Sarah Milhous tills the midterms

As observers struggle to divine Sarah Palin's effect on various races for Congress and governor, it's worth looking back at the all-time master of collecting mid-term election chits, Richard Nixon. Here's Rick Perlstein on Nixon's campaigning strategy, 1966:

Geographically, the itinerary felt random. Politically, it was anything but. He received over a thousand speaking invitations a month. The ones he chose were triangulated with scientific precision. The New York Times's John Herbers reviewed the crazy-quilt itinerary and concluded Nixon was campaigning "in districts where races are close." The failure of discernment was profound. It was the opposite: he was campaigning in traditionally Republican districts where a Democratic congressman had won in 1964 on Lyndon Johnson's coattails, but was likely to be swept out in the conservative backlash...

Come November, Richard Nixon could remind the New York Times that what these districts had in common was that Richard Nixon had campaigned there. He could reap credit for making water flow downhill ( Nixonland, p. 142).

Smoke and mirrors on Guantanamo recidivism

Remember all those fevered claims that 20% of the men released from Guantanamo had "returned to the battlefield"?  Today, Marc Ambinder's report on politically motivated Republican attempts to keep prisoners in Guantanamo contains this tidbit:

The letter doesn't refer to what the intelligence community has concluded about recidivism, but a senior U.S. official tells me that the Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that just 11 of the entire class of 525 former detainees have returned to the battlefield in some capacity and are still at large.

That contradicts Ambinder's own fairly recent report on the same subject -- unless some 80% of alleged recidivists (discounting 'suspected' ones) have been recaptured or killed:

The recidivism rate of the 558 official Guantanamo detainees is hotly debated. The Defense Intelligence Agency confirms that about 10 percent returned to battle or terrorism; an additional 11.2 percent of the released detainees are suspected of having done so.

A small fraction of the number, however, remains at large -- so most of those confirmed to have returned to terrorism have been recpatured, [sic] are imprisoned, or have been killed.

Mark and Joshua Denbeaux et al, attorneys to Guantanamo detainees,  have demonstrated in exhaustive detail that Dept. of Defense estimates of Guantanamo recidivism are vague, undocumented,  mutually contradictory  -- in short, completely unreliable. Which is not to say that the figure floated by Ambinder's latest anonymous source has any particular claim to credibility.

Obama skates past a strong counter-proposal on Afghanistan.

President Obama stuffed a bit of straw into one opposing view of the right course in Afghanistan in his lunch with reporters yesterday.

As reported by Marc Ambinder, Obama, in a rundown of alternative courses to the one he's chosen, said:

The other argument is that we can sort of stand pat, whether it's at 30,000 or 40,000 or 50,000, you have some platform there, you're basically pulled back and hunkered down but you're able to prevent Kabul from being overrun; you can still project some counterterrorism operations in the region. The problem there is whether that level is 50 or 60 or 70, you have sort of a flatline, where there is no inflection point, there's no point at which, we can say conditions have changed conditionally sufficiently so that we can start bringing our troops home.

Note the escalation in Obama's presentation of the troop level needed for this "option": 30-40-50-60-70. Perhaps there have been advocates for all those levels.  But compare the fully articulated strategy of one dissident from the outlines of the McChrystal plan, Rory Stewart:

The best Afghan policy would be to reduce the number of foreign troops from the current level of 90,000 to far fewer – perhaps 20,000. In that case, two distinct objectives would remain for the international community: development and counter-terrorism. Neither would amount to the building of an Afghan state or winning a counter-insurgency campaign. A reduction in troop numbers and a turn away from state-building should not mean total withdrawal: good projects could continue to be undertaken in electricity, water, irrigation, health, education, agriculture, rural development and in other areas favoured by development agencies. Even a light US presence could continue to allow for aggressive operations against Al Qaeda terrorists, in Afghanistan, who plan to attack the United States. The US has successfully prevent Al Qaeda from re-establishing itself since 2001 (though the result has only been to move bin Laden across the border.). The US military could also (with other forms of assistance) support the Afghan military to prevent the Taliban from seizing a city or taking over the country.

The core of Stewart's argument is that such a commitment would be sustainable -- and calibrated to a realistic time frame for Afghan development:

While, I strongly oppose troop increases, I equally strongly oppose a total flight. We are currently in danger of lurching from troop increases to withdrawal and from engagement to isolation. We are threatening to provide instant electro-shock therapy followed by abandonment. This is the last thing Afghanistan needs. The international community should aim to provide a patient, tolerant long-term relationship with a country as poor and traumatized as Afghanistan. Judging by comparable countries in the developing world (and Afghanistan is very near the bottom of the UN Human Development index), making Afghanistan more stable, prosperous and humane is a project which will take decades. It is a worthwhile project in the long-term for us and for Afghans but we will only be able to sustain our presence if we massively reduce our investment and our ambitions and begin to approach Afghanistan more as we do other poor countries in the developing world. The best way of avoiding the mistakes of the 1980s and 1990s – the familiar cycle of investment and abandonment which most Afghan expect and fear and which have contributed so much to instability and danger - is to husband and conserve our resources, limit our objectives to counter-terrorism and humanitarian assistance and work out how to work with fewer troops and less money over a longer period. In Afghanistan in the long-term, less will be more.

 The alternative to Obama's surge put forward by Stewart is not, per the argument framed by Obama, maintaining a mid-sized force too small to improve the status quo until we get exhausted. It's to keep a force (and aid effort) that we can maintain for decades to foster a development that will take decades. Stewart might argue (he hasn't) that his strategy is comparable to securing one's financial future with a $1000 yearly term life insurance payment, whereas Obama's is comparable to slapping down six figures in a risky derivative bet.

Obama could argue that Stewart's course is seductive but false: that a Taliban thriving long-term in large parts of Afghanistan will destabilize Pakistan; that with 20,000 troops the U.S. can't sustain intelligence operations; that there's no viable mission for 20,000 troops. Here, he didn't.

Ambinder stitches up some fig leaves for Pelosi et al

No one should jump to conclusions about the CIA briefings of select members of Congress. Still, Marc Ambinder's equivocal defense of Pelosi and other members who received briefings is rife with diversion and obfuscation:

Based on several years' worth of distance, it's easy to conclude that Congress failed to police the CIA. But Congressional oversight of these matters has never been forward-looking. Congress is ill-equipped to monitor CIA operations in real-time; it cannot look over the shoulder of every National Security Agency analyst who picks up someone on a wiretap. And -- in an environment where the threat of terrorism was real -- we might wonder whether the type of Congressional oversight we seem to want would be more harmful than productive. We want the CIA to think twice before doing something naughty, but we don't want Congress to preemptively prevent the CIA from bribing, say, a source with a prostitute. We really don't. That's why our casting about for blame ought to end with political leaders who make policy decisions -- which is, in fact, where the blame for this program does reside.

What has calling out "a wiretap" or preventing a prostitution bribe got to do with being briefed on torture techniques and doing nothing to stop the torture or even protest it? Members of Congress who receive classified briefings may indeed be poorly positioned to object to many questionable activities. But the are a Constitutional check -- the whole point is to create an opportunity briefings are designed to give them an opportunity cry halt to dangerous abuses of power and violations of law and the Constitution.

According to Ambinder, if Pelosi was briefed about waterboarding and other torture techniques and wanted to object, her only option was as follows:

What she could have done -- and this does happen, occasionally -- is to walk out of the briefing, telling those CIA officials who came that what she just heard did not constitute a formal briefing, and that she would record, for her own records, that the CIA did not brief her on the subject. The CIA briefers would then return to Langley and inform their supervisors that Pelosi walked out of the briefing, mid-stream. Since CIA felt it was required to brief her -- and since Pelosi declared herself not briefed -- the CIA would then be compelled to try to re-brief her -- and would probably send a high-ranking official who could better explain the program.

What about insisting on meeting with the President and telling him that the procedures he had authorized were illegal? What about threatening to disclose them? Disclosing the contents of a classified briefing might be against the law. But so is torture.

Ambinder also offers this sympathetic read-back into Pelosi's circumstances at the time of the briefing:

But back in 2002, when more Americans (probably) supported those techniques than they do now (and most Americans support at least some of the EITs), and when Pelosi herself did not have the means or the legal knowledge to perform her own analysis of the legality of the techniques, and when the climate of dissent was quashed -- her reaction is understandable... maybe not, from our current perspective, excusable, although there is a range of opinion on that question.

Not to underestimate the pressure, and the enormous reservoir of goodwill that still belonged to Bush in September '02. And we don't know what Pelosi was told at that time. But if she was informed about, say, waterboarding -- would not the knowledge and values she walked in with be enough to recognize the procedure as torture? If not in the briefing, then after the fact?

Okay, what'd she mean this time?

Every week brings a new low for Hillary Clinton. I think that this comment to the Argus (SD) Leader hits the third rail -- and may get her run out of the race on a rail. Asked "you don't buy the party unity argument?" - that is, the argument that she's hurting the party by continuing to run -- she said:

I don’t because I’ve been around long enough, My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. You know, I don't understand it. And there's lots of speculation about why it is.

Once again, as with her "hard working Americans, white Americans" comment, I think you have to distinguish between Hillary's real-time thought process while speaking this and the unconscious bilge that propelled it. Her point was that nomination fights often carry into the summer. (Never mind that the claim that Bill didn't wrap up his race until June is almost entirely bogus; he was nominee presumptive by mid-March. ) Bill was fighting into June; Bobby Kennedy was just getting going in June when he was assassinated; the conscious point is that the nomination was far from settled at that time. But, as Ambinder asks,

why didn't she bring up Ted Kennedy in 1980? Or Gary Hart in 1984? I think she was pointing to primary races where the eventual nominee was unknown at this point in the cycle.... But 1984 would apply more, her husband was the de-facto nominee at this point, and the compressed calender really renders such comparisons null and void.

It's hard to escape the conclusion that what propelled this example was Hillary's background thought that anything can happen.

11-0, back to the wall?

The Clinton campaign made a modest little attempt today to spin expectations:

To: Interested Parties

From: The Clinton Campaign

Date: Friday, February 29, 2008

RE: Obama Must-Wins

The media has anointed Barack Obama the presumptive nominee and he's playing the part.

With an eleven state winning streak coming out of February, Senator Obama is riding a surge of momentum that has enabled him to pour unprecedented resources into Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont.

The Obama campaign and its allies are outspending us two to one in paid media and have sent more staff into the March 4 states. In fact, when all is totaled, Senator Obama and his allies have outspent Senator Clinton by a margin of $18.4 million to $9.2 million on advertising in the four states that are voting next Tuesday.

Senator Obama has campaigned hard in these states. He has spent time meeting editorial boards, courting endorsers, holding rallies, and - of course - making speeches.

If he cannot win all of these states with all this effort, there's a problem.

Should Senator Obama fail to score decisive victories with all of the resources and effort he is bringing to bear, the message will be clear:

Democrats, the majority of whom have favored Hillary in the primary contests held to date, have their doubts about Senator Obama and are having second thoughts about him as a prospective standard-bearer.

There's been no lack of incredulity in the face of this the-more-you-win-the-bigger-you- have-to-win-to-stay-even logic (best comment on Ambinder, by Lampwick: "so what they're saying is that a 1-14 win/loss streak would trump a 14-1 win/loss streak"). But the weirdness here is more than mathematical. One sideswipe in particular struck me as even odder than the main premise:

Senator Obama has campaigned hard in these states. He has spent time meeting editorial boards, courting endorsers, holding rallies, and - of course - making speeches.

A candidate who makes speeches! How opportunistic! How shallow! Can't be trusted with the red phone...