House on fire: Hillary opens a new front

After weeks of 'kitchen sink' attacks (and some defense) on matters of identity and character, Hillary Clinton made a strong bid today to shift the nomination battle to ground that plays to her strengths.

She delivered an economics speech that focuses almost entirely on the housing crisis -- from the homeowners' point of view. The speech isn't elegant, and may leave Hillary vulnerable on several policy points. But it may nonetheless give increased traction to her claims that she's ready with solutions to our most pressing problems.

The speech's rhetorical frame: Hillary casts the prospect of mass foreclosure as the the crisis threatening the middle class today. The Bush Administration is fiddling while home is burning, but Hillary will act as vigorously to protect Main Street as Bush has to protect Wall Street:

Last week when it became clear Wall Street was on the brink of a financial melt down, the Fed and the administration sprang into action. The Fed extended a $30 billion lifeline to prevent Bear Stearns from imploding and took unprecedented action to provide tens of billions of dollars in credit for other struggling investment banks as well. Homeowners, on the other hand, have received next to no assistance. Well, let's be clear. When families are losing their homes, that's also a financial crisis. When people’s greatest source of wealth is losing its worth, as college costs and health care costs and food and gas prices shoot up, that’s a financial crisis too. When "for sale" signs line streets across our country, when cities and towns are struggling with the costs of foreclosed properties, that is also a financial crisis.

The policy thrust is to move on multiple fronts to forestall foreclosures, guarantee loans, and create incentives and conditions under which lenders will renegotiate loans to keep people in their houses. In effect, bail out everyone: homeowners, with guaranteed renegotiated loans and/or with interest freezes; states, with money to buy foreclosed properties; mortgage companies, with protection against lawsuits by securities holders if they renegotiate loans. And of course, create another commission: an Emergency Working Group on Foreclosures, calling on Greenspan, Rubin, Volcker and presumably other ghosts of Christmas Past.

The political thrust: I've been out early and often on this issue. I've called for urgent action for a year, and I've got a comprehensive plan. I'm the one to get it done:

Now, a year ago in March 2007 I called for immediate action to address abuses in the subprime market, and I laid out detailed concrete proposals for how to do so. I warned this administration that the problems in subprime mortgages would soon spill over into regular mortgages.....I called for immediate action and laid out concrete proposals to prevent foreclosures and help states hard hit by this crisis.I also called for tighter regulation of the housing market....I also called for greater regulation of mortgage lenders...I’ve also proposed that we amend the bankruptcy code to give judges the discretion to write down the value of struggling families' homes.

Obama has not been slow on this issue, or short on proposals for easing the pressure on homeowners. But Hillary is upping the ante, putting the crisis and a web of proposed legislation to cope with it front and center. This marks a shift in the center of gravity on bread-and-butter Democratic economic issues. Obama will have to engage her in a sustained way if she keeps this up.

Mind you, there's plenty to engage. Hillary's plan can be hit from more than one direction. First, a blanket rate freeze on adjustable mortgages is a radical retroactive price control that would give a free lunch to lots of people who went into ARMS with eyes open. Second, another blue-ribbon commission will sound to some like another can kicked down the road. And to put forward Greenspan as Wise Man No. 1 is an eye-popper -- there's something like consensus, even among Greenspan admirers, that he bears considerable responsibility for blowing up the housing bubble -- by leaving interest rates too low too long, and by refusing to regulate mortgage lenders more vigorously when warned of excesses. To pair him with Rubin recalls what many Democrats regard as the Clinton Administration's excessive friendliness to business and acquiescence to Republican-driven bank deregulation.

Hillary may get caught between two stools -- advocating almost socialist price control on mortgages on one hand, and showing deference to yesterday's deregulators on the other. But Obama will have to pivot.

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If China gets wealthy....

Layman gets a glimmer: A special report in The Economist on "China's Thirst for Resources" includes a piece on "The perils of abundance" that highlights the environmental dangers of China's rapid industrialization. That environmental risk, however, is flip side of the tremendous economic reward to humanity in China's rise. It was the latter that struck me here:

Last year, in a report funded by Rio Tinto, Ross Garnaut and Ligang Song of the Australian National University argued that in countries where income per person has passed $2,000, as it did in China in 2006, demand for natural resources begins to grow at a much faster pace than previously, and continues to do so until income per person reaches roughly $20,000. That pattern has been particularly pronounced in Japan and South Korea, they argue, because of high levels of investment, exports and urbanisation. China also has high and rising levels of all three, so the authors expect its consumption of natural resources to follow a similar path. “The increase in China's demand for metals during the next two decades may be comparable to the total demand from the industrialised world today,” they conclude.

Let's say there are a billion people living today in countries with per capita income over $20,000 -- a baseline, apparently, for first-world prosperity. China reaching that threshold will double the world's 'upper middle class.' That may be obvious to economists, but it was a bit of a lightbulb for me. And by the time China gets there, Russia, Brazil, India should have moved well along that path.

I realize that this is only a surface scratch of the enormously complex task of viewing the path of world development. The catastrophes that could sidetrack or distort pervert the swift increase in human prosperity are manifold. Still, the snapshot of the possible seemed worth registering.

Swiftboating Faith: WSJ's Riley smears Obama

A hit job on Obama by a Wall Street Journal opinion editor -- who cares? Well, this one, by WSJ deputy Taste editor and Fox News panelist Naomi Schaefer Riley, tests some lines of religious attack we're sure to hear a lot more of.

In her rush to belittle Barack Obama's integration of faith in his political persona, Rileydisplays a breathtaking --probably willful -- ignorance of Obama's religious practice, his stated beliefs about how faith should and should not inform politics, and of the multi-staged process of conversion he details -- without self-aggrandizement -- in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father.

Riley's premise is that Democrats can't do religion because they don't mean it. Her core charge is that Obama's membership in Wright's church was a matter of expedience:

As Mr. Obama recounts in his memoir, he went to meet Pastor Wright because he was advised that it would "help your [community organizing] if you had a church home. . . . It doesn't matter where really." So he became a member of the largest black church in the neighborhood, thereby furthering his activism and eventually getting the votes of Trinity's 8,000 congregants. Which is fine, but such an attachment is more utilitarian than religious, and sooner or later its true character will show.

"So he became a member..." What a wealth of Rovian distortion in that little conjunction of causation. Never mind that Obama chronicles the pressures, chronicles his doubts, chronicles much of Wright's doctrine and his and others' reaction, chronicles even how his own wariness of yielding to expedience delayed his commitment. Then, finally, chronicles a fully credible conversion experience that conjoins the content of the sermon that prompted it (in fact a beautiful, nonpolitical sermon of Wright's (hat tip: Andrew Sullivan) about the power of hope in people who had suffered greatly), the experience of the parishioners and the community in which Obama had immersed himself, and the associations aroused in his own mind. Obama quoted the conversion passage from Dreams in his speech on race, to extraordinary effect:

People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend's voice up into the rafters....And in that single note - hope! - I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories - of survival, and freedom, and hope - became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn't need to feel shame about...memories that all people might study and cherish - and with which we could start to rebuild.

This from a young man who had chosen a line of work that engaged him day-by-day in the experience of the people of the South Side of Chicago. I do think that that Obama's desire to belong, and to be effective in his organizing work, played a part in this conversion, which was spurred by a willing imagination. Obama acknowledges as much in Dreams, which is pervaded by awareness of the complexity of motivation generally. What person who takes religious experience seriously would cast a motivational stone at Obama?

Second, Riley offers a ridiculous comparison with that man of the spirit, George W. Bush:

If you want to speak the language of religious people, substance matters more than style. Some religious leaders hoped early on that Sen. Obama's speeches would be peppered with the biblical language he had picked up in church, as President Bush's speeches have been. But there is no sign of that so far. Sen. Obama may have the smooth cadences of a black preacher, and his public appearances include a certain kind of call and response, but his biblical references are so commonplace that it's hard to call them biblical anymore. They tend to include the Golden Rule and regular admonitions to "be our brother's keeper."

This style-substance bifurcation omits an inconvenient truth: Obama, unlike Bush, has actually belonged to and attended a church for more than 20 years. In itself, I don't regard that as anything to boast about But when you're talking about "substance" of religious experience, it's germane.

Finally, there's the question of why Obama incorporates only the most "commonplace" Biblical references. It's deliberate-- a matter of the ground rules that Obama has set out for invoking 'religious' values in a political arena. According to Obama, it's fine to be inspired by the scriptures and tenets of a particular religion. But in politics, the values absorbed in this way must be translated into universal terms and argued on their intrinsic merits. Here's how Obama puts it in The Audacity of Hope (p. 219):

What our deliberative, pluralistic democracy does demand is that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals must be subject to argument and amenable to reason. If I am opposed to abortion for religious reasons and seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or invoke God's will and expect that argument to carry the day. If I want others to listen to me, then I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

The 'universal' vocabulary of faith that Obama regards as valid in politics also describes the content of his beliefs. In Audacity, after chronicling his doubts, he has this to say about the content of his faith:

This is not to say that I'm unanchored in my faith. There are some things that I'm absolutely sure about -- the Golden Rule, the need to battle cruelty in all its forms, the value of love and charity, humility and grace.

Or, as Riley calls them, the 'commonplace' doctrines of the Golden Rule and being our brother's keeper. Dull stuff, that. Wouldn't want our politicians pushing such tired platitudes.

Leave it to Bush to inject the unctuous and intrusive preacher's vocabulary into his speeches. Obama aims to connect with Americans of all faiths and no faiths. Looks like he is succeeding.

Related Post:
Audacity of Obama: Embracing Wright and Grandma

McCain to Europe: I'm not Bush

With Democrats branding a McCain presidency as Bush's third term, McCain used the Financial Times yesterday to send a message to Europe and the world: not so.

McCain's pitch was for renewed transatlantic partnership. Its subtext was 'I'm not Bush':

At the heart of this new compact must be mutual respect and trust. We Americans recall the words of our founders in the Declaration of Independence, that we must pay “decent respect to the opinions of mankind”. Our great power does not mean we can do whatever we want whenever we want, nor should we assume we have all the wisdom and knowledge necessary to succeed.

We need to listen to the views and respect the collective will of our democratic allies. When we believe that international action is necessary, whether military, economic or diplomatic, we will try to persuade our friends that we are right. But we, in return, must also be willing to be persuaded by them.

"A decent respect for the opinions of mankind"..radical! Recall Bush's ferocious vows that the U.S. would never ask any entity's permission to act as it saw fit. Never mind that this bow to multilateralism is folded inside a proposal to bypass the unmentioned United Nations (and to a lesser extent, China and Russia) in all matters of substance:

We need to renew and revitalise our democratic solidarity. We need to strengthen our transatlantic alliance as the core of a new global compact – a League of Democracies – that can harness the great power of the more than 100 democratic nations around the world to advance our values and defend our shared interests.

The superannuation of the U.N. might make McCain's outreach to the multilateralist Europeans a bit of a stretch. Still, he does set out several marked departures from the substance and style of the Bush Administration policies, including:

Stopping torture: "We all have to live up to our own high standards of morality and international responsibility. We will fight the terrorists and at the same time defend the rights that are the foundations of our societies. We cannot torture or treat inhumanely the suspected terrorists that we have captured. We must close the detention facility at Guantá­namo and come to a common international understanding on the disposition of dangerous detainees under our control."

This does leave unexplained McCain's recent vote against subjecting the CIA to the U.S. Military code of conduct in treatment of detainees. The 'common international understanding' he calls for remains a black box. Nonetheless, the impression persists that McCain would roll back at least some of Bush's outrages against civil liberties and international law.

Going first on climate change: "We need to reinvigorate the US-European partnership on climate change where we have so many common interests at stake. The US and Europe must lead together to encourage the participation of the rest of the world, including most importantly, the developing economic powerhouses of China and India" (my emphasis)...."We need a successor to Kyoto, a cap-and-trade system that delivers the necessary environmental impact in an economically responsible manner." Gone, it would seem, is the Bush insistence that China and India must move with us before we take a step.

Eur-autonomy on defense: "We welcome European leadership to make the world a better and safer place. We look forward to France’s full reintegration into Nato. And we strongly support the EU’s efforts to build an effective European Security and Defence Policy [ESDP]. A strong EU, a strong Nato and a true strategic partnership between them is profoundly in our interest."

While support for ESDP may not be a departure from Bush Administration policy, it is a departure from the McCain of yore. In a speech at Kansas State University in March 1999, he warned:

Second, Europe's growing determination to develop a defense identity separate from NATO. Once only the product of French resentments, the idea of a separate defense identity is now even entertained in London. We must be emphatic with our allies. We encourage their efforts to assume more of the burden of their defense, but only within the institutions of NATO. Defense structures accountable to the WEU or any other organization other than the alliance will ultimately kill the alliance.

McCain is doubtless aware that upwards of 85% of polled world population supported Kerry over Bush in 2004. With much of the world intoxicated by the prospect of Obama as atonement, McCain seems to be moving fast here to prevent the global encirclement of his campaign. True, Bush prevailed in the only vote that mattered to him. But four years later, Americans are plainly more attuned to the downside of alienating the world. Good for McCain that he recognizes this changed reality.

Recall, though, Patrick Buchanan's pronouncement that McCain as President will "make Cheney look like Gandhi." Somehow, I had the feeling that Buchanan knew what he was talking about. The responsible tone McCain strikes in the FT steers clear of several past and present signature positions. Mostly hidden here is the McCain who

• Advocated risking war with North Korea in 1999, 2002 and 2006 (potentially nuclear war, the last two times) rather than conciliating Kim Jong-il's regime in any way.
  

• Relentlessly frames al Qaeda in Iraq (conveniently conflated with al Qaeada proper) as the antagonist that "will win" in Iraq if we don't stay indefinitely. His recent confusion of AQI with groups supported by Iran (the very day this op-ed appeared) underscores McCain's longstanding penchant for lumping disparate militant and radical Islamic antagonists together.
  

• Voted against a Senate bill that would have held CIA interrogators to the code of conduct adopted by the U.S. military--repudiating his longstanding argument that the U.S. undermines its own security when it engages in torture.
  

Which McCain would we see as President? An unrollable but not immovable multilateralist, or Cheney on steroids?

Related Posts:
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Breaking the Commander-in-Chief Chokehold: Obama maps a strategy

Obama has pitched two perfect games in a row. His speech on foreign policy, delivered today in Fayetteville, NC, had all the conceptual clarity and layered complexity of his speech on race, delivered yesterday.

The speech accomplishes several interlocking goals. It yokes McCain and Clinton together (with Bush) as blinkered tacticians who lacked the judgment and the strategic breadth to recognize our main enemy. It delivers a series of hammer blows that lay bare the blind alley of our current course. It explains how the debate about the past frames our decisions about what we do next. It lays out a coherent strategic vision that shifts our emphasis from Iraq to Afghanistan. Finally, it delves into the mindsets of masses throughout the world who regard the U.S. as an enemy and outlines how to turn those minds around.

In his critique of McCain and Clinton, Obama differentiates as well as equating the two. In Obama's telling, McCain was Bush's fellow ideologue, and Clinton was the fellow traveler who went along for political expediency:

History will catalog the reasons why we waged a war that didn't need to be fought, but two stand out. In 2002, when the fateful decisions about Iraq were made, there was a President for whom ideology overrode pragmatism, and there were too many politicians in Washington who spent too little time reading the intelligence reports, and too much time reading public opinion. The lesson of Iraq is that when we are making decisions about matters as grave as war, we need a policy rooted in reason and facts, not ideology and politics.

Make no mistake, for Obama it's McCain who's rooted in 'ideology' and Clinton in 'politics.' And it's because Hillaray went along, Obama argues, that politics as well as policy dictates that he will be the stronger candidate:

It is time to have a debate with John McCain about the future of our national security. And the way to win that debate is not to compete with John McCain over who has more experience in Washington, because that's a contest that he'll win. The way to win a debate with John McCain is not to talk, and act, and vote like him on national security, because then we all lose. The way to win that debate and to keep America safe is to offer a clear contrast, and that's what I will do when I am the nominee of the Democratic Party – because since before this war in Iraq began, I have made different judgments, I have a different vision, and I will offer a clean break from the failed policies and politics of the past

The promised "clear contrast" structures the speech. It starts with the initial decision to go to war, the point onPublish Post which Obama has largely based his claim to good judgment. But before dissecting that error, Obama pauses to rebut McCain's complaint that Obama just wants to talk about the past. How we view the decision to invade Iraq, he argues, determines how we conceive our strategy going forward:

...the judgment that matters most on Iraq – and on any decision to deploy military force – is the judgment made first. If you believe we are fighting the right war, then the problems we face are purely tactical in nature. That is what Senator McCain wants to discuss – tactics. What he and the Administration have failed to present is an overarching strategy: how the war in Iraq enhances our long-term security, or will in the future. That's why this Administration cannot answer the simple question posed by Senator John Warner in hearings last year: Are we safer because of this war? And that is why Senator McCain can argue – as he did last year – that we couldn't leave Iraq because violence was up, and then argue this year that we can't leave Iraq because violence is down.

That last bit of mockery recalls the oft-repeated point that Bush justified his tax cuts first by surplus, then by recession, then by recovery (and now McCain is justifying them by impending recession). This drives home his point that for Bush and McCain "ideology overrode pragmatism" and our policy was not (and will not be with McCain) "rooted in reason and facts."

The past is prologue for Obama because he wants to turn our foreign policy inside out. His core argument is that Afghanistan, not Iraq, is "the central front in the war on terror," and we can't win in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) unless we divert resources for Iraq. Hence the heart of his critique drives home with anaphoric hammer blows the ill effects of our inverted strategy, in ascending order of priority:

The war in Iraq has emboldened Iran, which poses the greatest challenge to American interests in the Middle East in a generation, continuing its nuclear program and threatening our ally, Israel. Instead of the new Middle East we were promised, Hamas runs Gaza, Hizbollah flags fly from the rooftops in Sadr City, and Iran is handing out money left and right in southern Lebanon.

The war in Iraq has emboldened North Korea, which built new nuclear weapons and even tested one before the Administration finally went against its own rhetoric, and pursued diplomacy.

The war in Iraq has emboldened the Taliban, which has rebuilt its strength since we took our eye off of Afghanistan.

Above all, the war in Iraq has emboldened al Qaeda, whose recruitment has jumped and whose leadership enjoys a safe-haven in Pakistan – a thousand miles from Iraq.

Having laid out the damage and brought us to the present, Obama reminds us of a reality that Kerry, to be fair, stated forcefully almost four years ago. Since then there's been a seismic shift in perception, so perhaps we're ready to hear this:

The central front in the war against terror is not Iraq, and it never was. What more could America's enemies ask for than an endless war where they recruit new followers and try out new tactics on a battlefield so far from their base of operations? That is why my presidency will shift our focus. Rather than fight a war that does not need to be fought, we need to start fighting the battles that need to be won on the central front of the war against al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This is the area where the 9/11 attacks were planned. This is where Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants still hide. This is where extremism poses its greatest threat. Yet in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, we have pursued flawed strategies that are too distant from the needs of the people, and too timid in pursuit of our common enemies....

It is not too late to prevail in Afghanistan. But we cannot prevail until we reduce our commitment in Iraq, which will allow us to do what I called for last August – providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our efforts in Afghanistan.

The speech is packed with detailed argument over about policy specifics -- about why Iraq is likely to do better if we withdraw troops steadily (I confess to serious doubts about that), about how to regain credibility in Pakistan, how to go after al Qaeda. But there's one more piece to the large strategic sweep, and that's a vision for winning, to lapse into a tired phrase Obama avoids, the battle for hearts and minds. Just as in the speech on race Obama sketched in a couple of paragraphs the mindset of blacks embittered by discrimination and whites embittered by affirmative action, here Obama takes a swift flyover the world's interior landscape:

What lies in the heart of a child in Pakistan matters as much as the airplanes we sell her government. What's in the head of a scientist from Russia can be as lethal as a plutonium reactor in Yongbyon. What's whispered in refugee camps in Chad can be as dangerous as a dictator's bluster. These are the neglected landscapes of the 21st century, where technology and extremism empower individuals just as they give governments the ability to repress them; where the ancient divides of region and religion wash into the swift currents of globalization.

It is hard to imagine a more, er, nuanced depiction of the challenges of asymmetrical warfare. The common theme in Obama's prescriptions for the broader contest is leading by example -- by focusing aid to countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan in large part on education and welfare; by strengthening the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and returning to Reagan's goal of "a world without nuclear weapons"; by restoring habeas and other civil liberties and banning torture; by doubling foreign assistance aimed at poverty and disease; by leading world efforts on global warming; and by investing in education at home to maintain our competitiveness.

There's broad consensus on some of these goals, but the strategic framework in which Obama places them raises the hope once again that the force of his words can build a working majority that will enable meaningful action on all or most of these fronts.

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Audacity of Obama: Embracing Wright and Grandma
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Obama's Metapolitics
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Feb. 5: Hillary's Speech was Better than Obama's
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Audacity of Obama: Embracing Wright and Grandma

Obama's speech on race and Wright will go down in history, beside Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream' speech, as a defining moment in America's conception of itself. Its organizing trope is the oxymoron in the preamble of the Constitution -- the aim to create a "more perfect" union. Obama's overarching vision is of an America that's a work in progress. He embraces the commitment to "perfecting" while portraying the instruments -- Wright, his own grandmother-- as flawed but but fundamentally to be embraced as instruments of progress.

With regard to Wright, he repudiated the words but not the man. He set Wright's anger in full historical and cultural context and explained precisely how his own thought differs:

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made, as if this country– a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

Talk about audacity -- in affirming what he gained from Wright, even as he repudiated his bitter and paranoid view of America, he paired Wright's role in his development and affections with those of his own grandmother. Without self-aggrandizement, he effectively identified himself as the locus of the unity he wants the nation to strive for:

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

That is absolut Obama. He demonstrates the strength of his commitment through criticism. He pairs Wright and has grandmother as parts of his, and our, identity to be embraced.

The speech was anything but narrowly personal; it addressed the predicaments and attitudes of the entire nation. It included compressed and accurate capsule portraits of the disabling force of racism on blacks and the anger against race-based privilege in whites being whipsawed by the eroding power of workers in the U.S. Obama acknowledged the legitimacy of anger on both sides and challenged both to move beyond. He identified forces -- larger than individuals but products of human agency too -- that he invited all of us to recognize as the true adversaries:

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.

Obama's signature mental and rhetorical move is to double back. One of his favorite grammatical structures is "just as." He consistently recognizes at least a core of legitimacy in points of view he seeks to rebut or transcend. And so, while 'black anger' and 'white resentment' are presented as forces to transcend, there's this acknowledgment:

And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

In The Audacity of Hope, Obama issues a challenge to all who would make their religious belief a basis of teaching to make it universal - to appeal to those outside the faith not on the basis of the authority of the scriptures but on the evident rightness of the values you take away. So, here, his call for national unity boils down to the simplest scriptural precepts, which Obama is at pains to convince us are universal:

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

Obama has put the ball in our court. No one in his right mind could listen to this speech and come away believing that Obama secretly harbors racial resentments or anti-American sentiments. He has delved into his own identity, and our national identity, and called on us to acknowledge that we are all wounded, we are all flawed, and all part of an unending project to form 'a more perfect union.'

Related posts:
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Obama's Metapolitics
Obama gets down to tax brass
Obama brings it back to earth in Virginia
Feb. 5: Hillary's Speech was Better than Obama's
Truth and Transformation
Obama Praises Clinton, and Buries Him
Obama: Man, those Clinton Kids are Something

The New Yorker laughs off torture

In February 2007, Jane Mayer, writing in The New Yorker, did us all a service by documenting the extent to which Fox's 24 had inured Americans to torture -- making it seem necessary and thrilling and heroic. How sad, then, that the same publication this week should publish an obscene little attempt at humor by Geroge Saunders that replays the old RosannaDanna op-ed in favor of "violins on TV" by coming out in favor of "washboarding" terrorists. That is, playing a washboard as a percussion instrument. Catch the hilarity:

I honestly don’t understand the mind-set here. Are these people terrorists or not? Or, I should say, is it possible that these people might be terrorists? Or, rather, has someone (possibly us, possibly someone other than us, such as, for example, someone they knew back in their home country, with whom they have possibly been having, say, a blood feud) alleged that they were possible terrorists? Keep in mind that we’ve never washboarded anyone who has not been, by someone or other, accused, more or less, of being a suspected, pending, or eventual possible terrorist. So why do we want to coddle these people? I say washboard the bastards 24/7, then supplement the washboarding with a circle of Peruvian wood flautists, then reinforce the flautists with a circle of acne-faced, oblivious fifteen-year-old boys with Fender guitars and distortion boxes, and let the war on terror begin.

Gilda Radner waxing enthusiastic about "violins on TV" was funny. Pretending to enthusiasm about "washboarding" terrorists is disgusting. What's the difference? First of all, RosannaDanna had no inkling what violence on TV was. Second, the evils of violence on TV, such as they are, are a matter of degree, part of the furniture of everyday life, fair game for humor. On the other hand, to mix the rhetoric of enthusiasm for torturing terrorists with depictions of ridiculous un-pleasantries is to trivialize the intense evil that we have collectively consented to. An extended joke about waterboarding in The New Yorker is perhaps stronger evidence of the coarsening of our culture than the popularity of 24.

Which candidate would be the most bellicose President?

Gideon Rachman cites an argument by Robert Kagan "that the common notion that McCain will necessarily be a more bellicose and trigger-happy president than either of the Democrats is not necessarily right." According to Kagan, leaders with established military cred (Eisenhower) are less likely than the relatively untested (Kennedy) to feel that they need to prove their toughness when a crisis arises.

That may be a reasonable generalization. But in this election, consider the individuals involved.

McCain at several points advocated cutting off all aid and trade with North Korea, admitting that such a policy would risk war, in later years with a nuclear power. It’s no accident that in a recent ad he casts himself as Churchill; for fifteen years he has cast the dictators Milosevic, Saddam and Kim Jong-il as Hitlers (and Bill Clinton as Neville Chamberlain). In the Clinton years, he also pushed for a much more aggressive stance against China, advocating that we provide Taiwan with missile defense. Speaking of missile defense, he spoke in favor of abrogating the ABM treaty in 1999. As a self-identified “Churchill,” McCain may not rest until he finds a suitable “Hitler” to oppose.

Hillary Clinton may indeed fit the profile of an unproven leader anxious to prove her “toughness.” Fear of appearing weak appears to have motivated her vote in favor of the resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq, and probably also her vote in favor of the recent resolution deeming the Iran Guard a terrorist group.

Obama may indeed make serious mistakes borne of inexperience if elected. He is not the kind of personality, however, that acts out of a need to be perceived as tough. He recognizes the political necessity of showing that he can’t be pushed around, but his demeanor and approach to decision-making are the opposite of bluster. Just look at his wry, weary, measured reprimands of both Clintons when their tactics turn Rovian.

James Carville's diversion

James Carville's call in today's FT for us all to lighten up and accept hardball politics is a tad disingenuous. Claiming oversensitivity in the press and by the campaigns to "mildly offensive" comments, he provides cover for Clinton to let 'er rip:

Politics is a messy business, but campaigning prepares you for governing. It prepares you to get hit, stand strong and, if necessary, hit back. So our candidates need to buck up, toughen up and recognise that time spent whining and sniping is time not spent addressing the real concerns of the people.

By carping about oversensitivity to a few over-the-top remarks (and cleverly opening with a defense of the rival camp's eminently defensible Samantha Powers), Carville diverts attention from what's truly objectionable about Hillary Clinton's campaign: she is deliberately undercutting the viability of her own party's frontrunner in the general election. By absurdly claiming that she and John McCain "cross the commander-in-chief threshold" while Obama does not; by qualifying her denial that Obama is a Muslim; by deploying surrogates to state baldly that Obama can't win the general election and to insinuate that he appeals narrowly to black voters, she is well on the way to tearing the Democratic party apart.

Carville's cheerful (and tired) memories of his wife insulting the other party's candidate, and of more distant egregious insults in the political arena, are irrelevant. Clinton is violating Ronald Reagan's 11th Commandment: thou shalt not speak ill of fellow [party members]. For that
she deserves to be driven into the political wilderness.

The post-racial president?

If I can give over a moment to dumbstruck admiration, here's Obama on race as a campaign issue:

Obama said some voters might favor or disfavor him because he is black, just as some might favor or disfavor Clinton because she is female.

However, he said, "the overwhelming majority of Americans are going to make these decisions based on who they think will be the best president. I have absolute confidence that if I'm doing my job, if I'm delivering my message, then there are very few voters out there that I can't win."

"If I'm not winning them over," he said, "then it's my fault."

If I'm not winning them over then it's my fault. Is there a more pitch-perfect way to diffuse the question of whether his appeal is too narrow? He has put the ball back in the voter's court and challenged us to be as mature, as post-racial, as detached from the passions of identity politics as he is proving to be. He is challenging us to be better than we are. And he is demonstrating a trust in the electorate on which he has staked his campaign.


Related posts:
Obama spanks the Clinton Kids again
Changing "The Rules" on Clinton
Audacity of Respect: What Obama Owes to Reagan II
Truth and Transformation
Obama: Man, those Clinton Kids are Something

No way to pick a candidate

I am learning more than I ever wanted to know about the delegate selection process. States that go through four rounds of caucuses before naming delegates to the national convention, with delegates not legally bound to a candidate at any stage. Delegates awarded by Congressional district, with districts that have an even number of delegates almost guaranteed to split evenly. Districts awarded disproportionate numbers of delegates according to how they voted last election (or is that states? or both?). States getting bonus delegates for holding their primaries late. Superdelegates designed as a check to too much democracy.

This whole process is insane. In a hundred years, it will look as absurd as the 'rotten boroughs' of 19th century England, or tax farming in prerevolutionary France. Not to mention our own Electoral College....

What if we started from scratch? Suppose, gasp, nominations were one-citizen-one-vote affairs, with the nomination determined by an absolute popular vote total. Every voter could choose one party's primary in which to vote. If we wanted to drag out the nomination process, primaries could be held in four waves at equal intervals, with each bloc's position rotating on a four-election cycle.

I gather that the current system is designed to incent state and local party organizations to spur activism, get out their vote, etc. Maybe if I were more involved in politics I would recognize the rationale, the utility, even the necessity of this kind of motivation. But it seems to me that the downside - chaos, nonrepresentative democracy, fights over delegates rather than the votes that are supposed to determine the delegates -- outweighs the benefits.

When it comes to Constitutional matters, change should be slow, according to the principle expressed in the Declaration of Independence: "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." But party rules are a different matter. The system is so dysfunctional that bold experimentation would seem to be in order.

Debunked! Obama spanks the Clinton Kids again

That magnificent clip circulating in which Obama punctures the Clintons doublespeak that he is "unready to be commander in chief/a dream candidate for vice president" left off the best part, the finale:

I am not running for Vice President. I do not believe Senator Clinton is about change because in fact this kind of gamesmanship, talking about me as Vice President, but he maybe he’s not ready for Commander in Chief. That is exactly the kind of double speak, double talk that Washington is very good at. That people who spend a lot of time in Washington have a lot of experience at, but is not gonna solve the problems of the country.

Here Obama builds on the retaliatory strategy he used to shut the Clintons up the last time they got down-and-dirty, in the run-up to the South Carolina primary. Back then, he argued that when the Clintons distort the truth with Rovian attacks, they undercut voter trust and so cannot build the "working majority" that Bill failed to build during his presidency. Here's how he framed the Clintons' truthiness problems in the January 22 CNN debate:

Now, this, I think, is one of the things that's happened during the course of this campaign, that there's a set of assertions made by Senator Clinton, as well as her husband, that are not factually accurate. And I think that part of what the people are looking for right now is somebody who's going to solve problems and not resort to the same typical politics that we've seen in Washington...the larger reason that I think this debate is important is because we do have to trust our leaders and what they say. That is important, because if we can't, then we're not going to be able to mobilize the American people behind bringing about changes in health care reform, bringing about changes in how we're going to put people back to work, changing our trade laws. And consistency matters. Truthfulness during campaigns makes a difference.

That approach won Obama 5-6 weeks attack-free weeks, during which he became the frontrunner.

Obama's back to saying that the Clintons are part of the problem, and their attacks are Exhibit A. But now the diagnosis has a new layer of depth and authority. He's not just saying that the Clintons distort. He's saying (with weary there-they-go-again humor) that they play mind games:

See I was trying to explain to somebody a while back, the okidoke. You all know the okidoke. When somebody is trying to bamboozle you, when they are trying to hoodwink you.

And most damningly of all, he ties the Clinton mode of political attack to Hillary's policymaking:

And I believe that I have shown better judgment than Senator Clinton. I believe I offer a clean break from the policies of George Bush. Because Senator Clinton went along with George Bush on the war in Iraq. Senator Clinton went along with George Bush on her willingness to try to saber rattle when it came to Iran. She has gone along with many of the conventional ways of thinking about foreign policy that have gotten us into trouble. That is what I intend to change when I am President of the United States.

"Conventional ways of thinking" are of a piece with conventional ways of campaigning. Broken politics, which relies on distortion and deception, leads to broken policy. Political style shapes judgment. When you'll "say anything to get elected," as Obama in his fiercest attack mode so far has accused Clinton, you will also take positions calculated to benefit you politically.

Obama has stopped short of saying about Hillary what John McCain never tired of saying about Bill, that " the President, in his poll driven approach to his every responsibility, fails to distinguish the office he holds from himself" (Floor Statement on Kosovo Resolution, May 1999). But that's the subtext here. The Clintons are using "the kind of double speak, double talk that Washington is very good at." And Hillary has "gone along with many of the conventional ways of thinking about foreign policy that have gotten us into trouble."

A few days ago (March 7), at Obama's darkest moment in the campaign so far, David Brooks spoke for many when he set up what I regard as a false choice for Obama: get down in the dirt with Clinton, or fold up like Kerry before the swiftboat attacks. He characterized the Obama campaign as thinking they could square a circle: "they can go on the attack, but in the right way. They can be tough and keep their virginity, too."

I wrote in response: "'Virginity' is a snidely charged way of casting what he stands to lose. I believe that he will highlight Clinton's weaknesses without losing his integrity. " Three days later, he's already done it.

Related posts:
Changing "The Rules" on Clinton
Audacity of Respect: What Obama Owes to Reagan II
Truth and Transformation
Obama: Man, those Klinton Kids are Something
The Lying Clinton Meme

McCain: (Bill) Clinton fails commander-in-chief test

Memo to Obama: Since Hillary has grown so fond of repeating that John McCain "crosses the commander-in-chief threshold," why not ask her whether she agrees with McCain's repeated portrayals of her husband as unfit to be commander-in-chief? What does McCain's judgment of Bill Clinton suggest about the quality of her 'experience' by her husband's side?

If there's one consistent element in McCain's foreign policy pronouncements from the mid-nineties to the present (besides a reflex to respond to perceived threats with force or the threat of force), it's contempt for Bill Clinton's conduct of foreign policy. In McCain's telling, every crisis has the same cast of characters: tin-pot dictator as Hitler, and Bill Clinton as Neville Chamberlain with a drawl.

Throughout Clinton's presidency and well into Bush's, McCain went out of his way not just to criticize Clinton's policies but to accuse him of the most humiliating traits that could be ascribed to a commander in chief: self-doubt, vacillation, and valuing political expediency above the national interest.

The broad theme of McCain's assessments of Bill Clinton's conduct of foreign policy is nicely captured in an 6/3/96 op-ed he published in support of Bob Dole's candidacy in the LA Times:

But in this campaign's foreign policy debates, I hope the media recognize the gross disservice they will do if they fail to critically examine the Clinton foreign policy, which is broadly dismissed overseas for its incoherence, contradictions and perpetual if directionless motion. Those flaws are a direct consequence of the president's style of foreign policy leadership, which less often locates the national interest in the security imperatives of a superpower than it does in Clinton's reelection prospects.

In a foreign policy lecture at Kansas State University on March 15, 1999, McCain accused the Clinton Administration of "two pronounced flaws: strategic incoherence and self-doubt" - the former a "primary cause" of the more rhetorically satisfying latter:

The second fault I find with the administration, it's [sic] self-doubt, is obviously related and a primary cause of its strategic incoherence. Often evident in administration policies is a mystifying uncertainty about how to act in a world where we are the only superpower. When the administration stands mute and undecided about where and how they want to lead the world, they exhibit, to friend and foe alike, an identity crisis, an image of America an existential crisis, who are we and why are we here?
[snip]
The most prevalent symptoms of the administration's self-doubt have been its spasmodic, vacillating and reactive approaches to world problems, and a tendency to put off resolution of the most difficult problems, often substituting photo op diplomacy for meaningful action....In Iraq, of course, these symptoms have been on full display.

McCain in this speech saved his most damaging personal allegation for a now-forgotten 'crisis,' U.S. transfer of technology to China:

In addition to their strangely relaxed attitude toward what looks to be an extraordinarily damaging espionage incident, they have tolerated, indeed, insisted upon extremely liberal licensing practices for transferring dual use technology to China. It is a sad sign of the times, that the best face that can be put on these lapses in judgment is that they were mistakenly committed for the sake of a stable bilateral relationship,

Far more distressing is the charge that they are, at least in part, a consequence of the President placing his own re-election before the supreme national interest. Sadly, that charge grows more credible every day. And if it is proven beyond a reasonable doubt, it will bring more of history's shame upon the President than his personal failings will, indeed, greater shame than any President has ever suffered.

"Greater shame than any President has ever suffered"? Have fun in the general, Hillary.

A couple of months later, while U.S. forces were bombing Serbia to drive the Serbs out of Kosovo, McCain spoke in favor his own resolution authorizing the President to use any means necessary to end the Serbian occupation. The resolution was a finger in Clinton's eye, because the President had preemptively ruled out the use of ground forces and had not asked for the authority McCain sought to give him. McCain cast his "support' as a means to uphold the powers of the Presidency notwithstanding the unworthiness of the current occupant - and once again charged Clinton with placing political expediency before the national interest:

Although I can speak only for myself, I believe the sponsors of this resolution offered it to encourage the President to do what almost every experienced statesmen has said he should do - prepare for the use of ground troops in Kosovo if they are necessary to achieve victory. Regrettably, the President would rather not be encouraged. But his irresponsibility does not excuse Congress'. I believe it is now imperative that we pass this resolution to distinguish the powers of the Presidency from the muddled claim made upon them by the House of Representatives. .....

I regret to say that I have on more than one occasion suspected, as I suspect today, that the President and some of us among the loyal opposition suffer from the same failing. It seems to me that the President, in his poll driven approach to his every responsibility, fails to distinguish the office he holds from himself. And some of us in Congress are so distrustful of the President that we feel obliged to damage the office in order to restrain the current occupant. Both sides have lost the ability to tell the office from the man.

Publicly and repeatedly ruling out ground troops may be smart politics according to the President's pollster, but it is inexcusably irresponsible leadership. In his determination to put politics over national security, the President even acquiesced to the other body's attempt to deprive him of his office's authority. He sent a letter promising that he would seek Congress' permission to introduce ground troops in the unlikely event he ever discovers the will to use them.

In October 2002, McCain used his contempt for Bill Clinton not only to spur George Bush on to invade Iraq, but to go to the brink of war with North Korea after U.S. intelligence reported evidence that the North Koreans had been seeking the means to enrich uranium in apparent violation of the "Agreed Framework" negotiated by Clinton in 1994 to halt the North Koreans' pursuit of nuclear weapons. McCain began a Washington Post op ed with best-worn bludgeon in any hawk's rhetorical arsenal, casting Clinton as you-know-who and implicitly warning Bush not to follow in his spineless predecessor's slippered footsteps:

I believe it is peace for our time . . .
Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.
-- British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Sept. 30, 1938

As we contemplate preemptive action to prevent Saddam Hussein from acquiring the world's worst weapons, it's worth understanding how the temptation to go home and get a nice quiet sleep led directly to the inevitable crisis we now face on the Korean peninsula -- where North Korea's acknowledgment of a secret nuclear weapons program demonstrates the perils of entrusting American security to dangerously flawed agreements with rogue regimes.

This crisis first came to a head in 1994 with North Korea's threat to weaponize plutonium from its Yongbyon nuclear facility. After months of American concessions, the Clinton administration agreed to build North Korea two civilian nuclear reactors and provide it with a half-million tons of oil annually until the reactors were built. Totalitarian North Korea became the largest recipient of American assistance in Asia as we propped up a regime that might otherwise have collapsed.

Serious people can differ honorably over the morality of feeding and funding a regime that starves, oppresses, tortures and kills its own people while threatening to destroy its southern neighbor, in order to prevent that regime from developing nuclear weapons. But there is scant moral refuge for those accommodationists who believe even today that we can concede our way out of this crisis. A decade of appeasement and assistance to one of the world's worst regimes provided it the time and the means to develop weapons that now threaten America and our friends....

The Clinton administration's lack of credibility in dealing with North Korea emboldened the regime to defy America. The Bush administration's credible threat of force against Iraq is rallying American and international opinion in our favor, and has put Baghdad on notice. Pyongyang is watching.

Arguably, most of the Clinton actions that McCain made a career of lambasting had relatively good outcomes. The Agreed Framework did mostly freeze North Korea's pursuit of nuclear weapons until the Bush Administration, overreacting to evidence that Pyongyang had taken some steps toward preparing to enrich uranium, cut off fuel oil shipments and broke off negotiations. The bombing of Iraqi military installations in 1998 effectively destroyed what was left of Iraq's military capability. The air war against Serbia forced Milosevic to withdraw from Kosovo and ultimately led to his being voted out of office and tried as a war criminal before the World Court. All the stranger, then, that Hillary would laud Bill's most relentless foreign policy critic as having "crossed the commander-in-chief threshold."

Plainly, Hillary wants at McCain. Against him, she could parry like it's 1999 -- and perhaps actually win a debate about the conduct of policy -- domestic and foreign -- in the 1990s. But still her flattery of McCain amounts to an implicit repudiation of her husband's international legacy.

Changing "The Rules" on Clinton

David Brooks, with his inimitable instinct for oversimplification, has posed a false choice for Barack Obama: get into a "knife fight" with Clinton or refuse to counterattack now that it seems that "Clinton attacked him, and the attacks worked." Brooks mocks the Obama campaign's purported belief that "they can go on the attack, but in the right way. They can be tough and keep their virginity, too."

The last time things got nasty, before South Carolina, Obama shut down the Clinton attack machine for two months by very coolly pointing out that the Clinton's well-known truthiness problems undercut their credibility and hence Hillary's chance to build the "working majority" that Bill Clinton failed to build. In other words, he offered an essentially accurate critique of her Rovian attacks and integrated that critique into his pitch to reform our political process. I think he'll find a way to do that again -- by challenging the Clintons to the kind of disclosure (tax records, donations to the Clinton Library and Foundation, etc.) that they cannot withstand, and by continuing to debunk Hillary's ridiculous claims to substantive foreign policy experience.

It is not true, as Brooks asserts, that Obama"has never explained how this new politics would actually produce bread-and-butter benefits to people in places like Youngstown and Altoona." Obama has been explicit and precise on this point. He will get those "bread-and-butter-benefits" enacted by appealing to independents and Republicans as well as to Democrats; he will take the poison out of the political process by building a "working majority" that will ease partisanship and thus empower him to move to the substantive process reform of curbing lobbyist power. The appeal beyond the party base is grounded in part on the 'demonstration effect' of his clean campaign; in part on his eloquent appeal to broad American values; and in part on his channeling of Reagan, which is built on a genuine respect for the last "transformative" president -- a respect that conservatives can sense. At the same time, the promise of a new politics is wrapped around a frankly liberal, untriangulated policy platform that, if passed, will counter the tides of income inequality and risk transfer from the community to the individual.

Back in January, Obama found a way to shut down the Clinton attack machine without getting into the gutter. He bought himself two months, during which time he became the frontrunner. Now that desperation has led Hillary to a more deeply malicious and misleading set of attacks, I believe he'll find a way to stymie her once again. "Virginity" is a snidely charged way of casting what he stands to lose. I believe that he will highlight Clinton's weaknesses without losing his integrity.

Related posts:
Audacity of Respect: What Obama Owes to Reagan II
Truth and Transformation
Obama: Man, those Klinton Kids are Something
The Lying Clinton Meme

Audacity of Respect: What Obama Owes to Reagan II

The idea is circulating that conservatives, largely at Rush Limbaugh's instigation, voted in significant numbers for Hillary and helped put her over the top in Texas.

Ironically -- or maybe not -- Obama has been cast many times as the liberal Reagan. Conservatives thinking this way might well try to block his nomination -- who wants to be cast into the wilderness for forty years? On the other hand, if conservatives think about liberalism the way Obama thinks about Reagan's conservatism, they might conclude that he'd be good for the country and even for their party.

How exactly has Obama channeled Reagan? Christopher Caldwell's excellent analysis of What Obama Owes to Reagan sent me back to The Audacity of Hope, in which Caldwell sees "an interest in Reagan that borders on fascination." He's right. Obama not only admires Reagan's political skills, his ability to "change the trajectory" of American politics as he put it in his notorious interview with The Reno Gazette-Journal in January. He also acknowledges the legitimacy of the course-change that Reagan drove and pays tribute to substantial accomplishments.

Obama's homage to some of Reagan's core principles bespeaks his faith in the American electorate. Implicitly, he acknowledges that Americans were right to give Reagan his mandate:

Reagan spoke to America's longing for order, our need to believe that we are not simply subject to blind, impersonal forces, but that we can shape our individual and collective destinies, so long as we rediscover the traditional virtues of hard work, patriotism, person responsibility, optimism, and faith.

That Reagan's message found such a receptive audience spoke not only to his skills as a communicator; it also spoke to the failures of liberal government, during a period of economic stagnation, to give middle-class voters any sense that it was fighting for them. For the fact was that government at every level had become too cavalier about spending taxpayer money. Too often, bureaucracies were oblivious to the cost of their mandates. A lot of liberal rhetoric did seem to value rights and entitlements over duties and responsibilities. Reagan may have exaggerated the sins of the welfare state, and certainly liberals were right to complain that his domestic policies tilted heavily toward economic elites, with corporate raiders making tidy profits throughout the eighties while unions were busted and the income for the average working stiff flatlined.

Nevertheless, by promising to side with those who worked hard, obeyed the law, cared for their families, and loved their country, Reagan offered Americans a sense of a common purpose that liberals seemed no longer able to muster. And the more his critics carped, the more those critics played into the role he'd written for them--a band of out-of-touch, tax-and-spend, blame-America-first, politically correct elites (Audacity of Hope, 31-32).

Obama treads a delicate line in these tributes. Always, he acknowledges a degree of legitimacy in Reagan's critique and course correction; usually, too, he paints the rhetoric and the policies as exaggerated, deceptively oversimplified, damaging on many fronts. "Fascination" is a good way to describe these ambivalent assessments. But whatever his feelings about Reagan, his portrayal of the liberalism to which Reagan was reacting is unsparing:

In his rhetoric, Reagan tended to exaggerate the degree to which the welfare state had grown over the previous twenty five years. At its peak, the federal budget as a total share of the U.S. economy remained far below the comparable figures in Western Europe, even when you factored in the enormous U.S. defense budget. Still, the conservative revolution that Reagan helped usher in gained traction because Reagan's central insight--that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic, with Democratic policy makers more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than with growing the pie--contained a good deal of truth. Just as too many corporate managers, shielded from competition, had stopped delivering value, too many government bureaucracies had stopped asking whether their shareholders (the American taxpayer) and their consumers (the users of government services) were getting their money's worth (Audacity, 156-157).

Arguably, Obama himself is proof that Reagan's chastening of liberal orthodoxy was a net positive for American governance. Obama is running on an unabashedly liberal platform, seeking a "working majority" to accomplish universal healthcare, strong wealth redistribution through the tax code, and ambitious public investment in infrastructure and energy technology. But he filters these goals through a consciousness, reflected in his rhetoric, that liberalism must hold itself to a diet; government must hold itself accountable -- and hold the beneficiaries of its various programs accountable as well.

This awareness, I think, underpins conservatives' warm response to Obama. He is no triangulator. He makes no bones about wanting to move the American center to the left, rather than move the left to the center. His goals are liberal -- to redistribute wealth back toward the center and bottom, and to redistribute risk back toward the community. But he recognizes the need to move in these directions without killing the golden goose. This awareness makes Obama credible when he presents his set of tax cuts and subsidies for the working poor as a matter of restoring "balance" and "fairness" after thirty years of widening income inequality.

Obama's liberalism is neo-, not in the sense of being cramped or defensive, but in its respect for the limits of government action, for the need to maintain incentives for generating wealth, and in its willingness to place responsibility on the individual. When he talks about working with the opposition, refraining from demonizing, acknowledging that they may have a point or two, it's plain that he means it. He has internalized such respect as a habit of mind.

Related Posts:
Reagan-Clinton in '08
Obama's Metapolitics
Truth and Transformation
Obama Praises Clinton, and Buries Him
More on Rhetoric:
Obama gets down to tax brass
Obama brings it back to earth in Virginia
Feb. 5: Hillary's Speech was Better than Obama's
Obama: Man, those Klinton Kids are Something

McCain's economic bridge to nowhere

The Wall Street Journal's Bob Davis, reporting on an interview with John McCain focused on his economic platform, does a nice job highlighting multiple inconsistencies -- not to say an overall incoherence -- without any explicit diss. Repeatedly, Davis presents McCain's claims against an understated backdrop of inconvenient truths.

Among the highlighted lacunae:

Social security reform: "the Arizona senator says he still backs a system of private retirement accounts that President Bush pushed unsuccessfully, and disowned details of a Social Security proposal on his campaign Web site." That is, the website calls for a plan similar to Hillary Clinton's, creating personal investment "supplementing" social security, without touching the structure of the existing program. That's a switch from his 2000 campaign, when McCain called for diverting a portion of social security taxes to fund private accounts, as Bush tried to do in 2005. McCain's chief economic aide, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, chalks up the change to the runup of the deficit in the Bush years.

But, Davis reports, "asked about the apparent change in position in the interview, Sen. McCain said he hadn't made one. 'I'm totally in favor of personal savings accounts," he says. When reminded that his Web site says something different, he says he will change the Web site. (As of Sunday night, he hadn't.) ' As part of Social Security reform, I believe that private savings accounts are a part of it -- along the lines that President Bush proposed."

This repudiation highlights the article's subtext: that McCain claims to be a deficit hawk but avoids any serious attempt to make his numbers add up - that is, to deal with the deficit. Which brings us to self-repudiation #2:

Bush tax cuts and more: As is well known, McCain voted against Bush's massive tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 but now opposes letting them expire. Now he wants to pile on with a cut in the corporate tax rate from 35% to 25% at a cost of $100 billion per year, and elimination of the Alternative Minimum Tax, at a cost unspecified in the Journal article but estimated by the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center at least $800 billion over the next decade (Aviva Aron Dine, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities). "In all," Davis reports, "his tax-cutting proposals could cost about $400 billion a year, according to estimates of the impact of different tax cuts by CBO and the McCain campaign. The cost will make it difficult for him to achieve his goal of balancing the budget by the end of his first term."

Offsetting savings? Davis makes it clear that they're pitifully inadequate:

To show he can control spending, Sen. McCain cites his long record as a spending hawk, who battles sweetheart deals between the Pentagon and defense contractors, as well as projects that lawmakers of both parties cram into appropriations bills -- "earmarks," in budget lingo.

Congressional earmarks total $18 billion a year, according to the Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington, D.C., research group -- and each has a member of Congress who will ferociously fight to keep that spending going. Mr. Holtz-Eakin, the McCain adviser, says that earmarks actually cost $60 billion a year, counting programs that started in earlier years and get funded year after year.

Another source of spending cuts eyed by the McCain campaign is a White House hit list of underperforming or redundant programs. But again, the numbers are relatively small -- $18 billion annually -- compared to the cost of Sen. McCain's tax plans, and the programs include housing loans, education grants, and water projects popular with Congress.

The accompanying interview highlights the absurdity. Asked by Davis, "are you worried your numbers don't add up?", McCain responds:

If you just look at two spending bills that the president signed into law, there's $35 billion just in those two bills [that could be cut]. I saved the taxpayers over $6 billion on one Air Force tanker deal. I'm not worried about being able to find savings in government.

I love the use of brackets above - $35 billion [that could be cut] -- if the President got every cut he claimed to want in two bills totaling several hundred billions in spending. That's in a budget with a current deficit of over $400 billion. Tack McCain's $400 billion in new tax cuts onto that, and then take a guess at the cost of maintaining over 100,000 troops in Iraq indefinitely.

Slow Stimulus: To get the economy going, Davis emphasizes that McCain "said he might have 'a couple of fireside chats with the American people.'" Beyond that, nothing -- except extending the Bush tax cuts and adding his own:

While other candidates were scrambling in January to put together stimulus plans to boost flagging consumer spending, he proposed long-term tax cuts which could take years to come into law. "In the shorter term, if you somehow told American businesses and families, 'Look, you're not going to experience a tax increase in 2010,' I think that's a pretty good short-term measure," he says.

The Bush tax cuts have already been justified, first by the surplus of 2000, then by the recession of 2001, then by the recovery of 2003-07. Now McCain is tacking on the anticipated recession of 2008. Here we go again: massive tax cuts are the cure for every economic slowdown, and the cause of all economic growth.

Pat Buchanan recently said that McCain running our foreign policy "could make Cheney look like Gandhi." With this deadpan presentation, Bob Davis makes it clear that McCain running the economy could make Bush look like Alexander Hamilton.

Related posts:
Obama and Clinton share a pander on trade
Obama channels Edwards in Janesville

Obama and Clinton share a pander on trade

Obama and Clinton appear to be offering parallel panders to working class voters in their promises to change the tax code to discourage job offshoring. Here are their promises:

Obama in Janesville WI , Feb. 13:

I'll pass the Patriot Employer Act that I've been fighting for ever since I ran for the Senate - we will end the tax breaks for companies who ship our jobs overseas, and we will give those breaks to companies who create good jobs with decent wages right here in America.

Clinton, Youngstown OH, Feb. 19:

Let's get real about keeping jobs right here in Ohio and America where they belong. As president, I will send a loud and clear message to any company shipping jobs overseas. If you take jobs away from the families of Youngstown, you'll pay a price because when I am president, you will never again be able to use our tax dollars to help outsource our jobs.

I can find no specifics on either the Obama or Clinton websites about how the candidates would end tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas. Obama's Patriot Employer Act works the other end of the equation, providing a tax credit equal to 1% of taxable income to companies that, among other things, "invest in American jobs, by maintaining or increasing the number of full-time workers in America relative to the number of full-time workers outside of America AND by maintaining corporate headquarters in America if the company has ever been headquartered in America" (Obama press release, Aug 2 '07). That's an incentive for desired behavior without reference to closing any currently existing tax breaks for "companies who ship our jobs overseas."

According to Factcheck.org, both candidates are targeting "a feature of the U.S. tax code that allows domestic companies to defer taxes on 'unrepatriated income.' In other words, revenue that companies earn through their overseas subsidiaries goes untaxed by the IRS as long as it stays off the company’s U.S. books. "

Does this mean that both candidates would revive something like John Kerry's 2004 proposal to limit the "deferral" of unrepatriated income described above? The Kerry proposal would have only allowed "deferral" when the profits are earned by producing and selling in the country where the subsidiary is based. In return, Kerry would have cut the US corporate tax rate from 35% to 33.25% -- an important aid to development, since US corporate taxes are higher than those of most competitors, including developed as well as undeveloped countries.

According to Factcheck.org, " economists, including left-leaning ones, do not agree that eliminating this provision will bring an end to off-shoring." For one thing, tax policy only marginally affects decisions about where to locate production. To the extent that tax incentives do operate, Gary Clyde Clyde Hufbauer and Paul Grieco of the nonpartisan Peterson Institute argued in depth in an April 2004 paper that the incentives in Kerry's plan were skewed and that the tax restructuring would not check job outsourcing. Here's the gist of their critique:

Relocating production in the United States...is unlikely to be the central response. Instead, MNCs [multinational corporations] would explore alternative ways to avoid the higher US tax burden and might well sell their operations abroad to foreign-based MNCs...under Kerry's plan, moreover, foreign-based MNCs would gain further tax advantages over US companies in worldwide markets--giving them a leg up in future expansion.

Among the likely workarounds to the new tax law, Hufbauer and Grieco predicted:

...they might sell their entire output to foreign-owned wholesale firms in the host country. Those firms would then handle the distribution to other countries, including the United States....[a foreign subsidiary, or CFC ] might price its out-of-country sales to related firms at bargain basement prices and claim the bulk of its earnings was derived from in-country sales. If all other avenues were closed off, then 'corporate inversion' would represent the nuclear option. By moving corporate headquarters overseas, former US parent firms could entirely escape the US tax net for their non-US operations...[or] the MNC might simply sell a majority of its CFC shares to a foreign partner. Once non-US parties own 51 percent of the foreign subsidiary, it ceases to be a CFC...and thus escapes the US tax net.

To the extent that Kerry's plan did succeed in driving production back to the U.S., it would place US multinationals at a disadvantage:

US MNCs...account for only one-fourth of world foreign direct investment in countries other than the United States. Plenty of competitors are willing and able to take their place if, for tax reasons, US-based MNCs are no longer able to competitively produce goods and services abroad for sale in the United States or third-country markets.

Interestingly, Obama's website includes a throwaway line that points toward a remedy that Hufbauer and Grieco recommend in place of Kerry's plan -- though the odds of getting it done are probably vanishingly small. Obama's Plan to Strengthen the Economy includes this promise:

Obama will also pressure the World Trade Organization to enforce trade agreements and stop countries from continuing unfair government subsidies to foreign exporters and nontariff barriers on U.S. exports.

That promise appears to be addressed at an imbalance in WTO rules that, according to Hufbauer and Grieco, severely disadvantage U.S. exports relative to foreign companies selling goods in the U.S. It's this:

Under current WTO rules, US exporters must pay on importing nations' value added tax (VAT), but foreign exporters selling the US market are exempted from their home-country VAT. WTO rules do not permit the United States to levy its corporate tax on exports. Correcting this archaic distinction between indirect and direct taxes....would significantly promote US production and jobs.

Good luck, though, getting a major rules change favorable to the US through the WTO.

Related post:
Obama gets down to tax brass

Caldwell captures core Clinton-Obama contrast

Christopher Caldwell, honing in on What Obama owes to Reagan, has a dead-on diagnosis of the difference in approach to politics between Clinton and Obama. He hones in on a paradox: Clinton's positions are more centrist, but Obama captures more independents and Republicans. "Their biggest difference," Caldwell writes,

is in their attitude towards the US electorate. Voters sense that that is everything. They are right. The non-ideological differences between Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton are vast, possibly greater than those between either of them and the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain...

Mrs Clinton views voters as either committed friends or foes. There are good people on one side. On the other, depending on the rhetorical mood she is in, is "the vast rightwing conspiracy" or "the special interests"...

Mr Obama views the electorate's affections and affiliations as changeable - at least at certain pivotal times. He believes independents and Republicans will rally to his cause, and many have done so.

Caldwell rightly points out that Obama's bid to coopt the center and build a "working majority" owes much to Reagan: "To read Mr Obama's political autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, is to see an interest in Reagan that borders on fascination. 'I understood his appeal,' Mr Obama writes." This usefully reminds us that Obama's notorious hat-tip to Reagan in an interview with the The Reno Gazette-Journal in January did not come out of a void. Obama clearly has internalized what Reagan accomplished politically and how he accomplished it:

I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.

Caldwell points out that Obama, like Reagan, is trying to move the center rather than move to the center:

Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in 1980 by attracting disaffected Democrats in millions. They did not jump to Reagan because Mr Carter was a particularly leftwing Democrat. Nor did Reagan appeal by watering his positions down into centrist mush. He ran as an unapologetic conservative, just as Mr Obama has run as an unapologetic man of the left. But the revolutionary coalition that Reagan formed was less ideological than he was. Reagan won because he solicited the whole nation's support at a time when lesser politicians mistook their parties' battles for the country's.

Obama is far from alone in sensing that the time is ripe now to move the center left. As David Frum memorably put it in the FT, "If they eat right, exercise and wear seatbelts, today's 20-somethings will be voting against George W. Bush deep into the 2060s." That's why Obama's invocation of "the fierce urgency of now" is no New Age mush (contra Caldwell's FT Comment cohort Gideon Rachman), but rather a very specific argument that the electorate is ready to be moved left if the case is made frankly, forcefully, and without demonizing the opposition.

One fascinating aspect of this election is the right's soft spot for Obama. Many Reagan Revolution alumni recognize the mirror image and respect what Obama is trying to accomplish. The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes, writing on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page of all places, traced the parallels earlier this week, noting that "Throughout his campaign, Reagan fought off charges that his candidacy was built more on optimism than policies," and that Obama faces the same charge, though both laid out clear and far-from-centrist agendas.

Like Reagan, Obama casts his noncentrist agenda as a corrective. That's the opportunity of the moment. Just as Obama acknowledges that in 1980 Americans felt that government had grown bloated, so now even many conservatives are hung over by the results of triple-branch Republican rule. That leaves an opening for Obama to cast his tax and spending policies as a matter of restoring "balance" and "fairness," as he did while laying out his economic agenda in Janesville, Wisconsin:

when opportunity is uneven or unequal - it is our responsibility to restore balance, and fairness, and keep that promise alive for the next generation. That is the responsibility we face right now, and that is the responsibility I intend to meet as President of the United States.

More broadly, in Lorain, Ohio on Feb. 24, he cast excessive income inequality as unamerican, and unity behind an agenda of strengthening unions, taxing outsourcing and greenhouse gas emissions, and spending on infrastructure and alternative energy as fidelity to democracy:

But in the end, enacting this agenda won't just require an investment. It will require a new spirit of cooperation, innovation, and shared sacrifice. We'll have to remind ourselves that we rise and fall as one nation; that a country in which only a few prosper is antithetical to our ideals and our democracy; and that those of us who have benefited greatly from the blessings of this country have a solemn obligation to open the doors of opportunity, not just for our children, but to all of America's children. That's the kind of vision I have for this country, and that's the kind of vision I hope to make real as President of the United States.

Every candidate casts his or her policies as a fulfillment of American ideals. But to make the case that a sharp course correction left or right is a restoration of core values takes unusual political skill. So far, Obama seems to be making the case effectively, and building the "working majority" he frankly asks for.

Related posts:
Obama gets down to tax brass
Obama brings it back to earth in Virginia
Feb. 5: Hillary's Speech was Better than Obama's
Obama's Metapolitics
Obama: Man, those Klinton Kids are Something
Obama Praises Clinton, and Buries Him