Lugar's noble sign-off, leavened with false equivalence

Richard Lugar's statement issued last night in the wake of his primary loss to Tea Party candidate Richard Mourdock will be rightly celebrated as warning and diagnosis about the dangers of extreme partisanship. At the same time, in perhaps inevitable loyalty to his own side, Lugar raises false equivalence to a high art:

Unfortunately, we have an increasing number of legislators in both parties who have adopted an unrelenting partisan viewpoint. This shows up in countless vote studies that find diminishing intersections between Democrat and Republican positions. Partisans at both ends of the political spectrum are dominating the political debate in our country. And partisan groups, including outside groups that spent millions against me in this race, are determined to see that this continues. They have worked to make it as difficult as possible for a legislator of either party to hold independent views or engage in constructive compromise. If that attitude prevails in American politics, our government will remain mired in the dysfunction we have witnessed during the last several years. And I believe that if this attitude expands in the Republican Party, we will be relegated to minority status. Parties don't succeed for long if they stop appealing to voters who may disagree with them on some issues...

Nut-cutting time

Those who think that Obama will be placatory forever, let's see how he reacts to this joint statement (h/t E. Klein) from Sens. Mitch McConnell and Jon Kyl:

“The White House and Democrats are insisting on job-killing tax hikes and new spending. That proposal won’t address our fiscal crisis, our jobs crisis, or protect and reform entitlements. And a bill with new spending and higher taxes would fail with bipartisan opposition — as it should. President Obama needs to decide between his goal of higher taxes, or a bipartisan plan to address our deficit. He can’t have both. But we need to hear from him.”

Maybe it's wishful thinking, or the residue from last night's steely Afghanistan speech, or the memory from last November that Obama has absorbed The Clinton Tapes...but I think he's going to win this high stakes round.

Rip Van Kyl

Jon Kyl wants to reduce Russian and U.S. nuclear stockpiles and resume mutual nuclear monitoring between the two countries. I know, because I just visited the Senator's website:

Moreover, Russia has not been particularly helpful in the ongoing talks to replace the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) – which expired last December – with a follow-on agreement.  START, considered by many to be the most important nuclear arms reduction treaty in history, dramatically reduced the number of nuclear warheads in the U.S. and Russian arsenals, and provided the means for each country to effectively verify the other’s nuclear activities.

With the expiration of the treaty last year, the United States and Russia have lost key means to monitor one another’s nuclear forces.

Good news, Jon! A New START treaty has been negotiated, which, according to your party's foremost in-office expert on nuclear proliferation, provides for a fully adequate inspection regime, will further reduce stockpiles on both sides, and will have no effect on U.S. missile defense development. Oh wait..

President, opposition leader come to terms on international pact

A distant echo of President Obama's struggles to get the New Start treaty ratified in the lame duck session without caving completely on Democratic domestic priorities can be heard in the deal struck on November 23,1994 between President Clinton and Senate majority leader-to-be Bob Dole to expand the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). 

Dole had by this point already told Clinton privately what Mitch McConnell recently proclaimed publicly: that his party's top priority was defeating the president's reelection bid. But the calculus on this issue was different from that of New Start.  At stake was expanding free trade, long a top Republican priority -- because also a top priority, as populist America-Firster Pat Buchanan pointedly noted, of their big business paymasters.  Today, by contrast, the goals advanced by New Start -- advancing nonproliferation, securing Russian nukes, assembling effective international coalitions and inhibiting Iranian nuclear weapons development -- are matters of apparent indifference to Republican leadership. A nearer analogy would be with the free trade agreement Obama just struck with Korea - presumably even the next Senate won't block that.

Still, the contrast strikes me as worth looking at on a few fronts. First, the GATT expansion contained a core provision -- subjecting the U.S. like all member nations to the international group's jurisdiction on trade disputes -- that today's GOP would doubtless demagogue to death, never mind the free trade pressures. Second, notwithstanding Gingrich's then-unprecedented radicalism and level of ambition for an opposition Congress, the "tone in Washington" was less extreme then than now -- the possibility of genuine negotiation still taken for granted and was in fact fulfilled.  There were, the Times reported, genuine concessions on both sides:

"Robin" Medvedev gets red-breasted over missile defense

Is it unduly speculative to infer that Medvedev's newfound tough-guy demeanor is early fallout from the WikiLeaks cable dump? From The New York Times online:

MOSCOW — President Dmitri A. Medvedev, expressing continued wariness over the prospect of military cooperation with his country’s former cold war adversaries, warned on Tuesday that a failure by Russia and the West to reach an agreement on missile defense could provoke a new arms race. [snip]

The following alternatives await us in the next 10 years,” Mr. Medvedev told an audience of Russia’s top leaders gathered at the Kremlin. “Either we reach an agreement on missile defense and create a joint mechanism for cooperation or, if we do not succeed in entering into a constructive understanding, there will begin a new arms race.”

In the absence of cooperation, he said, Russia would be prepared to deploy “new means of attack.”

Obama picks his battleground

Those of us who have watched with distress a chastened post-election Obama revert to futile bipartisan gestures and gratuitous mea culpas have wondered what he would choose to take a stand on in the lame duck session, as Republicans move to stymie all meaningful action.  The Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest? Didn't look like it, though the signals have shifted a bit in recent days. DADT?  Votes to bust a filibuster probably aren't there.

Today we have our answer. There is one battle Obama can't afford to lose -- and will lose if he defers it. That is ratification of the New START treaty with Russia.  The treaty is essential to national security, future nonproliferation efforts, United States credibility on the world stage, and, by extension, Obama's ability to conduct foreign policy.

Since Kyl's betrayal on Tuesday, I have wondered why Obama has not wrapped himself round with the six secretaries of state, seven STRATCOM commanders and five secretaries of defense who have voiced support for the treaty. Today he did that. And cleverly, he brought Ronald Reagan to the table where also sat James Baker, Madeline Albright, Henry Kissinger, William Cohen, William Perry, Brent Scowcroft, Sam Nunn, along with his current national security team:

If we ratify this treaty, we’re going to have a verification regime in place to track Russia’s strategic nuclear weapons, including U.S. inspectors on the ground.  If we don’t, then we don’t have a verification regime -– no inspectors, no insights into Russia’s strategic arsenal, no framework for cooperation between the world’s two nuclear superpowers.  As Ronald Reagan said, we have to trust, but we also have to verify.  In order for us to verify, we’ve got to have a treaty.

I think that as with healthcare reform, Obama is going to go all out and get this one over the line.  Yesterday Dick Lugar laid out the blueprint: force senators to vote yea or nay on a treaty that the entire foreign policy establishment of the last thirty years not currently holding elective office supports:

"I'm advising that the treaty should come on the floor so people will have to vote aye or nay [even if there's no deal]," he said. "I think when it finally comes down to it, we have sufficient number or senators who do have a sense of our national security. This is the time, this is the priority. Do it."

Putting a Lugar to Jon Kyl's head

One gets wearily accustomed to Republicans destroying the country's financial viability with enormous tax cuts for the wealthy and skillfully defending those tax cuts to the (fiscal) death. As the ideological embodiment of the personal financial interests of the wealthiest 1% of Americans, that's what they're hired elected to do.

There's more than garden variety opportunism, however, in Jon Kyl's attempt to spike a vote on the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty in the lame duck session.  The administration has negotiated for months with Kyl, the Republican point man on this issue, and accommodated virtually all of his mostly bogus and mercenary demands for more spending on nuclear modernization and expanded commitment to missile defense.  In a reprise of Republican tactics in the healthcare battle, Kyl solemnly declared that a vote before year's end is not feasible, "given the combination of other work Congress must do and the complex and unresolved issues related to START and modernization." To delay the vote until next year, when the Democratic majority shrinks from 59 to 53 and a whole new round of hearings would be required, is to kill the treaty.

No one needs me to make the case for a treaty supported by seven former commanders of U.S. Strategic Command, six former secretaries of state, five former defense secretaries, and a partridge in a pear tree. In brief, New START gets U.S. weapons inspectors back into Russia,  it continues the nuclear force reduction in an equitable manner, it gives both countries nonproliferation credibility, it has enabled and will continue to enable U.S.-Russian cooperation on vital issues such as restraining Iranian weapons development, and it unquestionably leaves the U.S. free to pursue that probably worthless Republican shibboleth, missile defense.  End of story. Only cranks, crackpots and Kyle vile opportunists oppose it.  In support, see George Schultz, Madeline Albright, Gary Hart and Chuck Hagel here, Brent Scowcroft here, Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton here, Henry Kissinger here, and thirty foreign policy grandees from both parties here.  (Opposed: a notorious war criminal and Dr. Strangelove.)


Initial reports suggested that Kyle's opposition would effectively kill the treaty. But I am heartened. Some antibodies remain in the system.  A full-court press is on. Gates, Clinton, Kerry, Lugar. In particular, Lugar's pressure on fellow Republicans -- and direct bid to put some spine in Obama and other Democrats -- seems vital: