Among foreign policy mandarins here and abroad, it’s become axiomatic that America must radically downsize its global ambitions to avoid hubris and to match our straitened economic circumstances. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is having none of it.
In a speech this week to the Council on Foreign Relations, Clinton vigorously affirmed the world’s need for, and America’s capacity to provide, strong global leadership. Even in a multipolar world, she argued, no other nation has the unique combination of strengths necessary to organize collective action against common global problems.
And, at a time when moral relativism has crept into U.S. foreign policy discourse in the guise of realism, Clinton was refreshingly unapologetic in pledging U.S. support for the “universal” values of liberal democracy. As she had done in an important speech to the Community of Democracies in Krakow July 3, she noted that authoritarian governments are cracking down on independent civil society organizations, and she pledged U.S. assistance to embattled NGOs.
Clinton’s confident assertion of a “new American moment” is in striking contrast to narrative of U.S. decline now fashionable among global elites. The story goes something like this:
As the Cold War ended, the U.S. found itself the last superpower standing, its system of democratic capitalism triumphant — and quickly succumbed to hubris. It intervened in conflicts all over the globe, rashly plunged into unnecessary wars, drank the elixir of free market ideology, and in general overestimated its ability to shape events and impose its will on others. Now we are overextended and facing a global backlash against U.S. imperialist pretensions.
What’s more, we’re broke and can no longer afford to maintain our old position as global hegemon. Meanwhile, economic dynamism has shifted eastward, and the rapid growth of China, India and others is fundamentally altering the world’s balance of power.
All this Spenglerian gloom points to an inescapable conclusion: America must retrench strategically. This entails defining our interests more narrowly, shrinking our military, ceasing to lecture others about democracy, and shedding the too-costly burdens of global leadership.
Clinton instead argued essentially for updating the liberal internationalist vision for today’s interconnected world. She stressed the need for America to once again be the chief “architect” of cooperative institutions, at both the regional and global level, for providing mutual security and prosperity, tackling underdevelopment and climate change, and defending human rights (with her customary special emphasis on women’s equality). Through such interlacing institutions, she said, the burden of providing “public goods” could be spread more broadly.
She also widened the definition of the Obama administration’s policy of “engagement.” In addition to engaging adversaries and rivals diplomatically, she stressed her determination to engage directly with the people and foreign publics in general.
Less convincing was her account of U.S. efforts to contain Iran’s nuclear program. Our engagement with China and Russia, she said, paid real political dividends when the U.S. Security Council last spring passed, “the strongest and most comprehensive set of sanctions ever on Iran. ”
True, but Iran’s continued intransigence suggests the limits of multilateral diplomacy more than its effectiveness. The underlying assumption that Tehran is eager to be welcomed back into the world community overlooks the regime’s self-conception as a revolutionary Islamist theocracy and challenger of the international status quo.
In a curious omission, Clinton had little to say about terrorism amid all the architectural metaphors. While al Qaeda may be holed up in Pakistan, its ideology has spread to affiliates in Iraq and, more recently, in Somalia and Yemen, where the gruesome pattern of suicide attacks and mass murder of civilians is more and more evident.
Containing this ideological contagion is of critical importance to the United States and to its vision of a world order upheld by a growing network of liberal democratic institutions. Let’s hope we hear more from the Administration on this subject soon.
With the arrival of Labor Day, and the end of Vacation Time for Americans lucky enough to have jobs with benefits, the options for changing the dynamics of the midterm elections have gradually but steadily narrowed. Significant external events could still happen, but probably won’t; the economy is not going to turn around between now and November 2.
Moreover, the opportunity to engineer a basic sea change in public opinion on the Obama’s administration’s agenda is probably past for the time being. Much as the White House’s earlier efforts to convince people that the economy would be far worse without unpopular market interventions made sense, basic judgments have been made by most persuadable voters. The same is true of health reform; the legislation’s beneficial effects will have to kick in before it gets a fresh trial in the court of public opinion.
What Democrats can — and must — do more of during the shank of the campaign season is to challenge Republicans to disclose their own agenda for the country, and draw greater attention to the extremist logic of where Republican positions of current events would lead. The vast majority of all Democratic messaging in the next two months needs to relentlessly focus on this single topic.
This is obviously easier in the case of Republican nominees such as Rand Paul, Sharron Angle and Joe Miller, who have called for phasing out Social Security and Medicare. But many other Republicans are demanding elimination of any federal role in education, energy environmental protection or agriculture, and virtually the entire party is reflexively opposing regulations on a wide variety of subjects where corporate misbehavior has had a devastating effect on the national interest and middle-class Americans individually.
Even those GOP elected officials and candidates who have been careful to avoid such specific positions have accepted the party-wide argument that federal budget deficits must be immediately reduced if not eliminated even as new tax cuts for high-earners and corporations are provided and the defense budget is protected (if not expanded via a new war with Iran which many Republicans have been agitating in favor of for years now). By any sort of math, the Republican agenda means massive steps to eliminate regulations and scale back Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other basic safety net programs.
Democrats need to hammer away at these general and particular implications of the GOP agenda every day and in every competitive contest across the country.
To those who argue that this sort of “negative” campaigning would represent an effort to change the subject from its own performance in office, Democrats must respond: it’s Republicans who are trying to change the subject from a proper comparison of the agendas of the two parties and of individual candidates.
There’s no secret about the Democratic agenda; the administration and the congressional Democratic leadership have been trying to implement it since January of 2009, against the active obstruction of the GOP, which is using every dilatory tactic, most notably unprecedented threats to use Senate filibusters. The public deserves to know exactly what the Republican Party will propose if it gains control of either House of Congress.
At this late date, such a “negative” campaign by Democrats is the right thing to do, and perhaps the only thing to do that can simultaneously persuade swing voters and motivate a high turnout by Democrats. Waiting until next year to force the hand of Republicans is both irresponsible and politically feckless.
However much conservatives and many elements of the media insist the midterm elections are a “referendum” on the Obama administration or this or that Democratic initiative, they cannot wish away the fact that every contest that will decide control of Congress or of state and local governments involves a choice between a Democrat and a Republican–with the former being held strictly responsible for every discontent with the status quo, and the latter free to demagogue and make vague or wild promises without immediate consequences.
Every Democrat reading these words knows the sort of extremist and very unpopular agenda the GOP will be forced to advance in the very near future by its own loose rhetoric, the logic of its conflicting promises, and the growing radicalism of its cadre of politicians. It’s time to tell the country about it right now.
I hope David Frum is right and that the Tea Party movement, which is growing in numbers and ferocity, will hit its limit, experience an Icarus moment, and plunge back into the fringe of American politics where pugnacious, jingoistic, narrow band nationalism has always lurked.
But Clemons is skeptical: “But there is no guarantee of this,” he writes, citing a prominent funder, who frets that “their political loss didn’t teach the Republicans anything; they actually got much worse.”
Kevin Drum chimes in with faith in the political pendulum that always swings back:
I think Frum is right and the mega-funder just needs to have a bit more patience. Parties rarely move to the center immediately after a big defeat. Usually it takes two or three before they finally get the message, and on that metric Republicans aren’t due for a move to the center until sometime after 2012.
Sure, when a party keeps losing, eventually there is a move to shake it up. But the problem is that Republicans are winning doing this, which the wingnuts in the party will surely interpret as a vindication for their, errr, patriotic turn.
But I’m still optimistic that the Tea Party movement does have a limited shelf life. Here’s why:
And governing is more difficult than campaigning. Once in Congress, these wild turks won’t be able to deliver on their outrageous promises of ending big government and repealing healthcare. This will likely provoke disillusionment and then infighting among Tea Party types as to whether to find a new breed of “purer” Tea Partiers, or to remain loyal to their existing leaders. Disillusionment and infighting will sap the Tea Party movement of energy.
Additionally, Tea Party legislators, especially in the Senate, will effectively grind the wheels of governance to a halt. Moderate voters, who are now fed up with Democrats for not fixing the economy in two years, will still want somebody to blame for a sluggish economy. And this new batch of Tea Party fanatics, who like to run off their mouths into the deep recesses of ridiculousness, will now find that being accountable makes them the hunted rather than the hunters.
In many ways, this is just the latest step in a decades-long ratcheting up of opposition political rhetoric and promises. The party out of power always promises that there are simple solutions to hard problems that will solve everything, and accuses the party in power of being just too corrupt, incompetent, or whatever to see that. But of course hard problems actually have hard solutions, and the problems now are harder than before and the solutions are even harder. In short: it’s probably a bad time to be overpromising.
The primary defeat of incumbent Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski (confirmed by her concession yesterday) by former judge Joe Miller is generally being interpreted as another scalp for the Tea Party Movement in its assault on Republicans deemed too moderate on this or that key issue. But there’s something going on a bit deeper, if you consider Alaska’s exceptional dependence on the federal government and the past political track record of politicians like Murkowski’s mentor, the late Ted Stevens, who aligned themselves with the anti-government GOP but emphasized their ability to “bring home the bacon” via appropriations.
In endorsing Miller on behalf of his Senate Conservatives Fund, Jim DeMint emphasized this dimension of Murkowski’s defeat:
Joe Miller’s victory should be a wake-up call to politicians who go to Washington to bring home the bacon. Voters are saying ‘We’re not willing to bankrupt the country to benefit ourselves.’
Now it wouldn’t be quite right to accept DeMint’s characterization of either Alaska voters’ motivations or Miller’s ideology at face value. After all, when Miller calls for abolishing the federal Department of Energy, he’s appealing to the rather selfish desire of Alaskans to control their “own” energy resources–whose value is a lot higher than any federal earmark– regardless of what it means nationally.
But it’s true that there’s an element of collective self-denial among those conservatives who are genuinely willing to take on federal spending categories that are popular among their constituents. Miller is just the latest of a number of Republican Senate candidates this year who have called for phasing out Social Security and Medicare. DeMint himself has long described these programs, along with public education, as having seduced middle-class Americans into socialist ways of thinking.
As Republican pols from Barry Goldwater to George W. Bush can tell you, going after Social Security and Medicare is really bad politics. And they’ve yet to come up with a gimmick, whether it’s “partial privatization” or grandfathering existing beneficiaries, to make major changes in these programs popular (I seriously doubt the very latest gimmick, “voucherizing” Medicare, will do any better once people understand the idea). Indeed, Republicans notably engaged in their own form of “Medagoguery” by attacking health care reform as a threat to Medicare benefits.
Yet the sudden Tea Party-driven return to fiscal hawkery among Republicans, particularly if it’s not accompanied by any willingness to consider tax increases or significant defense spending cuts, will drive the GOP again and again to “entitlement reform.” In Senate candidates like Rand Paul and Sharron Angle and now Joe Miller, we are seeing the return of a paleoconservative perspective in the GOP that embraces the destruction of the New Deal/Great Society era’s most important accomplishments not just as a matter of fiscal necessity but as a moral imperative.
You can respect this point of view even if you abhor its practical implications. But there’s little doubt it represents political folly of potentially massive dimensions. Certainly Democrats owe it to these brave conservatives to take them seriously in their desire to free middle-class seniors from the slavery of Social Security and Medicare, and draw as much attention to it as possible.
Yesterday morning, that’s what we were wondering around the PPI offices — would Obama thank President Bush during his Iraq address that night? I had a conversation with my colleague Lindsay Lewis, who had just heard White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs mention that Obama was scheduled to call Bush that afternoon. Might Obama directly thank Bush for adopting “the surge”, which, as the incomplete political narrative goes, was responsible for the decrease in violence in Iraq in 2007?
If he was explicit in his praise, I felt that the left would be apoplectic. DailyKos and HuffPo headlines would read “The Jerk THANKED Bush”, not “Obama Fulfills Campaign Pledge.” As polls indicate Democrats’ looming losses this November, that’s not what the administration wants floating around its mysteriously disenchanted base.
Lindsay, ever the astute politico, noted that by paying tribute to Bush, Obama was playing long-ball: If he were to thank Bush, Obama would be positioning himself as a post-partisan Commander-In-Chief. In political terms, he’d be positioning himself for the reelect.
Turns out that Lindsay wasn’t far off, and Obama even did him one-better: The president threaded a very fine needle that mollified critics on left and right:
This afternoon, I spoke to former President George W. Bush. It’s well known that he and I disagreed about the war from its outset. Yet no one can doubt President Bush’s support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security. As I’ve said, there were patriots who supported this war, and patriots who opposed it. And all of us are united in appreciation for our servicemen and women, and our hopes for Iraqis’ future.
Turns out he didn’t go so far as to thank Bush, which keeps the focus on fulfilling his campaign pledge for the progressive base, but he succeeded in praising Bush enough to mute conservative critique and position himself as a post-partisan leader. If you’ll pardon the phrase, Mission: Accomplished.
The conservative intelligensia are split. Here Max Boot sounding… magnanimous, even:
I thought that this speech was about as good as we could expect from an opponent of the Iraq war — and better than Obama has done in the past. He even (for the first time?) held out an olive branch to his predecessor. … There was only a brief mention of Afghanistan, but what he said was pretty good.
I thought his speech was on the whole commendable, and even at times impressive. … Not a bad tribute to the troops, and not a bad statement of the importance and indispensability of hard power. And, on the whole, not a bad speech by the president.
Truth be told, I’m happy to see them giving credit where credit is due.
Of course, every conservative didn’t feel so gooey inside. Here’s Jennifer Rubin:
Obama is still candidate Obama, never tiring of reminding us that he kept his campaign pledge and ever eager to push aside foreign policy challenges so he can get on with the business of remaking America. All in all, it was what we were promised it would not be — self-serving, disingenuous, ungracious, and unreassuring.
I really disliked it…. If you read this closely, what Obama is saying is that not only do we owe it to the troops to rally around his discredited and partisan economic agenda (“It’s our turn”), not only is it a test of our patriotism to sign on with his environmental and industrial planning schemes, but that doing so “must be our central mission as a people.” I find everything about that offensive.
The point is that on some level, Obama succeeded in presenting himself as a post-partisan Commander-in-Chief. Of course, anyone can concoct a reason why not to like a speech given by the president of a different political persuasion. So while Rubin and Goldberg’s reactions are stock and trade, drawing even faint praise from the likes of Bill Kristol is a remarkable and welcome milestone.
Many commentators seem puzzled over President Obama’s decision to use an Oval Office speech to mark the “end of combat operations” in Iraq. The reason: Iraq is important to Barack Obama, even if most Americans are nowadays preoccupied with a foundering economy.
Iraq, in fact, may be the reason Obama is President. During the 2008 campaign, the very green Junior Senator from Illinois used his opposition to the war to distinguish himself from more experienced rivals like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. His anti-war credentials allowed him to ride the powerful tide of anti-Bush sentiment among progressives. It also buttressed his claims to be a Washington outsider, the most authentic agent of political change in the race. This appealed to independents.
So it’s little wonder that Obama takes his pledge to end the Iraq war very seriously. He undoubtedly regards it as a matter of keeping faith with his core supporters. At the same time, he was careful not to inflame old passions over the war. On the contrary, he rightly praised U.S. troops for their skill and valor, offered a graceful salute to his predecessor, and urged the country to move on.
In this respect, the speech was probably the most genuinely “post partisan” of his presidency. But it also raised questions about what Obama really thinks about the war. He noted that U.S. troops, at tremendous sacrifice, toppled one of the world’s worst tyrants and gave Iraq a chance to embrace “a different destiny.” Does that mean he disagrees with the New York Times’ characterization of Iraq as a “tragic, pointless war”? Obama sounded ambiguous on the question of whether it was all worth it, but such reticence probably comes with the job of being President.
Whether the public will regard his declaration as an important milestone is another matter. Violence in Iraq is already down, thanks at least in part to the surge that Obama initially opposed but has since implicitly endorsed by putting the same general, David Petraeus, in charge of a similar escalation in Afghanistan. What’s more, 50,000 U.S. troops will remain in Iraq for the next 16 months, and at least some of them will be fighting al Qaeda insurgents. Truth to tell, the President did little more last night that endorse the timetable set forth in the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) the Bush administration negotiated with the Iraqi government.
For Obama, the significance of this moment is that it marks the transition to Iraqi responsibility for security. That’s fine, but America can’t simply wash its hands and walk away at the end of next year. Iraq didn’t ask to be invaded, or to be plunged into the hellish sectarian violence that followed. The United States has incurred an unavoidable moral obligation to help a decent political order emerge in Iraq. If that requires revisiting the SOFA, the administration shouldn’t be inflexible on the point.
In stressing the limits of America’s responsibilities, the President also drew parallels between Iraq and Afghanistan. The United States should stay in Afghanistan only as long as it takes to build the capacity of the Afghan government and security forces to defend the country against a vicious Taliban insurgency.
Obama, in fact, seemed to be implicitly advancing a new doctrine of limited U.S. military intervention. The unstated assumption: America probably will be forced to intervene again in failing and fragile states beset by terrorism or communal conflict. But we should make no open-ended commitments to counterinsurgency and national building. But war is seldom so tidy. The United States still has troops in South Korea, 57 years after the war there ended.
In all, it was an often confusing and even contradictory speech, as Fred Kaplan captured well today. It reflected the deep ambivalence of a man who rose to prominence on the strength of his anti-war stance, and now finds himself, as Commander in Chief, responsible for bringing no less than three wars – Iraq, Afghanistan and the fight against al Qaeda – to a successful conclusion.
Among the literature I picked up on Saturday while attending the “Restoring Honor” rally on the National Mall (purely to indulge my curiosity) was a three-by-five card asking me: “ARE YOU READY TO BEGIN THE REBIRTH OF THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION?” The card directs me to a website, the1789project.com, where I can pledge money to a PAC that will only support candidates who adhere to the Constitution.
Another card tells me: “Politicians are destroying our country. We have the solution. Join us. We seek the modern day incarnations of Madison, Franklin, and Jefferson.” The card is for the “Get Out of Our House” project, or GOOOH. The plan, according to the website, is “to remove all members of the U.S. House of Representatives and replace them with everyday Americans just like you.” Wow. Just like me? I can only dream.
I was struck by the ways in which this resonated with the larger theme of the program: Restoring Honor. Restoring. This great hope that only if we could get back to some golden era, if only we could tap into this apparently forsaken “Constitution” document, if only we could get rid of all the “career politicians” and replace them with ordinary citizens, somehow all the problems of the world would solve themselves.
It’s a wonderfully alluring biblical narrative: the return to the lost Eden. One gentleman I spoke with assured me that if only we all would just stop and really read the Bible and take its teachings to heart, all of our problems would be solved. There would be no need for government. Everything would work perfectly. (He was handing out literature for “Project Restore”). Meanwhile, Glenn Beck announced over the loudspeakers: “To Restore America, we must restore ourselves.”
The idea of redemption through a return to first principles is nothing new, and it’s far from the exclusive province of the political right. One is reminded, for example, of the hopeful Port Huron statement, with its great emphasis on a return to participatory democracy driven by a return to values, and its explicit narrative of decline: “Theoretic chaos has replaced the idealistic thinking of old — and, unable to reconstitute theoretic order, men have condemned idealism itself. Doubt has replaced hopefulness — and men act out a defeatism that is labeled realistic.” Compare that to Glenn Beck: “My role, as I see it, is to wake America up to the backsliding of principles and values.”
Sure, I’m all for self-improvement. We could all be kinder, gentler, harder working, better people. But the very fact that self-improvement is a $10 billion a year industry (and growing) is a testament to the human condition never quite being able to live up to our ideals. “If men were angels,” wrote Madison in Federalist #51, “no government would be necessary.”
The flaw in the redemption-by-return-to-first-principles story is that there never was a golden age. Each era had its strengths and weaknesses, but we tend to remember the wisest statements because those are the ones that are passed on and consecrated. (And lest we forget: The America of 1789 was an isolated agrarian nation in which only rich, educated, white property owners could vote. Would we want go back, even if we could?)
The mild danger in the redemption-by-return-to-first-principles story is that it undermines the ability of political institutions to solve problems through the messy art of compromise. If the only acceptable solution to the mess we’re in is to start fresh (for example, to replace to whole stinkin’ lot of lawmakers with “ordinary citizens”), it won’t be long before that fresh start encounters the same timeless governance problem of aggregating diverse preferences, and start acting like “politicians.” The more serious danger is that the redemption-by-rededication is a kindred spirit of utopian thinking that slides easily into ends-justifies-the-means murder and genocide, from communist purges to terrorist jihads.
The current sputtering economy, or the toxic brew of declining revenues and spiraling debt and entitlement obligations, or climate change, or any of the hard problems we face as a society — these are not going to go away if only we learn to love thy neighbor. The only way they’ll go away is with patience and compromise and hard work. This is the world in which we live. We need to roll up our sleeves and be realistic.
Yes, we can all be better people. I’m trying every day. But a full and complete purge of sin as gateway to a lost Eden is not a substitute for the real challenges of politics. Politics, whatever its shortcomings, is the art of the possible. The return to a lost golden age is the art of the impossible.
There has been growing chatter this week in response to James Surowiecki’s recent piece in The New Yorker suggesting we create a new, higher-rate tax bracket for the “super rich.” It’s the kind of side story I should expect to see and not take too seriously when major tax changes are on the political agenda. But I can’t just ignore this one, because it keeps getting more traction, and I think it baits extremists on both sides into all-too-familiar class warfare arguments, which are exactly the kind of discussions we should not be having right now.
As a Democrat, I am strongly in favor of a progressive tax system. It’s one of the widely held values that defines us as a party, and it’s something we should not shrink from fighting for. But there comes a point when the zeal for progressivity can overtake reasonable concerns about encouraging economic growth, and this year is not the time to let that happen. Questions of distributional justice are important, and the Bush tax cuts did a lot to worsen inequality in our country that need to be remedied, but let’s keep the bigger picture in mind here.
The proposed “super rich” bracket is a supercharged example of how progressives are misdirecting our energies in the tax debate. While there’s not much chance that it will make the jump to becoming an actual legislative proposal, the idea has struck a nerve on the left, which is already twitchy over the debate over whether to extend the Bush tax cuts for the top tax brackets, as Paul Krugman dutifully showed in his Times op-ed on Monday. CNBC was quick to give the story more legs by bringing on Michael Linden from the Center for American Progress to endorse the idea in a segment on Monday. Then they came back to it with another segment Wednesday night with Matt Miller (also from CAP) facing off with Stephen Moore from the Wall Street Journal.
For someone who has written about the Tyranny of Dead Ideas, Miller really let himself go a little zombie on this one, sounding too much like the “talking dead” with the old-school liberal argument for steep progressivity in the tax code and a deaf ear to the concerns about economic growth. I’m not criticizing him personally as much I am CNBC for painting him that way, since Miller has repeatedly weighed in with very good thoughts about cuts for payroll and corporate taxes, but I think volunteering to step into the scripted left-wing role for this segment was a step backward from his earlier calls for a more radical centrism.
Is this really the kind of debate we are going to get dragged into this year? With the country still languishing in recession, people in every tax bracket are looking to Washington to do what needs to be done to get the economy going again. Do we really have to listen to the same broken records from both sides this time around (and they really are records, because these arguments haven’t changed much since the days of vinyl)? This is the type of discussion that will drag the current tax debate into a predictable and unproductive battle of liberal and conservative clichés, which all but ensures that Congress will spend the fall in a tug-of-war over marginal tweaks to the Bush tax cuts and ignore other proposals for reform and stimulus.
We Democrats should not paint themselves into our usual corner in the tax debate by limiting our ideas to line-drawing, whether it’s the Administration’s line for the richest two percent or a new line for the “Ultrarich” in the top 0.1 percent. Letting this happen would be a mistake for two reasons:
First, it obscures and marginalizes better policy questions at a time when sustainable economic growth should be our top priority. Putting aside broader reform proposals, even the Bush tax cuts may not deserve to be lumped together and simply cleaved in two at the $250,000 line. For example, rates on dividend income for the top brackets could jump from 15% to 39% in 2011, while capital gains income will stay at a lower 20% rate. There is a good case to be made that the dividend rate should be kept in line with the capital gains rate, regardless of what happens to marginal rates, because having a disparity between these two taxes on investment negatively affects the cost of capital for utilities and other companies paying high dividends, which discourages spending on new capital and infrastructure. But we likely won’t have that debate, because the distributional effects of playing with the dividend rate fall mostly within the top brackets, so they are on the wrong side of the dividing line Obama has drawn.
Second, Republicans usually do a much better job delivering their zombie rhetoric than Democrats. As John Boehner so frequently demonstrates, the Republican response for talking about the top brackets is to use “small business” as a euphemism for rich people. They have shaky new statistics every week about how the Democrats are raising taxes on small business. But trying to explain away all the false numbers tends to put Democrats on the defensive, when they should be making an affirmative case for promoting economic growth. And so far, Boehner and company are getting away with doing just that, because the President and congressional leaders are following our party’s tradition of being reactive on taxes instead of laying out a real vision. So right now the public thinks the “Democrats’ plan” is pretty much whatever John Boehner and the tax zombies say it is.
Progressives’ top priority right now needs to be reviving economic growth and broad-based prosperity. We can’t have a meaningful debate about economic inequality until we get our economy growing again. Jobs and growth—not punishing the rich—are what Americans are interested in, and what we should be talking about. Instead, progressives are limiting their talking points to justifying the dividing line between those who deserve tax cuts and those who don’t—the helps and the help-nots—and we’re letting Republicans own the growth side of the debate.
Democrats need to have something more than tired old thinking that says the Bush tax cuts are mostly OK for now, as long as we give them a quick liberal haircut—just a little off the top. Instead of trying to repackage Bush’s mistakes, we should be framing the debate around the pro-growth virtues of a free-standing package of “Obama tax cuts.” All we need now is for Obama to actually propose one. I hope the zombies didn’t get to him too.
Last weekend, Australia held a national election. And for the first time in 70 years, the land down under is now facing a hung parliament.
While Australia struggles to figure out how to govern itself, it’s worth reflecting on a larger trend: there is now a hung parliament in every major nation that is governed by a winner-take-all, “Westminster model” parliament (For those of you keeping score at home, that’s India, U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). And just about every other major industrial democracy relies on some version of proportional representation, resulting in multi-party governing coalitions of varying stability.
India obviously is an astoundingly heterogeneous country, so that makes sense. But it’s not immediately obvious why the four Anglo countries should be having such a difficult achieving political consensus these days. It’s enough to make one wonder: have we entered a new era of global politics in which it’s no longer possible for any party to win an electoral majority anymore?
And then of course, there is the good U.S. of A. (not a Westminster parliament, obviously, but also a winner-take-all system) where even though Democrats control both Congress and the Presidency, filibuster powers in the hands of an obstructionist minority sure makes it feel like a hung parliament.
But the big U.S. story this election is of course how the voters are growing increasingly sour on both parties, and no matter who winds up in control of the House and Senate come 2011, it’s not like any electoral majority is going to have anything close to a meaningful national mandate. In the latest National Journal poll 28 percent of all respondents disapproved of both parties, and the number of Independents has been rising over the last six years to the point where the plurality of voters (36 percent) now choose to identify themselves as independents. And even if most independents tend to vote like partisans, the changing self-identification suggests they are less and less happy about it.
And while there are any number of possible explanations (Is it the hyper-adversarial nature of modern politics, stoked by the 24/7 media cycle, in which every trivial tiff is the new Waterloo? Is it something about the grim global economy, and the difficult reckonings that almost all nations are facing on some level?). One wonders: have we entered a new era in which it is impossible for the majority of any modern nation to come together behind one banner? Is the modern partisan majority dead? And if so, what do we do about it?
David Brooks’ column today tackles what he sees as a pervasive intellectual laziness in modern political discourse, emerging in good part out of confirmation bias run amok and coddled by a culture that errs on the side of affirmation as opposed to challenge.
The ensuing mental flabbiness is most evident in politics. Many conservatives declare that Barack Obama is a Muslim because it feels so good to say so. Many liberals never ask themselves why they were so wrong about the surge in Iraq while George Bush was so right. The question is too uncomfortable.
Brooks figures maybe this has something to do with that simple fact that giving people what they want is always more profitable than the alternative:
In the media competition for eyeballs, everyone is rewarded for producing enjoyable and affirming content. Output is measured by ratings and page views, so much of the media, and even the academy, is more geared toward pleasuring consumers, not putting them on some arduous character-building regime.
Brooks is surely right on this point. But here are two additional ways in which the current media environment probably contributes to intellectual laziness:
1) Given the inexhaustible availability of content at any given moment, it is easier than ever to stay on a selective media diet, only munching on the news you know you like. Gone are the days when if you wanted to know what was going on in the world, you had only your local papers and evening television news to guide you. Today, you can read and read and read and watch and watch and watch to your heart’s content without ever so much as having to encounter an idea with which you disagree, or even a discomfiting fact.
2) The infinite chaos of the modern media stream might just be too overwhelming for anyone to approach without the crutch of an ideological filter. Imagine, for a moment, that you were truly agnostic as to some policy question, and you earnestly wanted to research it objectively. Where would you start? And more importantly: where would you stop? And when contrary ideas and facts emerged, how would you evaluate them? Picking an ideology to start provides coherence in a chaotic world (as it always has). And with the news environment more chaotic and expansive than ever, having a starting ideology seems even more helpful.
All of this suggests that those of us who agree with Brooks about the dangers of intellectual laziness built on ideology may be facing more obstacles than ever before. In short, we have our work cut out for us.
It’s a familiar argument: we know that putting a price on carbon will impose economic costs, but we can’t be absolutely sure that major climate change will happen. Therefore, we shouldn’t impose a carbon price, or at least we should avoid doing so in a recession, and be very reticent to do so at any point. The argument strikes many as logical and wise.
It is neither. And it won’t help make good policy or make progress towards consensus on what good climate policy should be.
At its core, the argument claims that any uncertainty about climate change means we should either give up, or at least wait indefinitely for better evidence. I call it the “McClellan principle.” Like the Civil War general, proponents of the argument counsel doing nothing until absolutely certain of success. The principle is frequently stated or assumed to be true in climate policy debates, often but not always by professed climate skeptics. To give a few recent examples, Stephen Calabresi states the principle explicitly in a Politico debate last week, while Steve Everley of Newt Gingrich’s American Solutions outfit uses the stealth version of the principle by listing costs of a carbon price while failing to mention climate change at all. But perhaps the most common form of the principle is simply as a concluding statement, thrown in as if its implications were obvious and unworthy of debate. The Wall Street Journal does this when criticizing California’s AB32 cap-and-trade policy in an April editorial:
While almost all of AB32’s benefits are speculative and uncertain, its costs are hitting businesses and residents now. This is one more blow to jobs and growth that California doesn’t need.
The appeal of the McClellan principle may come from the fact that it is cloaked in rational language, but it isn’t a rational approach to policy at all. In fact, it’s the inverse of the familiar “precautionary principle” advanced by many Greens (at least in the precautionary principle’s strong form). The strong precautionary principle would require a policy response even if uncertainty is large. The McClellan principle requires inaction even if uncertainty is small. Both principles are simplistic, and neither leads to good policy decisions.
The reason for this is that there are both costs and uncertainty about those costs associated with climate policy and with doing nothing. Both are real choices with consequences, even if we can’t say with complete precision what those consequences are.
The McClellan principle stresses that the economic costs of climate policy—primarily higher energy prices—are certain, while there is at least some chance that all the climate science models are wrong and that there will be no costs associated with doing nothing. Holding out hope that the Earth will not warm (or that we can do nothing about it) strikes me as absurdly Panglossian, but the basic premise that we can be more confident in estimates of the economic costs of policy—particularly that they will not be zero—is probably right.
The McClellan principle’s conclusion does not follow from this premise, however. Making policy based only on which kind of costs we think are more or less likely to be zero doesn’t make sense. We should instead do the best we can in estimating the two costs, both their magnitude and precision, and make the policy we can based on those estimates. That is of course incredibly difficult in practice. It raises questions about discounting of future costs and benefits, the tensions between national policy and global risks, and distributional impacts, among others. But it has to be the basic framework for making a decision. Both the McClellan and (strong) precautionary principles try to offer shortcuts, but in doing so they obfuscate rather than clarify.
I illustrating this is hard because conversations about climate policy are, unfortunately, so loaded with politics and preconceived ideas. Instead, let’s look at another issue loaded with different politics and preconceived ideas: crime. Imagine you are on a parole board considering release of a prisoner. There is a cost to releasing the felon (he might commit another crime) and a cost to keeping him in prison (prisons are crowded and expensive, and he might contribute to society if released). You know the cost of prison is not zero. The cost of release might be zero, or it might be big. But that doesn’t mean you should release the felon— or even that you should be any more likely to. Setting moral/ethical considerations about the prisoner aside, all we should care about is balancing our best guess about the costs of both options.
Of course, the way that parole boards work in practice—or at least the way most people demand that they work—is that any real chance of repeat offense is regarded as a reason for denying parole. So why is there such a dissonance between the way many people view parole decisions and the way so many view the climate policy debate? Why does the mainstream view on releasing felons appear to be a form of the precautionary principle, while the McClellan principle, if not the mainstream view on climate, is at least a major and usually uncriticized one? Surely a big factor is that the risks of crime are viewed as more personal and visceral, even if the chances of actually being a victim of a re-offender are low. It might be as simple as saying that most of us fear criminals more than we fear the more emotionally and temporally, if not probabilistically distant risks of climate change—and that mainstream positions are defined by what we most fear. That’s unavoidable to some extent, but it’s not a rational approach to making good policy.
Others, most notably Richard Posner, have made a similar analogy between major climate change and asteroid impacts—for which uncertainty is similarly paired with catastrophic downside risk. This analogy is useful because asteroid impacts are completely politically irrelevant—there’s no party line, and little fear—and as a result few people seem to have either a precautionary or McClellan principle-style reaction. A rational approach is the most appealing, though the same lack of fear may cause us to ignore the risk entirely and do nothing.
As these analogies hopefully illustrate, precision is important, but lack of it shouldn’t keep us from acting—on climate or on other problems of risk. Precision is just another factor in estimation of risks and costs. And whether the costs of action or inaction might have a chance of being zero doesn’t provide a shortcut out of the difficult task of balancing the two and making policy. Uncertainty matters, but it does not and cannot do the work alone.
I suspect that many people who advance the McClellan principle as their argument against pricing carbon would still oppose a price even if there were much less uncertainty about climate change risks (or would simply disbelieve claims of certainty). In their case, the McClellan principle may provide cover for less politically-acceptable positions, like an economic or political interest in fossil fuels or a very large discount rate. But many people who state the principle are not being disingenuous just to score rhetorical points. You don’t even have to reject climate science to advance the McClellan principle—you just need to point to the uncertainty within it.
But even for the intellectually honest, the wellspring of the principle’s appeal is, again, fear. Especially in a recession, the downside of pricing carbon sparks greater concern than climate change does, at least for many people. To them, the economic costs of a carbon price are very real, immediate, and personal, while the costs of climate change are distant and abstract. This is to some extent true for everyone, though if you are unemployed and live in a coal state, economic costs are certainly more apparent: a recent study suggests that unemployment and some measures of concern about climate change are negatively correlated. In a democracy, these perspectives cannot and should not be dismissed. They are valuable and should be listened to when considering climate policy, and in particular its distributional impacts.
But the fact that costs are tangible—that they are feared—doesn’t mean the McClellan principle is any more logically sound. Lack of certainty about climate change risks doesn’t justify inaction any more in Ohio than it does in California—or places at great risk from warming, like Bangladesh. The McClellan principle is ultimately based on fear, not reason. Stripping the principle of its thin cloak of rationality might therefore make a difference, however small, in the politics of climate policy. As I mentioned above, I’m certainly not the first person to try to do this, but the principle remains a resilient meme. It’s worth having the counterargument in your pocket. Next time you hear it, ask its proponent what they would do on a parole board.
Last week’s The Economistleader and cover story, “Picking winners, saving losers”, painted an insidious picture of governments’ increasing intervention in market economies, arguing that the hideous Leviathan of the state was gobbling up one sector after another and warning that “picking industrial winners nearly always fails.” Now, put aside the fact that the government was forced into some sectors—such as automobiles and financial services—only after mammoth market failures and pleas for rescues from capitalism’s chieftains. The more important fact is that the article feeds a Socialism-is-coming hysteria and ignores how picking winners—within limits—has worked in the past for the United States (and Japan, South Korea, etc.) and is needed more than ever to bolster our long-term competitiveness.
Of course, the debate about the appropriate role between the state and the private sector in market economies has raged for centuries. The debate is marred in part by vague terminology, and The Economist perpetuates this problem by throwing around a slew of terms—“picking winners”, “industrial policy”, “innovation policy”—without adequately distinguishing between them but while uniformly indicting them as inappropriate manifestations of government economic intervention.
It would be more constructive to envision a continuum of government-market engagement, increasing from left to right in four steps from a “laissez faire, leave it to the market” approach to “supporting factor conditions for innovation (such as education)” (which The Economist endorses, as, certainly, does ITIF) to going further by “supporting key technologies/industries” to at the most extreme “picking specific national champion companies”, that is, “picking winners.” And while it is generally inadvisable for governments to intervene in markets to support specific national champion companies, ITIF believes there is an appropriate role for government in placing strategic bets to support potentially breakthrough nascent technologies and industries.
Ironically, The Economist asserts that, “Industrial policy may be designed to support or restructure old struggling sectors, such as steel or textiles, or to try to construct new industries, such as robotics or nanotechnology. Neither track has met with much success. Governments rarely evaluate the costs and benefits properly.” Yet, seconds later, the authors admit, “America can claim the most important industrial-policy successes, in the early development of the internet and Silicon Valley.” In one sentence, the article glosses over the point that the government, in this case the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), “supported creation of ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet, despite a lack of interest from the private sector.” (Italics mine.) But this point, as economists are wont to say, is “non-trivial.” In fact, it is the precisely the point.
Early on, companies were reticent to invest in the nascent field of computer networking because the sums required were enormous and the technology was so far from potential commercialization that companies were unable to foresee how to monetize potential investments. Moreover, such basic research often results in knowledge spillovers, meaning the company cannot capture all the benefits of its R&D investment (in economist’s terms, the social rate of return from R&D is higher than the private rate of return), and thus companies tend to underinvest in R&D to societally optimal levels. Of course, this dynamic pertained not just to the Internet, but applies today to a range of emerging infrastructure technologies such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, robotics, etc. As Greg Tassey, Senior Economist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), explains it, “the complex multidisciplinary basis for new technologies demands the availability of technology “platforms” before efficient applied R&D leading to commercial innovation can occur.” In other words, the levels of investment required to research and develop emerging technologies is so great that the private sector cannot support it alone, and thus, “government must increasingly assume the role of partner with industry in managing technology research projects.”
Such was the case with the initial development of the Internet, as government stepped in and provided initial R&D funding, helped coordinate research between the military, universities, and industry, and thus seeded development of a breakthrough digital infrastructure platform, making the Internet a reality decades before the free market ever would have (if ever) if left to its own devices. And this admittedly-successful industrial policy has indeed been a spectacular success. As ITIF documented in a recent report, The Internet Economy 25 Years After.com, the commercial Internet now adds $1.5 trillion to the global economy each year—that’s the equivalent of adding South Korea’s entire economy annually.
Moreover, the list of technologies in which government funding or performance of research and development (R&D) has played a fundamental role in bringing the technology to realization is long and compelling. It includes: the cotton gin, the manufacturing assembly line, the microwave, the calculator, the transistor and semiconductor, the relational database, the laser beam, the graphical user interface, and the global positioning system (GPS), amongst many others. The National Institute of Health (NIH) practically created the biotechnology industry in this country. And yes, even Google, the Web search darling, isn’t a pure-bred creature of the free market; the search algorithm it uses was developed as part of the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Digital Library Initiative. (But Google hasn’t done much to spur economic growth!) The point is that companies like IBM, Google, Oracle, Akamai, Hewlett-Packard, and many others may not have even come into existence─and certainly would not have prospered to the extent they have─if the U.S. government was not either an early funder of R&D for the technologies they were developing or a leading procurer of the products they were producing. And if you don’t get Intel developing the semiconductors, or Cisco building out the Internet, or Akamai securing it, or Google making it accessible, then you don’t get the downstream companies like the Amazons or eBays, the latter of which 724,000 Americans rely on as their primary or secondary source of income.
Thus, while governments shouldn’t be creating and running such companies itself—that is for the free market to do—the government has a role to play in thoughtfully, strategically, and intentionally placing strategic bets on nascent and emerging technologies—as the United States did with information and communications technologies in the 1960s and 1970s—that have the potential to turn into the industries, companies, and jobs that drive an economy two to three decades hence. We call this innovation policy, as opposed to industrial policy. Today, this augurs the need for smart policies and investments in industries such as robotics, nanotechnology, clean energy, biotechnology, synthetic biology, high-performance computing, and digital platforms such as the smart grid, intelligent transportation systems, broadband, and Health IT. Explicit in this approach is a recognition that some technologies and industries are in fact more important than others in driving economic growth—that “$100 of potato chips does not equal $100 of computer chips.” Indeed, they are not because some industries, such as semiconductor microprocessors (computer chips) experience very rapid growth and reductions in cost, spark the development of subsequent industries, and increase the productivity of other sectors of the economy—not to mention support higher wage jobs.
Yet The Economist frets that governments aren’t very good at identifying and investing in strategic emerging technologies. In impugning governments’ ability to pick winning technologies, the article cites failures such as France’s Minitel (a case of a country picking a national champion company) and argues that “Even supposed masters of industrial policy {like Japan’s MITI, or Ministry of International Trade and Industry} have made embarrassing mistakes.” But this would be tantamount to pointing to the spectacular failure of Apple’s Newton and arguing that Apple’s no good at innovation. The Economist seems to suggest that if governments failed 80-90% of the time in picking technology winners (and ITIF actually thinks their success rates are much higher), then they must be pretty incompetent at the effort and should stop trying altogether.
But if private corporations followed that advice, then we would have no innovation whatsoever. Indeed, research by Larry Keeley of Doblin, Inc. finds that, in the corporate world, only 4 percent of innovation initiatives meet their internally defined success criteria. More than ninety percent of products fail in the first two years. Other research has found that only 8 percent of innovation projects exceed their expected return on investment, and only 12 percent their cost of capital. Yet companies have to continue to try to innovate, even in the face of these long odds, because research finds that firms that don’t replace at least 10 percent of their revenue stream annually are likely to be out of business within five years. The point is that just because innovation is difficult and success rates are low, this does not mean that corporations, or governments, should quit trying—or that their successes, like the Internet, can’t be spectacularly successful and have a profound impact on driving economic growth.
But The Economist laments that industrial or innovation policies are subject to capture by industries. What this neglects is that all countries, including the United States, already have de facto industrial policies that favor some industries over others. In the United States, for example, our regulatory and tax system favors agribusiness through farm subsidies, the oil industry through oil subsidies, airlines and highways at the expense of rail, and mortgage and financial industries. In fact, it is precisely because the United States has historically lacked an ability, or willingness, to have a clearly defined innovation strategy and an open dialogue about “making strategic decisions about strategic industries” that we’ve ended up with a de facto industrial policy ill-suited to supporting industries that will drive economic growth in the future. The Economist notes that “there is no accepted framework for “vertical” policy, favoring specific sectors or companies.” True. So let’s make one.
Finally, while The Economist criticizes President Obama’s new Strategy for American Innovation (released in 2009), it fails to come up with compelling evidence that breakthroughs such as mapping the human genome, unlocking nanotechnology’s potential, or achieving the technology-enabled transformations that need to occur in sectors from energy to transportation will occur solely because of the market’s ability to allocate capital efficiently. In this, it discounts the need for effective, intentional public-private partnerships to invest in and collaborate in the development and diffusion of these industries and technologies.
This critique is not meant to pick on The Economist, which is usually chock full of solid reporting and informed commentary. Rather it is take on the myth of America’s purely free market capitalist system and make the case for an informed innovation policy. It is also to note that countries (like the United States) find themselves desperately turning to industrial policy in a last ditch effort to save stumbling sectors such as automobiles because they have failed to make adequate investments in innovation policies that would support science and technology, R&D, and the development and diffusion of innovative processes and technologies that could have helped keep old sectors like automobiles at the technology frontier while supporting the development of new sectors to drive the economy forward.
Finally, it seeks to rebut the ideological and highly politicized assault on the idea the governments cannot make prudent, targeted bets on the industries of tomorrow. As Greg Tassey has noted, competition among governments has become a critical factor in determining global market share among nations. Indeed, the role of government is now a critical factor in determining which economies win and which lose in the increasingly intense process of creative destruction.
There are appropriate and inappropriate roles for governments to play in this competition. Supporting education, removing barriers to competition, supporting free and fair global trade, opening countries to high-skill immigration, and targeting strategic R&D investments towards the technologies and industries of the future are appropriate roles for governments to play in this competition. Other government policies, such as mercantilist ones which deny foreign countries’ corporations access to domestic markets, pilfer intellectual property by stealing it outright or making it a condition of market access, creating indigenous or proprietary IT standards, failing to adhere to trade agreements, or directly subsidizing domestic companies or their exports, are illegitimate forms of global economic competition. The United States—and The Economist—must abandon its fanciful, stylized neoclassical notion of a purely free global economic marketplace unfettered by any form of government intervention whatsoever, and recognize that governments play a legitimate and crucial role in shaping the innovation capabilities of national economies. As between corporations, it’s a competition; and, as with companies, the ones that develop the best strategies and skills at fostering, developing, and delivering innovation are the ones most likely to win.
The real outcome of most Washington lobbying is … nothing. Until the right party or person comes to power. So finds a 10-year study.
Actually… according to Lobbying and Policy Change (the landmark book by five political scientists that the post references), 40 percent of the time, lobbyists succeeded. So yes, technically, 60 percent of the time is most of the time and so it is correct to say that most of the time lobbying yields nothing.
But, to me, 40 percent is actually an astonishing success rate.
Sure, this may not look like much if your starting assumption is that special interests own Washington, and that all a clever lobbyist needs to do is approach a Congressman with the promise of a campaign check and that poor helpless Congressman will practically be begging to fete that lobbyist with most indefensible corporate giveaway.
But, on the other hand, if you’ve spent any time in Washington, and you know how hard it is to get just about anything done, 40 percent is definite batting champion territory.
And the big point of the study is actually about the difficulty of change: the status quo is really, really sticky in Washington, in good part because on most important issues there are forces mobilized on both sides, and every action on one side provokes an equal but opposite reaction on the other side. Forces fight each other to stalemate for years. But then then, suddenly, there is movement – and whoever has won the war of positioning is likely to win the war of motion.
But the problem is that nobody – not even the cleverest of lobbyists – really knows which ideas and issues are likely to break and when. Which means the keys to success in the Washington wars of influence are a long-term strategy and the patience and resources to carry it out. One must build a compelling case, nurture allies, and be in position to take advantage of the rare windows of opportunity when they do arise.
Still, the more one works at it, the more likely the success. As the authors of this study note: “The passage of time increases the odds of policy change among our cases. We observer policy changes on significantly more issues after four years than after just two years” (237) (This study only covered a four-year period (1999-2002). Had it looked at a longer period of time, perhaps the success rate would have topped 50 percent. Would the headline then have been “Lobbying Often Yields Something”?)
Interestingly, the study finds that having more resources is no guarantee of success, partly because there are often large resources on both sides of an issue. But that doesn’t mean that money doesn’t matter – it just suggests the price of entry to even get in the fight is quite high. Overall, lobbying is now a $3.5 billion industry, with corporations and business associations accounting for about two-thirds of the expenditures.
Ultimately, any attempt to simplify lobbying as either fundamentally influential or not influential misses a very basic point: lobbying is a process, a conversation, a multi-dimensional chess game that sometimes never ends. Nobody in Washington carries a magic wand that can make policy happen with a mere wave. Not even lobbyists. Influence happens in more subtle and patient ways, something that anybody who might be concerned about the role of lobbyists needs to understand.
4,419. That’s the number of Americans who have died in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, according to the Pentagon. Tens of thousands more have been wounded, maimed, or traumatized in various ways. And although it’s hard to get an accurate count, it’s likely that more than 100,000 Iraqis have perished.
As U.S. troops head home ahead of President Obama’s Sept. 1 deadline for ending major combat operations in Iraq, it’s worth asking: What did all this sacrifice achieve?
No dispassionate observer can doubt that Iraq, the United States, and the rest of the world are well to be rid of Saddam Hussein, one of history’s worst tyrants. He continually menaced his neighbors, invading two of them (Iran and Kuwait) and launching missiles at a third (Israel). At home, the paranoid dictator presided over a nightmarish police state in which anyone suspected of disloyalty – including school children – were abducted, tortured and murdered by the regime’s vast security apparatus. All told, the Iraqi dictator was responsible for the death of nearly two million people. He was Iraq’s weapon of mass destruction.
It took U.S. troops to free Iraqis from Saddam’s sadistic grip. Despite the many blunders the Bush administration committed following the invasion, that act of liberation is to America’s everlasting credit.
Now it remains to be seen what Iraqis will make of it. It’s easy to be pessimistic. Terrorist acts, though down, are still almost a daily occurrence. Sectarian rivalries have abated somewhat, but still seethe under the surface and could yet fracture the country. Five months after its last elections, Iraqi politicians seem paralyzed, unable to agree on a new government.
But if Iraqi democracy is a mess, even a messy politics is preferable to no democracy at all, as James Traub has argued Slowly, fitfully, a brutalized people have begun to take control of their own destiny. The United States, which will keep an “overwatch” force of 50,000 in the country for another year, still has considerable influence. There’s a reasonable chance that Iraq could continue to evolve into the Arab world’s first functioning democracy.
But even if you grant that the United States has accomplished much in Iraq, many Americans, and not just critics of the war, still wonder whether it was worth the cost. That’s a very different question, and one we’re likely to be debating long after the last U.S. soldier has left Iraq.
That the mood in this country is sour seems beyond debate. Ronald Brownstein sums up the sentiment nicely in this week’s National Journal: “If polls existed just before the French Revolution, they might have returned results such as these.” One pollster has (appropriately, I think) called this the “JetBlue Election” – a reference to our newest rebel folk hero, Steven Slater.
No doubt, campaign consultants across the country are at this very moment scheming on the ways that challenger candidates can tap into same great ur-fantasy that Steven Slater embodied: that each of us has the courage to lash out at the forces of oppression stifling our creativity and genius and, in so doing, be rewarded as heroes. (Get government off our backs! Stop the corruption in Washington!).
Still, these candidates ought to be careful: they are playing with fire.
No doubt many voters out there, feeling great personal frustration for any number of reasons, are increasingly receptive to the too-good-to-be-true secret that lashing out in anger may actually be the best way to solve things. Hence, the great success of the Tea Party. It offers the same seductive solution as Steven Slater: salvation through anger. (Never mind that under normal circumstances, Mr. Slater would now be facing a the rather unpleasant reality of being unemployed and unemployable, as opposed to reality of a possible reality show.)
The temptation for challenger candidates, of course, will be to stoke such sentiment in hopes that they will be the ones to profit from it. But such challengers ought to be careful what they stir up and what they promise. Those who come to Washington on the bold premise that they will be the ones to shake the place out of its alleged abominations are likely to face a sorely disappointed electorate when things don’t, in fact, change immediately (see Obama, Barack).
After all, when the challenger becomes the incumbent, the blame Washington meme isn’t so helpful anymore. (And remember, even if Republicans do manage to regain some control in Congress, it’s not like they are much beloved either. The latest WSJ/NBC poll finds positive feelings about the Republican Party at a new 21-year low: just 24 percent.)
So then, a word to candidates, especially challengers: Be careful. Take succor from the sour mood at your own peril. Teaching voters that lashing out in anger is the best way to solve problems is a lesson they will not forget as easily as you might wish.
I wrote last week about the political rhetoric of “uncertainty,” both real and imagined. My thinking was that Republicans should be called out for their recent talking points that attribute our continued economic woes to fears and uncertainties created by the Democrats’ agenda, but that we should be careful not to dismiss legitimate problems of uncertainty that actually do exist in the economy.
In the Times today, Tom Friedman makes a more eloquent case for the need to recognize the real uncertainties we face. His analysis is from a higher altitude, as one might expect, and it is dead right. Friedman attributes broad economic uncertainties to three structural problems: (1) a decade of U.S. growth fueled by deficits and borrowing rather than investment and innovation, (2) a wave of new technology that is destroying lower-skilled jobs in favor of those requiring more education and training, and (3) the “existential crisis” of the European Union as German discipline is exported to Greece and elsewhere. But these real uncertainties are not on anyone’s political agenda:
America’s two big parties still cling to their core religious beliefs as if nothing has changed. Republicans try to undermine the president at every turn and offer their nostrum of tax-cuts-will-solve-everything — without ever specifying what services they’ll give up to pay for them. Mr. Obama gave us expanded health care before expanding the economic pie to sustain it.
Friedman does not get very deep into specifics for structural solutions, but he doesn’t need to. As is often true of Friedman’s perspective, the real value of today’s piece lies in the diagnosis. We are facing real economic uncertainties, and the fact that Republicans are mischaracterizing them so shamelessly does not relieve the president and Democrats from the obligation to show more leadership. As I wrote last week, Democrats need to stop sticking their fingers in the dike and come up with a more comprehensive plan built on a long-term vision of investment and sustainable growth. Or as Friedman puts it:
The president needs to take America’s labor, business and Congressional leadership up to Camp David and not come back without a grand bargain for taxes, trade promotion, energy, stimulus and budget cutting that offers the market some certainty that we are moving together — not just on a bailout but on an economic rebirth for the 21st century.
Among foreign policy mandarins here and abroad, it’s become axiomatic that America must radically downsize its global ambitions to avoid hubris and to match our straitened economic circumstances. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is having none of it.
