President Obama, in accepting his Nobel Prize, spoke in lofty terms about the requirement that all nations, weak and strong, must adhere to the legal standards that govern the use of force. He noted that the U.S. had played a leading role in creating that legal framework. And he went on to underline that the U.S. too must respect international law: “America cannot insist that others follow the rules of the road if we refuse to follow them ourselves. For when we don’t, our action can appear arbitrary, and undercut the legitimacy of future intervention — no matter how justified.”
And yet the absence of any public discussion or analysis of the legal issues raised by America’s efforts against terrorism is striking. Whether it be torture and extraordinary rendition, military commissions, the targeted killing by drone attacks in Pakistan, the planning of CIA assassination squads, the large number of civilian deaths in air strikes in Afghanistan, or even the prospect of military strikes in Iran, all of these raise significant and complex international law issues. But you will not find any meaningful discussion of those issues in the media, or indeed in the talking points, blogs, or analysis produced by most liberal or progressive organizations.
Consider the contrast between the media coverage of such topics and the analysis of the issues surrounding the Israeli operations in Gaza earlier this year. There were countless articles examining the legal significance of the claims that the Israeli use of force was disproportionate, that civilians and civilian structures had been targeted, and that Israeli forces were using illegitimate munitions. The coverage was often sympathetic to the Israeli position, but there was nonetheless an examination of the legal issues involved. In contrast, when in the same month American forces killed Afghani civilians in air strikes, there was no such analysis – the entire discussion revolved around the strategic and political ramifications of killing civilians.
Liberal advocates say in private that they did not want to raise the international law arguments against torture, because such arguments “do not play well” in middle America. So the focus of the debate in this country was on the ineffectiveness of torture, and how counterproductive it could be. That is a dangerous argument to stake one’s entire position on. The fact is that the prohibition of torture is one of the very few peremptory norms in international law (known as jus cogens norms) – meaning it is one of the most bedrock principles of international law that nations may not derogate from under any circumstance. The other such norms include the prohibitions on slavery, genocide, and piracy. Yet in America, the debate was over when and under what circumstances we might derogate from the norm, and liberals were afraid to raise the law, because it does not “play well.”
The danger in all of this is that if liberals and progressives are afraid to make the argument for international law and the rule of law, then the argument will not get made. Progressives, afraid of looking weak, abandon the defense of the rule of law in favor of functional arguments. And so the country lurches ever rightward, in a one-way ratchet effect, with crucial principles being left by the side of the road as political liabilities.
Yet this country is supposed to be a “nation of laws” that preaches to the world the importance of the rule of law. These principles are supposed to be foundational, part of the constitutional DNA of the nation. They are part of the identity that is presented to the rest of the world. It cannot reject international law without doing violence to its own notions of the importance of law and the rule of law.
Moreover, as President Obama said, if the U.S. does not respect and observe the international legal standards, then it will lose its legitimacy and moral authority in the world. And that means that the extent to which American policy conforms to international law, from military commissions to targeted killings in Pakistan, must be part of the national discourse. So progressives have to engage the legal issues more, both to help preserve the country’s identity as a nation of laws, and to help ensure that we at least understand whether policy complies with the law.
The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of the Progressive Policy Institute.
A great new piece from Shadi Hamid in the latest Democracy: A Journal of Ideas on “The Cairo Conundrum” — the seeming paradox between peace and stability in the Middle East. Hamid examines American policy towards Egypt, arguing convincingly:
[T]he pursuit of peace came to depend on prevailing authoritarian structures. Unless autocracy can be made permanent–and there is little reason to think that it can–this state of affairs is unsustainable. If Obama wishes to repair relationships with Middle Eastern governments, then he may, in the process, alienate the other key constituency he seemed to be speaking to [in Cairo] on June 4: the millions of everyday Arabs and Muslims hoping for more freedom and democracy.
He offers a dual-track approach to break the longstanding American mindset that democracy and stability in Egypt are a zero-sum game. The first track is “positive conditionality” — offering even more aid to Egypt, provided the government meets a series of democratization benchmarks. Should it fail in the first year, the money would be denied but rolled over into an accumulating fund. The entire amount would remain available once Egypt fulfilled the requirements; fail to do so, and the price of non-compliance would grow every year. The second track is “Islamic engagement” whereby the administration would facilitate political participation with moderate Islamist parties that renounce violence.
Hamid’s formula may not prove to be ultimately successful — after all it is quite possible that Egypt would be happy to accept ever-increasing American donations while feigning a reformist bent. But as long as the White House remains continually engaged across the spectrum of Egyptian politics, it is quite possible that Hamid’s formula of grassroots pressure married to large financial incentives could move Egypt along the path to democratic openness.
Greetings from Miami, where the weather is warm and the politics are positively scorching. Down in these parts, the talk has centered on the struggles of Gov. Charlie Crist in the Republican primary for the Senate against former House Speaker Marco Rubio, who is challenging him from the right.
Rubio was once considered a long shot. But a recent Rasmussen poll has pegged the race as a dead heat. As Ed Kilgore noted in these pages, Rubio has become a star in the national conservative movement, winning the endorsements of the right’s true believers eager to bag themselves another RINO in the moderate Crist.
Miami Republican Reps. Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart have pulled their endorsement of Gov. Charlie Crist for the U.S. Senate, dealing his campaign a significant blow in South Florida’s Hispanic community.
When asked by the Miami Herald the reason for pulling their support, Lincoln Diaz-Balart was cryptic, saying Crist “left us no alternative and he knows why.” The Herald reports that it might have something to do with Crist passing over a prosecutor recommended for a North Florida county judgeship by Lincoln Diaz-Balart.
Whatever the reason, it’s the latest round of bad news for Crist, whose moderate Republicanism has run afoul of a state party that — like the national conservative movement — has the urge to purge.
But that’s not all! Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer has been facing calls for his resignation from state party leaders who have accused him of mismanaging the state GOP’s finances and mishandling its political operations. As Crist’s handpicked GOP chairman, Greer has been widely seen as devoting much of his efforts to Crist’s campaign. In fact, Greer had sought to snuff out Rubio’s primary challenge early on, a move that certainly did not endear him to the party’s restive base.
(Now, before you go and think that Greer is a reasonable, level-headed Republican being targeted by an inflamed rank-and-file, think again. Remember when President Obama gave that televised speech to students across the country at the beginning of the school year and caused a right-wing meltdown? Here was Greer’s Glenn Beck-ian response: “As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology.”)
Greer has responded by sending out a letter accusing his critics of being “bent on the destruction of the Republican Party.” He has also agreed to hold a special meeting to rescind his chairmanship, as his critics had demanded — but claimed in his letter that the rules do not allow for such a move at the special meeting.
One thing seems certain: with the well-funded Crist and his GOP chairman now fighting for their political lives, the Florida GOP civil war is only going to get uglier. After weeks of watching progressives duke it out over health care, it’s nice to be distracted by the internecine wars on the other side for a change.
As a Democrat from the South, the news that freshman Rep. Parker Griffith of Alabama was switching parties brought back bad memories from the 1990s, when a goodly number of elected officials from the region who had been Democrats for no particular reason other than political convenience became Republicans for no particular reason other than political convenience.
But the exodus of party-switchers back then was both natural and healthy, painful as it was. Jay Cost of RealClearPolitics seems to think, or hope, that Griffith’s flip-flop could touch off another wave of party-switching. I have two reactions to that: (a) if, as appears entirely possible, Griffith loses his seat anyway, then I doubt he’s going to be a major role model for others; and (b) Griffith is from the rare southern seat that is conservative but has never elected a Republican congressman. In other words, it’s like the venues of the party-switchers of the 1990s, when the realignment of the parties was reaching its peak. Most moderate-to-conservative Democrats in the South are from areas where genuine Democrats-In-Name-Only left the party years ago. The remainders are a pretty hardy bunch, even if more progressive Democrats don’t like their voting records.
But whether or not Parker Griffith is the wave of the future or the north end of a south-bound brontosaurus, one thing ought to be clear: his protestations that he had to change parties because of some shocking new ideological development in the Democratic Party is total, absolute, conscious b.s. Griffith’s not some crusty old long-time incumbent whose party changed without him; he was first elected in 2008, when Barack Obama was running on a platform promising climate change and health care reform legislation, and going along with George W. Bush’s decision to rescue the financial industry. Nancy Pelosi, whom Griffith is now attacking, wasn’t any less liberal then that she is today. Sure, he needs to play catch-up with his new party-mates in shrieking about socialism and the destruction of the U.S. Constitution, but nobody should be under any illusion that anything has changed since 2008 other than Parker Griffith’s assessment of his re-election prospects.
So however you assess the meaning of this development, nobody in either party should have any particular respect for Griffith–not because he’s a “turncoat,” but because he’s trying to disguise his opportunism as an act of principle, which it is not.
Dick Cheney may have wonHuman Events‘ “Conservative of the Year” award, but the Right’s more contemporary megastar, Sarah Palin, got her own big end of the year award. She’s the author of PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year,” via her infamous Facebook post on health reform and “death panels.”
This was indeed an instant classic: completely fabricated, aimed at a particularly important constituency, and applying one of the favorite hallucinations of Palin’s buddies in the Right to Life movement (liberals want to extend their “holocaust” from the unborn to old folks) to the domestic policy issue of the day. And best of all, the lie was distributed not through some clunky and news-cycle-sensitive speech, but through Facebook!
TPM has a nice slide show illustrating how the “death panel” meme pre-developed before Palin invented the term and launched it into the national consciousness.
The Whos down in Whoville might almost be jealous of Portici – a town of some 60,000 residents near Naples, Italy – whose mayor, Vincenzo Cuomo declared that Christmas decorations would be banned in public this year.
And why would Whoville be jealous of this decidedly anti-festive decree? Because at least the good mayor has a reason to justify his actions: In Whoville, the Grinch stole Christmas out of spite; in Portici, Mayor Cuomo’s policy is an attempt to break a Mafia funding scheme.
The crackdown on tinsel, Mr. Cuomo says, is the latest front in his battle against the Camorra, the Naples-based mob known for its brutality and economic savvy.
When the Christmas season comes around — and holiday shopping picks up — the town sees a spike in payments of the pizzo, or protection money. The “pizzo di Natale,” as Christmas-time payments are called, is commonly carried out through the forced sale of overpriced decorations — from Advent calendars to poinsettias — by the Camorra to shopkeepers.
So far, so good, though the Mafia aren’t usually ones to take such aggressive attempts to curb their power lightly. Two months ago, the mayor received a bullet from an AK-47 in the mail. And that’s not the only threat: No doubt if they ever get wind of it, Fox News viewers will also shower him with a deluge of War on Christmas hate mail.
PPI President Will Marshall joined a panel to discuss and assess President Obama’s performance on national security and domestic policy issues at the end of his first year in office.
Essays written by the panelist are featured in the current edition of The American Interest.
This event will run from 12:15pm – 1:45pm EST and will be featured on CSPAN later this week.
Panelist Walter Russell Mead
Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy
Council on Foreign Relations
Richard Perle
Resident Fellow
American Enterprise Institute
G. John Ikenberry (via conference call)
Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs
Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs
Princeton University
Will Marshall
President
Progressive Policy Institute
Stephen Krasner (via conference call)
Former Director of Policy Planning, US State Department
Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations, Stanford University
Ronald Steel
Professor Emeritus of International Affairs
University of Southern California
stage-setting remarks Adam Garfinkle
Editor The American Interest
moderator Steve Coll
President
New America Foundation
Staff Writer, New Yorker
Here at P-Fix, the ever-energetic Scott Winship has pivoted from a debate with me and others about the advisability of limiting or killing off the Senate filibuster into an extended and scholarly discussion of the origins and nature of partisan polarization. He’s mainly doing battle with the 2005 book “Off-Center” by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. I have no particular dog in that fight, other than to observe that Hacker and Pierson did usefully draw attention to the perils involved in allowing either party to unilaterally move “the center.”
But while I am not competent to joust with Scott on the proper exegesis of Poole-Rosenthal “scores,” I do find a couple of the assumptions he makes quite troubling.
The first is his understandable but still misleading reliance on self-identification of “liberals, moderates, and conservatives” (or some variation involving intensity) for defining the ideological character of the American electorate. Yes, polls of self-identification on this scale do show a very stable “center-right country” in which conservatives typically outnumber liberals three-to-two or even more. This is how Scott arrives at his fundamental argument that polarized elected officials don’t adequately represent the people who elected them, and also how he somehow concludes that the notable shift of Republican opinion to the right in recent years has made the system more, not less representative (that’s his major refutation of the Hacker-Pierson contention that the GOP has dragged the political center to the right).
Self-identification measurements are always iffy, as is made most evident by the vast gap between the number of voters who call themselves “independents” and the number who actually behave in an independent manner. But the hoary liberal-moderate-conservative scale is particularly influenced by the unpopularity of the “liberal” term, even among many voters who are “liberal” by the normal standards. This is what conservatives have bought with so many years and so many billions of dollars invested in the demonization of “liberalism,” compounded by the very different meanings the term has denoted here and abroad.
The distortion involved in using this term is made evident by many, many surveys that show millions of “non-liberal” voters agreeing with liberal values and policy goals, and by a few efforts to use a different typology. In the latter category, John Halpin and Karl Agne published a study earlier this year that found a significantly different spectrum of ideological self-identification simply by adding two other options — “progressive” and “libertarian” — to the usual three choices. The electorate broke down as 16% progressive, 15% liberal, 29% moderate, 34% conservative, and 2% libertarian — a much more equal distribution than the ancient three-to-two-or-higher advantage for the right.
It’s worth noting as well that the “center-right nation” meme has the perverse effect of holding Democrats to a higher standard of “bipartisanship” than Republicans, since “liberals” obviously have to move further to reach the actual political center than “conservatives.” And indeed, that’s pretty much what Scott suggests.
The second problematic feature of Scott’s analysis is that his data is (unavoidably, since you use what you can get) crucially out of date when it comes to profiling Republicans ideologically. Pre-2006 analyses of Republican elected official ideology may well be useful for a historical debate, but since this whole discussion began with the current partisan gridlock in Congress, the sharp movement of the GOP to the right following its defeat in the last two election cycles is more than a little relevant. To put it simply, the “moderate” wing of the Republican Party, at least in Congress, largely died after 2006 and 2008, partly because many moderates were defeated, and partly because party leaders and activists alike made a collective decision to blame both defeats on insufficient GOP conservatism. Few if any Republican “thinkers” are arguing for greater moderation or bipartisanship; more common are safaris to bag the increasingly rare species of the RINO. And most obviously, as Barack Obama seeks to implement the campaign platform (if not, as in health care, something to the right of his platform) he won on, Republicans in Congress are united against him while Democratic moderate dissenters are sometimes so thick you can’t stir them with a stick. This is not the picture Scott paints from his data of a political system where both parties have equally eschewed “the center.”
Getting back to the original discussion, Scott suggested that reforms to open up primary elections to independents might be a more fruitful approach to ending gridlock than restoring something like majority rule in the Senate. Though I favor open (or at least more open) primaries as a general proposition, the idea that this would have an immediate impact on polarization isn’t terribly compelling. It’s a subject that is complicated by definitions: some states with “closed” primaries allow very late changes in party registration, even on Election Day, which certainly gives independents every opportunity to participate. “Open” primaries range from the “jungle” primaries of Louisiana and Washington, to those in states with no party registration to begin with, to those who allow registered independents to vote in either party’s primary. But if you are looking in this direction for a cure-all, consider that the two most ideological senators, Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, are both from open primary states. (Meanwhile, Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman, and Olympia Snowe are products of closed primary states.) And remember, too, that registered “independents” are not always “centrists.”
In the immediate future, there are only two apparent routes to ending gridlock. One would be curbing the filibuster, either through intrapartisan pressure among Democrats to support cloture votes as a matter of course, or a change in the Senate rules. The other would be the revival of interest among Republicans in governing, either because they win elections and are forced to do so, or they lose so badly that today’s rightward stampede is reversed.
TNR published a piece I did the other day examining the ideological underpinnings of the left/center split in the Democratic Party over the propriety of a universal health care system based on regulated and subsidized private health insurers. I suggested there was a burgeoning, if questionably workable, tactical alliance between “social-democratic” progressives and some conservatives to derail much of the Obama overall agenda. Then I made this observation:
[O]n a widening range of issues, Obama’s critics to the right say he’s engineering a government takeover of the private sector, while his critics to the left accuse him of promoting a corporate takeover of the public sector. They can’t both be right, of course, and these critics would take the country in completely different directions if given a chance. But the tactical convergence is there if they choose to pursue it.
This statement has drawn considerable comment from people on both the Right and Left, mainly objecting to the argument that Obama’s critics can’t all be right.
Conservative theoretician Reihan Salam, writing for National Review, first argued that there’s not much substantive difference between the “New Democrat” deployment of private-sector entities in public initiatives and that favored by the privatizers of the Right. But then he pirouetted to make common cause with Obama’s critics on the Left:
It is entirely possible for both sets of critics to be correct. The concern from the right isn’t that the Obama approach will literally nationalize for-profit health insurers. Rather, it is that for-profit health insurers will continue evolving into heavily subsidized firms that function as public utilities, and that seek advantage by gaming the political process. Profits, including profits governed by medical loss ratios, can and will then be cycled into political action, which leads to the anxiety concerning a “corporate takeover of the public sector.”
Salam’s friend Ross Douthat of The New York Times added an “amen” to this argument:
The point is that the more intertwined industry and government become, the harder it is to discern who’s “taking over” whom — and the less it matters, because the taxpayer is taking it on the chin either way.
But do conservatives really oppose this intertwining of industry and government? Rhetorically, yes, operationally — not so much.
Consider the default-drive Republican approach to health care reform, such as it is. It typically begins with federal preemption of state medical malpractice laws and health insurance regulation, the latter intended to produce a national market for private insurance (while also, not coincidentally, eliminating existing state provisions designed to prevent discriminatory practices). But the centerpiece is invariably large federal tax credits, accompanied by killing off the current tax deduction for employer-provided coverage, all designed to massively subsidize the purchase of private health insurance by individuals (with or without, depending on the proposal, any sort of group purchases for high-risk individuals). Another conservative pet rock is federal support for Health Savings Accounts, which encourage healthy people to pay cash for most medical services, perhaps supplemented by (very profitable) private catastrophic insurance policies. And most conservatives, when they aren’t “Medagoguing” Democratic proposals to rein in Medicare costs, favor “voucherizing” Medicare benefits—another gigantic subsidy for private health insurers.
Now some conservatives will privately tell you that all these subsidy-and-deregulation schemes are just an interim “solution” towards that great gettin’ up morning when tax rates can be massively lowered, all the tax credits, vouchers and other subsidies can be eliminated, and the government gets out of the health insurance business entirely. But don’t expect to see that on any campaign manifestos in the foreseeable future. In the meantime, Republicans generally support huge government subsidies to corporations without any public-spirited regulatory concessions in return.
Do anti-“corporatist” progressives really think they can make common cause with conservatives, beyond deep-sixing Obama’s agenda in the short term? Well, sorta kinda. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, who rejected my “incompatibility” argument about left and right critics of “corporatism” as strongly as did Salam, is smart and honest enough to acknowledge there’s no real common ground with conventional conservatives or Republican pols. He instead offers a vision of an “outsider” coalition that includes anti-corporatist progressives and Tea Party types. This is, of course, the age-old “populist” dream (most famously articulated by Tom Frank inWhat’s the Matter With Kansas?) of a progressive takeover of the Democratic Party that attracts millions of current GOP voters (or nonvoters) who don’t share the economic interests of the Republican Party or the conservative movement but have seen little difference between the two parties.
All I can say is: Good luck with that, Glenn. Short of a complete and immediate revolution within one or both parties, complete with blood purges and electoral chaos, it’s hard to see any vehicle for a left-right “populist” alliance other than a Lou Dobbs presidential run. Barring that unlikely convergence, wrecking Obama’s “corporate” agenda would produce little more on the horizon than a return to the kind of governance we enjoyed during the Bush years, or maybe a bit worse given the current savage trajectory of the GOP.
Part of my intention in the original essay was to suggest that pro-Obama Democrats take seriously the views of intra-party rebels on health care and other issues, instead of insulting them as impractical and childish or obsessed with meaningless totems like the “public option” (which in the anti-corporatist context isn’t meaningless at all). But said rebels really do need to think through where they are going, and where they would take Democrats and the progressive coalition.
Meanwhile, conservatives need to be far less pious about their alleged objections to “corporatism.” Cheap rhetoric aside, their own agenda (when it’s not just preserving the status quo) is largely corporatism with any clear and enforceable public purpose cast aside whenever possible.
Robert Stavins, who wrote us a dispatch from Copenhagen upon President Obama’s arrival there last week, has had a couple of days to mull over the outcome of the talks. His verdict: qualified approval, with a healthy dose of “too soon to tell.”
At the final hour in Copenhagen, the leaders of a small number of key countries worked creatively together to identify a politically feasible path forward. I have previously argued (“Defining Success for Climate Negotiations in Copenhagen”) that the best goal for the Copenhagen climate talks was to make progress on a sound foundation for meaningful, long-term global action, not some notion of immediate, numerical triumph. That has essentially been accomplished with the “Copenhagen Accord,” despite its flaws and despite overt challenges from five of some 193 countries represented (Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Sudan, and Venezuela).
Stavins calls the deal “a potentially very important third step” (the Rio Earth Summit in ’92 and Kyoto in ’97 being the first two), noting the improvement it makes over the Kyoto Protocol. The accord “expand[s] the coalition of the willing” by including rapidly growing developing countries that were left out in the Kyoto agreement, a crucial move if the world really is to make a concerted effort to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.
Underscoring the immense difficulty of getting the whole world to sign on to one agreement, Stavins argues that while the Copenhagen accord may fall short of people’s expectations, it nonetheless was much better than what most people anticipated days before the conference’s end, when talks seemed hopelessly stuck in neutral. Stavins singles out President Obama’s late-game intervention as key to hammering out an accord. But as Stavins’ item-by-item breakdown of the deal suggests, there are simply too many details that have yet to be hammered out to fully determine the accord’s merits. The jury is still out.
One point that Stavins does make stands out: pointing the way forward, he suggests that bilateral and multilateral talks might be the more effective path as we proceed from here. I’ve been wondering about this, too. Considering how unwieldy it is to get nearly 200 nations on the same page, and that only 17 countries in the world account for some 90 percent of its emissions, wouldn’t scaling down agreements to the bilateral and multilateral level have a better chance of getting results?
Of course, it will all go for naught if the U.S. doesn’t act. Although China is now the world’s largest GHG emitter, it is still doing more on the renewable energy front than the U.S. And let’s face it: the average Chinese citizen is still nowhere near the polluter the average American is. The fact is that the U.S. needs to now do its part and enact a cap-and-trade bill. Senators, the world is watching — and waiting.
So: at about one o’clock this morning, the United States Senate, or at least the 60 members of its Democratic Caucus, passed the long-awaited cloture vote to proceed to a final consideration of a health care reform bill.
As one who has had an irrational faith that the Senate would get to this point somehow or other, I have to say it was still an improbable accomplishment.
As recently as a few days ago, Joe Lieberman looked all but unreachable for this vote. Then Ben Nelson looked unreachable, even as Republicans Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins made it clear they had decided that nearly a year of begging from the White House and Senate Democrats wasn’t enough to overcome the right-wing heat they were experiencing. Then Democrats like Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders came under intense pressure to hold up the bill from progressives determined to derail the latest deal and force a recourse to a 2010 reconciliation strategy.
More fundamentally, a 60-vote Democratic Caucus was an exceptionally improbable achievement. It took (a) a near-sweep by Democrats of winnable seats in 2008; (b) a complex deal to keep arch-apostate Lieberman in the Caucus; (c) a favorable resolution of the near-tie vote in Minnesota after months of GOP legal obstruction; and (d) swift action by the Massachusetts legislature to provide for an interim Senator to replace the late Ted Kennedy.
It all came down to a one a.m. vote after a rare Washington snow storm, with Republicans openly praying that someone (i.e., the infirm Robert Byrd of West Virginia) wouldn’t be physically present.
The current conservative caterwauling about a “rushed” vote is pretty hilarious, given the endless delays undertaken by Senate Democrats all summer and early fall in an effort to engage Republicans, the open and notorious GOP strategy of running out the clock (reminiscent of the Bush strategy for securing the presidency nine years ago), and the front-page status of every detail of the legislation since last spring. Does anyone doubt for a moment that if Democrats had gone along and delayed final Senate action until after the holidays, the same people whining about their spoiled Christmas would be demanding the legislation be put off until after the 2010 elections? Indeed, that’s what we will in fact be hearing in January when a House-Senate conference committee completes its work.
That conference committee, and the House and Senate votes necessary to ratify its report, is far from a slam dunk, given House Democratic resentment of Senate deal-making, and substantive disputes on issues ranging from the public option to abortion. But the struggle to get to 60 votes in the Senate makes the endgame of health care reform look manageable by contrast.
The following is an excerpt from Will Marshall’s piece in the latest issue of American Interest magazine:
How to grade President Obama’s first year in office? As Zhou Enlai replied when asked his opinion of the French Revolution, “It’s too soon to say.” Obama has set in motion a host of bold reforms that could break some of America’s deepest political impasses, or cause massive disillusionment if they fail. The big question now is whether his tenacity matches his audacity.
The string of “incompletes” on the Obama report card, however, hasn’t kept partisans and ideologues from rushing to judgment. To Charles Krauthammer, the President is “a man of perpetual promise” who has “achieved nothing.” That must be a relief, since the conservative columnist also maintains that Obama is a European-style social democrat bent on expanding government at home and appeasing America’s foes abroad. The backbone issue also arises on the Left. Many liberals fret that Obama isn’t tough enough to face down Republican obstructionists, or keep balky Democratic moderates in line. They also worry that his pragmatism and coolly logical approach to governing lacks the power to stir progressive souls. At this stage, though, all such judgments seem as premature as the Nobel Committee’s risible decision to award him a Peace Prize.
The President does have one big accomplishment under his belt: preventing the U.S. economy from sliding into the abyss. As Alan Blinder notes, the Administration managed to rescue the nation’s largest banks and get a hefty stimulus bill through Congress with impressive dispatch. That vigorous response, buttressed by an open-handed Fed, surely played a part in the stock market’s healthy gains since the Inauguration, as well as the economy’s return to growth (3.5 percent in the third quarter). But even if the recession is technically over, millions of working families are hurting. White House economists say unemployment will hit double digits soon and stay high well into next year. Consumer confidence is low, credit is still scarce, and there will likely be more foreclosures next year as mortgage rates reset.
Washington’s hyperactivity, moreover, seems to have awakened fears of “big government”, especially among independent voters who hold the balance in U.S. politics. There’s simmering anger in Middle America over taxpayer bailouts of greedy speculators and inept auto companies, reinforced by a sense that the government has intruded too deeply into the workings of private companies. None of this has led Obama to temper his ambitions. He is also trying to fix the health care system, create a new regulatory framework for finance, pass a complicated “cap and trade” scheme for carbon emissions, and turn around failing public schools. He’s promised to take on the highly combustible issues of entitlements and immigration reform just as soon as he can.
On the security front, he is attempting to check a spreading insurgency in Afghanistan, abet Pakistan’s struggle against extremists, and withdraw U.S. troops without destabilizing Iraq; shut down nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea en route to a “world free of nuclear weapons”; rekindle Middle East peace talks; and meet his one-year deadline for closing the Guantánamo Bay prison. Give the man his due: He’s not dodging the tough ones.
But by taking so many challenges on at once, Obama risks diluting his focus and making a themeless pudding of his presidency. His determination to solve stubborn public problems seems commendable, but his frenetic activity has yet to gel into a coherent story about the kind of society he wants America to be. The narrative of Obama’s presidency so far is more about him than us.
It seems almost elementary that the governments of Pakistan and the U.S. both have a vested interest in extending Islamabad’s authority over the whole of its country, a point David Ignatius makes today:
Here’s the cold, hard truth: U.S. success in Afghanistan depends on Pakistan gaining sovereignty over the tribal belt. If the insurgents can continue to maintain their havens in North Waziristan and other tribal areas, then President Obama’s surge of troops in Afghanistan will fail. It’s that simple.
Extending the Pakistani government’s writ is certainly a core element to any hope of securing Afghanistan. A safe base of operation across the border in Pakistan would allow al Qaeda’s senior leadership room to incubate in hopes of re-spreading its wings in a larger Taliban-protected region. Points for identifying the problem, but it’s not that simple.
But just a handful of pages away from Ignatius is a reminder of just how difficult that challenge will be:
Pakistan’s Supreme Court nullified on Wednesday a controversial deal that had given President Asif Ali Zardari and thousands of other government officials amnesty from prosecution on corruption charges, a decision likely to further weaken Zardari’s shaky hold on power.
The ruling could open the door to additional legal challenges against Zardari. Although he still has immunity from prosecution under the constitution, opponents plan to contest that by arguing that Zardari is technically ineligible for the presidency. …
But Zardari’s ability to make decisions about the level of Pakistani cooperation with the United States has been compromised by his struggle to simply hold on to his job — a task likely to be made more difficult by the court ruling.
There are essentially three legs of power in the Pakistani government — the military and intelligence services are the largest center of gravity, followed by the courts and then the civilian leadership. Rivalries between all three are intense to say the least, a dissection of which could take up an entire encyclopedic volume. And even though the military isn’t mentioned in the WaPo’s article, it almost goes without saying that the generals would be fine if Zardari fell from power.
The point is that as long as these communities’ main focus is a struggle for power, the White House will never get them to pay primary attention to internal security. And even if you could, each power base has reasons (some better than others) to turn a blind eye to the Taliban lodged in Pakistan’s hinterland.
The situation isn’t hopeless…yet. Despite long-standing suspicions of civilian President Zardari’s corruption (hey, the guy wasn’t called “Mr. 10 Percent” for nothing), he is the legitimately elected leader and was allowed to return to Pakistan — with his late-wife Benazir Bhutto — in an amnesty deal reached with ex-President Pervez Musharraf. Therefore, the U.S. should stand by Pakistan’s nascent democracy and support Zardari, without making him look like an American puppet.
Then the U.S. government should work on aligning the military under Pakistan’s civilian leadership. Congress tried this by conditioning aid on just such a goal in October. Guess what? It didn’t go over so well with Pakistan’s generals. Back to the drawing board.
Word going around Washington this week is that Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA) are pushing to reinstate Glass-Steagall:
McCain and Cantwell, a Washington Democrat, join other lawmakers in Congress proposing to reinstate the 1933 law, repealed a decade ago by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that led to a rise in conglomerates including Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp. active in retail banking, insurance and proprietary trading. Legislation to reinstate the ban was introduced today in the House.
While this move is a well-meaning attempt to rein in the financial sector, it doesn’t address the issues that caused last fall’s crisis.
Glass-Steagall was aimed at separating “boring” retail banking (the Bailey Building and Loan Association, for example) from “risky” investment bankers (Gordon Gekko). It was eventually repealed, as U.S. banks felt it put them at a disadvantage in the global marketplace against European “universal” banks, such as Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, and HSBC.
At the time there was concern that repealing Glass-Steagall would create banks that were systematically dangerous. In hindsight, that concern would seem to be born out — but it isn’t. After all, the three major bank collapses that precipitated the crisis were Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Lehman Brothers. All three were obviously Too Big Too Fail, but all three would have been unaffected by a reinstatement of Glass-Steagall — none of them is a retail bank (this is why you never saw Merrill or Lehman ATMs).
Rather than focusing on micromanaging bank structure, and stifling entrepreneurship in the financial sector, the Senators would be better served by evaluating different options to limit the size of Too Big Too Fail banks. A smarter idea would be to extend the retail bank deposits cap idea to total bank assets. Currently, no bank can have more than 10 percent of total national retail deposits (Bank of America got a waiver for the 2007 purchase of Chicagoland’s LaSalle bank and now has 12.2 percent of national deposits). Peter Boone and Simon Johnson suggest applying this simple principle to total bank liabilities. They recommend a limit of 2 percent of GDP, which is in line with the $300 billion that Felix Salmon has been recommending since March. Importantly, it’s also in line with the de facto $100 billion threshold that bank regulators are using now.
This way the government isn’t running banks and bankers can pursue the capitalist impulse that drives our economy. But with a cap on liabilities, the decisions of bankers cannot threaten our economy like they have in the past.
Let’s examine Hacker and Pierson’s definition of “the center.” When they compare activists to independents, changes in the distance from independents may be due to growing extremism among activists. However, the distance may grow without activists changing their views at all if independents change their views. So saying Republican activists drifted further away from the center than Democratic activists may misstate what occurred; independents may simply have drifted toward Democratic activists over time without activists drifting anywhere. It’s also possible that Republican activists have grown more extreme, which has pushed independents closer to Democratic activists’ (unchanged) views.
Furthermore, secular changes in ideology over time can move people from the independent category into Democratic and Republican camps and vice versa, making it difficult to say whether the changes identified indicate that activists (or independents) are changing their views, or that it’s just flows into or out of the parties that is changing. If one of the parties looks more or less extreme, it could simply be that people who would have called themselves independent in the past are now identifying with one of the parties, making the leftover independents look somewhat more extreme in the opposite direction.
Rather than compare activists to independents, why not simply measure how far they are from the midpoint of the ideology scale? When one does so, one obtains the graph below.
By this measure, which avoids all of the problems with using independents as a reference point, the change in extremism among Democratic activists looks exactly the same as the trend for Republican activists. Once again, Republican activists look more extreme in any year, and this time (not shown) this remains the case when one looks at the unsmoothed data points.
A Better Way to Measure Ideology
There is also a problem with Hacker and Pierson’s measure of ideology. If we want to know whether party activists have become ideologically more extreme over time, we should use as pure a measure of ideology as possible. The measure Hacker and Pierson use, however, conflates ideology with tolerance and empathy because it is based on questions asking how warm or cold one feels toward liberals and conservatives. It could be that Democratic activists are simply more tolerant of their opponents than Republican activists rather than being more centrist. One can feel warmly toward a group without identifying oneself with it.
A better measure of changing ideology among party activists would be to look directly at changes in self-identified ideology. The NES asks respondents to place themselves on a 7-point scale ranging from extremely liberal to extremely conservative. Here, then, is a final chart showing trends for activists in each party, with ideology measured as the distance of activists from “4” – the midpoint of the seven-point scale. The actual data points are connected and the smoothed trends are shown as black dashed lines. It should be noted that this chart is based on even smaller sample sizes than Hacker and Pierson’s, so I show the margin of error for the data points as dashed vertical lines. I also omit off-year elections to make the chart less noisy.
This chart confirms that Republican activists more often than not have been more extreme than Democratic activists, though the two groups were statistically tied in 1972, 1976, 1992, and 2004. There is a clear trend toward greater extremism among Republican activists. Among Democratic activists, there was little consistency between 1972 and 1998, but they appear to have moved to the center in 2000 and 2002 before jumping up to the level of Republican extremism in 2004.
Finally, there is the claim by Hacker and Pierson that Democratic activists are more centrist than other Democrats. In my results, this was not true in 2004 whether one used the thermometer index or the self-identified seven-point ideology measure and was not true in 2002 unless one used the seven-point measure (which Hacker and Pierson did not). Regardless, none of the differences between the two groups – in my results or theirs – are statistically significant due to the small sample sizes.
In sum, Republican activists have generally been at least as extreme as Democratic activists and often more so, though not in 2004, which makes the Republican pattern seem less worrisome. Furthermore, while in 2002 it looked like Republican extremism had increased and Democrats had become more moderate, by 2004 Democrats had completely caught up to Republicans. Republican and Democratic activists were equally far from the center in 1972 and in 2004, so the shift was of the same magnitude for both. And there’s no reliable evidence that Democratic activists are more moderate than other Democrats.
The Bush administration and the Republican Congress may have used various tactics in order to pass an agenda that lacked strong support. But they were not “off center” if that phrase is taken to mean that their agenda was outside the bounds of what the public supported. Or more specifically, where Republicans succeeded, their agenda was not out of bounds. Hacker and Pierson downplayed the extent to which Republicans had to reach out to the center in what they did or did not favor. Education spending, for instance, increased more under Bush than under Clinton, in a nod to “compassionate conservatism.” Furthermore, where Republicans truly moved off center, they failed, as with Social Security privatization. And of course, 2006 and 2008 happened.
The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of the Progressive Policy Institute.
The following is a guest column from PPI friend and sometime contributor Robert Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government at Harvard and director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program. He is attending the U.N. climate change negotiations in Copenhagen.
First things first: Let’s start with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s announcement today regarding U.S. funding for developing countries. The developing countries are asking for truly huge sums in Copenhagen — more than $100 billion to $200 billion annually to pay for their carbon mitigation and climate change adaptation through 2050. The U.S. can play an important role, and it could do so in a way that will not add to U.S. debt and ought not antagonize more conservative elements in the U.S. Congress, but it will not be through direct payments from the U.S. government to governments of developing countries. Let me explain.
Although it is inconceivable that the governments of the industrialized world, including the U.S. government, will come up with sufficient, sustainable foreign aid to satisfy the demands for financial transfers by the developing countries, they can — through sensible domestic and international policy arrangements — provide key incentives for the private sector to provide the needed financing through foreign direct investments.
For example, if the cap-and-trade systems that are emerging throughout the industrialized world as the favored domestic approach to reducing CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions are linked together through the existing, common emission-reduction-credit system, namely the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), then powerful incentives can be created for carbon-friendly private investment in the developing world. That would not add to U.S. debt; indeed, it would be good for U.S. private industry.
Clearly the CDM, as it currently stands, cannot live up to this promise, but with appropriate reforms there is significant potential. Of course, problems of limited additionality will inevitably remain. Therefore, what is needed is for the key emerging economies — China, India, Brazil, South Korea, South Africa, and Mexico — to take on meaningful emission targets themselves (even if equivalent to business-as-usual in the short term), and then participate directly in international cap-and-trade, not government-government trading as envisioned in Article 17 of the Kyoto Protocol (which won’t work), but firm-firm trading through linked national and multinational cap-and-trade systems.
Importantly, the private finance approach stands a much greater chance than government aid of being efficiently employed — that is, targeted to reducing emissions, rather than spent by poor nations on other (possibly meritorious) purposes. So, the job can be done, and governments have an important role, but as facilitators, not providers, of finance. Unfortunately that has not been the focus of the Copenhagen discussions.
Moving Past Kyoto
More broadly, the developing countries have insisted that the Kyoto protocol must be the basis for a new agreement. This is a real problem, because the Kyoto Protocol, in particular its dichotomous distinction between the small set of Annex I countries with quantitative emission-reduction commitments and the majority of countries in the world with no responsibilities, is the “QWERTY keyboard” (that is, unproductive path dependence) of international climate policy — the major stumbling block in negotiations here in Copenhagen.
The world has changed dramatically since the 1997 Protocol divided the world in two. More than 50 non-Annex I countries (with no legally binding commitments) now have greater per capita income than the poorest of the Annex I countries (with commitments). So, even if this distinction was appropriate in 1997, it surely no longer is. But updating the list is impossible. Mexico and South Korea, for example, joined the OECD just six months after Kyoto, but they are unwilling to join the set of Annex I parties. Furthermore, updating the list would be insufficient. It is the very notion of a dichotomous distinction between countries with stringent targets and countries with no targets whatsoever that is at the heart of the problem. A more subtle, more sophisticated interpretation of “common but differentiated responsibilities” is needed. More about this below.
The industrialized (Annex I) countries have emitted most of the stock of manmade carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, so shouldn’t they reduce emissions before developing countries are asked to contribute? While this may seem to make sense, here are four reasons why a new climate agreement must engage all major emitting countries — both industrialized and developing:
Emissions from developing countries are significant and growing rapidly. China surpassed the U.S. as the world’s largest CO2 emitter in 2006, and developing countries may account for more than half of global emissions within the next decade.
Developing countries provide the best opportunities for low-cost emissions reduction; their participation could dramatically reduce total costs.
The U.S. and several other industrialized countries may not commit to significant emissions reductions without developing country participation.
If developing countries are excluded, up to one-third of carbon emissions reductions by participating countries may migrate to non-participating economies through international trade, reducing environmental gains and pushing developing nations onto more carbon-intensive growth paths (so-called “carbon leakage’’).
How can developing countries participate in an international effort to reduce emissions without incurring costs that derail their economic development? Their emissions targets could start at business-as-usual levels, becoming more stringent over time as countries become wealthier. If such “growth targets’’ were combined with an international emission trading program, developing countries could fully participate without incurring prohibitive costs (or even any costs in the short term). This approach — described in a recent Discussion Paper by Harvard Professor Jeffrey Frankel and Valentina Bosetti of the University of Venice for the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements — could provide a progressive route forward, breaking the logjam between developed and developing countries, if only the two sides would begin to talk to each other, rather than past each other.
Obama in Denmark
Now that President Obama is on his way to Copenhagen, will his presence and that of so many heads of state provide the needed push for success? Unquestionably the presence of some 100 heads of state and government increases the likelihood that a climate change deal will be reached by the close of business on Friday, but the key question is whether it increases the likelihood that a “meaningful climate change deal” will be achieved. I am of mixed views on this.
On the one hand, the presence of the leaders surely provide impetus to the process in the sense that many of the key countries — including the U.S. — will not want their leaders to fly home without a “success” in hand. For President Obama, two flights home from Copenhagen within a few weeks without success in either would be a substantial political embarrassment. (The international press and Republicans in Congress have not forgotten the failed Chicago bid for the Olympics). Furthermore, as I explained in a Financial Timesblog post last week, the very fact that the White House decided to shift President Obama’s trip to Copenhagen from the first week of the conference to its final day suggests that they had good reason to anticipate a successful outcome.
On the other hand, the political incentive that is provided for achieving “success” by the leaders’ presence may be to accept a deal that is less than meaningful (if a meaningful deal cannot be achieved), but one that has the appearance of success. So, with the heads of state and government present, the incentives could be strong to agree to a climate change deal that is less than meaningful. The key, outstanding question is whether the outcome will be one that provides a sound foundation for meaningful, long-term global action, as opposed to some notion of immediate, albeit highly visible triumph.
It would be unfortunate if the outcome were no more than a signed international agreement per se, glowing press releases, and related photo opportunities for national leaders, because such an agreement would most likely be the Kyoto Protocol on steroids: more stringent targets for the industrialized countries and the absence of real commitments by the key, rapidly growing emerging economies of China, India, Brazil, Korea, Mexico, and South Africa (let alone by the numerous developing countries of the world). With the promise of $100 billion now on the table in Copenhagen, such an agreement could — in principle — be signed, but it would not reduce global emissions and it would not be ratified by the U.S. Senate (just like Kyoto). Hence, there would be no real progress on climate change.
The Need for a New Mindset
At the heart of the matter is the reality that eventually the negotiations must get beyond what has become the “QWERTY keyboard” of international climate policy: the distinction in the Kyoto Protocol between the small set of Annex I countries with quantitative targets, and the majority of countries in the world with no responsibilities. Various meaningful policy architectures could begin to bridge the massive political divide that exists between the industrialized and the developing world, as we’ve found in the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements.
For example, it remains possible that a midterm agreement could be reached on an approach involving an international portfolio of domestic commitments, whereby each nation would commit and register to abide by its domestic climate commitments, whether those are in the form of laws and regulations or multi-year development plans. Support for such an approach has been voiced by a remarkably diverse set of countries, including Australia, India, and the U.S. And comments yesterday from the Chinese delegation suggest that support is increasing for this approach.
Consistent with this portfolio approach, President Obama recently announced that the U.S. would put a target on the table in Copenhagen to reduce emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 (in line with climate legislation in the U.S. Congress). In response, China announced that it would reduce its carbon intensity (emissions per unit of economic activity) 40 percent below 2005 levels over the same period of time. Subsequently, India announced similar targets. Given these countries rapid rates of economic growth, the announced targets won’t cut emissions in absolute terms, but they are promising starting points for negotiations. The key question is not what this approach would accomplish in the short term, but whether it would put the world in a better position two, five, and ten years from now in regard to a long-term path of more aggressive action.
Until we see the final outcome in Copenhagen, I will remain cautiously optimistic, because at least some of the key nations, including the U.S., appear to be more interested in real progress than in symbolic action.
Dick Cheney 
How to grade President Obama’s first year in office? As Zhou Enlai replied when asked his opinion of the French Revolution, “It’s too soon to say.” Obama has set in motion a host of bold reforms that could break some of America’s deepest political impasses, or cause massive disillusionment if they fail. The big question now is whether his tenacity matches his audacity.
Word going around Washington this week is that Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA) are pushing to 
