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...

Flashback: a moment of choice

Jonathan Bernstein's Republican-eye view of the battle over New Start -- a minor PR hit for the GOP that helped run out the clock on the omnibus spending bill and so positioned them much more strongly on next year's budget battles -- is sobering but true.  It's equally true, though, that New Start was one battle that Obama could not afford to lose, though he could have fairly quietly delayed the hit by deferring (and probably dooming) the ratification effort until next term. 

By picking and winning this fight, Obama arrested the fast-hardening perception that electoral defeat at home would cripple his ability to advance U.S. interests and policy abroad.  His high-stakes, highly effective full court press on New Start also marked the end of his personal post-election remission.  I can't resist a flashback to November 18, when Obama very publicly doubled down on New Start. Re-post from that day is below.

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."

Profiles in cowardice, courage, and a little bit of both

Noting that as the dam breaks in favor of the New Start treaty, many Republicans now seem, in Rich Lowry's words, to be lining up to get on "the right side," Kevin Drum interprets:

In other words, a big chunk of the Republican caucus has known all along that New START was a good treaty but was holding out for strictly partisan purposes. If it had been close, and giving Obama a black eye had been a serious possibility, they would have voted no. But with that option gone, they're willing to vote yes. It's a real profile in cowardice.

That may be a little too cold.  There is still a choice to be made, and a month ago, Richard Lugar framed it for his fellow Republicans with brutal clarity even as he steeled Democrats' nerves for a showdown.  Immediately after Jon Kyl's bid to simply take New Start off the Senate calendar for this year -- assuring that it would never pass -- Lugar said:

"At the moment, the Republican caucus is tied up in a situation where people don't want to make choices," Lugar told reporters in the hallway of the Capitol building Wednesday. "No one wants to be counted. No one wants to talk about it."....

Lamar Alexander writes a short history of the Obama presidency

After succumbing to reason and announcing that he'll vote for the New START treaty, Lamar Alexander received a thank you call from Obama.

"It was good,” Alexander said of his talk with Obama. “I asked him how he keeps playing with basketball with people who hurt him. He said he beats them.”

I'd like to think that right there is history's verdict, circa, say, 2030, on the Obama presidency.

McConnell gets Pott(er)y-mouthed with the President

When, exactly, will the hubris of the Republican leadership boomerang? Here's Mitch McConnell on the Senate floor yesterday, impugning the President's motives in pushing for ratification of a nuclear arms treaty backed by all six living former Republican secretaries of state:

Our top concern should be the safety and security of our nation, not some politician's desire to declare a political victory and host a press conference before the first of the year.

The projection -- who's gamed the timing of this vote? -- take one's breath away. Even more so, the disrespect.

McConnell's locution -- some politician -- recalls the sneer of the rapacious banker Potter in It's a Wonderful Life, as he smears the lending practices of  the Bailey Building & Loan  -- and particularly of its president-to-be, that model of empathic probity young George Bailey:

You see, if you shoot pool with some employee here, you can come and borrow money.

You might argue that an ideological caricature like Potter the banker doesn't much illuminate complex contemporary political reality.   But turn that charge around. Republicans, in their demonization of Obama, are caricaturing themselves.Why credit the fulminations of some shameless lying demagogue?

The politics of pique, redux

Do Republicans threatening to spike New START because their DADT stonewall broke down perchance remember how Newt Gingrich's confession-cum-boast that he was moved to shut down the government in part because he found himself seated at the back of Air Force One played out?

WASHINGTON (CNN) [Nov. 16, 1995] -- As the government budget standoff continued Thursday, House Speaker Newt Gingrich indicated the Republican hard line was due, in part, to a "snub" from President Clinton during their recent trip to Israel for the funeral of assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. White House Chief of Staff

Leon Panetta called the Gingrich comment "bizarre."

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..

Bringing home the borrowed bacon for the dispossessed

Like most progressives, I have been bitterly disappointed by Obama's refusal to use presidential power to force the sunsetting of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2%.  It has seemed simple: had Obama announced in August, September, or even immediately after the election that he would veto any bill that extends the tax cuts for income over $250k per family/$200k per individual, Republicans would have either had to cave now or start over -- fast -- to salvage what they could of the expired tax cuts early next session. The notion that the GOP would then be able to blame Obama and the Dems for "raising taxes" seemed ass-backwards.

While Obama could have won the short-term optics, though, its appears that with the deal just cut with the Republicans he is betting, both substantively and in a two-year political play, on getting whatever he can to jolt the economy and relieve those who are hurting most. Further tax cuts for the top 2% -- and large cuts to the estate tax -- are inefficient, unjust, negligible stimulus. But 13 months of unemployment insurance extension is not. Nor is a payroll tax cut, or a continuation of the stimulus's tuition tax credit and expanded earned income tax credit, nor accelerated writeoffs for businesses' equipment investments.

What this amounts to is a messy, inefficient, hugely expensive extension of the stimulus -- the Times puts the price tag at $900 billion over two years.  But what Obama's won is some genuine stimulus -- and hence an enhanced shot at decent economic growth prior to the 2012 election, not to say income boosts for the middle and less-than-middle class to offset the latest giveaway to the wealthy.  None of that would have happened had he "won" the battle of the sunset.

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:

A spotlight on patient diplomacy

In the Times' account of the WikiLeaks revelations vis-a-vis Iran, the authors'* admiration for the Obama's administration's response to Iran's nuclear program is palpable:.

[The cables] also offer new insights into how President Obama, determined to merge his promise of “engagement” with his vow to raise the pressure on the Iranians, assembled a coalition that agreed to impose an array of sanctions considerably harsher than any before attempted.

When Mr. Obama took office, many allies feared that his offers of engagement would make him appear weak to the Iranians. But the cables show how Mr. Obama’s aides quickly countered those worries by rolling out a plan to encircle Iran with economic sanctions and antimissile defenses. In essence, the administration expected its outreach to fail, but believed that it had to make a bona fide attempt in order to build support for tougher measures.

When Mr. Nice Guy won't yield...

As previously noted, and as is now manifest to all, Obama has focused on ratification of the New START treaty as his one must-do in the lame duck session of Congress.

Like most Democrats, I have been frustrated by the President's continued patter about compromise and bipartisanship on the tax front in the wake of the election.  Notwithstanding that large majorities of Americans say that they want compromise between the president and Republicans, and that equally large majorities trust the president more than the Republicans in Congress to bargain in good faith, it seems to most of us that with Republican knives not only drawn but brandished, Obama needs to stake out his own ground -- on taxes, on DADT, on unemployment benefits. No real compromise is possible when one side does all the conceding.

It may be, though, that the show of humility on all those fronts is designed to set up a kind of reverse Nixon-to-China moment for Obama on New START.  "Nixon to China" means only a tough guy has the standing to compromise. Obama's stand on New START signals that when Mr. Reasonable won't yield, the other side must be playing politics. Rhetorically, on New START, it's easy for Obama to wrap himself in Reagan, Kissinger, Baker, Powell, Lugar, etc. And that's precisely what he's done in his latest weekly address.

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:

The delayed gratification presidency

"Patience" and "persistence" have been the Obama team's watchwords as they tout the Presidedent's victories in health care reform and an arms reduction treaty with Russia.

For months, delays in Obama's signature projects have been portrayed as signs of weakness. But the 'patience' tag is carefully chosen.  The long delays are in at least some cases a result of Obama's willingness to wait out counterparties -- and so a sign of strength.

That is the subtext of the admittedly Administration-lauding account by The New York Times' Peter Baker of the yearlong negotiations with Russia (though Baker pointedly claims Russians as well as admin officials as sources).  The narrative suggests that the Russians repeatedly tried to roll Obama and " would not resolve the big issues until they had taken his measure"; and that last month, when Medvedev introduced 11th-hour demands, Obama had to show willingness to let the whole deal fall apart.  Perhaps even more revealing, though, is this chapter:

The two sides also split over sharing missile data known as telemetry. Moscow was adamant that the new treaty not require telemetry exchange. The topic came up so frequently that Mr. Medvedev joked, “My favorite word in English now is ‘telemetry.’ ”

With those issues unresolved, Start expired in December. The Russians calculated that Mr. Obama would be so eager to have a new treaty by the time he traveled to Oslo later that month to accept his Nobel Peace Prize that he would accept concessions, so they took a hard line.

The rap on the peace prize, of course, was that Obama had no concrete accomplishments on the world stage. The temptation to seal a deal may have been strong.  But the evidence is considerable -- in health care, in setting AfPak strategy, and in "new Start" negotiations with the Russians -- that Obama is willing to appear weak rather than be so.