Democracy Will be Ruined if Obama Acts Like... Ronald Reagan

Poor Ross Douthat is in a tizzy over the possibility that President Obama may act through executive order, to address some of the immigration issues that the Republicans refuse to address through legislation. No, of course, Douthat makes no mention of the fact that the Senate passed an immigration reform bill that died in the Republican-controlled House. He instead sees the inevitable death of democracy in the President's following in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Douthat's first resort is to the slippery slope, the idea that if the President is willing to shield some groups from deportation in a manner consistent with his constitutional authority and existing law, he could exempt pretty much every person unlawfully in the U.S. from being subject to deportation. He fantasizes,

So the president could “temporarily” legalize 99.9 percent of illegal immigrants and direct the Border Patrol to hand out work visas to every subsequent border crosser, so long as a few thousand aliens were deported for felonies every year.

Even if we assume that to be the case, as Douthat's fantasy has no chance of actually becoming reality, it makes for a weak argument against the exercise of executive prerogative. If anything, though, Douthat's hyperbolic scare tactics reveal the weakness of the Republican position. Perhaps it is only in the face of such a fantasy scenario that House Republicans could be inspired to do their job and actually pass legislation.

Douthat makes an extraordinarily weak attempt to distinguish the President's proposal from past executive actions, revealing his essential ignorance of the facts.

In past cases, presidents used the powers he’s invoking to grant work permits to modest, clearly defined populations facing some obvious impediment (war, persecution, natural disaster) to returning home.

Obviously, the amnesty that Bush and Reagan granted to the wives and children of prior beneficiaries of legislative amnesty do not even slightly resemble what Douthat describes. Douthat also suggests that the number of potential beneficiaries somehow makes the Obama proposal different from what has come before. However, what the numbers truly reflect is the extent to which Congress has neglected this issue -- immigration reform was supposed to be a priority for George W. Bush, but he was never able to get a bill past his own party. As the previously linked article indicates,

"Bush Sr. went big at the time. He protected about 40 percent of the unauthorized population. Back then that was up to 1.5 million. Today that would be about 5 million."

The same article quotes a former Republican aide to then-Senator Alan Simpson that a difference at that time was that Congress indicated that it was going to pass legislation addressing the issue. That's really a distinction without a difference. Nothing is stopping Congress from passing immigration reform legislation, or a narrowly tailored bill directly addressing the issues on which Obama has proposed executive orders. Instead they talk about trying to tie anti-immigration provisions onto "must pass" legislation, potentially triggering a government shut-down. A mature Congress would debate and legislate. We don't have a mature Congress.

From there, it's back to the slippery slope. A President, Douthat argues, could "rewrite" vast areas of public policy through executive order. Again, Douthat ignores the fact that executive orders must be consistent with the law, and thus that Congress has an easy and obvious remedy to overreach -- namely, doing its job. Douthat adds one of his near-inevitable whinges about how Democrats are supposedly hypocritical,

No liberal has persuasively explained how, after spending the last Republican administration complaining about presidential “signing statements,” it makes sense for the left to begin applying Cheneyite theories of executive power on domestic policy debates.

Perhaps Douthat spent years complaining about executive overreach by Bush and Cheney; I can't say that I've followed him closely enough to know, and can say that I don't care enough about his past writings to try to find out. I could point out the obvious, that executive orders are not the same thing as signing statements. A signing statement declares, in effect, "I don't think that this law (or some provision of this law) is constitutional, so I won't be bound by it". Congress can't do much about a signing statement -- it has already legislated on the issue, so passing another bill saying "We really mean it" isn't going to have an impact.

As Douthat should know, an executive order must be consistent with federal law. With an executive order, Congress is free to express its will, and nothing is stopping Congress from passing an immigration law addressing these issues. A better analogy would be to the objections raised to the stack of executive orders that George W. Bush signed on his way out of the White House, but perhaps Douthat doesn't know that history -- or perhaps he doesn't want to allude to facts that betray how pathetic his argument truly is.

It's also interesting that Douthat floats from accusing "liberals" of being hypocrites to relying on a poll that documents that most Democrats oppose unilateral action.

According to the latest IBD/TIPP poll, 73% of the public say Obama should work with Congress on reforms. Just 22% say he should "sidestep Congress and act on his own using executive orders" — something the president has repeatedly pledged to do.

Among independents, 78% say Obama should work with Congress, with only 19% saying he should go it alone. Even among Democrats, only 39% say Obama should act unilaterally, while 54% say he should work with Congress.

Were Douthat more interested in facts and less interested in attacking "liberals" and the President, he might concede that the President's willingness to act by executive action flows from his own party's refusal to legislate on a wide range of important issues, including immigration. He could even call on his party to preempt the President or to make immigration reform a priority in January. Odds are it will take a year from the time any executive order is finalized to when agencies have new regulations and procedures in place to carry out the new policy -- Douthat should note that if the Republicans who will be in control of both chambers of Congress choose not to pass an immigration law during that year, they have nobody to blame but themselves. If they pass a clean bill and it is vetoed by the President, they will be in a strong position to complain -- but they have no apparent intention of being that responsible.

Douthat next resorts to the notion that the midterm election stands as some sort of informal referendum on the President's agenda, I guess signifying that he's supposed to abandon his agenda in favor of whatever the Republicans want. By now, Douthat should be aware that his depiction of a midterm election as a plebiscite is not, in fact, its role, nor is it how legislators treat the outcome of an election. What the election does do, however, is give the Republican Party control in both chambers of Congress, and tremendous latitude to pass an immigration reform bill of their own design come January 1 -- or, if the House Republicans choose to do so, even during the lame duck session.

Douthat follows up by describing his column as "shrill-but-accurae", which shows, I guess, that he can be half-right. After reiterating his position that the number of people who might benefit from the executive orders is larger that with similar prior actions, percentages apparently being beside the point, Douthat expresses the belief that President Obama hopes that his executive orders create "facts on the ground" that a future President won't easily be able to reverse. Wow, now that's the sort of brilliant insight that makes clear why he got his NYTimes gig. Next column, "I just looked in a mirror and realized that there's a nose on my face."

Douthat believes that the executive orders might not be reversed because a "moral obligation" could arise; it's not clear why Douthat believes that such a "moral obligation" would sway a Republican president or legislators. He argues that the "moral obligation" would result in "a form of political pressure", with its supposedly being harder for government "to retract a benefit than to grant it in the first place". Again, no explanation as to why he believes the Republicans -- their party being dedicated to rolling back Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other aspects of the social safety net -- would not give it a college try. Oh, but then he gets to the real issue -- that we're talking about "a Republican establishment that’s fearful of doing anything to alienate Latinos in a presidential year".

A reasonable interpretation of that last point is that the rest is window dressing. Douthat knows that the problem is not so much an issue of executive overreach as it is an example of Republican Party dysfunction. The faction that wants to pass immigration reform can't get a bill past the party's anti-immigration factions, but if you have some form of immigration reform in place the party as a whole won't want to touch the issue for fear of alienating an important voter bloc.

[Recognition of Republican reluctance to alienate Latino voters] is, of course, part of the political calculation here … that claiming more presidential authority won’t just accomplish a basic liberal policy goal, but could also effectively widen the G.O.P.’s internal fissures on immigration, exploiting the divergence of interests between the congressional party and its would-be presidential nominees.)

It's not the President's fault that Douthat's party is dysfunctional on this issue. It's the fault of its elected representatives.

Douthat makes a rather incredible statement,

Then finally, even setting all of the foregoing aside, even allowing that this move could be theoretically reversed, pointing to the potential actions of the next president is still a very strange way to rebut complaints about executive overreach.

It's as if Douthat has never before heard of an executive order. Could he be so ignorant of the U.S. system that he's unaware of the thousands upon thousands of executive orders that have been signed by past administrations, or that there's absolutely nothing unique or special about how Congress or a future President would respond to Obama's proposed administrations as compared to any other executive order?

And this....

But that reality doesn’t really tell us much of anything about whether a particular moves claims too much power for the executive branch itself. Even in the fairly unlikely event that Chris Christie or Marco Rubio cancels an Obama amnesty, that is, the power itself will still have been claimed and exercised, the line rubbed out and crossed; the move will still exist as a precedent, a model, a case study in how a president can push the envelope when Congress doesn’t act as he deems fit.

Given his prior concessions, Douthat knows that's a specious argument. When you're talking about actions that literally track the footsteps of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, you're not talking about a new line being set. Perhaps Douthat means to indict Reagan and Bush for moving the line that Obama is treating as a fair limit? No, of course not. We're dealing with a standard Republican argument that boils down to, "Whatever may have happened under a past Republican president, it's different when a Democrat does it."

Douthat could have offered a reasoned explanation for why immigration reform is a bad idea, or why his political party is correct to oppose it. He could have offered a balanced argument -- yes, it follows precedent; yes, it follows Republican precedent; yes, it flows from Republican obstruction in Congress; but it's still a bad way to implement policy. He could have implored his party to finally pass an immigration reform bill and render the issue moot. But any of that would be far too surprising. Instead, predictably, Douthat makes what is at its heart an appeal to fear, built on the weak foundation of the slippery slope.

Me? As this whole issue could be preempted if Congress simply does its job, I call on Congress to do its job. If Congress can't do that much, even as Douthat bleats about executive overreach, presidents will be effectively forced to rely on executive orders to circumvent Congressional gridlock. That's bad for the country, but in most cases it will likely be worse for nothing to get done.

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.

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.

A "Bush v. Gore" What If....

Courtesy of Sandra Day O'Connor, Scott Lemiuex shares his memories of a horrible series of Supreme Court decisions.

And, again, it’s not just that justices notably unsympathetic to broad equal protection claims claimed to accept an innovative equal protection argument. Where Bush v. Gore immediately falls apart and becomes a historic disgrace is that the completely lawless remedy left an election count with all of the alleged equal protection defects of the court-ordered recount (and the “mess up” job of the Florida authorities) in place.

Here's a thought experiment: What if, rather than tampering in a poorly conducted state election the Supreme Court had let the result stand. Even in the worst of circumstances the Constitution provides a remedy, specifically that the House of Representatives would elect the President.

The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves. And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each; which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted. The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed; and if there be more than one who have such Majority, and have an equal Number of Votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately chuse by Ballot one of them for President; and if no Person have a Majority, then from the five highest on the List the said House shall in like Manner chuse the President. But in chusing the President, the Votes shall be taken by States, the Representation from each State having one Vote; A quorum for this purpose shall consist of a Member or Members from two thirds of the States, and a Majority of all the States shall be necessary to a Choice. In every Case, after the Choice of the President, the Person having the greatest Number of Votes of the Electors shall be the Vice President. But if there should remain two or more who have equal Votes, the Senate shall chuse from them by Ballot the Vice President.

Had the election come down to that, we might as a nation have taken a hard look at how elections are conducted, inconsistent approaches to taking and tallying votes, and similar flaws and set about fixing them. Instead the Supreme Court allowed the nation to bypass that type of difficult work, and subsequent concerns about election technology, fairness and potential for actual fraud have largely been either ignored or have gained attention based not on the genuine flaws reveled by Florida, but based upon demagoguery about largely imaginary allegations of voter fraud. Rather than having remedies directed at improving elections, legislatures have largely focused on making it difficult for certain classes of voter to reach the polls and vote.

Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference. But....

Is it Really 'Picking a Fight' if the Other Guy Doesn't Notice

Michael Gerson, in an effort to redeem his former employer's record, has to go all the way back to an early campaign speech.

In the summer of 1999, George W. Bush chose the first major policy speech of his presidential campaign to pick a fight with Grover Norquist. Bush flatly rejected the “destructive” view “that if government would only get out of our way, all our problems would be solved” — a vision the Texas governor dismissed as having “no higher goal, no nobler purpose, than leave us alone.”

As they say, you campaign in poetry and govern in prose. The fact that the only significant evidence Gerson can find to support his notion that Bush was standing up to the anti-tax crowd comes from a campaign speech is telling.

For some reason Gerson didn't link to the actual speech, but it's available online. The speech was part of Bush's attempt to reinvent himself as a "compassionate conservative", a concept to which he offered little more than lip service.¹ Once Bush took office it wasn't that "deficits don't matter" because we need to "carry a message of hope and renewal to every community in this country". It was "deficits dont' matter" because Bush wanted to expand spending on Medicare (something Mitt Romney might cynically characterize as "buying votes") and massive tax cuts for the wealthy, even if it meant that the deficit would go through the roof.

Gerson relies upon the conceit that a single campaign speech in which Bush supposedly picked a fight with Norquist should be read in a vacuum. As if the only person whose opinion matters in the entire Republican hierarchy is a single anti-tax zealot. Given a choice between a Democratic President who was disinclined to cut taxes and would have tried to maintain budget balance, and a Republican candidate who was promising massive tax cuts for the rich even if it meant going back to deficit spending, who do you think Norquist would choose? And... one suspects Norquist was receiving assurances behind-the-scenes.

Twice in the past week, Bush has sharply criticized his party. A week ago, he charged that congressional Republicans were trying to "balance the budget on the backs of the poor." On Tuesday in New York, he said that his party has been too negative, too pessimistic and too enamored of believing that free markets can solve social problems while ignoring the role of government....

Grover Norquist, who heads Americans for Tax Reform, said the Bush speech was not even discussed at the weekly meeting of conservative activists that he hosts each Wednesday.

"What, me worry?"
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1. I don't want to be unfair here - perhaps Bush sincerely believed in the "compassionate conservative" concept that he made a cornerstone of his campaign. But if he did, he either quickly changed his mind once in office or decided that it wasn't a concept worth pursuing.

American Grandstand, Feauring Rand Paul

Had Rand Paul been President on September 11, 2001, he would have fired somebody... other than himself.

We spent trillions of dollars, but there were a lot of human errors, these are judgment errors, and the people who make judgment errors need to be replaced, fired, and no longer in a position of making these judgment calls."

He's apparently in a tizzy that the Secretary of State doesn't personally review and evaluate each and every one of the 1.4 million or so cables received by the State Department.

I don't believe for a second that, had he been a Senator back in 2001, Rand Paul would not have fallen right into line, circling the wagons around Bush and Rice just like every other Republican. In start contrast with Condoleezza Rice's dismissal of responsibility by her and Bush, the "historic document" excuse, Clinton has been receptive of criticism of the State Department and of how security issues might be improved. Rand Paul-style grandstanding, basically trying to score cheap political points by attacking somebody whose last name is "Clinton", obscures the actual work to be done and makes even valid criticism look partisan.

As Usual, Michael Gerson Overplays His Hand

It's not that he gets off to a good start - he's eager to jump sharks from the word "go" - but how can the man look himself in the mirror after serving up a whopper like this one:

There is a political problem at the heart of the budget debate. If Democrats get what they want — tax-rate increases on the wealthy — they can crow about it in public. If Republicans get what they want — structural reductions in entitlement spending — they are unable to crow. Their motivation is fiscal and ideological, not political.

Gerson's memory is perhaps too short to recall, but when his former boss, George W. Bush, was elected to office our nation had a budget surplus. A few years later we has massive tax cuts, two unfunded wars, the unfunded Medicare Part D benefit, and a massive budget deficit. And then, for Act 2, we got the collapse of the economy. Their motivation is fiscal? If you believe that the Republican Party cares about balancing the budget, you're a fool.

Remind me again, where was Michael Gerson when the Bush Administration was taking the explicit, public position that deficits don't matter? Oh yeah... he was writing Bush's speeches.

Is Republican opposition to Social Security and Medicare ideological, at least within the party itself? Certainly, but not an ideology born in a vacuum. The ideology that drives the Republican Party to attempt to undermine Social Security and Medicare is very much about politics - it's about pleasing powerful and monied interests that bankroll the party, and is about gaining and holding power over the long term.

If Gerson means to suggest that it's a double-edged sword - that the Republicans accept a certain amount of political risk when they make massive cuts to Medicare and Social Security a central part of their party's ideology, and that they thus misrepresent their motivations and goals so as not to alienate the beneficiaries of those programs - he has a point. But to make that point he has to actually admit that the leaders of his party cannot be trusted to tell the truth. That is to say, opposition may be driven by ideology at the top, but the rank and file Republican voters like Social Security and Medicare. They don't share the ideology of the party's elite, and the Republicans therefore obfuscate lest they find themselves unable to win an election.

The heart of the present conflict is that the Republicans have been lying to the public for years, a lie exemplified by the Romney/Ryan budget proposal. Romney promised that he was going to cut taxes, significantly increase military spending and, although he proposed an idea to transform Medicare into a voucher program starting a decade in the future, that he would maintain Medicare benefits for those 55 and older and would not cut Medicare spending. When he was asked for specifics we got "I'll fire Big Bird".

The truth is, if you want to balance the budget it's going to be painful. If you want to balance the budget without increasing tax revenue, it's going to be extremely painful to the middle class. Gerson had no problem with the Bush-era lie that "deficits don't matter", and he has no problem with the present Republican lie that the budget can be balanced - with trillions freed up for tax cuts and increased military spending - by closing loopholes in a revenue-neutral fashion and eliminating waste. His problem is that the Democrats refuse to take ownership of the Medicare and Social Security cuts his party desires.

In focusing on the specifics of Gerson's mendacity, let's not lose track of the big picture. This Congress cannot bind future sessions of Congress to its spending plan. What Gerson and the Republicans want is not an actual, workable plan to balance the budget over a period of years. They want the President to agree to structural changes to Social Security and Medicare that would be difficult for future sessions of Congress to undo, while offering no assurance that they won't be every bit as profligate and irresponsible as Bush with the "savings" that result.

The President is resisting that "deal", and Gerson's unwilling to articulate the stakes in an honest manner, so instead we get this noisome whinging about how the President is a meany-pants who isn't offering enough concessions to the poor, downtrodden Republicans.

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".

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?

If You Want a Balanced Budget....

At a bare minimum, you need to vote for politicians who are serious about balancing the budget. How do you know if balancing the budget is a priority to a politician? Ask him to produce his plan. A weak plan might sound like "We'll cut spending, and raise taxes if we have to." A stronger plan would identify some, most or all of the spending cuts and tax increases necessary to balance the budget. And if you hear something like this,

First, we cut taxes....

You can pretty much take for granted that you're being played for a fool. If the rest of the plan never gets more specific than "tax reform", "cut funding for PBS", and the like, but you choose to believe that the politician at issue is serious about balancing the budget, it's all on you. And if you hear that politician add, "The budget will be balanced in ten years," that is, two years into the next President's term, he's not actually promising to balance the budget.

At The American Conservative, Jordan Bloom expresses desire for a balanced budget amendment - and he's so eager to get it that he proposes what he describes as a "nuclear option", an Article V constitutional convention - to get one. I've commented on balanced budget amendments before - most of them... actually , all the examples I've seen... are weak, politically driven, full of loopholes.... The most sensible comment I've heard on the matter remains that of Warren Buffett - if you want a balanced budget, pass a law that sets a maximum threshold for a deficit and then bar any Member of Congress who votes for spending above that threshold from being reelected. Problem solved.

If you include loopholes in your balanced budget amendment, they will be exploited to the point that the amendment becomes meaningless and can be expected to distort the budgetary process. If you don't include loopholes, you tie the government's hands when deficit spending is necessary, you encourage the sort of budgetary shenanigans you see in state to pretend that a budget is balanced, such as balancing the current budget by shifting the debt into future budgets, and creating a context in which budgetary disputes could end up being litigated - do you seriously want a single federal judge to review and potentially revise the federal budget? Even if it were practically feasible, and could be completed in a timely manner, judicial review would intrude upon what is intended to be a legislative process. You could also inspire the government to expand the money supply - to balance the budget through tools that would trigger inflation.

Proponents of a balanced budget amendment often embrace the notion that the federal government's budget is analogous to a household budget, and that you should not spend more than you "earn". Lots of problems with that... not the least of which are that taxes are not analogous to income, there are times at which running a deficit can be necessary and others when it's good policy (ideally the two will mostly overlap), and the big picture is clouded by the deficit nobody likes to talk about - the trade deficit.

In the biggest picture sense, the concept that you cannot deficit spend forever - that you cannot indefinitely expand the debt burden at a rate that exceeds inflation, has merit. Yes, it would make sense for the government to work on the long-term fiscal health of the nation when the economy is robust, not to spend irresponsibly - or cut taxes irresponsibly - when they have the opportunity to move the budget toward balance or keep it there.

There are two main objections to the plan. The first is that one can never be quite sure what’s going to come out of a constitutional convention. The second is that a balanced budget amendment would probably mean in the near-term rapid austerity and arbitrary spending cuts. You know, like the fiscal cliff–a net deficit ameliorant–but bigger.

On the first front, not only could you end up with a constitution that's unrecognizable by historic measures, it might not even include a balanced budget amendment. On the second front, Bloom basically concedes the policy argument - a balanced budget amendment could put us into a cycle of a worsening recession followed by tax cuts necessary to counterbalance reduced government revenues and the right-wing horror story becomes reality - we become Greece.

It’s worth pointing out that had Romney won last night, this option would likely be closed – conservatives would be expected to believe that he would work to restore fiscal discipline (while increasing spending on wars and “preserving” Medicare).

Romney talked about balancing the budget, his actual promises did not encompass much more than cutting taxes (and PBS). If you believe his confused comments at the debates, the tax cuts were going to somehow be revenue-neutral, but he was unwilling to offer specifics. I do believe that he would have delivered his tax cuts, just as G.W. delivered the cuts he promised, as that's what his financial backers wanted him to do. The rest? Snake oil.

The Republican Party Can No Longer Blame Bush

Okay, I'm really turning that line back on the political right, specifically those factions that have tried to turn the War in Afghanistan into "Obama's War" and the slow economic recovery resulting from the Bush-era economic collapse into "Obama's economy". No doubt, memories of Bush did play a role in holding some voters in the Democratic column where they might otherwise have supported a Republican contender.

Nonetheless, when I read something like this, I think it's fair to say that it was the Republican Party that lost this election, not Bush. It is fair to say that Bush caused damage and that the Republican Party has not recovered from that damage, but I don't think that damage rises to the level that it either cost the party this election or, with more responsible leadership, would have remained a significant issue four years out.

But in reality the more pressing problem is that Republicans are still a party badly damaged by the George W. Bush years. The GOP has traditionally held huge advantages on foreign policy and the economy. That advantage is gone now. And Mitt Romney was the wrong candidate to give the party a refresh on those issues, particularly when the gettable voters were downscale whites. It isn’t that Republicans aren’t reaching enough voters; voters simply don’t believe the GOP is competent to govern.

The Republican Party has long held undeserved advantages on... I think it's more fair to call it "the military" as opposed to foreign policy, and on the economy. Past Republican Presidents did a good job portraying the Democratic Party as "tax and spend", while running up record deficits. They did a good job portraying the Democratic Party as "weak", while committing the U.S. to foreign military escapades that were of questionable value to national security, with sometimes disastrous results. Bush didn't depart from that formula - he simply kicked it up a notch.

But that's still not why the Republican Party lost. The Republican Party lost because it chose to nominate Mitt Romney. I'm certainly not convinced that any of the other declared candidates would have won, at least once the few who displayed any signs of "paleoconservatism" were drummed out of the pool, but let's recall a few things: Bush dreamed of an ethnically inclusive Republican Party. When he ran for office he favored immigration reform, albeit of a somewhat watered down nature. Senator John McCain was a champion of the DREAM Act. John McCain responded to anti-immigrant sentiments in his party by abandoning any support for immigration reform. Mitt Romney predictably tried to come down on multiple sides of the issue, but was not credible. And the Republican Party lost votes as a result - vote losses that cannot be blamed on Bush.

You want a party that is credible on foreign / military policy? Even though he chose to endorse President Obama, Colin Powell is still a Republican. No, I'm not saying run Powell, and I'm well aware of the positions taken by his critics, but I am saying that there are Republicans that continue to have credibility with the public. It was not the Democratic Party that chose to marginalize that faction of the Republican Party.

Obama did not really propose anything new on the economy or foreign policy fronts, but he did make contraception, rape, and Roe v. Wade a large part of this campaign. He constantly portrayed Romney as a man with “the social policies of the 1950s.” Apparently this worked.

I'm sure it played a role in President Obama's advantage among women, but again that's not something you can pin on Bush. G.W. ran as an unapologetically pro-life candidate, and implemented a lot of policies that made the pro-choice crowd angry, but he knew where to draw the line. He didn't come across as the type who wanted to ban contraception or who would make crackpot statements on sexual assault, and I don't think he would have left any ambiguity about where he stood on those issues. Romney tried to dance around the issues, and I doubt that anybody was left satisfied - the social conservatives he was attempting to appease, or the women who questioned whether he would stand up even for their right to access contraception.

The "back to the 1950's" issues, let's recall, arose in no small part from the statements of Tea Party candidates. In many ways the Tea Party is a reinvention of a certain bloc of Republican voters, but it was the Republican establishment and right-wing media that chose to amplify their voice and power. That helped the Republicans gain seats in 2010, but appears to have contributed to their loss in 2012. It definitely contributed to some of the Democratic victories in the Senate.

So let's say this: Right now it is fair to say that the economy is struggling back from collapse, and that the present economic conditions are in significant part an echo of the Bush Administration's mistakes, but that it would have been at least theoretically possible to have a more robust recovery had the President advanced (and if the Republicans would have allowed) certain recovery measures that were not tried, or were not strengthened when they proved inadequate. Right now it is fair to say that the echo of G.W. Bush played a role in why the public is suspicious of the Republican Party on foreign / military policy and economic issues, and probably contributed to the line-up of candidates from which Mitt Romney was deemed "the most electable".

But from this point forward, it's ownership time. It's Obama's job to keep the nation on a path to recovery. It's the Republican Party's job to find a candidate who is credible on foreign policy and economic issues. (As was obvious some months ago, Jeb Bush was already seeing the handwriting on the wall and has long been positioning himself to be that candidate four years from now.) Acknowledge his actual contribution if appropriate, but from this point forward the only politician who is entitled to say "It's G.W.'s fault" is Jeb, if he cannot get his own quest to be President back on track.

You Don't Bend to The Opinion Polls, Yet You Call Yourself a Leader?

If Michael Gerson were an honest man, he would admit that his former colleague, David Frum, made a valid point when he argued that the Republican Party would have benefited from making itself a part of healthcare reform rather than positioning itself as an obstacle. The Republican Party's continuing avalanche of misinformation about the Affordable Care Act is a sight to behold - as was the manner in which a contrived "activity vs. inactivity" distinction was puffed up over the course of two short years into a legal theory that almost defeated the legislation. Having lost first at the legislature and then in the courts, what's a hack like Gerson to do but double down on his party's mendacity.

Gerson was, of course, an important cog in the wheel of the Bush Administration's misinformation machine. The machine for which popular opinion was a meaningless distraction. The public is starting to oppose war with Iraq? "Well then, let's get the invasion underway - the public always comes around when the bombs start dropping." The public opposes privatizing Social Security? "Well then, let's find a different word to use. How does 'private accounts' sound?" The public wants to know who met with Dick Cheney when he was forming the Administration's energy policy? "Well, it's tempting to scoff or laugh, but let's stick with stonewalling for now."

But when it's the other guy in office, Michael Gerson is suddenly all for government by plebiscite. Gerson can't even be honest about public sentiment. He whines about the Affordable Care Act, "Change came in the form of a law that a plurality of Americans opposed", but he knows full well that the opposition was in no small part a result of Republican demagoguery and misinformation. He wasn't the worst of the bunch, but he played an eager and happy role in that misinformation campaign.

He knew then, just as he knows now, that the only significant part of "Obamacare" that polled poorly was the individual mandate - that pretty much every other significant reform element, when people understood what they were asked about, received majority support. He focuses on the bill as a whole because it advances his narrative - the lie he and his party keep telling the nation, not because they believe that the public doesn't like "Obamacare" but because they're terrified that it will succeed.

Yes, that's right, they're terrified of its success. If they believed a tenth of their demagoguery, they would allow the ACA to come into full effect and let people see for themselves how bad it is. It's easy to repeal unpopular laws. They live in abject terror of a popular, successful reform that brings insurance to tens of millions of people who are presently uninsured or underinsured. So their effort has been to keep that from happening - and to tell as many lies as necessary to provoke public suspicion, concern and opposition.

Gerson has good company in today's Republican Party, because his position is essentially that of a coward. If you're trying to advance what you believe to be good policy, or at least the best policy you can implement given political reality, and run into a political headwind, you should abandon ship, run for the hills, scurry off the sinking ship like a terrified rat. Perhaps that's how he perceives his ex-boss's abandonment of immigration reform and Social Security reform, or McCain's abandonment of immigration reform, campaign finance reform, cap and trade.... The ultimate politician is a Mitt Romney, a guy with no core beliefs, a guy who's always chasing the latest poll, a guy who will discard his most significant (and arguably only) significant political achievement in the name of winning an election. I would like to say that nobody in their right mind would confuse Gerson's brand of cowardice with leadership but... while you can't fool all of the people all of the time, Gerson and friends are happy to shoot for 51%.

Listen to Gerson's platitudinous nonsense:

Obamacare matters in the current election not only because its future is at stake but for what its passage tells us about Obama as a leader. He is stubborn, which can be an admirable trait when applied to the public interest. But on health-care reform, Obama combined stubbornness with ideological predictability and partisan ruthlessness — imposing a very conventional liberalism in the Chicago way.

Obama is "stubborn" - a good thing if it means advancing Gerson's political agenda, really that of his party, but a terrible thing if it means advancing any other agenda. To pass legislation with a significant majority in the House, a 60 vote majority in the Senate, and then to reconcile minor differences in the bill based upon majority support in the Senate? That's anti-democratic. Not at all like the Bush-era tax cuts that shot our deficits through the roof and create a lingering hangover for our nation, crammed through the Senate by reconciliation in Bush's first term based upon a series of patently false promises. Who was heading up the team tasked with spinning that sow's ear into a silk purse? Oh, yeah....

For goodness sake, "the Chicago way"? Can't Gerson try to be even a little bit creative, to try to disguise his silly and childish attacks as something other than warmed over Republican demagoguery? Is he unable to conjure up a novel turn of phrase without the help of David Frum? To find fresh poison to inject into the public discourse without the help of Marc Thiessen? (Lord, what a dream team that was.)

Gerson continues to whine that Obama failed to broker a "grand budget compromise in 2011", a failure attributed to his demand that a significant part of the balancing of the budget come in the form of tax increases, then goes on to whine about forthcoming "large issues" - "avoiding the fiscal cliff, reforming the tax code, making entitlement commitments more sustainable". Never mind that the "fiscal cliff" is of little concern to anybody but pundits and demagogues - here in the real world we know that Congress will act to prevent that "cliff" from having any meaningful impact on the economy or defense spending. Never mind that Obama's "grand bargain" proposals included significant entitlement reform, and that the very legislation Gerson rails about, "Obamacare", implements cost-saving reforms - and that it has been Gerson's own Republican Party that has demagogued against the Medicare cuts that are part of that legislation. Never mind that "reforming the tax code" is a meaningless phrase - you may as well whimper that the President hasn't spent enough time reshuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Gerson closes by suggesting that if Obama doesn't "become an entirely different type of leader", by which he apparently means a spineless Republican, we should conclude that "America needs a new one". I guess it's fortunate for Gerson that a man who shares his complete lack of integrity, and endorses Gerson's apparent notion that "presidential leadership" is best demonstrated by following the latest opinion poll, is presently the Republican presidential nominee.

David Brooks and his Milquetoast Moderates

A few days ago David Brooks wrote an interesting column about an imaginary brand of "moderate voter". Oh, not completely imaginary, but certainly rare enough not to be a factor in any given election, certainly not the type to be duped by the partisanship Brooks dribbles into his column. I'm left wondering, did Brooks write this column because he wants to flatter low-information voters who, even at this stage of the game, are undecided and would prefer to embrace the conceit that their inability to decide which candidate to support results from their being deep thinkers wrestling with deep issues? Or is it that he truly believes that there's a significant class of undecided "moderates" who fit his definition, and nonetheless condescends to them in a manner their certain to see through? My guess is that, as with Douthat, it's the former. Don't get me wrong. It's nice to see a major pundit reject the Beltway conceit that "moderate" politicians advancing "bipartisan" ideas are the cure to our nation's woes. Brooks is correct that merely seeking out the "midpoint between two opposing poles and opportunistically planting yourself there" does not make you a moderate. Regrettably, Brooks' notion of what it means to actually be a moderate is not much better than the conception so often advanced by his peers.

Moderates start with a political vision, but they get it from history books, not philosophy books. That is, a moderate isn’t ultimately committed to an abstract idea. Instead, she has a deep reverence for the way people live in her country and the animating principle behind that way of life. In America, moderates revere the fact that we are a nation of immigrants dedicated to the American dream — committed to the idea that each person should be able to work hard and rise.

Part of that is fair: a moderate of this stripe would be something of an intellectual, and thus would look to and attempt to learn from history. But how in the world does Brooks come to the idea that you can understand the history and underpinning philosophy of our country while rejecting philosophy. Does he think that the thinkers who influenced the path of post-Revolutionary America, for example Montesquieu and Thomas Paine, were historians? That the Federalist Papers are studies of history? What in the world does it mean to "revere" as "fact" the concept that "we are a nation of immigrants dedicated to the American dream" devoted to meritocracy and advancement? And how would Brooks have us reconcile that so-called "fact", which is in fact a philosophy, with... the actual facts on American economic mobility? Brooks continues,

This animating principle doesn’t mean that all Americans think alike. It means that we have a tradition of conflict. Over the centuries, we have engaged in a series of long arguments around how to promote the American dream — arguments that pit equality against achievement, centralization against decentralization, order and community against liberty and individualism.

So a moderate is like... a feng shui interior decorator, always trying to seek harmony and balance? Less concerned with whether a solution is right or wrong, but instead about whether the chairs and tables are correctly positioned? Why... yes, that does seem to be how Brooks views moderation:

The moderate doesn’t try to solve those arguments. There are no ultimate solutions. The moderate tries to preserve the tradition of conflict, keeping the opposing sides balanced.

So a moderate, having embraced the concept that "we are a nation of immigrants dedicated to the American dream", would confront the anti-immigrant sentiments in states like Arizona and... what? Attempt to seek "balance" between his core belief in immigration and people who want to close our borders to pretty much any immigration? A moderate, having embraced the Horatio Alger myth as an American ideal, would confront the facts of inequality and a Mitt Romney-type attitude of "If you don't pay federal taxes, you don't matter to me," by... what? If in fact the moderate embraces the core beliefs described by Brooks, how does he advance "balance" when a political party or candidate openly rejects those core beliefs? Brooks never makes clear what a moderate would do in the present political environment. But he does contend that Romney's latest revision of his core beliefs, his attempt to distance himself from his anti-immigrant, anti-equality rhetoric of only a few months ago, is an aggressive appeal to moderate voters. Well, no, not unless they're stupid. Brooks continues,

[A moderate] understands that most public issues involve trade-offs. In most great arguments, there are two partially true points of view, which sit in tension. The moderate tries to maintain a rough proportion between them, to keep her country along its historic trajectory.

By that measure, President Obama led the nation as a moderate, only to be rebuffed by the opposition party. President Clinton's triangulation, arguably, would also be recast as moderation; or would that be the staking out of the middle ground that Brooks rejects? One way or another, it appears that Brooks has little regard for how moderation of one form or another plays itself out in our political system.

Americans have prospered over the centuries because we’ve kept a rough balance between things like individual opportunity and social cohesion, local rights and federal power. At any moment, new historical circumstances, like industrialization or globalization, might upset the balance. But the political system gradually finds a new equilibrium.

But that balance certainly is not because our nation has been governed by moderates. It's much more the result of our system of government having incorporated serious impediments to dramatic change, and a constitution that forces a significant degree of balance between state and federal power. There's a reason that Brooks does not give one concrete example of a moderate of his conception having led the nation through a difficult time. One who has led our nation at any time. Even one name. It's because Brooks' brand of moderation is a form of intellectualism that does not stand up well to politics. You don't take a policy white paper to a politics fight.

Brooks did qualify his statement about moderation, expressing that in "most great arguments, there are two partially true points of view". But let's take a step back and look at how that played out through American history. For much of our nation's history, it might have been accepted that opponents of slavery "had a point", but we nonetheless maintained and legally enforced chattel slavery. For almost a century afterward, opponents of legally enforced racial segregation "had a point", but we nonetheless maintained and legally enforced racial segregation. Proponents of women's suffrage "had a point", but the larger societal view was that women shouldn't vote.

If somebody were to now advance the position that slavery should be reintroduced or that women should be stripped of their right to vote, Brooks would likely say that those arguments fall outside of the sphere for which there are two partially true points of view. But that's not because of a victory of his brand of "moderate" - the type who would have sought to bring into balance the two competing philosophies. It's because people with what were then extreme political positions worked hard, often at significant peril to themselves, to advance those agendas until they won the public debate, brought about massive societal change, and created a context in which what was once acceptable is now viewed as unacceptable.

Brooks' "moderate" is more of a philosophical traffic cop:

The moderate tries to maintain a rough proportion between them, to keep her country along its historic trajectory.

But sometimes you need to climb off the fence and take a side. Sometimes the "new equilibrium" is what you achieve after upsetting the apple cart, not the sort of careful balancing that Brooks proposes. Sometimes if you embrace that form of "moderation" you end up holding society back or perpetuating a wrong. Sometimes the conceit that you are a "moderate" and "above the fray" is a rationalization or excuse used by somebody who has not though through the issues well enough to pick a side.

Brooks compounds his error,

The moderate does not believe that there are policies that are permanently right.

If that's true, Brooks' moderate is a moral coward. Given that Brooks clearly thinks of himself as one of these "above-the-fray, all-seeing, soloution-seeking moderates", that would certainly be quite a condemnation of self. But if Brooks admits the obvious truth - that there are policies that, once implemented, make it obvious that the policy that came before was wrong-headed, even destructive, his conceit collapses.

Somebody might respond that you need to separate social issues from legal issues - that you can be a political "moderate" of the type Brooks describes while adhering to social views driven by something other than fact or history. The problem with that is, the key problems of our time are driven by an attempt to balance social and economic interests. If you say that reproductive freedoms are a social issue, you're taking the position that the government can pass laws that principally restrict the rights and freedom of women. And how far can one push such a distinction before we're back to talking about segregation or slavery. If you take the position that society owes no duty to the poor, not even to poor children, there's no discussion to be had on how to balance those interests against a balanced budget or low taxes.

Before making that absurd claim, Brooks retreats a bit to his conception of the moderate as an intellectual:

The moderate creates her policy agenda by looking to her specific circumstances and seeing which things are being driven out of proportion at the current moment. This idea — that you base your agenda on your specific situation — may seem obvious, but immoderate people often know what their solutions are before they define the problems.

That's reasonable enough. A moderate would attempt to find solutions based upon fact, not upon ideology. You don't start with the assumption that your solution will fix whatever's wrong - you look at the problem and then try to identify the best tools to fix it. While Brooks goes a bit soft with his notion of balance - this notion that a good "moderate" is always trying to restore and maintain equilibrium rather than rejecting an idea that should be properly placed in history's trash heap, there are issues for which the best we can do is seek some sort of balance suitable to the era. Brooks lists "equality against achievement, centralization against decentralization, order and community against liberty and individualism"; again, those sound arguments largely informed by philosophy, but history will often give you a sense of what is likely to work or to be accepted by the public.

Also, are "equality" and "achievement" actually in tension? Mitt Romney, George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush could certainly attest to the fact that starting from a position of privilege helps you achieve far beyond what you would be likely to accomplish from the starting point of a typical American. Of the three, George H.W. Bush might even admit that obvious fact. Brooks laments "inequality" in America, but makes no case that you cannot decrease inequality without also reducing "achievement" - one could argue that creating a more equal starting point, not dragging down the top but giving a boost to capable people at the bottom, will significantly increase achievement. But I overanalyze - it appears that Brooks is talking about affirmative action, but wants to tiptoe around the subject matter rather than attacking it directly. (I doubt that he's talking about legacy admissions - those, after all, reflect parental "achievement", right?)

For those of us who favor seeking good policy solutions to chronic problems, there's certainly appeal to the argument that you should start by looking at the facts and then try to find the best solution that's likely to get past the legislature and be signed into law - I'm not certain that Brooks can be arm-twisted into admitting it, but that's how we ended up first with Romneycare and later with Obamacare.

Alas, Brooks cannot resist his usual partisan nonsense,

For a certain sort of conservative, tax cuts and smaller government are always the answer, no matter what the situation. For a certain sort of liberal, tax increases for the rich and more government programs are always the answer.

That is to say there is a "certain sort of conservative" who rejects fact-based solutions in favor of ideology, namely the type who would sign Grover Norquist's anti-tax pledge. That would be about 236 out of 242 Republican Members of Congress, and 40 out of 47 Republican Senators. You may as well say "The Republican Party". On the other hand you have this "liberal [who believes that] tax increases for the rich and more government programs are always the answer" who... appears to exist solely in David Brooks' imagination. If Brooks wants us to believe that he, personally, favors fact-driven analysis in pursuit of balance, he certainly picked odd examples.

Brooks tells us more about his brand of "moderate" - being a moderate does not mean being "tepid" and can mean simultaneously pressing for hard change in two directions. It's a "distinct ethical disposition" (ethical, but not philosophical?) suspicious of imbalance not only in others but in herself. (Introspection = good.) Brooks' moderate is suspicious of "passionate intensity and bold simplicity" and admires "self-restraint, intellectual openness and equipoise". Brooks' moderates either don't mind or prefer to be categorized as feminine (I don't specifically recall a column in which Brooks so conspicuously and consistently references his subject as "she")... which, frankly, makes the column seem a bit like a push for undecided women to vote for Romney - the politician he purports to now be "pander[ing] to the moderate mind-set". I guess that's his form of balance - vote for the candidate who has taken every position on every issue and assume that it all averages out?

Brooks tells us,

There are many moderates in this country, but they have done a terrible job of organizing themselves, building institutions or even organizing around common causes.

You could say the same thing of libertarians, except that we can point to actual people who organize as libertarians and say, "That's what a libertarian looks like". For Brooks' brand of moderates, you can assume that David Brooks would be able to at least find himself, but... if he possesses the level of introspection he insists defines his brand of "moderate", he appears to be excluding even himself. More to the point, to organize politically you need to have a common set of beliefs or values, and "everybody else is wrong" isn't going to work. A group of Brooks' moderates might have a wonderful coffee house debate over the issues of the day and where balance properly lies, but they're unlikely to leave their debate having reached a consensus. And by Brooks' definition, at the very next meeting whatever agreement was previously reached goes out the window, because the balance point is constantly shifting.

As with the forces that led to the financial industry deregulation that contributed to the financial industry collapse, sometimes things are already pretty much in balance when one side starts arguing for an extremist position, and it's all too easy for a Brooks-style centrist to believe he's staking out a new middle ground when he's in fact embracing a policy change that throws the system out of balance.

Brooks also embraces the conceit that his form of "moderation" can be played out in words, starting weeks or days before an election, and that if a politicians words feel good as they slither down your ear canal you should ignore all that came before. What actual moderate, informed by history, would trust such a politician? And why, given that Brooks so recently rejected the notion that moderation leads to success in Washington, is Brooks pushing the notion that Romney is a moderate, or at least is suddenly and conveniently putting on a moderate's clothing?

I have no objection to the notion that our system would be more effective if it were more intellectual, more focused on policy, more willing to reject ideology that gets in the way of good policy formation, and to some degree Brooks endorses such a vision. I don't have a problem with the argument that there is a point at which we must balance what we should do against what we can do - that a cost-benefit analysis must come into play. Alas, although one could argue that those philosophies are part of what Brooks argues, he ends up endorsing a sort of fence--sitting, balance-seeking, mythology-driven centrism, uninformed by either a coherent philosophy or an accurate view of history, and in essence endorsing polite acquiescence in a status quo that may in fact be immoral or otherwise unacceptable.