Catholic leaders' threats to deny Communion to the Health and Human Services nominee have serious ramifications.
LA Times
By TIM RUTTEN
April 25, 2009
When Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius this week vetoed another in the seemingly unending series of restrictive abortion bills her state's Legislature churns out, it guaranteed that her confirmation as secretary of Health and Human Services would become a battleground in the increasingly nasty campaign being waged against officeholders who are both Catholic and Democratic. Politics in Kansas has long been poisoned by extremism on both sides of the abortion question. This latest bill is one of a number that Sebelius, who is not a lawyer, has been advised to veto as unconstitutional.
The measure would have amended an existing statute on late-term abortions, which Kansas permits after the 21st week of pregnancy only if the mother is at risk of death or severe physical or mental injury. The amendment would have required far more detailed reporting by physicians and would have allowed prosecutors who disagreed with the doctor's judgment to file criminal charges. Husbands who objected to the abortion would have been allowed to file civil suits.
"A physician acting in good faith to save a pregnant woman's life, and using his or her best medical judgment, should not be subject to later criminal prosecution," said Sebelius, explaining why she vetoed the bill. She is a practicing Catholic who personally opposes abortion. She argues, however, that such opposition does not relieve her of a legal obligation to veto legislation she thinks is unconstitutional. In 2006, Sebelius said: "My Catholic faith teaches me that all life is sacred, and personally I believe abortion is wrong. However, I disagree with the suggestion that criminalizing women and their doctors is an effective means of achieving the goal of reducing the number of abortions in our nation."
The governor contends that other approaches, particularly adoption incentives and better public health programs, are more effective, and she frequently notes that the number of abortions in Kansas has declined 10% during her six years in office.None of this impresses antiabortion hard-liners such as Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann of Kansas City, Kan. Earlier this year, when Sebelius vetoed another measure that would have allowed a third party to seek a court order restraining a woman from obtaining an abortion -- even if it was necessary to save her life -- Naumann forbade the governor to receive Communion unless she changed her views.
So far, so parochial -- and none of this is likely to deter Sebelius' confirmation, though a great deal is likely to be made of her being "an enemy of the unborn," as she's been labeled by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. Look for Republicans to make as much out of this confirmation as possible.
Here's why:For conservatives who've been trying for years to pry Catholic voters out of the Democratic Party, the Holy Grail of political advantage is a long-sought clerical edict that would prohibit any Catholic officeholder who ever has cast a pro-choice vote from receiving Communion. From there, it would be a relatively small step to extend the ban to any Catholic who has voted for a pro-choice candidate. Catholic Democrats would be forced to choose between their party and their church.
For years, most bishops -- though unswervingly pro-life -- have avoided such an either/or moment, not least because, on the vast majority of issues apart from abortion, their social agenda coincides more closely with the Democrats than the GOP. But time is gradually changing the character of the American Catholic hierarchy. The generation of pastoral, politically savvy bishops and cardinals appointed by Pope Paul VI and John Paul II in his early years -- the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles and Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington come to mind -- are aging and passing from the scene. In their place a new, more brittle and ultramontane group of bishops appears willing to elevate the abortion issue over all others.
That's important because in the past, when more conservative bishops have forbidden Communion to Catholic officeholders, some cardinals -- McCarrick and Mahony in particular -- have declined to enforce the ban. Now, however, the new archbishop of Washington, Donald Wuerl, and Bishop Paul S. Loverde of Arlington, Va., have said they expect Sebelius to obey her local bishop's order if she moves into their sees.
If conservative activists can persuade enough local bishops to do to, say, Vice President Joe Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sens. Ted Kennedy, John Kerry and Christopher Dodd what Naumann has done to Sebelius, the long-sought national edict is a fait accompli.George W. Bush's former advisor on Catholic affairs, Deal W. Hudson, said this week that Wuerl's and Loverde's acquiescence in denying Sebelius the sacrament "will send the message to other bishops that if they choose to pronounce members of Congress from their dioceses unfit for Communion, their authority will be respected in D.C. and across the Potomac in Virginia.
The ramifications are enormous." This is a nasty business with serious implications, and the bishops might want to consider where they'll find themselves if even their own co-religionists come to believe they're in the business of dictating officeholders' actions rather than forming consciences.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Why Obama Shook Chávez's Hand
He campaigned on a new approach to diplomacy.
Wall St. Journal
James P. Rubin
4/24/09
Beneath the attacks on President Barack Obama's performance at recent meetings abroad lie two fundamental questions about American foreign policy. The first is the extent to which Washington should make changing despised leaders of other countries a primary goal. The second is how to use the power of the presidency.
What the chorus of Mr. Obama's critics is ignoring is that the 2008 election was, in part, a referendum on President Bush's policy of regime change and his approach to diplomacy.
Candidate Barack Obama could not have been clearer. He was going to talk to foreign leaders directly whether the United States agreed with their policies or not. And the purpose of this new diplomacy, Mr. Obama emphasized, was not to change regimes around the world but to advance American interests. His opponent, Sen. John McCain, took the opposite view. He wouldn't be seen in the company of Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. And as far as Iran was concerned, Mr. McCain would demand that Tehran capitulate on a series of issues as the price for a meeting with the president.
Despite the results of November's election, Mr. Obama's critics are judging him on the basis of the old Bush calculus. Whether it is Venezuela or Cuba, they assess Mr. Obama's actions based on whether or not they immediately contribute to the downfall of a regime. If not, then they go off in high dudgeon.
Worse yet, Mr. Obama's critics are using the same logic that contributed to early failures in Iraq. They say the president's politeness to Hugo Chávez, for example, should be judged by the standards of the Cold War. They point to the fact that dissidents in Eastern Europe were heartened when President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an "evil empire." But that truth doesn't always translate to other parts of the world. If Iraq has taught us anything, it is that not all countries respond the same way when a dictator falls. Unfortunately, many heirs to the Reagan tradition haven't learned that policy by analogy is a risky business.
Whether the challenge is Afghanistan, Pakistan or nuclear proliferation, the new administration seems determined not to be distracted by the advocates of regime change or the likes of Hugo Chávez. Instead, the Obama administration has used recent summits in London, Prague and Trinidad as a way to restore respect for the U.S. abroad, and to build the base of support that is necessary to achieve larger goals.
Mr. Obama not only has a different view than Mr. Bush about the ends of U.S. foreign policy, but he has also promised to use different means than his predecessor. Mr. Bush believed that he could extract concessions from recalcitrant governments as the price of admission for dialogue with the U.S. When it came to preventing North Korea from building nuclear weapons, or Iran from developing nuclear technology, the Bush policy failed. Denying direct access to U.S. officials did not compel the governments in Pyongyang or Tehran to reverse course.
Soon enough Mr. Obama's critics will be howling that he is meeting with the leaders of problematic countries with no dramatic concessions to show for it. But again, they will be missing the point. As he made clear during the campaign, the president believes direct diplomacy is a tool in America's arsenal. It is not a prize to be won.
Mr. Obama's new diplomacy is well-suited to an era of democratic government and instant communication. By refusing to snub Hugo Chávez, Mr. Obama makes it harder for dictators and anti-American activists to demonize the U.S. Of course, national security is not a popularity contest. But since governments around the world are increasingly democratic, they must respond to the attitudes of their people. A popular America has more leverage at the negotiating table on issues from trade to terrorism. While Republican operatives may dismiss the significance of having a president the world admires, the fact is that Mr. Obama's popularity brings tangible benefits we have lost over the last eight years.
If the president's critics continue to judge him by Bush-era standards of diplomacy and regime change, they are going to have a lot to shout about over the next four years. But the majority of Americans who supported Barack Obama will withhold judgment and give the administration the opportunity to implement its initiatives on climate change, nuclear proliferation, Afghanistan and Iran. They may even give the new policies time to work.
Wall St. Journal
James P. Rubin
4/24/09
Beneath the attacks on President Barack Obama's performance at recent meetings abroad lie two fundamental questions about American foreign policy. The first is the extent to which Washington should make changing despised leaders of other countries a primary goal. The second is how to use the power of the presidency.
What the chorus of Mr. Obama's critics is ignoring is that the 2008 election was, in part, a referendum on President Bush's policy of regime change and his approach to diplomacy.
Candidate Barack Obama could not have been clearer. He was going to talk to foreign leaders directly whether the United States agreed with their policies or not. And the purpose of this new diplomacy, Mr. Obama emphasized, was not to change regimes around the world but to advance American interests. His opponent, Sen. John McCain, took the opposite view. He wouldn't be seen in the company of Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. And as far as Iran was concerned, Mr. McCain would demand that Tehran capitulate on a series of issues as the price for a meeting with the president.
Despite the results of November's election, Mr. Obama's critics are judging him on the basis of the old Bush calculus. Whether it is Venezuela or Cuba, they assess Mr. Obama's actions based on whether or not they immediately contribute to the downfall of a regime. If not, then they go off in high dudgeon.
Worse yet, Mr. Obama's critics are using the same logic that contributed to early failures in Iraq. They say the president's politeness to Hugo Chávez, for example, should be judged by the standards of the Cold War. They point to the fact that dissidents in Eastern Europe were heartened when President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an "evil empire." But that truth doesn't always translate to other parts of the world. If Iraq has taught us anything, it is that not all countries respond the same way when a dictator falls. Unfortunately, many heirs to the Reagan tradition haven't learned that policy by analogy is a risky business.
Whether the challenge is Afghanistan, Pakistan or nuclear proliferation, the new administration seems determined not to be distracted by the advocates of regime change or the likes of Hugo Chávez. Instead, the Obama administration has used recent summits in London, Prague and Trinidad as a way to restore respect for the U.S. abroad, and to build the base of support that is necessary to achieve larger goals.
Mr. Obama not only has a different view than Mr. Bush about the ends of U.S. foreign policy, but he has also promised to use different means than his predecessor. Mr. Bush believed that he could extract concessions from recalcitrant governments as the price of admission for dialogue with the U.S. When it came to preventing North Korea from building nuclear weapons, or Iran from developing nuclear technology, the Bush policy failed. Denying direct access to U.S. officials did not compel the governments in Pyongyang or Tehran to reverse course.
Soon enough Mr. Obama's critics will be howling that he is meeting with the leaders of problematic countries with no dramatic concessions to show for it. But again, they will be missing the point. As he made clear during the campaign, the president believes direct diplomacy is a tool in America's arsenal. It is not a prize to be won.
Mr. Obama's new diplomacy is well-suited to an era of democratic government and instant communication. By refusing to snub Hugo Chávez, Mr. Obama makes it harder for dictators and anti-American activists to demonize the U.S. Of course, national security is not a popularity contest. But since governments around the world are increasingly democratic, they must respond to the attitudes of their people. A popular America has more leverage at the negotiating table on issues from trade to terrorism. While Republican operatives may dismiss the significance of having a president the world admires, the fact is that Mr. Obama's popularity brings tangible benefits we have lost over the last eight years.
If the president's critics continue to judge him by Bush-era standards of diplomacy and regime change, they are going to have a lot to shout about over the next four years. But the majority of Americans who supported Barack Obama will withhold judgment and give the administration the opportunity to implement its initiatives on climate change, nuclear proliferation, Afghanistan and Iran. They may even give the new policies time to work.
Should Presidential Power be Checked?
Since 9/11, the power of the executive has grown, which some say has come at the expense of the Constitution's founding principles of separation of powers and checks and balances. Is it time for Congress and the Courts to reassert their power? Here is one Senator's perspective:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22656
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22656
Obama Nears 100: Average Approval & Ultra-Polarizing
Real Clear Politics
By David Paul Kuhn
April 23, 2009
As he approaches the 100th day of his presidency, Barack Obama's public approval stands in the middle of the ten presidents who preceded him, based on an extensive analysis of historic Gallup polling.
Obama's standing is as remarkable as it is distant from the grand expectations that greeted him on Inauguration Day. Obama has indeed earned historically lofty support from his base. But the historically paltry support from his political opposition keeps Obama well short of the more popular presidents of less partisan eras.
The president who campaigned on "turning the page" will hit his 100th day in the same black and white standing as George W. Bush. Obama may in fact cross the milestone as the most polarizing president of the modern era.
Wednesday will mark day 100. Media will both fixate on the milestone and belittle it. It's a Washington ritual. And although an artificial ritual at that, 100 days has become the traditional first landmark for reflecting on a new president.
Obama will come to that milestone a more popular president than his two recent predecessors. He will also be short, on mean and median, of the public standing of half the presidents' since Dwight Eisenhower. Ike was the first president that Gallup repeatedly polled over the first 100 days.
Americans view of Obama has stabilized in recent weeks, allowing for a firm sense of where the president stands on the cusp of a milestone no president has wished to highlight since Franklin Roosevelt.
It was Roosevelt who began the 100-day count. FDR signed a breathtaking 15 major bills into law before the milestone passed. Obama, like most presidents since Roosevelt, has wrestled with the long shadow of FDR's precocious scorecard.
Obama will need all the public support he can muster to compete with FDR's legislative tally. As Americans gauge their president on the eve of his 100th day, below are three significant trends to watch.
Obama's popular, but no JFK
The bar is 65. That's the average 100-day approval rating for the ten presidents between 1953 and 2009. Obama will likely be narrowly underachieving when the milestone comes to pass, perhaps earning 63 percent. That would place Obama between Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter in the public's view.
John F. Kennedy matches Lyndon Johnson for the highest average 100-day approval rating. But Johnson, like Harry Truman, owed his vaulted status to the death of a president.
Americans' early view of Kennedy is the most impressive in the modern era. JFK won the White House by the narrowest of margins. He struggled with policy in his first 100 days--including the Bay of Pigs debacle. Yet at the close of the first chapter of his presidency, Kennedy was able to unite the country like no other figure in the modern day.
Only 6 percent of Americans on average disapproved of Kennedy over this period. Obama will likely average four times JFK's disapproval by next week. That's twice the modern average. It's a disapproval level only topped by Clinton. And the reason? Polarization.
The Polarizing ‘Post-Partisan'
Obama may be the most partisan 100-day president of the modern era, but only by a hair's margin. Obama's partisan gap averages 60 percentage points. Bush was the most partisan modern president at 57 points. Clinton closed his first 100 days with a 51-point gap. The partisan gap is the margin between the high approval of a president's political base and the low approval of the opposition party.
The polarized view of Obama would hardly be notable if not for the tenor of Obama's candidacy, as partisanship has steadily risen since Clinton. Transcending the two tribes of Washington was the nucleus of Obama's campaign.
Polarization is rooted in trends from gerrymandering to partisan migration. Northeastern moderate Republicans became Democrats. Conservative southern Democrats became Republicans. Polarization became so pervasive over the past decade that more Republicans approved of Bush early on than Eisenhower or Ronald Reagan.
Obama's polarization was not fated. Republicans approval of Obama dropped from 41 to 30 percent between Obama's first and fourth week in office. Conservative Republicans drove that decline, their support fell from 36 to 22 percent.
By late February, Obama was a polarizing figure in the mold of Bush, as RealClearPolitics first reported. Obama's partisan gap has shifted between 63 and 65 percent in the past seven consecutive weeks.
Obama will likely close his 100 days with the same level of support from Democrats that Bush enjoyed from Republicans, nine in ten. Meanwhile, Obama trends a couple points worse than Bush with the opposing party. It's a slight difference. And notably, GOP ranks have slimmed down since 2001. It's likely more moderate Republicans who remain. That would leave a more conservative party to gauge the new president.
Eight years ago, even Bush attempted to convey a bipartisan tone. "We are beginning to get a spirit here in Washington where we are more agreeable," he said on the anniversary of his first 100 days.
It's the contradiction that spotlights Obama's polarization problem. At Obama's inaugural address, the new president said, "the stale political arguments, that have consumed us for so long, no longer apply."
Holding the Center
It was Yeats who once wrote that when "things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." In broad terms, a president's mandate ebbs and flows with the support of that center.
Obama has held the center thus far. Obama is likely to close the 100-day milestone with about six in ten independents behind him. That would place Obama where Nixon stood, ranking perhaps seventh of eleven presidents.
Seven is no ranking to sniff at. Obama will likely close about 5 points higher than Bush with independents, and surpass Clinton by about twice that margin. George H.W. Bush closed his first 100 days with the approval of only 51 percent of independents.
But the center is not assured. Last week Obama's independent support ebbed below 60. Absent significant GOP backing, the center is the keystone to Obama's mandate. And Obama can ill afford the average approval that now defines that mandate. He is a president with historic legislative ambitions who wins only standard public support. That's not the equation for major legislative prizes. For Obama to turn historic bills to law, in the months ahead, the center will have to do more than hold. Obama will have to wield a center overwhelmingly behind him.
By David Paul Kuhn
April 23, 2009
As he approaches the 100th day of his presidency, Barack Obama's public approval stands in the middle of the ten presidents who preceded him, based on an extensive analysis of historic Gallup polling.
Obama's standing is as remarkable as it is distant from the grand expectations that greeted him on Inauguration Day. Obama has indeed earned historically lofty support from his base. But the historically paltry support from his political opposition keeps Obama well short of the more popular presidents of less partisan eras.
The president who campaigned on "turning the page" will hit his 100th day in the same black and white standing as George W. Bush. Obama may in fact cross the milestone as the most polarizing president of the modern era.
Wednesday will mark day 100. Media will both fixate on the milestone and belittle it. It's a Washington ritual. And although an artificial ritual at that, 100 days has become the traditional first landmark for reflecting on a new president.
Obama will come to that milestone a more popular president than his two recent predecessors. He will also be short, on mean and median, of the public standing of half the presidents' since Dwight Eisenhower. Ike was the first president that Gallup repeatedly polled over the first 100 days.
Americans view of Obama has stabilized in recent weeks, allowing for a firm sense of where the president stands on the cusp of a milestone no president has wished to highlight since Franklin Roosevelt.
It was Roosevelt who began the 100-day count. FDR signed a breathtaking 15 major bills into law before the milestone passed. Obama, like most presidents since Roosevelt, has wrestled with the long shadow of FDR's precocious scorecard.
Obama will need all the public support he can muster to compete with FDR's legislative tally. As Americans gauge their president on the eve of his 100th day, below are three significant trends to watch.
Obama's popular, but no JFK
The bar is 65. That's the average 100-day approval rating for the ten presidents between 1953 and 2009. Obama will likely be narrowly underachieving when the milestone comes to pass, perhaps earning 63 percent. That would place Obama between Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter in the public's view.
John F. Kennedy matches Lyndon Johnson for the highest average 100-day approval rating. But Johnson, like Harry Truman, owed his vaulted status to the death of a president.
Americans' early view of Kennedy is the most impressive in the modern era. JFK won the White House by the narrowest of margins. He struggled with policy in his first 100 days--including the Bay of Pigs debacle. Yet at the close of the first chapter of his presidency, Kennedy was able to unite the country like no other figure in the modern day.
Only 6 percent of Americans on average disapproved of Kennedy over this period. Obama will likely average four times JFK's disapproval by next week. That's twice the modern average. It's a disapproval level only topped by Clinton. And the reason? Polarization.
The Polarizing ‘Post-Partisan'
Obama may be the most partisan 100-day president of the modern era, but only by a hair's margin. Obama's partisan gap averages 60 percentage points. Bush was the most partisan modern president at 57 points. Clinton closed his first 100 days with a 51-point gap. The partisan gap is the margin between the high approval of a president's political base and the low approval of the opposition party.
The polarized view of Obama would hardly be notable if not for the tenor of Obama's candidacy, as partisanship has steadily risen since Clinton. Transcending the two tribes of Washington was the nucleus of Obama's campaign.
Polarization is rooted in trends from gerrymandering to partisan migration. Northeastern moderate Republicans became Democrats. Conservative southern Democrats became Republicans. Polarization became so pervasive over the past decade that more Republicans approved of Bush early on than Eisenhower or Ronald Reagan.
Obama's polarization was not fated. Republicans approval of Obama dropped from 41 to 30 percent between Obama's first and fourth week in office. Conservative Republicans drove that decline, their support fell from 36 to 22 percent.
By late February, Obama was a polarizing figure in the mold of Bush, as RealClearPolitics first reported. Obama's partisan gap has shifted between 63 and 65 percent in the past seven consecutive weeks.
Obama will likely close his 100 days with the same level of support from Democrats that Bush enjoyed from Republicans, nine in ten. Meanwhile, Obama trends a couple points worse than Bush with the opposing party. It's a slight difference. And notably, GOP ranks have slimmed down since 2001. It's likely more moderate Republicans who remain. That would leave a more conservative party to gauge the new president.
Eight years ago, even Bush attempted to convey a bipartisan tone. "We are beginning to get a spirit here in Washington where we are more agreeable," he said on the anniversary of his first 100 days.
It's the contradiction that spotlights Obama's polarization problem. At Obama's inaugural address, the new president said, "the stale political arguments, that have consumed us for so long, no longer apply."
Holding the Center
It was Yeats who once wrote that when "things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." In broad terms, a president's mandate ebbs and flows with the support of that center.
Obama has held the center thus far. Obama is likely to close the 100-day milestone with about six in ten independents behind him. That would place Obama where Nixon stood, ranking perhaps seventh of eleven presidents.
Seven is no ranking to sniff at. Obama will likely close about 5 points higher than Bush with independents, and surpass Clinton by about twice that margin. George H.W. Bush closed his first 100 days with the approval of only 51 percent of independents.
But the center is not assured. Last week Obama's independent support ebbed below 60. Absent significant GOP backing, the center is the keystone to Obama's mandate. And Obama can ill afford the average approval that now defines that mandate. He is a president with historic legislative ambitions who wins only standard public support. That's not the equation for major legislative prizes. For Obama to turn historic bills to law, in the months ahead, the center will have to do more than hold. Obama will have to wield a center overwhelmingly behind him.
Democrats plan to avoid filibuster on healthcare bill
A legislative maneuver would allow the senators to pass a bill to overhaul healthcare without a single GOP vote. Republicans warn against the move.
LA Times
By Noam N. Levey
April 25, 2009
Reporting from Washington --
Senior Democrats have reached broad agreement on a plan to prevent Republicans from blocking President Obama's sweeping healthcare proposals, congressional officials said Friday.The plan, which would use special provisions of the budget process to prevent a Senate filibuster, threatens to sow outrage among Republican lawmakers and could complicate Democrats' efforts to push through the rest of their agenda. But Obama and his allies believe their decision to use the "budget reconciliation" process will allow passage of the kind of health system overhaul that has eluded Washington.
The president reiterated that position Thursday night in a meeting with congressional leaders, according to officials in the White House and on Capitol Hill.Adding healthcare to the list of measures that will be treated as part of the budget resolution process would allow Democrats to pass the legislation with 51 votes in the Senate instead of the 60-vote supermajority normally required to avoid a filibuster.With a big Democratic majority in the House and Democrats controlling at least 58 seats in the Senate, the move would all but guarantee that a single GOP vote would not be needed.
Democrats hope to approve the budget resolution as early as next week, although the specifics of a healthcare plan will take months to work out.With Senate Democrats talking through final details of the legislative strategy, lawmakers said there was broad agreement to invoke the budget reconciliation process to circumvent a filibuster if the two parties have not reached agreement on a healthcare bill by September.
"We are hopeful we will be able to complete work next week," Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) said in a statement Friday, adding that there was still "a fair amount of work to be done."Under the budget deal, Obama still would need 60 votes to pass his plans to fight global warming, although he has a trump card on climate change: the ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the Environmental Protection Agency.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) warned against the move to limit GOP power."Fast-tracking a major legislative overhaul such as healthcare reform . . . without the benefit of a full and transparent debate does a disservice to the American people," he said. "And it would make it absolutely clear they intend to carry out their plans on a purely partisan basis.
"Speaking to reporters Friday morning, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who is drafting healthcare legislation, sought to play down partisan tensions.
"An awful lot of Republicans really want to do significant healthcare reform," Baucus said, stressing that he hoped Democrats would not have to use reconciliation."If we don't use reconciliation, we are going to have a much more sustainable result," he said. "When we jam something down someone's throat, it's not sustainable."
Among the most arcane legislative maneuvers, budget reconciliation was established to streamline the federal budgeting process by specifying spending targets for legislation; Congress should stay close to the budget goals as it drafts the specific bills named in the resolution.
Since those bills are not subject to filibuster, using the provision has long been among the most controversial steps authorized in congressional rules.All 41 Senate Republicans sent a letter to Democratic leaders stating that the tactic "violates the principle of bipartisanship to which President Obama and congressional leaders have publicly committed."
In the early 1990s, senior Senate Democrats prevented President Clinton from using the tactic to push through his healthcare agenda, which ultimately collapsed. This year, Conrad and Baucus argued vociferously against doing likewise.The budget resolution passed by the Senate three weeks ago did not include reconciliation language.
But House Democrats, noting that Republicans used the tactic to push through tax cuts when they were in the majority, included it in their budget resolution. And Obama and his aides promoted the idea in their conversations with lawmakers.
Thursday night, the president bluntly told McConnell that though he wanted to work with Republicans, he would not tolerate any delays in the push for a healthcare overhaul, according to a White House official who was in the meeting but was not authorized to speak on the record.Senior Democrats have stressed that the September deadline should encourage Republicans to work with them in coming months.
The reconciliation instructions in the budget resolution may also make it far more likely that several controversial Democratic healthcare priorities end up in the final bill, said Diane Rowland, executive vice president of the nonpartisan Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a leading voice in healthcare policy.
That includes the creation of a government program to cover some of the roughly 46 million people without coverage and new limits on private insurers that contract with Medicare.But, Rowland said, the tactic also substantially increases the likelihood that Obama will succeed in pushing through a significant healthcare bill."It may not be the most effective way to build bipartisan consensus," she said. "It may be the most effective way to get such a large bill passed."
LA Times
By Noam N. Levey
April 25, 2009
Reporting from Washington --
Senior Democrats have reached broad agreement on a plan to prevent Republicans from blocking President Obama's sweeping healthcare proposals, congressional officials said Friday.The plan, which would use special provisions of the budget process to prevent a Senate filibuster, threatens to sow outrage among Republican lawmakers and could complicate Democrats' efforts to push through the rest of their agenda. But Obama and his allies believe their decision to use the "budget reconciliation" process will allow passage of the kind of health system overhaul that has eluded Washington.
The president reiterated that position Thursday night in a meeting with congressional leaders, according to officials in the White House and on Capitol Hill.Adding healthcare to the list of measures that will be treated as part of the budget resolution process would allow Democrats to pass the legislation with 51 votes in the Senate instead of the 60-vote supermajority normally required to avoid a filibuster.With a big Democratic majority in the House and Democrats controlling at least 58 seats in the Senate, the move would all but guarantee that a single GOP vote would not be needed.
Democrats hope to approve the budget resolution as early as next week, although the specifics of a healthcare plan will take months to work out.With Senate Democrats talking through final details of the legislative strategy, lawmakers said there was broad agreement to invoke the budget reconciliation process to circumvent a filibuster if the two parties have not reached agreement on a healthcare bill by September.
"We are hopeful we will be able to complete work next week," Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) said in a statement Friday, adding that there was still "a fair amount of work to be done."Under the budget deal, Obama still would need 60 votes to pass his plans to fight global warming, although he has a trump card on climate change: the ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the Environmental Protection Agency.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) warned against the move to limit GOP power."Fast-tracking a major legislative overhaul such as healthcare reform . . . without the benefit of a full and transparent debate does a disservice to the American people," he said. "And it would make it absolutely clear they intend to carry out their plans on a purely partisan basis.
"Speaking to reporters Friday morning, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who is drafting healthcare legislation, sought to play down partisan tensions.
"An awful lot of Republicans really want to do significant healthcare reform," Baucus said, stressing that he hoped Democrats would not have to use reconciliation."If we don't use reconciliation, we are going to have a much more sustainable result," he said. "When we jam something down someone's throat, it's not sustainable."
Among the most arcane legislative maneuvers, budget reconciliation was established to streamline the federal budgeting process by specifying spending targets for legislation; Congress should stay close to the budget goals as it drafts the specific bills named in the resolution.
Since those bills are not subject to filibuster, using the provision has long been among the most controversial steps authorized in congressional rules.All 41 Senate Republicans sent a letter to Democratic leaders stating that the tactic "violates the principle of bipartisanship to which President Obama and congressional leaders have publicly committed."
In the early 1990s, senior Senate Democrats prevented President Clinton from using the tactic to push through his healthcare agenda, which ultimately collapsed. This year, Conrad and Baucus argued vociferously against doing likewise.The budget resolution passed by the Senate three weeks ago did not include reconciliation language.
But House Democrats, noting that Republicans used the tactic to push through tax cuts when they were in the majority, included it in their budget resolution. And Obama and his aides promoted the idea in their conversations with lawmakers.
Thursday night, the president bluntly told McConnell that though he wanted to work with Republicans, he would not tolerate any delays in the push for a healthcare overhaul, according to a White House official who was in the meeting but was not authorized to speak on the record.Senior Democrats have stressed that the September deadline should encourage Republicans to work with them in coming months.
The reconciliation instructions in the budget resolution may also make it far more likely that several controversial Democratic healthcare priorities end up in the final bill, said Diane Rowland, executive vice president of the nonpartisan Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a leading voice in healthcare policy.
That includes the creation of a government program to cover some of the roughly 46 million people without coverage and new limits on private insurers that contract with Medicare.But, Rowland said, the tactic also substantially increases the likelihood that Obama will succeed in pushing through a significant healthcare bill."It may not be the most effective way to build bipartisan consensus," she said. "It may be the most effective way to get such a large bill passed."
Military agency warned against ‘torture’
Extreme duress could yield unreliable information, according to 2002 memo
By Peter Finn and Joby Warrick
Washington Post
4/25/09
WASHINGTON - The military agency that provided advice on harsh interrogation techniques for use against terrorism suspects referred to the application of extreme duress as "torture" in a July 2002 document sent to the Pentagon's chief lawyer and warned that it would produce "unreliable information."
"The unintended consequence of a U.S. policy that provides for the torture of prisoners is that it could be used by our adversaries as justification for the torture of captured U.S. personnel," says the document, an unsigned two-page attachment to a memo by the military's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency. Parts of the attachment, obtained in full by The Washington Post, were quoted in a Senate report on harsh interrogation released this week.
It remains unclear whether the attachment reached high-ranking officials in the Bush administration. But the document offers the clearest evidence that has come to light so far that technical advisers on the harsh interrogation methods voiced early concerns about the effectiveness of applying severe physical or psychological pressure.
The document was included among July 2002 memorandums that described severe techniques used against Americans in past conflicts and the psychological effects of such treatment. JPRA ran the military program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE), which trains pilots and others to resist hostile questioning.
The cautionary attachment was forwarded to the Pentagon's Office of the General Counsel as the administration finalized the legal underpinnings of a CIA interrogation program that would sanction the use of 10 forms of coercion, including waterboarding, a technique that simulates drowning. The JPRA material was sent from the Pentagon to the CIA's acting general counsel, John A. Rizzo, and on to the Justice Department, according to testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
A memo dated Aug. 1, 2002, from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel authorized the use of the 10 methods against Abu Zubaida, the nom de guerre of an al-Qaeda associate captured in Pakistan in March 2002. Former intelligence officials have recently contended that Abu Zubaida provided little useful information about the organization's plans.
Senate investigators were unable to determine whether William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon's general counsel in 2002, passed the cautionary memo to Rizzo or to other Bush administration officials reviewing the CIA's proposed program.
'A lot of cautionary notes'Haynes declined to comment, as did Rizzo and the CIA. Jay S. Bybee, who as an assistant attorney general signed the Aug. 1 memo, did not respond to a request for comment.
Daniel Baumgartner, who was the JPRA's chief of staff in 2002 and transmitted the memos and attachments, said the agency "sent a lot of cautionary notes" regarding harsh techniques. "There is a difference between what we do in training and what the administration wanted the information for," he said a telephone interview yesterday. "What the administration decided to do or not to do was up to the guys dealing with offensive prisoner operations. . . . We train our own people for the worst possible outcome . . . and obviously the United States government does not torture its own people."
Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said he thinks the attachment was deliberately ignored and perhaps suppressed. Excerpts from the document appeared in a report on the treatment of detainees released this month by Levin's committee. The report says the attachment echoes JPRA warnings issued in late 2001.
"It's part of a pattern of squelching dissent," said Levin, who added that there were other instances in which internal reviews of detainee treatment were halted or undercut. "They didn't want to hear the downside."
A former administration official said the National Security Council, which was briefed repeatedly that summer on the CIA's planned interrogation program by George J. Tenet, then director of central intelligence, and agency lawyers, did not discuss the issues raised in the attachment. Tenet, through a spokesman, declined to comment.
"That information was not brought to the attention of the principals," said the official, who was involved in deliberations on interrogation policy and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. "That would have been relevant. The CIA did not present with pros and cons, or points of concern. They said this was safe and effective, and there was no alternative."
The Aug. 1 memo on the interrogation of Abu Zubaida draws from the JPRA's memo on psychological effects to conclude that while waterboarding constituted "a threat of imminent death," it did not cause "prolonged mental harm." Therefore, the Aug. 1 memo concluded, waterboarding "would not constitute torture within the meaning of the statute."
But the JPRA's two-page attachment, titled "Operational Issues Pertaining to the Use of Physical/Psychological Coercion in Interrogation," questioned the effectiveness of employing extreme duress to gain intelligence.
"The requirement to obtain information from an uncooperative source as quickly as possible — in time to prevent, for example, an impending terrorist attack that could result in loss of life —has been forwarded as a compelling argument for the use of torture," the document said. "In essence, physical and/or psychological duress are viewed as an alternative to the more time-consuming conventional interrogation process. The error inherent in this line of thinking is the assumption that, through torture, the interrogator can extract reliable and accurate information. History and a consideration of human behavior would appear to refute this assumption."
GIs prosecutedThere was no consideration within the National Security Council that the planned techniques stemmed from Chinese communist practices and had been deemed torture when employed against American personnel, the former administration official said. The U.S. military prosecuted its own troops for using waterboarding in the Philippines and tried Japanese officers on war crimes charges for its use against Americans and other allied nationals during World War II.
The reasoning in the JPRA document contrasted sharply with arguments being pressed at the time by current and former military psychologists in the SERE program, including James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who later formed a company that became a CIA contractor advising on interrogations. Both men declined to comment on their role in formulating interrogation policy.
The JPRA attachment said the key deficiency of physical or psychological duress is the reliability and accuracy of the information gained. "A subject in pain may provide an answer, any answer, or many answers in order to get the pain to stop," it said.
In conclusion, the document said, "the application of extreme physical and/or psychological duress (torture) has some serious operational deficits, most notably the potential to result in unreliable information." The word "extreme" is underlined.
By Peter Finn and Joby Warrick
Washington Post
4/25/09
WASHINGTON - The military agency that provided advice on harsh interrogation techniques for use against terrorism suspects referred to the application of extreme duress as "torture" in a July 2002 document sent to the Pentagon's chief lawyer and warned that it would produce "unreliable information."
"The unintended consequence of a U.S. policy that provides for the torture of prisoners is that it could be used by our adversaries as justification for the torture of captured U.S. personnel," says the document, an unsigned two-page attachment to a memo by the military's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency. Parts of the attachment, obtained in full by The Washington Post, were quoted in a Senate report on harsh interrogation released this week.
It remains unclear whether the attachment reached high-ranking officials in the Bush administration. But the document offers the clearest evidence that has come to light so far that technical advisers on the harsh interrogation methods voiced early concerns about the effectiveness of applying severe physical or psychological pressure.
The document was included among July 2002 memorandums that described severe techniques used against Americans in past conflicts and the psychological effects of such treatment. JPRA ran the military program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE), which trains pilots and others to resist hostile questioning.
The cautionary attachment was forwarded to the Pentagon's Office of the General Counsel as the administration finalized the legal underpinnings of a CIA interrogation program that would sanction the use of 10 forms of coercion, including waterboarding, a technique that simulates drowning. The JPRA material was sent from the Pentagon to the CIA's acting general counsel, John A. Rizzo, and on to the Justice Department, according to testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
A memo dated Aug. 1, 2002, from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel authorized the use of the 10 methods against Abu Zubaida, the nom de guerre of an al-Qaeda associate captured in Pakistan in March 2002. Former intelligence officials have recently contended that Abu Zubaida provided little useful information about the organization's plans.
Senate investigators were unable to determine whether William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon's general counsel in 2002, passed the cautionary memo to Rizzo or to other Bush administration officials reviewing the CIA's proposed program.
'A lot of cautionary notes'Haynes declined to comment, as did Rizzo and the CIA. Jay S. Bybee, who as an assistant attorney general signed the Aug. 1 memo, did not respond to a request for comment.
Daniel Baumgartner, who was the JPRA's chief of staff in 2002 and transmitted the memos and attachments, said the agency "sent a lot of cautionary notes" regarding harsh techniques. "There is a difference between what we do in training and what the administration wanted the information for," he said a telephone interview yesterday. "What the administration decided to do or not to do was up to the guys dealing with offensive prisoner operations. . . . We train our own people for the worst possible outcome . . . and obviously the United States government does not torture its own people."
Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said he thinks the attachment was deliberately ignored and perhaps suppressed. Excerpts from the document appeared in a report on the treatment of detainees released this month by Levin's committee. The report says the attachment echoes JPRA warnings issued in late 2001.
"It's part of a pattern of squelching dissent," said Levin, who added that there were other instances in which internal reviews of detainee treatment were halted or undercut. "They didn't want to hear the downside."
A former administration official said the National Security Council, which was briefed repeatedly that summer on the CIA's planned interrogation program by George J. Tenet, then director of central intelligence, and agency lawyers, did not discuss the issues raised in the attachment. Tenet, through a spokesman, declined to comment.
"That information was not brought to the attention of the principals," said the official, who was involved in deliberations on interrogation policy and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. "That would have been relevant. The CIA did not present with pros and cons, or points of concern. They said this was safe and effective, and there was no alternative."
The Aug. 1 memo on the interrogation of Abu Zubaida draws from the JPRA's memo on psychological effects to conclude that while waterboarding constituted "a threat of imminent death," it did not cause "prolonged mental harm." Therefore, the Aug. 1 memo concluded, waterboarding "would not constitute torture within the meaning of the statute."
But the JPRA's two-page attachment, titled "Operational Issues Pertaining to the Use of Physical/Psychological Coercion in Interrogation," questioned the effectiveness of employing extreme duress to gain intelligence.
"The requirement to obtain information from an uncooperative source as quickly as possible — in time to prevent, for example, an impending terrorist attack that could result in loss of life —has been forwarded as a compelling argument for the use of torture," the document said. "In essence, physical and/or psychological duress are viewed as an alternative to the more time-consuming conventional interrogation process. The error inherent in this line of thinking is the assumption that, through torture, the interrogator can extract reliable and accurate information. History and a consideration of human behavior would appear to refute this assumption."
GIs prosecutedThere was no consideration within the National Security Council that the planned techniques stemmed from Chinese communist practices and had been deemed torture when employed against American personnel, the former administration official said. The U.S. military prosecuted its own troops for using waterboarding in the Philippines and tried Japanese officers on war crimes charges for its use against Americans and other allied nationals during World War II.
The reasoning in the JPRA document contrasted sharply with arguments being pressed at the time by current and former military psychologists in the SERE program, including James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who later formed a company that became a CIA contractor advising on interrogations. Both men declined to comment on their role in formulating interrogation policy.
The JPRA attachment said the key deficiency of physical or psychological duress is the reliability and accuracy of the information gained. "A subject in pain may provide an answer, any answer, or many answers in order to get the pain to stop," it said.
In conclusion, the document said, "the application of extreme physical and/or psychological duress (torture) has some serious operational deficits, most notably the potential to result in unreliable information." The word "extreme" is underlined.
Wallup Daily Tracking Poll Update
Wallup Daily Tracking Poll 4/24/09
If the election were held today, which party would you support?
TPP - 30%
RKP - 26%
FP - 21%
MP - 5%
MDP - 2%
Don't Know - 16%
Analysis:
Our most recent daily tracking poll reveals a dynamic race for control of the General Assembly. The TPP maintains the lead but has seen its lead shrink dramatically. Ten days ago, the TPP enjoyed a 14 point lead over the RKP. That lead is now down to four points according to our most recent poll. The FP is at its lowest point since March 10th. Meanwhile the MP and MDP have failed to garner any electoral traction.
If the election were held today, which party would you support?
TPP - 30%
RKP - 26%
FP - 21%
MP - 5%
MDP - 2%
Don't Know - 16%
Analysis:
Our most recent daily tracking poll reveals a dynamic race for control of the General Assembly. The TPP maintains the lead but has seen its lead shrink dramatically. Ten days ago, the TPP enjoyed a 14 point lead over the RKP. That lead is now down to four points according to our most recent poll. The FP is at its lowest point since March 10th. Meanwhile the MP and MDP have failed to garner any electoral traction.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Dealing With a Disgrace
President Obama strikes a wise balance in coming to terms with the torture of terrorism suspects.
Washington Post
Friday, April 17, 2009
THE OBAMA administration acted courageously and wisely yesterday with its dual actions on interrogation policy. The pair of decisions -- one essentially forgiving government agents who may have committed heinous acts they were told were legal, the other signaling that such acts must never again be condoned by the United States -- struck exactly the right balance.
The administration announced that it would not seek to press criminal charges against CIA operatives who participated in enhanced interrogations of terrorism suspects during the Bush administration. "It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department," Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a statement.
At the same time, the Justice Department released and repudiated four more Bush-era memos from the Office of Legal Counsel that provided the legal justification for such extreme interrogations. An Aug. 1, 2002, OLC memo endorsed the legality of 10 techniques the CIA considered for use against al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida. Some techniques were mild, such as holding the detainee's face or grasping him by the lapels to grab his attention. Others were despicable, such as waterboarding, in which water is poured over a prisoner's cloth-covered face to simulate drowning, or sleep deprivation for up to 11 days. Eleven days! A May 10, 2005, memo gave the legal thumbs up to confining a detainee in a cramped, dark box for up to eight hours at a time and up to 18 hours a day. Some techniques were simply bizarre, such as placing a caterpillar into a confined box holding Mr. Zubaida -- who was believed to be afraid of insects -- as long as the insect did not sting and Mr. Zubaida was not led to believe that it was capable of stinging.
By repudiating the memos, the Obama administration has again seized the high ground and restored some of the honor lost over the past few years. President Obama's actions not only restore confidence that this country will not torture, but he has also strengthened the nation's moral authority in condemning these heinous acts wherever they occur.
Yet the decision to forgo prosecutions should not prevent -- and perhaps should even encourage -- further investigation about the circumstances that gave rise to torture. What has become clear as more of the so-called torture memos are released is that common sense and established legal doctrine were often contorted to justify abhorrent techniques. An OLC memo dated May 30, 2005, and released yesterday reveals that at that time, the CIA had custody of 94 detainees and had used a variety of enhanced interrogation techniques against 28. All the techniques were deemed legal as long as they did not inflict prolonged or severe physical or mental pain. More light needs to be shed on how decisions were made and why. And more information is needed on who in the Bush administration made the ultimate decision to authorize the use of techniques that have long been considered torture and a violation of domestic and international legal strictures. A commission like the one that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks would likely provide the best vehicle for such an exploration.
Washington Post
Friday, April 17, 2009
THE OBAMA administration acted courageously and wisely yesterday with its dual actions on interrogation policy. The pair of decisions -- one essentially forgiving government agents who may have committed heinous acts they were told were legal, the other signaling that such acts must never again be condoned by the United States -- struck exactly the right balance.
The administration announced that it would not seek to press criminal charges against CIA operatives who participated in enhanced interrogations of terrorism suspects during the Bush administration. "It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department," Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a statement.
At the same time, the Justice Department released and repudiated four more Bush-era memos from the Office of Legal Counsel that provided the legal justification for such extreme interrogations. An Aug. 1, 2002, OLC memo endorsed the legality of 10 techniques the CIA considered for use against al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida. Some techniques were mild, such as holding the detainee's face or grasping him by the lapels to grab his attention. Others were despicable, such as waterboarding, in which water is poured over a prisoner's cloth-covered face to simulate drowning, or sleep deprivation for up to 11 days. Eleven days! A May 10, 2005, memo gave the legal thumbs up to confining a detainee in a cramped, dark box for up to eight hours at a time and up to 18 hours a day. Some techniques were simply bizarre, such as placing a caterpillar into a confined box holding Mr. Zubaida -- who was believed to be afraid of insects -- as long as the insect did not sting and Mr. Zubaida was not led to believe that it was capable of stinging.
By repudiating the memos, the Obama administration has again seized the high ground and restored some of the honor lost over the past few years. President Obama's actions not only restore confidence that this country will not torture, but he has also strengthened the nation's moral authority in condemning these heinous acts wherever they occur.
Yet the decision to forgo prosecutions should not prevent -- and perhaps should even encourage -- further investigation about the circumstances that gave rise to torture. What has become clear as more of the so-called torture memos are released is that common sense and established legal doctrine were often contorted to justify abhorrent techniques. An OLC memo dated May 30, 2005, and released yesterday reveals that at that time, the CIA had custody of 94 detainees and had used a variety of enhanced interrogation techniques against 28. All the techniques were deemed legal as long as they did not inflict prolonged or severe physical or mental pain. More light needs to be shed on how decisions were made and why. And more information is needed on who in the Bush administration made the ultimate decision to authorize the use of techniques that have long been considered torture and a violation of domestic and international legal strictures. A commission like the one that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks would likely provide the best vehicle for such an exploration.
The President Ties His Own Hands on Terror
The point of interrogation is intelligence, not confession.
By MICHAEL HAYDEN and MICHAEL B. MUKASEY
Wall Street Journal
4/17/09
The Obama administration has declassified and released opinions of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) given in 2005 and earlier that analyze the legality of interrogation techniques authorized for use by the CIA. Those techniques were applied only when expressly permitted by the director, and are described in these opinions in detail, along with their limits and the safeguards applied to them.
The release of these opinions was unnecessary as a legal matter, and is unsound as a matter of policy. Its effect will be to invite the kind of institutional timidity and fear of recrimination that weakened intelligence gathering in the past, and that we came sorely to regret on Sept. 11, 2001.
Proponents of the release have argued that the techniques have been abandoned and thus there is no point in keeping them secret any longer; that they were in any event ineffective; that their disclosure was somehow legally compelled; and that they cost us more in the coin of world opinion than they were worth. None of these claims survives scrutiny.
Soon after he was sworn in, President Barack Obama signed an executive order that suspended use of these techniques and confined not only the military but all U.S. agencies -- including the CIA -- to the interrogation limits set in the Army Field Manual. This suspension was accompanied by a commitment to further study the interrogation program, and government personnel were cautioned that they could no longer rely on earlier opinions of the OLC.
Although evidence shows that the Army Field Manual, which is available online, is already used by al Qaeda for training purposes, it was certainly the president's right to suspend use of any technique. However, public disclosure of the OLC opinions, and thus of the techniques themselves, assures that terrorists are now aware of the absolute limit of what the U.S.
government could do to extract information from them, and can supplement their training accordingly and thus diminish the effectiveness of these techniques as they have the ones in the Army Field Manual.
Moreover, disclosure of the details of the program pre-empts the study of the president's task force and assures that the suspension imposed by the president's executive order is effectively permanent. There would be little point in the president authorizing measures whose nature and precise limits have already been disclosed in detail to those whose resolve we hope to overcome.
This conflicts with the sworn promise of the current director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, who testified in aid of securing Senate confirmation that if he thought he needed additional authority to conduct interrogation to get necessary information, he would seek it from the president. By allowing this disclosure, President Obama has tied not only his own hands but also the hands of any future administration faced with the prospect of attack.
Disclosure of the techniques is likely to be met by faux outrage, and is perfectly packaged for media consumption. It will also incur the utter contempt of our enemies. Somehow, it seems unlikely that the people who beheaded Nicholas Berg and Daniel Pearl, and have tortured and slain other American captives, are likely to be shamed into giving up violence by the news that the U.S. will no longer interrupt the sleep cycle of captured terrorists even to help elicit intelligence that could save the lives of its citizens.
Which brings us to the next of the justifications for disclosing and thus abandoning these measures: that they don't work anyway, and that those who are subjected to them will simply make up information in order to end their ordeal. This ignorant view of how interrogations are conducted is belied by both experience and common sense. If coercive interrogation had been administered to obtain confessions, one might understand the argument. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who organized the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, among others, and who has boasted of having beheaded Daniel Pearl, could eventually have felt pressed to provide a false confession. But confessions aren't the point. Intelligence is. Interrogation is conducted by using such obvious approaches as asking questions whose correct answers are already known and only when truthful information is provided proceeding to what may not be known. Moreover, intelligence can be verified, correlated and used to get information from other detainees, and has been; none of this information is used in isolation.
The terrorist Abu Zubaydah (sometimes derided as a low-level operative of questionable reliability, but who was in fact close to KSM and other senior al Qaeda leaders) disclosed some information voluntarily. But he was coerced into disclosing information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh, another of the planners of Sept. 11, who in turn disclosed information which -- when combined with what was learned from Abu Zubaydah -- helped lead to the capture of KSM and other senior terrorists, and the disruption of follow-on plots aimed at both Europe and the U.S. Details of these successes, and the methods used to obtain them, were disclosed repeatedly in more than 30 congressional briefings and hearings beginning in 2002, and open to all members of the Intelligence Committees of both Houses of Congress beginning in September 2006. Any protestation of ignorance of those details, particularly by members of those committees, is pretense.
The techniques themselves were used selectively against only a small number of hard-core prisoners who successfully resisted other forms of interrogation, and then only with the explicit authorization of the director of the CIA. Of the thousands of unlawful combatants captured by the U.S., fewer than 100 were detained and questioned in the CIA program. Of those, fewer than one-third were subjected to any of the techniques discussed in these opinions. As already disclosed by Director Hayden, as late as 2006, even with the growing success of other intelligence tools, fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from those interrogations.
Nor was there any legal reason compelling such disclosure. To be sure, the American Civil Liberties Union has sued under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain copies of these and other memoranda, but the government until now has successfully resisted such lawsuits. Even when the government disclosed that three members of al Qaeda had been subjected to waterboarding but that the technique was no longer part of the CIA interrogation program, the court sustained the government's argument that the precise details of how it was done, including limits and safeguards, could remain classified against the possibility that some future president may authorize its use. Therefore, notwithstanding the suggestion that disclosure was somehow legally compelled, there was no legal impediment to the Justice Department making the same argument even with respect to any techniques that remained in the CIA program until last January.
There is something of the self-fulfilling prophecy in the claim that our interrogation of some unlawful combatants beyond the limits set in the Army Field Manual has disgraced us before the world. Such a claim often conflates interrogation with the sadism engaged in by some soldiers at Abu Ghraib, an incident that had nothing whatever to do with intelligence gathering. The limits of the Army Field Manual are entirely appropriate for young soldiers, for the conditions in which they operate, for the detainees they routinely question, and for the kinds of tactically relevant information they pursue. Those limits are not appropriate, however, for more experienced people in controlled circumstances with high-value detainees. Indeed, the Army Field Manual was created with awareness that there was an alternative protocol for high-value detainees.
In addition, there were those who believed that the U.S. deserved what it got on Sept. 11, 2001.
Such people, and many who purport to speak for world opinion, were resourceful both before and after the Sept. 11 attacks in crafting reasons to resent America's role as a superpower. Recall also that the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the attacks on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the punctiliously correct trials of defendants in connection with those incidents, and the bombing of the USS Cole took place long before the advent of CIA interrogations, the invasion of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, or the many other purported grievances asserted over the past eight years.
The effect of this disclosure on the morale and effectiveness of many in the intelligence community is not hard to predict. Those charged with the responsibility of gathering potentially lifesaving information from unwilling captives are now told essentially that any legal opinion they get as to the lawfulness of their activity is only as durable as political fashion permits. Even with a seemingly binding opinion in hand, which future CIA operations personnel would take the risk? There would be no wink, no nod, no handshake that would convince them that legal guidance is durable. Any president who wants to apply such techniques without such a binding and durable legal opinion had better be prepared to apply them himself.
Beyond that, anyone in government who seeks an opinion from the OLC as to the propriety of any action, or who authors an opinion for the OLC, is on notice henceforth that such a request for advice, and the advice itself, is now more likely than before to be subject after the fact to public and partisan criticism. It is hard to see how that will promote candor either from those who should be encouraged to ask for advice before they act, or from those who must give it.
In his book "The Terror Presidency," Jack Goldsmith describes the phenomenon we are now experiencing, and its inevitable effect, referring to what he calls "cycles of timidity and aggression" that have weakened intelligence gathering in the past. Politicians pressure the intelligence community to push to the legal limit, and then cast accusations when aggressiveness goes out of style, thereby encouraging risk aversion, and then, as occurred in the wake of 9/11, criticizing the intelligence community for feckless timidity. He calls these cycles "a terrible problem for our national security." Indeed they are, and the precipitous release of these OLC opinions simply makes the problem worse.
Gen. Hayden was director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006 to 2009. Mr. Mukasey was attorney general of the United States from 2007 to 2009.
By MICHAEL HAYDEN and MICHAEL B. MUKASEY
Wall Street Journal
4/17/09
The Obama administration has declassified and released opinions of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) given in 2005 and earlier that analyze the legality of interrogation techniques authorized for use by the CIA. Those techniques were applied only when expressly permitted by the director, and are described in these opinions in detail, along with their limits and the safeguards applied to them.
The release of these opinions was unnecessary as a legal matter, and is unsound as a matter of policy. Its effect will be to invite the kind of institutional timidity and fear of recrimination that weakened intelligence gathering in the past, and that we came sorely to regret on Sept. 11, 2001.
Proponents of the release have argued that the techniques have been abandoned and thus there is no point in keeping them secret any longer; that they were in any event ineffective; that their disclosure was somehow legally compelled; and that they cost us more in the coin of world opinion than they were worth. None of these claims survives scrutiny.
Soon after he was sworn in, President Barack Obama signed an executive order that suspended use of these techniques and confined not only the military but all U.S. agencies -- including the CIA -- to the interrogation limits set in the Army Field Manual. This suspension was accompanied by a commitment to further study the interrogation program, and government personnel were cautioned that they could no longer rely on earlier opinions of the OLC.
Although evidence shows that the Army Field Manual, which is available online, is already used by al Qaeda for training purposes, it was certainly the president's right to suspend use of any technique. However, public disclosure of the OLC opinions, and thus of the techniques themselves, assures that terrorists are now aware of the absolute limit of what the U.S.
government could do to extract information from them, and can supplement their training accordingly and thus diminish the effectiveness of these techniques as they have the ones in the Army Field Manual.
Moreover, disclosure of the details of the program pre-empts the study of the president's task force and assures that the suspension imposed by the president's executive order is effectively permanent. There would be little point in the president authorizing measures whose nature and precise limits have already been disclosed in detail to those whose resolve we hope to overcome.
This conflicts with the sworn promise of the current director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, who testified in aid of securing Senate confirmation that if he thought he needed additional authority to conduct interrogation to get necessary information, he would seek it from the president. By allowing this disclosure, President Obama has tied not only his own hands but also the hands of any future administration faced with the prospect of attack.
Disclosure of the techniques is likely to be met by faux outrage, and is perfectly packaged for media consumption. It will also incur the utter contempt of our enemies. Somehow, it seems unlikely that the people who beheaded Nicholas Berg and Daniel Pearl, and have tortured and slain other American captives, are likely to be shamed into giving up violence by the news that the U.S. will no longer interrupt the sleep cycle of captured terrorists even to help elicit intelligence that could save the lives of its citizens.
Which brings us to the next of the justifications for disclosing and thus abandoning these measures: that they don't work anyway, and that those who are subjected to them will simply make up information in order to end their ordeal. This ignorant view of how interrogations are conducted is belied by both experience and common sense. If coercive interrogation had been administered to obtain confessions, one might understand the argument. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who organized the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, among others, and who has boasted of having beheaded Daniel Pearl, could eventually have felt pressed to provide a false confession. But confessions aren't the point. Intelligence is. Interrogation is conducted by using such obvious approaches as asking questions whose correct answers are already known and only when truthful information is provided proceeding to what may not be known. Moreover, intelligence can be verified, correlated and used to get information from other detainees, and has been; none of this information is used in isolation.
The terrorist Abu Zubaydah (sometimes derided as a low-level operative of questionable reliability, but who was in fact close to KSM and other senior al Qaeda leaders) disclosed some information voluntarily. But he was coerced into disclosing information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh, another of the planners of Sept. 11, who in turn disclosed information which -- when combined with what was learned from Abu Zubaydah -- helped lead to the capture of KSM and other senior terrorists, and the disruption of follow-on plots aimed at both Europe and the U.S. Details of these successes, and the methods used to obtain them, were disclosed repeatedly in more than 30 congressional briefings and hearings beginning in 2002, and open to all members of the Intelligence Committees of both Houses of Congress beginning in September 2006. Any protestation of ignorance of those details, particularly by members of those committees, is pretense.
The techniques themselves were used selectively against only a small number of hard-core prisoners who successfully resisted other forms of interrogation, and then only with the explicit authorization of the director of the CIA. Of the thousands of unlawful combatants captured by the U.S., fewer than 100 were detained and questioned in the CIA program. Of those, fewer than one-third were subjected to any of the techniques discussed in these opinions. As already disclosed by Director Hayden, as late as 2006, even with the growing success of other intelligence tools, fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from those interrogations.
Nor was there any legal reason compelling such disclosure. To be sure, the American Civil Liberties Union has sued under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain copies of these and other memoranda, but the government until now has successfully resisted such lawsuits. Even when the government disclosed that three members of al Qaeda had been subjected to waterboarding but that the technique was no longer part of the CIA interrogation program, the court sustained the government's argument that the precise details of how it was done, including limits and safeguards, could remain classified against the possibility that some future president may authorize its use. Therefore, notwithstanding the suggestion that disclosure was somehow legally compelled, there was no legal impediment to the Justice Department making the same argument even with respect to any techniques that remained in the CIA program until last January.
There is something of the self-fulfilling prophecy in the claim that our interrogation of some unlawful combatants beyond the limits set in the Army Field Manual has disgraced us before the world. Such a claim often conflates interrogation with the sadism engaged in by some soldiers at Abu Ghraib, an incident that had nothing whatever to do with intelligence gathering. The limits of the Army Field Manual are entirely appropriate for young soldiers, for the conditions in which they operate, for the detainees they routinely question, and for the kinds of tactically relevant information they pursue. Those limits are not appropriate, however, for more experienced people in controlled circumstances with high-value detainees. Indeed, the Army Field Manual was created with awareness that there was an alternative protocol for high-value detainees.
In addition, there were those who believed that the U.S. deserved what it got on Sept. 11, 2001.
Such people, and many who purport to speak for world opinion, were resourceful both before and after the Sept. 11 attacks in crafting reasons to resent America's role as a superpower. Recall also that the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the attacks on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the punctiliously correct trials of defendants in connection with those incidents, and the bombing of the USS Cole took place long before the advent of CIA interrogations, the invasion of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, or the many other purported grievances asserted over the past eight years.
The effect of this disclosure on the morale and effectiveness of many in the intelligence community is not hard to predict. Those charged with the responsibility of gathering potentially lifesaving information from unwilling captives are now told essentially that any legal opinion they get as to the lawfulness of their activity is only as durable as political fashion permits. Even with a seemingly binding opinion in hand, which future CIA operations personnel would take the risk? There would be no wink, no nod, no handshake that would convince them that legal guidance is durable. Any president who wants to apply such techniques without such a binding and durable legal opinion had better be prepared to apply them himself.
Beyond that, anyone in government who seeks an opinion from the OLC as to the propriety of any action, or who authors an opinion for the OLC, is on notice henceforth that such a request for advice, and the advice itself, is now more likely than before to be subject after the fact to public and partisan criticism. It is hard to see how that will promote candor either from those who should be encouraged to ask for advice before they act, or from those who must give it.
In his book "The Terror Presidency," Jack Goldsmith describes the phenomenon we are now experiencing, and its inevitable effect, referring to what he calls "cycles of timidity and aggression" that have weakened intelligence gathering in the past. Politicians pressure the intelligence community to push to the legal limit, and then cast accusations when aggressiveness goes out of style, thereby encouraging risk aversion, and then, as occurred in the wake of 9/11, criticizing the intelligence community for feckless timidity. He calls these cycles "a terrible problem for our national security." Indeed they are, and the precipitous release of these OLC opinions simply makes the problem worse.
Gen. Hayden was director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006 to 2009. Mr. Mukasey was attorney general of the United States from 2007 to 2009.
Green Shoots and Glimmers
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: April 16, 2009
Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, sees “green shoots.” President Obama sees “glimmers of hope.” And the stock market has been on a tear.
So is it time to sound the all clear? Here are four reasons to be cautious about the economic outlook.
1. Things are still getting worse. Industrial production just hit a 10-year low. Housing starts remain incredibly weak. Foreclosures, which dipped as mortgage companies waited for details of the Obama administration’s housing plans, are surging again.
The most you can say is that there are scattered signs that things are getting worse more slowly — that the economy isn’t plunging quite as fast as it was. And I do mean scattered: the latest edition of the Beige Book, the Fed’s periodic survey of business conditions, reports that “five of the twelve Districts noted a moderation in the pace of decline.” Whoopee.
2. Some of the good news isn’t convincing. The biggest positive news in recent days has come from banks, which have been announcing surprisingly good earnings. But some of those earnings reports look a little ... funny.
Wells Fargo, for example, announced its best quarterly earnings ever. But a bank’s reported earnings aren’t a hard number, like sales; for example, they depend a lot on the amount the bank sets aside to cover expected future losses on its loans. And some analysts expressed considerable doubt about Wells Fargo’s assumptions, as well as other accounting issues.
Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs announced a huge jump in profits from fourth-quarter 2008 to first-quarter 2009. But as analysts quickly noticed, Goldman changed its definition of “quarter” (in response to a change in its legal status), so that — I kid you not — the month of December, which happened to be a bad one for the bank, disappeared from this comparison.
I don’t want to go overboard here. Maybe the banks really have swung from deep losses to hefty profits in record time. But skepticism comes naturally in this age of Madoff.
Oh, and for those expecting the Treasury Department’s “stress tests” to make everything clear: the White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, says that “you will see in a systematic and coordinated way the transparency of determining and showing to all involved some of the results of these stress tests.” No, I don’t know what that means, either.
3. There may be other shoes yet to drop. Even in the Great Depression, things didn’t head straight down. There was, in particular, a pause in the plunge about a year and a half in — roughly where we are now. But then came a series of bank failures on both sides of the Atlantic, combined with some disastrous policy moves as countries tried to defend the dying gold standard, and the world economy fell off another cliff.
Can this happen again? Well, commercial real estate is coming apart at the seams, credit card losses are surging and nobody knows yet just how bad things will get in Japan or Eastern Europe. We probably won’t repeat the disaster of 1931, but it’s far from certain that the worst is over.
4. Even when it’s over, it won’t be over. The 2001 recession officially lasted only eight months, ending in November of that year. But unemployment kept rising for another year and a half. The same thing happened after the 1990-91 recession. And there’s every reason to believe that it will happen this time too. Don’t be surprised if unemployment keeps rising right through 2010.
Why? “V-shaped” recoveries, in which employment comes roaring back, take place only when there’s a lot of pent-up demand. In 1982, for example, housing was crushed by high interest rates, so when the Fed eased up, home sales surged. That’s not what’s going on this time: today, the economy is depressed, loosely speaking, because we ran up too much debt and built too many shopping malls, and nobody is in the mood for a new burst of spending.
Employment will eventually recover — it always does. But it probably won’t happen fast.
So now that I’ve got everyone depressed, what’s the answer? Persistence.
History shows that one of the great policy dangers, in the face of a severe economic slump, is premature optimism. F.D.R. responded to signs of recovery by cutting the Works Progress Administration in half and raising taxes; the Great Depression promptly returned in full force. Japan slackened its efforts halfway through its lost decade, ensuring another five years of stagnation.
The Obama administration’s economists understand this. They say all the right things about staying the course. But there’s a real risk that all the talk of green shoots and glimmers will breed a dangerous complacency.
So here’s my advice, to the public and policy makers alike: Don’t count your recoveries before they’re hatched.
Published: April 16, 2009
Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, sees “green shoots.” President Obama sees “glimmers of hope.” And the stock market has been on a tear.
So is it time to sound the all clear? Here are four reasons to be cautious about the economic outlook.
1. Things are still getting worse. Industrial production just hit a 10-year low. Housing starts remain incredibly weak. Foreclosures, which dipped as mortgage companies waited for details of the Obama administration’s housing plans, are surging again.
The most you can say is that there are scattered signs that things are getting worse more slowly — that the economy isn’t plunging quite as fast as it was. And I do mean scattered: the latest edition of the Beige Book, the Fed’s periodic survey of business conditions, reports that “five of the twelve Districts noted a moderation in the pace of decline.” Whoopee.
2. Some of the good news isn’t convincing. The biggest positive news in recent days has come from banks, which have been announcing surprisingly good earnings. But some of those earnings reports look a little ... funny.
Wells Fargo, for example, announced its best quarterly earnings ever. But a bank’s reported earnings aren’t a hard number, like sales; for example, they depend a lot on the amount the bank sets aside to cover expected future losses on its loans. And some analysts expressed considerable doubt about Wells Fargo’s assumptions, as well as other accounting issues.
Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs announced a huge jump in profits from fourth-quarter 2008 to first-quarter 2009. But as analysts quickly noticed, Goldman changed its definition of “quarter” (in response to a change in its legal status), so that — I kid you not — the month of December, which happened to be a bad one for the bank, disappeared from this comparison.
I don’t want to go overboard here. Maybe the banks really have swung from deep losses to hefty profits in record time. But skepticism comes naturally in this age of Madoff.
Oh, and for those expecting the Treasury Department’s “stress tests” to make everything clear: the White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, says that “you will see in a systematic and coordinated way the transparency of determining and showing to all involved some of the results of these stress tests.” No, I don’t know what that means, either.
3. There may be other shoes yet to drop. Even in the Great Depression, things didn’t head straight down. There was, in particular, a pause in the plunge about a year and a half in — roughly where we are now. But then came a series of bank failures on both sides of the Atlantic, combined with some disastrous policy moves as countries tried to defend the dying gold standard, and the world economy fell off another cliff.
Can this happen again? Well, commercial real estate is coming apart at the seams, credit card losses are surging and nobody knows yet just how bad things will get in Japan or Eastern Europe. We probably won’t repeat the disaster of 1931, but it’s far from certain that the worst is over.
4. Even when it’s over, it won’t be over. The 2001 recession officially lasted only eight months, ending in November of that year. But unemployment kept rising for another year and a half. The same thing happened after the 1990-91 recession. And there’s every reason to believe that it will happen this time too. Don’t be surprised if unemployment keeps rising right through 2010.
Why? “V-shaped” recoveries, in which employment comes roaring back, take place only when there’s a lot of pent-up demand. In 1982, for example, housing was crushed by high interest rates, so when the Fed eased up, home sales surged. That’s not what’s going on this time: today, the economy is depressed, loosely speaking, because we ran up too much debt and built too many shopping malls, and nobody is in the mood for a new burst of spending.
Employment will eventually recover — it always does. But it probably won’t happen fast.
So now that I’ve got everyone depressed, what’s the answer? Persistence.
History shows that one of the great policy dangers, in the face of a severe economic slump, is premature optimism. F.D.R. responded to signs of recovery by cutting the Works Progress Administration in half and raising taxes; the Great Depression promptly returned in full force. Japan slackened its efforts halfway through its lost decade, ensuring another five years of stagnation.
The Obama administration’s economists understand this. They say all the right things about staying the course. But there’s a real risk that all the talk of green shoots and glimmers will breed a dangerous complacency.
So here’s my advice, to the public and policy makers alike: Don’t count your recoveries before they’re hatched.
Libertine Economics and the GOP's Identity Crisis
David Paul Kuhn
Real Clear Politics
For decades the GOP framed itself as the sober response to indulgent Democrats. From crime and welfare to hawkish approaches to policy abroad and perceived moral decline at home, Republicans cast themselves as the disciplinarians of American politics. They were the daddy party by design.
Yet the Republican Party has relegated itself to absentee fatherhood on the economy. It's the one issue where conservatives call for near absolute permissiveness. The GOP became comfortable as the Dr. Spock parents of the financial industry--indulgent and light on the oversight. It's been this way since the Great Depression. But in more recent decades, the GOP pushed for more deregulation. Republicans' faith in unfettered markets blinded their prudent instincts. The conservative skepticism of unchecked institutions appears to end at Wall Street.
As the country continues to sort through the wreckage of the worst financial meltdown in decades, Republicans are experiencing an identity crisis. Conflict is brewing between the party's Main Street and Wall Street factions.
The tax day protests exposed the anger on Republican Main Street. Many activists are upset that fiscal conservatism became more oxymoron than principle in recent years. As Republican strategists Chris Lacivita said, "When a party starts losing its identity on the very issues it's founded on, you are going to have a reckoning."
That reckoning is taking place. Conservatives largely agree that when they lost their discipline on spending they lost their identity. But what truly compromised their identity was not merely spending. It was the loss of discipline itself.
The rhetorical theme beneath the rise and decline of the modern Republican Party is simple: a call for order. The GOP rose in a period of cultural and urban upheaval. Republicans' won voters with the promise to regulate. At times tough love turned to intolerance. But it was nonetheless the concept of discipline in culture, spending and cause that defined conservatism.
In time, as Saul Anuzis said, the party that claimed to stand for "responsibility, smaller deficits and ethics voted for the bridge to nowhere and had Abramoff." Anuzis is the former head of the Michigan Republican Party. He added, speaking fresh from a tea party in Lansing, that in his view "over the last 6 to 8 years we had lost our credibility to voters."
Credibility is always easier to lose than win. And Republicans have lost it. When asked which political party can do a "better job" leading the country out of the recession, according to NBC News/Wall Street Journal polling, Democrats are favored by more than a 2-to-1 ratio. The two parties were at par on the same question during the early 1990s recession.
"If you are raising taxes and pushing giant bills through and a year later you turnaround and say you are against that stuff, it's a bit disingenuous," Lacivita said. "That's why the Republicans coming into office have a bigger responsibility to be consistent."
Most Republicans believe the majority was lost when they lost their principles. The result has been near unanimous Republican opposition to Barack Obama's budget and bailout. Opposition to spending has been perhaps needlessly joined with opposition to regulation. Conservatives have come to believe that the strict hand is warranted in every place but the market place.
Few issues do expose the partisan fault line better than questions of bigger or smaller government. When Gallup asked voters their opinion on the "expansion of government's role in this economy in response to the financial crisis," 78 percent of Democrats and blue-leaning independents "approve" of it. Yet 72 percent of Republicans and red-leaning independents said they "disapprove."
Anxiety over taxes has tracked with the rise and decline of Republicans. Gallup has asked for decades whether voters consider their federal income taxes "too high, about right or too low." The gap between "too high" and "about right" was widest in 1969, with 69 percent saying "too high" and only 25 percent saying "about right." That gap remained wide until the late 90s. By the time George W. Bush was in office, there was no gap.
This is why fiscal conservatives argue that tax policy is vital to Republican success. But the saliency of the tax issues has dulled. Only twice since 1956 have more voters said their tax burden was "about right" rather than "too much," once in 2003 and again this year. The taxman lost some political punch because Republicans succeeded in lowering the tax burden. To the extent taxes remain a potent issue, it's the Democratic president now promising tax cuts for most Americans.
The economic issue today is the crisis itself. And the public trusts Democrats to bring order to that crisis. A CBS News/New York Times poll recently asked, echoing several other surveys, who is "more likely to make the right decisions about the nation's economy: Barack Obama or the Republicans in Congress?" Voters said Obama by a 3-to-1 ratio.
These are sobering days for Republicans. The recent CBS/Times poll found the least favorable public view of Republicans in a quarter century. Climbing out of that hole may call less for a reckoning with core principles than resolving conflicts within those principles, exposed by this recession.
"When you burn down your house you've got a foundation to rebuild," said Alex Castellanos, a Republican strategist.
"We are supposed to be the party of order and discipline," as Castellanos ruefully put it.
The recession has sparked a more profound public call for order, not simply for disciplined spending but a disciplined economy. This is the permissiveness conservatism does not want to confront, promiscuity not in culture but markets.
"Of all the terrors of democracy, the worst is its destruction of moral habits," Russell Kirk once wrote.
It was conservatives who understood that free love came with costs. Yet conservatism ignores the costs of unregulated free markets. The call for "law and order" that won conservatives the mandate to resolve the cultural crisis of the 1960s appears absent in the economic crisis of today.
Real Clear Politics
For decades the GOP framed itself as the sober response to indulgent Democrats. From crime and welfare to hawkish approaches to policy abroad and perceived moral decline at home, Republicans cast themselves as the disciplinarians of American politics. They were the daddy party by design.
Yet the Republican Party has relegated itself to absentee fatherhood on the economy. It's the one issue where conservatives call for near absolute permissiveness. The GOP became comfortable as the Dr. Spock parents of the financial industry--indulgent and light on the oversight. It's been this way since the Great Depression. But in more recent decades, the GOP pushed for more deregulation. Republicans' faith in unfettered markets blinded their prudent instincts. The conservative skepticism of unchecked institutions appears to end at Wall Street.
As the country continues to sort through the wreckage of the worst financial meltdown in decades, Republicans are experiencing an identity crisis. Conflict is brewing between the party's Main Street and Wall Street factions.
The tax day protests exposed the anger on Republican Main Street. Many activists are upset that fiscal conservatism became more oxymoron than principle in recent years. As Republican strategists Chris Lacivita said, "When a party starts losing its identity on the very issues it's founded on, you are going to have a reckoning."
That reckoning is taking place. Conservatives largely agree that when they lost their discipline on spending they lost their identity. But what truly compromised their identity was not merely spending. It was the loss of discipline itself.
The rhetorical theme beneath the rise and decline of the modern Republican Party is simple: a call for order. The GOP rose in a period of cultural and urban upheaval. Republicans' won voters with the promise to regulate. At times tough love turned to intolerance. But it was nonetheless the concept of discipline in culture, spending and cause that defined conservatism.
In time, as Saul Anuzis said, the party that claimed to stand for "responsibility, smaller deficits and ethics voted for the bridge to nowhere and had Abramoff." Anuzis is the former head of the Michigan Republican Party. He added, speaking fresh from a tea party in Lansing, that in his view "over the last 6 to 8 years we had lost our credibility to voters."
Credibility is always easier to lose than win. And Republicans have lost it. When asked which political party can do a "better job" leading the country out of the recession, according to NBC News/Wall Street Journal polling, Democrats are favored by more than a 2-to-1 ratio. The two parties were at par on the same question during the early 1990s recession.
"If you are raising taxes and pushing giant bills through and a year later you turnaround and say you are against that stuff, it's a bit disingenuous," Lacivita said. "That's why the Republicans coming into office have a bigger responsibility to be consistent."
Most Republicans believe the majority was lost when they lost their principles. The result has been near unanimous Republican opposition to Barack Obama's budget and bailout. Opposition to spending has been perhaps needlessly joined with opposition to regulation. Conservatives have come to believe that the strict hand is warranted in every place but the market place.
Few issues do expose the partisan fault line better than questions of bigger or smaller government. When Gallup asked voters their opinion on the "expansion of government's role in this economy in response to the financial crisis," 78 percent of Democrats and blue-leaning independents "approve" of it. Yet 72 percent of Republicans and red-leaning independents said they "disapprove."
Anxiety over taxes has tracked with the rise and decline of Republicans. Gallup has asked for decades whether voters consider their federal income taxes "too high, about right or too low." The gap between "too high" and "about right" was widest in 1969, with 69 percent saying "too high" and only 25 percent saying "about right." That gap remained wide until the late 90s. By the time George W. Bush was in office, there was no gap.
This is why fiscal conservatives argue that tax policy is vital to Republican success. But the saliency of the tax issues has dulled. Only twice since 1956 have more voters said their tax burden was "about right" rather than "too much," once in 2003 and again this year. The taxman lost some political punch because Republicans succeeded in lowering the tax burden. To the extent taxes remain a potent issue, it's the Democratic president now promising tax cuts for most Americans.
The economic issue today is the crisis itself. And the public trusts Democrats to bring order to that crisis. A CBS News/New York Times poll recently asked, echoing several other surveys, who is "more likely to make the right decisions about the nation's economy: Barack Obama or the Republicans in Congress?" Voters said Obama by a 3-to-1 ratio.
These are sobering days for Republicans. The recent CBS/Times poll found the least favorable public view of Republicans in a quarter century. Climbing out of that hole may call less for a reckoning with core principles than resolving conflicts within those principles, exposed by this recession.
"When you burn down your house you've got a foundation to rebuild," said Alex Castellanos, a Republican strategist.
"We are supposed to be the party of order and discipline," as Castellanos ruefully put it.
The recession has sparked a more profound public call for order, not simply for disciplined spending but a disciplined economy. This is the permissiveness conservatism does not want to confront, promiscuity not in culture but markets.
"Of all the terrors of democracy, the worst is its destruction of moral habits," Russell Kirk once wrote.
It was conservatives who understood that free love came with costs. Yet conservatism ignores the costs of unregulated free markets. The call for "law and order" that won conservatives the mandate to resolve the cultural crisis of the 1960s appears absent in the economic crisis of today.
Democrats still ducking on guns and gays
By Derrick Z. Jackson
Globe Columnist / April 18, 2009
THREE YEARS AGO, then-House minority leader Nancy Pelosi told the Trotter Group of African-American columnists that the Republicans won the White House in 2000 and 2004 because of "gays, guns, and God - abortion, gay marriage, and guns - and they've had success with that with people whose personal interests are being served by voting Democratic . . . they've not heard a Democratic economic message that addresses their needs. They haven't heard anything with the clarity that they need."
Pelosi is now House speaker. Her party runs the White House and the Senate. The Democrats have made only one thing clear: They still duck and cover on gays and guns.
As a candidate, Barack Obama wrote in 2007 that the "don't ask, don't tell" policy for gay and lesbian soldiers should be repealed because "It's time to turn the page on the bitterness and bigotry." But on Thursday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said don't ask the administration to turn the page too soon.
Saying only that military leaders "have begun a dialogue" with Obama, Gates said, "If the law changes, so will our policies."
This begs the question of who is the chicken, who is the egg, and is it all a ruse to chicken out?
Last September, as Obama closed in on the White House, he began to punt to the military, saying, "Although I have consistently said I would repeal 'don't ask, don't tell,' I believe the way to do it is to make sure that we are working through a process, getting the Joint Chiefs of Staff clear in terms of what our priorities are going to be."
And just how long will the process be?
Gates said, "From the time President Truman signed the executive order for integration in 1948, it was five years before that process was completed. I'm not saying that's a model for this, but . . . this is something that needs to be done very, very carefully."
Five years? This is despite 81 percent of Americans in a December CNN poll saying that openly gay or lesbian citizens should be allowed to serve. Former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairmen Colin Powell and John Shalikashvili said "don't ask, don't tell" should be reversed or reconsidered.
Then there's the roll-over by the Democrats on guns. Also on Thursday, Obama traveled to Mexico to pledge his help against the flow of US guns into the Mexican drug wars that have left 10,000 people dead in the last two years. But Obama rendered his pledge hollow by saying that any urgent actions he will take do not include his campaign promise to reinstate the lapsed assault weapons ban.
Even if Obama wanted to reinstate the ban, too few key Democrats have his back. Senate majority leader Harry Reid opposes the ban, and when Attorney General Eric Holder supported the reinstatement in February, Pelosi clucked like a wind-up National Rifle Association doll, "Let's start out enforcing the laws we have now."
Which, of course, is effectively no gun laws at all.
In a hysteria over an Obama presidency, gun buyers are on an unprecedented binge. A key indicator of gun purchases are federal criminal background checks. Based on the last six months, the United States will have 16 million checks in 2009, obliterating the 2008 record of 12.7 million checks. State-by-state laws do not even qualify as patchwork, and private gun shows and expos are barely regulated, from Southwest border states to here in Massachusetts, where an 8-year-old boy accidentally killed himself last fall with a Micro Uzi at a gun-club pumpkin shoot in Westfield.
Obama and the Democrats have less to fear than they think as America's gun culture is in overall decline. The University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center says the percentage of Americans who claim a gun in the home has declined from 54 percent in 1977 to 34.5 percent in 2006.
Pelosi once said "gays, guns, and God" worked for the Republicans in the "absence of a strong Democratic message."
Now in charge of Capitol Hill, the Democrats are still absent.
Globe Columnist / April 18, 2009
THREE YEARS AGO, then-House minority leader Nancy Pelosi told the Trotter Group of African-American columnists that the Republicans won the White House in 2000 and 2004 because of "gays, guns, and God - abortion, gay marriage, and guns - and they've had success with that with people whose personal interests are being served by voting Democratic . . . they've not heard a Democratic economic message that addresses their needs. They haven't heard anything with the clarity that they need."
Pelosi is now House speaker. Her party runs the White House and the Senate. The Democrats have made only one thing clear: They still duck and cover on gays and guns.
As a candidate, Barack Obama wrote in 2007 that the "don't ask, don't tell" policy for gay and lesbian soldiers should be repealed because "It's time to turn the page on the bitterness and bigotry." But on Thursday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said don't ask the administration to turn the page too soon.
Saying only that military leaders "have begun a dialogue" with Obama, Gates said, "If the law changes, so will our policies."
This begs the question of who is the chicken, who is the egg, and is it all a ruse to chicken out?
Last September, as Obama closed in on the White House, he began to punt to the military, saying, "Although I have consistently said I would repeal 'don't ask, don't tell,' I believe the way to do it is to make sure that we are working through a process, getting the Joint Chiefs of Staff clear in terms of what our priorities are going to be."
And just how long will the process be?
Gates said, "From the time President Truman signed the executive order for integration in 1948, it was five years before that process was completed. I'm not saying that's a model for this, but . . . this is something that needs to be done very, very carefully."
Five years? This is despite 81 percent of Americans in a December CNN poll saying that openly gay or lesbian citizens should be allowed to serve. Former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairmen Colin Powell and John Shalikashvili said "don't ask, don't tell" should be reversed or reconsidered.
Then there's the roll-over by the Democrats on guns. Also on Thursday, Obama traveled to Mexico to pledge his help against the flow of US guns into the Mexican drug wars that have left 10,000 people dead in the last two years. But Obama rendered his pledge hollow by saying that any urgent actions he will take do not include his campaign promise to reinstate the lapsed assault weapons ban.
Even if Obama wanted to reinstate the ban, too few key Democrats have his back. Senate majority leader Harry Reid opposes the ban, and when Attorney General Eric Holder supported the reinstatement in February, Pelosi clucked like a wind-up National Rifle Association doll, "Let's start out enforcing the laws we have now."
Which, of course, is effectively no gun laws at all.
In a hysteria over an Obama presidency, gun buyers are on an unprecedented binge. A key indicator of gun purchases are federal criminal background checks. Based on the last six months, the United States will have 16 million checks in 2009, obliterating the 2008 record of 12.7 million checks. State-by-state laws do not even qualify as patchwork, and private gun shows and expos are barely regulated, from Southwest border states to here in Massachusetts, where an 8-year-old boy accidentally killed himself last fall with a Micro Uzi at a gun-club pumpkin shoot in Westfield.
Obama and the Democrats have less to fear than they think as America's gun culture is in overall decline. The University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center says the percentage of Americans who claim a gun in the home has declined from 54 percent in 1977 to 34.5 percent in 2006.
Pelosi once said "gays, guns, and God" worked for the Republicans in the "absence of a strong Democratic message."
Now in charge of Capitol Hill, the Democrats are still absent.
Defeat Obamacare
Now is the time for Republicans to justify their existence.
Weekly Standard
by Fred Barnes
04/27/2009
As isolated as Republicans appear to be in Washington, they often find allies in the struggle to keep the federal government from becoming the command-and-control center of American life. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups have stymied organized labor's drive for legislation ("card check") to unionize workers without a secret ballot election. Moderate Democrats in Congress have joined the opposition to the perilous plan ("cap and trade") to limit carbon emissions at the expense of a growing economy.
But there's one issue on which Republicans are alone and President Obama and Democrats have the upper hand: health care. Indeed, the prospects have never been better for expanding Washington's role in even the smallest decisions made by doctors and patients. Thwarting this won't make Republicans more popular. Their efforts might be in vain. But at least they'll be heroes in the cause of defending private health care and preserving individual freedom. They'll vindicate their existence as Republicans.
Obama's liberal reforms would probably be irreversible. Most ominous is creation of a government health insurance program open to everyone. The respected Lewin Group estimates such a program would soon cover 130 million Americans, most of them refugees from private insurance. It would only be a short step to a Canadian-style, single payer system run by bureaucrats in Washington.
It's worth noting how Canadian health care failed to save the life of actress Natasha Richardson after a recent ski accident. The nearby hospital had no scanning equipment or neurosurgeon, and there was no helicopter to fly her to a trauma center. By the time she arrived at one, she was brain dead. Why wasn't proper treatment and equipment at hand? Government had decided not to pay for them.
In taking up health care legislation, this isn't 1994. Back then, Republicans, conservatives, and queasy Democrats worked with doctors, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, HMOs, and insurers to defeat the scheme cooked up by Hillary Clinton. It failed without being reported out by any committee in a Democratic Senate or House.
Times have changed. Fifteen years of one-sided discussion of soaring costs, the plight of the uninsured, and the heartlessness of insurance companies have increased demand for more and cheaper health care. And Obama has learned from the Clintons' mistakes.
The Clinton proposal was developed at the White House with little contribution from congressional Democrats, the folks who would have to approve it. In addition, the Clinton team was unwilling to accommodate either allies or critics who wanted to reach a compromise on health care. Hillary Clinton stood her ground, until it crumbled beneath her.
Obama, in contrast, has assigned Democrats in Congress the task of drafting the health care bill. This is both smart and politically safe. They're in sync with Obama on a mandate that every American have health insurance with generous minimum benefits, that businesses offer it to employees or pay a stiff fine, and that people have the option of switching to government health insurance.
That's not all. Obama and other Democrats now talk about health care in a more appealing fashion. "They've co-opted Republican rhetoric on health care," a leading Washington lobbyist says. They've learned this from extensive polling. Would voters like the option of choosing between employer-based health insurance and a government insurance program? Of course they would, particularly when the word "public" is substituted for "government."
And rather than replace employer-purchased insurance, the "public" plan would merely "compete" with it. The competition might not last long, as we discovered in 1965 when Medicare drove private insurers out of business and quickly became the only plan for seniors. That's exactly the effect a government health insurance option would have now. By offering cut-rate fees and drug prices--it wouldn't need to make a profit--it would soon clear the field of competitors.
Obama and company have one more big advantage. For the first time since the 1960s, liberal Democrats control Washington. Their freedom to do what they please has been enhanced by the economic downturn. On top of that, Obama argues that health care reform is a precondition for economic recovery, though he must know it really isn't.
For now, the natural opponents of Obamacare are divided and fearful. Doctors are not engaged. Hospitals are concerned with the narrow issue of fees paid by the government. Insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry are terrified of crossing Obama. The conservative movement hasn't set its sights on stopping the president on health care.
Tea parties won't suffice. It's up to Republicans to rally a well-financed army of relentless opposition--not for the good of the party, but for the good of the country. And who knows?
Obamacare might suffer the fate of HillaryCare. Stranger things have happened in Washington.
Weekly Standard
by Fred Barnes
04/27/2009
As isolated as Republicans appear to be in Washington, they often find allies in the struggle to keep the federal government from becoming the command-and-control center of American life. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups have stymied organized labor's drive for legislation ("card check") to unionize workers without a secret ballot election. Moderate Democrats in Congress have joined the opposition to the perilous plan ("cap and trade") to limit carbon emissions at the expense of a growing economy.
But there's one issue on which Republicans are alone and President Obama and Democrats have the upper hand: health care. Indeed, the prospects have never been better for expanding Washington's role in even the smallest decisions made by doctors and patients. Thwarting this won't make Republicans more popular. Their efforts might be in vain. But at least they'll be heroes in the cause of defending private health care and preserving individual freedom. They'll vindicate their existence as Republicans.
Obama's liberal reforms would probably be irreversible. Most ominous is creation of a government health insurance program open to everyone. The respected Lewin Group estimates such a program would soon cover 130 million Americans, most of them refugees from private insurance. It would only be a short step to a Canadian-style, single payer system run by bureaucrats in Washington.
It's worth noting how Canadian health care failed to save the life of actress Natasha Richardson after a recent ski accident. The nearby hospital had no scanning equipment or neurosurgeon, and there was no helicopter to fly her to a trauma center. By the time she arrived at one, she was brain dead. Why wasn't proper treatment and equipment at hand? Government had decided not to pay for them.
In taking up health care legislation, this isn't 1994. Back then, Republicans, conservatives, and queasy Democrats worked with doctors, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, HMOs, and insurers to defeat the scheme cooked up by Hillary Clinton. It failed without being reported out by any committee in a Democratic Senate or House.
Times have changed. Fifteen years of one-sided discussion of soaring costs, the plight of the uninsured, and the heartlessness of insurance companies have increased demand for more and cheaper health care. And Obama has learned from the Clintons' mistakes.
The Clinton proposal was developed at the White House with little contribution from congressional Democrats, the folks who would have to approve it. In addition, the Clinton team was unwilling to accommodate either allies or critics who wanted to reach a compromise on health care. Hillary Clinton stood her ground, until it crumbled beneath her.
Obama, in contrast, has assigned Democrats in Congress the task of drafting the health care bill. This is both smart and politically safe. They're in sync with Obama on a mandate that every American have health insurance with generous minimum benefits, that businesses offer it to employees or pay a stiff fine, and that people have the option of switching to government health insurance.
That's not all. Obama and other Democrats now talk about health care in a more appealing fashion. "They've co-opted Republican rhetoric on health care," a leading Washington lobbyist says. They've learned this from extensive polling. Would voters like the option of choosing between employer-based health insurance and a government insurance program? Of course they would, particularly when the word "public" is substituted for "government."
And rather than replace employer-purchased insurance, the "public" plan would merely "compete" with it. The competition might not last long, as we discovered in 1965 when Medicare drove private insurers out of business and quickly became the only plan for seniors. That's exactly the effect a government health insurance option would have now. By offering cut-rate fees and drug prices--it wouldn't need to make a profit--it would soon clear the field of competitors.
Obama and company have one more big advantage. For the first time since the 1960s, liberal Democrats control Washington. Their freedom to do what they please has been enhanced by the economic downturn. On top of that, Obama argues that health care reform is a precondition for economic recovery, though he must know it really isn't.
For now, the natural opponents of Obamacare are divided and fearful. Doctors are not engaged. Hospitals are concerned with the narrow issue of fees paid by the government. Insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry are terrified of crossing Obama. The conservative movement hasn't set its sights on stopping the president on health care.
Tea parties won't suffice. It's up to Republicans to rally a well-financed army of relentless opposition--not for the good of the party, but for the good of the country. And who knows?
Obamacare might suffer the fate of HillaryCare. Stranger things have happened in Washington.
Twitters From Texas
By GAIL COLLINS
Published: April 18, 2009
Let us pause to consider Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, and his feelings about seceding from the union.
This all started during the recent anti-tax protests. You undoubtedly saw the pictures of the demonstrations full of people wearing teabags or tricorner hats who kept comparing themselves to the founding fathers at the Boston Tea Party. True, when it comes to taxation without representation, they were slightly different from colonial New Englanders on the minor point of having representation. But let’s not be picky.
Have you ever noticed that the states where anti-tax sentiment is strongest are frequently the same states that get way more back from the federal government than they send in? Alaska gets $1.84 for every tax dollar it sends to Washington, which is a rate of return even Bernard Madoff never pretended to achieve. Yet there they were in Ketchikan waving “Taxed Enough Already!” signs and demanding an end to federal spending.
Also, have you noticed how places that pride themselves on being superpatriotic seem to have the most people who want to abandon the country entirely and set up shop on their own?
“What a great crowd,” Perry twittered, referring to the protesters he addressed in Austin, some of whom were waving American flags and yelling “Secede!”
Afterward, he told reporters that Texas had come into the union with a unique right “to leave if we decided to do that.” This is a beloved piece of state folklore despite its unfortunate drawback of being totally untrue.
“My hope is that America and Washington in particular pays attention,” Perry continued. “We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, who knows what may come of that.”
Later, while Perry was holding another press conference after signing a bill extolling states rights, he repeated the part about this being “a great union” but then said that he understood the secessionists’ feelings.
This is not exactly a ringing endorsement. It’s as if your spouse pointedly noted that it’s extremely easy to dissolve marriages these days, then added that although he was not currently advocating a divorce, he certainly understood why other people who knew you both might think it was a good idea.
And what about my country, right or wrong? Weren’t there complaints, some from Texan quarters, during the last election that Barack Obama seemed insufficiently up front about his love of country? Isn’t threatening to dissolve the union over the stimulus package a little less American than failure to wear a flag pin?
Remember the time when Michelle Obama said, in a moment she spent an entire campaign trying to take back, that 2008 was the first time she could remember ever feeling really proud of her country? Can you imagine how the conservative base would have reacted if she said that it was the first time she didn’t feel like renouncing her citizenship?
And how, by the way, can you stand at a rally waving the American flag while yelling “Secede”? It’s like an employer handing out “worker of the week” certificates to employees who just learned that he was moving the plant to Mexico.
Can’t feel the love.
Perry, who is the sort of person who calls other guys “dude,” used to be a cotton farmer, a group that seems to have a special talent for combining rugged individualism with intransigent demands for government assistance. Even as we speak, the Obama administration budget-cutters are trying to end a longstanding federal practice of paying the costs of storing the entire national cotton crop every year. No other farmers get this kind of special treatment, and I am sure Perry’s failure to mention it when he calls for an end to corporate bailouts is a terrible oversight that will be corrected immediately.
The big mystery here is why the tax-protest crowds were behaving as if the world was coming to an end when all Obama’s infant presidency has done is lower taxes for a vast majority of the public. And why people like Perry seem to feel compelled to egg them on.
The answer is that what’s left of the Republican Party is intent on cutting off the knees of the administration before it actually manages to fulfill any campaign promises on reducing the huge economic gap between the top 5 percent of the country and the rest of the populace. In pursuit of that mission, fortune favors the hysterical and rewards politicians who behave like gerbils that just bit into an electric wire.
We don’t want to blame all Texans for the high jinks in Austin. It’s a state full of lovely people, three-fourths of whom, according to a recent Rasmussen Reports poll, have no desire whatsoever to secede from the United States.
But Perry really understands how that other quarter feels.
Published: April 18, 2009
Let us pause to consider Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, and his feelings about seceding from the union.
This all started during the recent anti-tax protests. You undoubtedly saw the pictures of the demonstrations full of people wearing teabags or tricorner hats who kept comparing themselves to the founding fathers at the Boston Tea Party. True, when it comes to taxation without representation, they were slightly different from colonial New Englanders on the minor point of having representation. But let’s not be picky.
Have you ever noticed that the states where anti-tax sentiment is strongest are frequently the same states that get way more back from the federal government than they send in? Alaska gets $1.84 for every tax dollar it sends to Washington, which is a rate of return even Bernard Madoff never pretended to achieve. Yet there they were in Ketchikan waving “Taxed Enough Already!” signs and demanding an end to federal spending.
Also, have you noticed how places that pride themselves on being superpatriotic seem to have the most people who want to abandon the country entirely and set up shop on their own?
“What a great crowd,” Perry twittered, referring to the protesters he addressed in Austin, some of whom were waving American flags and yelling “Secede!”
Afterward, he told reporters that Texas had come into the union with a unique right “to leave if we decided to do that.” This is a beloved piece of state folklore despite its unfortunate drawback of being totally untrue.
“My hope is that America and Washington in particular pays attention,” Perry continued. “We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, who knows what may come of that.”
Later, while Perry was holding another press conference after signing a bill extolling states rights, he repeated the part about this being “a great union” but then said that he understood the secessionists’ feelings.
This is not exactly a ringing endorsement. It’s as if your spouse pointedly noted that it’s extremely easy to dissolve marriages these days, then added that although he was not currently advocating a divorce, he certainly understood why other people who knew you both might think it was a good idea.
And what about my country, right or wrong? Weren’t there complaints, some from Texan quarters, during the last election that Barack Obama seemed insufficiently up front about his love of country? Isn’t threatening to dissolve the union over the stimulus package a little less American than failure to wear a flag pin?
Remember the time when Michelle Obama said, in a moment she spent an entire campaign trying to take back, that 2008 was the first time she could remember ever feeling really proud of her country? Can you imagine how the conservative base would have reacted if she said that it was the first time she didn’t feel like renouncing her citizenship?
And how, by the way, can you stand at a rally waving the American flag while yelling “Secede”? It’s like an employer handing out “worker of the week” certificates to employees who just learned that he was moving the plant to Mexico.
Can’t feel the love.
Perry, who is the sort of person who calls other guys “dude,” used to be a cotton farmer, a group that seems to have a special talent for combining rugged individualism with intransigent demands for government assistance. Even as we speak, the Obama administration budget-cutters are trying to end a longstanding federal practice of paying the costs of storing the entire national cotton crop every year. No other farmers get this kind of special treatment, and I am sure Perry’s failure to mention it when he calls for an end to corporate bailouts is a terrible oversight that will be corrected immediately.
The big mystery here is why the tax-protest crowds were behaving as if the world was coming to an end when all Obama’s infant presidency has done is lower taxes for a vast majority of the public. And why people like Perry seem to feel compelled to egg them on.
The answer is that what’s left of the Republican Party is intent on cutting off the knees of the administration before it actually manages to fulfill any campaign promises on reducing the huge economic gap between the top 5 percent of the country and the rest of the populace. In pursuit of that mission, fortune favors the hysterical and rewards politicians who behave like gerbils that just bit into an electric wire.
We don’t want to blame all Texans for the high jinks in Austin. It’s a state full of lovely people, three-fourths of whom, according to a recent Rasmussen Reports poll, have no desire whatsoever to secede from the United States.
But Perry really understands how that other quarter feels.
Obama’s Savvy Cuba Move
The New Yorker
Jon Lee Anderson
President Obama’s moves on Cuba, which he announced on Monday, have been cleverly thought out. By removing existing restrictions on Cuban-Americans seeking to visit the island or send money to help their relatives, he satisfies several political constituencies. It’s what most Florida Cubans want, and most Cubans in Cuba, too. (An estimated one in ten Cubans on the island have relatives in Florida.) A lot of people wish Obama had gone even further, but by now it’s clear that Obama is a canny, cautious political player, unlike his predecessor. T
he White House also said that U.S. telecommunications companies would be free to offer their services in Cuba, that commercial flights between the two countries might resume (only charters are now possible), and that Americans could send humanitarian packages to whomever they liked in Cuba except to functionaries of the Cuban government. With these measures and the accompanying backhanders about “freedom and liberty,” Obama is at once showing goodwill, testing the waters for dialogue, and throwing down challenges. He has effectively kicked the ball for “change” back to los hermanos Castro; until now, the onus was on him.
Since Obama’s Inauguration, a parade of Latin American heads of state have visited Havana, met with an apparently amenable Raul Castro, and declared that it was time for Washington to end the embargo on Cuba and to normalize relations. And Fidel—in hibernation due to illness these past two and a half years—has been using his column in Granma in recent days to egg on Obama and intone about the past perfidies of American policy toward Cuba. There was not much for Obama to do, it seemed, except to listen to reason—and Fidel. By relaxing some of the more onerous aspects of the U.S.-sanctions regime in advance of the Americas Summit to be held in Trinidad this weekend—where Cuba is destined to be the main topic of discussion—Obama has deflected some of that pressure, acquired some regional respect, and given the United States a strong negotiating position. Much of that leverage will accrue from the sheer juggernaut of American wealth pouring into the island—assuming Cuba allows it to pour in.
The increased flow of remittances and visitors could transform the daily lives of many Cubans. This kind of private economy, though, has always been a double-edged sword for the Cuban regime, as I saw while living in Havana in the mid-nineties. The bottom had dropped out of the economy after the Soviet Union collapsed and its subsidies disappeared. In short order, Fidel lifted his own set of sanctions imposed on Cubans who had fled his rule. For years he had vilified them as deserters, traitors, counterrevolutionaries, or gusanos—worms. Suddenly the gusanera became la comunidad—the community—and it’s citizens were officially encouraged to visit and shop for their relatives from government-owned stores that accepted only hard currency. But these families that received food and goods bought with dollars soon became the “haves” of Havana, and were deeply resented by others.
Fidel enacted some restrictions on “material ostentation” so as to curb the growing social schism, but was unable to finesse it entirely. He was unwittingly assisted by George W. Bush, who cracked down on remittances and travel from the United States. Then Fidel’s oil-rich Venezuelan protégé, Hugo Chavez, stepped into the breech, providing subsidized oil and also money to repair Cuba’s deteriorating hospitals, schools, and electricity grid— and help cement over some of Cuba’s emerging social cracks. But Chavez may not always have pots of money to throw around, so Venezuelan aid was only going to ever be a stopgap lifeline.
Most jobs in Cuba pay about twenty dollars a month. What if, six months or a year from now, Cubans all over the island are being clothed and fed, thanks to friends and relatives—or anonymous donors—living in the United States? Where would that leave Cuba’s government?
Fidel is unaccustomed to being outdone by American Presidents; he has outlasted ten, and outsmarted most of them. On Tuesday, Fidel said, a little begrudgingly, that Obama should have gone all the way and ended the trade embargo imposed back in 1961. Doing that, of course, would have meant a symbolic victory for Fidel. In a sense, he has already won, at least in the court of international public opinion. But at the same time, Obama appears to want to reserve the right for the United States to be seen as magnanimous in defeat.
Jon Lee Anderson
President Obama’s moves on Cuba, which he announced on Monday, have been cleverly thought out. By removing existing restrictions on Cuban-Americans seeking to visit the island or send money to help their relatives, he satisfies several political constituencies. It’s what most Florida Cubans want, and most Cubans in Cuba, too. (An estimated one in ten Cubans on the island have relatives in Florida.) A lot of people wish Obama had gone even further, but by now it’s clear that Obama is a canny, cautious political player, unlike his predecessor. T
he White House also said that U.S. telecommunications companies would be free to offer their services in Cuba, that commercial flights between the two countries might resume (only charters are now possible), and that Americans could send humanitarian packages to whomever they liked in Cuba except to functionaries of the Cuban government. With these measures and the accompanying backhanders about “freedom and liberty,” Obama is at once showing goodwill, testing the waters for dialogue, and throwing down challenges. He has effectively kicked the ball for “change” back to los hermanos Castro; until now, the onus was on him.
Since Obama’s Inauguration, a parade of Latin American heads of state have visited Havana, met with an apparently amenable Raul Castro, and declared that it was time for Washington to end the embargo on Cuba and to normalize relations. And Fidel—in hibernation due to illness these past two and a half years—has been using his column in Granma in recent days to egg on Obama and intone about the past perfidies of American policy toward Cuba. There was not much for Obama to do, it seemed, except to listen to reason—and Fidel. By relaxing some of the more onerous aspects of the U.S.-sanctions regime in advance of the Americas Summit to be held in Trinidad this weekend—where Cuba is destined to be the main topic of discussion—Obama has deflected some of that pressure, acquired some regional respect, and given the United States a strong negotiating position. Much of that leverage will accrue from the sheer juggernaut of American wealth pouring into the island—assuming Cuba allows it to pour in.
The increased flow of remittances and visitors could transform the daily lives of many Cubans. This kind of private economy, though, has always been a double-edged sword for the Cuban regime, as I saw while living in Havana in the mid-nineties. The bottom had dropped out of the economy after the Soviet Union collapsed and its subsidies disappeared. In short order, Fidel lifted his own set of sanctions imposed on Cubans who had fled his rule. For years he had vilified them as deserters, traitors, counterrevolutionaries, or gusanos—worms. Suddenly the gusanera became la comunidad—the community—and it’s citizens were officially encouraged to visit and shop for their relatives from government-owned stores that accepted only hard currency. But these families that received food and goods bought with dollars soon became the “haves” of Havana, and were deeply resented by others.
Fidel enacted some restrictions on “material ostentation” so as to curb the growing social schism, but was unable to finesse it entirely. He was unwittingly assisted by George W. Bush, who cracked down on remittances and travel from the United States. Then Fidel’s oil-rich Venezuelan protégé, Hugo Chavez, stepped into the breech, providing subsidized oil and also money to repair Cuba’s deteriorating hospitals, schools, and electricity grid— and help cement over some of Cuba’s emerging social cracks. But Chavez may not always have pots of money to throw around, so Venezuelan aid was only going to ever be a stopgap lifeline.
Most jobs in Cuba pay about twenty dollars a month. What if, six months or a year from now, Cubans all over the island are being clothed and fed, thanks to friends and relatives—or anonymous donors—living in the United States? Where would that leave Cuba’s government?
Fidel is unaccustomed to being outdone by American Presidents; he has outlasted ten, and outsmarted most of them. On Tuesday, Fidel said, a little begrudgingly, that Obama should have gone all the way and ended the trade embargo imposed back in 1961. Doing that, of course, would have meant a symbolic victory for Fidel. In a sense, he has already won, at least in the court of international public opinion. But at the same time, Obama appears to want to reserve the right for the United States to be seen as magnanimous in defeat.
Will Americans Turn Inward? (Study The 1970s)
Forbes.com
4/18/09
If you think the national mood is low now, go back to 1973-76. Gas prices doubled in 1973. Stocks fell 48% between January 1973 and December 1974. The American vice president, Spiro Agnew, resigned in disgrace in November 1973. President Richard Nixon followed in August 1974. Saigon collapsed in April 1975 after U.S. armed forces withdrew from a war they were not permitted to win.
In November 1976, Americans elected as president a man almost no one outside of politics or the state of Georgia had known just one year earlier. Democrats captured 61 seats in the Senate, some of them such pacifists they wanted to shut down the Central Intelligence Agency. The Democrats took two-thirds of the seats in the House.
Economic growth was distinctly out of favor during the 1970s. America's bellwether state, California, had a governor, Jerry Brown, who spouted Zen Buddhism and slept on a mattress on the floor. Jerry Brown liked to recommend a book called Small Is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher.
A "consensus" among correct-thinking scientists and environmentalists during the 1970s was the world's oil reserves would run dry soon, possibly by the 1980s and surely by the 1990s.
The novelist Kurt Vonnegut, worried about the resource drain, told college students that getting married and having babies was immoral. Newsweek ran a cover on the latest boogeyman, global cooling.
Thus does our current mess look like the 1970s more than anything. There are some notable differences, of course: House speculation, poorly understood credit derivatives, crazy leverage, bad accounting rules and lax SEC enforcement created today's woes.
In the 1970s, it was oil shocks, inflation, tax bracket creep and a growing welfare state. Those differences aside, we seem to have wound up in the same place. We are led by a government that once again (1) distrusts markets, (2) embraces oddly contradictory Keynesian deficit spending for growth and Malthusian limits to growth (except for the government) and (3) is run by a president with a deep regard for his own virtue.
Then as now, the U.S. economy will recover. But it is hard to imagine anything stronger than a tepid recovery--occasional bright periods of growth interrupted by numerous mini recessions, oil shocks and so forth. On the whole, this will produce European-style growth of 1% to 2%. If you doubt this, then think of the American industries whose top companies will shift capital and creative energy from growth investment to regulatory compliance: banking, for one.
Automobiles. Oil and gas. Electric utilities. Pharmaceuticals. Picture yourself at a board meeting at any top company in these fields. You will hear defensive talk overwhelming growth talk.
How did ordinary Americans cope in the 1970s? Many turned inward. Writer Tom Wolfe captured the decade's mood in a 1976 essay called "The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening." Wolfe used the term "awakening" as satire. What Wolfe described was far from the religious awakenings led by Jonathan Edwards in the early 18th century or by the abolitionists of the 19th century. Rather, the great awakening of the 1970s was a national plunge into self-absorption.
These were the years of psychological analysis, self-therapy, the jogging craze and cults. "Everyone, it seemed, had an analyst, adviser, guru, genie, prophet, priest or spirit," writes the Web site, eNotes. The 1960s sexual revolution hit Main Street in the 1970s, and divorces exploded. So did sexually transmitted diseases.
What happened during the 1970s was that the first wonder of the world, human energy and creativity, got diverted from serious economic pursuits to trivial pleasure pursuits. Tax, regulatory and inflation hurdles made economic pursuits, on balance, too bothersome for too many during the 1970s. I am reminded of the movie Cabaret, about debauched and inflation-ridden Germany during the 1920s. Hollywood period movies are never solely about the historical period portrayed on film. They are also statements about present. Cabaret debuted in 1972.
Not all Americans wasted their energies chanting "om" or swapping spouses. Some brave souls started companies. Federal Express, Southwest Airlines, Charles Schwab, Microsoft, Apple, Genentech, SAS Institute, Oracle and others were launched into the headwinds of the 1970s.
The same thing could happen again. One hopes, anyway, and crosses his fingers. As feckless as President Jimmy Carter turned out to be, he had the virtue of being an entrepreneur himself--a peanut farmer. He had the wisdom to know that deregulation could be better than regulation. Hence, Carter deregulated America's airline and trucking industries and let them compete on price.
Barack Obama is not an entrepreneur. No one close to him is. Not a single aide, adviser, Cabinet member or House committee chair. Obama almost never mentions small businesses in his economic speeches. It is clear that he would like to divert some portion of America's human creativity away from private economic pursuits and toward community building. That's just who Obama is, and it can be a noble goal. But Obama won't achieve it. The lessons of the 1970s are clear. When you put barriers in front of private economic gain, you won't get more community gain. You'll send a nation off a cliff of self-absorption and trivial pursuits.
4/18/09
If you think the national mood is low now, go back to 1973-76. Gas prices doubled in 1973. Stocks fell 48% between January 1973 and December 1974. The American vice president, Spiro Agnew, resigned in disgrace in November 1973. President Richard Nixon followed in August 1974. Saigon collapsed in April 1975 after U.S. armed forces withdrew from a war they were not permitted to win.
In November 1976, Americans elected as president a man almost no one outside of politics or the state of Georgia had known just one year earlier. Democrats captured 61 seats in the Senate, some of them such pacifists they wanted to shut down the Central Intelligence Agency. The Democrats took two-thirds of the seats in the House.
Economic growth was distinctly out of favor during the 1970s. America's bellwether state, California, had a governor, Jerry Brown, who spouted Zen Buddhism and slept on a mattress on the floor. Jerry Brown liked to recommend a book called Small Is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher.
A "consensus" among correct-thinking scientists and environmentalists during the 1970s was the world's oil reserves would run dry soon, possibly by the 1980s and surely by the 1990s.
The novelist Kurt Vonnegut, worried about the resource drain, told college students that getting married and having babies was immoral. Newsweek ran a cover on the latest boogeyman, global cooling.
Thus does our current mess look like the 1970s more than anything. There are some notable differences, of course: House speculation, poorly understood credit derivatives, crazy leverage, bad accounting rules and lax SEC enforcement created today's woes.
In the 1970s, it was oil shocks, inflation, tax bracket creep and a growing welfare state. Those differences aside, we seem to have wound up in the same place. We are led by a government that once again (1) distrusts markets, (2) embraces oddly contradictory Keynesian deficit spending for growth and Malthusian limits to growth (except for the government) and (3) is run by a president with a deep regard for his own virtue.
Then as now, the U.S. economy will recover. But it is hard to imagine anything stronger than a tepid recovery--occasional bright periods of growth interrupted by numerous mini recessions, oil shocks and so forth. On the whole, this will produce European-style growth of 1% to 2%. If you doubt this, then think of the American industries whose top companies will shift capital and creative energy from growth investment to regulatory compliance: banking, for one.
Automobiles. Oil and gas. Electric utilities. Pharmaceuticals. Picture yourself at a board meeting at any top company in these fields. You will hear defensive talk overwhelming growth talk.
How did ordinary Americans cope in the 1970s? Many turned inward. Writer Tom Wolfe captured the decade's mood in a 1976 essay called "The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening." Wolfe used the term "awakening" as satire. What Wolfe described was far from the religious awakenings led by Jonathan Edwards in the early 18th century or by the abolitionists of the 19th century. Rather, the great awakening of the 1970s was a national plunge into self-absorption.
These were the years of psychological analysis, self-therapy, the jogging craze and cults. "Everyone, it seemed, had an analyst, adviser, guru, genie, prophet, priest or spirit," writes the Web site, eNotes. The 1960s sexual revolution hit Main Street in the 1970s, and divorces exploded. So did sexually transmitted diseases.
What happened during the 1970s was that the first wonder of the world, human energy and creativity, got diverted from serious economic pursuits to trivial pleasure pursuits. Tax, regulatory and inflation hurdles made economic pursuits, on balance, too bothersome for too many during the 1970s. I am reminded of the movie Cabaret, about debauched and inflation-ridden Germany during the 1920s. Hollywood period movies are never solely about the historical period portrayed on film. They are also statements about present. Cabaret debuted in 1972.
Not all Americans wasted their energies chanting "om" or swapping spouses. Some brave souls started companies. Federal Express, Southwest Airlines, Charles Schwab, Microsoft, Apple, Genentech, SAS Institute, Oracle and others were launched into the headwinds of the 1970s.
The same thing could happen again. One hopes, anyway, and crosses his fingers. As feckless as President Jimmy Carter turned out to be, he had the virtue of being an entrepreneur himself--a peanut farmer. He had the wisdom to know that deregulation could be better than regulation. Hence, Carter deregulated America's airline and trucking industries and let them compete on price.
Barack Obama is not an entrepreneur. No one close to him is. Not a single aide, adviser, Cabinet member or House committee chair. Obama almost never mentions small businesses in his economic speeches. It is clear that he would like to divert some portion of America's human creativity away from private economic pursuits and toward community building. That's just who Obama is, and it can be a noble goal. But Obama won't achieve it. The lessons of the 1970s are clear. When you put barriers in front of private economic gain, you won't get more community gain. You'll send a nation off a cliff of self-absorption and trivial pursuits.
Tea Parties Offer Energy but Few Answers for GOP
The Washington Post
By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 18, 2009
The teabag protests that marked tax day on April 15 represent an opportunity and a risk for the Republican Party. Opportunity because they offer a jolt of energy for a battered party after two dismal elections. Risk because they supply at best only a partial answer to what ails the Republicans.
There is certainly a sense of déjà vu to the demonstrations. Was this a faint echo of 1978 and the Proposition 13, anti-tax movement in California that eventually helped bring Ronald Reagan to the presidency two years later? Was it the first sign of revival of the leave-us-alone, anti-government coalition that sprang up in the early 1990s and helped bring Republicans to power in the House and Senate in 1994?
In both cases, those movements helped propel Republicans to new heights. Reagan cemented what turned out to be a long period of conservative ascendance in American politics, one whose roots were in Barry Goldwater's loss and Richard Nixon's victories but that did not begin to reach political maturity until the Gipper was elected.
The 1994 landslide took the party further in that it reshaped the Republican coalition and altered the balance of power. Though the South had been trending Republican in presidential elections, it took Newt Gingrich and his brash leadership to drive those voting habits down to House races. The 1994 election consolidated the South in Republican hands. Over time the South became the party's geographical and ideological heart.
Once again, however, Republicans are in the wilderness. In the four years since George W. Bush won his second term as president, Republicans surrendered power in the House and Senate and then gave up the White House. Their numbers have fallen not just in elected officials but among the rank and file; fewer people now identify themselves as members of the Grand Old Party.
The party is in decline, and the southern-based conservatism that it projected has fallen into disfavor elsewhere. Not just President Obama's electoral map, which turned red to blue in some surprising places, showed that. The Democrats' success in congressional and senatorial elections in 2006 and 2008 also speaks to the decline.
Four years ago, political analysts talked about the Republican inroads in rural America and the exurban counties outside the big cities in describing the party's strengths. Today, the Democrats' coalition looks to be the more robust.
Democratic success in the suburbs (and in some of those same exurbs), particularly outside the South, has for now trumped those earlier Republican advances. Add to that the reversal of Republican gains made among Hispanics early in Bush's presidency and the portrait of GOP retrenchment becomes even more vivid.
The Republican Party's road back requires reassembling of its conservative base, which was badly fractured during the final years of Bush's presidency. But real success will require a new effort to reach beyond that base to disaffected moderate Republicans and especially to independent voters who have moved decisively in the direction of Obama and the Democrats.
The tea party protests offer the GOP an alluring lifeline, an energized cadre of indeterminate size. They may be a one-time phenomenon or the start of something larger. The potency of the Republican prescription of tax cuts and small government has lessened with the failures of the Bush years and the scope of the economic crisis. Can its potency be restored? Much depends on the success or failure of Obama's economic policies.
Republican leaders are gambling that Obama is making sizeable miscalculations on the public's appetite for bigger government and bigger deficits. For now the president and his policies remain popular, but it is early in the experiment. Obama must be mindful of overreaching, a problem that has affected winning parties in the past. Republican leaders have seized on the teabag protests as a sign that he is doing just that.
Given the state of the party, any sign of life in the coalition is alluring. The question is what Republicans have learned from their recent failures. How much do they acknowledge the limits of an anti-government message? How much do they acknowledge that the country that elected Obama president and gave Democrats their majorities in Congress has changed culturally and demographically from the one that gave them their victories a decade ago?
Gingrich got the Republicans part of the way to power in 1994; Bush got them the rest of the way there in 2000. But as a presidential candidate, Bush had to distance himself from the Gingrich wing at times to make himself acceptable more broadly. That was an early sign of the limitations of the coalition that emerged in the 1990s.
In power under Bush, Republicans struggled to adapt their anti- government, culturally conservative philosophy to the practical demands of governing and to a changing country. The party split internally over spending and immigration and lost the confidence of independents and moderates over Iraq and cultural issues.
Steve Schmidt, who was a top adviser to John McCain in the presidential campaign, said Friday that the party must rethink its opposition to gay marriage to appeal to voters, especially outside the South. His decision to speak out reflects a concern among moderates that the party has become too culturally conservative to win national elections.
For now standing back and saying no to Obama may be enough. But opposition to Obama's policies represents an incomplete message for a party seeking to regain power. Republicans still must confront larger questions of how they can appeal nationally and how they would govern were they given the opportunity again.
By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 18, 2009
The teabag protests that marked tax day on April 15 represent an opportunity and a risk for the Republican Party. Opportunity because they offer a jolt of energy for a battered party after two dismal elections. Risk because they supply at best only a partial answer to what ails the Republicans.
There is certainly a sense of déjà vu to the demonstrations. Was this a faint echo of 1978 and the Proposition 13, anti-tax movement in California that eventually helped bring Ronald Reagan to the presidency two years later? Was it the first sign of revival of the leave-us-alone, anti-government coalition that sprang up in the early 1990s and helped bring Republicans to power in the House and Senate in 1994?
In both cases, those movements helped propel Republicans to new heights. Reagan cemented what turned out to be a long period of conservative ascendance in American politics, one whose roots were in Barry Goldwater's loss and Richard Nixon's victories but that did not begin to reach political maturity until the Gipper was elected.
The 1994 landslide took the party further in that it reshaped the Republican coalition and altered the balance of power. Though the South had been trending Republican in presidential elections, it took Newt Gingrich and his brash leadership to drive those voting habits down to House races. The 1994 election consolidated the South in Republican hands. Over time the South became the party's geographical and ideological heart.
Once again, however, Republicans are in the wilderness. In the four years since George W. Bush won his second term as president, Republicans surrendered power in the House and Senate and then gave up the White House. Their numbers have fallen not just in elected officials but among the rank and file; fewer people now identify themselves as members of the Grand Old Party.
The party is in decline, and the southern-based conservatism that it projected has fallen into disfavor elsewhere. Not just President Obama's electoral map, which turned red to blue in some surprising places, showed that. The Democrats' success in congressional and senatorial elections in 2006 and 2008 also speaks to the decline.
Four years ago, political analysts talked about the Republican inroads in rural America and the exurban counties outside the big cities in describing the party's strengths. Today, the Democrats' coalition looks to be the more robust.
Democratic success in the suburbs (and in some of those same exurbs), particularly outside the South, has for now trumped those earlier Republican advances. Add to that the reversal of Republican gains made among Hispanics early in Bush's presidency and the portrait of GOP retrenchment becomes even more vivid.
The Republican Party's road back requires reassembling of its conservative base, which was badly fractured during the final years of Bush's presidency. But real success will require a new effort to reach beyond that base to disaffected moderate Republicans and especially to independent voters who have moved decisively in the direction of Obama and the Democrats.
The tea party protests offer the GOP an alluring lifeline, an energized cadre of indeterminate size. They may be a one-time phenomenon or the start of something larger. The potency of the Republican prescription of tax cuts and small government has lessened with the failures of the Bush years and the scope of the economic crisis. Can its potency be restored? Much depends on the success or failure of Obama's economic policies.
Republican leaders are gambling that Obama is making sizeable miscalculations on the public's appetite for bigger government and bigger deficits. For now the president and his policies remain popular, but it is early in the experiment. Obama must be mindful of overreaching, a problem that has affected winning parties in the past. Republican leaders have seized on the teabag protests as a sign that he is doing just that.
Given the state of the party, any sign of life in the coalition is alluring. The question is what Republicans have learned from their recent failures. How much do they acknowledge the limits of an anti-government message? How much do they acknowledge that the country that elected Obama president and gave Democrats their majorities in Congress has changed culturally and demographically from the one that gave them their victories a decade ago?
Gingrich got the Republicans part of the way to power in 1994; Bush got them the rest of the way there in 2000. But as a presidential candidate, Bush had to distance himself from the Gingrich wing at times to make himself acceptable more broadly. That was an early sign of the limitations of the coalition that emerged in the 1990s.
In power under Bush, Republicans struggled to adapt their anti- government, culturally conservative philosophy to the practical demands of governing and to a changing country. The party split internally over spending and immigration and lost the confidence of independents and moderates over Iraq and cultural issues.
Steve Schmidt, who was a top adviser to John McCain in the presidential campaign, said Friday that the party must rethink its opposition to gay marriage to appeal to voters, especially outside the South. His decision to speak out reflects a concern among moderates that the party has become too culturally conservative to win national elections.
For now standing back and saying no to Obama may be enough. But opposition to Obama's policies represents an incomplete message for a party seeking to regain power. Republicans still must confront larger questions of how they can appeal nationally and how they would govern were they given the opportunity again.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Is Robert Gates A Genius?
In the past, weapons production has existed in a dreamland, regardless of enemies, costs or trade-offs.
Fareed Zakaria
Published Apr 11, 2009
When a true genius appears," the English satirist Jonathan Swift wrote, "you may know him by this sign; that all the dunces are in confederacy against him." Genius might be a bit much as a description of the secretary of defense, but Robert Gates's budget proposal has certainly gathered all the right opponents. There are the defense contractors, worried that decades of fraudulent accounting are coming to a halt; the Beltway consultants for whom the war on terror has been a bonanza; the armed services, which have gotten used to having every fantasy funded; and the congressmen who protect all this institutionalized corruption just to make sure they keep jobs in their state.
If you're wondering where to come down on the Gates plan, here's a simple guide: John McCain, the most thoughtful, reform-minded legislator on military issues, "strongly supports" it. Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe—who has compared the EPA to the Gestapo, Carol Browner to Tokyo Rose and environmentalists to the Third Reich—warns that it will lead to the "disarming of America." You choose.
In recent decades, defense budgeting has existed in a dreamland, where ever-more-elaborate weapons are built without regard to enemies, costs or trade-offs. In 2008 the General Accounting Office said cost overruns for the Pentagon's 95 biggest weapons programs—just the overruns!—added up to $300 billion. The system has become so pervasive and entrenched that most people no longer bother to get outraged.
The endless flow of cash from the taxpayer has prevented strategic thought. Much of the Pentagon budget is based on wish lists from the services, often lists that were conceived during the Cold War. The Air Force developed such a strong attachment to its F-22 fighter-plane program that it failed to notice that the Soviet Union had collapsed and no great-power rival was around to get into dogfights with the U.S. military. We're fighting two wars right now, and not one of the 135 or so F-22s that we already have is being used in either theater. If you're wondering why the program is still around, here's one reason: its manufacture has been spread across 44 states.
Gates also trims the Navy's wish list, cutting its destroyer program. But here his ambition suddenly dried up. He did propose that the United States scale back one of its aircraft-carrier groups, going from 11 to 10—but it will happen 31 years from now! Even so, of course, he faces the usual conservative opposition. The Wall Street Journal worries that a 300-ship Navy is "perilously small." In the recent clash with Somali pirates, it points out that U.S. warships were "hours away." Well, if you've traveled by sea, you'll know that ships move slower than planes. Given the vastness of the oceans, the fact that American naval vessels could reach a relatively nonstrategic location within a few hours is actually a sign of the incredible reach of the Navy, not the opposite.
Gates has really just begun a much-needed process of rethinking American defense strategy after the Cold War. He has focused sensibly on the wars we are actually fighting, to make sure the military is equipped to wage them success- fully. But while we don't need the F-22, we are still going to make 2,443 F-35s at an eventual cost of $1 trillion. Do we really need those? What is the thinking behind that program?
American military budgets should be based on two competing imperatives. The first is that we are likely to be engaged in small, complex conflicts with much weaker opponents in difficult terrain. In other words, Iraq and Afghanistan. The Gates budget makes intelligent provision for these kinds of wars—in which manpower and intelligence are key. The second requirement is deterrence. The U.S. military protects global sea lanes and, in a general sense, preserves the peace. If the Somali pirates were to cause too much trouble, eventually it would be the United States military that would help tackle them. If the Chinese were considering offensive actions in Asia, it is the American response that would make them cautious.
But these imperatives can surely be satisfied with a military that is leaner, more cost-effective, more efficient and does keep somewhere in mind the capacity of potential adversaries. The U.S. Navy has 11 aircraft-carrier groups. China has zero. The U.S. defense budget for 2009 is $655 billion. China's is $70 billion, Russia's is $50 billion. America's cumulative cost overruns add up to more than the total annual defense budgets of China, Russia, Britain and France combined. This smacks less of deterrence and more of mindless extravagance and waste.
Coming up next for Gates is the Quadrennial Defense Review. He should take the opportunity—his last one to leave a long legacy—and move the United States toward a military strategy that is shaped by the world we actually inhabit. That would make him a true genius. He will certainly have all the dunces arrayed against him to prove it.
Fareed Zakaria
Published Apr 11, 2009
When a true genius appears," the English satirist Jonathan Swift wrote, "you may know him by this sign; that all the dunces are in confederacy against him." Genius might be a bit much as a description of the secretary of defense, but Robert Gates's budget proposal has certainly gathered all the right opponents. There are the defense contractors, worried that decades of fraudulent accounting are coming to a halt; the Beltway consultants for whom the war on terror has been a bonanza; the armed services, which have gotten used to having every fantasy funded; and the congressmen who protect all this institutionalized corruption just to make sure they keep jobs in their state.
If you're wondering where to come down on the Gates plan, here's a simple guide: John McCain, the most thoughtful, reform-minded legislator on military issues, "strongly supports" it. Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe—who has compared the EPA to the Gestapo, Carol Browner to Tokyo Rose and environmentalists to the Third Reich—warns that it will lead to the "disarming of America." You choose.
In recent decades, defense budgeting has existed in a dreamland, where ever-more-elaborate weapons are built without regard to enemies, costs or trade-offs. In 2008 the General Accounting Office said cost overruns for the Pentagon's 95 biggest weapons programs—just the overruns!—added up to $300 billion. The system has become so pervasive and entrenched that most people no longer bother to get outraged.
The endless flow of cash from the taxpayer has prevented strategic thought. Much of the Pentagon budget is based on wish lists from the services, often lists that were conceived during the Cold War. The Air Force developed such a strong attachment to its F-22 fighter-plane program that it failed to notice that the Soviet Union had collapsed and no great-power rival was around to get into dogfights with the U.S. military. We're fighting two wars right now, and not one of the 135 or so F-22s that we already have is being used in either theater. If you're wondering why the program is still around, here's one reason: its manufacture has been spread across 44 states.
Gates also trims the Navy's wish list, cutting its destroyer program. But here his ambition suddenly dried up. He did propose that the United States scale back one of its aircraft-carrier groups, going from 11 to 10—but it will happen 31 years from now! Even so, of course, he faces the usual conservative opposition. The Wall Street Journal worries that a 300-ship Navy is "perilously small." In the recent clash with Somali pirates, it points out that U.S. warships were "hours away." Well, if you've traveled by sea, you'll know that ships move slower than planes. Given the vastness of the oceans, the fact that American naval vessels could reach a relatively nonstrategic location within a few hours is actually a sign of the incredible reach of the Navy, not the opposite.
Gates has really just begun a much-needed process of rethinking American defense strategy after the Cold War. He has focused sensibly on the wars we are actually fighting, to make sure the military is equipped to wage them success- fully. But while we don't need the F-22, we are still going to make 2,443 F-35s at an eventual cost of $1 trillion. Do we really need those? What is the thinking behind that program?
American military budgets should be based on two competing imperatives. The first is that we are likely to be engaged in small, complex conflicts with much weaker opponents in difficult terrain. In other words, Iraq and Afghanistan. The Gates budget makes intelligent provision for these kinds of wars—in which manpower and intelligence are key. The second requirement is deterrence. The U.S. military protects global sea lanes and, in a general sense, preserves the peace. If the Somali pirates were to cause too much trouble, eventually it would be the United States military that would help tackle them. If the Chinese were considering offensive actions in Asia, it is the American response that would make them cautious.
But these imperatives can surely be satisfied with a military that is leaner, more cost-effective, more efficient and does keep somewhere in mind the capacity of potential adversaries. The U.S. Navy has 11 aircraft-carrier groups. China has zero. The U.S. defense budget for 2009 is $655 billion. China's is $70 billion, Russia's is $50 billion. America's cumulative cost overruns add up to more than the total annual defense budgets of China, Russia, Britain and France combined. This smacks less of deterrence and more of mindless extravagance and waste.
Coming up next for Gates is the Quadrennial Defense Review. He should take the opportunity—his last one to leave a long legacy—and move the United States toward a military strategy that is shaped by the world we actually inhabit. That would make him a true genius. He will certainly have all the dunces arrayed against him to prove it.
End of the Clash of Civilizations
New York Times
Published: April 11, 2009
On his visit to Turkey last week, President Obama made important progress toward recalibrating America’s relations with the Islamic world. The president steered away from the poisonous post-9/11 clash of civilizations mythology that drove so much of President George W. Bush’s rhetoric and disastrous policy.
He told Turkey’s Parliament that the United States “is not and will never be at war with Islam” and promised that its relationship with the Muslim world will be founded on more than opposition to terrorism. An opinion poll last year said that only 12 percent of Turks had a favorable view of the United States. While there were some protests, Mr. Obama’s overall reception in Turkey was enthusiastic. Muslims in other countries also seem willing to listen.
Mr. Bush often voiced respect for Islam and rightly insisted that “the enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends” but the “radical network of terrorists” and governments supporting them. But he and his Republican allies also used words like “crusade” and “Islamic fascists,” feeding fears that the so-called war on terrorism was really a war on Islam. The horrors of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, and Mr. Bush’s unnecessary war in Iraq, greatly compounded the problem.
Not only are Mr. Obama’s words and tone better, his policies are better. He opposed the Iraq war and has begun planning an orderly withdrawal of American troops. He is trying to engage Iran after 30 years of mutual isolation. And he has promised an active effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and reaffirmed support for a two-state solution — a goal that Israel’s newly elected prime minister says he does not share.
Mr. Obama’s credibility is enhanced by personal experience. He is Christian, but his father was Muslim; the president lived part of his childhood in Indonesia, the most populous Muslim-majority nation.
While he played down this background during the 2008 campaign, it was a compelling line in last week’s speech. “The United States has been enriched by Muslim-Americans,” he said. “Many other Americans have Muslims in their family, or have lived in a Muslim-majority country. I know, because I am one of them.”
Aides say Mr. Obama is still planning a bigger speech to the Muslim world. The next one will have to acknowledge not just common ground but important differences with many Muslim countries — including the issues of women’s rights and freedom of religion — that are not easily bridged.
Published: April 11, 2009
On his visit to Turkey last week, President Obama made important progress toward recalibrating America’s relations with the Islamic world. The president steered away from the poisonous post-9/11 clash of civilizations mythology that drove so much of President George W. Bush’s rhetoric and disastrous policy.
He told Turkey’s Parliament that the United States “is not and will never be at war with Islam” and promised that its relationship with the Muslim world will be founded on more than opposition to terrorism. An opinion poll last year said that only 12 percent of Turks had a favorable view of the United States. While there were some protests, Mr. Obama’s overall reception in Turkey was enthusiastic. Muslims in other countries also seem willing to listen.
Mr. Bush often voiced respect for Islam and rightly insisted that “the enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends” but the “radical network of terrorists” and governments supporting them. But he and his Republican allies also used words like “crusade” and “Islamic fascists,” feeding fears that the so-called war on terrorism was really a war on Islam. The horrors of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, and Mr. Bush’s unnecessary war in Iraq, greatly compounded the problem.
Not only are Mr. Obama’s words and tone better, his policies are better. He opposed the Iraq war and has begun planning an orderly withdrawal of American troops. He is trying to engage Iran after 30 years of mutual isolation. And he has promised an active effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and reaffirmed support for a two-state solution — a goal that Israel’s newly elected prime minister says he does not share.
Mr. Obama’s credibility is enhanced by personal experience. He is Christian, but his father was Muslim; the president lived part of his childhood in Indonesia, the most populous Muslim-majority nation.
While he played down this background during the 2008 campaign, it was a compelling line in last week’s speech. “The United States has been enriched by Muslim-Americans,” he said. “Many other Americans have Muslims in their family, or have lived in a Muslim-majority country. I know, because I am one of them.”
Aides say Mr. Obama is still planning a bigger speech to the Muslim world. The next one will have to acknowledge not just common ground but important differences with many Muslim countries — including the issues of women’s rights and freedom of religion — that are not easily bridged.
Climate change hits Australia first, and hard
Floods, fires, droughts, disease, extinctions and a dying Great Barrier Reef may be a hint of things to come globally.
LA Times
April 11, 2009
In the 1959 Gregory Peck classic “On the Beach,” humanity's last holdouts in the aftermath of a global nuclear war huddle in Australia and wait for the inevitable atomic wind to carry the rest of the species away. When it comes to today's real-world climate crisis, though, Australia is going first, not last.
As Times staff writer Julie Cart reported Thursday, Australia appears to be experiencing the effects of climate change earlier and more dramatically than most of the other inhabited parts of the globe. A Southern Hemisphere continent that was already a land of climate extremes has become more so in recent years. Even as the tropical north is deluged by flooding and warmer ocean currents are spawning more powerful cyclones, the parched south and interior have turned into baking dead zones. The results: vast brush fires, killer heat waves, increased tropical diseases, ruined crops, loss of livestock, severe water shortages and quickening species extinction.
Climate skeptics believe that Australia is simply in the midst of a cyclical change in weather patterns, or that the steel-warping temperatures turning the interior into a Martian landscape are the result of a natural warming period rather than a phenomenon with human causes. Most of these skeptics live outside Australia. There, the effects are too dramatic and the science too conclusive to leave much doubt. The country's biggest tourist draw, the Great Barrier Reef -- among the world's most biologically diverse places and the largest structure built by living organisms -- is vanishing before Australians' eyes. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that this astonishing natural wonder will be "functionally extinct" by 2050.
If Australia serves as a harbinger of things to come for the rest of the world, its political response shows how difficult it will be to solve the problem. Progress is being made, but it's achingly slow. A country that gets 80% of its electricity from coal (compared with 50% in the U.S.) is deeply reluctant to pay the price of switching to renewable energy sources; so far, the government has agreed to cut greenhouse gas emissions just 5% by 2020. That won't do much to reduce the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere and slow the pace of global warming.
Can the United States, where the impacts of climate change aren't yet nearly as apparent, be expected to do better? For Australia's sake, and our own, we must. Soon, you may not have to travel to the outback to see a desolate wasteland; it may be coming to your neighborhood.
LA Times
April 11, 2009
In the 1959 Gregory Peck classic “On the Beach,” humanity's last holdouts in the aftermath of a global nuclear war huddle in Australia and wait for the inevitable atomic wind to carry the rest of the species away. When it comes to today's real-world climate crisis, though, Australia is going first, not last.
As Times staff writer Julie Cart reported Thursday, Australia appears to be experiencing the effects of climate change earlier and more dramatically than most of the other inhabited parts of the globe. A Southern Hemisphere continent that was already a land of climate extremes has become more so in recent years. Even as the tropical north is deluged by flooding and warmer ocean currents are spawning more powerful cyclones, the parched south and interior have turned into baking dead zones. The results: vast brush fires, killer heat waves, increased tropical diseases, ruined crops, loss of livestock, severe water shortages and quickening species extinction.
Climate skeptics believe that Australia is simply in the midst of a cyclical change in weather patterns, or that the steel-warping temperatures turning the interior into a Martian landscape are the result of a natural warming period rather than a phenomenon with human causes. Most of these skeptics live outside Australia. There, the effects are too dramatic and the science too conclusive to leave much doubt. The country's biggest tourist draw, the Great Barrier Reef -- among the world's most biologically diverse places and the largest structure built by living organisms -- is vanishing before Australians' eyes. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that this astonishing natural wonder will be "functionally extinct" by 2050.
If Australia serves as a harbinger of things to come for the rest of the world, its political response shows how difficult it will be to solve the problem. Progress is being made, but it's achingly slow. A country that gets 80% of its electricity from coal (compared with 50% in the U.S.) is deeply reluctant to pay the price of switching to renewable energy sources; so far, the government has agreed to cut greenhouse gas emissions just 5% by 2020. That won't do much to reduce the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere and slow the pace of global warming.
Can the United States, where the impacts of climate change aren't yet nearly as apparent, be expected to do better? For Australia's sake, and our own, we must. Soon, you may not have to travel to the outback to see a desolate wasteland; it may be coming to your neighborhood.
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