I hope David Frum is right and that the Tea Party movement, which is growing in numbers and ferocity, will hit its limit, experience an Icarus moment, and plunge back into the fringe of American politics where pugnacious, jingoistic, narrow band nationalism has always lurked.
But Clemons is skeptical: “But there is no guarantee of this,” he writes, citing a prominent funder, who frets that “their political loss didn’t teach the Republicans anything; they actually got much worse.”
Kevin Drum chimes in with faith in the political pendulum that always swings back:
I think Frum is right and the mega-funder just needs to have a bit more patience. Parties rarely move to the center immediately after a big defeat. Usually it takes two or three before they finally get the message, and on that metric Republicans aren’t due for a move to the center until sometime after 2012.
Sure, when a party keeps losing, eventually there is a move to shake it up. But the problem is that Republicans are winning doing this, which the wingnuts in the party will surely interpret as a vindication for their, errr, patriotic turn.
But I’m still optimistic that the Tea Party movement does have a limited shelf life. Here’s why:
And governing is more difficult than campaigning. Once in Congress, these wild turks won’t be able to deliver on their outrageous promises of ending big government and repealing healthcare. This will likely provoke disillusionment and then infighting among Tea Party types as to whether to find a new breed of “purer” Tea Partiers, or to remain loyal to their existing leaders. Disillusionment and infighting will sap the Tea Party movement of energy.
Additionally, Tea Party legislators, especially in the Senate, will effectively grind the wheels of governance to a halt. Moderate voters, who are now fed up with Democrats for not fixing the economy in two years, will still want somebody to blame for a sluggish economy. And this new batch of Tea Party fanatics, who like to run off their mouths into the deep recesses of ridiculousness, will now find that being accountable makes them the hunted rather than the hunters.
In many ways, this is just the latest step in a decades-long ratcheting up of opposition political rhetoric and promises. The party out of power always promises that there are simple solutions to hard problems that will solve everything, and accuses the party in power of being just too corrupt, incompetent, or whatever to see that. But of course hard problems actually have hard solutions, and the problems now are harder than before and the solutions are even harder. In short: it’s probably a bad time to be overpromising.
So far so good: The White House china survived in tact. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, PA President Mahmoud Abbas, Jordanian Prince Abdullah, and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak managed to dine peaceably last night with President Obama. No plates thrown, no glasses busted in anger.
I wrote a quick piece the other day about what to watch for coming out of these talks. In terms of body language and messaging, everyone’s saying the right things.
When the talks get down to specifics, what should we look for? Martin Indyk has a smart column at The Daily Beast where he lays down some critical markers. The first, as I’ve discussed previously, is the September 26th deadline to lift the moratorium on construction in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Getting Netanyahu to give even an inch on his pledge to lift it would be a big win for Abbas. Finding a face-saving way so Bibi’s right-ist coalition partners don’t abandon him is this trick.
Obama should use the limited time available before the settlement moratorium actually expires at the end of this month to focus the negotiators on defining the western border of the Palestinian state. The Palestinians have already agreed in previous negotiations to the principle that some settlement blocs will be annexed to Israel as part of a land swap. If negotiators can agree on which blocs will be absorbed by Israel, settlement activity can continue there, while the moratorium is extended everywhere else.
I think that’s mostly right. Defining the final boarders is only one of the elements to a negotiated solution, but resolving a first issue to both parties’ satisfaction would be an incredible confidence-building measure.
The elephant in the room is Jerusalem, whose final status will remain one of the most contentious matters. A way forward might include negotiating a solution for the rest of the West Bank and the handful of Israeli settlements in suburban Jerusalem, like Gilo, that both sides know will one day be part of Israel. The city’s political composition can wait for another day.
The primary defeat of incumbent Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski (confirmed by her concession yesterday) by former judge Joe Miller is generally being interpreted as another scalp for the Tea Party Movement in its assault on Republicans deemed too moderate on this or that key issue. But there’s something going on a bit deeper, if you consider Alaska’s exceptional dependence on the federal government and the past political track record of politicians like Murkowski’s mentor, the late Ted Stevens, who aligned themselves with the anti-government GOP but emphasized their ability to “bring home the bacon” via appropriations.
In endorsing Miller on behalf of his Senate Conservatives Fund, Jim DeMint emphasized this dimension of Murkowski’s defeat:
Joe Miller’s victory should be a wake-up call to politicians who go to Washington to bring home the bacon. Voters are saying ‘We’re not willing to bankrupt the country to benefit ourselves.’
Now it wouldn’t be quite right to accept DeMint’s characterization of either Alaska voters’ motivations or Miller’s ideology at face value. After all, when Miller calls for abolishing the federal Department of Energy, he’s appealing to the rather selfish desire of Alaskans to control their “own” energy resources–whose value is a lot higher than any federal earmark– regardless of what it means nationally.
But it’s true that there’s an element of collective self-denial among those conservatives who are genuinely willing to take on federal spending categories that are popular among their constituents. Miller is just the latest of a number of Republican Senate candidates this year who have called for phasing out Social Security and Medicare. DeMint himself has long described these programs, along with public education, as having seduced middle-class Americans into socialist ways of thinking.
As Republican pols from Barry Goldwater to George W. Bush can tell you, going after Social Security and Medicare is really bad politics. And they’ve yet to come up with a gimmick, whether it’s “partial privatization” or grandfathering existing beneficiaries, to make major changes in these programs popular (I seriously doubt the very latest gimmick, “voucherizing” Medicare, will do any better once people understand the idea). Indeed, Republicans notably engaged in their own form of “Medagoguery” by attacking health care reform as a threat to Medicare benefits.
Yet the sudden Tea Party-driven return to fiscal hawkery among Republicans, particularly if it’s not accompanied by any willingness to consider tax increases or significant defense spending cuts, will drive the GOP again and again to “entitlement reform.” In Senate candidates like Rand Paul and Sharron Angle and now Joe Miller, we are seeing the return of a paleoconservative perspective in the GOP that embraces the destruction of the New Deal/Great Society era’s most important accomplishments not just as a matter of fiscal necessity but as a moral imperative.
You can respect this point of view even if you abhor its practical implications. But there’s little doubt it represents political folly of potentially massive dimensions. Certainly Democrats owe it to these brave conservatives to take them seriously in their desire to free middle-class seniors from the slavery of Social Security and Medicare, and draw as much attention to it as possible.
Yesterday morning, that’s what we were wondering around the PPI offices — would Obama thank President Bush during his Iraq address that night? I had a conversation with my colleague Lindsay Lewis, who had just heard White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs mention that Obama was scheduled to call Bush that afternoon. Might Obama directly thank Bush for adopting “the surge”, which, as the incomplete political narrative goes, was responsible for the decrease in violence in Iraq in 2007?
If he was explicit in his praise, I felt that the left would be apoplectic. DailyKos and HuffPo headlines would read “The Jerk THANKED Bush”, not “Obama Fulfills Campaign Pledge.” As polls indicate Democrats’ looming losses this November, that’s not what the administration wants floating around its mysteriously disenchanted base.
Lindsay, ever the astute politico, noted that by paying tribute to Bush, Obama was playing long-ball: If he were to thank Bush, Obama would be positioning himself as a post-partisan Commander-In-Chief. In political terms, he’d be positioning himself for the reelect.
Turns out that Lindsay wasn’t far off, and Obama even did him one-better: The president threaded a very fine needle that mollified critics on left and right:
This afternoon, I spoke to former President George W. Bush. It’s well known that he and I disagreed about the war from its outset. Yet no one can doubt President Bush’s support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security. As I’ve said, there were patriots who supported this war, and patriots who opposed it. And all of us are united in appreciation for our servicemen and women, and our hopes for Iraqis’ future.
Turns out he didn’t go so far as to thank Bush, which keeps the focus on fulfilling his campaign pledge for the progressive base, but he succeeded in praising Bush enough to mute conservative critique and position himself as a post-partisan leader. If you’ll pardon the phrase, Mission: Accomplished.
The conservative intelligensia are split. Here Max Boot sounding… magnanimous, even:
I thought that this speech was about as good as we could expect from an opponent of the Iraq war — and better than Obama has done in the past. He even (for the first time?) held out an olive branch to his predecessor. … There was only a brief mention of Afghanistan, but what he said was pretty good.
I thought his speech was on the whole commendable, and even at times impressive. … Not a bad tribute to the troops, and not a bad statement of the importance and indispensability of hard power. And, on the whole, not a bad speech by the president.
Truth be told, I’m happy to see them giving credit where credit is due.
Of course, every conservative didn’t feel so gooey inside. Here’s Jennifer Rubin:
Obama is still candidate Obama, never tiring of reminding us that he kept his campaign pledge and ever eager to push aside foreign policy challenges so he can get on with the business of remaking America. All in all, it was what we were promised it would not be — self-serving, disingenuous, ungracious, and unreassuring.
I really disliked it…. If you read this closely, what Obama is saying is that not only do we owe it to the troops to rally around his discredited and partisan economic agenda (“It’s our turn”), not only is it a test of our patriotism to sign on with his environmental and industrial planning schemes, but that doing so “must be our central mission as a people.” I find everything about that offensive.
The point is that on some level, Obama succeeded in presenting himself as a post-partisan Commander-in-Chief. Of course, anyone can concoct a reason why not to like a speech given by the president of a different political persuasion. So while Rubin and Goldberg’s reactions are stock and trade, drawing even faint praise from the likes of Bill Kristol is a remarkable and welcome milestone.
Many commentators seem puzzled over President Obama’s decision to use an Oval Office speech to mark the “end of combat operations” in Iraq. The reason: Iraq is important to Barack Obama, even if most Americans are nowadays preoccupied with a foundering economy.
Iraq, in fact, may be the reason Obama is President. During the 2008 campaign, the very green Junior Senator from Illinois used his opposition to the war to distinguish himself from more experienced rivals like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. His anti-war credentials allowed him to ride the powerful tide of anti-Bush sentiment among progressives. It also buttressed his claims to be a Washington outsider, the most authentic agent of political change in the race. This appealed to independents.
So it’s little wonder that Obama takes his pledge to end the Iraq war very seriously. He undoubtedly regards it as a matter of keeping faith with his core supporters. At the same time, he was careful not to inflame old passions over the war. On the contrary, he rightly praised U.S. troops for their skill and valor, offered a graceful salute to his predecessor, and urged the country to move on.
In this respect, the speech was probably the most genuinely “post partisan” of his presidency. But it also raised questions about what Obama really thinks about the war. He noted that U.S. troops, at tremendous sacrifice, toppled one of the world’s worst tyrants and gave Iraq a chance to embrace “a different destiny.” Does that mean he disagrees with the New York Times’ characterization of Iraq as a “tragic, pointless war”? Obama sounded ambiguous on the question of whether it was all worth it, but such reticence probably comes with the job of being President.
Whether the public will regard his declaration as an important milestone is another matter. Violence in Iraq is already down, thanks at least in part to the surge that Obama initially opposed but has since implicitly endorsed by putting the same general, David Petraeus, in charge of a similar escalation in Afghanistan. What’s more, 50,000 U.S. troops will remain in Iraq for the next 16 months, and at least some of them will be fighting al Qaeda insurgents. Truth to tell, the President did little more last night that endorse the timetable set forth in the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) the Bush administration negotiated with the Iraqi government.
For Obama, the significance of this moment is that it marks the transition to Iraqi responsibility for security. That’s fine, but America can’t simply wash its hands and walk away at the end of next year. Iraq didn’t ask to be invaded, or to be plunged into the hellish sectarian violence that followed. The United States has incurred an unavoidable moral obligation to help a decent political order emerge in Iraq. If that requires revisiting the SOFA, the administration shouldn’t be inflexible on the point.
In stressing the limits of America’s responsibilities, the President also drew parallels between Iraq and Afghanistan. The United States should stay in Afghanistan only as long as it takes to build the capacity of the Afghan government and security forces to defend the country against a vicious Taliban insurgency.
Obama, in fact, seemed to be implicitly advancing a new doctrine of limited U.S. military intervention. The unstated assumption: America probably will be forced to intervene again in failing and fragile states beset by terrorism or communal conflict. But we should make no open-ended commitments to counterinsurgency and national building. But war is seldom so tidy. The United States still has troops in South Korea, 57 years after the war there ended.
In all, it was an often confusing and even contradictory speech, as Fred Kaplan captured well today. It reflected the deep ambivalence of a man who rose to prominence on the strength of his anti-war stance, and now finds himself, as Commander in Chief, responsible for bringing no less than three wars – Iraq, Afghanistan and the fight against al Qaeda – to a successful conclusion.
Over at the American Conservative Magazine, William S. Lind makes a powerful conservative case for renewed investment in public transit: “For cities, conservatives’ banner should be read, ‘Bring Back the Streetcars!’”
A couple of points are worth highlighting:
1) The current car-dependent culture we have now is not a free market outcome. Lind notes that: “it is the produce of almost a century of government intervention in the transportation market.” Highways, according to Lind, only “cover 58 percent of their costs from user fees, including the gasoline tax.”
2) Public transit is a real driver of economic development or redevelopment. (Lind cites Portland, OR and Kenosha, WI as cities that got a real boost from putting in a streetcar line)
3) Public transit helps advance energy independence.
4) And if the first conservative political virtue is prudence, as Russell Kirk advised, “there is nothing prudent about leaving most people immobile should events beyond the pale cut off our oil supply, as happened in 1973 and 1979)
Lind’s piece is one of several in a symposium on transit over at the American Conservative. And in fact, “The American Conservative’s nonprofit parent, The American Ideas Institute, will launch a new center on transportation made possible by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. The center will work to showcase conservative arguments for a balanced transportation system in which rail and roads complement one another.”
Just after President finishes his Oval Office speech on Iraq (and because they’re somewhat linked, Afghanistan), you may flip to your favorite cable news channel and listen to your favorite talking head or two banter on about the war’s history. In an effort to set the record straight, here’s a quick guide to Barack Obama’s political history with Iraq (and by extension Afghanistan). If you want to a more detailed timeline, you can click over to the Washington Post, which has a good interactive map and timeline. Or you can check out my new favorite site, LetMeGoogleThatForYou.com.
Here’s the bottom line: After reading just about ever single speech Obama has given on Iraq since 2002, he has been remarkably consistent for a politician.
He opposed the war, while being explicit that he’s comfortable with the use of force. He’s been steadfast that Bush was screwing around in Iraq while he should have been concentrating in Afghanistan. Hence, this administration’s current policy is the continuation of Obama’s thinking since 2002.
However, once we were in Iraq, he recognized America’s ongoing national security concerns, and sought to promote debate on striking the balance between responsibility, national interest, and political reality. Even though Obama opposed the surge, it was not because he was uncomfortable with using force, but because he felt that the threat of removing US troops would force political cooperation amongst Iraqi governing stakeholders.
Throughout his campaign, he stayed on message about bringing the war to a “responsible conclusion” a pledge that he has largely fulfilled.
The future is murky: Violence may return to haunt Iraq as the remaining troops are pulled out over the next 17 months (as George Bush’s 2008 SOFA dictates). While a new Iraq government may request that continued presence of American forces past the 2011 deadline, it is dubious whether Obama, in the midst of a re-election bid, would reopen such a divisive arguement, particularly as America’s national security interests seem long-since secured.
Here are the details:
October 2, 2002: On the eve of a Congressional resolution authorizing President George Bush to use force in Iraq, Illinois State Senator Barack Obama gives a speech at a Chicago Anti-War Rally. Here’s what he said:
Let me begin by saying that although this has been billed as an anti-war rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances. …
After September 11th… I supported this [Bush] Administration’s pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance. … I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war.
Ambassador Keyes and I agree on one thing, and that is that the War on Terror has to be
vigorously fought. Where we part company is how to fight it, because I think Afghanistan in fact was not a preemptive war, it was a war launched directly against those who were responsible for 9-11. Iraq was a preemptive war based on faulty evidence. … Now, us having gone in there, I do think we now have a deep national security interest in making certain that Iraq is stable. If is it not stable, not only are we going to have a humanitarian crisis, I think we are also going to have a huge national security problem on our ands—because, ironically, it has become a hotbed of terrorists consequence, in part, of our incursion there.
What do we want to accomplish now that we are in Iraq, and what is possible to accomplish? What kind of actions can we take to ensure not only a safe and stable Iraq, but that will also preserve our capacity to rebuild Afghanistan, isolate and apprehend terrorist cells, preserve our long-term military readiness, and devote the resources needed to shore up our homeland security?
[G]iven the enormous stakes in Iraq, I believe that those of us who are involved in shaping our national security policies should do what we believe is right, not merely what is politically expedient….
But I believe that, having waged a war that has unleashed daily carnage and uncertainty in Iraq, we have to manage our exit in a responsible way – with the hope of leaving a stable foundation for the future, but at the very least taking care not to plunge the country into an even deeper and, perhaps, irreparable crisis.
January 9, 2006. Senator Obama podcast following a trip to Baghdad:
I think the general view was that we were in such a delicate situation right now and that there was so little institutional capacity on the part of the Iraqi government, that a full military withdrawal at this point would probably result in significant civil war and potentially hundreds of thousands of deaths.
January 25, 2006. Senator Obama podcast following post-trip meeting with George Bush:
I believe we need to bring our troops home as quickly as possible, but to do so in a way that does not precipitate all out civil war in Iraq.
On February 22, 2006, the Sumarra Mosque, one of the holiest sites in Shiite Islam, is bombed. The repercussions set off a spiral of increasing violence that many call a civil war.
June 26, 2006. Senator Obama floor statement on Iraq following proposed Kerry Amendment, which called for redeployment of troops.
I would like nothing more than to support the Kerry Amendment; to bring our brave troops home on a date certain, and spare the American people more pain, suffering and sorrow.
But having visited Iraq, I’m also acutely aware that a precipitous withdrawal of our troops, driven by Congressional edict rather than the realities on the ground, will not undo the mistakes made by this Administration. It could compound them. …
I do not believe that setting a date certain for the total withdrawal of U.S. troops is the best approach to achieving, in a methodical and responsible way, the three basic goals that should drive our Iraq policy: that is, 1) stabilizing Iraq and giving the factions within Iraq the space they need to forge a political settlement; 2) containing and ultimately defeating the insurgency in Iraq; and 3) bringing our troops safely home.
…
I cannot support the Kerry Amendment. Instead, I am a cosponsor of the Levin amendment, which gives us the best opportunity to find this balance between our need to begin a phase-down and our need to help stabilize Iraq.
November 20, 2006. Senator Obama speaks to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs:
The President should announce to the Iraqi people that our policy will include a gradual and substantial reduction in U.S. forces. He should then work with our military commanders to map out the best plan for such a redeployment and determine precise levels and dates. … [I]t could be suspended if at any point U.S. commanders believe that a further reduction would put American troops in danger. …
Perhaps most importantly, some of these troops could be redeployed to Afghanistan, where our lack of focus and commitment of resources has led to an increasing deterioration of the security situation there. The President’s decision to go to war in Iraq has had disastrous consequences for Afghanistan — we have seen a fierce Taliban offensive, a spike in terrorist attacks, and a narcotrafficking problem spiral out of control.
In January 2007, George Bush announced ‘the Surge’, which Obama opposed. Here’s a video. Here’s what Obama said in a Senate floor statement:
The President’s decision to move forward with this escalation anyway, despite all evidence and military advice to the contrary, is the terrible consequence of the decision to give him the broad, open-ended authority to wage this war back in 2002…. I cannot in good conscience support this escalation.
Drawing down our troops in Iraq will put pressure on Iraqis to arrive at the political settlement that is needed and allow us to redeploy additional troops in Afghanistan… My plan would couple this phased redeployment with an enhanced effort to train Iraqi security forces.
As the political narrative tells us, “the surge worked.” However, if you dig a little deeper, you’ll find that three events really helped bring about a de-escalation in violence in Iraq in 2007. Read this op-ed from my friend Michael Kleinman on what really happened.
October 2, 2007. Early in the presidential campaign, Senator Obama pledges to bring home troops within 16 months of taking office:
I will begin to remove our troops from Iraq immediately. I will remove one or two brigades a month and get all of our combat troops out of Iraq within 16 months. The only troops I will keep in Iraq will perform the limited missions of protecting our diplomats and carrying out targeted strikes on Al Qaeda.
November 19, 2008. Just before leaving office, George Bush negotiates a new Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government. It calls for US troops to be out of Iraq’s cities and towns by mid-2009 and out of the country altogether by the end of 2011. Read the entire SOFA here. Obama’s campaign timeline is more-or-less in line with Bush’s.
January 21, 2009. Just after taking office, President Obama met with military leaders and asked them to draw up a 16-month withdrawal plan from Iraq.
February 27, 2009. Obama tells Congressional leaders that he’s planning to pull all combat troops out of Iraq by August 2010. That 19 month time-line is three longer than his campaign promise. He tells lawmakers that he intends to keep 35,000-50,000 non-combat forces in the country for training and force protection. Some Democratic Congressional members are upset at the remaining forces; Generals Petraeus and Odierno are supportive.
August 25, 2010: U.S. troop numbers in Iraq at 49,700.
It’s another Tuesday, and believe it or not, there are no primaries today! In fact, the next batch is not until September 14, when seven states plus the District of Columbia hold elections. This last weekend, however, voters in Louisiana and West Virginia went to the polls, with the latter limited to a special primary election for the late Robert Byrd’s Senate seat.
West Virginia
The results there were absolutely predictable, with Gov. Joe Manchin easily defeating Ken Hechler for the Democratic nod, and 2008 Senate nominee Jon Raese winning the Republican bid without breaking a sweat. Given the refusal of better-known Republicans to take on Manchin, this contest will provide a pretty good test of generic Republican strength in a red-leaning state where Democrats have often dominated in non-presidential elections.
Louisiana
Down in Louisiana, Senate candidates David Vitter (R) and Charlie Melancon (D) had no trouble winning their parties’ nominations. The more interesting contests were in two House districts. In LA-02, where Republican Joseph Cao pulled off a flukey win in 2008 over the ethically challenged Bill Jefferson, state legislator Cedric Richmond (D), the well-financed consensus choice of both New Orleans and DC Democrats, easily won the nomination without a runoff. This is perhaps the ripest Democratic House pickup opportunity in the nation. But in Melancon’s LA-03, a ripe Republican pickup opportunity, front-runner Jeff Landry, the beneficiary of Tea Party and Christian Right support, just missed avoiding a October 2 runoff against former state House Speaker Hunt Downer. The runoff will boost the uphill candidacy of Democrat Ravi Sangisetty, who has raised an impressive amount of money.
Alaska
A major bit of unfinished business from last Tuesday’s primaries continued to play out today, as Alaska election officials began to count an estimated 25,000 absentee and provisional ballots. Former judge Joe Miller leads incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski by 1,668 votes, and things are getting nasty already with Miller’s campaign alleging vote-tampering by the Murkowski camp. On another front, the Alaska Libertarian Party decided against offering Murkowski its ballot line should she lose the GOP nomination. That means her options would be limited to a write-in campaign. The Libertarian action was bad news for Democratic candidate Scott McAdams, though the hatefulness surrounding the Republican contest could still give him an opening.
Delaware
Meanwhile, in Delaware (another Senate contest where Republicans were assumed to have a virtual lock, in Delaware) the Tea Party Express has decided to weigh in on behalf of insurgent conservative candidate Christine O’Donnell, who is challenging Republican party establishment favorite Mike Castle.
New Hampshire
Similarly, in NH, longtime front-running Republican Senate candidate Kelly Ayotte may be getting nervous following the endorsement of hard-core conservative Ovide Lamontagne by the New Hampshire (nee Manchester) Union-Leader. Democrat Paul Hodes has been leading Lamontagne in general election test heats.
North Carolina
And in yet another race often conceded to Republicans, a new PPP survey of NC (which involved a switchover by PPP from registered to likely voters) shows Democrat Elaine Marshall hanging in there against Sen. Richard Burr, trailing him 43-38 with 6% going to a Libertarian candidate.
It would be ironic, to say the least, if Democratic control of the Senate were saved by unlikely wins in Alaska, Delaware or North Carolina (not to mention Nevada, where most observers wrote off Harry Reid as early as last year), but it’s always possible.
Florida
And then there’s Florida, where two recent polls have shown Charlie Crist falling significantly behind Marco Rubio. Crist is in real danger of losing crucial Democratic support to freshly minted nominee Kendrick Meek, and is dancing around the key question of which party he would caucus with in the Senate.
The game of predicting Republican House gains is intensifying as we get closer to November, and this week GOPers are buzzing over a new Gallup House generic ballot poll that shows them with a ten point lead, the largest in Gallup history. But as Pollster.com’s Mark Blumenthal explains, this result looks a lot like a random-noise outlier, particularly when you compare it to the most recent Newsweek generic ballot poll, which shows the two parties tied. The overall trendlines, though, are hardly comforting for Democrats.
On Friday, I wrote about the current tax debate and bemoaned the failure of Democrats to frame the debate around a more comprehensive proposal of their own, instead of just talking about a more progressive version of the Bush tax cuts. I concluded with my hope that President Obama will put forward his own package of broad, pro-growth reforms to do just that.
Since then, I have two new reasons for hope. First, on Friday afternoon, the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board (PERAB), chaired by Paul Volcker, released a long-overdue report on tax reform proposals. Then President Obama said Monday that his team is weighing “additional measures” to move the economy forward, including both extension of expiring middle-class tax and “further tax cuts to encourage businesses to put their capital to work creating jobs here in the United States.” It’s not much to go on, but the president promised more details on these “proposals” in the days and weeks to come.
Looking at these two news items together, are there clues in Friday’s report to what the president is planning? I think there are. Obama chose to mention putting capital to work, which is different than simply talking about putting people to work. I may be reading too much into it (no doubt from watching too much Rubicon), but the president’s choice of words suggests to me that he’s chosen an approach based on corporate income tax incentives, rather than alternatives like payroll tax cuts to boost hiring, which has been suggested at various times by Republicans, Democrats, and both. The corporate income approach would be consistent with options laid out in Friday’s report, which looks at the benefits of corporate income tax changes and treatment of corporate operations overseas, but not other things like payroll taxes.
Drawing from the Volcker report, my best guess is that the president will offer a version of the “direct expensing” proposal to increase incentives for new capital investments. This seems like an easy choice to argue for stimulating demand and getting larger companies to spend the piles of cash they have been sitting on. Plus, it complements the administration’s push for more spending on clean energy and infrastructure, two priorities the president also mentioned as additional measures on Monday. But the real reason I’m betting on this option is the marketing. As the report acknowledges, “direct expensing” is really just “accelerated depreciation” on steroids (insert Rocket joke of the day here), but giving it a new-ish name and taking it to a new extreme are classic markings of the kind of political repackaging Obama may be looking for right now.
If I let my optimism go completely unchecked, I can also interpret the president’s sentence fragment as a sign he’s prepared for more comprehensive corporate tax reform—taking up the Volcker report’s suggestions for simplifying and reducing corporate rates to incentivize investment and make U.S. more globally competitive. Unlikely, I admit. However, the tone and substance of the report’s chapters on corporate tax reform do match up in many respects to Obama’s rhetoric about “putting capital to work” and “creating jobs here in the United States.” These two themes apply to the predicted benefits of several options included in the report:
Lowering marginal corporate rates will make the U.S. more competitive relative to other developed nations (we currently have the second-highest rates in the world).
Lowering marginal rates will encourage companies to build and create jobs by reducing the cost of capital for new investment and reduces incentives to use debt to finance new spending.
Lost revenues from lower rates can be replaced by eliminating special-interest giveaways and tax expenditures, thereby broadening the base and reducing inefficient corporate subsidies and market distortions.
With lower marginal rates, it will be possible to deal rationally with income earned by U.S. corporations overseas and end the nonsense system of deferring repatriation of earnings to avoid high U.S. taxes.
It’s true that the report is short on specifics and estimates for the options it proposes, which has prompted some to pronounce the entire effort as a missed opportunity for comprehensive reform. This might be true in the sense that Volcker and company could have provided more concrete numbers for the president to cite (and for his opponents to distort), and they could have taken it upon themselves to go beyond what was asked of them and issue an urgent call to arms for overhauling the tax code. They didn’t do either of those things. Instead, they did what they were supposed to do: create an opportunity for the president to do whatever he wants with the report.
That the report is so non-committal doesn’t mean it isn’t part of a larger strategy. Thinking big without announcing a hard-and-fast position to fight for from the outset is classic Obama (can I already say “classic” less than two years into his presidency?). When Obama actually comes out in favor of specific proposals, he frequently likes to do it without telegraphing his punch, as was the case the last time he teamed up with Paul Volcker to endorse the Volcker Rule. So it’s conceivable that both the timing and the tone of this report were planned by the White House—not simply to be ignored and forgotten in the doldrums of August, but to quietly lay the groundwork to support a new tax proposal this fall.
Most of the smart money has been on Congress waiting until after the elections to take up taxes, but that leaves a lot of time for Republicans to pound away at the president’s tax plan and for Democrats to splinter off from the administration’s plan to partially extend the Bush tax cuts. The next couple weeks seems like as good a time as any for Obama to stand with Paul Volcker in a Rose Garden press conference to announce the new “Volcker Plan” for corporate tax cuts. You heard it here first.
For the first time in 20 months, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators will sit down face-to-face in Washington, DC this week. Building on a year and a half of shuttle diplomacy “proximity talks” shepherded by George Mitchell, the White House’s Middle East envoy, this Wednesday, September 1, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu will sit down with his Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas.
There’s been broad skepticism surrounding these talks from the get-go. Is the Obama administration convening talks for domestic political reasons within a pessimistic geo-political environment, or because there’s actual hope? My colleague Will Marshall shares this decidedly luke-warm take: “It’s not hard to find grounds for pessimism,” he wrote last week here on ProgressiveFix.
Here are five ways to gauge the talks’ success:
1. Cameras
Yes, yes – a press conference ain’t much, what with the security and happiness of millions hanging in the balance. But the mere act of holding a joint press conference with Obama stewarding Abbas and Netanyahu at least indicates the talks were a basis for some extraordinarily cautious optimism. It would be better than, say, both leaders departing quietly in the middle of the night without so much as a word to the cameras. But this is the low bar the situation demands.
2. Netanyahu’s position on the settlement moratorium
Upon assuming office last year, Netayahu issued a 10-month moratorium on construction in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. It is due to expire in late September, and Netanyahu, facing right-wing pressure from within his coalition, has said that building will resume.
It is, of course, a shame that the extraordinarily complex issue of where and how to build settlements has been reduced to the binary choice of “build” or “don’t build”. That’s why if Netanyahu, fresh off a positive meeting with Obama in July, can finesse his pledge to continue construction (and please his political base) while giving ground somewhere to show the Palestinians and Obama that he’s serious, we might be in business.
3. Level of buy-in from the “moderate” Middle Eastern countries
Jordan’s King Abdullah and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak are planning to attend. While neither leader is on extraordinarily solid political ground domestically (which may turn out to be the understatement of the year for Mubarak, who faces a potentially explosive election), Abbas needs their blessing to create breathing room with the likes of the nay-sayers in the Arab League, who are already predicting failure but remain generally supportive of talks because of Obama’s “sincerity”. Building an Arab coalition around a deal is key, so watch whether they are vocally supportive of the meeting and what message they take back home.
4. A statement from Hillary Clinton
She’ll be the direct intermediary between the two, so watch her closely. Everything from body-language to expression to the actual words out of her mouth will be important. If there’s a tense, negative air surrounding the talks, the Secretary might just literally embody them.
5. Reactions in Israeli press
Israel has a wide selection of English language publications of good quality, like the Jerusalem Post and Ha’aretz. Keep an eye on what they’re saying – for them, the talks will be issue #1 this week and will no doubt maintain lively commentary. They were the bell-weather for Netanyahu’s trip to DC in July, and the Israeli English-language press deemed that trip a success, which became the de facto public narrative.
Among the literature I picked up on Saturday while attending the “Restoring Honor” rally on the National Mall (purely to indulge my curiosity) was a three-by-five card asking me: “ARE YOU READY TO BEGIN THE REBIRTH OF THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION?” The card directs me to a website, the1789project.com, where I can pledge money to a PAC that will only support candidates who adhere to the Constitution.
Another card tells me: “Politicians are destroying our country. We have the solution. Join us. We seek the modern day incarnations of Madison, Franklin, and Jefferson.” The card is for the “Get Out of Our House” project, or GOOOH. The plan, according to the website, is “to remove all members of the U.S. House of Representatives and replace them with everyday Americans just like you.” Wow. Just like me? I can only dream.
I was struck by the ways in which this resonated with the larger theme of the program: Restoring Honor. Restoring. This great hope that only if we could get back to some golden era, if only we could tap into this apparently forsaken “Constitution” document, if only we could get rid of all the “career politicians” and replace them with ordinary citizens, somehow all the problems of the world would solve themselves.
It’s a wonderfully alluring biblical narrative: the return to the lost Eden. One gentleman I spoke with assured me that if only we all would just stop and really read the Bible and take its teachings to heart, all of our problems would be solved. There would be no need for government. Everything would work perfectly. (He was handing out literature for “Project Restore”). Meanwhile, Glenn Beck announced over the loudspeakers: “To Restore America, we must restore ourselves.”
The idea of redemption through a return to first principles is nothing new, and it’s far from the exclusive province of the political right. One is reminded, for example, of the hopeful Port Huron statement, with its great emphasis on a return to participatory democracy driven by a return to values, and its explicit narrative of decline: “Theoretic chaos has replaced the idealistic thinking of old — and, unable to reconstitute theoretic order, men have condemned idealism itself. Doubt has replaced hopefulness — and men act out a defeatism that is labeled realistic.” Compare that to Glenn Beck: “My role, as I see it, is to wake America up to the backsliding of principles and values.”
Sure, I’m all for self-improvement. We could all be kinder, gentler, harder working, better people. But the very fact that self-improvement is a $10 billion a year industry (and growing) is a testament to the human condition never quite being able to live up to our ideals. “If men were angels,” wrote Madison in Federalist #51, “no government would be necessary.”
The flaw in the redemption-by-return-to-first-principles story is that there never was a golden age. Each era had its strengths and weaknesses, but we tend to remember the wisest statements because those are the ones that are passed on and consecrated. (And lest we forget: The America of 1789 was an isolated agrarian nation in which only rich, educated, white property owners could vote. Would we want go back, even if we could?)
The mild danger in the redemption-by-return-to-first-principles story is that it undermines the ability of political institutions to solve problems through the messy art of compromise. If the only acceptable solution to the mess we’re in is to start fresh (for example, to replace to whole stinkin’ lot of lawmakers with “ordinary citizens”), it won’t be long before that fresh start encounters the same timeless governance problem of aggregating diverse preferences, and start acting like “politicians.” The more serious danger is that the redemption-by-rededication is a kindred spirit of utopian thinking that slides easily into ends-justifies-the-means murder and genocide, from communist purges to terrorist jihads.
The current sputtering economy, or the toxic brew of declining revenues and spiraling debt and entitlement obligations, or climate change, or any of the hard problems we face as a society — these are not going to go away if only we learn to love thy neighbor. The only way they’ll go away is with patience and compromise and hard work. This is the world in which we live. We need to roll up our sleeves and be realistic.
Yes, we can all be better people. I’m trying every day. But a full and complete purge of sin as gateway to a lost Eden is not a substitute for the real challenges of politics. Politics, whatever its shortcomings, is the art of the possible. The return to a lost golden age is the art of the impossible.
The White House today withdrew charges against Abd-Al Rahim al-Nashiri, the al Qaeda operative who lead the attack on the USS Cole in Aden harbor, Yemen in October 2000, and was awaiting trial in a reformed military commission in Guantanamo Bay.
Reasons for the withdrawal remain unclear, but one possibility is that the Obama administration is not comfortable with how rules for the new military tribunal system are being implemented.
As background, on the campaign trail in 2008, then-Senator Obama campaigned against the Bush version of military tribunals. In office, the president endorsed the 2009 Military Commissions Act, which reformed Bush’s military tribunals by letting, say, the defendant actually cross-examine witnesses and call witnesses in their defense. (You can read details of the 2009 law, and how it improves Bush’s 2006 iteration, here.)
Any discomfort from the White House may stem from another dropped case this year against a Guantanamo detainee. In May, the Administration scuttled charges against Omar Khadr, a Canadian, when it became uncomfortable with interpretation of certain legal definitions in the 2009 Act. Based on the Khadr precedent, one Administration estimate believed up to one-third of the Guantanamo proceedings might be canned on similar grounds.
We’ve been operating in this legal limbo for nearly ten years: the system for prosecuting terrorism suspects is an ad hoc, inefficient mish-mash of stop-gap solutions.
But there are better solutions. One is “National Security Court,” along the lines of what the – gasp – French have. Harvey Rishikof made a strong argument for this in PPI’s Memos to the New President:
As a practical matter, however, it will be difficult for you to close Gitmo without an appropriate legal framework for adjudicating terrorism cases.
Such a framework is urgently needed. …
In the French system, an investigating judge is essentially a special prosecutor in charge of a secret, grand jury-like inquiry through which he can file charges, order wiretaps, and issue warrants and subpoenas. These judges can request the assistance of the police and intelligence services; order the preventive detention of suspects for six days without charge; and justify keeping someone behind bars for several years pending an investigation. The judges have international jurisdiction when a French national is involved in a terrorist act, be it as a perpetrator or as a victim.
Clearly, this is by no means an ideal to be adopted wholesale by the American justice system. Several of the French magistrates’ powers would run far afoul of proper constitutional safeguards in the United States. It is worth noting, however, at least one benefit of the French system that we could readily emulate: It has produced a pool of specialized judges and investigators adept at prosecuting terrorist networks.
Of the Bush administration’s many failings in the so-called GWOT, perhaps its greatest is that it never defined the rules of the road to prosecute those who had harmed us. A National Security Court would right that wrong.
Tuesday’s five-state primary/runoff extravaganza produced plenty of drama, several close races, and a few surprises — especially in Alaska’s Republican U.S. Senate primary, where former judge Joe Miller, endorsed by Sarah Palin and fueled by the Tea Party Express, ran slightly ahead of incumbent Lisa Murkowski despite being heavily outspent.
With absentee and provisional ballots still pending, Miller leads by 1668 votes. His campaign appears to have benefitted a great deal from turnout patterns affected by an anti-abortion ballot initiative. If she ultimately loses the GOP nomination, Murkowski could possibly run as the candidate of the Libertarian Party, giving Democrat Scott McAdams a chance.
In a less dramatic outcome, in Arizona, John McCain easily brushed off J.D. Hayworth’s once-fearsome challenge, and Gov. Jan Brewer (R) won with little trouble. GOP House primaries in AZ were a bit more turbulent. In AZ-3, Ben Quayle, son of yes-that-Quayle, overcame involvement in an off-color internet site to win an open seat nomination over a crowded field. In AZ-8, represented by Democrat Gabby Giffords, the GOP primary was won by Tea Party favorite Jesse Kelly over front-runner Jonathan Paton in a mild upset.
In Oklahoma, two Republican congressional runoffs were held. In OK-2, veterinarian Charles Thompson won a low-profile primary to face Blue Dog Democrat Dan Boren. The national GOP will now decide whether to give Thompson a lift by making this a targeted race. In OK-5, church camp director James Lankford won a surprisingly large win over Club for Growth candidate Kevin Calvey (who appears to have gone too negative) for an open Republican seat.
In Vermont, the Democratic gubernatorial contest seems to be ending as it began: close and civil. Final but unofficial returns showed state senate president pro tem Peter Shumlin edging former Lt. Gov. Doug Racine and Secretary of State Deb Markowitz for the right to take on Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie (R). There’s a chance of a recount, but the candidates have already had a unity rally.
There wasn’t much civility down in Florida, however, where the Republican gubernatorial primary was won by wealthy “conservative outsider” Rick Scott, who will carry his extensive baggage into a three-way general election battle with Democrat Alex Sink and independent Bud Chiles.
Scott’s bitterly disappointed opponent, Attorney General Bill McCollum, has suggested he might endorse Sink. Meanwhile, Scott’s Democratic doppelganger, billionaire investor Jeff Greene, did not do so well in the Senate primary; congressman Kendrick Meek beat him easily. (Over at pollster.com, Mark Blumenthal has a good analysis of the challenges Meek will face in the general election).
In highly competitive FL House primaries, 2nd district Blue Dog Alan Boyd narrowly turned back a surprisingly strong challenge from state senate minority leader Al Lawson. 8th district Democrat Alan Grayson, who’s painted a bullseye on his own back with chronic conservative-baiting comments, will face former state senator majority leader Daniel Webster (R). And another vulnerable Democrat, 24th district congresswoman Susan Kosmas, will face state legislator Sandy Adams, who won a fractious primary dominated by fights between Karen Diebel and Craig Miller.
On Saturday, Louisiana will hold its congressional primary, with three Republicans battling for the 3rd district nomination, an open seat being vacated by Democrat Charlie Melancon, who is running for the Senate. In the 2nd district, four Democrats are fighting for the chance to take on one of the most vulnerable Republican incumbents in the House, Joseph Cao.
Meanwhile, also on Saturday, West Virginia is holding its special Senate primary, with Gov. Joe Manchin sure to win the Democratic nod in this sleepy contest, and the late Robert Byrd’s 2008 opponent, John Raese, likely to win the Republican nomination.
We’ll then have a brief break in the primary calendar until September 14, when no less than seven states, plus the District of Columbia, hold their nominating contests.
There has been growing chatter this week in response to James Surowiecki’s recent piece in The New Yorker suggesting we create a new, higher-rate tax bracket for the “super rich.” It’s the kind of side story I should expect to see and not take too seriously when major tax changes are on the political agenda. But I can’t just ignore this one, because it keeps getting more traction, and I think it baits extremists on both sides into all-too-familiar class warfare arguments, which are exactly the kind of discussions we should not be having right now.
As a Democrat, I am strongly in favor of a progressive tax system. It’s one of the widely held values that defines us as a party, and it’s something we should not shrink from fighting for. But there comes a point when the zeal for progressivity can overtake reasonable concerns about encouraging economic growth, and this year is not the time to let that happen. Questions of distributional justice are important, and the Bush tax cuts did a lot to worsen inequality in our country that need to be remedied, but let’s keep the bigger picture in mind here.
The proposed “super rich” bracket is a supercharged example of how progressives are misdirecting our energies in the tax debate. While there’s not much chance that it will make the jump to becoming an actual legislative proposal, the idea has struck a nerve on the left, which is already twitchy over the debate over whether to extend the Bush tax cuts for the top tax brackets, as Paul Krugman dutifully showed in his Times op-ed on Monday. CNBC was quick to give the story more legs by bringing on Michael Linden from the Center for American Progress to endorse the idea in a segment on Monday. Then they came back to it with another segment Wednesday night with Matt Miller (also from CAP) facing off with Stephen Moore from the Wall Street Journal.
For someone who has written about the Tyranny of Dead Ideas, Miller really let himself go a little zombie on this one, sounding too much like the “talking dead” with the old-school liberal argument for steep progressivity in the tax code and a deaf ear to the concerns about economic growth. I’m not criticizing him personally as much I am CNBC for painting him that way, since Miller has repeatedly weighed in with very good thoughts about cuts for payroll and corporate taxes, but I think volunteering to step into the scripted left-wing role for this segment was a step backward from his earlier calls for a more radical centrism.
Is this really the kind of debate we are going to get dragged into this year? With the country still languishing in recession, people in every tax bracket are looking to Washington to do what needs to be done to get the economy going again. Do we really have to listen to the same broken records from both sides this time around (and they really are records, because these arguments haven’t changed much since the days of vinyl)? This is the type of discussion that will drag the current tax debate into a predictable and unproductive battle of liberal and conservative clichés, which all but ensures that Congress will spend the fall in a tug-of-war over marginal tweaks to the Bush tax cuts and ignore other proposals for reform and stimulus.
We Democrats should not paint themselves into our usual corner in the tax debate by limiting our ideas to line-drawing, whether it’s the Administration’s line for the richest two percent or a new line for the “Ultrarich” in the top 0.1 percent. Letting this happen would be a mistake for two reasons:
First, it obscures and marginalizes better policy questions at a time when sustainable economic growth should be our top priority. Putting aside broader reform proposals, even the Bush tax cuts may not deserve to be lumped together and simply cleaved in two at the $250,000 line. For example, rates on dividend income for the top brackets could jump from 15% to 39% in 2011, while capital gains income will stay at a lower 20% rate. There is a good case to be made that the dividend rate should be kept in line with the capital gains rate, regardless of what happens to marginal rates, because having a disparity between these two taxes on investment negatively affects the cost of capital for utilities and other companies paying high dividends, which discourages spending on new capital and infrastructure. But we likely won’t have that debate, because the distributional effects of playing with the dividend rate fall mostly within the top brackets, so they are on the wrong side of the dividing line Obama has drawn.
Second, Republicans usually do a much better job delivering their zombie rhetoric than Democrats. As John Boehner so frequently demonstrates, the Republican response for talking about the top brackets is to use “small business” as a euphemism for rich people. They have shaky new statistics every week about how the Democrats are raising taxes on small business. But trying to explain away all the false numbers tends to put Democrats on the defensive, when they should be making an affirmative case for promoting economic growth. And so far, Boehner and company are getting away with doing just that, because the President and congressional leaders are following our party’s tradition of being reactive on taxes instead of laying out a real vision. So right now the public thinks the “Democrats’ plan” is pretty much whatever John Boehner and the tax zombies say it is.
Progressives’ top priority right now needs to be reviving economic growth and broad-based prosperity. We can’t have a meaningful debate about economic inequality until we get our economy growing again. Jobs and growth—not punishing the rich—are what Americans are interested in, and what we should be talking about. Instead, progressives are limiting their talking points to justifying the dividing line between those who deserve tax cuts and those who don’t—the helps and the help-nots—and we’re letting Republicans own the growth side of the debate.
Democrats need to have something more than tired old thinking that says the Bush tax cuts are mostly OK for now, as long as we give them a quick liberal haircut—just a little off the top. Instead of trying to repackage Bush’s mistakes, we should be framing the debate around the pro-growth virtues of a free-standing package of “Obama tax cuts.” All we need now is for Obama to actually propose one. I hope the zombies didn’t get to him too.
Long one of urban America’s ugly ducklings, Washington D.C. is beginning to shine as a national showcase for school reform.
Two developments this week burnished the capital city’s growing reputation as a laboratory for tough-minded reforms in the areas of school choice and teacher accountability. Education Secretary Arne Duncan named Washington along with nine states as winners in Round 2 of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top grants. And a new Fordham Foundation survey, America’s Best (and Worst) Cities for School Reformranked D.C. second among the 26 cities most receptive to change.
The $4.3 billion Race to the Top (RTTT) program is arguably one of President Obama’s most successful and cost-effective initiatives. To qualify for the competitive grants, states have been obliged to change their laws to make them more reform-friendly. For example, many states have lifted legislative caps on charter schools, adopted common performance standards, and, perhaps most controversially, agreed to use student test scores in evaluations of individual teacher performance.
Reformers and skeptics alike nonetheless slammed this week’s awards as arbitrary and political (some pointed out, for example, that a lot of the winning states happen to have Democratic governors.) Reformers fretted that RTTT’s vague selection criteria rewards states for winning teachers’ union acquiescence in modest reforms, while overlooking states like Colorado that have pursued bolder experiments. In any case, Washington will receive $75 million to be shared by the traditional school system headed by Chancellor Michele Rhee and the city’s robust charter school sector.
So what makes Washington, D.C. so special?
The Fordham study gave the District high marks for attracting talented educational entrepreneurs and organizations, like Teach for America and the New Teacher Project, that recruit and train highly qualified teachers. It praises D.C.’s new contract with the Washington Teachers’ Union, which permits teachers to be paid according to performance, and merit-based layoffs.
The study notes that, with the help of private philanthropy, the District invests generously in school improvement and innovation. The city’s “thriving charter sector” also comes in for praise (full disclosure: I’m a member of the Public Charter School Board here), though the chronic shortage of suitable and affordable facilities for charters is also acknowledged. D.C. also gets high marks for quality control in both the traditional and charter sectors.
Rising test scores in the District attest to Rhee’s single-minded devotion to closing achievement gaps, as well as the charter board’s increasingly tough stance toward persistently low-performing schools in its portfolio. Last spring, 40 D.C. elementary schools achieved double-digit gains in pass rates on the citywide math exams, while 19 had double-digit losses. In reading, 26 elementary schools gained at least 10 points in pass rates on standardized tests, while 19 lost ground. Scores also rose at public charter schools, which enroll fully 38 percent of D.C.’s students. While far from perfect, these numbers represent dramatic progress for a school system that has habitually dwelt in the cellar in comparisons with other urban systems. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/14/AR2009081402168_pf.html)
Rhee also has done battle with the school system’s notoriously inefficient central bureaucracy. Now the schools open on time with a full complement of textbooks. Now we know how many people the system employs. And then there are the all-important intangibles: A new cultural of accountability is being systematically instilled in the system as bad schools are closed or merged with better ones, new principals are brought in and teachers are evaluated and paid based on classroom performance.
On a less positive note, the survey highlighted a polarized D.C. municipal environment. No doubt there’s been a backlash against Rhee’s disruptive reforms and hard-charging style. Lots of comfortable employment arrangements have been upended. Here’s the Fordham Foundation survey: “respondents report that Mayor Adrian Fenty is the only municipal leader willing to expend extensive political capital to advance education reform.” Fenty is locked in a tough reelection battle against D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray. If he loses, it’s widely assumed that Rhee will have lost her lone protector and will be forced to step down as Chancellor. (She may be gone soon anyway; next month she’s getting married to Sacremental Mayor and former NBA standout Kevin Johnson.)
Whatever happens, Washington’s business, political and civic leaders need to find a way to unite behind a firm commitment to finishing the job Fenty and Rhee have begun, as well as strengthening the innovative charter sector. It’s the only way to give D.C. students a decent shot at a quality education, to close achievement gaps between black and Latino kids and others, and to staunch the steady flow of middle class families with kids from the city to the suburbs.
The New York Times implies there’s a problem with fighting corruption in the Afghan government while paying the corrupt, in this case Mohammed Zia Salehi, the chief administration on Afghanistan’s National Security Council:
Mr. Salehi’s relationship with the C.I.A. underscores deep contradictions at the heart of the Obama administration’s policy in Afghanistan, with American officials simultaneously demanding that Hamid Karzai root out the corruption that pervades his government while sometimes subsidizing the very people suspected of perpetrating it.
That’s not right. If we begin holding every official in Afghanistan to some vague corruption-based litmus test, the intelligence community would be completely handcuffed: I’d bet you a paycheck that you could pin some sort of corruption charge on every single official in the entire country.
After all, it’s a bit of a Catch-22, right? If Afghanistan was a graft-free Jeffersonian democracy, CIA wouldn’t have such a need need to recruit unsavory sources like Salehi. But the country is a mess, and our intelligence community better damn-well have its ear to the ground. And if we really want to stop corruption at the highest level, Salehi has regular access to the biggest fish of them all: Karzai. That’s highly valuable.
I understand the desire to keep things above-board, but tough situations demand hard choices, and paying a well-placed but corrupt source is clearly the lesser evil.
Will the Tea Party endure? If so, for how long?
