American politics

Lexington's notebook

  • The killer instinct

    Michele Bachmann's migraines

    Jul 21st 2011, 17:18 by Lexington

    FIRST "Obamneycare", then Michele Bachmann's migraines. On both occasions Tim Pawlenty has managed to turn a rival's weakness into an own-goal against himself. He should just have said nothing. For the full gruesome televised details, see David Weigel's post here.  It includes the priceless James Carville aphorism: "if the son of a bitch is drowning, throw him an anvil."

  • Rick Perry

    The Texas job story

    Jul 21st 2011, 15:48 by Lexington

    MY PRINT column in tomorrow's Economist looks at Rick Perry and makes the point that, if he runs for the Republican nomination, job-creation in Texas will come under closer national scrutiny. It has, indeed, already started. See a lively discussion forum in the New York Times here.

  • Barack Obama and Islam

    What Arabs think of America

    Jul 20th 2011, 19:19 by Lexington

    UPDATE: James Zogby of the Arab American Institute did not like aspects of this post.  I have appended his comment in full at the bottom of the piece.

     

    ONE disappointment of Barack Obama's presidency has been his failure to satisfy the expectations he raised in the Arab world. A recent poll by James Zogby's Arab American Institute shows that his favourability rating there is now 10% or less. In the various countries surveyed, "American interference" came top of a list of "obstacles to peace and stability". In Egypt, poster-child of the Arab spring, 65% single out American interference in Arab affairs as an obstacle to peace and security, whereas only 29% picked interference by Iran.

    This is bad news not only for Mr Obama but also for America in general. Some American voices have nonetheless greeted the finding with what Mr Zogby, at a meeting yesterday of the New America Foundation, called "gloating". So Barack Hussein Obama is no more popular among Arabs than was George W. Bush? Serves him right for swallowing the illusion that he could buy Arab popularity by "betraying" Israel.

    That response gets it all wrong. The moral of the Arab spring is not that Arabs don't care about Palestine. It remains, as Mr Zogby puts it, the "existential, defining issue" in the Arab world. Arab views of America slumped after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, began to rise somewhat when Mr Obama came into view in the 2008 election campaign, and spiked after his first three months, around the time he promised in Cairo in 2009 to help the Palestinians to statehood. It seems reasonable to infer that the subsequent slump has more to do with his failure to deliver than with having tried in the first place.

    Having said that, Mr Zogby left me wondering. What exactly do the Arabs expect of America in relation to Israel? As it happens, a bit of the answer is to be found in another piece of polling referenced in an article for National Interest by Benny Morris, one of Israel's "new historians" (who in recent years has made a marked shift to the right). He quotes a new survey of Palestinian opinion, finding that

    About 80 percent of those polled agreed that it was the duty of all Muslims to participate in jihad to eradicate Israel. The poll also found that 61 percent of Palestinians rejected the American-Israeli formulation for a settlement of the conflict based on two states for two peoples, one for the Arabs and one for the Jews. Only 34 percent of Palestinians questioned supported a "two-states-for-two-peoples" solution.

    I'm sure there are plenty of ways to "contextualise" this finding to make it sound less disturbing. But it does rather knock on the head the idea that the conflict in the Middle East persists solely because of Israeli obduracy and America's failure to lean on Israel hard enough.

    James Zogby comments:

    While I appreciated The Economist's coverage of our most recent Arab poll ("What Arabs think of America"), I must take issue with the piece's conclusion.

    What our more than 4,000 respondents (in Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and UAE) told us, and what The Economist correctly reported, was that Arab favorable attitudes toward the US, which had spiked upward in 2009 following the election and early promise of Barack Obama, had now fallen to levels lower than they were in 2008. What our respondents further told us was that the main reasons for this decline were unmet expectations, specifically with regard to the "continued occupation of Palestinian lands" and "American interference in the Arab World".

    Where I have a problem with The Economist's treatment of our poll was the observation made at the end of the piece -  "...Mr. Zogby left me wondering. What exactly do the Arabs expect of America in relation to Israel?" The author goes on to provide a response - "a bit of the answer is to be found in another piece of polling" and then points to another survey suggesting that Palestinians hold some very hostile views toward Israel and are split in their support for a two-state solution.
    The Economist then concludes that this other poll "knocks on the head the idea that the conflict in the Middle East persists solely because of Israeli obduracy and America's failure to lean on Israel hard enough".

    My objection is simply this: you can not compare a poll of the views of Palestinians (who have been living under a rather brutal occupation for more than four decades) toward Israel with a poll of the views of Arabs (in six  countries) toward America. To attempt to extrapolate from the Palestinian poll a general observation about broader Arab attitudes toward the US is an illogical stretch, unsubstantiated by the data.  In fact the only observation that can be made from these two polls is the simple and obvious one - "Palestinians are furious at their occupier, and Arabs are disappointed with America's failure to act on its commitment to advance peace. No "knock on the head" there. 

    (Photo credit: AFP)

  • Governing America

    Worst Congress ever?

    Jul 20th 2011, 17:56 by Lexington

    NORM ORNSTEIN of the American Enterprise Institute quite literally wrote the book on congressional dysfunction. So it is profoundly depressing to see that he has now labelled the 112th Congress the worst one ever. More discouraging still, this is not a temporary problem brought about by transient phenomena such as the recent recession and the advent of the tea-party movement. It is the culmination of a long period of realignment in American politics, encompassing sharper ideological conflict between the parties, the extinction of the Boll Weevils and the Gypsy Moths, the simultaneous balkanisation of the mass media, the advent of the permanent campaign and a new way of thinking and operating on Capitol Hill. Moreover, it is going to become even worse:

    Partisan and ideological conflict is inherent in democratic political systems, of course, and governing is often a messy process. But this level of dysfunction is not typical. And it is not going away in the near future. The 2012 elections are sure to bring very close margins in both houses of Congress, and even more ideological polarization; the redistricting process now underway in the House is targeting some of the last few Blue Dog Democrats in places like North Carolina and enhancing the role of primary elections on the Republican side, which will pull candidates and representatives even further to the right.

    Early last year, when President Obama's health-insurance reform looked as if it had run into a brick wall on Capitol Hill, I made a somewhat heroic effort in The Economist to argue that American politics were not quite as paralysed as they looked. In the end, that piece argued,

    the question of whether a country is governable turns on how much government you think it needs. America’s founders injected suspicion of government not only into the constitution but also into the political DNA of its people. And even in the teeth of today’s economic woes, at least as many Americans seem to think that what ails them is too much government, not too little.

    But there was a kicker:

    However much Americans say they want a small government, they seem wedded to the expensive benefits of the big one they actually have, such as Social Security, health care for the elderly and a strong national defence. With deficits running at $1 trillion a year, and in order to stay solvent, they will have at some point to cut spending, pay more taxes, or both. Last month the Senate blocked a proposal for a bipartisan commission on deficit reduction: the yeas outnumbered the nays by 53 to 46, but failed to reach a supermajority. Mr Obama is now creating a commission by executive order, but its powers are unclear. To balance the books, politicians have sometimes to do things the people themselves oppose—even in America. That will be the true test of whether the country is governable.

    We are now, it seems to me, facing a real instance of that journalistic cliche: a moment of truth. And it's hard to feel optimistic.

  • The deficit

    More on balancing the budget

    Jul 19th 2011, 17:54 by Lexington

    IF YESTERDAY'S posting did not convince you, take a look at today's letter from some of America's most illustrious economists opposing the balanced-budget amendment. Of course, these are just pointy-headed intellectuals, some of them with Nobel prizes. I'm not sure they even belong to a tea party.

  • Deficits

    Against balanced-budget amendments

    Jul 18th 2011, 20:17 by Lexington

    THINK there is merit in the House Republicans' notion of a balanced-budget amendment? I commend Bruce Bartlett's discussion of the impracticalities, which concludes, correctly:

    that this is nothing but a political ploy designed solely to appeal to the GOP’s Tea Party wing. The time wasted debating a balanced budget amendment would be better spent taking care of the House’s long list of unfinished business, such as passing appropriations bills.

  • The debt ceiling

    The McConnell gambit

    Jul 13th 2011, 17:10 by Lexington

    WHAT to make of Mitch McConnell's plan for raising the debt ceiling without an agreement on spending and taxes? I outsource to the excellent David Hawkings of Congressional Quarterly, a sister organisation of The Economist.

    For all of its dismissive nicknames — “last-ditch option,” “Hail Mary punt” and “Pass the Buck Act” seem to be the most popular — McConnell’s idea really could be just the sort of surprising, bold and complicated maneuver needed to get around the coming budgetary calamity ...

    Going with the McConnell option will forestall the sort of panicked Wall Street sell-off that might have been needed in the next three weeks to pressure the most liberal and most conservative lawmakers to acquiesce in an actual deal. It gives Obama fiscal stability on which to run the government and on which to run for re-election. It gives Boehner a way to avoid either capitulating on his call for a 1-to-1 ratio of spending cuts to debt ceiling increases — or reversing his fealty to the no-new-taxes position he’s been forced into by Cantor and the GOP caucus’s tea party majority. And (without choking on the details) it would still give every congressional Republican at least three and maybe six chances to cast a politically potent but ultimately meaningless vote before Election Day 2012 against raising the debt limit, while forcing Democrats to cast just as many votes in favor of the extra borrowing.

    The biggest potential downside, and it’s a significant one, is that the people who voted for a Republican House so that it could make bold and politically risky decisions will view this as a too-clever-by-half cave-in. That’s the sentiment that most worries (and at the same time bucks up) the 87 freshmen, who sound like they want the next three weeks to be filled with all the brinkmanship, high drama and confrontation with a president they distrust as they imagined as candidates. And so they may yet insist with their “no” votes on any compromise that the moribund talks keep going up to, or even beyond, the appointed hour for falling into the budgetary abyss.

  • The Republican nominee

    Room for an electable conservative

    Jul 6th 2011, 18:39 by Lexington

    HENRY OLSEN of the American Enterprise Institute did a splendid job of predicting the result of last year's mid-term elections. Now, in National Affairs, he has written the best piece I have seen so far to look at the voters who will end up choosing the Republican nominee for 2012 rather than looking at the candidates themselves. His first point is crucial: that although the media focus on the most conservative Republicans and on the tea-party movement, it is in fact moderate (or "dispositional") Republicans who will determine the winner.

    The distinction between dispositional and ideological conservatives is often subtle; as a result, the breakdown is difficult to capture neatly in public-opinion polls. It is, however, approximated by the distinction made in some polls between Republican voters who identify themselves as "somewhat conservative" and those who identify as "very conservative." And as exit-poll data from the 1996, 2000, and 2008 Republican presidential primaries and caucuses show, these different types of "conservatives" prefer very different types of presidential candidates. Very conservative Republicans favor rhetorically aggressive champions of conservative ideology. Somewhat-conservative Republicans, on the other hand, tend to prefer established candidates — people who, while generally in agreement with ideological conservatives in their positions on the issues, are not as strident when it comes to ideology, rhetoric, or temperament.

    It is worth noting that these somewhat-conservative voters make up a majority of Republican primary voters who identify as conservative. Polls taken in late 2010 and early 2011 show that conservatives comprise between 66% and 71% of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents. Most pollsters do not break conservatives into "somewhat" and "very" categories, but a mid-October 2010 Wall Street Journal poll asked if respondents were "very conservative" or "just conservative." At the height of Tea Party fervor within the GOP, "just conservatives" outnumbered "very conservatives," 36% to 34%.

    In 2008, somewhat-conservative voters were an even larger share of the GOP electorate. Looking at state-by-state exit polls during the period before John McCain clinched the nomination, "somewhat conservative" voters averaged about 35% of the electorate. Moreover, somewhat conservatives outnumbered very conservatives in all but four Southern states. In many early states this advantage was sizable. In Florida and Michigan, somewhat conservatives outnumbered very conservatives by a nearly 3-2 margin; in New Hampshire, their margin was nearly 2-1. Even in supposedly ultra-conservative South Carolina, somewhat conservatives and very conservatives tied with 34% of the GOP electorate, with moderates and liberals nearly even at 32%. Given their number and distribution throughout key states, these somewhat-conservative voters generally have enormous influence over what kind of presidential candidate the Republican Party tends to nominate.

    As for the tea-party movement,

    The depth of Tea Party support, too, is less than previously thought. The April NBC/Wall Street Journal poll also asked Republican Tea Party supporters whether it was more accurate to describe them as Republicans or Tea Partiers. Only slightly more than half of Republicans who supported the Tea Party — or about 30% of the entire Republican electorate — said they identified themselves principally as Tea Partiers. The other half said they were better described as Republicans. The Tea Party is certainly vocal and will remain a powerful force within Republican politics through 2012; it does not, however, represent anything close to a majority of Republicans, and so will not be the sole arbiter of who becomes the GOP's nominee.

    But moderates are an important part of the Republican voting bloc — and they may be especially crucial in 2012. Polls show that moderates comprise between 30% and 35% of the expected Republican electorate. And in 2008, in states with early primaries — such as New Hampshire, Michigan, and Florida — moderates' share of the electorate was between 39% and 45%. This cohort is likely to remain large despite the rise of the Tea Party, because most states either permit registered independents to vote in party primaries or do not have party registration at all. As a result, many primary elections are left open to all voters. Since President Obama will almost certainly run unopposed, independents in 2012 are much likelier to vote in the GOP primary than in the Democratic one. If there is only one candidate tailoring his appeal to moderate Republicans and independents, he is likely to garner a large share of the vote.

    Indeed, a would-be dark horse candidate who devotes too much of his message to pet Tea Party themes risks alienating the 2012 GOP contest's truly underserved constituency: Republican moderates. Because of its role in the 2010 Republican resurgence, an enormous amount of attention is being paid to the Tea Party. And some of the most prominent candidates of this cycle have abandoned past moderate stands in order to "check the boxes" of conservative orthodoxy leading up to 2012. As a result, the GOP's moderate bloc has been largely overlooked.

    Be warned: this is a long article. But it repays study.

  • Independence Day

    Americans are dreamers (in a good way)

    Jul 4th 2011, 16:51 by Lexington

    IT HAS become a custom of bloggers to find an intriguing quotation for Independence Day. Here's one I like, from a letter by Bernard De Voto to a fellow historian who had been accused of being too romantic about American history:

    [American history] is the most romantic of all histories. It began in myth and has developed through centuries of fairy stories. Whatever the time is in America it is always, at every moment, the mad and wayward hour when the prince is finding the little foot that alone fits into the slipper of glass. It is a little hard to know what romantic means to those who use the word umbrageously. But if the mad, impossible voyage of Columbus or Cartier or La Salle or Coronado or John Ledyard is not romantic, if the stars did not dance in the sky when our Constitutional Convention met, if Atlantis has any landscape stranger or the other side of the moon any lights or colours or shapes more unearthly than the customary homespun of Lincoln and the morning coat of Jackson, well, I don't know what romance is.

    Ours is a story mad with the impossible, it is by chaos out of dream and it has continued as dream down to the last headlines you read in a newspaper. And of our dream there are two things above all others to be said, that only madmen could have dreamed them or would have dared to -- and that we have shown a considerable faculty for making them come true.

  • The debt ceiling

    Just do it

    Jun 30th 2011, 17:19 by Lexington

    A PICTURE is worth a thousand words (or in my case, my "friends" tell me, 2,000). If you want to read the print column that accompanies KAL's cartoon this week, it is here.

  • War weariness

    Mars in the descendant

    Jun 22nd 2011, 22:35 by Lexington

    An early look at this week's Lexington column:

    "I VENTURE to say that no war can be long carried on against the will of the people." Edmund Burke should be alive today. None of America's several wars is popular. According to a Pew Research poll this week, a majority of Americans (56%) now believe that their troops should come home from Afghanistan as soon as possible. Only 39% favour waiting for the situation there to stabilise, even though most still think that the original decision to go to war was right. In the case of Libya there was never any equivalent enthusiasm to intervene in the fighting between Muammar Qaddafi and the rebels. As for Iraq—well, there at least the United States is close to the exit: under present plans, all its forces will leave by the end of this year.

    America has reason to be war-weary. Since September 2001 it has spent some $1.3 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which some 6,000 service personnel have died. Even conservative Republicans, the group keenest on "staying the course", have started to tell pollsters that America should pay less attention to problems overseas and more to the growing ones at home. In their New Hampshire debate several Republican presidential candidates joined the cry to bring the boys home—"as soon as we possibly can", said Mitt Romney, the putative front-runner.

    For Barack Obama, these signs of Republican softening are a godsend. Many in his own party hate the war in Afghanistan. Some were aghast when, in 2009, he ordered the deployment of 33,000 more troops in an Iraq-style "surge". He always planned to announce the return of some of them this summer. But too fast a withdrawal would have exposed him to charges of wavering against al-Qaeda. Now the Republicans' own wobbles, the killing of Osama bin Laden and General David Petraeus's move from Afghanistan to the CIA have given him useful flexibility. On June 22nd Mr Obama said that all the surge troops will be out by the end of next summer. This will leave about 68,000 behind, and Mr Obama where he wants to be as his re-election campaign nears: out of the "dumb" war in Iraq and carefully but visibly winding down the necessary one in Afghanistan.

    It is, weirdly, the least costly of America's wars, the one in Libya, that is causing him most political grief at home. His grounds for intervening were simple enough. Only America had the means to stop Colonel Qaddafi from perpetrating a massacre in Benghazi. But this war was never popular. Many Democrats, traumatised by Iraq, say that such ventures are bound to fail, however noble the cause. Many Republicans hold that the nobility of the cause is itself the problem. With no vital American interest at stake, argues Michele Bachmann, another of the Republicans' presidential candidates, the "Obama doctrine" has set a precedent for American intervention in "one country after another".

    Going into one country after another is in fact the last thing on the mind of this hyper-cautious president. No American drones are stopping the slaughter in Syria. Even in Libya Mr Obama was a reluctant warrior. He acted only when Benghazi was on the brink of falling, and only after securing cover and help from NATO, the UN and the Arab League. He also insisted that America's European allies, who had goaded him into the war, should take over the chief responsibility for it in short order. If Libya was going to end in a mess, the president who inherited the messes in Iraq and Afghanistan wanted someone else to be in charge of it.

    It all made perfect sense, at the beginning

    The trouble is that Libya's dictator has hung on—perhaps precisely because the superpower has chosen to stand back. And standing back has meanwhile not earned Mr Obama the political credit he hoped for. If anything, the opposite has happened.

    The White House boasts that since early April America has had only a "non-kinetic", "supporting" role in Libya. It has no troops on the ground and is not exchanging fire with hostile forces (unless you count the odd drone strike). That makes the war cheaper for America while allies do the dirtier work—the opposite of the dismal pattern in Afghanistan. This was splendid, until one of Mr Obama's advisers called the idea "leading from behind". Though not the "John Wayne expectation" of America's role in the world, the unnamed adviser told the New Yorker, it was "necessary for shepherding us through this phase".

    Perhaps so, but a thought this subtle should never have been uttered in the hearing of a journalist. "Leading from behind" has since become a prime campaign-trail exhibit in the Republicans' scornful excoriation of Mr Obama's foreign policy. The president now finds himself accused of being both a warmonger for entering the war and a wimp for his lame prosecution of it.

    To make matters worse, he now denies that it is a war at all. Under the War Powers Resolution a president must ask Congress's permission if hostilities last more than 90 days. That deadline fell on June 17th, but Mr Obama did not ask, on the eccentric ground that America's "supporting role" no longer amounts to "hostilities". This has outraged even the war's supporters, especially since the disclosure that Mr Obama overruled the lawyers in the Justice and Defence Departments and turned to more pliant ones in the White House and State Department. Bruce Ackerman, a professor of law and political science at Yale, said in the New York Times that this could open the way for "even more blatant acts of presidential war-making in the decades ahead".

    It is odd. A weary America has adopted Mr Obama’s wary instincts in foreign policy. He is making a good fist of extricating America from the big wars he inherited from George Bush. But the tiny one he started so cautiously himself, in which not a single American soldier has died, has landed him in deep trouble. Even before it disposed of bin Laden, America had lost its appetite for venturing abroad in search of monsters to destroy.

  • The GOP candidates

    Body language

    Jun 20th 2011, 17:57 by Lexington

    THE main thing, of course, is character and policy. But after watching the Republican presidential candidates doing their thing in New Hampshire and New Orleans last week, I was struck by the differences in their comportment.

    Easily the biggest contrast in New Orleans was that between Texas's governor, Rick Perry, and the former governor of New Mexico, Gary Johnson. The form at the Southern Republican Conference in the Big Easy is for loud music to blast from backstage, followed by the speaker of the moment swaggering aggressively to the mike like a boxer into the ring. Not so Gary Johnson. There was strident music, alright, but then an odd silence as the former governor sidled self-effacingly on to the stage, looked around him in a startled sort of way, and then confessed, sotto voce, that oh, by the way, he was Gary Johnson and he was running for president. This was followed by a rather winning, very professorial, job interview with himself, in which he came over as a man whose pride in what he had achieved in New Mexico simply could not mask a deeply ingrained habit of diffidence. Later, in a press conference, this impression was reinforced. Confronted by a score or so of reporters, Mr Johnson squirmed uncomfortably in his rumpled suit and looked positively relieved when it was all over.

    Rick Perry was the opposite. He bounded to the podium, handsome in a sharp dark suit, and unleashed a booming voice. In fact with his square face and jet-black hair he looks a bit like a singer of operatic arias. He clenched his fists, jutted his chin, crouched, sprang and gesticulated wildly. The crowd loved it. For sheer theatricality he came second only to Herman Cain, who at his fiery Baptist best is right off the charts. Michele Bachmann can do a bit of stirring oratory too. But the striking thing in her case at New Orleans was how brittle she seemed at a press conference afterwards. She was oddly evasive when pressed on just how long her 23 foster children had lived with her, and her minders bustled her away just as the press was getting warmed up. I don't quite understand this defensiveness about the foster children. Nobody wants to know who they were or to invade their privacy, just roughly how long she looked after them for. It is, after all, an accomplishment she frequently brags about.

     

  • Two tea-party heroines

    Sarah and Michele

    Jun 11th 2011, 18:43 by Lexington

    ALL this could change in an instant, but so far the media organisations trawling Sarah Palin's email trove for some fatal "gotcha" have come up with zilch. If anything, the former governor of Alaska emerges as an industrious and rather endearing figure. Politico's assessment gets it about right:

    The Palin that emerges from the first cut at nearly 25,000 emails released by the state of Alaska Friday is touchingly authentic, responding to the news she’s been tapped for the national ticket with the words, “Can you flippinbelieveit?!”

    She comes across as practical and not doctrinaire, as when she explains at length to an aide, early in her term, why she opposes a bear hunt in a wildlife preserve: “I am a hunter. I grew up hunting — some of my best memories growing up are of hunting with my dad to help feel (sic) our freezer… I want Alaskans to have access to wildlife… BUT — he’s asking if I support hunting the bears in the sanctuary? No, I don’ t … Many Alaskan and Outside visitors view these animals on the McNeil river, within the sanctuary, and, as my parents have reported back after their viewing trip, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience to see such beauty on that river.”

    I'm also intrigued by the flattering profile of Michele Bachmann just published in the Wall Street Journal, depicting the congresswoman from Minnesota not just as an efficient politician but as something of an intellectual, who reads economics at the beach:

    Ms. Bachmann is best known for her conservative activism on issues like abortion, but what I want to talk about today is economics. When I ask who she reads on the subject, she responds that she admires the late Milton Friedman as well as Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. "I'm also an Art Laffer fiend—we're very close," she adds. "And [Ludwig] von Mises. I love von Mises," getting excited and rattling off some of his classics like "Human Action" and "Bureaucracy." "When I go on vacation and I lay on the beach, I bring von Mises."

    Can this be right? She's made the odd flub or three, including muddling up her revolutionary history. But maybe she is being underestimated. Next Monday's televised debate in New Hampshire will be an early way of telling. I'm on my way up there to watch.

  • On not doing your homework

    Turkey and The Economist

    Jun 10th 2011, 20:23 by Lexington

    WHAT'S happened to higher education in California? Two academics there have attacked The Economist for presuming to advise the Turks how to vote in their forthcoming election. One is Richard Falk, Albert G Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Research Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Another is Hilal Elver, his wife, also at Santa Barbara.

    They say:

    The Economist leader headline in its June 4 issue is revealing: "The best way for Turks to promote democracy would be to vote against the ruling party." It reveals a mentality that has not shaken itself free from the paternalism and entitlements of the bygone colonialist days. What makes such an assertion so striking is that The Economist would know better than to advise US or Canadian or Israeli citizens how to vote. And it never did venture such an opinion on the eve of the election of such reactionary and militarist figures as George W Bush, Stephen Harper, or Binyamin Netanyahu. Are the people of Turkey really so politically backward as to require guidance from this bastion of Western elite opinion so as to learn what is in their own best interest?

    What’s so peculiar is that anyone who has a glancing familiarity with this bastion of elite opinion knows that, for good or ill, it has indeed advised American, Canadian and Israeli citizens how to cast their votes. Don’t professors do any homework nowadays? As for all that "paternalism" nonsense, I was dimly under the impression that Turkey had a colonialist past of its own.

    Update: Mr Falk and Ms Elver have issued a "Retraction, Apology, and Clarification"

  • Political implosions

    Gingriched

    Jun 9th 2011, 20:01 by Lexington

    INSIDERS say that Newt Gingrich has superb political instincts. I don't see it. True, he showed over the so-called ground-zero mosque affair that he knows how to stir up religious bigotry. But he pretty much destroyed his primary campaign at the get-go by calling Paul Ryan's Medicare plan "right-wing social engineering", and now a lot of his campaign team has resigned en masse, just days before the first big television debate in New Hampshire. Maybe he shouldn't have taken time out for that little Greek island cruise. One of the last press releases I received from his communications director, who has now reportedly resigned, was headed "Winning the Future Together: Right Policies, Right Results". If you want voters to believe you can run the United States, you just have to do better this.

  • Sarah Palin again

    Looking for a smoking gun

    Jun 9th 2011, 18:40 by Lexington

    I KNOW times are hard in the news business, but this is unusual. The Washington Post is seeking volunteers to trawl through the 24,000 emails sent to and from Sarah Palin during her time as Alaska's governor and about to be released in Juneau.

    Our hope is that working together, we can efficiently find interesting information and extract new stories that will lead to further investigation. We don’t know what we’ll find, but we want you to be ready and open for the challenge.

    Only masochists need apply.

  • Sarah Palin

    The guilty pleasure of writing about Sarah

    Jun 2nd 2011, 15:30 by Lexington

    I CONFESS to feeling guilty every time I write about Sarah Palin. This week I spotted her whizzing past on her Harley at the Rolling Thunder Memorial day event in Washington, DC. A lot of the veterans were indifferent to her presence, and some were annoyed by it. Others were pleased - but didn't regard her presence as a big deal. They had a more serious agenda of their own that day.

    Shouldn't the political media take the same attitude? After all, she's not formally in the GOP race yet, and, even if she were, her chances of winning look slight. Wouldn't the high-minded approach be to ignore her magical mystery tour to New England?

    I mulled this question for a nanosecond - and answered No. In the end voters, not journalists, must decide whether a politician is serious or not. And although she holds no elected office, nobody can deny that the former governor is still a politician, who will have an impact on the primary campaign even if she doesn't run. Besides, a story is a story, and you know one when you see one. Here's my print column this week:

    LOVE her or loathe her, you have to give this to Sarah Palin: she is indeed “Going Rogue”. Having been all but counted out as a serious presidential contender for 2012, she changed all that on Memorial Day, rumbling over Memorial Bridge on the back of a Harley (“I love that smell of emissions”), svelte in black leather amid a sea of pot-bellied Vietnam veterans biking into the capital for their annual “Rolling Thunder” commemoration. Is she genuinely running? Nobody knows—including, if you take her at her word, the lady herself. “There truly is a lot to consider before you throw yourself out there in the name of service to the public,” she told reporters who caught up with her “One Nation” bus the next day near Gettysburg. The Republican field was strong, she said, but not yet set—“not by a long shot”.

    And that bus. What is it, exactly? Hardly the traditional campaign bus on the lines of John McCain’s Straight Talk Express, which groaned under the weight of well-buttered-up hacks. Apart from a chum from Fox News (for which Mrs Palin works herself), there is no media pack on board. The media are not told where she is travelling, learning from her SarahPAC website only that the former governor will be meandering with her family through New England “to educate and energise Americans about our nation’s founding principles”. But the bus is hardly designed for privacy either, decked out as it is with stars and stripes, the Liberty Bell and the constitution, and, in giant letters against a glorious mountainscape, Mrs Palin’s own flowing signature. By hook, crook and presumably her own design, the media have caught up with her at every stop, where she smiles and giggles and is coy, but invariably finds something newsworthy to say, and by doing so keeps a nation guessing.

    Unlike many Republican candidates, Mrs Palin can afford this slow dance of the seven veils. For ordinary candidates, job one is telling Americans who you are. Her fling as Mr McCain’s running mate in 2008 has made her famous already. Since 2008 she has morphed into a television celebrity and author, quitting her job as Alaska’s governor and adding a fortune to her fame. She is to be the subject of a two-hour movie, “The Undefeated”, which compares her to Joan of Arc and is due to premiere soon in Iowa, which happens to be the first state to hold its caucuses. Her bus is expected to find its way to Iowa, too, where she will no doubt encounter the fans and reporters who greet her wherever she goes. Granted, she is not always welcomed by everyone: though many of the veterans said they were happy enough to have her along, Ted Shpak, Rolling Thunder’s spokesman, grumbled that nobody had asked her to muscle in on the bikers in Washington.

    You can wager that the inner rage of the Republican field far exceeds Mr Shpak’s. Mrs Palin’s magical mystery tour has put a hideous dent in many of their best-laid plans. Take poor, rich Mitt Romney. Having worked in his dull and methodical way to the head of the race, he intended to make his long-assumed candidacy formal this week. And yet for some reason the media seem keener on pursuing their Alaskan Pimpernel than covering the grey man’s big speech in New Hampshire. Michele Bachmann, the congresswoman from Minnesota and darling of the tea-party movement, is about to declare her candidacy from Iowa. Now the other darling of the tea-party movement is stealing her thunder without even troubling to say that she is running. Tim Pawlenty had reason enough to fear Mrs Bachmann’s appeal to the social conservative voters he is aiming for without Mrs Palin fishing from the same pool. “I want to make it very clear: I consider Governor Palin a friend,” says Mrs Bachmann. You betcha.

    It may well be that Mrs Palin’s tour is intended only to titivate the celebrity on which her income depends. Those who think she is bluffing note that she has done none of the customary preparation. She has not hired a campaign team or glad-handed local supporters in the early-voting states. This, however, is to make the mistake of judging Mrs Palin by the standards of conventional warfare. She sees herself more as a guerrilla, adept in the arts of asymmetric warfare.

    Watch your flanks

    If she does run, says Mrs Palin, her campaign “would definitely be unconventional and non-traditional”. Even a media-savvy rogue on a Harley will find it difficult to tear up all the old rules of primary elections. But Facebook and Twitter are changing politics in America as well as the Arab world. Politicians no longer depend on party panjandrums and the gatekeepers of the media to raise money and get their message out. Many Americans doubt whether Mrs Palin is qualified to be president. But she has a big name, avid followers and the ability to raise money. There is a chance, however small, that she could win the nomination.

    In which event, Democrats might well be the first to celebrate. Polls suggest that Barack Obama would trounce her by almost 20 percentage points (Mr Romney trails the president by less than 7%). So it is not only her immediate rivals but also the Republican establishment who have cause to worry. What if she is another Barry Goldwater, who wowed the right but led the Republicans to a crushing defeat by Lyndon Johnson in 1964?

    The trouble is that Mrs Palin is not the sort to step aside just because people tell her she cannot win. She thrives on rejection. Twitting intellectuals and the “lamestream” media is part of her brand. She harbours a grudge against the Republican “blue-bloods” who blame her for Mr McCain’s failure to beat Mr Obama in 2008, and would love to prove them wrong. She may not be able to win the presidency herself, but so long as she stays in the headlines, hinting at a run, she makes the party’s sobersides look dull by comparison. For them, the phenomenon from Alaska has gradually mutated into the problem from hell.

  • Medicare

    Demagoguing health reform

    Jun 1st 2011, 21:11 by Lexington

    ISN'T it a bit rich for Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, and Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House budget committee, to complain so bitterly about how the president is "misdescribing" their plans for Medicare? Barack Obama's retort, that the demagoguery comes from both sides, is an understatement. Have Messrs Cantor and Ryan forgotten what they said, and continue to say, about the way "Obamacare" was destroying the very idea of America? In their joint book, "The Young Guns", Mr Ryan said, of Mr Obama's plan:

    We will continue this fight because it is a fight about the idea of America .. Americans today are being asked to subscribe to an ideology that is against the American idea. It's an ideology that says that government creates rights - and government takes them away. This rejects the goal of government as securing equal opportunity, it demands that government create equal results. It is an ideology that treats citizens like children and politicians like divinities ...

    Of course, the tea-partiers said much worse. If you dish it out, you should be prepared to take it. That's just politics. For a spot of sanity, I recommend this from Bill Galston, of the Brookings Institution.

    If Ryan’s proposal is unacceptable, but the status quo is unsustainable, what is to be done? To begin answering that question, we can’t do much better than taking the bipartisan Domenici-Rivlin proposal as our point of departure and figure out ways of refining and improving it. But there’s a huge stumbling-block at the threshold: the American people don’t believe that the status quo is unsustainable. Until they do, they’ll reject not only the Ryan plan, but also alternatives that are far more balanced and less draconian. So both political parties face, and cannot avoid, the bedrock challenge of every democracy: persuading the people, who are the ultimate arbiters of what’s possible, to accept a bitter truth and its necessary consequences.

    Worth reading the whole thing.

  • Israel and America

    Obama in the middle

    May 25th 2011, 23:29 by Lexington

    PAUL PILLAR assumes that Israel will never offer the Palestinians a state:

    Netanyahu ... is content to let the status quo endure indefinitely. Israel will maintain that status quo through brute force—military force within the territories, and political force in Washington.

    Benny Morris assumes that the Palestinians will never accept the Jewish state:

    The Palestinians don't intend to negotiate in good faith, and they don't intend to reach a two-state solution. They want all of Palestine, nothing less.

    Either way, says Walter Russell Mead, Barack Obama is not the man to bridge the gap:

    His record of grotesque, humiliating and total diplomatic failure in his dealings with Prime Minister Netanyahu has few parallels in American history.  Three times he has gone up against Netanyahu; three times he has ingloriously failed.  This last defeat — Netanyahu’s deadly, devastating speech to Congress in which he eviscerated President Obama’s foreign policy to prolonged and repeated standing ovations by members of both parties — may have been the single most stunning and effective public rebuke to an American President a foreign leader has ever delivered.

    Three depressing posts worth reading.

  • That higher-education bubble

    Eureka!

    May 19th 2011, 17:51 by Lexington

    MY RESEARCH into that supposed higher-education bubble has at last paid dividends. A 5,000-word article in a rival newsweekly concludes definitively that American parents are beginning to worry that sending their kids to college "may be a commitment they simply cannot afford to make"—and that college "may not be providing their sons and daughters with the kinds of education they need". Key quote:

    There will almost surely be a surplus of college graduates on the market for at least the next decade. Such a glut will have serious effects on the economy, on national policy and on the future of higher education ... Harvard economist Richard Freeman and MIT professor J. Herbert Hollomon have been studying the college market for the past several years. "We have arrived at a point where a growing number of people may be destined to remain unemployed - or, by implication, over-educated," they conclude. In the long run, this may mean "the virtual end of education as a means of upward mobility in society." For the first time in American history, they warn, large numbers of young people may deliberately choose to become less well educated than their parents.

    So said Newsweek—in 1976. College enrolment continues to boom.

  • The race for the moon

    That Kennedy speech plus 50

    May 19th 2011, 15:47 by Lexington

    MY print column this week notes that it is half a century next week since John Kennedy called for sending a man to the moon and returning him safely to Earth. The bottom line, I think:

    If we can send a man to the moon, people ask, why can’t we [fill in the blank]? Lyndon Johnson tried to build a “great society”, but America is better at aeronautical engineering than social engineering. Mr Obama, pointing to competition from China, invokes a new “Sputnik moment” to justify bigger public investment in technology and infrastructure. It should not be a surprise that his appeals have gone unheeded. Putting a man on the moon was a brilliant achievement. But in some ways it was peculiarly un-American—almost, you might say, an aberration born out of the unique circumstances of the cold war. It is a reason to look back with pride, but not a pointer to the future.

  • Tackling the deficit

    The non-deliberative body

    May 19th 2011, 11:08 by Lexington

    SENATOR Tom Coburn, late of the "gang of six" that was trying to do something bipartisan on the deficit but hit an impasse, publishes a bitter cri de coeur in this morning's Washington Post. The nub of it:

    I understand the disappointment, and real danger, associated with our impasse. The question, though, is not how we tried and failed but why the Senate has not even tried. Commissions and “gangs” form when members lose confidence in the institutions in which they serve. Working groups have their place — but they should support, not replace, the open work of the full Senate. The truth is that we already have a permanent standing debt commission. It’s called Congress ...

    It is not realistic to expect six members to pull the Senate out of its dysfunction and lethargy. Some will ask why we should have more hope in an open, deliberative process, in which all senators are engaged, when a dedicated few did not succeed. The America I know comes together when tough times call for us to do so. It’s time for the Senate to earn its reputation as the world’s greatest deliberative body and help lead that effort. The constituency to help 60 senators agree on a balanced deficit-reduction plan already exists among the public. The public rightly prefers spending cuts over revenue increases, but numerous polls indicate the vast majority of Americans would support the only type of plan that would ever make it out of Congress and be signed into law: one that favors spending cuts over revenue increases but includes both.

    The senator now intends to publish his own deficit-reduction plan. Good luck to him.

  • In my absence

    A big week in the news business

    May 18th 2011, 18:13 by Lexington

    I CHOSE a bad time to take a holiday in London. In my absence The Donald flamed and burned, Huckabee bowed out, Newt shot himself in the foot and the IMF's Monsieur Big did the perp's walk to Rikers Island. All this leaves a returning blogger wondering just where to pick up. Maybe I'd better wait a few more hours. That should produce a story or five.

  • America and al-Qaeda

    The killing of Osama bin Laden

    May 2nd 2011, 12:30 by Lexington

    "THERE'S an old poster out West that says: Wanted Dead or Alive." So said President George Bush of Osama bin Laden in September 2001, a week after the al-Qaeda attack that brought down New York's twin towers and struck the Pentagon in Washington. Now, ten long history-altering years later, the United States has at last got its man. News late on May 1st that American special forces had killed the al-Qaeda leader in a raid on his compound deep inside Pakistan brought jubilant crowds thronging to the White House and, in New York, to Times Square and the site of ground zero.

    The heli-borne raid that killed the arch-terrorist was completed in only 40 minutes, according to the White House. Mr bin Laden resisted the attackers and was killed in a firefight. His body was removed and, it is now reported, buried at sea so as to avoid the possibility of his grave becoming a shrine. But if the raid was lightning-fast, the intelligence operation that preceded it was long and deliberate. Barack Obama was told in August last year that the intelligence community might have discovered bin Laden's hiding place—not some cave but a fortified compound in the town of Abbottabad, not far north of Islamabad, Pakistan's capital city.

    The first lead came four years ago. Thanks to information acquired by interrogating detainees, the Americans identified one of the few al-Qaeda couriers trusted by bin-Laden, and the area of Pakistan in which he operated. But it was not until last August that they worked out precisely where this man and his brother lived: a large home built in 2005 on what were then the outskirts of the growing town of Abbottabad. It was surrounded by walls up to 18 feet high topped with barbed wire. Access was controlled by two security gates. Suspiciously, the inhabitants of the house burned their own rubbish instead of putting it out for collection. Astonishingly, for a house so large and expensive, it had no phone or internet connection. The three-storey house had few outward-facing windows. In addition to the two brothers a third family was in residence. After careful analysis the Americans concluded that this family was bin Laden's.

    In March President Obama and his security team started an intensive series of meetings on how to act on this intelligence. Mr Obama gave the final go-ahead for the raid on Friday morning. On Saturday evening he gave a relaxed, wisecracking speech to the annual dinner of White House correspondents. The raid was launched the following evening. In addition to bin Laden, three men and a woman were killed in the compound. But although one helicopter had to be left behind, there were no American casualties.

    As Mr Obama himself acknowledged in a short late-night speech on May 1st, this flawless military operation will not put an end to the war against al-Qaeda. Many analysts believe that the organisation long ago mutated into a franchise operation, relying on local jihadist fervour and initiative rather than central direction. Having died fighting, Osama bin Laden may well remain, even in death, a potent symbol of jihad against the infidel. Al-Qaeda will no doubt try to retaliate swiftly. It is also possible that the raid will aggravate the already raw relationship between the United States and Pakistan. To preserve security, Pakistan appears not to have been informed about the American attack in advance. Meanwhile, the compound's location in an affluent town near to Pakistani military bases raises uncomfortable questions about how serious Pakistan's own spies were in their search for the master terrorist. All that said, the elimination of the terror group's top figurehead is a heavy blow to al-Qaeda at a time when the pro-democracy Arab awakening had already demonstrated the organisation's waning influence on the Arab street.

    For Mr Obama, this could hardly be a sweeter moment. At a stroke, the daring raid and the careful planning that preceded it have destroyed the credibility of the Republican argument that he is soft on terrorism or does not have what it takes to be commander-in-chief. Just conceivably, that will make it easier for him to accelerate the planned start of this summer's drawdown of troops from Afghanistan. The last American troops are already scheduled to depart from Iraq at the end of the year. The long and bloody decade that began on September 11th 2001 is not quite over. But it may at last be drawing to an end.

    Read on: Clausewitz looks at the evolution of al-Qaeda. Newsbook reports on the humiliation of Pakistan's leaders.

    (Photo credit: AP)

  • Higher education

    More on that bubble

    Apr 28th 2011, 14:07 by Lexington

    I'M STILL delving into the question of whether inflation in the price of university education portends a new bubble. Here's one highly readable analysis that answers "yes", (from a magazine I wasn't familiar with before). It's long and worth reading in total, but here's its conclusion:

    In addition to the billions colleges have spent on advertising, sports programs, campus aesthetics, and marketable luxuries, they’ve benefited from a public discourse that depicts higher education as an unmitigated social good. Since the Baby Boomers gave birth, the college degree has seemed a panacea for social ills, a metaphor for a special kind of deserved success. We still tell fairy tales about escapes from the ghetto to the classroom or the short path from graduation to lifelong satisfaction, not to mention America’s collective college success story: The G.I. Bill. But these narratives are not inspiring true-life models, they’re advertising copy, and they come complete with loan forms.

    Well, yes, college education is not a panacea, and many colleges offer a mediocre education. But this is hardly new. The Economist was complaining about the massification of higher education more than a decade ago. But for all its faults, the singular genius of the American system of higher education, by contrast with the more monolithic systems in Europe, is surely that tertiary education is available in so many different forms at so many different prices. A course at your own state university is not prohibitively expensive, and the evidence I cited in my earlier post on this subject is that the credential you receive at the end is still likely to repay itself in future earnings, irrespective of the actual quality of the tuition provided.

    To be continued.

About Lexington's notebook

In this blog, our Lexington columnist enters America’s political fray and shares the many opinions that don't make it into his column each week.

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