President Obama's choice about Afghanistan isn’t getting any easier. Last week Matthew Hoh, a senior State Department official in the country, resigned to protest U.S. policies there. Hoh said he didn't "see the value or the worth in continued U.S. casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year old civil war." This is not the first time a policymaker stepped down over choices made in Washington. Click through this TNR slideshow to see some historical wartime resignations.
President Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates have announced a dramatically-altered approach to deploying U.S. missile defenses. Click through this slideshow for a look at the current deployment of our missile defense systems, and how they'll change.
When President Obama arrives in Tokyo on Friday, he will confront a country that seeks to be an ally of the United States. For Japan has never been an American ally. It was first a rival, then an enemy, and finally, after it lost the war it foolishly started with the U.S., it became a protectorate, not an ally.
The distinction matters. An alliance is an institution negotiated between two sovereign governments in which each agrees to a series of reciprocal obligations that have the force of law. A protectorate arrangement, by contrast, sees the protectorate retaining a degree of control of its internal affairs, but surrendering authority to manage external relations--most crucially, in the area of military decision-making. In return for the protectorate's ceding of this key aspect of sovereignty, the dominant partner in the arrangement agrees to provide for the defense of the protectorate.
So again, yesterday, in an otherwise poignant and truthful memorial talk at Fort Hood, the president assured us that religion does not kill. It killed in ancient Judaism: remember Amalek. It killed through virtually the entire history of Christianity. Hindu fanatics kill in India. Alas, Muslim faith kills every day in half the globe. It kills in zeroes, many zeroes. Look at your daily newspaper. Read your habitual web-site. Watch blood-thirsty Muslim television from centers of the faith.
The NYT reports that Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, and Mike Mullen are supporting a big troop increase for Afghanistan. This actually isn't terribly newsy: We've had a pretty good idea while that those three have been leaning towards a McChrystal-ian position. The Times describes Obama as undecided.
Alan Wolfe is a TNR contributing editor and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College.
Just before the House of Representatives voted on the Stupak Amendment, designed to stop any public funding of insurance plans that cover abortion, the U. S. Conference on Catholic Bishops (USCCB) weighed in with its endorsement. According to The Hill, their action gave the amendment a “boost,” helping its eventual passage.
To the frustration of many a cabinet secretary, the Obama administration is a little behind on its appointments. At this point—with only five weeks to go before the Senate breaks for recess—a little over half of the 514 positions that need filling have been filled. Some jobs are really important: The nominee for the Office of Legal Counsel has been held up for months. Obama’s choice for a USAID director came down just today. U.S. attorney nominations have slowed to a crawl.
Other jobs? Not as important.
Take, for example, the eight-person Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the five media entities—Voice of America foremost among them—tasked with broadcasting American culture and journalism around the globe. In theory, the board is supposed to serve as a “firewall” between the broadcasters’ mission of journalistic objectivity and the political whims of legislators, who would often rather see taxpayer dollars go towards burnishing America’s image abroad. By statute, the president and minority party nominate four governors each to keep a bipartisan mix. But right now, the BBG is only half full. The four currently serving members were all appointed in 2002, and have overstayed their terms by three years—if anyone left, the board would no longer have a quorum to conduct business. Journalistic wise man Walter Isaacson is rumored to be the administration’s choice for the vacant post of chairman, and it’s hard to imagine him being held up for any substantive reason. It’s also hard to imagine the administration nominating him between now and when Congress leaves town in December.
The sad saga of the BBG began almost as soon as it was created in its current form, when the U.S. Information Administration was dissolved in 1999. As this magazine documented in 2005, Bush partisan Kenneth Tomlinson turned the board into an ideological battleground—purging people whom he saw as insufficiently conservative—that hamstrung the broadcasters’ operations and drove morale into the toilet. After Tomlinson was ousted, the well-respected editor James Glassman restored the board to some order, before he was tapped as Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy in the dying days of the Bush administration.
On the heels of President Obama's speech last week touting the need for radical improvements in U.S. schools, the Center for American Progress (CAP) released "Leaders and Laggards," a state-by-state report on education innovation. CAP assesses states and the District of Columbia in seven key areas, including school management, teacher hiring and evaluation practices, the ability to fire ineffective teachers, and access to technology.
There seems to be an undercurrent of surprise that Howard Wolfson is now advising Ned Lamont in his Connecticut gubernatorial campaign, but it's worth remembering that this isn't the first time these two have teamed up.
I had a friend visiting me this weekend who had fervently backed Barack Obama for President (against the “devil-woman” Hillary), but who now thinks Obama has betrayed his followers – most recently by agreeing to disastrous compromises in the health insurance bill. We argued the point on Sunday morning, while reading reports of the passage of the House bill.
... or not.
In the Ben Smith piece Mike cited earlier, Huckabee has some choice words for Pat Toomey:
Huckabee met in the spring with Pat Toomey, then the president of the Wall Street-backed Club for Growth, which had attacked him during the 2008 campaign for raising taxes in Arkansas.
I don't wish to join Isaac in piling on Matthew Continetti's love letter to Sarah Palin in the Weekly Standard. Wait. Let me re-phrase that. I do wish to join Isaac in piling on Matthew Continetti's love letter to Sarah Palin in the Weekly Standard. I know I shouldn't but I can't resist. Here's a passage that gives you an inkling of the method Continetti used to compile his argument:
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan).
In the few hours between landing after a swing through Pakistan, the Middle East, and North Africa and taking off again for Berlin, Singapore, Japan, and the Philippines, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton found time on Friday to stop over in much friendlier territory: a subterranean banquet hall at Washington’s Reagan International Trade Center. There, she addressed the people who tried to make her president of the United States.
The occasion: a “policy conference”—really more of a reunion—put on by a Hillary-centric advocacy group called NoLimits.org, which her staunchest defenders had founded in the wake of the 2008 election. They wanted to preserve the sisterhood that had grown up around her campaign, and the secretary, by being there, was just returning their loyalty. “We have had some extraordinary times,” Hillary said, relaxed and smiling. “There were so many of you here who were there with me on that long, exciting, death-defying journey across our country! You’re the ones who helped put all those cracks in the glass ceiling.”
The conference drew a peculiar mix: well-preserved Hillraisers, mingling and gossiping in their blonde coifs and furs, alongside supporters of a more pedestrian stripe, many of whom came with one friend or sat alone. They had all paid upwards of $175 apiece to listen to speakers like Barney Frank and Obama aide Jim Messina talk about issues of the day. The real draw, though, was Hillary herself.
The crowd (women, mostly) sat spellbound while she narrated her travels. They shook their heads when Hillary told them, in intimate tones, of visiting rape survivors in the Congo. When she finished, they surged forward to touch her hand, catch her eye, or take her picture—flashes of recognition crossed her face as she bent down from the dais to greet them.
It is just about 30 years since the wall around Iran went up. And it is a few days away from fully 20 years since the Berlin Wall came down.
The Berliner Mauer had been up for more than a quarter century, and its surface facing east, grim gray, was a metaphor for life in the German Democratic Republic. On its western face graffiti evoked the freer spirit of the half-city whose heart had nonetheless been broken by the Soviet goose step that divided it. And the Cold War was won on the very day the authorities of the D.D.R. were simply coerced by the power of human will to let its subjects scramble over the deeply ugly barrier into a Berlin with life and life-blood.
There are three broad reasons that the Wall came down. The first is that the communist system itself was a Potemkin Village, and even the village facade spread from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics--always distrust political projects pompously named!--all the way through eastern Europe was not pretty. Neither was it efficient. It's human relations were, well, inhumane. No, they were cruel, although the Bolshoi Ballet danced serenely. My friend Dr. Jerry Groopman, the great chronicler of contemporary medicine, returned from a trip to Moscow a few years before the fall. And his report after visiting a few hospitals: "There is an ongoing epidemic of tuberculosis. The Soviet Union is a failure." This was not an oversimplification.
The second reason for the collapse of both the Warsaw Pact and the U.S.S.R. was the problem of nations and nationalities. The Pact put the Soviets as sovereign over great historic peoples. This simply could not last. There is just so much humiliation that Poles and Hungarians, Czechs and Rumanians could take. Moreover, the Soviet Union was also a union of coerced ethnic groups with pasts of which they were both conscious and proud. The regime began to aggress against these already shortly after the revolution, and these aggressive strategies soon included starvation, exile, population transfer and the importation of Russian nationals into the lands of others. Not many observers or, for that matter, scholars noticed--let alone, saw deeply--these issues abuilding. I was lucky. The greatest historian of communism, at least in the languages I read, Adam Ulam (now deceased), who was the supervisor of my doctoral dissertation at Harvard, saw these phenomena plenty clear and thus was always optimistic about the Soviet collapse. Look at some of his books and a few of his TNR pieces to get a sense of his depth and breadth. Also on the national question, see Hélène Carrère d'Encausse's masterful The End of the Soviet Empire: The Triumph of the Nations, a volume the publication of which in English by New Republic Books (in collaboration with Basic Books) I had much to do.
For all of the crazy arguments against health care reform, a few of them are entirely sensible--and worth taking seriously. As I write in my latest Kaiser Health News column, which appeared on TNR’s home page yesterday, one of those is the worry that Congress won’t follow through with promises to raise the revenue--or find the savings--necessary to finance expansions of health insurance.
In other words, Congress may pass a law calling for reductions in Medicare expenditures or raising an assortment of new taxes. But the people affected by those changes--be they health care businesses that would lose reimbursements or everyday Americans facing the prospect of higher taxes--will complain. Once they do, Congress is likely to have second thoughts and repeal those measures.
I wrote the article thinking primarily about conservatives and libertarians who have made this case. But, to be clear, you don't have to be a conservative to have these concerns. Just a few days ago, for example, the New Yorker's John Cassidy warned about the likely high costs of health care reform:
Paul Krugman's column today is about how the stimulus was too small. I agree entirely. What I find puzzling is his apparent belief that the Obama administration is the primary culprit for this shortcoming. Here's Krugman:
Jacob S. Hacker is the Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science at Yale University, author of The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream, and an occasional contributor to The Treatment.
Diane Archer is the director of the Health Care Project at the Institute for America's Future and the founder and past president of the Medicare Rights Center.
How short memories are in Washington. A few weeks ago, when it looked possible that Nancy Pelosi could marshal enough Democratic support to create a “robust” public insurance option with rates tied to Medicare’s, everyone was talking about the big savings and reduced premiums that a series of estimates by the CBO showed this option could create. Then, the concern was that the public insurance plan would put private insurers out of business by using the government’s bargaining power to drive too hard a bargain with providers, creating an “un-level” playing field.
Now, however, the punditocracy is abuzz about the latest CBO estimates that show that the public plan eventually embraced by Pelosi--one that would negotiate rates with providers, rather than base them on Medicare’s--might actually charge higher premiums than the average private plan. No matter that the CBO estimates clearly state that the higher projected premiums reflect its expectation that the public plan will disproportionately enroll less healthy Americans--which might be seen as a virtue, since these are folks private insurance tends to serve most poorly. And no matter that a subsequent CBO letter to the House stated that even a public plan with negotiated rates would still place “downward pressure on the premiums of private plans.” Suddenly, in the commentariat, the public plan isn’t a fearsome predator. It’s a complacent kitten. Initially not worth having because it would be too strong, it’s now, according to critics, not worth having because it would be too weak.
In truth, both the initial fears and current dismissals are overblown. The CBO’s declining estimates of savings certainly make a strong case for having the public plan use modified Medicare rates, as we have long argued. It’s a shame the House will not be considering a bill that shows how substantially a public plan can contribute to freeing up federal dollars to help Americans afford coverage. But we should keep in mind that the prime argument for the public plan has never been about a particular payment formula. It has been that a public insurance plan is vital as an institutional check on private plans, its role evolving to reflect the emerging weaknesses (or strengths) of regulated private competition. Put simply, health reform is much more likely to succeed with a public health insurance option, even one with negotiated rates, than if private insurers are left to run the show.
Matthew Continetti's editorial in last week's issue of the Weekly Standard--"The Inevitability Myth: Health care reform is not a fait accompli"--makes the case that, despite all evidence, health care reform may not be enacted after all. (Continetti does concede that "the chances of some sort of health bill passing, at some point, are by no means negligible." So he's telling us there's a chance.)
This sort of argument is actually the signature style of the Standard. A magazine like National Review specializes in making the case for conservative ideas. The Standard's contribution is to assert over and over that Republicans are succeeding, or at least doing better than you think they are. The idea is to buck up your side and encourage them to keep fighting, in order to ward off the self-defeating psychology of losing.
It's unclear to me why the subscribers of that magazine pay money to be the subjects of a disinformation campaign. To be sure, like any stopped clock, sometimes the Standard gets it right. But there's a distinctly Pravda-esque feel to the political coverage that makes back reading an enjoyable experience. With help from Noah Kristula-Green, I pulled together some examples:
Let's understand this, just for starters.
And I know that Nidal Malik Hasan was also crazy. But which suicide bomber, even one inspired by what the president continues to call the "Holy Koran," as if that nomenclature would moderate the hatred of America in the world of Islam, is not crazy? Stark raving crazy, in fact?
(Just like the assassination of Robert Kennedy, to begin at the beginning, was an act of jihad, as well. And Sirhan Sirhan was also nuts.)
The day before President Obama spoke in Madison, Wisconsin, about the pressing need to improve America's teachers, a report was released on the same topic at a conference in Washington's swanky Capitol Hilton. The task force that wrote the report was chaired by Minnesota Governor (and rumored 2012 presidential candidate) Tim Pawlenty and included such education policy heavyweights as New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee. The report's 20 recommendations for improving teacher effectiveness include providing more funding for alternative teacher training and certification routes (like Teach for America), requiring school districts to create teacher evaluations contingent on student achievement, and using those evaluations to help determine teacher salaries and make tenure decisions.
Strikingly, though, the report wasn't endorsed by the full task force. Reasons, according to conference speakers, ranged from a) "there just wasn't time" for all of the members to get their organizations to sign on to the document, to b) it was enough for the full body to have endorsed the "gist" of the report. But it turns out that the schisms on the task force run deeper than the leadership let on. EdWeek reported on Wednesday that Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), one of the nation's largest teachers' unions, and a task force member, has called the report "disrespectful." In a letter to the task force's leadership, she said its work "has focused almost exclusively on how teachers need to change rather than how the system and all its actors need to change."
EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. -- Tuesday's elections were a rebuke to the right wing and a warning to Democrats.
They were also a timely reminder that President Obama needs to tune up his celebrated political organization and find a way to make Americans feel hopeful again.
Earlier today, two key groups--the American Cancer Society and the American Association of Retired Persons--endorsed the House health care reform bill. On a conference call that's just wrapping up now, the American Medical Association (AMA) pledged its support, as well. But it did so with some crucial qualifications.
The AMA made clear that it was endorsing not one but two bills: H.R. 3962, the bill that would expand insurance coverage, reorient the delivery system, etc.; and H.R. 3961, the bill that would eliminate the planned reductions in Medicare physician payments to keep them in line with the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR).
AMA President James J. Rohack explained the group's position thusly:
One of the most frustrating consequences of an Election Day like Tuesday is that it invariably (if fleetingly) transforms moderate politicians with no particular insight into the dynamics of public opinion into all-knowing sages. More to the point, it elevates their perfect-for-every-occasion view of politics, which says that if your party suffers a setback, the reason must be that it was too far to one side of the political spectrum, and so the answer is obviously to move back to the middle. And, of course, "the middle" is almost never a coherent worldview or set of policy preferences, but simply 10 or 25 or 50 percent less than what one side or the other proposes. So, for example, you get stuff like this from Ben Nelson and Olympia Snowe in Politico:
"People need to be saying slow it down and don’t add more to the deficit," Nelson said. "And what have many of us been talking about? We don’t want to see anything added to the deficit unless there’s cost containment." On health care, Nelson said: "Let’s see coverage extended, … but at what cost?’
Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe, the lone Republican to vote for a health care bill, said Tuesday’s results should slow Democrats down on health care — and "certainly gives pause on how you approach things.
Or take this from today's Wall Street Journal:
"What the exit polls showed was real voter fatigue with how crowded the plate is," said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D., Va.). "We need to take a deep breath, step back and clean the plate before we add to it." ...
"I do consider Virginia a bellwether state," said Rep. Gene Taylor of Mississippi, a conservative Democrat. "I would encourage the leadership to get back to the center."
But why would "too liberal" or "too expensive" or "too crowded" be the most plausible reading of what voters said Tuesday? Wouldn't an equally plausible reading be that voters don't think the economy is improving or that Washington is making it better, regardless of where those efforts lie along some dubious ideological spectrum?
For the moderate view of politics to be right, it would have to be the case that the average voter has a well-worked out worldview, and that he or she gets upset when politicians deviate even a couple ticks in either direction along the ideological spectrum. Or it would have to be the case that the average voter has fairly precise, well-thought-out ideas about the "right amount" for Congress or the White House to have "on its plate" at any given moment. Deviate from those preferences, and the voters will rise up to punish you.
