Category Archives: United States of America

Iowa Speeches II

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Thank Fortuna someone else out there reacted to the Iowa speeches the way that I did. Here’s Hendrik Hertzberg writing for The New Yorker (“A Brave, Lonely Dissent,” 5 January 2008):

I thought that, of the three main Democratic candidates Thursday evening, Hillary Clinton gave the best speech. It was gracious, generous, properly subdued, and surprisingly selfless. Her theme was the overarching imperative that the next President be a Democrat, the implication being that this was more important than that the next President be her (or Obama or John Edwards) — a message that fits the mood of supporters of all three.

…

Obama’s impromptu talks, at their best, have a symphonic structure that starts quietly and builds fitfully to an emotional climax that is all the more impressive because of his own restraint — he coaxes the emotion out of his audience rather than supplying it himself. His prepared speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, the speech that rocketed him to national fame, had a similar quality. I didn’t find that quality in the Thursday speech — not enough of it, anyway. I thought the text threw him off his usual musicality, that it dissipated some of the excitement, that it was too general, too abstract, too “speechy” — grandiose and banal at same time.

“Grandiose and banal at same time,” describes just about the entire Obama oeuvre to me. Mr. Hertzberg is aware that there is something wrong with bucking the received wisdom that Senator Obama is anything less than a generation-inspiring genius and so offers a bit of an insincere apology: “it may have been something I ate. The food in New Hampshire is not always reliable.”

Unfortunately events have shown that Senator Clinton was not so steady as she may have seemed that night.

Iowa Speeches

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Perusing the responses to the outcome in Iowa, I think I must be on another planet. My response seems to be nearly the opposite of most. I thought John Edwards’s and Hillary Clinton’s were strong, but that Barack Obama’s was merely okay.

Hillary Clinton, I thought, did an incredible job of handling this loss. She was completely unphased and didn’t say a word conceding it as a loss. This was model framing.

New Hampshire is currently neck-in-neck and South Carolina will be tight, especially after Iowa. It would be dangerous for Hillary Clinton to go three primaries without a win. Loosing South Carolina in isolation could be dismissed, but loosing it as the third in a row may send a signal that could change the dynamics in subsequent states. That being said, Senator Clinton is a candidate that will really start to perform when the primaries break out of the idiosyncratic states and get more normal. Hillary Clinton is presently on track to trounce Senator Obama on Super Tuesday and in delegate rich states like Michigan and New York. And in her speech I heard someone speak with the confidence of knowing this.

Regarding John Edwards, the Democratic party has been a lagging indicator of how far to the left U.S. political sentiment has shifted in the last two years or so. We presently have an electorate that is consistently to the left of the left-leaning party. Listening to John Edwards’s speech I was struck that his is the tone that I would expect in such an environment: fiery, strongly liberal, naming a list of villains and not afraid to make enemies in staking out his positions.

Senator Obama’s speech was exciting in some respects in that it did contain some dramatic lines, most outstandingly the first one, and the poses he struck, the expressions on his face, his intonation were all very strong and dramatic. But I kept on spacing out because most of what he actually said was the usual kissing babies, better world for out children, petting puppydogs political rhetoric. I’ve said it before (“Where’s the Hate?,” 9 March 2007), but I find Barack Obama every bit as vacuous as Hillary Clinton.

Quote of the Day: Class Warfare on the Right

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Ezra Klein reports (“I Fear Huckabee,” The American Prospect, 3 January 2008):

Good line from Huckabee on The Tonight Show. Asked what’s behind his remarkable rise in the polls, Huckabee decided to stop calling it divine intervention and try out a populist response. “I think it’s because people want to vote for someone who reminds them of the guy they work with rather than the guy who laid them off.”

Gorgeous. That’s exactly how Mitt Romney comes across.

S. points out that Huckabee vs. Edwards would be a real interesting campaign. If both the Republicans and the Democrats choose a populist it would represent a dramatic rejection of the politics of special interest. Also it would mean a big shift of the entire debate to the left.

Governor Huckabee is pulling a sort of Bill Clinton-like triangulation. Senator’s Clinton or Obama could be outflanked from the left on poverty and other domestic issues while not being able to similarly outflank Governor Huckabee to the right regarding foreign policy. People suggest that Barack Obama is the candidate with the most cross-over appeal and most likely to capture independents. But conceivably Huckabee neutralizes this advantage.

Primary Time!

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The first of the primaries is on Thursday so I guess a few words in that direction are in order. On the Democratic side my judgment is perhaps too clouded by desire for me to be objective: I want John Edwards to win.

A few days ago CNN was polling the three candidates as essentially in a statistical dead heat. Unfortunately the Des Moines Register’s final poll has Barack Obama suddenly jumping way into the lead (Beaumont, Thomas, “New Iowa Poll: Obama Widens Lead Over Clinton,” 31 December 2007). From what I hear, a lot of the outcome will be determined by the weather: the support of Senators Obama and Clinton is heavily tilted toward first-time caucus-goers and if the weather is bad, many may in fact turn out not to have been the likely caucus-goers that poll models had them chalked up to be. Having a formidable segment of the old hands who are likely to turn out no matter what, Edwards wins if the weather if foul. And on such slender bases are great hopes built.

But after that, there just isn’t much upon which to base any hope for the Edwards candidacy. Maybe the knock-on effect of a win gives him a boost in subsequent states, but right now he is polling in every other state far behind Clinton and Obama. Even in his home state of South Carolina he is closer to the undecided number than neck-in-neck Clinton and Obama. In California he is polling 13 percent to Clinton’s 36 percent (“Election Guide 2008,” The New York Times). I imagine that after South Carolina it will at least be down to a two candidate race.

Why John Edwards? Because he is the most left-leaning of the three frontrunners. All three have their advantages and disadvantages, but I am bothered by how right-wing Hillary Clinton is on national security and I think that despite his four years as a Senator, Barack Obama just doesn’t get how vicious the right-wing machine is. I don’t think he is ready for the general campaign and I don’t think he is ready for the White House. I want someone who stakes out a good starting position for negotiation on legislation and is ready to unload on his opponents with both barrels. I’m not interested in bipartisanship. I think it is not necessarily the optimum political arrangement and I think it is a fools errand with today’s Republican party.

As for the Republicans, they’re all over the map. Huckabee’s polling up in Iowa and South Carolina; Romney in New Hampshire and Michigan; and Giuliani in Florida, Nevada, California and New York. Obviously Giuliani has the best states in his column from an electoral vote standpoint, but it won’t matter how well Giuliani will do in states that are going to deliver their electors to the Democrats. It’s possible that each could go to the convention with a few wins in their pocket and a number of pledged delegations. Even McCain could pull out New Hampshire and enter the convention in a plausible position.

In recent political history, the candidates have headed for the convention with a clear front-runner and the convention was just a formality to make it official. This time the Republicans could be in for a real convention battle of yore, complete with complex delegation maneuver and smoky backroom wheeling and dealing of the political fixers. The question then becomes, does a pitched convention battle add excitement and pathos to the Republican ticket, or does it make the Republicans look disorganized and weak. I, of course, hope for it because it would be an exciting turn of events.

As a brief coda, it occurred to me today that the nightmare match up from the standpoint of having to endure two months of general campaign, is Clinton-Romney. Just the thought of the two most Zen-negative-space candidates trading vacuous political truisms, trying to be everything to every constituency without actually revealing a stitch of substance that might commit either one to anything concrete is enough to make me despair of politics.

Events Unfold

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It’s 3:35 AM here in Washington, D.C. A last survey before bed turns up still very little commentary of much use regarding events in Pakistan. One of the strange things about D.C. is the proximity to the powers that be gives at least me the sense of hidden events unfolding. One can see in the mind’s eye the chaos that must be going on at the National Security Council, the State Department and the Pentagon even at this late hour. The encrypted channels to India and Israel have to be at capacity right about now. There is a lot of intelligence to exchange, contingencies to be agree upon and reassurances to be extracted. I imagine that if I were to bike down to the White House campus right about now, the lights at the Old Executive Office Building would be blazing. Twenty copies of an about fiver-hundred page briefing book are expected at the West Wing tomorrow at 7:30 AM. More darkly, I imagine that they will also be working overtime at STRATCOM and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. The thing that I am worried about the most is what is going on in the Office of the Vice President tonight and into tomorrow. Or at least it’s the thing I’m most worried about in my own neck of the woods. Even a mind’s eye can only perceive to the horizons of one’s imagination. Dark plans, as yet unrevealed to the world, are unfolding everywhere.

The Bush Debt

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The Fiscal Year 2007 Financial Report of the United States Government was released on 17 December 2007 and accompanying the report was a letter in summery prepared by the Comptroller General of the United States, Mr. David Walker, in which he highlights the following:

the federal government’s fiscal exposures totaled approximately $53 trillion as of September 30, 2007, up more than $2 trillion from September 30, 2006, and an increase of more than $32 trillion from about $20 trillion as of September 30, 2000. This translates into a current burden of about $175,000 per American or approximately $455,000 per American household.

Later that day Mr. Walker told the National Press Club (“Some Progress on U.S. Government’s Financial Statements But Significant Problems Remain,” YubaNet.com, 17 December 2007),

If the federal government was a private corporation and the same report came out this morning, our stock would be dropping and there would be talk about whether the company’s management and directors needed a major shake-up.

So, just in case you missed that, the total debt of the United States, all that had been racked up through the years of Great Society, guns and butter, stagflation, the Reagan arms buildup and the corrections of the Bush, Sr. and Clinton years was $20 trillion. Since that time President Bush has managed to pile a whopping $32 trillion on top of that. In a scant seven years he has managed to increase the debt of the United States by 160 percent. That’s nearly a half-a-million dollars per household.

The right lauds the Bush tax cut, but it’s all smoke and mirrors. There has been no Bush tax cut. Deficits are future taxes. There has merely been the Bush tax deferral. George W. Bush looks good at the expense of one of his successors having to play the adult. “[T]alk about whether the company’s management and directors needed a major shake-up,” indeed. And yet, still one more year of the Bush administration with nothing to be done.

The FY2008 Military Budget

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On Friday I wrote, “my ideal president would expend a significant portion of their political capital on the bland and unrewarding task of rationalizing the budget.” To balance the budget one cannot niggle over small change programs. A million here or a million there is chump-change in a $2.9 trillion budget. One has to turn to the big line items and that should include military spending. Today Democracy Arsenal points out just how crazy-detached from reality the military budget has become in recent years (Kelly, Lorelei, “How High is Up? The Defense Budget Gets Even Crazier,” 18 December 2007):

Last week, both houses of Congress approved the conference report on the Fiscal Year 2008 Defense Authorization bill, H.R. 1585. The bill includes $506.9 billion for the Department of Defense and the nuclear weapons activities of the Department of Energy. The bill also authorizes $189.4 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. This funding is NOT counted as part of the $506.9 billion.

…

Keep in mind, today’s defense spending is 14% above the height of the Korean War, 33% above the height of the Vietnam War, 25% above the height of the “Reagan Era” buildup and is 76% above the Cold War average.

In fact, since the September 11, 2001 attacks, the annual defense budget – not including the costs of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan – has gone up 34%. Including war costs, defense spending has gone up 86% since 2001.

But where to cut? Given our problems in Iraq and Afghanistan it seems that the United States has a problem in on-the-ground troop strength and the Democratic candidates are all talking about increasing that. Given the vagaries of air power projection we probably should keep a regular replacement schedule for aircraft carriers. I have suggested that anti-submarine warfare will probably be important in the near future, so we should probably keep those skills primed (“ABM,” 14 October 2007). There is missile defense, but that is only $10 billion — only $230 billion to go before we’re back in the black. The obvious thing seems to me to be advanced tactical fighters. Is there a single potential opponent out there that will be able to come anywhere close to contending with the U.S. for tactical air superiority any time in the coming decade? But between the Joint Strike Fighter and the F/A-22 the U.S. is only spending $6.24 billion in 2008.

I guess the thing we could cut would be the breadth of our commitments, but that’s a hard political call of another scale than putting off a generation of aircraft procurement.

Anyway, if you want to play your own Pentagon budget scenarios, the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation has a nice breakdown of the fiscal year 2008 military budget (Hellman, Christopher and Travis Sharp, “Analysis of Conference Agreement on the FY2008 Defense Authorization Bill [H.R. 1585/S. 1547],” 12 December 2007).

What Basis the Clinton Myth?

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Ezra Klein takes the opportunity of Bill Clinton’s recent poor performance in support of his wife’s faltering campaign to review one of my shibboleths, the unimpressive record he racked up as president (“The Myth of Bill Clinton’s Strategic Genius,” The American Prospect, 17 December 2007):

… it’s worth taking a moment to examine the myth of Clinton’s extraordinary political skills. The 1992 election occurred in context of a deep recession, the post-Soviet Union turn towards domestic policy, and a vicious third party challenge to the sitting Republican. Clinton won, but did not capture a majority.

This was a huge deal for the Democrats, and rightfully so, as they’d been locked out of the White House for 12 years. But it wasn’t the world’s most impressive political feat. By 1994, Clinton had suffered a tremendous defeat on health care reform, passed a deficit reduction act that he was unable to secure a single Republican vote for, attracted Republican support to pass NAFTA, and presided over the loss of 52 Democratic seats in Congress. The next two years were a period of significant retrenchment with some successes, notably the crime bill and, again, the non-traditional priority of “welfare reform.” Clinton did, to be sure, beat Bob Dole, but he failed to capture a majority of the vote. Between 1996 and 2000, the economy roared forward, Clinton managed it ably, pushed through some decent-if-incremental legislation, almost got impeached, and turned his attention to foreign policy work. He exited office a popular president, but not a historic one. His successor — for a variety of reasons — failed to take office, and congressional majorities were reduced from their 1992 peak.

… the remarkable thing about Gingrich wasn’t his eventual fall, but the damage he caused Clinton during his rise. Clinton “won” the personal confrontation, but Gingrich won the ideological showdown, essentially ending a Democratic president’s ability to pursue recognizable progressive priorities for six of his eight years in office.

The purpose of Mr. Klein’s account is to suggest that Bill Clinton is no electoral silver bullet:

Bill Clinton was, to be sure, a very good politician, but that aptitude mainly manifested in getting himself elected. There’s no real evidence that he’s got the same talent for getting other people elected. His tenure did not end with increased Democratic majorities, a Democratic successor, or a vastly expanded social welfare state. The 90s were, to be sure, better for Democrats than the Bush years, but they shouldn’t be blown out of proportion.

I think the sooner the Democratic party gets over its Bill Clinton mythos — and every aspect of it: the deft economic management, the heroic foreign policy, the cleaver triangulation of his opponents, the knack for the pulse of America — the better off it will be.

Democrats Always Looking Over Their Partner’s Shoulder

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Matthey Yglesias laments the absence of a second Al Gore candidacy (“The Case for Gore,” TheAtlantic.com, 14 December 2007):

Gore hits the sweet spot of experience and vision in a way that nobody else can. What’s more, a person who’s in a position to be a viable presidential candidate and who believes the things Gore says he believes almost has a duty to run, a duty that I’m sad he hasn’t seen fit to take up.

In 2000 I think a lot of Democrats settled for Gore. He was, for me, the ideal candidate. A bland technocrat is exactly what I want in a president. A book that nags at me constantly is Mismanaging America: The Rise of the Anti-Analytic Presidency by Walter Williams. One blurb of the book reads,

An American president must be a master of two arts: politics and management. According to Willians, no president since Dwight Eisenhower has been a top manager.

I think this is pretty close. I’m not so pessimistic as Mr. Williams. I think there is a line of managerial presidents that includes Eisenhower, arguably Gerald Ford, and George Bush, Sr. A President Gore would have been a part of this lineage: technocratic, competent, hands on, detail oriented, dedicated to getting the small things right, steadfast to the facts of the matter, not necessarily good at the P.R. thing, eschewing the elaborate ideological pronouncement, ultimately a politician, but willing to alienate a key constituency when faced with a tough decision.

I tend to see George Bush, Sr. as a paragon here because he never made things politically difficult for Gorbachev when reveling in Cold War triumphalism might have been domestically expedient and because he went back on his “read my lips” promise when balancing the budget was at stake. In this regard I almost see his professed lack of the “vision thing” as charming; and ultimately all these things cost him the election. He did the right thing even when it conflicted with personal ambition.

For probably the last ten years now I have pretty much figured that my ideal president would expend a significant portion of their political capital on the bland and unrewarding task of rationalizing the budget. After Bill Clinton, I too am an Eisenhower Republican.

When Al Gore was denied the presidency by the Supreme Court in 2000, I think a lot of people imagined him coming back after a period to claim his rightful position, but history doesn’t always work out that way.

It’ll All End In Tears, Redux

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The Financial Times today (Stephens, Philip, “A Physicist’s Theory of the Transatlantic Relationship,” 14 December 2007):

The overarching geopolitical fact of coming decades is likely to be the relative decline of US power. The word relative is important. Measured by economic, technological and military might, America is likely to remain the pre-eminent nation during the first half of the present century and, perhaps, well beyond. But the US is already an insufficient as well as an indispensable power. As China, India and others rise, and Russia re-asserts itself, the US will become more dependent on the goodwill of others. How it responds to the shifts will in large degree shape the new international order — or disorder.

The image of the future in the minds of many is of a multipolar system, with power shared between two or three groups of nations. … Others — in the US as well as Europe — conjure up a world divided into two competing blocs: the liberal democracies on one side, the authoritarian capitalists, notably but not exclusively China and Russia, on the other. …

More probably we are on the cusp of an era of great power competition in which alliances and allegiances shift according to accidents of circumstance and geography. Those who like historical analogies could look back at the second half of the 19th century.

The problem with looking back at the second half of the Nineteenth Century is that we all know how that ended.