The Great Debate

Republicans could join Obama on same-sex marriage

Sally Kohn

May 9, 2012 17:19 EDT

In finally evolving to support marriage equality, President Obama has not only placed himself firmly on the right side of history with respect to an issue of fundamental rights and justice but he has also thrown down the gauntlet for Republicans, especially his presumed challenger, Mitt Romney.

In his comments to ABC News, the president said his attitude toward gay marriage has been shaped over time by voters and members of his own staff “who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together” – who are clearly in love. In other words, the president let the human reality around him shape his personal views and will now lead accordingly – a stark contrast, say, with Mitt Romney, who seems to have little grasp of the struggles and experiences of actual voters and instead rotates his political viewpoints as often as he rotates the cars on his vehicle elevator. In President Obama’s “evolution,” America saw a leader who is not afraid to be wrong and not afraid to change his mind. It’s refreshing.

And now it’s the Republicans’ turn. As Fox News anchor Shepard Smith suggested in reporting the president’s shift, Republicans are “on the wrong side of history.” Indeed. But they have plenty of time to make amends. Republicans should be ashamed enough that theirs is the party that stood in the way of interracial marriage and civil rights. Is that really a legacy the GOP wants to continue into the 21st century? It seems to me the GOP has a choice between courting the open-minded next generation of voters, or continuing to be marred by scandals in which anti-gay Republican after anti-gay Republican is embarrassingly outed and shamed. Apparently this is a tough choice for the GOP, which would rather keep implicitly firing up bigotry than stand firm for equality.

In our exceptionally and often disgustingly hyper-partisan political environment, it can be difficult to remember that political decisions affect real people – and that the politicians who make those decisions are people, too. People can make mistakes. People can change. The same goes for presidents. I believe the president genuinely did evolve on this issue. Sure, it’s easy to be cynical that the same Obama who has been conflict-averse since day one of his administration was merely letting his opinion on gay marriage sail with the winds of political pressure. As the New York Times editorialized, the president “dampening the enthusiasm of allies without gaining the support of equality’s opponents [is] not an unfamiliar place for this president to be, unfortunately.” Unfortunate but accurate. But he deserves our praise now for coming out on the right side of marriage equality and having the decency to call his shift a shift rather than maneuver like Romney, who plainly flip-flops on issues like gay marriage for political gain while trying to feign consistency. Not only should the gay community (including gay Republicans) be thoroughly fed up with being political pawns, but voters in general should be fed up with politicians who refuse to do what’s right and merely, cautiously do what they think is popular.

The great leaders in history were not the ones who did what was popular, but those who did what was difficult – yet ultimately right. In standing up for marriage equality, President Obama showed that he has the capacity to be that kind of leader. Here’s hoping Republicans will follow his lead.

PHOTO: President Barack Obama gestures during the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies (APAICS) 18th annual gala dinner in Washington, May 8, 2012. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas

The real reason Romney is struggling with women voters

Amanda Marcotte

May 9, 2012 10:18 EDT

Back in February, things started to look dire for the Romney campaign’s ability to attract female voters. Every day brought another story about Republican attacks on reproductive rights: attacks on insurance coverage for contraception, transvaginal probes, all-male panels called in Congress to discuss contraception, attacks on Planned Parenthood’s funding, and the candidate himself increasingly afraid to say a positive word about contraception when asked directly in the debates. A gender gap opened up between the candidates in the polls, with Obama outpacing Romney with women by 19 points. The Romney campaign responded by trying to change the subject, to jobs and the economy. But if Romney wants to close the gender gap, he should rethink that strategy. After all, the polling data suggests that his stance on economic issues – specifically the size of the safety net and amount of economic support the government provides to citizens – is what’s really hurting him with female voters.

The real war between the sexes may not be over feminism or sex so much as whether or not our tax dollars should go to social spending. Research conducted by Pew in October 2011 showed women support a strong, activist government in much larger numbers than men. On the question of whether the government should offer more services, women said yes by 9 more percentage points than men. The gender gap on social spending remained when pollsters asked about specific interest groups. Women wanted more spending on the elderly than did men by 11 percentage points, more spending on children by 10 percentage points and more spending on the poor by 9 percentage points.

Female voters respond much more strongly than male voters to government providing pragmatic solutions and real-world support for ordinary citizens, which helps explain why women flock to Obama and to the Democrats in general. In fact, with college-educated white voters, the gender differences are nothing short of astounding. In this group, female voters prefer Obama 60 to 40, and male voters prefer Romney 57 to 39.

As the lingering downturn puts economic issues front and center in the election, a ballooning gender gap was entirely predictable. Voters cite healthcare and economic issues as their top concerns, and with all the discussion of the student loan crisis of late, that will likely become part of the larger concerns about jobs and the economy. Knowing this, Romney wants to keep talking about these issues.

Support for healthcare reform remains low, at 43 percent, but as the public learns more about what the Affordable Health Care Act provides, the polling numbers have been creeping up a bit. With female voters, the uptick has been swift, with 47 percent of female voters supporting the new law in late March, 10 percentage points up from November. Student loan debt is another issue where women lean more to the left than men. In a recent Daily Kos/SEIU poll conducted by Public Policy Polling, more women than men – by 6 percentage points – supported legislation to keep student loan rates low, a policy that, because of congressional Republicans’ protest, voters strongly associate with Democrats, not Republicans.

Not that reproductive health issues don’t matter to female voters, but women voters have a more expansive view of what meaningful contraception policy looks like. They don’t just want the government to protect the legal right to use contraception; they also want it to enact policies that make sure birth control is affordable for all women, regardless of income. Fifty-five percent of women cite government contraception policy as an important issue for them, compared with 35 percent of men, according to Gallup. By requiring insurance companies to cover contraception and by protecting Planned Parenthood’s funding, the Obama administration appealed to female voters’ preference for a government that offers services as well as ensures reproductive rights.

What happened to ‘Yes we can’?

Don Tapscott

May 4, 2012 13:01 EDT

At this pivotal moment in the presidential race, President Barack Obama and his re-election team need to focus on a key question that could influence the outcome of this year’s election:

How do they get the “we” back?

Good question. We all remember how Obama broke new ground in the 2008 campaign by using social media as a powerful political tool. Obama’s campaign created an expansive Internet platform, MyBarackObama.com, that gave supporters tools to organize themselves, create communities, raise money and induce people not only to vote but to actively support the Obama campaign. What emerged was an unprecedented force, 13 million supporters connected to one another over the Internet, all driving toward one goal, the election of Obama.

When they chanted “Yes we can,” it wasn’t just a message of hope for the future – it was a confirmation statement of collective power. They weren’t waiting to be told what to do; they were actively engaged, calling friends to come to events, learn what was at stake, contribute ideas, and help out in some way. The power of “we” was awesome to behold. The “we” not only raised hope for people but also unprecedented sums of money for the old-fashioned campaign on the ground.

But this time, “Yes we can” has been replaced by a new modus operandi for the Obama campaign. It’s “We know you.”

The Democrats are investing heavily in what’s called Big Data to give them significant new insights into the everyday behavior of each one of their supporters. Big Data allows companies, or political campaigns, to probe and analyze information about you – your friends, your shopping habits, what type of events you go to and when, and what issues you care about. With this information, they can presumably be more accurate in sending messages out over email or in identifying the trigger points that send you to events and get you to donate money.

But whatever happened to the power of the people? Whatever happened to the “we”? We haven’t heard about it since the 2008 victory. “They built the largest online community in the history of the presidency,” says Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Media, which tracks the intersection of technology and politics. “But then they stopped talking to them and engaging them” – that is, until they called in recently with a pitch for money.

Larry Summers is playing economic Jeopardy

Glenn Hubbard

Apr 27, 2012 12:09 EDT

Editor’s note: This op-ed was originally published at the Financial Times in response to the recent piece by Lawrence Summers for Reuters. It has been republished, verbatim, with the FT‘s permission.

Larry Summers’ considerable intellect suggests that he would be an excellent contestant on the popular game show Jeopardy. Of course, on the show, the question offered by the contestant must match the answer on the board. Summers and I disagree on the answer that matches the question “What is President Obama’s budget?” Let’s see why.

I asked two questions in an op-ed in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal. (Neither question was addressed by Mr Summers, or in the simultaneous parallel critiques offered on the airwaves by US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and former Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Austan Goolsbee). The first question was whether the tax increases on high-income individuals proposed by President Obama (the Buffett rule, higher taxes on dividends and capital gains, a higher top marginal rate, and so on) raised enough revenue to materially offset the country’s large budget gap or higher federal spending under President Obama. The answer, using revenue estimates from the Treasury Department and spending estimates from the President’s budget is ‘No’. The second question was what that spending growth implied for future tax rates. That is, if federal spending as a share of gross domestic product was to increase permanently as the president proposes, by how much would taxes need to rise? Answer: a lot and for everyone. This simple thought experiment presumes that we will not ratify permanently larger deficits.

Without addressing these questions, Mr Summers proposes a different one. President Obama’s budget is supposedly fiscally sound because the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated that the budget would stabilise federal debt as a share of GDP for a short while. Yet, let’s look at what the CBO said. First, while the CBO shows the debt-to-GDP ratio stabilizing for a period of time – at an uncomfortably high level – in the budget window, it is not stable in the long run. Second and more importantly, in its April 20, 2012 report, the same CBO that Summers cites so selectively observed that the permanent deficits in the President’s budget would reduce the level of economic activity. By CBO’s estimate, under the President’s proposals, the CBO estimates for the 2018-2022 period, that the nation’s real output would be between 0.5 and 2.2 per cent lower compared to what would occur under current law. This adverse effect would grow in the future, as deficits continue to mount.

The President’s budget has met with little success in Congress. The 2013 budget was voted down in the House of Representatives, 414-0. The Senate did not bring the 2013 budget to the floor, though the 2012 budget was voted down in the Senate, 97-0.

And Mr Romney? The Romney budget proposes to reduce federal spending as a share of GDP to 20 per cent (its pre-financial-crisis, long-term average level) by 2016. It is ironic that the administration has criticised Mr Romney for specific cuts (for example, block granting the Medicaid program), while Mr Summers now argues the plan is not specific. Mr Romney is also the first candidate to propose specific ways of slowing the growth of Social Security and Medicare, a subject not mentioned by the president. And Mr Romney’s call for fundamental tax reform – reducing marginal tax rates accompanied by reducing tax expenditures to be revenue-neutral and distributionally-neutralcaptures the spirit of the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson commission, which was both appointed and ignored by President Obama.

In a ‘Final Jeopardy’ round, if the answer is long-term fiscal sustainability without large, across-the-board tax increases, the question cannot be “What is President Obama’s budget?”. There are important debates to be had over policy – Mr Summers is right that this is a “very consequential election”. But we first must make sure that we agree on math. Fortunately, the concept that permanently higher spending eventually requires taxes to match is not a controversial one to most Americans. And, at the levels of higher spending proposed by President Obama, higher taxes on the well-to-do won’t fix the gap.

Obama’s power grab at the Pentagon

Michael Hastings

Jan 10, 2012 16:10 EST

President Barack Obama’s decision last week to cut the defense budget by $487 billion over the next 10 years was met with cries of derision from his critics (“inexcusable,” said GOP front-runner Mitt Romney) and shrugs of acceptance from his supporters. The reduction’s two headlines: 1. One hundred thousand troops are being chopped from the Marine Corps and Army; 2. The entire U.S. foreign policy focus will begin to shift from the Near East to the Far East (anxieties about China having replaced—or at least settled alongside—our permanently ingrained fears of Middle Eastern terror). The cuts themselves, though, are less significant as fiscal policy than as a statement about President Obama’s relationship with the Pentagon: Barack is taking it over.

That President Obama wasn’t really in charge of the Defense Department might come as something of a shock. He is, after all, the commander in chief. But considering the size of the nation’s defense apparatus, it shouldn’t. The Pentagon has become the 51st state—America’s largest bureaucracy, employing three times more people than the population of Vermont and Wyoming combined. Its capital is the Five-Sided Puzzle Palace, as my journalist friends fondly call it, where 23,000 work daily. Its other residents are the 3.2 million military, intelligence and civilian personnel who live inside its borderless confines around the globe. And since the attacks of September 11th, the influence of the Pentagon’s constituency has grown exponentially, its budget increasing from $295 billion to $549 billion, sucking up some 54 percent of federal tax dollars.

The Pentagon has found plenty of ways to spend all that cash. In 2011, the DoD blew $20.2 billion on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan, equivalent to the entire NASA budget. There are more members of the U.S. military bands—and more sailors on a single aircraft carrier—than in the State Department’s entire foreign service. Up close, the largesse of the Pentagon is hard to miss as well: When top generals visit a country overseas, they often travel in their own private jets, with an entourage of dozens. Top diplomats fly commercial, business–or first-class, if they’re lucky. (Meanwhile, in Foggy Bottom, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton forbade business-class travel for State officials traveling to Afghanistan in 2010, citing budgetary concerns, department officials have told me privately.)

The Pentagon’s unprecedented power and influence turned it into a fierce rival of the White House. And so when President Obama crossed the Potomac last Friday Thursday, he was on a mission to reclaim enemy territory. In an unusual move, he made the budget announcement from within the Pentagon itself. It was something of a triumph that he chose to do it there. Upon arriving in Washington three years ago, Obama had a very different reception from the brass. The building was populated by Republicans. The last three defense secretaries had been with the GOP, and the rank and file were still supporters of the previous administration. They were heavily invested in the Iraq War—a war Obama had called “dumb.” At one of his first meetings in the Pentagon in January 2009, as I recount in my new book The Operators, he met General Stanley McChrystal, who would later confide to his staff that Obama appeared “uncomfortable.” A senior official at the meeting described the president as “intimidated by the crowd.” Months after the meeting, the Pentagon’s leadership would take advantage of this perceived weakness, pushing the president to escalate the war in Afghanistan and tripling the scope of the conflict.

The tension between the president and his generals reached its climax in June 2010 in the weeks after I published a Rolling Stone story exposing the contempt the military leadership had for their civilian counterparts. The president fired McChrystal and replaced him with General David Petraeus (tying Petraeus to the fate of the doomed mission, an association that Petraeus had wanted to avoid, according to McChrystal). Within the next year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates would retire as well (but not before Obama twice overruled his advice—on Libya and the Bin Laden raid) and was replaced by Democratic ally Leon Panetta. Petraeus came home from Kabul in June 2011, and was quickly defrocked and installed at the CIA (preventing the popular general’s potential and oft-rumored run for the presidency, another outcome the White House wanted to avoid). When Petraeus pushed to move troops to eastern Afghanistan, rather than bringing them home, Obama overruled him, prompting General John Allen (the man there now) to admit the president was no longer following the military’s advice. Either by accident or by design, the young president had neutered his formidable opposition. The celebrity generals were gone, a friendly Defense Secretary was in and a string of what were perceived as foreign policy successes had been accomplished.

There were other signs of the president’s new confidence. Tucked into Obama’s defense strategy—which he unveiled the same day as the cuts–was another not-so-subtle rebuke of the military’s much beloved counterinsurgency doctrine, which accounted for much of the $1.2 trillion poured into Iraq and Afghanistan. The new defense strategy called for “limited counterinsurgency”—a concept akin to being “slightly pregnant,” as Wired’s Spencer Ackerman observed. Keeping a reduced counterinsurgency initiative was a sop to the brass who had built their careers on the past decade of war, but not a convincing one. It was a stronger signal that the true lesson of the past decade was to not get involved in nation building debacles. “For the Army’s four stars to suggest Americans should treat the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan as a rich source of lessons for future war is tantamount to insisting the 1915 Gallipoli Campaign or the 1920 Sunday shoot-up of Irish civilians by British Soldiers at Croke Park in Dublin were successes,” retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor told me in an email. “A smaller defense budget is not only inevitable; it’s a national economic necessity.”  There’s even a possibility that President Obama might double the size of the cuts, taking out a total of $1 trillion. It seems he’s no longer intimidated by the crowd.

Now that the White House has the political power to control its military moves, the question is: Can the administration pull it off in 2012 and beyond? The Pentagon and the president may want to keep the focus on China over the next decade, but there’s going to be serious pressure to get drawn back into other misadventures in the Middle East and Central Asia. Our relationship with Pakistan sometimes feels as if we’re one Times Square bomber away from a serious military retaliation against Islamabad. We’ll have to avoid going to war with Iran, a prospect that, frighteningly, most Republican candidates seem to be rooting for.

from David Rohde:

Yes, we’re creating jobs, but how’s the pay?

David Rohde

Jan 5, 2012 17:50 EST

Update: The December job numbers released this morning continued the same trend described in yesterday’s column. Of the 200,000 new jobs created last month, 78,000 – or nearly 40 percent -- were in transportation, warehousing and retail, sectors known for low pay and seasonal hiring. In a far more positive sign, manufacturing gained 23,000 workers in December after four months of little change. A vast expansion of that trend would benefit the middle class tremendously.

WASHINGTON -- Between now and November, middle class Americans are going to hear an enormous amount of bragging about job creation.

Mitt Romney will tout his role in the creation of Staples, The Sports Authority and Domino's, three firms that he says created 100,000 jobs. Barack Obama will say 2.9 million jobs have been created since March 2010, and highlight a surge of 140,000 new private sector jobs in November.

The central question for middle class Americans, however, is: What quality of job is being created? The November job surge, for example, occurred primarily in retail, leisure and hospitality, sectors known for low wages. The other high-growth areas were professional services and health care, where higher education is a central determinant of income. Manufacturing and construction, one of the few areas left in the American economy where members of the middle class without elite educational pedigrees can find strong wages, were moribund. The following chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics breaks down the numbers.

In a rare moment of bipartisan agreement, Republicans and Democrats both recognize the problem. After years of Democratic politicians complaining about a lack of social mobility for Americans, The New York Times reported this morning that Republican candidates are complaining about the problem as well.

Presidential candidate and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum warned this fall that movement “up into the middle income is actually greater, the mobility in Europe, than it is in America,” according to The Times. Wisconsin Congressman Paul D. Ryan, a leading House conservative, recently wrote that “mobility from the very bottom up” is “where the United States lags behind.”

from Paul Smalera:

How Obama wins the election: the economy, stupid, and everything else

Paul Smalera

Dec 9, 2011 11:43 EST

Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, and the entire Republican presidential field before them, have enjoyed painting Barack Obama as a European-style socialist, an apologizer, an appeaser, a president who is ceding America’s place in the world. Their stump speeches and debate soundbites seem to always end with some variety of the phrase, “when I’m your president, I’ll make America great again.” It would seem the nation is hungry for that kind of leadership; after all, polls now say that Obama’s job approval ratings are worse than Carter’s at the same point in his term. The game clock would seem to be running down on his re-election hopes. But what if it turns out we’ve been reading the scoreboard wrong, and Team Obama already has the lead? What if, by the time Americans get to vote, less than a year from now, America is already great again?

Coming off the heels of a nasty recession and horrible intertwined crises in banking, housing and economic confidence, every decision President Obama and his team made on the country’s way forward has come under intense scrutiny. Inevitably, the left has called some decisions, like the smaller-than-hoped-for size of his stimulus bill, weak sauce. The right has decried everything this administration did, as with health care reform, as lurching us towards socialism. Even Rockefeller Republicans have changed their spots in order to make libertarian arguments, as when Mitt Romney argued in the New York Times that the auto-industry bailout was wrong and Detroit should have been allowed to go broke.

One shouldn’t feel bad for Obama -- this kind of scrutiny comes with the job, after all. But the criticism his administration has endured from all sides has seemed particularly craven, perhaps because the stakes have been so very high these past few years. And yet, the political capital invested in his centrist, negotiated policies are now paying dividends. Perhaps Bill Clinton was a smoother operator, but it’s beginning to look a lot like Obama’s triangulation of policy, politics and the press is working, and that may deliver him to a political comeback and a 1996-style election victory.

Take the economy: Unemployment numbers are still bad, but they are improving, reaching levels not seen since the very start of the crisis. GDP growth has been anemic but it long ago stopped contracting, as it was when Obama first took office, thanks to effects of the global financial crisis and US credit crunch. Asset management firm BlackRock, meanwhile, predicts that GDP growth will increase in the last quarter, hitting the 3% mark that puts the economy beyond “treading water” territory into real growth that companies large and small will invest in, both in terms of equipment and real estate upgrades, and new hiring. Macroeconomic Advisors puts the figure at 3.7%.

The GOP would love to challenge Obama on foreign policy, but here he is nearly unimpeachable. He’s steadfastly refused to commit U.S. resources to overseas adventures, resisting the “nation-building” that candidate George W. Bush had promised to not engage in. He corrected the Bush-era excesses by pulling out of Iraq and announcing a timetable to withdraw from Afghanistan. If a president John McCain had used drone strikes as much as Obama did, Republicans everywhere would be crowing about the president’s use of “smart power”  in the War on Terror.

As Todd Purdum recently explained in Vanity Fair, in an article about George Kennan and his disillusionment with our country’s military-driven growth and global-policeman interventionist foreign policy stance, there should never have been anything inevitable about the U.S. jumping into global hot spots just because it could. Obama is perhaps the only president in the last fifty years to successfully resist committing huge numbers of American lives and treasure to an overseas engagement. With that accomplishment, he joins only Dwight Eisenhower, who ended the Korean War, if we go back a little further. And yet, when asked Thursday at a press conference if he was engaging in a policy of appeasement with Iran, he smartly suggested that the reporter “ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 out of 30 top al-Qaida leaders who have been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement. Or whoever is left out there, ask them about that.” The GOP may try to pin Obama on foreign policy, but when he starts defending his record in such stark terms, it’s pretty easy to see how this is a losing fight.

If the economy rebounds even partly, and his foreign policy continues to be effective, what can the Republicans pin on Obama? The birth certificate is public and the country has grown comfortable, or at least used to, seeing him on the world stage. The “otherness” that plagued him during the early days of his presidency has been all but eradicated. The incumbent advantage will begin to manifest itself as the GOP nominee struggles to present a vision for America that differs significantly from where we already are. With social issues always being marginalized in general elections (and with Rick Perry proving even the GOP primary season is barely hospitable to his anti-gay TV spots), it’s becoming clear that no credible alternative narrative to the Obama era is going to emerge from this Republican party or its Tea Party wing.

from Ian Bremmer:

Romney’s foreign policy: Reagan redux

Ian Bremmer

Oct 13, 2011 11:55 EDT

By Ian Bremmer The views expressed are his own.

After yet another GOP debate where foreign policy took a near-total backseat to economic and domestic policy, Mitt Romney is in the catbird seat for the nomination. He even locked up the endorsement of Tea Party AND Republican machine favorite, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Romney’s only problem: it’s October 2011. Not one primary has yet taken place. Romney will have to return to his foreign policy platform to expand it, should he be fortunate enough to make it to the general election. And based on the speech he gave at The Citadel, we can already see that Mitt Romney intends to return to the American exceptionalism of the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush eras.

For Romney, as for many politicians of both parties in decades past, the United States is not just a big and powerful country. Rather, it is the only country in the world that deserves superpower status. What’s unfortunate for Mitt and his all-star, Bush-heavy foreign policy team is that, these days, that line of thinking is more nostalgic than realistic. (By the way, though Romney was almost bombastic at times, calling Iran’s leaders “suicidal fanatics,” his actual policies are unlikely to reflect or adopt that tone -- at least not with his foreign policy team as constituted now.) The idea of the U.S. as the leader of the free world is at a post-WWII nadir. However, that’s not because some other country, like China, has risen to fill the vacuum. No, the fault is wholly our own.

In fact, right now there’s a global debate about whether the U.S. really deserves its superpower mantle, given the political and economic issues of recent years that have unquestionably eroded its leadership position. It’s helpful to compare the two camps:

The exceptionalist camp believes that America’s pole position comes from more than its economic and political power-- that it comes from our set of values and worldviews, which no other global power possesses. These types of thinkers believe that no matter how powerful, for example, China, becomes, it can never truly take up the role of global leader, because its policies are fundamentally incompatible with the Western world’s.

Those of us who traveled in the Soviet Union prior to its collapse or in Eastern Europe soon afterwards, saw that dissidents and newly liberated peoples there thought about the U.S. in a different way, because America stood for a set of ideas that represented the gold standard of what free people could aspire to achieve. The non-exceptionalist camp believes less in the U.S. as the most influential country in the world, seeing that influence as having seriously eroded of late. Specifically, the events of the 2000 election, in which the Supreme Court took a vote divided among party lines to place George W. Bush into office, is seen by many as the beginning of the end of the era of U.S. infallibility abroad.

In trying to channel Reagan, Romney is also trying to link Obama to an era of economic and political malaise, to paint him as a modern-day Carter. But Romney is missing the very real toll on U.S global prestige in the last decade and its serious implications for foreign policy. It started with the 2000 election and the erosion of the U.S. as a political gold standard, but with the problems of Enron and Worldcom in the middle of the decade, and then the financial crisis’s roots in the U.S. financial system, America’s reputation as the gold standard of finance also began to crumble. In other words, global leaders aren’t paying as much mind to the Obama administration not because of Obama, but because Obama represents a diminished United States, one that can’t be trusted. This is ubiquitous — and currently playing out between the US and EU, where Timothy Geithner was recently rebuffed by Europe’s finance ministers when he tried to tell them what to do at a meeting in Poland. The world seems a little sick of the idea that America knows best, precisely because recently, it very visibly demonstrated that it does not.

Washington’s long con

Maureen Tkacik

Sep 23, 2011 15:34 EDT

By Maureen Tkacik The opinions expressed are her own.

There’s a scene in Ray Nagin’s Hurricane Katrina memoir from the Monday night after the storm in which twenty or thirty mysterious security guards, toting three guns apiece, suddenly descend upon the bombed out Hyatt city officials are using as a command center and commence measuring perimeters, laying down wires and barking orders. “We’re here to protect the mayor!” their apparent leader proclaims. “Everyone else leave!”

Nagin watches, “hallucination-like”, as his two preposterously outmanned bodyguards give the guards their best “Oh, hell no” glares, then politely asks the guards: “Who are you guys, and who sent you?” He has well-founded suspicions they are Blackwater mercenaries hired by the local business community, but the leader won’t divulge anything, so he and his staffers just keep asking the same questions of every guard they can corner, until the entire team suddenly vanishes en masse, “Ninja-like, as quickly and quietly as they arrived.”

Of the unnervingly frequent Bush Administration flashbacks I suffered reading Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington and the Education of a President, Nagin’s staredown of the elite hired guns is the one Obama never manages to repeat.

Instead the whole saga plays out like a more articulate slow-motion rehash of a memorable passage from an earlier Suskind book, in which an earlier inexperienced president in the afterglow of a crisis-fueled electoral victory listens to his economic advisers plot the next six months of tax breaks and “incentive package” announcements and finally asks, “What are we doing on compassion?”

(Silence.)

But Bush was a quicker study than his successor. By the end of Bush’s 2002 meeting with his economic advisers he has mastered the narrative they are concocting: the “spin” that the economy is bad is not “credible” enough to warrant compassion, but it is saddled with uncertainty—a malaise he identifies on his very own without cue as resulting from the twin ills of “SEC overreach” and the threat of Saddam Hussein’s continued rule in Iraq. By contrast, it takes 355 pages for Obama to complete a parallel metamorphosis, from compassion-infused campaigner to unprompted producer of his own brand of Beltway antilogic, by which he informs his advisers in the fall of 2009 he has learned to stop worrying about unemployment rate, since its historical magnitude is merely a rosy indicator of “productivity gains in the economy.”

Why Obama needs a primary challenge

Nicholas Wapshott

Sep 22, 2011 12:56 EDT

By Nicholas Wapshott The opinions expressed are his own.

There is talk in the air of a Democratic challenge to Obama. Since the Tea Party won the battle of the debt ceiling, it has been solid bad news for the president, and his party is wondering whether he is capable – or even genuinely wants – a second term. It is all very well being the world’s coolest guy, but, when you are leader of a party losing rock solid safe seats and alienating the very independent voters who decide who lives in the White House, you may be  leaving it a bit late to turn the tide. In the latest teasing McClatchy-Maris poll, Obama is both facing defeat — Americans say they will vote against him by 49 percent to 36, with 52 percent to 38 predicting he will lose — but he would beat every GOP candidate currently on offer.

No sooner had James Carville shouted “Panic!” about the state of drift in the West Wing, and demanded that “a lot” of heads roll, than Al Gore’s nemesis, Ralph Nader, announced he was championing a Democratic primary challenge to Obama from half a dozen candidates, though Nader is not even a registered Democrat. According to the Washington Times, an unlikely bellwether of liberal thinking, “More than 45 Democrats are supporting the move, and the candidates will be experts in fields ranging from poverty to the military.”

Among the mavericks named to lead this progressive revolt are the Princeton professor who starred in The Matrix Reloaded movie, Cornel West, the Zen Buddhist priest and actor Peter Coyote, the singer of Anchorage, Michelle Shocked, and the Democrats’ answer to William F. Buckley Jr., Gore Vidal. Asked whether he would be a stalking horse, the usually immodest kamikaze presidential wannabe Dennis Kucinich said he would decline the chance to stand himself, but said, “I think he should [face a Democratic challenger]. It would make him a better president.”

It may be tricky to find a suitable candidate, let alone a raft of them, to take on Obama. Those who challenge incumbents, such as Ted Kennedy against Jimmy Carter and Pat Buchanan against George H. W. Bush, end up as popular as a ringing cell phone in a Renée Fleming aria at the Met. No one with serious ambitions to succeed Obama, in victory or defeat, would risk the opprobrium that daring to strike the first blow brings, even when, as Bloomberg reports, one in three Democrats say they would welcome a contest.

But would a Democratic primary race, as Kucinich suggests, make Obama a better president? Quite likely. To regain his lost popularity, Obama must first shore up his base. Primaries would shift the national conversation from Republican debate territory, where each candidate takes it in turn to out-Hayek the others, to Obama’s home terrain: jobs and the economy; the economy and jobs.

Democrats feel the president has not been passionate enough about jobs, nor angry enough at those content to let the economy drift for the next 12 months, with all the damage that would do to employment and businesses big and small, rather than do a deal. It is hard to remember now how Obama last time round fired up parts of the Democratic constituency that traditionally don’t even register to vote. Perhaps a contest would revive his old pugilistic persona.