Month: December 2010

Andrew Exum is traveling through Afghanistan. He sees reason for hope but lodges this criticism: 

We have two "Achilles heels" in the current strategy: Afghan governance and insurgent sanctuaries in Pakistan.

What these two weaknesses have in common is their combined effect on the ability of insurgent ranks, which have been decimated this year, to regenerate either through sanctuaries (to include external support) or by exploiting grievances caused by bad governance. I'm going to be honest and say that I do not see a coherent or otherwise effective strategy for dealing with the sanctuaries in Pakistan. I do not see it anywhere in the U.S. government or within NATO, whose writ only extends to the borders of Afghanistan anyway. With respect to governance, I have seen some isolated rays of hope at the local level, but it is easy to see how, as long as Afghans consider their country the third most corrupt country on Earth and look elsewhere for the rule of law, insurgents will continue to recruit and recover their losses.

A reader writes:

I wonder if the biggest benefit for Obama of the tax cut deal, assuming it gets passed more or less intact, won't end up being that it frees the Republican party to spend the next two years tearing itself apart.

Think about it: up until this point virtually the only thing that all Republican factions – libertarians, political operatives, business lobbyists, theocrats, neocons - have agreed on is extending the Bush tax cuts. Repealing health care reform may be a close second – but even there, the party's Congressional leadership has shown a remarkably consistent propensity to hedge on what they may actually do. They, like everyone else, have seen the polls saying that most specific elements of the ACA are strongly supported by the public. Deregulation of all kinds may be third, but there too the specifics are generally much less popular than the concept. And the Tea Party wing hates Wall Street. Do Republicans really want to spend 2011 repealing Dodd-Frank?

Beyond those issues, there looks to be nothing but minefields.

Defense spending … Medicare spending … Social Security … abortion … stem cells … Afghanistan … it's hard to think of an issue where a strong legislative push won't wind up with Republicans either tearing themselves apart, or leaving themselves open to effective Democratic counterattacks. A solid victory on taxes in the first months of 2011 might have given them some unifying juice to last the next 23 months – but now that's been taken away from them. Instead we may spend the next two years watching the surfacing and metastasis of thirty years of underlying divisions in the Republican coalition. All thanks to a shrewd bit of appeasement by Obama, which also bought him some progress on liberal priorities and a healthy stimulus as a bonus.

Pejman Yousefzadeh pushes back against this post:

The mere fact that Republicans are negotiating with the Obama Administration over legislation does not mean that critiques against the Administration are somehow invalidated. You weren’t making this claim about the supposed invalidity of Democratic critiques of George W. Bush when Democrats were negotiating with him over legislation, were you?

Wrong on both counts.

No one on the left doubted George W. Bush's cultural or biographical legitimacy as president. In the first term there were claims of illegitimacy – but on the, er, understandable and technical grounds that he won fewer votes than his opponent, and won via an extremely contentious court case. No one treated the son of a former president as some kind of anti-American or un-American alien, the way Palinites treat Obama. Nonetheless, several Democrats immediately supported his massive tax cut – while no Republicans, in the wake of an Obama landslide – supported a desperately needed stimulus. I do not recall states mulling secession or nullification of federal decisions under the last president.

As for "critiques", GOP cooperation does not invalidate them. But I'm not talking about good faith critiques of policy. I'm talking about the plain fact that Fox News, talk radio, the Pajamas Media network have not just criticized the president, but demonized him as beyond the American pale, lying about his belief in American exceptionalism, tying him to "Kenyan anti-colonialism" or other such Stanley-Kurtz style paranoia-for-pay. Check out the image above. Did it appear in some fringe Larouchian publication? Nope; it was right there in Forbes Magazine, next to a piece by Steve Forbes. Name one MSM publication that photo-shopped Bush in that way.

The level of bile against anything he has done, the loathing projected onto him – for doing what he clearly promised to do – is clearly beyond what happened to Bush. I remember. Because for the first two years of Bush in office, I defended him against those on the left who wouldn't give him the slightest benefit of any doubt. And the fury that crested against him was largely due to the Iraq war – a decision he implicitly ran against in 2000, when he promised a humble foreign policy and less defense spending than Gore.

No, my point stands. By simply rallying behind Obama against his liberal base, the GOP leadership has deeply damaged the grass-roots campaign to make Obama seem like a remote alien, who has taken over America, rather than a president who is trying to govern it. That's one big concession that cannot be measured in dollars and cents, and it will benefit Obama almost as much as the massive second stimulus the GOP just gave him for re-election.

New Braunfels, Texas, 4.24 pm

Larison compares Gary Johnson's record on abortion to Rudy Giuliani's:

As governor, Johnson signed parental consent and partial-birth abortion ban legislation. At least by the standards of most national Republicans, that makes him as “operationally pro-life” as anyone, and he managed to do those things without engaging in a lot of absurd pandering by telling phony conversion stories. It makes a difference that Johnson has signed pro-life legislation. That is as much as most of his likely competitors in 2012 have done on this issue, and in some cases it goes beyond what other probable candidates did while in office. Giuliani’s claims that he would satisfy pro-life voters once in office were based on nothing in his record, so there was no reason to accept what he was saying.

Hitch attacks the tea partiers and those who enabled them:

 [T]he people who really curl my lip are the ones who willingly accept such supporters for the sake of a Republican victory, and then try to write them off as not all that important, or not all that extreme, or not all that insane in wanting to repeal several amendments to a Constitution that they also think is unalterable because it’s divine!

It may be true that the Tea Party’s role in November’s vote was less than some people feared, and it’s certainly true that several of the movement’s elected representatives will very soon learn the arts of compromise and the pork barrel. But then what happens at the next downturn? A large, volatile constituency has been created that believes darkly in betrayal and conspiracy. A mass “literature” has been disseminated, to push the mad ideas of exploded crackpots and bigots. It would be no surprise if those who now adore Beck and his acolytes were to call them sellouts and traitors a few years from now. But, alas, they would not be the only victims of the poisonous propaganda that’s been uncorked. Some of the gun brandishing next time might be for real. There was no need for this offense to come, but woe all the same to those by whom it came, and woe above all to those who whitewashed and rationalized it.

K-Thug says the tax cut compromise will hurt Obama's re-election chances because of lower growth in 2012. But Ryan Avent has already pointed out the following:

Take Mr Krugman's own example of the election of 1984, in which Ronald Reagan triumphed. Real GDP growth in that cycle actually peaked in the second quarter of 1983—more than a year before the election—after which it steadily slowed. From that 9.3% performance, growth tumbled to 3.3% by the fourth quarter of 1984, when voters actually went to the polls.

Now for the knock-out blow. David Leonhardt asks Zandi what he thinks about Krugman's alleged trade-off:

[S]tronger growth in 2011 (particularly in the first half of 2011) will ensure that the recovery achieves escape velocity. That is, enough G.D.P. growth to generate enough job growth to bring down unemployment and propel the recovery into a self-sustaining expansion. This is a necessary condition for addressing our long-term fiscal problems. Without this additional boost, unemployment would continue to hover near 10 percent throughout 2011 and the recovery would remain very vulnerable to anything that might go wrong. The objective of the Recovery Act was to end the Great Recession and jump-start a recovery. It succeeded. The objective of this package is to ensure the recovery evolves into a self-reinforcing expansion. I’m confident it will do that.