The Great Debate

As Hillary Rodham Clinton finished her last few weeks on the job, after a month of convalescence, how can we assess the secretary of state’s contributions?

The question is worth asking simply because of the job’s importance and its significance for U.S. national security. It is also relevant given Clinton’s unprecedented role in our national life over the last two decades.

She is probably the most politically powerful woman in U.S. history — at least in terms of positions held. She has come closer to being elected president than any other woman. She may well try again, and her record as secretary may be the best way to judge her candidacy for the highest job in the land. So how has she done?

My bottom line is this: Clinton has been a very good secretary – if more solid than spectacular. Pick your cliché or sports metaphor – she is more work horse than show horse, more an indefatigable marathoner (despite the setback last month) than a sprinter.

For someone who almost won the presidency before becoming a subordinate to her rival in his Cabinet, and who was already among the world’s most famous women before taking the job, this is a remarkable testament to her work ethic, her humility and her selflessness. It does not necessarily place her in the top tier of U.S. secretaries of state of all time – but even if not, she is certainly in the very next level.

The stubborn war in Afghanistan, which has spanned a decade and cost more than 2,000 American lives, has now faded to one key question: How many U.S. troops will remain after 2014?

This is the issue that will likely occupy President Barack Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai when they meet at the White House on Friday. Officials are already batting numbers about, ranging from zero to 20,000.

But how many Americans are still paying attention?

For many voters, and those they elect, the war is over. Only brief and irritating interruptions, like the scandal the led to the resignation of CIA director and retired General David Petraeus, serve to remind the public that the United States remains at war. In the presidential campaign, candidates in both parties mentioned the war only in passing. GOP nominee Mitt Romney didn’t even say “Afghanistan” in his convention acceptance speech, while Obama and Vice President Joe Biden referred to the war only to discuss its “responsible end.”

The Republican Party is in danger of reaping what it has sown.

Much has been written about the GOP’s problem with minority voters.  Quite simply, the party has managed to alienate every nonwhite constituency in the nation.

This is not an accidental or sudden phenomenon. Ever since Republicans chose almost 50 years ago to pursue a Southern strategy, to embrace and promote white voters’ opposition to civil rights, the party has been on a path toward self-segregation.

Successive Republican administrations have pursued agendas that included retreating on civil rights enforcement and opposing government programs that increase minority opportunity. That steady progression culminated in Mitt Romney’s disastrous showing among African-American, Latino and Asian voters.

Here is something that Richard Ben Cramer, the enormously gifted writer who died earlier this week, understood: Politicians are often created in the image of their journalistic portrayals, and when reporters impute opportunism or cravenness to them, they may well be inducing those things — as well as undermining public confidence in government. Cramer also understood that a more humane, sympathetic analysis might well lead to more humane public servants — and a deeper faith in government.

This should  have been his legacy, and it would have been a profound one. Except it isn’t. What It Takes, Cramer’s 1,000-page tome that chronicles the 1988 presidential election, showed what reporters could do if they had brilliance, fearlessness, indefatigability and, above all, empathy, and Cramer has received extraordinary praise this week for all these qualities. Particularly the last.

But where he led, few political reporters followed. Cramer was the anti-Maureen Dowd, the man who rejected snark and insiders’ gloat, who subordinated himself to his subjects — who gave politicians the benefit of the doubt.

Mutual funds, according to a recent Vanguard statement, are not “optimal agents to address social change.” I agree. But while a mutual fund may not be the best way to promote sound social policy, when trillions of dollars in mutual fund assets are managed without any social or environmental considerations, they can be a very effective way of promoting broad social harm.

Unlike other national tragedies fueled in part by investment decisions – the BP disaster immediately comes to mind – the Newtown massacre has prompted an important and overdue debate about the role of investment in our society. Your IRA is at the heart of that debate.

We’ve read about how the retirement funds of teachers and other public servants were used by Cerberus, a private equity fund, to create Freedom Group, the largest gun maker in the country. Freedom Group makes the assault weapon that was used to kill children and teachers. Unless you are a participant in a public pension fund, or a very wealthy individual, however, you are probably not invested in any of the private equity firms that own gun makers. But you are most likely invested in a mutual fund, and your fund may own gun stocks.

The hypocrisy over deficits and calls for shared sacrifice can be illustrated with one simple statistic. According to the Institute for Policy Studies, 25 of the most-well-paid chief executives got higher compensation than their companies paid in federal taxes.  There’s a class war on, as Warren Buffett has noted, and his class is winning it.

The drive for austerity, with its attendant manufactured crises, carries with it a host of mini-outrages making this point. Americans learned after the fiscal cliff negotiations ended that the final agreement, ostensibly to pass “tax hikes for the wealthy,” extended huge corporate handouts. These included special breaks for NASCAR, help for Hollywood movie studios, $3 billion a year for General Electric, support for mining and railroad companies, and even a push for electric scooters.

Outrage over this story flamed everywhere, from the floor of the House of Representatives to cable news networks, including ESPN. The anger at these corporate subsidies was justified because breaks like these are a symbol of a budget process designed to shift money and power to people who already have too much of it.

“Tax relief is an achievement for families struggling to enter the middle class,” the president trumpeted, shortly after Congress, by sweeping bipartisan margins and after a bruising battle, had lowered taxes for almost all Americans.  “For hard-working lower income families, we have cut the bottom rate of federal income tax from 15 percent to 10 percent. We doubled the per-child tax credit to $1,000 and made it refundable. Tax relief is compassionate, and it is now on the way.”

Despite a furious counterattack from the opposition, the president had scored a major victory by securing lower tax rates for everyone in the middle class on down.

President Barack Obama last week after narrowly averting the fiscal cliff?  Nope, President George W. Bush in June 2001, signing the first set of his much-sought-after tax cuts. Perhaps the “compassionate” was a giveaway.

The odds are that the extremely close national election wasn’t close at all in the place where you live.

And that’s a problem.

For the past four decades, Americans have been self-segregating into communities where they are increasingly likely to vote with their neighbors in overwhelming majorities. In 1976, only a quarter of voters lived in a county where either Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford won by 20 points or more. By 2008, 46.7 percent of voters lived in one of these landslide counties.

This year, the national margins narrowed still further. But more than half of all voters (52 percent) lived in a county where either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney won by 20 percentage points or more.

President Barack Obama asked Congress for more than $60 billion to help repair and rebuild infrastructure damaged by Hurricane Sandy in the Northeast. The House of Representatives finally voted Friday on a small down payment, roughly 10 percent.

As in the past, engineering experts will likely seek to build in added protections for the specific pieces of the infrastructure that failed in the storm – for example, flooded subway lines or power substations. What they don’t usually address, however, is how to protect networks as a whole.

Ignoring how everything works together is short-sighted. No matter how much money is spent, one part of the system can always go down again. As Sandy demonstrated, a failure at any point can have a cascading effect.

With Lisa Jackson, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, stepping down, President Barack Obama is losing one of the few people left in Washington who was willing to speak up about global warming and to push for significant measures to curb its impact. During her tenure, Ms. Jackson was frequently denounced by GOP members of Congress and all too often reined in by Obama. Despite his and Congress’ failure to pass legislation addressing global warming, Ms. Jackson advanced a regulatory agenda to pick up some of the slack.

She managed to see that fuel efficiency standards will increase by 2025, enact stricter pollution controls that must be met before any construction of new coal-fired power plants, and established EPA’s “endangerment finding,” bringing carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases (GHGs) under the Clean Air Act. Her departure, however, highlights the failings of the Obama administration to address global warming in a significant way. In his second term, the president can change that by pushing to enact a carbon tax.

A carbon tax would place a fee on polluters that emit GHGs like carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. It should be applied at major sources of GHG emissions: coal-fired power plants, petroleum refineries and importers, natural gas processors, and cement, steel, and GHG-intensive chemical plants. This tax would prod us away from dirty fossil fuels and toward clean energy alternatives to avert global warming while raising considerable revenue.