What Obama Might Achieve

Judis calls Obama’s UN speech today “his most significant foreign policy statement since becoming president.” The reason why:

If Obama does achieve a rapprochement between the United States and Iran, it could have repercussions throughout the Middle East. It could make a political settlement in Syria possible. It could ease negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians. Israel’s hardliners would no longer have an excuse for ignoring the West Bank occupation, and Hamas would no longer have international support in refusing to back a two-state solution. And, finally, of course, a rapprochement could give the United States a strong ally in reducing the threat of terrorist movements in the Middle East and South Asia.

Max Fisher thought Obama’s UN speech was harder on Iran than his recent remarks:

That Obama would harden his stance toward Iran, at precisely the moment when Tehran seems most receptive to his entreaties, may seem surprising on the surface. But U.S.-Iran engagement is shifting from theoretical to actual this week. And that means the United States is a little less worried about enticing Tehran to the negotiating table, and a little more preoccupied with keeping their Iranian counterparts honest.

But the toughening stance on Iran, like the decision to privilege the nuclear issue far above detente, seemed to nod to growing concerns from Israel. … Israel does not have veto power over U.S.-Iran engagement, exactly, but it does have significant influence – and sympathetic-minded legislators in Congress could have the power to block Obama from any deals with Tehran.

“No Other Country Has Suffered So Much From Chemical Weapons”

NIAC president Trita Parsi reveals which country while discussing how average Iranians make sense of the Syrian conflict:

In his UN speech today, Obama made a point to include Iranians among those who have suffered attacks from chemical weapons (go here and here for Dish coverage of how the US was complicit in those attacks).

In other Syria-Iran coverage, we recently featured some remarkable footage showing Iranian military advisors leading Assad’s forces inside Syria. Along those lines, last week the WSJ published a detailed report on Iran’s military assistance to Assad, including ongoing efforts by the Revolutionary Guard to train thousands of Syrians within Iran. The report also explains how the regimes in Iran and Syria were originally linked:

Tehran’s alliance with Syria began shortly after Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979. Damascus under Mr. Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, was the first Arab country to back Iran’s revolutionary government. Tehran’s ayatollahs, in turn, recognized the Assad family’s Alawite faith, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, as a legitimate branch of their religion.

The Guards’ influence in Damascus grew significantly after Bashar al-Assad took power in 2000, according to current and former Syrian military officers. Operations between the Guards and Syria’s security forces started to grow more integrated, with Iranian advisers basing themselves in Syria. Iran’s government opened weapons factories and religious centers in Syria as well.

How Callous Are Today’s Republicans? Ctd

A reader writes:

You can’t have a post about Republicans attempting to gut food stamps without including race in the conversation. To the Tea Party base, “food stamps” is code for “handouts to lazy black people,” and nothing gets the base more riled up than their hatred of any social program that helps “those people.” I think you’d agree that right now the right-wing GOP is much more motivated by placating and energizing its base than by any other factor. That’s what the votes to repeal Obamacare are about, and that’s what the food stamp votes are about. The simple fact is that the members of Congress who voted for the massive cut in food stamps did it so they could go back to their districts and tell the old, white, angry voters who elected them: “See, I’m in Washington, fighting the good fight to keep lazy, undeserving (*wink wink*) people from taking your hard-earned tax dollars.”

Another is on the same page:

I really think that people outside the South have trouble understanding these sorts of things. It isn’t callous at all. It is entirely about race. It really is a long-standing race issue for many Southern whites, especially as you get closer and closer to the lower end of the middle class, but it can be found at most every strata. An example of the poisonous logic goes like this: “Food stamps are a handout to blacks who don’t want to work.” Now, you could point out the obvious, and say, “But needy white people get food stamps too,” but the response would be: “But that is different, and in any case, white people want to work so they aren’t the problem.” It is basically the same meme about welfare in general that has persisted for a generation.

Another has a more nuanced perspective:

While all the commentators you cite certainly provide insights into why Republicans are so determined to cut food stamps, I think everyone is neglecting a major point of contention that grassroots Republicans have with food stamps:

unlike other federal programs, they see it happening, day in and day out. When I talk to conservative friends, many of them very intelligent and educated, they frequently become upset when discussing welfare in general, and food stamps in particular. I think I’ve identified two related factors that make this such a big deal to certain conservatives.

First, everyone has a story about someone they know of, usually a friend or family member, who cheats the welfare/food stamp system. It’s no surprise that people abuse and cheat government programs. The difference is that the conservatives I talk to take this as a personal insult, rather than an unfortunate but basically unavoidable reality. When the program in question is so visible, they place an outsize importance on SNAP, and they tend to exaggerate its size and corruption.

Second, and I think more importantly, many conservatives I talk to see people at the grocery store, supermarket, or corner store using food stamps day in and day out. It’s this daily grind that wears on them, and leads them to obsess over these programs. Again, the issue is more emotional than rational: even if the people I talk to have a fairly decent sense that SNAP and other assorted welfare programs don’t constitute a major part of the government’s expenditures, it just does not matter. Food stamps are real to them in a way that farm subsidies or defense spending or any other government program just are not. Food stamps rub their noses in it.

Food stamps are the most visible, tangible manifestation of a broad range of government actions they despise. Its conservative’s perfect storm: people they feel are undeserving gaming the system, and you have to stand in line and watch them do it.

I think this also explains the divergence between elite conservative and “grassroots” conservative opinion on SNAP and other welfare programs. How many conservative economists, who may dislike social welfare spending but worry more about larger programs, have stood in line at the supermarket after working 12 hours at a job they hate only to watch someone pay for their food with an EBT card? Combine this with a preexisting distrust and dislike of government, mix in a narrative about cheats running the system, and you’ve got a recipe for conservative pressure to cut food stamps while more people than ever need access to them.

Another shifts focus:

Instead of stigmatizing poverty, criminalizing and punishing it, we ought to stigmatize unearned wealth. Why do we think badly of people who need food stamps even though they are working hard? Why not stigmatize the Walton family members? They earn their billions off the labor of minimum wage employees, then they instruct them to apply for government assistance to feed their families. That kind of behavior takes more gall, more ugly nerve than applying for food stamps after a long day’s work in a warehouse.

Maybe we should stigmatize the corporate CEOs who accept large government subsidies and pay little or no taxes, who then give themselves million dollar bonuses. Maybe we should stigmatize the Republican congressmen who vote against hurricane relief aid for the East Coast but demand flood aid for their districts. Maybe we should stigmatize the Republicans who have voted 42 times to defund the Affordable Care Act (calling it socialist when it isn’t), while accepting socialist healthcare from the US government in the form of Medicare and Medicaid.

Update from a reader who takes issue with the second email above:

I don’t believe this person actually knows any conservatives, and is merely surmising how she thinks those “racist right wingers” think. Most conservative I know don’t say food stamps are for black people; they say food stamps are mostly for dirtbags and low-lifes, period. They don’t give a fuck what someone’s color is! None of them would say it is different for white people. None.

Screaming racism at everything is the easiest bullshit that prevents you from having to deal with reality. Call the GOP callous all you want, but this racism thing is such a small part of it for a small amount of them that it is not even worth discussing.

Moderates Who Move Us Forward

Karol Edward Soltan mulls over moderation in political life:

Almost everyone serious about moderation suggests a contrast between the bland or gray variety, on the one hand, and a more ambitious, more transformational and inspiring alternative, on the other. I have myself tried “militant moderation” and “vivid moderation” as labels; “transformational moderation” also seems very apt. Among examples are Gandhi, King (a quintessential transformational moderate, especially when he famously criticized the more conventional moderates in the Letter from Birmingham Jail), and the anti-communist opposition (such as the Solidarity trade union in Poland) that was instrumental in toppling communism in Europe.

Ever since the Clinton presidency, with its commitment to a Third Way program (shared with Tony Blair and others around the world), the Democratic Party has had something of a monopoly on moderation in the US. Two Democratic presidents, Clinton and Obama, have aspired to be transformative moderates, to provoke an American renewal. On the whole, it has been a disappointment. This is perhaps something of a paradox: the US is a country whose political DNA is deeply pervaded, from its founding, by Madisonian transformative moderation — a country in which transformative moderation has been given new form and new energy by Martin Luther King Jr. Yet, it is still apparently difficult to translate transformative moderation into an effective program of reforms.

The current radicals in the GOP could have something to do with that, no?

Clinton Fatigue … And Exhaustion

Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting In New York

Weigel rounds-up all of the anonymous pro-Clinton quotes in Joe Hagan’s profile of Hillary:

To recap: Clinton is humble, strategic, and learns from her mistakes, and if she loses it’s because people don’t trust her and her husband enough. Great—why was any of this anonymous? Again, no disrespect to Hagan, who is operating under the rules of this beat and coming out with a newsy exclusive story. My pre-emptive peeve is that the Obama administration is looking ready to pass the Democratic baton to a coterie that’s even more ridiculous about controlling the press.

And anyone is surprised by that? John Dickerson ponders Clinton’s press strategy:

Most presidential candidates strain for attention. They rush to Iowa, write books, or take extreme positions on controversial issues. Clinton has to do the opposite, trying to flee from the circus ready to chase her down the grocery store aisle. But she’s in a bind. If she makes too much news this far ahead of the 2016 presidential election, there’s a chance people will tire of her candidacy.

Yes, I feel narcolepsy coming on, and if I have to see another tedious interview with Chelsea Clinton, a coma is imminent. Only the newness of the first woman president can overcome it. But I really wish the first woman president were not the wife of a previous one. John goes on:

If she steps back, though, the unstoppable flow of Clinton stories will come anyway (especially the highly unflattering ones that feature people loosely associated with Clinton world, like the New Republic profile of Doug Band, who once oversaw the Clinton Global Initiative). Not all of these people leave a good impression.

Joan Walsh declares that she also Clinton fatigue. Waldman explains why:

The 2008 Obama candidacy was a romance between him and liberal voters. Romance is all about discovery, the excitement of the new, the thrill of venturing into unknown territory with someone as you begin to know them. Perhaps most importantly, romance also allows you to reimagine yourself as you’re seen through this new person’s eyes. And that was the most important thing about 2008: how it made liberals feel differently about themselves. They weren’t weak and defensive and they weren’t losers. They were brave and strong and smart. They were history’s actors, forging real, meaningful change with every yard sign and phone call and Facebook post. They were the future.

We can’t ever have a romance with Hillary Clinton, because we’re already in a relationship with her, one that’s over two decades old. A successful Clinton candidacy isn’t going to allow liberals to reimagine themselves. She could turn out to be the greatest president in American history, but the beginning of that presidency won’t give liberals the thrill that 2008 gave them.

Chait points out the candidacy’s flaws:

Bill Clinton has surrounded himself with wealthy people and paid barely any attention to the money flowing all around him. Even if nothing incriminating ever comes to light, the atmospheric revelations could form a potent combination with the policy agenda. Liberal complaints with their party’s failure to sufficiently regulate Wall Street have focused on figures like Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, but these men are proxies for the president who appointed them. Wall Street will be to 2016 what Iraq was to 2008: both a policy liability and a lever for her opponent to wedge open broader doubts about her character, to paint her as a corrupt and feckless insider. Clinton’s loyalists say she won’t repeat her 2008 errors. But she will have to show she understands just what the analogue is.

And we all know how flexible she is …

(Photo: Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton listens during the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) meeting on September 24, 2013 in New York City. Timed to coincide with the United Nations General Assembly, CGI brings together heads of state, CEOs, philanthropists and others to help find solutions to the world’s major problems. By Ramin Talaie/Getty Images)

The Pull Of History

One of the most remarkable features of the two Obama victories was how close the states he lost were to the member states of the Confederacy. There were a few mismatches, but it was hard to ignore that power of historical forces on the vote for the first African-American president. In Germany, too, here’s the map of Berlin’s election in 2013, courtesy of the FT (registration required) and the Berlin returning officer’s website. The old Berlin Wall is in black:

wall3

Notice how the former Communist, and still economically laggard, east (purple) still votes left, while the gentrified, formerly West Berlin votes right. The miracle? The West and the right are now led by a native woman of the East. And the beat goes on.

Happiness vs Meaningfulness

Roy F. Baumeister and a team of social psychologists recently studied the distinction:

If happiness is about getting what you want, it appears that meaningfulness is about doing things that express yourself. Even just caring about issues of personal identity and self-definition was associated with more meaning, though it was irrelevant, if not outright detrimental, to happiness. This might seem almost paradoxical: happiness is selfish, in the sense that it is about getting what you want and having other people do things that benefit you, and yet the self is more tied to meaning than happiness. Expressing yourself, defining yourself, building a good reputation and other self-oriented activities are more about meaning than happiness.

Previous Dish on the subject here and here.

If There Is No Deal With Iran …

… then military conflict looks inevitable:

Matt Steinglass likewise urges Obama to pursue diplomacy:

Barack Obama would have to be crazy at this point not to take up the diplomatic overtures the Iranian government has been making over the past few weeks. We shouldn’t have any illusions about what is on offer here. America and Iran are never going to be terribly friendly, or not on any foreseeable time horizon. We have commitments to Israel and the Persian Gulf states which we’re not about to drop and the Iranians are not about to forget. They have a partially theocratic system of government that entails human-rights violations we’re not about to overlook, and they’re not about to abandon their support for Hizbullah or for the ideology of Shiite jihad. But we have by now given up on the illusion that our problems in the Middle East will be solved by “regime change”. Indeed, the countries where the regimes change seem to be the ones where our problems now lie. We need to start approaching the regimes that aren’t likely to change and trying to arrange a wary but peaceful standoff, because the level of carnage and chaos at the moment is more than we can handle.

How Likely Is A Shutdown?

Philip Klein is betting against it:

The nation now has more than two and a half years of experience with divided government during the Obama presidency. And each time there has been a major crisis, it’s followed a familiar pattern. The sides are far apart. It looks like the crisis may hit. Then, at the last minute, there’s some sort of deal that’s able to pass the Senate that Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, is able to get through the House of Representatives with a lot of help from Democrats.

Cohn mostly agrees:

Most informed observers I know would agree with his assessment and, for the record, I would too. The conflict over financing government operations—and, weeks from now, raising the debt ceiling—is all about Boehner and his lieutenants waiting until the last possible minute, so that he can extract the biggest concessions from Democrats while telling the conservative base he did the best he could. One way or another, the two sides will come together before the government runs out of money and before it taps out its borrowing authority. In fact, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announcing that he won’t support Senator Ted Cruz’s call for a filibuster, the chances of a shutdown just diminished a little more.

But if the chances of either a shutdown or a debt ceiling crisis are modest, they aren’t modest enough. And there’s a chance the confidence all of us feel could actually make a last-minute deal less likely.

Ezra’s view:

Most in Washington and on Wall Street hold to a serene faith that the two parties will figure something out. And that’s probably right. But in interviews with both Democratic and Republican staff from the House and Senate leadership, as well as the White House, I have yet to hear a plausible story for how they figure something out. The tales range from the unlikely — Republicans expect Senate Democrats to force the White House to delay the individual mandate, while Democrats expect Boehner to simply fold and absorb the backlash from his party — to the nonexistent.

“I don’t know the end of this movie,” says Rep. Chris Van Hollen, ranking member on the House Budget Committee. “I don’t think anybody knows how it ends. And that’s a very dangerous place to be in.”