarication that the world does not take the U.S. seriously any more because we didn't invade Syria, and goes on to state, "I’m glad we don’t have 50,000 troops occupying Syria" -- as if we could occupy Syria with only 50,000 troops. The military estimated a short-term need for 75,000 troops just to secure Libya's weapon stockpiles.

• The Holy Land - Douthat complains that John Kerry's Israel/Palestine peace initiative has failed. I'm not sure that many people other than John Kerry expected the initiative to be a success. Douthat himself deems the failure "predictable" and... it was. George W. Bush had a number of peace initiatives directed at the Middle East that were far more ambitious than anything President Obama has endorsed. His father attempted a more coercive approach to advancing a peace accord. Clinton spent years hosting superficial peace talks before his last-minute effort to achieve agreement on the big issues helped contribute to a complete collapse of the peace process. But the fundamental problem is with the leaders of that region, and the last leader who seemed courageous enough to press for a bona fide peace deal was assassinated in 1995.

• Iraq - Douthat complains that "the caldron is boiling and Iranian influence is growing", as if this is a new thing. Who would have thought, after all, that replacing a largely secular Sunni regime with a much more religious Shiite regime would lead Iraq to become friendlier with Iran... except for anybody who knows anything about the Middle East? The failure Douthat attributes to Obama? a suggestion that the "White House’s indecision undercut negotiations that might have left a small but stabilizing U.S. force in place." That's not actually what the article linked by Douthat states. The author indicates that U.S. officials did not receive guidance from the Obama Administration about how many troops they wanted to leave behind, but that's attributed to ambivalence, not indecision. The article also suggests that the Obama Administration was not in fact ambivalent, but that "The American attitude was: Let’s get out of here as quickly as possible". Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, on the other hand, who was negotiating over troop levels, is explicitly described as indecisive. Douthat admits, "I sympathized with the decision to slip free of Iraq entirely", and he attempts no argument that the Middle East would be better off had the U.S. maintained a troop presence in Iraq.

• Afghanistan - Douthat complains that "", never mind that he's speaking of a first term decision by the President, or that if he's followed the Iraq and Afghanistan wars at all he should know that there are enormous differences between the two nations and the nature and purpose of the respective "surges". Douthat seems to have little understanding of Afghanistan, complaining, "even with an American presence the Taliban are barely being held at bay". Let's imagine that the U.S. took a few holds barred approach to occupation and modernization of Afghanistan, as the Russians did during their years of occupation. Did that make the Taliban go away? And if we're bringing first term decisions into the discussion, here's a doozy. For that matter, was Ronald Reagan's effort to get the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan a foreign policy success, in that the USSR withdrew, or should we look at what subsequently happened in both Afghanistan and Pakistan and contemplate whether it was one of the biggest foreign policy blunders of all time?

• Russia - Douthat complains that "the 'reset' with Russia — has ended in the shambles of the Ukraine crisis, as if there was something that the U.S. could reasonably have done to prevent Russia from invading Crimea. This is the same Putin who, as previously mentioned, invaded Georgia under G.W.'s watch. Expressing a willingness to start afresh with Putin is not something that can be achieved unilaterally.

• Iran - Although Douthat suggests that the Obama Administration could still achieve a "paradigm-altering achievement" with Iran, he simultaneously complains that those efforts could "unsettle[] America’s existing alliances in the region to very little gain". So it's the same situation G.W. Bush failed to resolve, but with the added caveat that any promising effort, and perhaps even a breakthrough agreement, could simultaneously be a failure. Perhaps that's not such a bad perspective on significant foreign policy issues, as blowback from even well-intentioned efforts can be harsh, but it seems like an absurd standard to impose on the President, particularly in light of Douthat's failure to acknowledge that the presidents whose second term accomplishments he finds to be most impressive all made foreign policy decisions that resulted in severe, negative consequences for the country.

Douthat goes on to qualify the Obama Administration's successful operation that resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden by asserting that the success of the mission "has to be qualified by Islamist terrorism’s resurgence". It's the sort of footnoting he's not willing to do for any other President, some of who can be credited with foreign policy failures that had much more profound and direct negative consequences for U.S. foreign policy interests. More than that, does Douthat believe that it's the killing of bin Laden that resulted in the "Islamist terrorism's resurgence"? That the Obama Administration shouldn't have pursued that mission? And, wait a minute, the blog post linked to support Douthat's allegation of the claimed "resurgence" doesn't even support his position, instead pointing out how difficult it is to hunt for terrorists and has resulted in U.S. security difficulties for government personnel in Yemen, that the U.S. issues regional security alerts when there is an "uptick in the fight against Al Qaeda in Yemen", and questioning the value of drone attacks.

From my reading, all Douthat's equivocation does is reaffirm that his goal is not to analyze Obama's foreign policy records, but to put a slightly centrist spin right-wing talking points. To be a "reasonable voice" by alluding to G.W. Bush's disastrous Iraq policy and distancing himself from the most ludicrous right-wing allegations directed at the President, and then to explain why none of that distance matters while hoping that his readers don't recognize his overt partisanship. If any lesson can be drawn from Douthat's analysis, it's that six years from now, no matter what larger consensus is drawn from the Obama Administration's foreign policy record, we can anticipate that some number of partisan pundits will offer tear-downs of the foreign policy records of the incumbent President and, if the President is a Republican, that they're apt to try to pick even the smallest of cherries from President Obama's record to try to paper over his acknowledged failures. Meanwhile, I would rather a second term President keep his eye on the domestic situation as even a small but significant foreign policy success does not overcome the rank incompetence of an administration that ignores or inflates an economic bubble that, upon bursting, almost takes down the world's economy.

Things That Never Happened

Kathleen Parker prevaricates,

When Jindal ran for governor in 2007, opponents frequently noted that his first name is Piyush. Democrats mentioned “Piyush Bobby Jindal” as often as Republicans brought up “Barack Hussein Obama” the following year.

But hey, at least she's not calling President Obama a half-blooded girlie-man, this time around.

Jennifer Rubin Finds a Mirror

Jennifer Rubin, who people say is smart but who nonetheless rattles off a predictable set of talking points and often makes hare-brained assertions, comments on Ted Cruz,

Smarts don’t always equate to common sense. In the case of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), there is an inverse relationship between the two. I’m told by smart lawyers that he has a sharp legal mind, can think on his feet and has remarkable recall for facts, cases and even page numbers of the briefs. But his political judgment has become distorted by ambition.

Hm...

Her illustration of Cruz's 'smarts' reminds me of an anecdote about a lawyer who was similarly famed for his ability to provide pinpoint citations, on his feet, in court. Somebody asked him, eventually, how he managed to recall cases and even page numbers with such specificity. "I make them up. Nobody ever checks." But with a bit less cynicism, having a good memory - even an eidetic memory - is proof of good memory, not intelligence. Cruz may well be as smart as some people say, or he may be smart in the same sense that Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan are touted as intellectual giants among their Republican peers. When the pond is that shallow, you don't need to be a particularly big fish to stand out - and sometimes all it takes is for you to be the one people see because it's sticking its head out of the pond with its mouth constantly open. I'm also reminded of a certain trial lawyer who once ran for President, who strikes me as having been deemed a great trial lawyer by virtue of having a well-rehearsed presentation of a particular type of big money case, and who retired into politics when that particular line of litigation dried up. Or a certain TV host who brags about her conviction rate for homicide prosecutions, never mind that homicide cases are often open-and-shut with defendants going to trial only because they have nothing to lose. You have to look beyond the surface to find out if somebody truly is as brilliant as he and his friends claim him to be.

Rubin notes that Cruz was spouting nonsense about how Mitt Romney was the greatest guy in the world before he lost, at which point she contradicted her prior claims about him and denounced his deep flaws without appearing to notice the contradiction. No, wait, that was Rubin. She notes that Cruz is pretending that the President might sign a bill defunding the PPACA/Obamacare, and purporting that the public won't blame the Republicans if they shut down the government.

Well, maybe he understands something else. Perhaps he is as smart as his admirers claim and he is wildly ambitious, hoping to draw attention and fundraising dollars for his windmill-tilting scam. Later in the CNN interview he made it clear he was playing to the base on this one... And who better to pull the tsunami to shore than Cruz, right? Send money! Come to his events! Become outraged when the “unprincipled” Republicans won’t support him!

Read his blog! Oh, wait...

Cruz is emblematic of a group of conservative hucksters peddling outrage and paranoia who contend that the strength of the political resistance they generate is equivalent to their own importance, and that one dramatic, losing standoff after another is the pinnacle of political success. Alas, they confuse their own fame with achievement and divisiveness with progress.

And if that doesn't work out for him in politics, maybe Fred Hiatt can give him a job?

Rubin suggests that Cruz would be better off following the lead of Speaker Boehner, and "trying to put the monkey on the Democrats’ backs (as the speaker of the House is doing) in the Obamacare fight". Nobody has ever accused Boehner of being a genius, but perhaps Rubin should take note of the fact that pretty much every aspect of Obamacare is popular, save for the mandate which is a necessary part of the popular provision that requires insurance companies to provide coverage without respect to preexisting conditions. Pushing a fantasy about defunding Obamacare is probably more sensible than crossing your fingers and hoping that the mandate proves so unpopular that people are willing to throw the baby out with a few inches of bathwater.

A political loner and man of rhetoric, not of action or achievement, he bears a striking resemblance to the current Oval Office resident. Each considers himself the smartest man in any room (inducing annoyance and resentment among his party members) and each fails to understand rhetoric is not effective governance.

Projection, much? Seriously, how many people other than Rubin look at Cruz and say, "Wow, he's just like President Obama"? This would be one of those "predictable talking points and hare-brained assertions" to which I previously alluded.

If I read more of Rubin's pontifications, I might know who she is pushing as the next Republican presidential nominee. Perhaps somebody who, unlike Mitt Romney, doesn't see himself as God's gift to the country and the smartest man in the room, who scurries away from his own record whenever it becomes politically inconvenient? Because Rubin doesn't seem to like those characteristics in candidates she doesn't support....

Fake Presidential Scandals, Then and Now

Paul Krugman suggests an explanation for why the Clinton-era fake scandals kept on going, while similar efforts to build fake scandals involving the Obama Administration seem to be fizzling:

Maybe the news media have actually learned something; maybe they’re effectively disciplined, this time around, by the blogosphere. Anyway, the narrative of a scandal-ridden presidency seems to be evaporating as we speak.

I don't credit the media or blogosphere. I think there are two important distinctions, one relating to the Presidents themselves and the other relating to the scandals.

First, the Clintons had a history of engaging in activity that, although never determined to be anything but lawful, didn't always pass the smell test. The remarkable success of Hillary Clinton's one-type foray into commodities trading, for example, continues to strike me as the sort of investment opportunity that would not have been made available to her were she not the governor's wife. At the same time many of the accusations made against the Clintons were truly unfair, and one of Mike Huckabee's most tragic decisions as governor may have its roots in his acceptance of a ridiculous conspiracy theory.

I don't want to discount the role of public perception, or the media's role in building and perpetuating public perception. But in no small part Clinton himself fed the public perception that was willing to play fast and loose with the facts - his claim that he never broke the drug laws of the United States, that he did not have 'sexual relations' with 'that woman', "it depends on what the definition of 'is' is", etc. - so while "slick Willie" may have been something of a caricature Clinton himself kept throwing fuel on the fire.

In contrast, although various efforts have been made to suggest that Obama is guilty by association for his relationship with Tony Rezko, or "pals around with terrorists" because of his relationship with William Ayers, the overall picture is pretty clear: President Obama has spent his adult life conspicuously avoiding anything that smacks of corruption. While certain right-wing partisans nonetheless scream from the top of their lungs that the Obama Administration is "the most corrupt ever", the facts say pretty much the opposite.

In fairness, that distinction could affect the media - covering a fake Clinton scandal was likely to turn up a colorful character or two, a colorful statement from the President, and perhaps just enough smoke to justify the coverage. Some of the allegation were so absurd ("Clinton murdered Vince Foster") that, even if not taken seriously, they were frequently referenced by those who most hated Clinton (and thus did not particularly care if the allegation was credible) and his supporters (who could use that type of allegation to depict Clinton's attackers, sometimes quite accurately, as loonies). There's no excitement in chasing a typical fake Obama scandals. The only person who can maintain enthusiasm about trying to concoct a direct connection between the actions of some low-level IRS agents and the President seems to be Darrell Issa.

Second, as I just intimated, the Obama scandals are largely boring. The Republicans got quite a bit of mileage out of Benghazi because it involved conspicuous violence and some tragic deaths, but they've run out of "revelations" so the media and public are losing interest. Ken Starr knew how to build a rolling scandal - "Nothing to Whitewater? Then how about we look under these other stones to see what we find." That only works, though, if you find stones that you can turn over, and that scandal seems to be fresh out of stones.

The IRS non-scandal is boring. Complaining that the President was spying on Americans only goes so far when half of the Republican Party is asserting that the present NSA program is a vindication of Bush, and various fire-breathing Republicans (including Michele Bachmann, Steven King, Jeff Flake and Ted Cruz) as well as various Republican "older statesmen" (including Orrin Hatch, Lindsey Graham and Saxby Chambliss) knew exactly what was happening and did not lift a finger to stop the programs. While you do see somewhat comical statements from people like Jim Sensenbrenner ("Whodathunk the USA PATRIOT Act could be used to support this type of monitoring?") the Republicans are at a disadvantage - their most prominent spokespersons knew about the monitoring, did nothing to stop it, and even now have no intention of doing anything to significantly curtail it. "It's horrible that the Obama Administration did this thing that we knew about, didn't stop, and are allowing to continue."

Further, although it's easy enough to engage in fiery rhetoric about how the programs "were illegal" when you actually start looking into the law the discussion becomes rather arcane and the Administration's position starts to look like it was narrowly tailored to fit within established law and precedent. It's the sort of argument that only a lawyer could love, in part because it's somewhat arcane, and in part because if you're not a lawyer or a close follower of the Supreme Court you're unlikely to have the context to participate in a debate and (because you are likely to find it boring) even if you can find a media account that attempts to explain the background in understandable terms you're unlikely to read it. So it devolves into a series of exchanges in which each side pounds the table for a while, with anti-monitoring activists refusing to acknowledge the legal framework for the monitoring, and Administration defenders asserting the lawful nature of the program while avoiding the implications of such programs, until people lose interest.

There's a media angle to that, as well, in that the media wants to generate readers and viewers, and you don't draw an audience by boring them. But that's less a matter of having learned from past mistakes and becoming more disciplined, and more a matter of being less concerned with the story than with its appeal to the masses. A responsible media might bore us a bit with the legal stuff, then engage in a debate over the margins of privacy, how we can protect and value privacy in the modern era, and how to balance privacy and security. If you looked hard enough you could find that sort of discussion back in the Clinton era and you can find it now - but it's not the sort of information the mainstream media actively promotes so you can expect to have to work to find it.

John McCain's Thoughtless Militarism

I was reading about John McCain's views on whether or not we should intervene in Syria and couldn't help but note that he simultaneously wants to launch a massive military assault on Syria to remove the Assad regime, but without putting boots on the ground. Never mind that the Assad regime has distributed caches of chemical weapons throughout the nation, and to bomb them (assuming we can even locate them) would almost certainly involve the release of chemical clouds, causing deaths on top of those of the civilians who would be killed in the bombing raids themselves. I have no doubt that Assad has placed weapons caches in locations that all-but-ensure that a bombing raid would cause civilian deaths. I also suspect that Assad might take the opportunity to set off some explosions and chemical releases of his own, and blame them on a U.S. raid. And if we topple Assad, all those caches are up for grabs - and some very nasty weapons could end up in the hands of factions allied with Hezbollah or Al Qaeda in Iraq, among other anti-U.S. groups.

McCain's recent grandstanding, through his surprise trip to Syria, also highlights both his ignorance of the region and its actors - he wants the Obama Administration to arm "good" Syrian rebels, but didn't know the history of the factions he met with, and doesn't seem to understand that the majority of rebels want to create an Islamist state. He also doesn't seem to be aware, or perhaps doesn't care, that a rebel victory is almost certain to be followed by atrocities or (at best) ethnic cleansing of Alawites. It's also worth noting that the groups he wants to support are not uniformed forces - they're the type of forces he would eagerly label "unlawful combatants" if they were fighting the U.S. or its allies. I'm reminded of this:

I think McCain's heart is in the right place, which is to say that he's in the "peance freeance" faction of the Republican Party - those who think that the U.S. military takes the form of the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers and, once they defeat the evil overlords and their minions, peace and democracy will break out all over. The problem is, he has no apparent interest in non-military solutions, or at least doesn't seem to deem them worthy of consideration or discussion, nor does he have any particular interest in the region or its actors. Why does he confuse Sunni and Shia, why doesn't his staff ensure that he doesn't meet with factions that are opposed to U.S. goals and interests when he grandstands, why does he seem to think that if you decapitate a despotic regime the people will immediately clamor for Western-style democracy? Because, to the extent that the subject matter doesn't make things go "boom", he appears to have given very little thought to pretty much any significant foreign policy issue. His mistakes suggest that he's not even interested, even as he plays the elder statesman and lobbies for war. He shows no sign that he's willing or able to learn from our nation's history, no matter how recent and no matter what role he played in that history.

When I look back at the Bush Administration, and its colossal incompetence on foreign policy issues, I'm reminded of the opportunities George W. Bush squandered in the early months of his regime. That would have been a time to reach out to nations like Egypt (with its aging leader) and to Syria (with its new leader), to try to move the region toward democracy, encourage economic development, and push for the development of institutions and policies that would make those states less oppressive and better able to eventually transition to democracy (e.g., driving corruption out of the civil service, ensuring independent courts, pushing for better respect for human rights). But for all of the talk of Bush's "Freedom Agenda", his actions suggested something else. The "Freedom Agenda" was a cloak for realpolitik - leaders that the Bush Administration wanted to keep in place knew that they were safe, and Bush had no apparent interest in pushing for changes that might upset those leaders or in trying to create bridges to leaders of traditionally hostile nations. That is, when it involves serious diplomatic effort, developing an understanding of the region or its players, or getting up to your elbows in difficult, long-standing factional conflicts, neither Bush nor McCain have much visible interest in advancing democracy. But if you can drop some bombs and call it a "Freedom Agenda", the're all in.

Grandstanding over Syria isn't helpful, because there's no good path forward. If the U.S. intervenes and things don't improve - or worsen - it will be deemed necessary to escalate our involvement. Once we're in, we'll yet again be in a situation where our departure is all but certain to be followed by a civil war or atrocities, but those issues will likely be even harder to resolve than they were in Iraq. So we pour hundreds of billions of dollars, perhaps a trillion or more, into yet another war in the Middle East followed by another indefinite occupation. It's not enough to say "Let's do something, but not put boots on the ground", even if it plays well on Fox News. And it's never enough to view the entire world as a military target, because the only tool in your toolbox is the military. But it seems, that's about all McCain has to offer.

What's the Alternative to Chained CPI

Matthew Yglesias is upset that the President has raised the possibility of using chained CPI for cost of living adjustments for Social Security:

The risk here now is twofold. Inside the Beltway, Republicans can say "well, look, we disagree about taxes but why don't we just do these entitlement reforms that even the president thinks we should do." Meanwhile, outside the Beltway Republican candidates can run ads castigating Democrats for bankrupting the country so badly that they want to add Social Security cuts to the dastardly Medicare cuts they already implemented. Part of the point of the Senate Democrats' budget was to stake out a position of easily defensible high ground. This seems like the White House wading into a much more exposed piece of territory.

If the leading concern is that the Republicans will take one of President Obama's proposals and run misleading or false attack ads, the President may as well close up shop and go home. That's inevitable.

If the leading concern is that the Republicans will propose a Social Security "fix" that renders the program solvent for the indefinite future, it's been pretty clear that the Democrats and President Obama would cooperate. That's been true for more than four years. Obama's "grand bargain" proposal from a couple of years ago included a Social Security "fix".

The Republicans won't propose to isolate Social Security, patch the program and end their demagoguery about its pending insolvency because they don't want to fix the program and leave it, essentially, as-is. Were they to actually propose such a Reagan-style fix, it would not be the Democrats whose agenda would suffer were it to become law.

I think Yglesias also misapprehends public sentiments about Social Security. That is, while there's not broad excitement or enthusiasm for benefits cuts, the net impact of decades of rhetoric about the program being on the verge of bankruptcy has created a context in which the public (including many Social Security recipients) is willing to accept cuts in order to preserve the program. There is no broad, public confusion about which party wants to preserve Social Security and which would prefer to privatize or end the program and, while the Republicans might create scare ads to try to gin up their base, I don't think many outside of the Republican base would be receptive to the notion that it is the Republicans who want to prevent cuts and save Social Security.

Social Security is supposed to be self-funding. If you want to preserve it as a self-funded program over the long-term, you need to look at its income and expenditures. If you want to complain that the President is looking at the wrong number, please tell us: what number would you prefer that he look at? Sure, you can argue that the President should be asking for a FICA tax increase to cover the projected growth in Social Security expenditures, instead of suggesting a cost of living adjustment that will lower payments over the long-term, but it's pretty obvious why the President isn't offering the Republicans a tax increase in exchange for their agreement with his tax increase for the general fund.

It would be reasonable to argue that there are presently two aspects of Social Security that are putting the most stress on the system, SSD benefits for disabled workers and the effective subsidy given to families where one spouse does not work outside the home or earns significantly less than a higher-earning spouse. If you believe the definitions are too lax, it would be reasonable to argue that Congress should revisit its definitions of what constitutes a disability for the purposes of qualifying for SSD. If you do not, it would be reasonable to argue that a spike in SSD applications and qualifications due to a significant downturn in the economy justifies a subsidy from the general fund, just as SSI payments for disabled persons who don't have enough work credits to qualify for SSD are paid from the general fund.

It would similarly be reasonable to argue that the benefits given to a stay-at-home or lower-wage spouse offer value to society, but would more reasonably be paid for out of the general fund as opposed to from wage-based contributions. Keep the program true to form, as a compulsory savings program, and to the extent that Congress believes it beneficial to society to provide a larger-than-otherwise-available retirement benefit to the lower-earning or non-earning spouse, pass that cost onto society as a whole instead of asking workers who will not receive that subsidy to take a benefits cut in order to subsidize other families. But... I don't hear anybody making that type of argument.

The proposal I hear most often is to remove the cap from FICA taxes, such that the wealthiest in effect experience a pretty massive tax increase. The argument is that if you look at the numbers, that move renders Social Security solvent for the indefinite future. The first problem is that it's a non-starter: nobody who is in a position to effect Social Security reform is backing it. It's not going to happen. The second problem is that you will shift some wealthy and powerful defenders of Social Security from the pro- column, based upon the largely equitable system for collecting and distributing benefits, into the anti- column, based upon your transforming a savings program into what will come to be perceived as a welfare program. You'll mobilize every anti-tax group that is presently agitating over significantly smaller numbers to target Social Security. So if that's your idea of "serious", you're agitating for a proposal that is completely unrealistic and, over the longer run, is apt to bring the roof down on our heads.

Let's recall also that one big factor here is that senior citizens vote. Yglesias is concerned about Republican ads that "Obama cut your Medicare and wants to cut your Social Security" because... senior citizens vote. So why am I to believe that if senior citizens realize that chained CPI is reducing their benefits to an unacceptable level, no politician will notice, and no senior will say, "Hey - let's vote for the politician who's going to fix this boondoggle and implement a more reasonable COLA"? We are presently talking about ten year budget plans but that means we're talking... five Congresses, two, maybe three Presidents... none of which can bind its successor. For a point of comparison, under the present formula if the cost of living adjustment would reduce benefits due to deflation, the COLA applied is zero percent - by design, not by accident. Seniors will notice what is happening.

Seriously, it's easy to say, "The President shouldn't have made that specific proposal, even though it fixes Social Security's books", but what's the alternative? And why should we view as "serious" a President who simply shrugs off the issue because a tough choice is involved or, shocking as it is, because politics are involved?

Paul Ryan's Playing Dumb Again

One hardly knows what to say.

"The question is, is [President Obama] going to go out on the campaign trail and start campaigning against us again like he has been since the election?" [Paul] Ryan said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."...

"Look, I ran against him, so we have different views. But at least we started talking. This is the first time I ever had a conversation like that with him. So I think that's a good, constructive start. The question is, is there follow through? The question is, does the campaign start back up or does the engagement continue in a real, constructive and promising way? I don't know the answer to that question. Time will tell."

Ryan seems to remember that he is a politician, and seems to recall having run against the President in a recent election. I assume he also recalls losing that election. But is he simply pretending to be stupid or does he sincerely not understand that he and the President are in different political parties, and that he is presently campaigning against the President's agenda?

The Finely Tuned Messaging of the Political Right

A week or two ago I saw a Republican commentator complaining about how mean President Obama was to Mitt Romney during the election campaign. She accused the President of running an ad that said that Mitt Romney gave somebody cancer. My reaction to that statement was that she knew the actual facts - an independent entity, backing Obama, ran an ad about a man whose wife died of cancer, and suggested that she might have had a better outcome had Bain not taken over his company, laid him off, and cost them his health insurance.

To the best of my knowledge, nobody is claiming that the ad was fair, and the story it told was misleading. But the problem for Republicans is that if you respond to the ad, you will have great difficulty not responding to its story - and that story is of the problems families face when their health insurance is tied to their employment.

So what's the solution? That's easy: you lie. You pretend not to be familiar with the details of the ad, pretend to believe that it was an official Obama campaign ad, and pretend that it says something absurd. That way you get to advance a story line of how negative the Obama campaign was, how it was detached from facts, and get to avoid responding to the difficult issues the actual ad raised.

It is simply not credible that right-wing power players are unfamiliar with the ad. It went viral, it was discussed at length (often with breathless overstatement) in political blogs, on "fact checking" sites, in editorials, on television.... The distortion is deliberate.

The Republicans have become very good at shaping a message, pushing it out through multiple channels, and sticking to the script. So it was no surprise when I heard essentially the same story being pushed again, by none other than Grover Norquist:

Norquist: [Obama] has a very expansive vision and a very different sales pitch. Eighty-six percent of his ads this year were trashing Mitt Romney as a person. He'll give you cancer. He'll do all this other stuff. Eighty-six percent...

Rehm: I don't think he said that.

Norquist: Oh, one of the ads that was paid for on his behalf said that some guy who worked at one point for one of his firms got cancer and that was somehow Romney's fault. I don't know why they put it in the ad if it wasn't Romney's fault. That said, they went after him personally, 86 percent of the ads. He won a smashing mandate, overwhelming mandate not to be Mitt Romney. He did not run ads saying I want to spend $1.6 trillion and higher taxes.

Norquist not only repeats the same essential lie about the ad and its content, he mixes in his home-brewed statistics, as if he wants to personify the phrase, "lies, damn lies, and statistics".

When you see Norquist speak, he sometimes displays an odd affect that can distract you from what he's saying. But when you listen to him it's clear that he's focused like a laser on his agenda (nominally the prevention of tax increases, but more accurately the advancement of policies that shift the tax burden from the wealthy onto the rest of us).

When Norquist gets a fact wrong, rest assured, it's not an accident.

What the Election Means for Medicare Reform

Yesterday, Diane Rehm's panel included Julie Hirschfeld Davis, congressional correspondent for Bloomberg News, and Amy Walter, political director for ABC News. I didn't catch much of the show, but I did catch the following atrocious analysis. Starting with Walter:

However, fixing some things about Medicare certainly are doable. And, you know, we had a big fight in this election about Medicare. Now, the interesting point is, you know, both sides can see victory there. On the one hand, the Romney ticket lost and, of course, on that ticket was Paul Ryan, who made the issue of Medicare a centerpiece of his budget. The so-called voucherization as Democrats would say, premium support is how Republicans would argue, lost in one sense.

Given her position, it is difficult for me to believe that Walter is unaware of the fact that Paul Ryan himself referred to his reform proposals as creating vouchers. The reason that the Republicans don't want to use that term has nothing to do with its being a fair description of their plan, and everything to do with how it polls. We saw exactly the same game played back when G.W. Bush was trying to "reform" Social Security - the Republicans called their plan a privatization plan, and when the public recoiled at the term they started talking instead about "personal accounts" and purported that their own original description of the plan was a partisan slur.¹

By the same token, who used to refer to the Ryan Plan as a voucher plan? You guessed it.² "Premium support" is the poll-tested term he would have preferred be substituted for the one he personally originated in relation to his own plans, and which he knows to be accurate. A political director for the news division of a major network should clarify the facts, not play along with Ryan's semantic games.

On the other hand, it didn't lose that badly. I mean, it's not as if the issue was the defining focus of this campaign, and in some cases, while the president was ahead on Medicare, in the final tally, it was not by such a tremendous percentage that Republicans can look back and say, boy, that was really dangerous. We shouldn't have brought that up at all. In fact, they can say, we didn't get beat that bad on it.

Here, Walter is simultaneously arguing that Medicare was not "the defining focus of this campaign" - that is, the President's victory cannot be ascribed to his position on Medicare - and that the Republicans "didn't get beat that bad on it". You can't have it both ways. If most voters were motivated by issues other than Medicare, although you can draw the conclusion that proposals to voucherize Medicare aren't going to destroy a campaign as long as they remain in the background, it tells you nothing about what would happen if they were perceived as the defining focus of a campaign.

Then Davis takes the argument from bad to worse:

The other thing is that if you look at the groups that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan won, seniors were a big part of it. I mean, it's been the case in the past that you couldn't talk about this without being really afraid that you were going to alienate an important voting constituency. It -- we didn't really see it happen in Florida or anywhere else, really, for Mitt Romney. And now, you could argue that Medicare wasn't the primary issue in this election. But it was certainly very much in the conversation.

And as Amy said, when Paul Ryan became the vice presidential pick, it was a major item on people's radar screen. And they didn't pay for it among older voters. So that is an indication, I think, for Republicans that they can maybe do this and maybe even for Democrats and not get -- pay such a huge political price if they do it the right way.

Surely Davis has a long enough memory to recall what actually happened. Romney promised not to touch Social Security for anybody who is presently retired or will be retiring over the next decade. Sure, some were smart enough to figure out that he intended to voucherize the program for younger workers, but many did not, and many who did either didn't care about the younger workers or felt that Romney's procrastination put the issue so far into the future that it wasn't relevant to their vote. On top of that, Romney engaged in shameless demagoguery about Obama's proposed cuts to Medicare spending, pretending that they were cuts of benefits to seniors and that the President wanted to take away the benefits of good, retired people who had earned them in order to give health insurance to lazy, poor people.

You cannot draw the lesson from Romney's campaign that it is safe to propose major changes to Medicare without risking alienating "an important voting constituency", namely the seniors who presently receive or who are about to receive Medicare, because Romney did not actually take that risk. A courageous political leader who sincerely believed Medicare needs to be turned into a voucher program for the good of the country might have done so, anyway, but Romney was anything but courageous and it remains difficult to discern whether he has any sincere beliefs.

Also, Davis has to know that before the election Ryan was a relatively obscure person outside of the Beltway and Tea Party circles, that his "budget" is hogwash, and that most voters don't believe accurate descriptions of what Ryan proposed to do through that budget. Ryan's selection as Romney's running mate meant about as much to Medicare policy as Palin's selection meant for foreign policy. The election is over - there's no need to pretend otherwise.
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1. G.W. Bush wrote in "Decision Points,

Democratic leaders alleged I wanted to "privatize" Social Security. That was obviously poll-tested language designed to scare people. It wasn't true. My plan saved Social Security, modernized Social Security, and gave Americans the opportunity to own a piece of their Social Security. It did not privatize Social Security.

As should be needless to say, the term "privatization" came from organizations like Cato and FreedomWorks, not the political left. Further, when he created the President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security, back in 2001, the members of the commission understood that the President wanted them to at least partially privatize the system. Here's an exchange between Committee member Leanne Abdnor (straight out of Cato) and Roger Hickey, from the Institute for America’s Future:

MS. ABDNOR: But just real quickly. In your statement you said that our mandate, as given to us by the President is, in other words, to privatize Social Security?

MR. HICKEY: That is the way I understood it.

MS. ABDNOR: My question is does that mean that a total -- does privatization mean that the President wants to dismantle, completely dismantle the program? Is that your understanding?

MR. HICKEY: No. I think I have specified that he has mandated you to partially privatize the system.

MS. ABDNOR: But not dismantle the system. Correct?

MR. HICKEY: I don’t think the President intends to dismantle the system. No.

MS. ABDNOR: I’m sorry?

MR. HICKEY: I don’t think the President intends -- thinks that he is giving you a mandate to --

MS. ABDNOR: Okay. And the reason I say that is because a lot of people, when they hear the term privatize, they interpret it as we are going to do away with Social Security and dismantle it all together and replace it with that. I just wanted to be clear what your interpretation of that was. So, thank you.

MR. HICKEY: no. My point that I tried to make in my testimony clearly is that I think when you go down this road, when you pull on the string on part of an integrated system, the whole thing does start to unravel. Nobody has explained to me how you are going to be able to maintain survivors benefits, for example, and disability benefits when you are tampering with the retirement benefit, if, in fact, you do that. I do think that there is a danger of going down the road of private accounts, that the whole system starts to unravel and that you have something akin to dismantling of the system. But I think that you have been asked to look at privatizing a portion of the Social Security system, and I think -- I hope that you will think through the implications of that.

MS. ABDNOR: Absolutely. But if I understand your answer, no, you don’t mean to say that you believe the intention of the commission of the President is to completely to dismantle, but it could lead to that?

MR. HICKEY: Yes.

Ms. Abdnor was aware of the possible public reaction to the term "privatization", but she accepted the term as a fair description of the President's goals for the Committee.

2. And in the manner of G.W., Ryan accused people who used his words to describe his plan as using "a poll tested word designed to scare today's seniors".

We Cannot Expect Republican Support for Carbon Taxes

On several recent occasions I've heard conservative talking heads make comments along the line of, "Global warming is real, the science supports it, but it's too late to do anything about it." Meanwhile, the global reality is that if it's a fraction of a penny cheaper to extract fossil fuels from the ground and burn them as compared to deriving energy from any other source, it's pretty clear that somebody is going to dig up or extract the fossil fuel and burn it.

Jamelle Bouie argues that conservatives should support (or is it "get back to supporting") some sort of tax on carbon emissions.

With a carbon tax off the table, new regulatory action becomes inevitable, with greater government intervention in the economy. This isn’t a hypothetical; when new taxes or direct spending is blocked as a means of implementing policy, the result is almost always a confusing, expensive and inefficient patchwork of regulations, mandates, and tax expenditures (see: the Affordable Care Act).

If conservatives believe that they can prevent any action on climate change indefinitely, then they should continue their opposition to a carbon tax or any other market-based mechanism for dealing with emissions. But if they have the slightest doubts, they would do well to open themselves to the possibility. All things being equal, it’s much better to conservative interests for the government to implement a tax and walk away, rather than develop a new scheme for regulation.

To which the "reasonable" people to whom I've previously alluded will argue that there's no point in a unilateral approach to climate change - if you can't bring China, India and the rest of the world along, the impact of unilateral action is modest. And as was suggested by the Republican approach to these issues during the primaries and presidential campaign, any regulatory approach is going to be derided as harming domestic oil production and driving up the cost of gas and heating oil to the detriment of U.S. consumers.

One of my frustrations with the debates is that both candidates were at times willing to adopt a narrative they knew to be misleading, not only because they stood to gain politically but also because the narrative is consistent with the beliefs of the voters they were hoping to reach. There are some issues for which pushing back against your opponent's false or misleading statement can hurt you politically.

The example that Bouie's argument brings to mind is the price of gas. Romney, who has to know better, was arguing that the President has some sort of magical control of gas prices. As if there's a valve hidden under his desk in the Oval Office that controls the nation's supply of gasoline. As if gas prices aren't affected by refinery capacity. As if increased domestic oil production will result in a sudden drop in the price of gasoline, even if the production has no meaningful impact on world supply or the price of oil in the global market. As if the difference between the price of gasoline on the date the financial crisis bottomed out and the price today is reflective of the White House energy policy instead of the laws of supply and demand.

Why not lecture Romney that he knows how commodity pricing works, and he knows that his argument is insipid? I suspect it's because polling and focus group testing suggests that it's not what people want to hear. Just like people don't want to hear that the President doesn't have granular control over the unemployment rate - as if a president in a recession who is looking at 8%+ unemployment would decide, coming into an election, "I think I'll keep unemployment high." People just don't want to know. And alas, politicians benefit by keeping the mythology alive.

Politics, Policy and the Fiscal Cliff

Robert Kuttner analyzes the President's proposals on taxes and the budget as we approach the so-called fiscal cliff:

However, despite the president’s elegant move on tax policy, there are two other aspects to deficit and budget politics where his posture is not quite so firm.

One is whether to include Social Security and Medicare reform (by which the right means cuts) in a Grand Bargain.

This was always a dubious idea, and part of the right’s hidden agenda to mix up current budget politics with long-term issues about social insurance. Yesterday, Obama came closer than ever before to saying that he would not sacrifice Social Security.

First, the President expressed during the first debate that Social Security reform was on the table:

You know, I suspect that, on Social Security, we've got a somewhat similar position. Social Security is structurally sound. It's going to have to be tweaked the way it was by Ronald Reagan and Speaker -- Democratic Speaker Tip O'Neill. But it is -- the basic structure is sound.

If the Republicans can put politics aside, they can get a Social Security deal inside of a few hours of negotiation - minor adjustments that improve the program's fifty year projection and make the accountants happy. The President appears to be telegraphing that no further deal will be made.

Second, the Republicans made clear first with their demagoguery about "death panels" and Obama's Medicare spending cuts, and second with their retreat from their own voucher proposals for anybody under fifty-five, that they have no stomach for actually reforming Medicare. They want to do it, but they lack the courage and fortitude.

The President can play the same game that Romney and Ryan attempted during the election - "We'll preserve Medicare for now, but we'll cut spending in the future, when the economy is stable and we've had time to study the issue and identify savings." Frankly, if the goal is to avoid the "fiscal cliff", that's all you can do in the short term. Whatever is agreed it's reasonable to anticipate that three, five years down the line when the cuts are supposed to be put into effect, Congress will blink. Just as they do every single year with the "doc-fix".

Kuttner argues,

Obama has let it be known that he wants the deficit reduction to be “back-loaded”—little if any in the first year or two, and then a gradual phase-in. That’s better than the reverse. But in the end game, the most important thing for Democrats is not to be locked into any multi-year mandatory cuts.

Barring some kind of multi-year super-deal—that Obama should avoid—the rules of Congress prohibit one Congress from binding another.

Right now, arbitrary, mandatory cuts are working pretty well for the President. If a new fiscal cliff is created to compel another round of negotiations a year from now, it's likely to be Congress that is running scared.

Realistically speaking, any deal would be in two parts - tax and spending changes that will be put into effect this year and an agreed framework for future years. I'll grant, if you push cuts too far into the future you are likely to see that although some reform measures are put into immediate effect, key future measures not. Neither side wants to fumble that ball - they both have wish lists they want put into immediate effect, and likely both hope to trade them for promises of what they "will" do in the future.

How to Approach Tax Reform and Balancing the Budget

Mark Thoma quotes Robert Reich on "grand bargain" negotiations, with Reich proposing how President Obama could open negotiations by describing a set of tax increases and loophole closures that would balance the budget, without any need to "raise taxes on America’s beleaguered middle class, cut Social Security or Medicare and Medicaid, reduce spending on education or infrastructure, or cut programs for the poor".

Although Reich presents his argument in apparent earnest, I don't think he expects that the President will follow his advice. Thoma presents a more basic suggestion,

Obama should at least reverse the Republican pre-election mantra and insist: raise taxes first, then we'll talk spending cuts.

I think you can take a bit from all three columns. The President could actually use Reich's model to illustrate "This is how we can balance the budget with tax increases," followed by, "Here are the tax increases and loophole closures I actually propose." He can add, I'm not saying these tax increases and reforms cannot be reduced or eliminated but I am saying this: before I'm willing to revisit that part of my proposal we must identify enough spending cuts to balance the budget, and only if we accomplish that can we start talking about additional spending cuts that might offset the revenue we otherwise need to raise through the tax changes I've identified."

I also think he should stick to his guns on Social Security, even if it makes some people gnash their teeth, with the same sort of tweaks that were made in 1982. Change as little as possible, in a manner that will make the CBO happy over a fifty year projection. It's the position he took in the debates, and it's consistent with the notion that Social Security should be self-funding.

Frankly, I think the conceit of the "grand bargain" can get in the way of good policy formation, just as throwing three competing goals (universal coverage, revenue neutrality, reduction of healthcare costs) into healthcare reform unnecessarily complicated the debate and legislation while arguably producing a weaker bill than might have been achieved through separate legislation. Social Security expenditures are increasing, but are not out of control. The federal deficit is not all that bad when you remove Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security from the mix. The real issue is the present cost and projected growth of healthcare expenditures. Ezra Klein summed up the issues a few days ago with a series of CBO graphs.

What these three charts tell you is simple: It’s all about health care. Spending on Social Security is expected to rise, but not particularly quickly. Spending on everything else is actually falling. It’s health care that contains most all of our future deficit problems. And the situation is even worse than it looks on this graph: Private health spending is racing upwards even faster than public health spending, so the problem the federal government is showing in its budget projections is mirrored on the budgets of every family and business that purchases health insurance....

Page 9 of the report includes this remarkable statistic: If we just continue on the way we’re going , then “spending for Social Security, Medicare, other major health programs, defense, and interest payments” will “nearly equal all of the government’s revenues in 2020 and would exceed them from 2022 onward — leaving no revenues to cover any other federal activities, such as income security programs, retirement benefits for federal civilian and military employees, transportation, research, education, law enforcement, and many other programs.”

The projection does not include reforms not yet in effect, i.e., those of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare"), but it's beyond obvious that healthcare costs are the elephant in the room. The cost control measures of Obamacare are not going to fix the problem, but at least they're a starting point. If the Republicans choose to continue to pretend that this is a problem we can fix by repealing the first serious effort to bend the cost curve, or by cutting funds for PBS, they're (still) not serious about balancing the budget. If you recall, when the Democrats proposed a modest measure to help patients understand end-of-life care, something that could conceivably lead to better care and outcomes for elderly patients, the Republicans demagogued about "death panels".

The only Republican reform ideas we seem to be hearing about on healthcare are to turn all public insurance programs into voucher programs, and to strip preventive care out of health insurance and pretty much make everything but catastrophic care self-funded through a MSA. "Let's not look at what is working here, and certainly not at what is working in the rest of the world." If our nation's per capita healthcare expenses were reduced to the levels typical of other developed nations, most of our immediate budgetary problems would disappear - we would still have a cost curve issue, but we would have a much better starting point. The Republicans won't consider emulating even the most market-based foreign healthcare models - not just because ideology trumps balancing the budget, but because it's easier to argue for cuts if you first contrive a crisis.

Thomas Friedman Pulls His Asbestos Undershorts Out of Storage

In simple terms, following the 1967 war between Israel and its Arab neighbors, three positions emerged on what should happen in the Palestinian lands Israel captured during the war:

1. "Get Out Now" - the position taken by then-M.K. Uri Avnery, that Israel should resist the temptation to try to significantly adjust its borders and settle the territories, and end its occupation as quickly as possible, lest it be drawn into a long-term occupation from which it would become increasingly difficult to extract itself.

2. "We All Know What Will Happen" - the position taken by much of the world, that the length of the occupation was a distraction and that eventually the two sides would reach an agreement creating a Palestinian state on most or all of the occupied territories, with some amount of border adjustment and land swapping.

3. "Dig In" - the position taken by certain Israeli politicians and generals, that they should set up a context for annexation of great swaths of the occupied territories, and to make it politically difficult for future leaders to agree to any borders approximating the Green Line, or perhaps to any concession of land at all.

During the years leading up to the second Intifada with its associated rash of Palestinian suicide bombings, Thomas Friedman fell into camp #2. He had a tendency to lecture both sides about the outcome that he viewed as inevitable, while hewing to a form of centrism that both sides in the conflict seemed to view as insufficiently sensitive to their concerns. It was a big picture view, one that avoided the need to address the complexity of actually getting to a final resolution. Following the collapse of peace talks, and more so 9/11, it's not so much that Friedman fell into a different camp, so much as he backed off his prior tendency to lecture Israel.

Prior to his retreat from the issue, Friedman's suggestion that Israel was not offering enough, that trying to change facts on the ground was a fool's errand, that the two sides should put aside feelings and history and accept the invevitable, earned him the enmity of people who disagreed with him. Needless to say, as you move toward people who hold more extremist views the reaction to Friedman became correspondingly shrill and hostile. Over the interim, open hostility toward Friedman seemed to diminish, but his critics have long memories. With this reengagement of the conflict, it's time once again for the asbestos undershorts.

I was thus a bit surprised to see Friedman be this direct:

Israeli friends have been asking me whether a re-elected President Obama will take revenge on Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu for the way he and Sheldon Adelson, his foolhardy financier, openly backed Mitt Romney. My answer to Israelis is this: You should be so lucky.

Ever since Jimmy Carter brokered the Camp David Accord between Israel and Egypt, there has been a sense that presidents have an obligation to try to mitigate or end what was once deemed the Middle East crisis, to help Israel maintain its democracy, borders and Jewish character while ending years, turning into decades, of Israeli military occupation of Palestinian lands. Friedman correctly states that the American public is demanding that the President focus on domestic concerns, as well as international conflicts that directly involve or threaten the U.S., and correctly states that in this context (as in pretty much any other) negotiations work best when the participants in a negotiation invite a mediator to help them polish off an agreement as opposed to when the mediator is asked to start negotiations by dragging the two sides to the table.

But I think Friedman misses some important components relating to why the issue has diminished in the minds of the U.S. public, and why pressing for negotiations is not a priority for the president. First and foremost, U.S. domestic concern about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was driven in large part by intensive news coverage. During the 1980's, it was not at all atypical for the evening news to sound like this: "Now news from the Middle East. A riot broke out in Ramallah when..." ar "a bomb exploded in a Jerusalem café...." Between Israel's security measures, changes in Palestinian leadership, and the significant number of other Middle East crises, conflicts and wars, that's no longer what Americans hear. Israel-Palestine has dropped considerably from the top spot of Middle East crises that the Americans want to resolve.¹

On the other side of the equation, a persistent effort to depict Muslims as irrational actors with whom you cannot negotiate, and who can't be trusted to follow a deal to which they agree, has eroded support for negotiations among factions that might otherwise press the President to become more involved. If, as certain Israeli leaders have argued, there's no one to talk to and no way to reach a meaningful agreement, why go there? Some raise similar arguments about Israel and leaders like Netanyahu - if there's no reason to believe that Netanyahu has the will or that he could get the authority to carry out an agreement involving the evacuation of Israeli settlements, why pretend that there can be a real negotiation - the gulf between what he can offer and what a Palestinian leader might accept may be too broad to bridge. Also, while Clinton might have been persuaded to provide funds to help Israel compensate Israeli settlers who had to leave their homes as part of a final deal, the present economic situation makes it highly unlikely that Congress would presently provide such a subsidy.

The conflict has reached a point at which there's little upside for a President in seriously engaging settlement. George W. Bush created a model of non-serious engagement, window dressing, and President Obama was not helped by his early effort to restart negotiations. If I were Obama and Netanyahu proposed that I attempt to mediate the conflict, and invitation I doubt Netanyahu is at all inclined to offer, and Abbas was willing to participate, my response would be simple. "No problem. Send me your maps of your proposed final borders and we'll start from there." Negotiations with no maps? What do they say about trying the same thing over and over again, while expecting a different result?
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1. David Ignatius wrote a recent column outlining what he sees as the President's foreign policy priorities - China, Iran, Afghanistan, then "the Middle East" which he subdivides into "the metastasizing Syrian civil war, solidifying democracy in Egypt and rehabilitating a broken Israeli-Palestinian peace process". I'll grant that Afghanistan is in South Asia, albeit bordering the Middle East, but last I checked Iran was part of the Middle East. By Ignatius's measure, that would make Israel... a distant number four on the list of Middle East priorities, and number six on his global list?

Ignatius suggests that in the Israel-Palestinian conflict Obama should engage in "a round of secret contacts to build up the local players who can be America’s partners for peace". Putting aside for the moment that if Ignatius knew about them, they wouldn't be secret, is he serious? These secret contacts would presumably be on the Palestinian side, so... is he talking about Hamas? Is Ignatius offering a plan or a fantasy?

Let's Not Forget How the Game is Scored

In sport, a team that has reached a point at which it is guaranteed victory may hesitate to run up the score. A win is a win and, absent the opportunity to set a new record, genuine concern about a late comeback, or a similarly reasonable reason to do so, it's widely viewed as poor sportsmanship.

Politics isn't sport, but a win remains a win. Save for the possibility of a recount, the outcome of an election predicated on the popular vote doesn't change based upon whether you win by 1 vote or 1,000,000 votes. If one strategy gives you a 75% chance at winning with 55% of the vote, and another gives you a 90% strategy of winning with 51% of the vote, the latter strategy is the better bet. When Karl Rove dreams of a "permanent Republican majority", or at least a semi-permanent majority, while I'm sure he would be happy if it were 75% or more, or even 55%, he'll take 51%.

Let's also recall, the presidency is not decided based upon the popular vote. It's decided based upon the Electoral College, and the Republican Party is very much focused on preserving that institution. Not because they're truly worried about voter fraud, but because the manner in which electors are assigned to states and subsequently chosen by voters benefits them. Do away with the electoral college and even in swing states the focus will be on major population centers. If you're trying to maximize the popular vote, your priorities will be very different than if you're trying to maximize the electoral vote.

When you watch a football game and you see a score of 21-18, that's a close game. If you see a score of 21-9, not so close. But the first score may be three touchdowns versus six field goals, and the second three touchdowns versus three field goals. Would you be tempted to say that the losing team "really won" the first game and "really tied" the second, based upon the number of times each team scored? Well, if it's your team you might be tempted, but your friends are going to laugh at you if you try to persuade them that you're right.

The Electoral College works in a similar way. You get a certain number of electors for each state you win, mostly on a "winner takes all" basis. So you plan your victory based upon the number of electoral votes you can accumulate. You put enough resources into safe states to keep them in your column, but you focus your recourses on getting your supporters to the polls in the states in which you believe you'll win - or lose - by a narrow margin. When a state does not appear to be in play, it won't get much attention from either candidate - you don't want to waste time and money on a sure win or sure loss when you can better use your resources in a swing state.

When Kevin Drum lectures,

Liberals, you should rein in the triumphalism. Obama won a narrow 51-49 percent victory and the composition of Congress changed only slightly. This was not a historic vindication of liberalism, and it doesn't mean that we can suddenly decide that demography will sweep us to victory for the next couple of decades.

I thus agree in part and disagree in part. If there are people on the far left of the Democratic Party who believe that the nation is now ready for the roll-out of their agenda, they are in for a rude awakening. If the Republican Party gets its act together, it could be a bona fide contender in the next presidential race - and even if it doesn't it remains a serious contender for the midterm elections.

But...

Obama did not win "a narrow 51-49 percent victory". Assuming Florida certifies for Obama, as it is likely to do, he won a landslide 332-206 victory. Because the victory is not based upon "number of states one" or "percentage of votes case". The victory is based upon the number of electors won. Had the Obama team reallocated its resources, it could have lost the election while winning 55% or more of the popular vote. Frankly, Romney could have done the same thing, but would likely have been rewarded by an even greater loss in the electoral vote. So yes, remember the popular vote and that the nation is divided on a lot of important issues - but don't pretend that the popular vote is significant to, or somehow trumps, the result of the electoral vote as that's not how the game is scored and obviously that's not how the game is won.

Still Crazy Illogical After All These Years

I've commented on the dimwitted argument by people that it's hard to believe don't know better, that any negative movement in the stock market is somehow the fault of a Democratic politician. For example, George Will.

Right-wing law professor Jim Lindgren made that insipid argument four years ago. Today he doubles down.

If Lindgren believes this type of claptrap, it would seem you can teach law while having a very poor grasp of logic. If he does not, that type of games-playing is beneath him.