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Making the Interest Rate Interesting

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As we head into the new year, one of the biggest questions facing the economy is: “Whither the interest rate?” This number is set by the Federal Open Market Committee and its targeting of the fed funds rate – or the rate at which banks lend funds to each other – is currently effectively zero (technically in a range from zero to 0.25 percent). It’s been there for just over a year, and is likely going to stay there for the better part of 2010 (if I could tell you when, I wouldn’t be here – I’d be lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills some place much warmer).

Despite its provenance as a dry economic term, the interest rate is interesting. It’s a fundamental piece of how our economy works. It determines everything, from how likely you are to get a loan or a mortgage (ceteris paribus – as the economists like to say – the lower the rate, the more lending that is done), to how likely we’re going to have inflation (high interest rates head off inflation, ceteris paribus), to how much a dollar is worth (a higher interest rate relative to overseas rates means it’ll be worth more, cete- you get the idea), to how fast the economy will grow (higher interest rates mean slower growth). It is usually the most powerful tool in any central banker’s toolbox, and certainly the one that’s most often used.

In addition to its central role in the economy, the interest rate is interesting for two other reasons these days.

First, there is the discussion of where the interest rate should be for recovery. There’s a good rule of thumb to determine what the ideal interest rate is: the Taylor rule. Very briefly put, the Taylor rule takes the inflation rate and the unemployment rate and uses them to compute what the ideal interest rate should be (check out the San Francisco Fed for more info). According to some Fed research last spring, the Taylor rule says that interest rates should be at -5 percent (that’s negative five percent – as unemployment is 1.5 percent higher now, the Taylor rule would say the rate now should be even lower).

The problem with negative interest rates is that while they’re technically feasible, they really discourage lending (would you give me a dollar today if I promised you ninety cents next Tuesday?). More realistically, negative real interest rates are possible if you encourage inflation. But inflation eats away at economic growth – ask Zimbabwe – and the “inflation tax” of high inflation falls disproportionately on the poor.

But inflation hawks have been arguing for the Fed to raise rates for a couple of months – to two percent. These hawks tend to be strongly laisse faire conservatives, One of the voices saying we should ignore the Taylor rule is – as Brad DeLong points out – the man who invented it himself, Stanford University’s (and Bush Treasury appointee) John Taylor.

Secondly, as the old saying goes: when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail. Interest rates, while powerful, cannot solve every economic problem. The Taylor rule tells us we shouldn’t raise the interest rate, we can’t lower the interest rate, and no one is happy where the economy is now. At a time when the interest rate is at zero, and should be negative, alternatives need to be explored. As Clive Crook says in his latest column:

Interest rates that take into account asset prices as well as general inflation are part of this, of course. But when it comes to financial regulation, the key thing is rules that recognise the credit cycle, and change as it proceeds. Most important, as argued by Charles Goodhart in these pages, capital and liquidity requirements should be time-varying and strongly anti-cyclical. In good times, when lending is expanding quickly and financial institutions’ concerns about capital and liquidity are at their least, the requirements should tighten. Under current rules, they do the opposite.

Crook is right that unusually low capital ratios (and their counterparts – high leverage ratios) were a catalyst of last year’s crisis. Now that we need to get the economy going again, banks need to lend. One way to do so would be to lower capital ratios (if it wouldn’t bring the solvency of some large banks into question). As part of a regulatory reform package, policymakers should pursue a counter-cyclical capital requirements policy.

They should also expand who has to follow capital requirements. As currently defined, only depository institutions and not investment banks – such as Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch were, and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley used to be – are required to follow the Fed’s Board of Governor’s capital requirements. Getting other financial institutions to respond to capital requirements will make that a much more powerful tool.

The “Heading for the Exits” Narrative

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Over the last 24 hours, word has been leaking out of four separate Democratic candidates for statewide office around the country deciding to retire from office or otherwise fold campaigns. They are Sens. Chris Dodd of CT and Byron Dorgan of ND, along with Gov. Bill Ritter of CO (up for re-election this year) and Lt. Gov. Don Cherry of MI (running for governor this year).

Republicans are naturally spinning these unrelated developments as part of a wave of discouraged Democrats getting out of campaigns in anticipation of a big pro-GOP November. That’s not surprising. But it is annoying that mainstream political media are so avidly buying this spin. Politico‘s banner headline this morning is: “Top Democrats head for the exits.”

The irony is that these changes of heart could actually improve overall Democratic prospects in November. Dodd was in deep political trouble, and his likely replacement as Democratic nominee, CT Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, will be favored to win. Cherry’s gubernatorial campaign was struggling to raise money, and his withdrawal could open the door to any number of better-positioned Democratic candidates. And in CO, Ritter’s retirement could well draw former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff out of a contentious primary challenge to Sen. Michael Bennet; if that doesn’t happen, highly popular Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper might run, and there’s even been some talk that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar would like to be governor. Any of these candidates would be considered stronger than Ritter.

Dorgan’s retirement is definitely a blow to Democrats. But he, too, was badly trailing Gov. John Hoeven in the polls, and if Rep. Earl Pomeroy decides to take the plunge, his prospects might be as good as Dorgan’s.

In terms of handicapping the overall contest for control of the U.S. Senate, it’s important to remember that not two but six Republicans have already announced retirements (in OH, FL, MO, KY, NH and KS). I don’t recall any “Top Republicans head for the exits” headlines about them.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Spooks in the Machine: How the Pentagon Should Fight Cyber Spies

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

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In Washington, “cybersecurity” is a term that’s come to have a thousand meanings, and none at all. Any crime, prank, intelligence operation, or foreign-government attack involving a computer has become a “cyber threat.” Russian teenagers defacing Georgia’s websites, hackers eyeing the power grid, overseas powers embedding government microchips with malicious code – they all share equal billing as cyber foes. The vague definition muddies the debate about what the real dangers are, where they lie, and how to respond to them. No wonder it took the White House so long to find someone to serve as a “czar” to coordinate government-wide responses. No wonder Congress is having such a hard time passing smart legislation.

But at the Pentagon, they aren’t worried about some kid painting a Hitler moustache on Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ online portrait. They’re not even that concerned about a full-scale attack on the military’s networks – even though the modern American way of war depends so heavily on the free flow of data. In the military, there’s now broad agreement that one cyber threat trumps all others: electronic espionage, the infiltration (and possible corruption) of Defense Department networks. The Pentagon is seeking to coalesce around an organizational response, if not clear-cut answers, to the cyber-spying problem. But it’s a very open question whether the solutions that they have come up with will make things better or worse for the military.

Well-placed spy software not only opens a window for an adversary to look into American military operations. That window can also be used to extract information — everything from drone video feeds to ammunition requests to intelligence reports. Such an opening also gives that enemy a chance to introduce his own false data, turning American command-and-control systems against themselves. How does a soldier trust an order, if he doesn’t know who else is listening – or who gave the order in the first place?  “For a sophisticated adversary, it’s to his advantage to keep your network up and running. He can learn what you know. He can cause confusion, delay your response times – and shape your actions,” says one Defense Department cyber official.

Cyber spying on sensitive government networks isn’t some theoretical concern. In December, we learned that militants could tap into the overhead surveillance feed of almost any aircraft in the American fleet – from spy drones to fighter jets. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that intruders were able to copy and siphon off “several terabytes of data” about the advanced F-35 Joint Strike Fighter stealth aircraft from the unclassified networks of defense contractor Lockheed Martin. In 2008, USB “thumb drives” were used to slip malicious and self-replicating code onto military computers. According to a 60 Minutes report, the software was able to monitor the classified networks of U.S. Central Command, which runs the American war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2007, the unclassified e-mail system of the Office of the Secretary of Defense was compromised. Earlier in the decade, a researcher from Sandia National Laboratories caught Chinese cyber sleuths with specs for the U.S. Army’s helicopter mission-planning system and for Falconview, the Air Force’s aerial imagery software.

The Problem of the Open Network

What’s particularly vexing about these intrusions is that sophisticated methods weren’t necessarily required to get inside the networks. In 2007, detailed schematics of Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and the Camp Bucca detention facility in Iraq were downloaded by reporters from file transfer protocol servers with easy-to-find passwords or no protection at all. The malware that spread via thumb drive across the military in 2008 had been around, in one form or another, since the early ‘90s. In 2009, troops were so susceptible to virus- or Trojan-laden messages — supposedly sent from friends on Facebook and Twitter — that U.S. Strategic Command network security officers wanted to ban access to the social networks altogether.

In other words, the end user – the service member or Pentagon civilian sitting at his desktop – is largely responsible for letting in these electronic intruders. They’re the ones who set passwords to “1234,” plug unknown drives into their computer, or download a Trojan virus when all they meant to do was sneak a peek at some online porn. “This makes us our own worst threat,” writes one Department of Defense network security specialist. “There are a variety of reasons for this and most are tied to the collective DoD inability to mitigate known vulnerabilities — vulnerabilities users intentionally and unintentionally utilize to create adverse impacts or risks.”

The Pentagon spends millions of dollars every year on so-called “information assurance” – checking to see that military desktops are loaded only with trusted software, and reminding users not to respond to e-mails from Nigerians with dubious business propositions. But within the Defense Department, these are seen as Sisyphean tasks. “With seven million systems in the DoD, think how many idiots there are bound to be,” one Pentagon cybersecurity official says.

cybersecurity memo photo 3The armed forces find it much easier to ban something than to educate its troops about responsible use. MySpace and YouTube are inaccessible from Pentagon computers – even though the military makes extensive use of the sites. Thumb drives are mostly forbidden as well, even though battlefield units rely on them to swap data in lonely places where bandwidth is hard to find. In the name of information security, information flow has been restricted. Meanwhile, secret overhead surveillance feeds are routinely left unencrypted; with an off-the-shelf satellite dish and $26 software, militants can see through the Air Force’s eyes in the sky. It’s a problem the military has known about for more than a decade but never bothered to fix. According to the Wall Street Journal, “the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn’t know how to exploit it.”

Clearly, there needs to be a rather serious re-evaluation of military information assurance. The Pentagon needs to do a better job of figuring out theoretical risks from actual dangers; secret drone feeds can’t be left open while blogs are placed off-limits. Troops also need to be trained – and then trusted. The military routinely gives a 19-year-old private the power to kill everyone he sees. Surely, if that private can be taught to use an automatic rifle responsibly, he can be educated in computing without sharing secrets.

An Imperfect Solution

Now, many in the military are wondering whether an even more serious overreaction is in the works. In June, Secretary Gates established U.S. Cyber Command to coordinate all of the military’s activities online. Heading the new command will be Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the super-secret National Security Agency. Conveniently for Alexander, the command will be located at Ft. Meade, Maryland – right next to the NSA’s headquarters. The job of stopping electronic espionage, in other words, is being put in the hands of the military and intelligence outfit which is already responsible for snooping on e-mail, breaking electronic encryption algorithms, and sneaking into foreign networks. It has a logic: Our cyber spies will tackle their cyber spies. And few government agencies can rival the NSA’s information security expertise.

But the move is problematic, too. For all of the NSA’s brainpower, the agency has had its share of spectacular failures. It spent six years and $1.2 billion on the “Trailblazer” effort to sift through electronic communications, with little to show for it. The successor project, “Turbulence,” has proved problematic, as well.

The NSA’s well-developed (some would say overdeveloped) sense of secrecy could also be an issue. Much of the country’s network infrastructure is in private, not government, hands. A great deal of today’s most important cybersecurity research is being pursued at private companies and universities, from Microsoft to M.I.T. How well can a clandestine agency work with these unclassified groups? Or even with military groups that might not be able to match the NSA’s security clearances?

Finally, the NSA has a rich history of monitoring the communications of Americans – sometimes legally, sometimes not. Earlier this year, the Justice Department confirmed that the agency was still “overcollecting” on U.S. citizens, despite the wide latitude the NSA now enjoyed to spy on whom they like. According to the New York Times, the agency even “tried to wiretap a member of Congress without a warrant.” Some in the armed forces cybersecurity community argue that in order to stop online espionage, the infiltrators need to be caught before they enter American networks. Cyberdefense becomes cyberoffense. With such a broad charter, the monitoring of innocent Americans’ datastreams would only grow, with an agency well-known for privacy violations in charge.

Guard the Networks – or Live Without Them

Clearly, the NSA has a major role to play in the nation’s network security. They’ve got the expertise that’s lacking in the various armed services’ geek squads, the network policy makers at U.S. Strategic Command’s Joint Task Force Global Network Operations, and the Defense Information Systems Agency’s cadre of Pentagon system administrators. But the NSA’s role can’t be all-encompassing. The agency needs to be part of a team. That team needs to include players that can work with experts both in and out of government. And that team needs to have oversight of the NSA’s activities, so that citizens’ civil liberties aren’t slaughtered wholesale in the name of cybersecurity.

Other groups within the Pentagon are trying to make the armed forces more resilient in the face of cyber attacks. They not only want to make the military’s data networks less susceptible to infiltration – they want to make its social connections more durable, too. If the military information grid is compromised, and orders can’t be trusted, they want service members to be able to carry on with their missions regardless.

Troops can’t lose time-honored skills just because they’re in a digital age. They need to be able to navigate without electronic maps, assemble information without online databases, and distribute battle plans without e-mail. Some cybersecurity specialists say that more and more “redundant” networks need to be added in order to keep the military’s data flowing. But for this group, the most important cyber defense may be learning to live without networks at all.

Download the full report.

Can Mitt Romney Get His Groove Back?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

With Republican prospects for 2010, and just maybe 2012, trending upward, it’s worth noting that Mitt Romney, the insiders’ front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, has announced a publicity tour for his upcoming book, No Apology. He’ll begin with two stops in (surprise!) Iowa in March.

Team Romney has tried to suppress in advance any comparisons between the Mittster’s round of book signings and that of Sarah Palin. “We’re not going to match her crowd size or sales. These are two different people with different ways of expressing themselves,” Eric Fehrnstrom, a Romney spokesman, told the Boston Globe. But, even if he’s no Sarah Palin, putative candidate Romney needs to show with this tour that he’s got his groove back.

After losing the GOP nomination 2008, he dropped below most Americans’ radar screens. Yet he retains most of his original points of appeal: the granite visage, the competent-exec air, the economic policy fluency, and the résumé that includes being governor of blue-state Massachusetts and CEO of the 2002 Winter Olympics, which is sure to make him a regular quote machine during the upcoming Vancouver games. Each day that passes takes him further away from the social policy heresies of his earlier political career. And some Republican insiders really do believe that a prior failed presidential bid is an essential box to check, making him arguably “next in line” for the nomination.

More importantly, the likely GOP field for 2012, in comparison to the 2008 crop, looks a bit easier for Mitt to manage. As National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru observed in asmart piece in October, Mitt didn’t fit in 2008 as the conservative alternative to John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, but he will find it easier in 2012 to be the establishment candidate acceptable to movement conservatives:

Romney seems more naturally an establishmentarian than a conservative insurgent, so this strategy would be a better fit for him than his last one. He is not a man to be swayed by the momentary passions of his party’s base; pretending otherwise adds to his reputation for slickness. If he ran as an establishment candidate, the fact that he used to take less-conservative positions would still matter. But it would not matter as much, because he would no longer have to prove himself as a true-blue conservative.

If either Mike Huckabee (strangely undamaged by the Maurice Clemmons firestorm of late November) or Sarah Palin runs in 2012, much of the oxygen among social conservatives will be bottled up. Since the GOP establishment really dislikes Huck and doesn’t have much faith in Palin, other than as a hobgoblin with which to terrify progressives, Romney would be nicely set up to be the “responsible conservative” in the race, competing for that mantle mainly with Tim Pawlenty, who makes Mitt look like Mr. Excitement.

But there’s one major problem with Romney’s positioning for 2012–and it’s a very big one: He may no longer be “acceptable” to movement conservatives thanks to his sponsorship of a health reform plan in Massachusetts that looks uncomfortably like the legislation that Barack Obama will probably be signing early this year.

In his profile of a possible Romney 2012 run, Ponnuru notes this problem, along with Mitt’s rationalizations for it:

Romney makes three arguments in his defense. The first is that a Democratic legislature and his Democratic successor made the plan worse than his original conception. The second is that he has no intention of pushing the Massachusetts plan on the entire country. Health-care reform, he tells me, “should occur on a state-by-state basis.” The third is that the plan has worked out well for his state. “The plan is well within budget and has accomplished its objectives at a relatively modest cost.”

It’s that third point that could get Romney into trouble. The cost to the state government has indeed been modest. But the plan was designed so that the state picks up only a fifth of the costs the plan generates, with the federal government and the private sector absorbing the rest. Premiums are growing much faster than in the rest of the nation. Waiting times are up, too, which imposes costs on people. The plan is losing popularity in Massachusetts. Ideally, Romney would learn from this experience that a reform centered on state governments’ manipulation of federal dollars is a mistake. At the very least, Romney would be foolish to keep defending the plan.

But, given the hopped-up rhetoric among Republicans about “Obamacare” since Ponnuru wrote these words, it may not be enough for Romney to “stop defending” his health care plan. For one thing, right-wing hysteria is now increasingly centered on the supposed tyranny imposed by the individual mandate, which Romney has always championed. But, were he to flatly repudiate his own record, the “flip-flop” attacks on his character would resume with a real vengeance.

Put simply, Romney can’t just recalibrate his 2008 race based on the 2012 landscape and expect to win. This isn’t the Republican Party of two or three years ago; it’s moved palpably to the right. While Romney’s 2008 rivals took some shots at his health care record, it wasn’t that big a deal in the contest. But, at that point in history, conservatives weren’t in the habit of using Slavedrivers-of-Collectivism rhetoric about individual mandates or other features of the Massachusetts system.

With health care policy certain to remain front-and-center in Republican politics for the foreseeable future, the supposed front-runner for the 2012 GOP nomination may face an impossible, disqualifying problem. And, given the choices Republicans look likely to have (any “fresh faces” emerging in 2010 won’t be ready for an immediate presidential race), that’s a very big problem for a party that considers itself on the brink of a return to power in the next few years.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Cape Wind Project Faces New Delay

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The squabble over the Cape Wind, an offshore wind farm off Cape Cod, has been raging for years now, with some residents of Nantucket who dearly prize their ocean views battling with pro-wind energy forces who want to establish the nation’s first major offshore wind farm. But after eight years of regulatory review, during which time no regulator has found that the project’s 130 turbines would cause harm to the environment, Cape Wind looked just about ready to be resolved, with one more regulatory hurdle waiting to be cleared.

Alas, the new year brought some bad news for Cape Wind backers:

In a new setback for a controversial wind farm proposed off Cape Cod, the National Park Service announced Monday that Nantucket Sound was eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places, guaranteeing further delays for the project.

Known as Cape Wind, the project is the nation’s first planned offshore wind farm and would cover 24 square miles in the sound, an area roughly the size of Manhattan. The Park Service decision came in response to a request from two Massachusetts Indian tribes, who said the 130 proposed wind turbines would thwart their spiritual ritual of greeting the sunrise, which requires unobstructed views across the sound, and disturb ancestral burial grounds.

The Park Service’s decision, which caught observers by surprise, no doubt throws the project’s prospects in doubt, and deals another blow to the cause of clean energy.

The ruling certainly caught the Obama administration’s attention. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, whose department oversees the Park Service, issued a statement calling on the principal parties in the dispute to meet next week to hammer out a “common-sense agreement” by March 1. Salazar added that if a deal isn’t reached, “I will be prepared to take the steps necessary to bring the permit process to conclusion.’’

Salazar’s statement is the boldest declaration of interest yet by the administration in the Cape Wind project. Perhaps after the frustrations of Copenhagen and cap-and-trade, the administration has a renewed sense of urgency about proving its commitment to clean energy. Certainly the comparison between the U.S. and its peers isn’t flattering to us: just two days ago, Britain announced that it would award £100 billion worth of development contracts for a new generation of offshore wind farms.

We won’t know until the meeting next week what the administration’s plan and next moves are. For now, we stick with a frustrating mantra familiar to followers of the Cape Wind saga: Stay tuned.

Is “The Party Base” Fed Up With Obama? No.

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Anyone paying attention to political discourse during the last two or three months is aware of an acute unhappiness with the Obama administration among a goodly number of self-conscious progressives, sometimes expressed in terms of the president’s “betrayal” of “the Democratic base,” which may not turn out to support the party in November.

But is “the Democratic base” really as upset with Obama as elements of the progressive commentariat?

Mark Blumenthal looks at the numbers over at pollster.com, and concludes there’s not much evidence of displeasure with the president among rank-and-file Democrats, particularly those of a more progressive bent. Using Gallup’s weekly tracking poll of presidential approval ratings as a benchmark, Blumenthal notes:

Obama’s rating among liberal Democrats the week before Christmas (89 percent) was just a single percentage point lower than in the first week of his presidency (90 percent). None of this suggests a full revolt.

Approval ratings, of course, don’t get at intensity of support or disdain, which could have an impact on voting participation, particularly in midterm elections. So Blumenthal goes on to look at more nuanced measurements:

Between late February and mid-December, the ABC/Post survey shows an overall decline in Obama’s strongly favorable rating from 43 percent to 31 percent. Among liberal Democrats, strong approval started out at 77 percent in February and varied between a low of 72 percent and a high of 81 percent through mid-September. It fell in October (65 percent) and November (67 percent) before rebounding in December (76 percent).

So that’s a one point drop in Obama’s high “strong approval” rating from self-identified liberals between February and December.

Now everyone doesn’t mean “self-identified liberal Democrats” when they refer to the “party base.” As Blumenthal notes, Bob Brigham, among others, has suggested that “base” really refers to smaller communities like activists or donors. But it is fair to say that the political relevance of any particular community is somewhat limited if its views are sharply at odds with those of rank-and-file voters who say they share the same ideology.

Remember that next time anyone presumes to speak exclusively for “the base.”

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Ross Douthat’s Agenda

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

I don’t know exactly what it is about being a “conservative columnist” at The New York Times, but now the young-un on that beat, Ross Douthat, is exhibiting the same habits as his older colleague, David Brooks. Brooks, of course, has mastered the art of looking down at the squabbling major parties from a great height, condemning them both, and somehow always coming down in the conclusion with recommendations that coincide with the short-term positioning of the Republican Party.

In his first column of the new year yesterday, Douthat performs a similar pirouette, with some interesting twists. His own skywalk begins with an Olympian view of America’s position in the world after the aughts–we’re now just a superpower, not a “hyperpower”–then predictably cites political polarization as one of the threats to our competitive position.

Warming to his task, Ross criticizes conservatives of the Bush era for a failed experiment in reduplicating Reaganomics, but then equals the score by accusing “Obama Democrats” of “returning to their party’s long-running pursuit of European-style social democracy — by micromanaging industry, pouring money into entitlement and welfare programs, and binding the economy in a web of new taxes and regulations.”

Aside from that very questionable characterization of the Democratic agenda, you will note that Douthat does not observe any causal relationship between one party’s “sins” and the other’s. Any “micromanaging industry” that’s going on presently is, rather obviously, the result of an economic calamity introduced under the previous national management. I don’t know if by “pouring money into entitlement and welfare programs” Douthat is referring to stimulus legislation used to counteract the disastrous effects of the economic calamity, or to the resolutely centrist health care reform proposal that is struggling through Congress after being signficantly compromised along the way. Any “new taxes” in prospect are part of said centrist plan, or part of the broader Democratic objective, announced not this year but as early as 2002, of reconfiguring the tax system to resemble what it looked like before the failed Republican exercise in Reaganomics that Douthat denounced earlier in his column.

All this is rather ho-hum High Broderism, but then Douthat gets more interesting when he proposes his own “center-right agenda” to replace the horrific move to the left essayed by Democrats. He begins with a tout court endorsement of the agenda recently laid out by Manhattan Institute wonk Jim Manzi, which is all the rage right now in what’s left of the non-Tea Party conservative commentariat:

Manzi’s National Affairs essay, a tour d’horizon of our socioeconomic situation, provides a solid place to start. He proposes a fourfold agenda: Unwind the partnerships forged between Big Business and Big Government in the wake of the 2008 crash; seek financial regulations that “contain busts,” by segregating high-risk transactions from lower-risk enterprises; deregulate the public school system, to let a thousand charter schools and start-ups bloom; and shift our immigration policy away from low-skilled immigration, and toward the recruitment of high-skilled émigrés from around the globe.

To this list, I would add tax reform and entitlement reform. The former should broaden the tax base while cutting taxes on work, childrearing and investment. The latter should means-test both Social Security and Medicare, reducing both programs’ spending on well-off retirees rather than questing fruitlessly for their privatization.

Now Manzi’s agenda has some virtues, but not so much as a Republican agenda. The Obama administration hopes to “unwind the partnerships” between government and business as fast as it can, and it, too, seeks to re-regulate the financial system in order to “segregate” high-risk transactions. For all the perennial conservative caterwauling about teachers’ unions holding a veto over good education policy, Obama, too, is a big fan of charter schools. This only looks like a “center-right agenda” if you buy the earlier Douthat premise that Obama is hell-bent on Swedenizing America.

Shifting the immigration system to favor higher skills (a very old “idea” also embraced today by Michael Barone) is not, as Douthat seems to think, a way to buy off conservative hatred of high levels of immigration; it may make the corporate community happy, but won’t do a thing for rank-and-file conservatives who dislike any wage competition from immigrants, and who want not a calibration of policies but wholesale expulsion of immigrants already in the country.

As for Douthat’s own supplementary ideas for a “center-right agenda,” he offers “tax reform” and means-testing Medicare and Social Security. Now “tax reform” as he is apparently discussing it is either one of two things: a continuation of the Bush-era failed experiment in Reaganomics involving deficit-financed tax cuts, however well-targeted they happen to be to workers and families, or a redesign of the system involving tax increases on some to pay for tax cuts for others. As Douthat knows, the constituency within the Republican Party for any tax increases on anybody could be comfortably accomodated in his own office.

Moroever, at a time when Republicans are shrieking about mean old Obama’s euthanasia-inspired efforts to cut Medicare benefits, Douthat is proposing the one “entitlement reform” — means-testing — that’s even less popular than privatization. It ain’t happening, and thus, like most of the rest of Ross’s “center-right agenda,” it’s not a serious contribution to the actual debate.

Now you could give Ross Douthat credit for thinking outside the box and proposing things that his own party would never embrace, which is tempting since he is a decent, thoughtful man. Or you could conclude, as many of us have simiilarly concluded about David Brooks’ MO, that by condemning Democratic policies without offering anything realistic to replace them, he’s simply ratifying the “Party of No” agenda of killing Obama’s policy intiatives and then figuring out later what to do once Republicans are back in the saddle again. It all adds up to an endorsement of Republican victory in 2010 and 2012, even if that would predictably return the country to the conservative policies that so distressed Ross Douthat, in retrospect of course, over the last ten years.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Who Is Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

With the news that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was linked to, and possibly directed by, a group called Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), there’s much apprehension and confusion about this offshoot of Osama Bin Laden’s network.

Though I’m usually not one to lead the charge against “the media,” I’ve been most disappointed by the lack of description about the differences in organizations, targets, intentions, and capabilities between the group based in Yemen and its distant cousins along the Af-Pak border.

Consider this post an effort to explain those nuances.

Let’s get the obvious but oft-unstated out of the way: Though AQAP may trace a share of its origins to the Bin Laden-directed 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, today AQAP is a distinct, separate entity from Bin Laden’s al Qaeda (commonly referred to throughout the intelligence community as Al Qaeda Senior Leadership, or AQSL). AQAP may share a general ideological affiliation with AQSL, but its specific targeting intentions and attack capabilities vary significantly. Furthermore, AQAP’s leadership is largely independent to do as it pleases: Though it may receive occasional communications and guidance from Osama Bin Laden’s cadre, AQAP is essentially free to follow or ignore as it sees fit.

So what are AQAP’s intents and capabilities? The group certainly shares an obvious anti-American/anti-Western bent, along with its Af-Pak based brethren. Indeed, since 2003, AQAP has launched several attacks against employees of Western petroleum countries, tourists, and the American embassy and consulate. But whereas AQSL is focused on large-scale attacks on U.S. soil, the Arabian Peninsula group is primarily motivated by toppling the Saudi and Yemeni governing regimes, and likely views American/Western targets significant if not quite as important.

“But what about the Christmas Day plot?” you ask. “That seems like a pretty serious attempt to kill Americans on American soil.” True, it does. However, note that the plot failed. It’s an important point. Successful terrorism plots are the marriage of a group’s intention to hit a particular target plus its capability to do so. On that score, AQAP has a long way to go before it would attempt anything as logistically complex as 9/11. It is quite easy for a lone operative like Abdulmutallab volunteer to conduct an attack and the groups’ leadership agree to provide him the basic training and materiel to execute it. But the fact that the bomber and explosives were incompetent and/or faulty speaks volumes about AQAP’s lack of capability to conduct anything close to a 9/11-style attack from a Yemeni safe haven. That said, by displaying an intention to target Americans in America, the group should merit close attention from U.S. intelligence for any improvements in operational capability.

Finally, the best move AQAP made is adopting the “al Qaeda” brand. Franchising AQ is a no-brainer: the group in Yemen and Saudi can entice finances and recruits to its organization on the al Qaeda name. And by trading on the al Qaeda name, a failed operation now — remarkably — strikes fear into hearts worldwide as pundits, hosts, and articles flippantly repeat “al Qaeda” as if the group were under direct orders from and possessed similar strike capabilities as Al Qaeda Senior Leadership did back in 2001.

And such thin analysis is, in a word, amazing because it only fuels partisanship that drives reactionary and often ineffective security policy. If we continue to let political bickering drive policy, then fledgling groups like AQAP continue to win as they gain fame and notoriety. It’s even more incredible that Republicans have the audacity to politically exploit nearly uncloseable gaps in America’s defensive net if you bear in mind that George W. Bush constructed that architecture in the first place.

“Primarying” Barack Obama–Some Relevant History

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Though he called it “unlikely,” the New York Times Magazine‘s Matt Bai unleashed the idea this weekend that disgruntled progressives might support a primary challenge to President Barack Obama in 2012, even suggesting that Dr. Howard Dean could be positioning himself to make the challenge himself.

It’s natural for pro-Obama Democrats to recoil from even discussing the possibility of the President being “primaried,” but I’d argue it’s healthier for everyone to pull the idea right out of the closet and examine it closely, beginning with the recent history of such challenges.

* Four of the last eight presidents (Bush 41, Carter, Ford and Johnson) prior to Obama faced serious primary challenges in their re-election campaigns.

* In all four cases, the challengers (McCarthy in 1968, Reagan in 1976, Kennedy in 1980 and Buchanan in 1992) ran on the implicit or explicit message that the incumbent had betrayed his party base. In all four cases, the incumbent was struggling in the polls to some extent, amidst shaky economic conditions (less LBJ than the others, though inflation was a big concern in 1968).

* In three of the four cases (all but Bush 41), the incumbent’s party had done very poorly in the prior midterm election.

* All four challenges ultimately failed to secure the party nomination.

* The opposition party–twice Democrats, twice Republicans–won all four general elections.

Suffice it to say that primary challenges to sitting presidents are more common than many people realize, but never, in recent history, successful in any way other than chastening party leaders via general election defeat.

There is a fifth president whose re-election campaign might well be examined in this context: one Richard M. Nixon. He, too was having some trouble in the polls going into 1972. He rather notably was presiding over a very unpopular war, and the economy was sufficiently troubled that he actually imposed wage and price controls. His party had a very disappointing showing in the 1970 midterms. And he faced intraparty insurgencies coming from two different directions: antiwar Republicans (yes, there were some back then) who ultimately produced a candidate, Rep. Pete McCloskey of CA; and conservatives, some of whose leaders (including William F. Buckley, Jr.) signed a statement “suspending” their support for Nixon in 1971. Conservatives, too, produced a sittling member of Congress willing to take on the incumbent, Rep. John Ashbrook of OH.

Ultimately, of course, Nixon brushed aside these intraparty challenges with ease, and won the general election by a huge 49-state landslide, in no small part because of divisions and weaknesses in the Democratic party. (Yes, the excesses of his reelection campaign contributed to his rapid fall from grace and forced resignation in 1974, but no one really thinks that the crimes and misdemeanors we now know collectively as “Watergate” won him re-election.)

My point in mentioning Nixon is to note that primary challenges don’t necessarily doom incumbents, and that developments in the opposing party can have a very large impact on the fate of struggling incumbents.

Now, I personally doubt that any serious primary challenge to Barack Obama will ultimately develop, if only because it would be exceptionally difficult to mobilize a revolt of “the party base” against the first African-American president. Obama will also likely benefit from the same phenomenon that kept Bill Clinton from being challenged for re-election in 1996: the desire for a united front against a militantly vicious GOP. And lest we forget, there’s always the strong possibility that by this time two years from now, the war in Afghanistan could be winding down, the economy could be reviving, health care reforms could be very popular, and Republicans could be gearing up for a fratricidal nomination battle of their own.

But Democrats might as well talk through the consequences of a primary challenge to Obama while it’s an abstract proposition rather than an imminent threat. The precedents for potential insurgents aren’t very encouraging.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Health Reform Ping Pong “Almost Certain”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

904824_ping_pong_3From The New Republic‘s Jonathan Cohn comes word that congressional Democrats are looking to ditch a formal conference committee to reconcile the House and Senate health care reform bills in favor of informal negotiations — or “ping pong,” as it’s called.

According to one of Cohn’s sources, a House staffer, “There will almost certainly be full negotiations but no formal conference,” noting that there are too many procedural obstacles in the Senate to convene a formal conference. A conference to reconcile the bills would require a series of motions in the Senate that call for votes with full debate, offering Republicans a fresh spate of opportunities to stall final passage of the bill (which you know they will not pass up).

To clarify, ping pong doesn’t necessarily mean that the House has to approve, without any say, the Senate health bill. As Cohn notes, ping-ponging can be used as a generic term for informal talks, with the idea that the Senate and House pass the bill back and forth to each other until they’ve agreed on a final version.

Considering the unprecedented obstructionism that Republicans have shown over the course of the past year, going the ping pong route is certainly understandable. From a policy standpoint, it limits the possibility of the bill becoming derailed as the Republicans stretch the process out and strike fear in the hearts of wavering lawmakers. From a political standpoint, its appeal, even to House Dems who don’t particularly like the Senate health bill, is obvious: it allows them to get the protracted health reform debate over with and pivot to jobs.

For the White House, it seems like a no-brainer: play ping pong, pass the bill, and sign it before the end of the month. That would be in time for President Obama’s State of the Union address, when he can stand in front of the American people boasting of a major victory on health care and charting a new path — jobs, jobs, jobs — for 2010.

A Name for the Decade: The Ooze

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As the 2000s come to a close, prominent publications (here and here) have joined in the name game: what to call these nameless past ten years. This post, by former PPI stalwart Mark Ribbing, was originally published by PPI in August:

The time is coming to give this decade a name. We are four months from its end, and still we have no handy moniker that captures the spirit of the 2000’s, their odd blend of dislocation, dissolution and hope.

Back at the start of the millennium, commentators offered various spoken shorthands for the 00’s, but none have caught on. The most logical choice, “The Two-Thousands,” is unwieldy. Playing on the multiplicity of zeros, some pundits suggested “The Zeros” or even—in an antiquarian turn—“The Aughts.”

Others chose to see all those circles not as numbers, but as letters, and to pronounce them as such—“The Oh’s.” This, it turns out, was a step on the right track. But let’s consider a different pronunciation, one that captures not only the numerical identity of the 00’s, but also their historical essence: “The Ooze.”

This name’s been suggested before, mainly as a gag entrant in the dub-the-decade sweepstakes. Now it’s time for us to embrace its aptness for our times. Let us ponder ooze.

My desk version of Webster’s dictionary lists its first definition of “ooze” as a verb meaning “[t]o flow or seep out slowly, as through small openings.” The second is “[t]o vanish or ebb slowly,” and offers as an example the following phrase: “felt my confidence ooze away.”

But “ooze” is not just a verb for things that seep through small openings (like an infiltrating terrorist, or a flu virus) or for things that vanish or ebb over time (like Arctic ice, or the U.S. manufacturing-job base).

For “ooze” is also a noun. It is mud, goop, gunk, but its meaning goes a bit, well, deeper than that.

Back to the dictionary. It turns out that ooze is the “[m]udlike sediment covering the floor of oceans and lakes, composed mainly of the remains of microscopic animals.” In other words, it is the inert decayed matter of that which was once alive, and moving, and whole, however fragile it turned out to be.

This was our national condition all too often in the 2000’s—a perceptible wearing-away of living, intact structures that upheld our sense of security, liberty, prosperity, and mutual obligation.

This sense of national loss and unsettlement was a continual theme of the first eight years of the decade. It was an undercurrent running from the September 11 attacks to Hurricane Katrina, from the abuses at Abu Ghraib to the implosion of our financial sector.

Yet before we mire ourselves in pessimism, let us once again consider the floors of oceans and lakes, where microscopic beings settle and separate into the mud. The resulting stew is a vital staging ground for life itself. It is a place where ecosystems filter and regenerate themselves.

In short, ooze need not only signify decay. It can also represent the conditions for lasting growth and renewal—the kind that emerges from the ground up.

Such emergence is often hard to see at first. Ooze does not lend itself to clarity or rapid fruition. But down there, beneath the surface, things are happening that will one day become visible to the wide world.

Somewhere, a laid-off worker is taking her career into her own hands and starting up a new business. An abandoned building is reborn as a charter school. A vacant lot becomes part of the growing nationwide push toward local, sustainable sources of food.

The American instinct for renewal was crucial to Barack Obama’s electoral appeal, and it may yet manifest itself in a national willingness to confront such challenges as our deeply flawed health-care system, our educational dysfunction, and our increasingly costly dependence on fossil fuels. These are big problems, and anyone who expected them to be solved easily or without opposition has forgotten the basic truths of human nature, and of democracy.

What matters is this: Progress toward change is indeed taking place, on all of these fronts and others besides. That progress may seem too slow, and it may send its tendrils down the occasional dead-end channel, but it’s nourished by something quite real — a keen desire to see our nation do better, to reclaim its inventive, expansive soul. The Ooze is where we have been, and our future is forming in its depths, nourished by the broken shells of what had come before.

The Big Lie About Failed Bipartisanship

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

‘Tis the season for year-end assessments. As the pundit class weighs in on Obama’s year in office, one meme has been particularly frustrating: the judgment that Obama “failed” to bring bipartisanship back to Washington.

Yesterday’s The Hill has the latest entry in the bogus narrative. “Obama’s first year yields few results in drive for bipartisanship” reads the headline. It then gives the floor to Republican sources:

“You might remember that Senate Republicans began the year hopeful that the president would actually make good on his campaign promises to reach across the aisle and build consensus,” said one GOP aide, who argued the divide began with the stimulus.

“People were skeptical of Obama’s rhetoric, but nobody could have predicted the surge in partisanship that his administration would wage over the first year. And their fierce partisan approach has become a major reason why independent voters are sprinting away from Democrats.”

In true he-said-she-said fashion, The Hill then gives some Democrats a chance to respond, without bothering to weigh in on who’s speaking in good faith and who’s spinning.

William Galston, in his evaluation of President Obama’s first year in American Interest magazine, offers a similiar take:

[T]he President never tried very hard to render bipartisanship a matter of substance as well as tone, making it all but certain that he would not redeem an important promissory note he had issued to the American people during the campaign.

Newsweek‘s Evan Thomas said much the same thing a month ago:

Obama tried to foster bipartisanship at the outset of his administration, but he didn’t try very hard, and his fellow Democrats can be just as rigidly partisan on the left.

It’s indisputable that Washington is as rancorous and polarized as ever. And there’s no question that Obama may have set himself up for criticism by campaigning as a post-partisan figure who could bridge the Washington divide.

Misplacing the Blame

But to blame Obama for failed bipartisanship is to blame the only grown-up in the room for the mess the kids are making. The two real culprits are a Republican Party that refuses to act responsibly, and a mainstream press that is unable or unwilling to call them on it.

What we have in the GOP today is a party that has lost all interest in policy now that it’s out of power. It has one goal: to destroy the Obama presidency. Every hand extended by the other side is to be rejected. The Republicans know what they’re doing — the media, true to form, has stuck to its pox-on-both-houses posture. Never mind that the president has made an honest effort to get Republicans interested in the idea of governing again: if Republicans keeps saying no, it must be because Obama’s not asking often and nicely enough.

Take the claim that the stimulus represented a violation of Obama’s pledge to reach out to the other side. Here was a stimulus plan that was one-third tax cuts designed to appeal to Republicans — tax cuts that economists agreed would be less than stimulative. Despite that sop to conservatives, it got only three GOP votes, including one from a Republican who would soon make the switch to the other side, Arlen Specter.

To think that Obama could have won more GOP votes had he given in a little more is to misread the GOP. The stated Republican objection to the stimulus was that there was too much spending in it — which is exactly what stimulus is. The hidden Republican objection, of course, was that it just might work. And if there’s one thing the GOP is deathly afraid of, it’s the rebound under Obama’s watch of an economy that they wrecked.

Take another example: health care. Some have complained that the Democrats rammed through their bill without Republican input. Does anyone not remember the slow-as-molasses work of the Senate Finance Committee on its bill, geared specifically toward winning the support of Republicans?

The Party of No Compromises

The Republican idea of compromise is that Obama enact Republican policies. Anything short of that means that he must not be serious about reaching out. Even policies that won Republican support in the past are now encountering opposition, lest Obama claim a bipartisan win. (Exhibit A: John McCain, hitherto a strong supporter of cap-and-trade, has now flip-flopped on it, calling it part of a “far left” agenda.)

True bipartisanship — the idea of two parties arguing in earnest over the direction of the country and reaching the necessary compromises to make sure everything runs smoothly — is impossible with the current Republican Party. Obama has made every effort to reach out to Republicans. And as president, annoying as it may be for some progressives, he should continue to seek the higher ground and not get caught up in the daily trench warfare. But there’s only so much one person can do in dealing with a rabid and unbending opposition.

A certain madness has gripped the GOP. Many in the media know it — and yet their stories barely mention the phenomenon. The same kabuki dance keeps getting enacted news cycle after news cycle. Fact-free spin is treated as a legitimate retort to good-faith argument. The enablers of a Republican Party gone rogue, the media are a key contributor to our broken politics. Only when the news stops giving politicians and parties the incentive to act irresponsibly can we expect irresponsible actors to even begin thinking about changing their ways.

Obama Vindicated on Iran

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Iran is lashing out furiously at the usual suspects – America, Britain, Israel – whom it blames for stirring up domestic dissent. But no amount of ritual execration of foreign devils by pro-government demonstrators yesterday could obscure the fact that the real threat to the regime comes from within.

The Green protest movement, which arose in reaction to Iran’s rigged election six months ago, took to the streets again on December 27. At least eight people were killed in the ensuing crackdown by the government.

The regime has been deeply shaken by the protesters, who have made it clear they don’t want to live in a theocratic dictatorship. Officials yesterday even threatened to execute opposition leaders, including Mir Hossein Mousavi, who lost his bid for the presidency in the disputed election.

2009 will likely be remembered as the year the mask slipped completely from the Islamic Republic of Iran, revealing a paranoid regime increasingly dominated by Iran’s thuggish Revolutionary Republican Guard. From show trials of supposedly repentant opposition leaders to Iran’s preposterous claim that three U.S. rock climbers are actually spies, Iran now exhibits the classic trappings of a police state.

With the grotesque exception of Hugo Chavez, friend to tyrants everywhere, Iran suffers from growing international isolation. For this, President Obama deserves considerable credit, though Republicans who have cluelessly criticized his policy of “engaging” Iran will never admit it. By reaching out repeatedly to the regime, Obama has made it harder for Tehran to cast Washington as a neo-imperalist bully determined to deny Iran’s rights to acquire civilian nuclear energy. And he has deprived the Islamic Republican of the external threat it needs to justify repression at home.

That’s why, despite the regime’s harsh crackdown on its opponents, President Obama should leave open the door to engaging Tehran on the nuclear issue. Even if the regime continues to rebuff his overtures, it will bear the onus of intransigence, and the U.S. may find it easier to win Russian and Chinese support for tightening sanctions on the regime and the Revolutionary Guard.

Our best hopes for a more tractable and cooperative Iran, however, lie in the success of popular efforts to transform the Islamic Republic. Although the U.S. government can’t materially aid the opposition without fatally compromising it, NGOs here and abroad should be prepared to respond to calls for help from indigenous Iranian reformers should they come.

In the meantime, President Obama should steer clear of anti-Iran bluster, but continue to be forthright in expressing solidarity with Iranians struggling for human rights and greater freedom. He’s been walking a fine line on Iran, and recent events have vindicated the wisdom of that course.

Cheney At War

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Former Vice President Dick CheneyThe last person we needed to hear about the terrorist incident over Detroit was Conservative of the Year Dick Cheney. But naturally, he’s out now with the most obnoxious statement imaginable about the president’s own reaction:

As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low-key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of Sept. 11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won’t be at war.

He seems to think if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core Al Qaeda-trained terrorists still there, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gets rid of the words, ‘war on terror,’ we won’t be at war. But we are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe. Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency — social transformation — the restructuring of American society. President Obama’s first object and his highest responsibility must be to defend us against an enemy that knows we are at war.

Forget for a moment the stupid little slur at the end about “social transformation,” an obligatory nod to the conservative movement’s bizarre suggestion that Barack Obama is in the process of creating a Soviet America of some sort. What’s amazing about Cheney’s statement is his extraordinary assertion, in the absence of any real evidence on the subject at present, that the attempted bombing was some sort of major act of war like 9/11 warranting a major reaction by the nation and its chief executive.

Has it crossed Cheney’s mind, even once, over the last nine years that routine overreaction by U.S. leaders is one of the most cherished goals of al Qaeda and its allies? Does Cheney understand that conceding the ability of a scattered band of terrorists to completely control the foreign policy of the world’s great superpower, to dominate its news, to panic it into abandoning its own values and legal system, “emboldens” terrorists more than anything else we could do?

Just wondering.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

The National Conversation on Terrorism

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

I’ve been fortunate to spend the holidays with my family up in British Columbia. We’re not from the Great White North, mind you, but a few days in the Canadian wilderness have been a welcome opportunity to forget about my everyday professional concerns. With the health care bill passed and the pressing Afghanistan strategy speech now well behind us, I was happy to have the break.

Until our trip home, that is. Your faithful blogger sits in the Vancouver airport, having just struggled through the newly enacted, draconian security procedures enforced in the wake of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s failed attempt to bomb a Northwest flight into Detroit on Christmas Day. All carry-on items were banned from the main cabin (I’m fortunate to be able to hand-carry my laptop through security, one of the few exemptions), each passenger was given a full pat-down (a wad of old Kleenex in my Levis provoked a particularly displeased look from my security guard), and each of the 16 pockets in my winter jacket were thoroughly searched.

Lost amidst the rush to batten down the hatches is any sense of rationality about airport security. It’s a classic case of diminishing marginal returns — every extra dollar the TSA or DHS spends on airport security buys us far less than a buck’s worth of permanent safety. Look no further than the 2006 Heathrow plotters: in response to their desire to ignite liquid explosives in sports drink bottles, liquids on flights were banned. Guess what? You can’t bring your Gatorade on the plane, but Abdulmutallab still got through with a different device. What’s more, the present level of heightened security might make us feel safer in the short term, but it is ultimately unsustainable due to a combination of inadequate resources and an abundance of annoyed passengers.

Worse than heavy-handed is the reaction from Washington’s political classes. Rep. Peter King (R-NY) wasted little time in claiming that America’s terrorism screening system didn’t work; his colleague Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) tried to paint the administration as weak on terrorism. Questions abound: why wasn’t Abdulmutallab caught on the no-fly list? Why wasn’t his father’s warning to the U.S. embassy in Nigeria heeded?

The reaction to Flight 253 underscores the need to change the tenor of America’s national dialogue about terrorism. Implicit in the criticism of the administration’s handling of terrorism is an assumption that with the “right,” effective security measures, America can somehow erect an impenetrable wall around its borders.

It’s time to stop kidding ourselves: We can’t. With the hundreds of thousands of names on security lists, and millions of daily passengers in and out of America’s domestic airports and international destinations, someone determined, smart, careful, and — perhaps most important — lucky will be able to get through, no matter how airtight we believe America’s defenses to be. As a counterterrorism analyst for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, I would write something similar in each threat assessment for U.S. Navy ships pulling into any given port-of-call.

Improvements to the system should be made, of course. But rather than overreacting with new airport procedures, bickering over watch-lists, and politicizing the issue, we’re better off spending our energy addressing terrorism’s root causes. That’s the best way to ensure our security.