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.

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.

A Lethal President?

Same as it ever was.

It's not that I don't appreciate the concerns raised by those who question the targeting of a secret list of enemies of the state, whether by drone or by commando raid. Those concerns are for the most part well-founded, and the issues will only become more pressing.

Drone technology will continue to advance. It's easy to imagine a future in which drones the size of birds or insects can be used to strike somebody who has been declared an enemy of the United States, with minimal chance of damage to anything or anyone beyond the target. But such an advancement would not resolve the question of who should be placed on a "kill list" or why, what due process should be available to a targeted individual, or how accurately the government determines who should be on the list. Similarly, the U.S. military is likely to increasingly rely upon special forces, and small, targeted raids, rather than full-scale land invasions.

As these trends continue, some questions wil become more pressing. Will improved drone technologies inspire a rapid escalation of the use of drones and the circumstances under which they're deemed appropriate? As drones continue to take the place of boots on the ground, will the temptation be to rely upon drones to kill people who could or should have been taken prisoner? Will the margins blur in relation to who is an appropriate target - terrorists and their sympathizers vs. the political leaders of rogue or enemy states? And as drone use is legitimized and expanded, what happens when other nations inevitably gain similar technology and start applying it to contexts that they deem equivalent to ours?

History implicates all of those questions, and then some, in relation to pretty much any protracted conventional or asymmetrical conflict, anywhere in the world. When under threat, developed nations with well-educated populations tend to tolerate, accept, even applaud the use of tactics that they once deplored - and perhaps continue to deplore when exercised by other nations. Indefinite detention without trial? Torture? Dismissing the Geneva Conventions as outdated relics? The Bush Administration's decisions on those issues were in many ways regrettable, but the U.S. was far from the first nation to rationalize that actions we used to describe as crimes and human rights violations were necessary to achieve the greater good.

Cato Institute Policy Scholar Jason Kuznicki's reaction to "kill lists" and drone strikes is about as strident as you'll find. He points out that the President's "kill list" can include U.S. citizens, even minors, "including within the United States. Including children sleeping peacefully in their homes."

If Obama wanted to, he could put all of Mitt Romney’s delightful, gingham-clad grandkids on the kill list, then send commandos to kill them (or drones, it hardly matters). He wouldn’t need to show any cause, and no one could stop him or tell him otherwise.

Do not say that he wouldn’t. Of course he wouldn’t. The problem is that someone else might. And that’s enough.

Kuznicki declares,

Yet the very act of claiming the power also calls into question anyone’s good judgment. How exactly does someone conclude that he, personally, deserves the unchecked power of life and death? I couldn’t. I would be ashamed to show my face in front of you or to call you my equals. I might be a god or a beast, but not a man in a society.

I'm not going to argue that it's a job I would want. It isn't. But although the mechanism has changed, what Kuznicki is describing has been part of the President's job from day one. Every armed conflict, domestic or abroad, involved strategic decisions that may prioritize destroying a block of buildings or even a town or urban area in order to harm the enemy's ability to produce weapons, mobilize, feed its troops, or may even be justified by the belief that a "high-value" individual is in the targeted area. You want to talk about the deaths of children sleeping in their beds? There's a reason that allied commanders were concerned that fire bombing raids in Germany and Japan might be deemed war crimes.

We are presented with a modern myth of surgical warfare, collateral damage is minimized, civilians aren't harmed, our soldiers are less likely to be killed. There's a disturbing sequence in the movie, Waltz With Bashir, in which a series of efforts to target militants result in the deaths of civilians, presented in the manner of a comedy montage. The film also highlights how a thin veneer of rationalization can help somebody who might otherwise be wracked with guilt decide that his role in an atrocity was marginal or excusable. I'm not trying to argue that an individual citizen or soldier will change the course of history by speaking up, but it's much easier to disregard our role if we think of ourselves as noble heroes, at least trying to do good and minimize harm, offloading responsibility for collateral damage or atrocity onto local forces or our enemies.

Kuznicki knows our nation's history, so he knows we have a long history of legal presidents and generals, deciding from a distant war room what military measures to take, estimating losses to their forces, our forces and civilians, drawing up lists of individuals who should be captured or killed, dispatching special forces and snipers to capture or kill specific individuals. He knows that the Constitution was drafted with that lethality in mind - the Constitution's suspicion of standing armies, preservation and reliance upon state militias, placing a civilian President in charge of the military, and attempting to create a system of checks and balances to rein in excess. Yet Kuznicki writes of the President,

We know that no one gets to review his decision. Ever. The ones who might do it have all abdicated the responsibility.

Kuznicki, in essence, declares that he is never again going to vote for a candidate who has a realistic chance of winning the presidency because Congress and the courts aren't doing their jobs. Frankly, I would view skeptically even the most sincere promise of a third party candidate to change the practice if elected, not only because presidents tend to accept any expanded powers achieved by their predecessors, but also because he'll have to directly face and address the consequences of a policy change.

I don't want to overstate the role of the courts, as Congress hasn't provided either the courts or prospective litigants with much of a framework for these issues, but their overall history is to defer to the executive on issues of national security and to quietly regret any mistakes only in future decades. The branch of government that has been least willing to do its job in this context is Congress. You'll find Republicans like Darrell Issa angrily demagoguing about issues of embassy security, but when there's hard work to be done - when they are asked to take ownership of their own failings - you'll find excuses ("Our refusal to fund increased embassy security has nothing to do with the fact that it wasn't increased") or silence. You can get objections out of Republicans like Issa over drone and cruise missile strikes - if they produce favorable media coverage; "The President did that to distract you from domestic politics, wag the dog, wag the dog!" But that type of reaction is not a substantive objection - its a politically calculated claim that relates only to timing.

We don’t need an elected beast-god with a kill list. We need to end the system that proposes, every four years, to place one of our human equals into that role. A role any decent human would refuse. And this election just isn’t going to do it.

This election won't do it, the next one won't either, nor the next.... To prevent Presidents from having this power, we would need a constitutional amendment. And as long as Congress pretends that this is not an issue, and the general public reaction is to accept the notion of surgical strikes with no collateral damage (the key rationalization, if you're innocent you won't be near the target, right?), and the media at large treats the issue with a collective yawn, nothing will change.

In Esquire, addressing the fine line that can exist between targeted killings and murder, Tom Junod argues that, unlike his predecessors, President Obama "had to answer an additional question before you took the job. Other presidents had to decide whether they could preside over the slaughter of massed armies, and the piteous suffering of whole populations." But again, that's more a question of degree, and of technology, than it is of fact. Sure, Ronald Reagan had to launch a significant air raid on Libya to try to kill Gadhafi. George H.W. Bush had to indvade Panama to capture Manuel Noriega. Clinton, though, sent cruise missiles to try to kill Osama bin Laden.

One could argue based upon that history that the new way is better - that as technology has advanced, in many contexts we can avoid the type of massive collateral damage that results from a full-scale invasion, even if we won't have to subsequently occupy the nation whose leader we've toppled. It's possible to point to the history of "boots on the ground" in nations like Somalia, and argue that the President can get at least as much cooperation from local warlords by making them aware of the possibility of a targeted drone strike, without putting large numbers of soldiers into the nation at great expense and considerable risk to their lives.

One could reply that history doesn't yet demonstrate that those possibilities are now reality, but the come-back would presumably be that a failed intervention by drone will cost far less in terms of money and lives than the cost of a failed intervention by land. If the choice is to "try drones and special forces" or "do nothing", what does an advocate of "humanitarian intervention" do? If the choice is between attempting to achieve a surgical victory, even if the surgery will be a lot less precise than the government or media are likely to admit, and a massive on-the-ground assault, can we really presuppose that the latter will be less lethal to civilians, more precise, or more likely to bring about and sustain the outcome we want?

A rather compelling objection to targeted killings, particularly in the context of asymmetrical warfare or a distributed target organization, is that the strategy can degenerate into trying to fight a hydra - cut off one head and two grow back. There was a period under Bush during which it seemed like a month wouldn't go by without a successful strike taking out the #2 or #3 man in al Qaeda. Either the strikes were a lot less accurate than the Bush Administration let on (and in some cases we know that to be the case - with the targeted individual turning up alive at a different location) or the U.S. was encountering the same level of "success" as nations have traditionally achieved by capturing and killing "terrorist" leaders - they're pretty easily replaced, and sometimes "martyring" the leader helps with recruiting efforts. Also, while collateral damage may seem modest and acceptable to somebody sitting in the U.S., you can rest assured that the populations hit by those attacks don't share our detachment when it's their loved ones who are being killed.

If Kuznicki wants change, he has a decent platform from which to advance his opinions in the public sphere. Far better than most. But if he wants to influence a political actor, rather than refusing to vote for the President and implicitly urging others to follow, he should be attempting to turn up the heat on Congress.

Mitt Romney's Empathy Deficit

When I saw a recent blog post by Charles Pierce, "The Problem with Romney Is the Problem with Empathy", my first thought was "he noticed that too?" Then, upon reading Pierce's analysis I saw that I misinterpreted the headline. Pierce believes that Romney has too much empathy, as compared to his party:

It turns out the problem Republicans have with the program is not the ideological big-government aspect of it. The problem they have with it is the good it turned out to do for people. The problem with it is that it made people's lives a little easier. The problem is that cruelty has become an ideology in itself, and it is an implacable one....

The problem with the Romney campaign is not the alleged ideological incoherence of his political resume. The problem is that he's trying to appeal to a party full of moral monsters.

Elided from the middle of that quote from Pierce is his own quote of a Tea Party activist, and I have to say that it does support Pierce's thesis that a powerful faction of the Republican Party not only lacks empathy, it eschews the concept:

"The thing Romney needs to do to beat Obama is show up in this debate and not have another empathy comment. Those comments are really hurting him far more than any 47% comments," said Ryan Rhodes, a tea party activist from Iowa. "The government's not here for empathy, it's here for the law. If we use empathy for everything we want to do, that's how countries go bankrupt and bad policy is created."

Let's be blunt: the Southern strategy, and the subsequent evolution of the Southern strategy (welfare queens, "young bucks" buying "T-bone steaks" with "food stamps", John McCain's "black" daughter, the "food stamp President (who hates capitalism, wants to undermine capitalism and implement socialism, and is a secret Muslim who won't show us his birth certificate)", "voter fraud", "I don't want to help 'bleah' people"....) relies upon an us vs. them philosophy, with "them" being greedy and undeserving poor people - or perhaps greedy and undeserving people that have more than you - with the subtext that they probably also have dark skin and vote for Democrats.

That Tea Party activist's comments also highlight the cognitive dissonance you see among a lot of the Republican "base" - the "Keep your government hands of my Medicare" philosophy. One of the ways in which the Republicans ginned up opposition to the ACA was to tell seniors, "Obama's cutting your Medicare to help [undeserving poor people] get health insurance." It was inconsistent with the Romney team's then-stated economic plans (now they're promising only to slash and burn Medicare for future seniors - again relying upon a lack of empathy among their supporters - "As long as it doesn't affect me..."), but a great number of the beneficiaries of the ACA do have jobs but are nonetheless uninsured or underinsured. If you talk to enough Republicans at the low end of the wage pool, you'll find people who receive or have received housing subsidies, food assistance, unemployment insurance, the earned income tax credit, WIC, Medicaid, Medicare... but they'll insist that their receipt of public assistance is somehow different from the "takers", or that "I paid for it through my taxes" (never mind the actual math).

I'm also reminded of a Ted Nugent quote shared at Beat the Press,

As I’ve written before, for at least the past 50 years the Democratic Party has intentionally engineered a class of political “victims” who have been bamboozled into being dependent on the federal government for their subsistence, including food, housing and now health care. They get this without paying any federal income taxes, and that’s wrong.

I've mentioned many times the fact that it used to be Republican policy to get people off of the federal tax rolls - and by that I mean average, working people, not only the wealthiest among us - but now something Ronald Reagan used as a bragging point is used by people like The Nuge to bash almost half of all Americans. But... does Nugent actually know what the word "subsistence" means?

By now you're probably thinking, "I thought you disagreed with Pierce." I'm getting to that. First, let me say, a lack of empathy is not something that is unique to the Republican Party. It may be more manifest in Republican politics, and may be more likely to be vocalized by supporters of that party, but our society as a whole is not very empathetic. About the best way to get our society, at large, to turn on a group is to paint it as a greedy, undeserving, exploitative "other" that is getting rich off of our dime. As others have pointed out, that's why the Republican distortion of "You didn't build this" resonated with some businesspersons, even those who had built their businesses based upon SBA loans, government contracts and the like - they were uncomfortable with seeing themselves as takers, even if they could respond that on the balance they have given back far more than they received.

But the fact is, Mitt Romney does have an empathy problem. I found it grating when I heard George W. Bush speak of "compassionate conservatism" and "a hand up, not a handout", because I didn't believe he meant what he was saying. Like Romney he comes across as the proverbial guy who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. But he made the effort. His public persona was carefully constructed around trying to make people see him as "one of them". And for all of his bashing of welfare recipients, Ronald Reagan projected empathy. George H.W. Bush, who in retrospect may have had more actual empathy than his predecessor and his son put together, came across as more distant, more patrician. That didn't help him in either the election he won or the one that he lost.

In the current election cycle, one of the themes the Republicans are pushing about President Obama is that he's cold and prickly, doesn't like to glad hand, eats dinner with his family on most nights instead of going to parties, doesn't have close friends among other world leaders and the like. Nobody is going to mistake Obama for Clinton, but here's the thing: pointy headed, introverted family man or no, most people like Obama. In contrast, Romney comes across as a phony, and when you hear the "behind the scenes" stuff about Romney, which of course you have to take with a grain of salt, it's not a case of "to know him is to love him". Clearly the Republican operatives pushing that line about Obama are hoping that people don't do a "compare and contrast" with their own candidate.

If you look at Romney's personal history, it's difficult to find examples of empathy. He'll point to acts of charity, but an act of charity through financial contributions to your church, providing assistance to members of your church and the like does not prove empathy. When you see Romney actually try to connect on a one-to-one (or one-to-many) level with members of the public you see a consistent pattern, from this:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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To this:

From "who let the dogs out", to a bucket full of "hardware stuff", to oversized bets with Rick Perry, Romney's pro forma efforts at humanization and humor tend not to resonate with voters - instead they reinforce the perspective that he's not just out-of-touch, but not even interested in them (save for wanting their vote). If you want to succeed in politics, you don't necessarily need to be sincere but at some level there will be times when you have to at least be able to fake sincerity. Romney's lack of connection with those outside of his stratospheric wealth and social class seems to be a product of an empathy vacuum.

Romney is capable of feeling and reacting to the crowd's energy directed at him, but he does not appear capable of giving anything back. He does not strike me as a narcissist, except at the level that anybody who gets to this point in a presidential campaign is apt to think very highly of himself, but he does strike me as somebody who, unless you can do something for him, simply doesn't care about anybody who is neither part of his inner circle. He can go from being a huge proponent of providing health insurance to the uninsured to sneering at them as takers because the former position was fakery. The 47% comment resonates because for once Romney seemed sincere.

Looking for Proof of Intelligent Life in the Political World....

Sometimes political events bring to mind the classic Ronald Reagan SNL sketch, in which whenever cameras were rolling or members of the public were around he would play the part of an affable grandfather, but the moment they were gone he turned into an energetic, detail-driven dynamo. There was probably some truth to it, that we never got to see the "real" Ronald Reagan who was concealed by a carefully contrived cowboy persona. Whatever his actual behind-the-scenes persona, Reagan was comfortable with his public image.

A few decades later, G.W. Bush offered the public a similarly contrived public persona, that of a Texas rancher who liked to drive around in a pickup truck and clear brush in his spare time. No pictures of G.W. on horseback - to put it mildly, he was not that much of a rancher. And never mind that the ranch was purchased as a campaign prop and sold pretty much the minute G.W. retired from the White House. But the public image worked... to a degree.

Bush apparently chafed at the public's perception that he was not very bright. So, during his presidency he arranged for some meetings with authors and other prominent individuals in which he would attempt to wow them with his deep understanding of their work, before ushering them out to share the news of how brilliant he was. The principal tool appears to have been flattery - convince the participant in the meeting that the President had read their work, thought about it, compared it to other ideas, and found it compelling. Flattery will get you... a lot of places.

I suspect that the campaign didn't succeed - at least, not to the degree the White House had hoped. That is, although I do recall hearing a number of people, some of whom were unquestionably intelligent, claim that the President was very impressive in their meetings, the formula was pretty obvious. But more to the point, it raised the question of why a man who is so impressive in a controlled meeting behind closed doors demonstrated none of the same brilliance and insight in any other context.

All presidents have aspects of their personality that they would prefer to hide from the public, and often they are quite successful in managing their public images. No matter how it is created, once a public persona is firmly established it can be difficult to overcome. John McCain seemed like something of a maverick until he fully embraced G.W., and some who scrutinize his record question the extent to which the label ever truly fit, but the image was strong enough to carry him through his presidential campaign. At the time, the public would have been shocked by some of the behavior attributed to Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, and while we now view Watergate as consistent with Nixon's personality, the Nixon you hear on tape is not the Nixon people thought they elected.

Negative images can stick, as well, which is no small part of the reason why political campaigns work so hard to tar opponents before they're known to the public. "Dukakis in a tank". Gerald Ford was probably less clumsy than the average president, but a few prominent incidents led to him being regarded as somewhat accident prone. Al Gore was not the dissembler that his detractors claim, but any number of myths persist about supposed false claims or exaggerations that made for good headlines but turned out to be misrepresentations of what Gore had actually said.

In G.W.'s case, it's difficult to believe that we were simply talking about stage management. That is, once his team made the decision to play up his intellect, it should have been possible to modify his public persona to better display his intellect. Once the decision was made to push his intellect, it should have been possible to demonstrate publicly what was reportedly being demonstrated in private. The fact that G.W.'s P.R. team failed in that effort suggests that the public persona was more genuine than what was going on in controlled, private meetings.

Here's the thing: Yes, the President and his team have enormous power to craft a public image and push that image forward. If it resonates with the public, it can be difficult to overcome, even with facts. By virtue of his intellectual incuriosity and desired "blue collar, man of the people", Bush was able to convince people that he was less intelligent than he actually was. But when he became uncomfortable with that persona, the public simply knew too much about him for him to take it to the other extreme. Had he settled for the middle, where by all appearances the truth most likely would have been found, he might have achieved at least that much.

In contrast with G.W. or Reagan, some candidates want to be seen as intelligent, even brilliant, and work to advance that perception. Sometimes they don't have to work very hard at it - our nation loves dynasties, business and political, and it also associates wealth with intelligence. So if you're rich and have a strong family name, you are 90% of the way to selling yourself as brilliant.

Even if you turn out to be Donald Trump, crass, boorish, prone to making absurd claims and statements, you are likely to maintain your reputation as a business genius simply by virtue of your claimed wealth, no matter how many failed ventures, bankruptcies and dubious licensing schemes you leave in your wake. Frankly, you can see why somebody like Trump would seethe at the "you didn't build that" misquote, because at this point there's little left to the myth behind his fortune - he looks like a narcissist of middling intelligence who learned the building trade (and got some very important connections) through his father, then got very lucky gambling with his inherited fortune.

But the fact is, when somebody is brilliant you can usually find evidence of that. Not in nebulous, Chauncey Gardener-type statements that require you to either defer to the speaker's brilliance or invite you to read into the statement the "brilliant" insight you are hoping to hear (yes, I'm talking about Alan Greenspan). But in documented, public actions, statements and writings that demonstrate the claimed level of intellect. When somebody tells you, in essence, "Trust me, when he's alone in private he says smart things," tell them, "I'll believe you when I hear the tape."

Appeals to Prejudice in the Public Sphere

A number of stories that have captured a great deal of public and media attention have, upon examination, been demonstrated to be predicated on exaggeration or outright fabrication. Shocking? Not really - with the rise of the Internet it sometimes feels like exaggeration is at an all-time high, but it's nothing new.

I read fiction, as well as accounts that are "based on true stories" (a distinction from outright fiction that sometimes seems razor thin), and appreciate them for what they are. But when somebody claims that their story is factual, I think it is reasonable to expect that they are making a sincere effort to convey facts, not the "real truth behind the facts".

I believe that this is important not just out of a slavish devotion to truth, but in recognition of why certain stories resonate, whether or not they are true. When you hear a story that rings true, inspires a public reaction and perhaps even motivates change, but turns out to be false, it's possible to argue that the lie served a greater good. But let's remember, we don't all share the same prejudices. We don't all share the same conception of what serves the greater good. No matter what your perspective, if you sort through lies that gained public traction you won't only find progress. You'll find lies that appealed to the worst aspects of human nature and pulled society (or parts of society) backwards.

At Forbes, Tim Worstall presents a partial defense of Mike Daisey's fabrications about Foxconn and Apple,

Assuming that we know we’re being lied to in search of that emotional reaction to the truthiness then indeed, it is being done with integrity. The problem comes if we are assuming actual truth while the artist is presenting us only with emotional truth. When theatre is presented as journalism say.

I’d go further too: I’m not just OK with, I applaud, laud, attempts to manipulate those emotional reactions in pursuit of some larger truth. It is what the arts of rhetoric and persuasion are all about after all. I’ve not even got a problem with people telling outright lies in order to get people to pay attention to an important point about our world. As long as we then get to the next stage.... Yes, once we’ve been manipulated, once our emotions have been aroused so that we do in fact take an interest in the subject, then we have to put that emotion aside and start to think rationally. We need to turn to journalism, to facts and reality, so that we can decide what, if anything, we are to do about this subject that has now been called to our attention.

It's easier to take a step back from a creative narrative that highlights an important problem and say, "Now let's figure out what the actual facts are and find possible solutions," than it is to step back from something you already believe to be true and start looking, in essence, for facts that contradict your beliefs. (Confirmation bias.) The manner in which the story is presented is important both to how it will be perceived and how wedded people will become to the narrative.

When Daisey attacks sweatshop conditions, underage labor and industrial injury in a Foxconn assembly line, the story falls into a long line of "the horrors of sweatshops" exposés, and people are inspired by those stories to push for change. Many manufacturers have, in the past, improved working conditions in their global factories when it was revealed that they used child labor or had unsafe, unsanitary or cruel working conditions. You can argue that the investigation and introspection that resulted from Daisey's attacks is a good thing, but what was your reaction to the internal investigations that refuted him? A cover-up? And what is the likely impact of the deception upon future reports of poor work conditions? Absent hidden camera video, is it more or less likely that those reports will be taken seriously by the media or inspire significant public outrage - that is, if we endorse misinformation to draw attention to an issue we care about, aren't we risking a "boy who cried wolf" effect?

As for hidden camera video.... Let's give James O'Keefe some credit for finding a few ACORN workers whose reaction to his desire to be a pimp was anything but appropriate, and some genuine management deficits within the organization. But was it in the interest of the greater good, though, that through selective editing and implication, he misled people about the prevalence of the problems and the manner in which he obtained the information? If you're among the right-wing population that bought into the demonization of ACORN, the fact that the organization was taken down by accusations that were largely false is in the greater good of society.

For that matter, what about the misinformation that occurs in politics. When a politician running for national office starts prevaricating about Cadillac-driving welfare queens, or runs a "Willie Horton"-type ad, people react. Is that for the better of society? We get manipulated, our prejudices are triggered, our emotions are aroused, and... how do we then transition to "put[ting] that emotion aside and start[ing] to think rationally"? If we're among the people who matter - the people who are the targets of that type of misinformation campaign - we don't.

The media often does a poor job of explaining the facts, but that's only part of the story. Sometimes when you create a mythology, it takes on a life of its own and is highly resistant to correction based upon the facts. Take, for example, the huge population of Republicans who are wedded to various lies and misrepresentations about President Obama - you can smack them across the nose with a stack of birth certificates and all they'll see is a "cover-up". It doesn't help that some national political leaders who know better help advance the lies or dance around the issue, but even if you look to the efforts of more honorable politicians like John McCain to push back you can see that we're way past the point that the facts matter.

Worstall suggests that a public reaction to misinformation potentially opens the door to a reasoned discussion,

[N]ow that consciousness has been raised let’s have that discussion. The tragedy of Mike Daisey’s monologue is that by allowing his fable to be broadcast as factual he’s obscured, buried even, the very points that we should be discussing.

The difficulty with endorsing lies to raise public consciousness is that you are endorsing an approach that can work against the best interests of society, or of certain groups within a society, and which contributes to public cynicism about media and government. The problem with qualifying that with, "As long as we then get to the next stage" where we have a reasoned discussion of the issues is that you cannot know in advance if such a discussion will occur, with history suggesting that in most cases it either will not occur, will come too late, or will occur at such a low relative intensity that it has no significant impact on continued belief in the misrepresentation.

No, That's Not What Republicans Want

David Brooks describes what Republicans supposedly want in a Presidential candidate:

The central problem is that Mitt Romney doesn’t fit the mold of what many Republicans want in a presidential candidate. They don’t want a technocratic manager. They want a bold, blunt radical outsider who will take on the establishment, speak truth to power and offend the liberal news media.

David Brooks is a Republican, so it's telling that he is saying "they" instead of "we". Brooks is not describing what he or his peers want - his thesis, after all, is that the Republican masses need to get past their visceral need for "Braveheart" and accept Mitt "Organization Man" Romney. (Yes, he really said that Republican voters want their leader to be like "Braveheart".)

The first thing that comes to my mind, though, is that I can't think of a single Republican nominee who has come close to fitting Brooks' description. Certainly not Gerald Ford. Ronald Reagan was literally a spokesperson for corporate America. Bush I and II were the antitheses of "outsiders". If you were to identify a Republican who comes close to fitting the bill you could argue Richard Nixon, although by today's measures of Republicanism he was something akin to a socialist. While Ronald Reagan presented the affable cowboy persona and G.W. played the part of a Texas rancher, as part of their respective efforts to present a public image that might fool people into thinking them something other than insiders, they were both selected and advanced by the party because of the expectation that they would advance the interests of the nation's political and corporate elite - and they did so, in spades.

If you were to challenge Brooks to explain why Republicans keep nominating Robert the Bruce instead of Braveheart, why their typical nominee is a "that ain't me" from Fortunate Son, you're probably going to hear it explained that (as with Brooks' push for Romney) Republicans would prefer Braveheart but to the extent that there's an actual contest for the nomination they'll settle for electability. Barry Goldwater, millionaire's son; George H.W. Bush, Senator's son; George W. Bush, Senator's grandson and President's son; John McCain, admiral's son. Bob Dole was in Congress for more than thirty years before he led the ticket - humble beginnings can't transform a guy who has spent a quarter of a century in the Senate into an outsider. Gerald Ford, despite almost a quarter century in the House, was the closest of the post-Nixon bunch to an outsider, for all the good it did him. Bold? If Brooks means "brash," perhaps he's thinking of G.W. as "the exception who proves the rule," but which of the Republican presidents or nominees had a track record in office (whether in Congress or the Senate) that can truly be called "bold" or "radical"? Blunt? If Brooks means "dull"....

Somehow, despite supposedly wanting a bold, blunt outsider, the Republicans keep nominating and electing establishment Republican insiders. Instead of electing people who will "speak truth to power", they elect corporate spokespersons. Instead of electing candidates who "offend the liberal news media", whatever that is, they elect candidates who get kid gloves treatment from the mainstream media. If you didn't live through his presidency, you might be confused (as Brooks apparently is) and believe that Ronald Reagan was vilified in the media, while in fact he was the "Teflon President". When an obviously unprepared G.W. Bush ran for the Presidency, the mainstream media told us that we shouldn't care because he would nominate and delegate to competent people and he was the guy we would most want to share a beer with. Such harsh treatment....

As usual, Brooks condescends to Republican voters. He knows better than the masses in his party what is good for them and what is good for the nation. They're grunting savages who want Braveheart, and they now need erudite nerds like Brooks to tell them what is best for them. Do I exaggerate?

The only real shift between school and adult politics is that the jocks realize they need conservative intellectuals, who are geeks who have decided their fellow intellectuals should never be allowed to run anything and have learned to speak slowly so the jocks will understand them.

I think it's a fair characterization to say that, in that sentence, Brooks is describing his perception of himself in relation to the typical Republican voter.

Brooks might respond that he's correct about what Republicans want, even if they keep voting for consummate insiders who might, in the vein of an ad for a pain reliever, declare, "I'm not a bold, honest outsider, but I play one on television". But if that's the case he's still not really telling us anything. You may as well make a claim like, "Liberals want the President to be a philosopher king, but keep voting for people who actually exist." What voters of all stripes really want is for their elected representatives to share their values. What insiders like Brooks have done is to both recognize and create a set of litmus tests and cognitive shortcuts, and to instruct voters, "These are the measures by which you know that the candidate is 'one of you'". Voters say they want strong leaders? Outsiders? People who will "speak truth to power" (now a Republican slogan?), and the like? Then, by Jove, that must be what they're voting for in their party nominee until, at the end of the campaign, they compromise on somebody who they think can win the election. I guess we're not supposed to ask why the nominee that best fits the bill of "what voters want" is so often rejected in favor of one who is "electable". Political self-flagellation?

Meanwhile, Brooks' "lunch room poly sci" lunch buddy, David Frum, is dancing on the grave of a politician that David Brooks would have us believe comes as close to the Republican ideal as is humanly possible. To Brooks, that would seem to translate into, "We can't vote for the candidate we all want because nobody will vote for her."

The Debt Deal as Continuing Political Theater

Paul Campos attempts to find a silver lining in the debt deal, but in so doing he reminds me of how seriously we take this type of political theater. Although there are some who argue that the deal harms the President, it would appear that his primary goal was to make sure that there was not a repeat performance of this debacle prior to the 2012 election. But then what?

The 2012 election will have one of two outcomes: Either Obama will be reelected or a Republican will become President. Do you recall the noise that Ronald Reagan made about Jimmy Carter's deficits before taking the nation's debt to unprecedented levels? Do you recall G.W. "joking" that he hit a "trifecta" and was thus free to deficit spend as he pleased, while Dick Cheney argued that deficits don't even matter? If President Obama does not win reelection, we'll return to Republican business as usual. The Republicans in Congress will set aside their obsession with balancing the budget in favor of attempting to buy votes. Serious cuts in Medicare? In Social Security? Budget cuts that may drag down their President in 2016? Get real. We're more likely to get the proud announcement of an unfunded, multi-trillion dollar "Medicare, Part E."

But what happens if President Obama is reelected? Then we are again faced with one of two realties: Either the Democrats control Congress, or the Republicans control one or both chambers. Realistically speaking, it's going to be the latter. The Republicans, with all of their sound and fury about government spending and the need for budget cuts, agreed to this deal to postpone identifying the actual cuts for two reasons: First, they couldn't identify and agree upon enough cuts to hit the arbitrary figures they kept tossing around, and second because they wanted to avoid having to take responsibility for cuts that will inevitably be very unpopular with motivated blocs of voters. Recall, the principal targets for Republican budget cuts are Social Security and Medicare. It's possible that they will insist, through the latest iteration of a deficit commission, that deficit reduction occur only through budget cuts. It's possible that, through lockstep partisanship and obstructionist tactics, they'll force a budget cutting bill through Congress. It's even possible that the President would sign the bill. The Republicans will then have to go to the polls attempting to blame obviously partisan, Republican-driven cuts on the other party's outgoing President. I don't see that the voters at issue are going to fall for that one.

Oh, and the special interests? Health insurance companies, long-term care facilities, doctors and hospitals, all of whom profit enormously from the status quo (even as they squawk about the alleged inadequacy of Medicare reimbursements)? You expect them to sit quietly by the sidelines as the Republicans slash hundreds of billions of dollars out of Medicare and the ACA? This Congress cannot bind future congresses - if they don't like the constraints of this legislation, they can and will change it. And the pressure to do so will be intense.

Here's something else to ponder: The best possible outcome would be for this new deficit commission to succeed where prior deficit commissions failed, and to actually come up with a viable long-term plan for the budget and economy that could be supported by both parties. Right now the left is expecting that the commission will principally target entitlements, something that is inevitable given that entitlement growth is significantly higher than inflation, while doing too little to generate new revenues (i.e., raise taxes). If it's impossible to come up with a fair and sensible plan to get Medicare spending and spending growth under control, we're doomed. We can wait and hope for a miracle, but there's no reason to believe that we're going to produce a new form of medical treatment or a new approach to medical care that is going to transform the bleak financial picture arising from the cost of treating chronic medical conditions and terminal disease, of "old age". But as we all know, it's not going to happen. Given a choice between responsible governance that could cost them reelection and running the nation into a brick wall, most members of Congress will choose the latter.

So this commission will fail and the Republicans in Congress will plot their next move not on policy but on elections and reelection: Who is in the White House, how much of a price will they pay for cutting entitlement spending, will it serve them better to return to their "business as usual" of running up the nation's debt to heights they know to be unsustainable (then complain and obstruct in their usual fashion when a Democrat is elected to clean up their mess). For a Republican President, after all, two wars, a recession and a national disaster (e.g., the collapse of the financial industry) is anything but cause for austerity - it's a "trifecta".

Last I Checked, The President Was a Democrat

I can't even begin to count the number of times I've heard a right-wing commentator whine that President Obama was "partisan" in describing why he favors the budget advanced by himself and his political party over the exercise in silliness advanced by the Republicans. I'll grant, the Ryan plan is so absurd and weak that you don't need to approach it from a partisan standpoint to devastate it on its merits; but I doubt that's the type of objectivity the Republicans purport to be demanding from the President.

Apparently the President is supposed to act like the dimwitted host of a TV morning show presenting two guests with divergent viewpoints, one of which is objectively wrong, then pretending to be an objective mediator because she has presented "both sides of the issue" without comment. Seriously, even if this weren't a "Democrats vs. Republicans" issue, the President has a duty, some might say an obligation, to oppose policy positions that are absurd and, in his view, objectively harmful to the nation and its people.

But come on. G.W. Bush didn't shrug his shoulders when Democrats challenged him on his plan to privatize Social Security and say, "They have a good point." He didn't hesitate to push his tax cuts through by reconciliation when he wasn't able to muster sufficient bipartisan support to get them past a potential filibuster. Ronald Reagan, prior to blowing the deficits through the roof, didn't hesitate to attack Jimmy Carter over government spending. Since when is the President supposed to act as a meek and objective arbiter of budget proposals, rather than advocating for himself and his party?

I'm not recalling a similar torrent of crocodile tears from the political left when past Republican Presidents argued in favor of their own budgets or their party's political and budgetary goals. What did I miss?

Balanced Budget Cowardice

Back in the 1980's, Ronald Reagan ran against the "tax and spend" Democrats, decrying Jimmy Carter's budget deficits. He then got elected, cut taxes, vastly increased government spending and the situation got so far out of control that he signed onto a tax increase. The budget deficit did not come back under control until Bill Clinton's Presidency, which due to a variety of factors (including the dot com bubble) produced a significant budget surplus. Republican partisans argued it was horrible to have a budget surplus, that paying down the nation's debt "too quickly" would result in disaster, and that the best thing to do would be to slash taxes for the wealthy and run the deficit back up. Oh, sure, they offered self-serving projections to indicate that the budget would remain in balance, but their manipulations were obvious - passing tax cuts that expired after ten years, for example.

While the Republican Party was cooking the books to defend this scheme the economy was souring, so you got their "tax cuts are good for any economy" argument - if the economy is strong, tax cuts keep it strong; if it's faltering, tax cuts will help it bounce back; if it's in recession, tax cuts will get us out of recession. The Bush Administration then launched two unfunded wars, Medicare Part D, and... let's admit it, G.W. Bush and his Republican majority spent like drunken sailors. G.W. tactfully described the nation's difficulties and tragedies as his having hit "the trifecta", and he and his party proceeded as if they had carte blanche for deficit spending.

No, I'm not arguing that the Democrats have played no role in the nation's deficit spending. I'm not even going to argue that Republican hypocrisy on the issue is somehow morally culpable. People can look to the facts and see, very easily, that both parties like to spend money. They can also see, without ambiguity, that the Republican Party has no sense of fiscal responsibility. But which party's presidents were in office during the worst run-ups of the nation's debt? It's not even a close question.

Every decade or so, the subject of a federal "balanced budget amendment" comes up. The appeal is simple - pretend that the nation's budget is equivalent to a household budget, pretend that the government's borrowing money in U.S. dollars, a currency it controls, is equivalent to a nation borrowing in a foreign currency or to household debt, pretend that deficits can never serve a useful purpose, and insist that a balanced budget amendment will magically cure all that ails the nation. It's a superficial, dishonest argument - even if you don't judge the federal politicians who demand a balanced budget amendment by their actions, it's very easy to find sound economic reasons why arbitrary caps on government spending, balanced budget requirements at the federal level, and you can look around the world to see what austerity programs are doing for the economies of nations like Ireland and the U.K.

Given the spending record of everybody in Congress, it's not really a surprise that the GOP is handing off their attempt to resurrect the issue to a freshman Senator. Make the tea partiers happy, pretend to be doing something, advance a bunch of policies favored by wealthy supporters, and once again pretend to care about deficit spending. Pretend it's bipartisan because, predictably, Democrats from conservative states and the usual array of opportunists will sign on. And best of all, submit the concept in the form of a non-binding resolution, just in case things go terribly wrong and it actually passes. (The goal here, after all, is not to actually be bound by these restrictions.)

But at the end of the day, the Republican Party knows that while beating the drum on budget deficits can get a segment of their base worked up, and can help them gain votes of people who (unbelievably at this point) continue to judge them by their words instead of their actions, the issue is a loser for them. Were they to win an amendment, they would have to slash and burn pretty much every spending program - and with limits on spending based on GDP we would have to further slash the budget every time the nation entered a recession. Let's not forget, folks, that a big part of the reason the present deficit is so bad is because the economy shrank. The best way to cover that gap is not to cut spending - it's to grow the economy - and repeated rounds of budget cuts during a prolonged recession can reasonably be expected to worsen and prolong that recession. The proposed amendment would also tie the government's hands in times of emergency. Want to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, or conclude that it's necessary to bail out the financial industry to prevent a depression? Too bad, so sad? It's extremely difficult to believe that a U.S. Senator doesn't know how idiotic it would be to impose a balanced budget amendment with no exceptions; it's also obvious that once you include exceptions you'll see them exploited in every budget cycle.

There are measures that could be much more easily passed than a balanced budget amendment, such as a system of automatic tax increases that would be triggered by a deficit in the prior year. There is no reason why the Republican majority in the House of Representatives couldn't pass such a measure right now. If they are going to pretend to care about the deficit, but pull the standard political line that they're too spineless to actually do anything about it, believe me - calls from people like the Koch brothers threatening to work to defeat their members in the next election if they trigger a tax increase is pretty much all the incentive they'll need to find their missing backbones.

But really, if the Republican Party truly is convinced that balanced budgets are a national priority, and that balancing the budget every truly is a necessity for the welfare of the nation, they don't need an Amendment. They don't need legislation. They simply need to decide, as a party, that they have a balanced budget policy and that they're going to stick to it. They can declare that, starting in fiscal year 2012 (or 2014), no Republican who signs onto a budget that involves deficit spending will stand for reelection (or that the deficit will be reduced by 25% per year over four years, followed by balanced budgets, with a similar consequence for violation). They can hold that if a Republican in federal office signs onto a budget in violation of that commitment, that person will face a primary contest and that the primary opponent will be supported by the Republican Party, with not a single endorsement or dollar flowing to the incumbent who broke their commitment to balanced budgets. They can then do just as they've promised, shutting down the government whenever necessary. It'll be an ugly process, but "everybody will thank them for it in the end," right? (Yeah, right....)

Nah, it's easier to pretend to care about deficits, and much easier to talk about balanced budget amendments, while continuing to spend like there's no tomorrow. Consequences? Individual consequences? Those are for suckers.

Update: Paul Krugman offers a capsule summary of deficit spending starting with Reagan.

Update 2: Ezra Klein describes a bizarre example of Senatorial budgetary cowardice:

The letter that Sens. Michael Bennet, Mike Johanns, and 62 of their colleagues sent President Barack Obama asking him to support comprehensive deficit reduction is an odd document....

There are a lot of letters and statements about deficit reduction flying around, but precious little legislation. If the 64 senators who signed this letter wanted to write and vote for a bill, that’d be a pretty “strong signal.” But for 64 senators to instead write letters about how someone else should be making affirmative noises about deficit reduction, well, read closely, that’s a signal of a very different kind.... Obama could be doing more to move public opinion, but on this issue, the empowered actor is the legislative branch, not the executive branch. And the legislative branch should begin acting like it.

We Should Shed Tears for Corrupt Dictators?

Pat Buchanan appears to believe so:

But what must Mubarak think of us?

He stood by us through the final Reagan decade of the Cold War. At George H.W. Bush’s request, he sent his soldiers to fight alongside ours against fellow Arabs in Desert Storm. He stayed faithful to a peace with Israel his people detested. He cooperated with George Bush II in some of the nastier business of the War on Terror.

A dictator, yes, but also our man in the Arab world. Yet a few hundred thousand demonstrators in Cairo’s streets caused us to abandon him.

In the last half-century, how many others who cast their lot with us have we abandoned as “corrupt and dictatorial” when they started to lose their grip? Ngo Dinh Diem, Gen. Thieu and Marshal Ky, Lon Nol, Chiang Kai-shek, Marcos, the Shah, Somoza, Pinochet — the list goes on.

When we needed them, they were hailed as America’s great friends. When they needed us, we abandoned them in the name of our rediscovered democratic values.

Buchanan was in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan Administrations, so he's in a position to tell us whether any of the dictators for whom he weeps ever came to the President with a question such as, "I want to create a legacy of bringing my people into enlightenment, creating an educated, free democratic society - can I count on your help?" My guess is that the answer is none. On the other hand, were we to count the times they might have approached a President with a question like, "I need help training my secret police to squelch dissent - can I count on your help?"...

As for Mubarak's cooperation with the U.S. and its principal goals in the region, yes, he did cooperate. But would Buchanan have us believe that no quid pro quo was involved? That even if Egypt were not receiving close to $2 billion per year in aid and participating in U.S. military training exercises, Mubarak would have been as cooperative - or would have cooperated with us at all?

Buchanan sees Mubarak as wanting a better legacy than fleeing his country in the face of popular protest. No doubt. But if that happens it won't be because of anything the United States did. As with the other dictators and tyrants on Buchanan's list, it will be because of the way he ran his country. What are Mubarak's accomplishments as leader of Egypt? If he's looking for a place in the history books, being deposed may in fact be the best way to keep himself from being a footnote between the Presidency of Anwar Sadat and that of his successor.

Mubarak could redeem himself and maintain power until a transition date of his own choosing, if he embraced the democratic process and started speaking about creating a safe context for elections in the fall. He could transform the tail end of his presidency into an interim government, bridging Egypt's undemocratic, dictatorial past with its (possible) more democratic and open future.

Also, if he has to turn tail and flee in the next few days it won't be because the U.S. hasn't tried to support him and to facilitate an orderly transition of government. It will be because, in lieu of making any substantive promise of or timetable for reform, he decided to try to put down the protests with violence. How is that anybody's fault but his own.

No, I don't want to say that U.S. policies don't play a role in this. As part of his quid pro quo with the United States, Mubarak helped sustain policies that were very unpopular with some, most, and perhaps at times all of his population. The U.S. government appreciated that type of loyalty to U.S. interests - but at the same time the government, most notably the administrations of Buchanan's past employers, were quick to withdraw support or attempt to oust allies of this stripe who weren't willing or able to demonstrate the required degree of loyalty. Mubarak might have had difficulty in a more open, democratic society, maintaining his nation's blockade of the Gaza Strip. But nobody said democracy was easy.

As for the rhetorical question, "what must Mubarak think of us," I guess it depends upon whether he knows his history. But in the greater scheme of things it doesn't matter. That's the part that's gotta hurt, right? That (albeit in large part due to his own choice and action) we see him as largely dispensable. That one of his biggest U.S. defenders categorizes him alongside Lon Nol and, implicitly, Manuel Noriega. (Should Saddam Hussein be on Buchanan's list?)

As With Deficits, Child Poverty is Now Important

Michael Gerson always seems to be late to the game. When his lord and master, G.W. Bush, was posting record deficits, all was well. When President Obama took office Gerson reinvented himself as a deficit hawk. Gerson is now suddenly concerned about child poverty and its effect on our society, but nary a mention of G.W. Let's see, how well did G.W. do on the issue of child poverty?

The number of U.S. children living in poverty increased in 2007 — continuing an upward trend dating back to 2000: In 2007, 13.3 million children were living in poverty, up from 11.6 million children in 2000. The percentage of children living in families with incomes below the poverty line has increased from 16.2 per- cent in 2000 to 18.0 percent in 2007. Thus, a large number of children — nearly one in five — are poor.

Taking a look at child poverty rates over time, going back to 1959, you see a rapid decline of child poverty until 1969, a leveling off at about 15% through 1976, a modest increase until 1980 (the recession under Jimmy Carter), and then... "Morning in America" was associated with a massive increase in the child poverty rate. The rate dropped slightly below 20% toward the end of Reagan's tenure, then went back up to the mid-20's under George H.W. Bush. The rate gradually declined under Clinton and, as the quote above suggests, consistently rose under G.W. Bush. The current, severe recession has increased the child poverty rate, from about 19% at the end of G.W.'s tenure to about 21% today, below the peaks that occurred under Reagan and at the end of George H.W. Bush's tenure, but well above what I expect most people would deem acceptable or healthy for our nation's future.

What is Gerson's simplistic take on this? He resorts to a "correlation is causation" argument, arguing,

If America had the same fraction of single-parent families as it had in 1970, the child poverty rate would be about 30 percent lower.

It's difficult to believe that Gerson was unaware that he was cherry-picking 1970 out of the five-year stretch between 1969 and 1974 when child poverty in this nation was atypically low. As you might expect, the decade of "free love" wasn't a high point for marriage: the number of children living in single parent families was 24% in 1960 and 46% in 1970 - so why was there a significant decline in child poverty over that period?

Please note, I don't want to diminish the importance of a stable family unit to child-rearing and poverty avoidance. But we shouldn't confuse a cause and effect, nor should we disregard the cyclical nature of poverty. When a girl becomes a mother with a partner who is unsuitable for marriage, uninterested in marriage, or both, she is set up for single parenthood, dropping out of high school or going no further in school, a work history (if any) that reflects her status as a parent of a preschooler, and in all likelihood subsequent relationships that similarly don't ripen into marriage. That may also be what was modeled for her by her extended family and within her peer group and community.

Gerson argues that it is "simplistic" to focus on "economic redistribution" as an answer to poverty. I'll concede the point he is trying to make, but at the same time point out that at least by definition if your society has enough wealth to go around you actually can eliminate poverty through income redistribution. The point he presumably is trying to make is that income redistribution won't actually solve poverty - you can mask or reduce it over the short-term, but if you withdraw the subsidies it will reappear. To argue otherwise would be simplistic, but arguably no more so than Gerson's suggestion that we could erase 30% of poverty by marrying off single mothers to unwilling suitors. Gerson quotes Brookings Institution researcers,

"Our research ... shows that if you want to avoid poverty and join the middle class in the United States, you need to complete high school (at a minimum), work full time and marry before you have children. If you do all three, your chances of being poor fall from 12 percent to 2 percent."

Gerson focuses on marriage, not completion of high school, perhaps because he understands that a teen mother who has not finished high school is significantly less likely to do so even if she's married and is exceptionally unlikely to have a full-time job. I wonder what issue he's trying to avoid mentioning.

Gerson's argument on "simplistic" approaches to poverty is itself simplistic.

Passing the tax compromise between President Obama and congressional Republicans would be a notable achievement - but mainly a negative one. It would avoid a contraction of the economy in January, when tax rates are scheduled to broadly rise. Deficit hawks are unhappy with another round of borrowed stimulus. But the first step in the recovery of economic health is the avoidance of self-inflicted wounds. On this commitment, at least, bipartisanship has returned.

Yet the deal also sparked an ideological argument on the nature of economic fairness. To some on the left, the refusal to raise taxes on the wealthy was a moral failure - a surrender to inequality. Conservatives generally countered that economic inequality is a matter of indifference, as long as the economy is growing. Both arguments are notable for their shallowness.

Gerson's concept of the "deficit hawk" seems to align with that of other "conservative" commentators - deficits only count if they're created by spending, not by tax cuts. No true deficit hawk would have looked at the idea of extending tax cuts for the rich at a cost of $70 billion per year and shrugged that off as irrelevant to the deficit. Nor would they shrug off the other tax cuts or the higher-than-expected estate tax cutoff and its lower-than expected rate. A deficit hawk would look at the Republican proposals to "balance the budget" and laugh. "How can anybody think you can balance the budget without painful budget cuts and significant tax increases? And the Republicans haven't proposed even one meaningful budget cut." But then, both students of history and serious deficit hawks know that the Republican Party is not even slightly concerned about deficits - they're something to complain about when a Democrat is in office, but should never interfere with a tax cut or the out-of-control spending of a Republican administration.

I'm not sure who, if anybody, is making the argument that Gerson attributes to the left, that "We need to raise taxes on the rich so that we can redistribute wealth," as the arguments I've seen have focused primarily upon the fact that the Republican approach will increase the budget deficit by almost a trillion dollars over the next decade. Sure, I've heard arguments that continued tax cuts for the wealthy aren't likely to stimulate the economy and thus that, if we take the Republican position that the $trillion doesn't matter, the money could be better directed at other priorities. But nobody of consequence is making the argument Gerson presents. (Gerson also leaps from the mythic "to some on the left" to "Progressives... seem[] happy to accept ideological leadership from a self-described democratic socialist[, Bernie Sanders]." Logic isn't his forté.)

Gerson proposes an approach to poverty that he claims is a "should be common ground for the center-left and center-right".

A mobility agenda might include measures to discourage teen pregnancy; increase the rewards for work; encourage wealth-building and entrepreneurship; reform preschool programs; improve infant and child health; increase teacher quality; and increase high school graduation rates and college attendance among the poor.

Here's something interesting, though - and although I've teased him for it I'm going to refer back to David Brooks and his magic marshmallows - the study Gerson uses as a basis for his article doesn't speak of quality high schools or college attendance - it speaks of completing high school, deferring childbirth, and holding a full-time job. That is, the underlying message is that a reduction in poverty is associated with learning how to complete things, learning responsibility, and deferring gratification. Improving schools and raising the rate of college attendance among qualified high school graduates is good for society, but for poverty reduction it's icing on the cake.

The largest fault with Gerson's list, of course, is that it's not a list of "center-left and center-right" ideas. It's principally a list of ideas from the political left that have largely been dismissed, ignored or subverted by the political right, including Gerson's former boss, George W. Bush. Yes, I understand that Gerson stuck that "school improvement" stuff in there as a monument to "No Child Left Behind" and the present push for improved inner city schools. But what was G.W.'s solution to teen pregnancy? Abstinence-only education and the undermining of family planning, both domestically and internationally. (Whoops.) What is the Republican response to initiatives to expand access to healthcare for struggling families? (Whoops.) What position typifies the Republican party on early childhood education in poor communities? (Cough.) While the criticism that Republicans only care about children until they're born is unfair, it's not without a kernel of truth. Even within the context of school reform, while G.W. seemed sincere in his desire to improve public education, the larger right-wing push seems animated by the opportunity to bash teachers unions.

Gerson's proposal to "increase the rewards for work" - how do you do that without redistributing wealth? The disincentive to work, after all, is that your public assistance will be reduced or eliminated based upon your income, so how do you increase rewards without creating a new subsidy? As for "encourag[ing] wealth-building and entrepreneurship", it would be nice if Gerson presented more than a sound bite. Maybe he pictures teen mothers making crocheted booties and selling them on Etsy?

All in all, if you want to put together and fund a comprehensive anti-poverty program, focused not on handouts but on improving poor communities with better support for family planning, families, access to health care, support for working parents, affordable, high-quality preschools, and support for helping kids - perhaps especially teen mothers - complete high school, you would be looking at programs and initiatives associated with the political left. The political right sounds more like Gerson - "All of that would be nice, but not if it means paying higher taxes. And spending on the poor? That's the one area where I'm serious about being a deficit hawk."

Gerson attempts to dabble in British politics, alluding to "the British Labor Party" as being socialist in the manner of Bernie Sanders, and suggesting that the true model for the Democratic Party is Nick Clegg and the (do you know this already) Social Democrats. Gerson's millimeter thick knowledge of British politics has apparently made him aware that Nick Clegg joined his party with the Conservatives in order to become part of the ruling coalition, and has backed severe budget cuts that are cutting back on the very types of programs Gerson just got through telling us were necessary to elevate families out of poverty. The standing of his party under its supporters is so low that it presently looks to be all-but wiped out in the next election.

Labour has risen about 10% in the last seven months by not being the Liberal Democrats. Converted into a House of Commons, these figures are sufficient to give Ed Miliband a majority of 18 whilst reducing the Liberal Democrats [from 57 seats] to just over 20 seats.

As a satirical "agony aunt" recently put it:

Dear Dr Mander

Earlier this year I decided to take a little break from front line politics and concentrate on writing. I have just published a brilliant and penetrating analysis of the crisis at the heart of globalised neo-liberal capitalism, including a visionary call for the recalibration of post-Keynsian orthodoxies to balance the efficiency gains of liberalised labour markets against the social consequences of asymmetric cross-border capital movements. It is, as I'm sure you can imagine, a real page-turner. Anyway, with this project out of the way, I'm ready to return to public life. I feel I have so much more to offer. But there don't seem to be as many opportunities around these days. How do you think my unique skills could best be deployed for the benefit of mankind?

G Brown

Dear Mr Brown

As I recall, when you were chancellor, agitating to become prime minister, you hinted that your leadership would mark a departure from the old politics of spin and that you would be guided by high principle. Once in office you stuck to the usual methods of shabby tactical manoeuvring, no one knew what you really stood for. Feint to the left, govern on the right; widely seen as unprincipled, failed leadership… Have you ever thought of becoming a Lib Dem?

As usual, whether by ignorance or by design, Gerson's advice to Democrats seems to amount to, "Load gun, aim at foot, pull trigger."