Surprise, Surp-rise, Young People Aren’t Interested in Politics! By Bruce L. R. Smith

Surprise, Surp-rise, Young People Aren’t Interested in Politics!  By Bruce L. R. Smith

Every once in a while, one comes across an idea well-intentioned but so wrong-headed that it takes one’s breath away.  I encountered such a one recently on the webpage of my esteemed former employer, the Brookings Institution, in a blog entry by an earnest non-resident Brookings scholar, Professor Jennifer Lawless of American University.  Readers are encouraged to look up and read the blog on the Brookings website www.Brookings.edu. Blog Entry

The problem, as Lawless explains, is that young people –high school and college students –aren’t interested in running for office these days and would rather spend their lives in a profession other than politics.  These apparently misguided young people perceive politics as a battle ground for egotistical, self-centered liberals and egotistical, self-centered conservatives who posture, advance themselves, and pretend to be doing something for the common good while in fact are merely scoring political points and accomplishing nothing. 

The cure for this parlous condition of the body politic, Lawless and her co-authors assert, is threefold: government should sponsor more programs for youths (like AmeriCorps, Teach for America, Peace Corps, etc.); colleges and universities should refocus admissions standards to reward knowledge of politics; and an app should be on smart phones to give young people information on which elective offices are currently vacant, how to qualify for the ballot, and how to become a candidate. 

A few observations come to mind about both the diagnosis and the remedy.  First, do we really need more brown noses, big men on campus, and other ambitious self-promoters in high schools and colleges?  Of course not, by any measure.  There is no shortage of people who think they know best, want power, and just love to run other people’s lives.  When young people suspect the motives of their peers who want to be the class presidents and teachers’ pets, they display a healthy understanding of human nature.  This skeptical stance, far from endangering, promotes and indeed is the essence of democracy.  As a former activist in student politics, I can attest to the difficulty of getting out the vote and persuading fellow students that this or that proposed campus reform would actually accomplish anything.  A skeptical citizenry is critical for democracy and a useful counter-balance for the ubiquitous and hyperactive would-be big shots.

Should government use taxpayer funds to tempt more young people into running for office?  The thought makes one shudder.  We should have fewer, not more, politicians, fewer half-baked enthusiasts with grand schemes for remaking society.  Politics should be the business of a small number of professionals who are thick-skinned and cynical enough to survive the contempt of their fellow citizens and pragmatic enough to understand that compromise is their main business.  The ultimate task of the politicians is to keep society from blowing apart, a goal that is served by keeping the well-intentioned amateurs as far as possible out of the process.  We have too many do-gooders, blundering amateurs and ideologues, who just know in their guts that they are right and everybody else is wrong.  The misfits, who half-understand the issues, greatly complicate the task of arriving at sound policy.  The few who actually run things should be judged harshly by their fellow citizens who are not wrong but are essentially correct in disparaging politicians as egomaniacs.  But we need those few egomaniacs who really know what they are doing and are strong enough to survive without flattery from sycophants and self-important journalists.

We should aspire to a condition where most of the people are apathetic about politics, most of the time because they are busy building companies and creating jobs, writing novels and scientific papers, raising their families, enjoying the higher things of life, and mostly minding their own business.  Give the real pros, the professional politicians, the scope to make their deals, solve problems, and mind the store.  But they don’t need to be loved and we should come down on them hard when they screw up.  Keep the media clatter within bounds, the hyperactive amateurs marginalized, and the hysterical alarms and the alarmists off to the side.  If people don’t want to vote, that’s fine.  It has become a cliche that our political system is dysfunctional and the nation is suffering from gridlock.  The fact is that the nation is not misgoverned and the critics are quite wrong and have grossly exaggerated the problems.  The dysfunction these days pales in comparison to other periods in American history – for example, the era that produced the Civil War, the Federalist-Jefferson disputes the second George Washington term, the Vietnam era and the late 1960s, the battles between the interventionists and non-interventionists on the eve of WWII, the late Truman Presidency, the governmental paralysis in the last two years of Hoover, just to name a few examples of far worse dysfunction.  Politics, alas, is not and has never been a pleasant business.  It is not made easier by fairy tales that see benign results coming from having government devise incentives to induce more youths to become perpetual candidates for office.

Celebrating the Publication of My New Book on Lincoln Gordon

I recently attended the Conference of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR).  

While at the conference, I had the opportunity to meet with Allison Webster of University Press of Kentucky (UPK); Steve Wrinn, Press Director, and with my colleague Lawrence S. Kaplan.

The Gathering celebrated publication of my new book: Lincoln Gordon: Architect of American Cold War Foreign Policy and Larry Kaplan’s new biography of Senator Arthur Vandenberg, also published by the University Press of Kentucky.  

The UPK publishes over 60 books a year, is a very professional organization, and was a pleasure to work with.

 

Please visit Amazon.com to purchase my new book or learn more.  I believe you can also find Lawrence Kaplin's book on Amazon!

Left to right: Bruce Smith, Allison Webster and Steve Wrinn.  Larry Kaplan not pictured.

How Open Is the Opening to Cuba? By Bruce L. R. Smith

     President Obama’s supporters congratulate him for “going big” in his opening to Cuba, restoring full diplomatic relations and proclaiming his intention to reverse a half century of failed policies.  At first look, this was indeed a bold move, not a mere loosening of a travel restriction (as Obama did when he took office in 2009). But it is a reopening of embassies, releasing of political prisoners, and paving the way for much broader economic relations in telecommunications for a start– and this all done with the help and the blessing of the Pope.  Apparently, eighteen months of secret negotiations were required.       Upon closer examination, there is less here than meets the eye.  The gains are more limited and what has actually changed is not quite what was proclaimed.  Consider, first the stated rationale for Cuba’s interest in the deal.  Raoul Castro has declared that Cuba is interested in a revival and rescue of its morbid economy, but has no intention whatsoever of changing Cuba’s one-party government.  The U.S. for its part has declared that the reopening of embassies requires that American diplomats have full rights to move about the country and speak with anybody they choose, not to be hemmed in and nor restricted in their movements as is currently the case.  This does not augur too well for a meeting of the minds anytime soon.  The first meeting of high-level officials from the two sides, which took place yesterday, January 22, in Havana, unsurprisingly it produced no quick resolution of this issue or other items discussed.
     The Cubans demanded, as conditions for further progress, the immediate lifting of the U.S. embargo against Cuba and the removal of their country from the State Department’s list of countries engaged in terrorism.   The first condition of course cannot be met by unilateral action, but requires action by Congress.  The claimed diplomatic advantage of the Cuban opening within the hemisphere is thus easily negated.  Those who are reflexively anti-American can and surely will declare that Obama’s opening to Cuba is phony because it is meaningless unless accompanied by the immediate lifting of the embargo.  Gaining Congressional support was not made easier by the fact that Obama did not include any Republicans in his secret negotiations, (he did phone Senator Menendez to “inform” him of the pending action but at the eleventh hour and did not even pretend to solicit advice from the Senator or any other Congressional Republican).  
     On the matter of Cuba’s removal from the terror list, the President, for all of the proposed boldness of his move, took no position, suggesting that he would seek a “recommendation” from the State Department and act accordingly.  Removal from the terror list is critically important from Cuba’s point of view because U.S. banks are chary of dealing with any country or bank that has even the remotest connection to terrorist financing.  
     The lifting of the embargo is a very complicated matter.  Before Congress can even consider lifting the embargo, a whole host of statutory requirements must be met relating to human rights, fulfillment of various claims, changes in political representation, plus additional other matters.  On top of this, there is a backlog of unresolved disputes relating to the seizure of properties and assets by Cuba from American investors following Fidel Castro’s seizure of power from the corrupt ancient regime of Fulgencio Batista.  Experience suggests that such disputes usually take years to resolve after protracted litigation and or arbitration.  So if you had any idea of rushing down to your neighborhood tobacco store for Cuban cigars or calling your travel agent for a quick flight to Havana, you can forget about it.  There is a way you can sign up for one of the twelve or so categories of cultural and educational exchange, a process which has been made easier to navigate and the categories have been broadened to expand travel by Americans.  But these are incremental gains and will mostly mean only a modest increase in tourism.
     Another long-term issue likely to emerge in future negotiations is the question of the American Gitmo base.  Some Americans believe that the base has no strategic significance anymore, but this is by no means a universal view and raising the issue would certainly complicate negotiations with the Cubans and inflame political passions here at home.
     All of this suggests that it will be difficult for American firms to operate freely in Cuba anytime soon and that diplomatic relations will move forward only slowly and with many bumps along the road.  There is also a danger that, if official relations are complicated and progress is slow, the shadow network of illicit money and criminal activity which bedeviled Cuban-American relations in the old days will return with a vengeance.  Collaboration between law enforcement might be a desirable first step in building toward a secure long-term diplomatic opening with Cuba.   

The Mayor Finds Himself in Hot Water… A View from Washington!

     New York is a tough town.  Its ballplayers, performers, business moguls, and of course politicians are always under pressure, and often find themselves in real jams. Mayor Bill de Blasio, near the end in his first year in office, has found himself in one of those very difficult positions, and it is partly of his own making.  He ran on an aggressively liberal platform which assailed police tactics in minority communities, as symbolized by the “stop [question] and frisk” practices, and called for reform of the NYPD.  Too many police officers however, de Blasio’s approach was one-sided – he put the blame for strained relations and racial tensions on the police.  

     Citing a lack of police “accountability” in dealings with minority communities, de Blasio sought in particular a change in what he saw as an outmoded concept of punishing minor offenses, a practice implemented by former Mayor Giuliani.  Liberals like de Blasio asserted that the “broken windows” theory of combating crime was responsible for the large-scale incarceration of young African Americans and Hispanics for relatively minor crimes which carried excessive sentences.  There was, and is, need for analysis and reform of many aspects of the criminal justice system, and the Mayor’s arguments were not without merit.   His intentions were good.  He wanted to reduce the racial divide in New York City and in America.  Alas, through his own mistakes, his political inexperience, and circumstances beyond his control, racial tensions in the city are at their worst point in years, and the ripple effects have been felt around the country.  

     What did the Mayor do wrong?   For one thing, his aggressive campaign against the “stop and frisk” tactic of the NYPD misstated what those tactics were.  Cops did not frisk unless, upon questioning, they had reason to do so.  De Blasio ignored the fact that the city’s cops are assigned to neighborhoods on the basis of crime statistics: neighborhoods with statistically high crime rates are assigned more police units.  This often meant more stops and questioning of persons of color since those communities had higher crime rates.  Further de Blasio injected his bi-racial teenage son into the campaign in order to curry favor with minority voters and frequently made the point that he had to caution his son to be wary of and extremely polite to the police if he was ever stopped and questioned.  The implication, though never quite stated so boldly, was that white officers were notorious for the use of excessive force on minority youths. The NYPD is the most diverse in the nation, with a majority of its officers in fact minority.  De Blasio’s campaign charges amounted to a slander on the most professionalized police force in the country and were recognized as such by the police and by anyone except de Blasio’s most fervent supporters on the far left.
      After he became mayor, de Blasio quickly announced that the NYPD would drop the stop and frisk tactics.  Fair enough.  He had run on the pledge to reform the police department and now followed through on his campaign promise.  But he put his wife, who was a well-known advocate and critic of the police, in charge of devising a plan to improve police/community relations.  She then hired, or tried to hire, another advocate to be her deputy.  It turned out that this woman unbeknown to the mayor and his wife had a boyfriend who was a convicted murderer, and that the woman’s teenage son had recently been arrested on a breaking and entering charge.  The leadership of New York City’s police unions raised alarms at the prospect of a mayoral adviser with this background.  The woman finally withdrew as a candidate for the deputy post, but the mayor and his wife issued statements deploring character assassination by the media and smear tactics by the police union leaders.  The Mayor’s reliance on the Reverend Al Sharpton, bête noire of the NYPD for his past incendiary tactics and current tax delinquency, as an adviser confirmed to many in the department the Mayor’s hostility to the police.  The Mayor increased the budget of the NYPD for technology, safety, and training, but he remained unpopular with rank and file officers and the police union leaders.  

     Fast forward to the events of November and December.  Widespread protests and demonstrations erupted In Ferguson, Missouri and elsewhere following the death of a black youth, Michael Brown, at the hands of a white officer.   Protests and demonstrations also erupted the next month in New York City when a grand jury in Staten Island failed to indict a white officer in the choke-hold death in July of Eric Garner, a middle-aged black man, in the process of arrest for selling untaxed cigarettes.  A video of the scene had been widely shown on television and passions in the city ran high.

       Mayor de Blasio defended the rights of peaceful protesters, spoke with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder about a potential federal investigation, and generally viewed his role as that of trying to calm the justifiable outrage against what appeared to be a travesty of justice.   The national attention fed the impression that police forces were under siege from the highest levels of the federal government. The New York City protests, unlike those in Missouri, were generally orderly and did not involve looting and destruction of property, but one protest march got out of hand.  Two police lieutenants were jostled and slightly roughed up by angry protesters.  Many police were enraged when the Mayor appeared to downplay the incident at a press conference when he used the word “allegedly” in response to a reporter’s question about the roughing of the police officers.  This appeared to be a failure to defend his officers against the mob.  

     The next day the situation took a grave turn when a gunman with a long record of arrests and mental health problems shot and killed two officers, execution style, as they sat in their patrol car.  On social media the murderer had declared that his motive in planning to kill two white policemen was to avenge the death of Eric Garner.  The two “white” officers he killed were Officer Ramos, a Hispanic, and Officer Liu, a Chinese American, before the suspect killed himself.  The normally astute Police Commissioner Bill Bratton did not help the situation when he initially in speaking to the press called the killings a “spin-off” from the climate of protests and anger directed against the police.  The Mayor and the Commissioner later appeared at a joint press conference (this time no Al Sharpton) where the Mayor, alternately downcast and testy, scolded the reporters, telling them to “get real” and recognize that they were partly to blame for the crisis by playing up the extremists when most of the protesters were peacefully exercising their constitutional rights.  The Mayor made the suggestions that protests and demonstrations be suspended until after the two officers were laid to rest.  The protesters ignored him.  

     When the Mayor and Commissioner visited the hospital to console the families of the slain officers, police officers turned their backs in a gesture of contempt and disrespect for the Mayor.  The head of the patrolmen’s Benevolent Association declared that the Mayor had blood on his hands.   At the funeral service for Officer Ramos in Queens a few days later, scores of officers outside again turned their backs when the Mayor rose to give his brief speech.  The Mayor, subdued and downcast, seemed to scrunch his 6’6” frame down to the height of the lectern.  The Mayor in general appeared dazed and uncertain of what to do, perhaps concluding that the best thing he could do was to keep a very low profile and allow Commissioner Bratton and community leaders to rescue him and the city.  No one rose to defend the Mayor.  The Democratic politicians acted as if they had never heard of him.  Former Republican Governor Pataki and former Mayor Giuliani piled on and blamed the Democrats from President Obama on down to de Blasio for creating a climate of hatred of the police.  One acquaintance the Mayor turned to for advice told reporters that it was the Mayor’s political inexperience and lack of knowledge of the city’s complex constituencies that had caused his problems – not, perhaps, the most robust defense of the embattled Mayor.  The Mayor’s only friend, it seemed, was Commissioner Bratton.

     New York is a tough town, yes, but it is also a resilient town.  One hopes the Mayor will regain his footing because it is not a good thing for the nation’s leading city to be leaderless.  At the same time one hopes that the Mayor has learned something.  It is not a good idea to charge into an explosive issue on an ideological high horse.  It is a mistake to see things only from one side and to appeal only to one’s base.  There is a reason why politicians are usually cautious, even timid, and waffle on the issues – they always run scared, and properly so.  They instinctively know that the body politic is like some giant slumbering monster which, once aroused, can thrash about and destroy its own habitat and everything in sight with its huge flailing tail.  The politician’s ultimate job to make everybody feel he or she belongs and has a stake in society.   Politicians who are cocksure and cater only to their political bases do not serve that larger end. 

***

Bruce L.R. Smith is a Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy of George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia.  Professor Smith made his career principally at Columbia University in New York City and at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D. C.   He lives in Washington, D. C. with his wife Elise, a health attorney and association executive representing and advising skilled nursing facilities.

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Please watch for Mr. Smith’s forthcoming book-biography of Lincoln Gordon.  It is scheduled for release May 2015.  Please see the following cover page and University of Kentucky Press catalog page. (Pending)

Forthcoming Book on Lincoln Gordon!!! Stay tuned...

For those of you who have asked for more information about my forthcoming book on Lincoln Gordon, I have included some details...

Lincoln Gordon

Architect of Cold War Foreign Policy

Bruce L. R. Smith

After World War II, American statesman and scholar Lincoln Gordon emerged as one of the key players in the reconstruction of Europe. During his long career, Gordon worked as an aide to National Security Adviser Averill Harriman in President Truman’s administration; for President John F. Kennedy as an author of the Alliance for Progress and as an adviser on Latin American policy; and for President Lyndon B. Johnson as assistant secretary of state. Gordon also served as the United States ambassador to Brazil under both Kennedy and Johnson. Outside the political sphere, he  evoted his considerable talents to academia as a professor at Harvard University, as a scholar at the Brookings Institution, and as president at Johns Hopkins University.

In this impressive biography, Bruce L. R. Smith examines Gordon’s substantial contributions to U.S. mobilization during the Second World War, Europe’s postwar economic recovery, the security framework for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and U.S. policy in Latin America. He also highlights the vital efforts of the advisers who helped Gordon plan NATO’s force expansion and implement America’s dominant foreign policy favoring free trade, free markets, and free political institutions.

Smith, who worked with Gordon at the Brookings Institution, explores the statesman-scholar’s virtues as well as his flaws, and his study is strengthened by insights drawn from his personal connection to his subject. Smith adeptly shows how this “wise man” personified both America’s postwar optimism and its dawning realization of its own fallibility during the Vietnam era.

Bruce L. R. Smith is a retired professor of political science at Columbia University and a Brookings Scholar. He is currently affiliated with the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. He is the author or editor of many books, including American Science Policy since World War II, The RAND Corporation, and The Advisers: Scientists in the Policy Process. He lives in Washington, DC.

www.kentuckypress.com  Page 25 in 2015 catalog.

I’m Feeling Tortured by All This Torture Talk...

You can’t turn around these days without running into somebody’s opinion about torture.  Not that this is not a very serious subject or to deny anybody’s right to an opinion, but I’d like to register my own belief that it’s time to blow the whistle on the discussion.  Both the attackers and the defenders are wearing me down.  Yes, some serious missteps and indefensible practices took place and, yes, it’s fruitful at times to acknowledge one’s sins.  But several questions are in order: for one, what is the statute of limitations on public confessions of sin?  Is it useful to continue to deplore and engage in hand-wringing for American atrocities committed in WWII, lynchings in the South, water -boarding by US troops in the Spanish-American War, public hangings in the Wild West, and other shameful episodes in the nation’s past?  One has to weigh the good that can come from public disclosures against the harm that can be done.  What is the good that could come from the Senate torture report?  Not much.  From public shame, Senator Feinstein and others have argued, there is the potential that future behavior might be influenced for the better.  The CIA actions after 9/11, however, have already been thoroughly aired, investigated, and commented upon, and whatever deterrent effect there is likely to be has already been recorded.

On the other side what is the harm that can come from reopening the old wounds and prolonging the discussion?  There is very considerable evidence that serious harm will result.  Relationships with foreign governments and their security services are bound to be affected, and for the worse.  Americans have no discipline and political changes can result in new Administrations disclosing damaging information about past Administrations in order to show themselves in a momentarily favorable light and/or to discredit their political opponents.  Moreover, if you are not going to prosecute officials, and the Justice Department and the Obama Administration, had already decided that CIA officers were not going to be prosecuted, is it fair to continue to pillory them in the media?  There had been a tradition that had survived even the nasty politics of  the recent past of a nonpartisan or bipartisan tradition in national security matters and particularly in the most sensitive aspects of intelligence work.  Putting out a report done by one side of the political spectrum to deplore the mistakes of a previous Administration of the opposite party goes a long way toward undermining that tradition.  The Obama Administration’s mild protests on the timing of the report’s release, while endorsing the release, and the report’s substance and tone, make it clear that fulfilling campaign talking points have trumped the tradition of bipartisanship in national security and intelligence matters.

Consider a homely analogy.  Most Americans can relate to a situation where something unfortunate has happened to the family in the past.  It sounds good to say that the family must acknowledge its mistakes and promise not to repeat them.  But if the family matter is not so clear, and there were extenuating circumstances that help to explain what some family member did, it would not help smooth out matters if one side in the family dispute declared that it was going to call out the other family member(s) on TV or in the newspaper as the best way forward.  Would this be likely to ease or to exacerbate the family crisis?  It does not take great wisdom to see that sometimes the best way to solve a problem or to resolve a family dispute is to drop it.  Time, if given half a chance, will heal all wounds, wound all heels, and generally restore “the mystic chords of memory that unite every hearth and hearthstone across this great land.” (By Abe Lincoln in his 1st Inaugural Speech)
***
Bruce L.R. Smith is a Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy of George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia. Professor Smith made his career principally at Columbia University in New York City and at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D. C. He lives in Washington, D. C. with his wife Elise, a health attorney and association executive representing and advising skilled nursing facilities. Mr. Bruce L. R. Smith has B.A. & M.A. from The University of Minnesota and a Ph.D from Harvard University.

Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

       Reading the Wind-Up Bird resembles a roller-coaster ride, with dips and swoops, dizzying turns, and loss of gravity amid heart-thumping plunges.  The story involves a bland, Hans Castorp-type everyman, Toru Okada, with little or no self-awareness who is increasingly and mysteriously drawn into experiences that are unnatural and surreal.  His wife disappears, he is visited by two strange sisters, a woman who can penetrate his thoughts and phones him offering oral sex, a precocious teen-age neighbor providing avuncular and worldly-wise advice to the naïve Okada, and his corrupt brother-in-law who tries to pressure him to grant a divorce to his wife and who employs the services of a sleazy gangster to that end.  Individual scenes are memorable, the writing is lean and evocative, and the “plot” bristles with sub-plots and twists that carry the reader via flashbacks and epistolary narrative devices through important chapters of contemporary Japanese history. 

       The novel makes for an exhilarating read even if one never quite understands what is happening.  Murakami has a devoted following among Japanese readers who seek a break from Japanese traditions and a deeper understanding of the malaise which seemingly afflicts the country and he also has a strong readership abroad.  Nominated for the Nobel price in literature for 2012 he fell just short but apparently may yet win this coveted recognition for his work.  Had he been from a poor, backward country he might have already won.  But Murtakami is Japanese and Japan usually does not get the underdog vote in international competitions.  Japan is unpopular with many neighboring countries for its refusal to acknowledge its World War II guilt and more recently for its alleged resurgent nationalism.

       How to account for Murakaami’s popularity and critical acclaim abroad and at home while also understanding the negative reactions?  His Japanese identity, or lack of Japanese identity, is a good starting point.  Unlike Japanese authors who celebrate the glories of Japan’s martial tradition, Murakami takes aim at the human rights abuses of Japan’s Manchurian invasion and occupation.  Through the hero’s encounter with a Japanese veteran of WWW II and the Manchurian campaign; the border war with Russia and Mongolia, and internment in a Siberian prison camp, the feckless protagonist Toru Okada learns the horrible truth about Japanese war crimes.  The anti-hero Okada, with no knowledge of history or of much else, is an apt representation of the see-no-evil Japanese public.  Murakami, who was born in 1949 and missed the wartime period, apparently initially learned about Manchuria from his father who served there.  The scenes of he border skirmish between Japan and Russia, the execution of Chinese prisoners, and the killing of zoo animals are the most dramatic in the book.  To his admirers, Murakami’s coming to grips with Japan’s past so memorably and unforgettably signifies his courage by holding the mirror up to the under side of the nation’s past.   

       But wait.  This simple explanation does not quite fit.  The portrayal of the mid-level Japanese soldiers caught up in the tragic events is too nuanced for those who want a more full-throated condemnation of Japanese wartime behavior.  Is there an implication that a few bigwigs, the generals and politicians, are the culprits?  After all it was small elite that made the strategic decisions and not the mid-level soldiers were themselves victims.  The same holds for the Japanese people who were guilty only of patriotism and behaving with the usual fidelity to authority. 

       Moreover the Russian prison camp in Siberia, and the behavior of the thuggish Russian officers/prisoners who run the camp, are far worse than any of the Japanese in Manchuria.  The Russians are, unlike the Japanese soldiers, depicted as one-dimensional villains.  The Mongolian side-kicks to the unsavory Russians are simply monsters.  The chief Mongolian aide to the Russian ruler of the prison camp, for example, specializes in skinning captured prisoners alive.  Americans are painted as being perfectly willing to fire on defenseless women and children on a captured vessel (until halting only because they receive word of the end of the war).  The author scarcely needs to remind readers that it was the Americans who were guilty of the greatest war crime of all by obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Thus Murakami may be seen, for some critics, as pulling his punches and providing a subtle apologia for Japanese atrocities and for failing to acknowledge Japan’s responsibility for starting the war in the first place.

       Murakami’s relation to Japanese history and cultural tradition is a puzzle.  The protagonist Okada is presented as a kind of blank slate; he is a postwar child, has no knowledge of the Japanese past, and for the first part of the novel simply filters and passes on to the reader his innocent impressions of everything he sees and experiences.  What he sees is that the politicians are corrupt and are not to be believed, the big businessmen are sinister and probably linked to organized crime, Japanese youth are aimless and tuned out, and Japanese culture is trashy, shallow, and commercialized.  His country is a mere caricature and reflection of the worst aspects of low brow American culture.  There is no past that is relevant to the hapless anti-hero Okada who has no job, no ambition, and no purpose in life.  He is ignorant of history until he learns about Manchuria. And the lesson he draws from his knowledge is that the past must be cast aside, not drawn on for guidance.  The author seems to say that Japan is a wasteland and a terra incognito, and that his countrymen, like the protagonist, must find their salvation by forging a new identity.  This identity must be an individualist one, a break from the collective identity of the past that stresses loyalty to the group, family cohesion, and a blind willingness to sacrifice for a glorious tradition like the last samurai in the Hollywood movie of a few years ago.  The hero must think for himself, and fight against big business, corrupt politicians, stultifying mass culture, and the deadening hand of tradition.  The anti-hero as the novel progresses begins to turn into he hero.  He is no longer passive; he knows what he wants and what he believes in – and this is his love for his wife.  His relationship to his wife is real, a human connection worth fighting for, and he has a plan, even if it is a long shot, for defeating his enemies.  The attractive characters in The Wind-Up Bird are the loners like the rebellious teenage girl who can’t stand school but has a passion for wig-making.  Or like the small businessman uncle who is something of a family black sheep but who has done well by opening a chain of restaurants (just as Murakami himself opened and ran a bar until he made enough money through his writing to write full-time).  These characters are “authentic” in the way J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield might view them.   

       Murakami artistically is breaking with tradition as well.  Suffering from what Harold Bloom calls the “anxiety of influence,” Murakami rejects everything Japanese: the warrior cult, the No plays, Confucianism and Buddhism, ancestor worship, the Emperor, and the rest.  He is fashioning a more open and more democratic art.  His influences are from the West: a blend of Latin American magic realism, German 1920s surrealism, Anglo-American modernism, and post-modern French structuralism and Lacanian psychiatric influences.  The Wind-Up Bird bristles with references to Western literature, art, and music and has no references to traditional Japanese culture.  Murakami has lived abroad, in the United States notably, and is thoroughly familiar with and apparently comfortable with American culture.  But no sooner have we made such observations that this picture, too, seems oversimplified.  Murakami is something of a patriot in his own way.  He returned to Japan from the U.S. in 1995 because of his desire to help his countrymen deal with one of the destructive earthquakes that bedevil the country and in time to witness the hideous and inexplicable Saran gas episode that killed thousands in the Tokyo subways.  The Wind-Up Bird was published s few years later and can be viewed as Murakami’s effort to help his nation deal with tragic shocks, the shame of the past, economic stagnation, and a general malaise by forging a new consciousness and an ethic based on individual responsibility and human intimacy.  Nor does he succeed in breaking totally from Japanese artistic radiations. The anti-hero Okada moves toward the status of a quiet hero because he is a modern day samurai warrior – in his case wielding a baseball bat rather than a sword.  Toru Okada takes after his unsavory brother-in-law and other enemies with his bat as his weapon.  He symbolically slays the modern dragons of crime, corruption, and crassness in a display of courage worthy of the ancient samurai warriors.  Murakami’s dream-like sequences also evoke shamanistic and mythic elements that appear in the old Japanese morality plays.  His break with his Japanese artistic forbearers is thus not quite as irrevocable and his Westternism is not quite as complete as appears at first glance.

       His evolution as a novelist shows that he will continue to surprise and confound us even as his appeal and his audiences grow.  His most recent book  1Q84 appearing in 2011 sold a million copies within a month of its publication in Japan and English translations followed shortly in England and the U.S. This work, even longer than The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, has many of the same elements – murder, parallel universe, sexually voracious women, cultural critique – but the plot is tighter and the protagonist more self-conscious than the Bird’s Toru Okada.  In between these two novels was Kafka on the Shore (2002) which some critics the greatest of Murakami’s works.  I will take up these other novels in a later blog.  For now I urge readers to take on the exhilarating ride of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. 

                 

Some Good News for Republicans

     For the poor Republican Party, beset lately with so many problems, there comes at last a small ray of good news.  Rep. Steve LaTourette, recently retired after 18 years in Congress representing Ohio’s 4th, has become President and CEO the Republican Main Street Partnership and launched an effort to protect the “good guys” in the Republican Party from primary challenges by the likes of the Club for Growth and other male factors.  LaTourette’s departure from the Congress is certainly not good news but this initiative is a welcome step.  Many moderate Republicans worried about the invasion of the well-healed body snatchers in their primaries now have some help in defending themselves.  The Main Street Partnership promises to come in with cash to help moderates or perhaps we should say center right Republicans to rebut misleading and unfair charges by the well-organized far right activist groups.   The Partnership is going to maintain a high tone and not go around attacking other groups or challengers, snooping in garbage cans for dirt on anybody, or pick fights with other elements of the party.   It will mainly try to say good things about the center right Republicans trying to stay politically alive and neutralize negative ads that can have an outsize influence in some primary battles.

     Karl Rove, not usually viewed as the face of the moderate Republicans, is also reportedly concerned with finding (and funding) Senate candidates who have a chance of winning and discouraging the likes of far right candidates who blew winnable Senate seats in Indiana, Nevada, Delaware, and Missouri after winning in the primary.    This attitude was expressed most pithily by Governor Bobby Jindal in his injunction that we should stop being the “stupid” party.  Of course the Democrats claim that a PR makeover and face lift will not change the underlying realities so long as Republicans cling to their outmoded ideas and remain the party of “no.”  But more than public relations is involved in this host of recent actions.  John Boehner’s quite remarkable feat of leadership in getting his caucus to abandon the debt ceiling focus in favor of a sequester strategy should be appreciated for what it was: a significant shift toward pragmatism.  The switch of House Republicans on immigration is another astounding development.  Hardliners now start by conceding that illegal immigrants now in the country should have legal status and argue only whether this status should include a path to citizenship and, if so, how long the path should be.  They seem willing to concede that significant progress has been made on border enforcement and want better enforcement inside the country and at ports.  A likely compromise is that illegal immigrants  now here will get a path to citizenship but will have to go to the “end of the line” (i.e., meaning in practice that the path will take ten to fifteen years after the backlog of applicants for legal entry is cleared up but the path could be shortened at some future point).

     There is another interesting development in the fight still to unfold over the succession to the Boehner Speakership to take place probably two years hence.  The rumor in Washington a while ago was that Paul Ryan, having bigger fish to fry, would resign his seat after this year’s budget battles and concentrate on a race for the Presidential nomination in 2016.  Now the thinking is that he feels his contribution should be to focus on the “inside” – that is, on the House and his potential role in the future leadership.  He seems to be shaping up as the center right alternative to the far right Eric Cantor.  In this fight I certainly prefer Ryan as a Midwestern pragmatist over the Southern ideologue.       The specter of Hillary Clinton on the Democratic ticket in 2016 is daunting and even Joe Biden would be formidable candidate if Hillary’s health isn't up to the challenge or she chooses not to run.  We have considerable talent and are not to be counted out for 2016 and that of course is the real answer to party splits.  The unity of the Republican Party would be reestablished in a hurry if we could win back the Presidency and then it would the Democrats turn to look fractured.

More on the Fiscal Cliff

       Two events stir me to add to my fiscal cliff ruminations: one the reading of Bob Woodward’s book on the 2011 negotiations The Price of Power  and attending a meeting with my Brookings colleagues on the cliff prospects.  Let me begin with several highlights from the Woodward book which I recommend to anyone who stumbles upon my blog. It is tough reading at times – endless discussions of this meeting and that session, etc. -- but rewarding for the light it casts on the agreement forming the background for the present negotiations over the “cliff.”  A few nuggets from the book:  it is commonly supposed that the Republicans were the “hostage takers” on the debt ceiling and the source of irresponsible threats to de-stabilize the economy, the nation, and the rest of the nonsense.  Actually, Sen. McConnell proposed a scheme in the negations whereby he Senate (and Congress) would vote to surrender power to the President for the purpose of his being able to raise the debt ceiling.  It was a rather complicated scheme and the white House had some doubts it would work.  Here’s what the plan called for: in this one instance Obama could raise the ceiling to whatever he wanted and the Congress would then in the fashion of the old “legislative veto” provisions (I forget whether McConnell made it a one house [Senate only] or two house veto) have no option to vote against the Presidential action.  McConnell thus gave his colleagues the chance to vote against raising the ceiling, but since it would take two-thirds to override the Presidential action the President’s action in raising the ceiling would stand.  The Senate/Congressional vote would amount to nothing other than political cover for the Republicans to vote against it.  At this point Harry Reid rose in wrathful opposition.  He did not spend 24 years as a U.S. Senator to give away his constitutional powers.  He didn’t give a damn what the President said; he would agree only to a two-step process of raising the ceiling, a $1 trillion first step followed by another raise if certain steps were taken in the meanwhile.
       The White House felt outraged at this point.  Reid was giving away the President’s key demand, namely, that the debt ceiling issue be settled and not come up again until after the 2012 election.
       Boehner meanwhile was having some doubts about the possibility of negotiating anything with Obama.  Obama seemed to offer a good deal at first blush; he would go raising Medicare’s age limit to 67 years over a 40 year period, a bit more means testing on Part B, the new CPI index for Social Security and federal civilian and military pensions, and some other steps on the spending side if Boehner would deliver on the $800 billion in taxes (Boehner was offering only tax reform as the vehicle to achieve the increased revenues).  He figure he could deliver his caucus by pointing out to his Republican colleagues that Obama was agreeing to cuts in health spending.  Thus the Dems could be in effect abandoning one of their chief electoral weapons: the familiar Mediscare tactic with which they had been clubbing the republicans on the head for years.  However, after Obama talked seriously to Pelosi and Reid he began to get cold feet on his potential commitments.  Pelosi told the President flatly that he could not agree to Medicare cuts because this would surrender the principal differentiating factors between the two parties: the Democrats’ appeal to the voters to defend their Medicare against the naughty Republicans like Ryan who wanted to voucherize the program.  Obama’s commitments thus turned into vapors and like vapors soon evaporated, leaving behind (so it appeared to Boehner) only a faint odor.
     Then along came another development that shook Boehner’s confidence in the President.  The Gang of Six came out at the worst possible time with their plan which included $1.2 trillion in taxes calculated against a different base but making Boehner’s offer of $800 look picayune in comparison.  To Boehner’s amazement the President rhetorically embraced the Gang of Six proposal, advised by David Pluff that one must not lose the PR game by letting the Gang get favorable headlines.  What in the name of god is Obama doing, thought Boehner and his aides, embracing this silly proposal which was so totally different in every way from what they had been negotiating with the President?  Obama then began pressing Boehner, first by letting an aide forward a trial balloon with a raise in the taxes to $1.2 trillion and then by himself demanding of Boehner that he raise the tax offer because Obama needed this to get Pelosi and Reid on board.  Since Obama was unwilling to stand up to Reid and Pelosi it dawned on Boehner that he might as well negotiate the deal directly with the Senate leadership and forget about Obama.  He concluded that Obama was incapable of or unwilling to negotiate a deal.  I interject here my own observation that Obama’s skills as a negotiator are depicted by Woodward in, shall we put it delicately, in a less than favorably le light.
       The White House is subsequently informed by Reid’s office that they are concluding a deal with Boehner.  Enraged, the President loses his cool, apparently for the first time in his presidency, and blows up at Boehner, accusing him of treachery, etc., and the President then summons the Congressional  leadership (without staff) to come to a key Saturday meeting at the White House to resolve the issues.  Obama opens the meeting by laying out the issues as he sees the.  He is accompanied only by Tim Gaithner who reiterates the dire consequences of default, etc.  Then, amazingly, Harry Reid asks the President to leave the meeting so that he may talk with the Congressional leaders alone.  Obama later tells Bob Woodward that he was happy to do this, that he had no pride of authorship, that he only wanted to solve the problem, etc.  But it is quite clear that Obama was enraged at being cut out of the decision-making process.  The Congressional leaders then in Obama’s absence cut the short-term deal with the Super Committee, sequester, etc. and have a two-step provision on he debt ceiling.  This is essentially what became the compromise which is now being negotiated – that is, it set forth the fiscal cliff.  The one exception was that the President got back into the act to the extent that he achieved his primary objective of pushing off the debt ceiling issue until after the election.  Other than that the whole process was carried out by the Congressional leaders with the President being largely irrelevant.  This is the story of the Woodward book.  There are many interesting details that could be elaborated and twists to the story, but in outline that is the story.
       Now where are we?  The answer is that of course we don’t know.  The kabuki dance is going on and progress may be made.  Unhappily it looks to me that we are uncomfortably close to repeating the same story line as Woodward presents of the 2011 negotiations.  Boehner and Obama are meeting, the tone is positive, and the two sides remain miles apart.  In fact it is worse than 2011.  Obama, having felt humiliated at being cut out of the 2011 negotiations, seems bound to humiliate his enemies this time (and most particularly Boehner and his Republican colleagues).  Obama this time is not even bothering with the vapors.  He is simply saying that since he won the election the Republicans must raise tax rates for the rich (not through tax reform but through actual raising of rates for the high earners).   In return, once the Republicans have actually voted for the raise or clearly agreed to raise the rates for the rich and extend the other bush tax cuts, then he WILL BEGIN TO THINK ABOUT doing something on spending, not actually do anything but to talk about doing something somewhere down the line.  Furthermore he will not specify what such steps might be until the Republicans have done their bit.  When faced with the predictable reaction to this negotiating stance, what does the President do?  Does he redouble his negotiating efforts – no, he goes back on the campaign trail, as if the election never happened.  Boehner is baffled.  This is GroundHog Day; we are going through the 2011 cycle again.   What accounts for this bizarre presidential behavior?  Let’s try to construct the reasoning process that the liberals and the Dems are relying on here as difficult as it might be.  The logic is something like Eric Foner’s criticism of Spielberg’s Lincoln.    The importance of the “insider” maneuvers by Lincoln and his allies were exaggerated; what was more important was the groundswell of public sentiment stirred up by the Seneca Falls ladies, the brave performance of Blacks on the battle field, the energetic actions of the Abolitionists in raising the public’s ire.  The “inside” game is secondary in importance to the outside factors – the will of the people, etc.  Obama thinks he will put the heat on the Republicans who will at last knuckle under and cry “Uncle!”
      The Liberal Mind is a strange and wondrous thing.  Liberals will fight to the death for tolerance; hey will defend your right to express your opinion, even if it is a conservative one.  However they are actually amazed if anyone holds, and dares to express, an opinion that is different from theirs.  Even more amazing to them is the tendency of some of those strange beings, the Conservatives, to insist on having their opinions considered by policy makers.  If only those people would acknowledge that they are 100 percent wrong and agree to accept the fact that the liberals are 100 percent right there would be no problem – agreement could be quickly reached!   Why are they being so stubborn when the liberals and the talking heads agree that the current Republican Party is made up of crazies?  Proof of the insanity of the Republicans is that they now talk “hostage taking” once again on the debt ceiling and they think they have strong leverage against the President when the opinion leaders have decided that the only course for the Republicans is to surrender.  The liberals have become almost hysterical; they just know that those naughty Republicans would like nothing better than to destroy the world economy, ruin the country, and immolate themselves as a political force.
       I would now like to present a more sane view (that is, my view and the view of a few of my conservative colleagues).  The Republicans, and especially the Republicans in the Senate (the departure of Jim DeMint is nothing but an unalloyed blessing for our present purposes) do not consider that the debt ceiling gives them tremendous leverage to take irresponsible positions.  Rather they know that it only gives them a chance to stay in the game and have some voice in policy on the issues that matter, namely, tax reform to promote growth and spending cuts to create fiscal sanity for the future.  If they de-couple the debt ceiling from tax reform and spending cuts they know that nothing will happen on those issues.  They count further that Wall Street will want a solution to our problems and will understand that there will never be a repudiat5iohn of U.S. debts.  Since no deal with Obama seems forthcoming (so many think) we might as well do what was done in 2011: negotiate a deal with Harry Reid that would raise rates on the highest earners, salvage low taxes on capital gains and dividends and probably something on the estate tax, probably provide a temporary fix on the alternative minimum tax, and maybe extend unemployment insurance for a while.  Whether payroll deductions will be extended, the Doc Fix agreed on, and other consequences of the cliff are probably now being quietly negotiated by the Congressional leaders.  There will also be some softening of the defense sequester.  Phase 2 of the deal will leave tax reform, spending cuts, and the debt ceiling to be negotiated by the end of next year, with probably the debt ceiling or some variant of the present fiscal cliff laid out in the Phase 1 short-term agreement as the action-forcing mechanism to ensure that negations go forward on the longer term fiscal issues.
       Will this be enough for Wall Street?  Here I use Wall Street as an abstract noun to denote the whole of world financial markets, the behavior of financial and non-financial firms, and the American consumers.  Wall Street has demonstrated a robust capacity for irrational behavior so we cannot be too confident about the reaction to another short-term deal that defers action on key issues.  So far, however, Wall Street has not gone bonkers over the cliff.  Business firms have gradually started to invest a bit and consumers have shifted away a bit from complete absorption with de-leveraging that has been their wont since the financial crisis.  If the liberals could stop crying “Wolf!” and howling about how dire everything is, and if the conservatives would just shut up, and the public stop listening to the talking heads, we would probably find ourselves not too badly off once we have averted the cliff (as we surely will).  There will always be a deal.  The only question is how good a deal and if the pundits would accept something short of miracles we will probably be able to live with the deal.  Until the next deal which we will also be able to live with until the next deal after that, and so on.  It is in the nature of politics that there will never be a permanent settlement of everything.  There are only partial, proximate and less than fully satisfactory settlements which carry us through this crisis to the next crisis if people can manage to keep their wits.  The only thing that is permanent is death (although I should perhaps acknowledge for my base that there may even be triumph over death – the ancient Greeks said that human beings are superior to the Gods who are immortal because we face and triumph over death and Christians and Jews believe in resurrection).          
         House had some doubts that it would work.  Here’s what it did: Obma could raise the ceiling to whatever he wanted this one instance and the Senate (or both Houses).

Why the Republicans Lost and What to Do About It

    A great deal of nonsense as usual has been said about the election.  The Pundits have gone crazy with their explanations, usually over explaining the result and calling for the most drastic remedies.  Let us start from the proposition that there were “internal” reasons – i.e., those related to the race itself, party organization, conduct of the campaign, etc. – as well as “external” or demographic reasons – those related to broad trends in society, the society, and the Zeitgeist, etc.  Much too much in general has been made of the demographic trends – in particular, the rise of the Hispanics, increasing incidence and prominence of single woman, the triumph of liberal life-style values, economic inequality, etc.  It is asserted that the Republicans are a white, male-dominated, upper-class, snot-nosed bunch of old fogies out of touch with the country.  And the predicable remedies are pronounced, especially by liberals and Democrats (who love to comment on what the Republicans should do to modernize) to the effect that the Republicans are doomed to extinction unless they cease being Republicans and adopt more moderate positions.  Democrats define a moderate position as based on asking oneself what would FDR feel about an issue and what has the New York Times said recently on its editorial pages, and then acting responsibly by apologizing for one’s past beliefs, recanting all apostasy, and embracing the Democratic platform.   And it goes without saying that Republicans should repudiate their base, denounce most of their supporters as hopelessly out of touch, and routinely and ritualistically disavow Rush Limbaugh, Grover Norquist, Ayn Rand, or any other figure disliked by any Democrat.   Of course there is some ambivalence among the Dems on the latter point since many love to have Rush and “shock jocks” around in order to portray them as the authentic voice of the Republican Party.

       Let me concede that the good guys took a thumping in the election.  It does no good to point out that the Republicans won the older vote, married women, white males, came close, etc. and any points of consolation from the election.  A good try does not count in politics.  A loss is a loss and there is no consoling ourselves by the nature of any upside.  We have to understand what went wrong and how we can fashion a strategy to win that does not depend so narrowly on eking out wins in ALL of a limited number of swing states.   I assert that the biggest problems lay with inside factors – that is, with mistakes in the campaign itself.  First our ground game was not good.  The Dems outclassed us in voter contacts, get out the vote, social media, fund raising, tactics, avoidance of big mistakes, and other aspects.  We have to do better and beef up our professionalism in party machinery.  I shy away from condemning our candidate which is very convenient in the wake of a loss.  Romney was the best candidate we had and fought valiantly despite some flaws as a candidate.  The choice of Ryan invited trouble le and this has to be laid at Romany’s feet.   Every one of his advisers advised him against Ryan, largely on tactical grounds of Florida, Mediscare by Dems, etc., but Romney decide3d to go ahead anyway.  Less Romney’s fault and more that of his advisers was the inexplicable failure of letting Obama define Romney as a vulture capitalist in Ohio and other key states very early without answering and counteract ting it.  The result was that by the time we started spending money it was too late.  We could not counteract the impression already firmly fixed that Baine Capital was a bunch of hoodlums, Romney loved to fire people, was a heartless plutocrat, etc. 

       The Axelrod-Pluff-Obama strategy was of course awful and ugly and certainly is not going to make it easier for the second term to be successful.  But it was effective.  It just was a bad year to be running a Wall Streer who would not release his tax returns until way too late.  Romney might have had trouble with the capitalist image so soon after the financial crisis in any event, but he could not help himself by releasing his tax returns earlier.  The first debate was a great success, but is clear in retrospect that we over interpreted it.  Romney, by laying back and being statesmanlike on the theory that voters would admire his restraint, allowed Obama to get away with his despicable aggressive tactics, the rudeness, interruptions, etc.  A more confrontational stance would have, it now appears, been a better tactic since presidential bearing counted for nothing these days.  The Romney message was too single-mindedly economic and stuck to some points that were just dumb.  There was no need to proclaim that everybody was going to get a tax cut.  Joe Sixpack understood in his toes that this was not going to happen, that the danger was of his taxes going up drastically, and wanted more realism in solutions to the debt and jobs crises.

       There is no doubt that some general factors were working against us: the protracted primary battle being a major one.  Romney went too far in the primary battles to defeat opponents who really could not have stopped him.  He adopted extreme positions which made it difficult for him to pivot easily to a general election strategy.  The immigration attack on Perry, the promise to veto the Dream Act, the too rigid stance on immigration, and other stands were unnecessary and counter productive.  A more aggressive critique of Obama’s foreign policy in general should have been part of the strategy.

       I could go on to dissect the campaign but I think you get the drift of my argument.  Now let me turn to the future.  Some general factors are still working against us.  The demographics have to be faced.  It is a no-brainer that we have to do better with Hispanics, and we can in fact do better.  Upward mobility, family values, the American Dream are naturally Republican virtues and values, and can be reclaimed by if we recruit good candidates and give prominent roles to Sen. Rubio, Governor Martinez of New Mexico, and others.  A good candidate at the top of the ticket next time would greatly help the cause, as would vigorous advocacy for appropriate steps on immigration reform in the Congress.  We are not going to be able to avoid a long primary fight next time, nor should we want to.  The party needs an internal battle in which the moderates and more progressive voices have a chance to make themselves heard.  The Democrats will of course declare that we are tearing outselves apart and will shed crocodile tears.  But this is really nothing but a return to the way the party was when I was a boy when my father and his pal Stassen (and then Ike and then Rockefeller and Romney senior) were fighting the Taft wing of the party or when Main Street was fighting Wall Street.  The Republican Party survived those battles and will survive the internal debates that will take place over the next few years.  We will emerge he stronger.

      As to the cultural issues Republicans do not have to abandon their more conservative beliefs and values.  They simply have to be more tolerant and less strident which is what they by nature are.  Most of us do not like the noisy claque of foaming at the mouth extreme voices. When we look ahead we see that we have a very deep bench with a group of outstanding candidates out there for 2016, any one of whom would be a better candidate than unfortunately poor Romney was because he had to try too hard to convince people he was what he was not.  We can be optimistic about our chances even against a Hilary Clinton or Joe Biden.  And one more thing: we have to avoid nominating candidates who blow great chances to win Senate or House seats.  It was self-inflicted missteps that cost us five to six U.S. Senate seats.  Let’s be what a Conservative Party should be – careful, cautious, moderate, intelligent, devoted to nation, strong on defense, open to change but not radical change, respectful of the individual but loyal to the community, and open to the opportunities for new groups to achieve the American Dream.   We will never get a break from the media; the talking heads are locked into their narrative that the Republicans are white, bloated males contemptuous of the little guy and the other tiresome and deep-rooted beliefs of which they are scarcely aware.  We simply have to fight that much harder to get our voices heard and to get any kind of reasonable hearing.  The people instinctively understand this bias and that is why the shock jocks have an audience.  We must have the reasonable voices in our party make the intelligent case against the liberal clichés and the Dems’ failure to address the country’s problems.   The Dems are the limosone liberals, the special interest panderers, the pusillanimous pollsters, the monied moguls, the pretend pals of the poor.   Onward Republicans!   

Obama’s “Light Footprint” Diplomacy

A major innovation of President Obama’s foreign policy is the so-called “low footprint” approach.  Broadly, this means that heavy, conventional military interventions will be downgraded and in their place the U.S will rely increasingly on: first, special forces (e.g., the attack that killed Osama bin Laden), subversion (e.g., computer worm planted in Iranian computers to cause blow-ups of centrifuges enriching uranium dubbed “Olympic games”), and the use of drones to target leaders of terror groups to avert imminent attacks on the U.S. or U.S. forces in theater.  The whole notion is also epitomized in the “leading from behind” strategy employed in Libya which has been proclaimed as a great success and a cogent demonstration of the new approach’s wisdom.  At first glance the idea appears to be grounded in good sense.  We are in a war fatigue mood, the nation wants out of expensive wars that have dragged on, and has no appetite for getting involved in new wars.  A reassertion of diplomacy in the t5aditional sense in place of rushing into military interventions has much to commend it.  Of course diplomacy is preferable to war, and there is no doubt an overdue shift toward stressing the arts of the diplomat in today’s world which seems to have no end of potential and actual crises that could easily lead to military commitments.

     But if Libya is an example of the new approach’s success (a proposition I dispute) the case of Syria illustrates its shortcomings.   Laying back, allowing others to take the lead, waiting for an opportunity to target a bad guy with a drone – in short, being generally passive and reactive but highly aggressive in a narrow anti-terrorist arena – got us nowhere.   Ore more precisely we are arguably worse off than if we had been somewhat more active in the traditional arts of diplomacy, trying to exert our influence openly,  or in supplying arms and assistance to rebel forces in the hope of bringing a decisive end to the situation.  Of course we cannot be sure that the bigger footprint approach would have worked, but we can be pretty sure that the light footprint approach would not work.  Libya, if it was a success, worked only because the geography facilitated the use of U.S. power to destroy conventional troop build-ups in advance of a march on the anti-Gaddafi forces.  Even at that, the effort cost us some $1-$2 billion, and it produced what?  A weak and practically non-existent state that controls only Tripoli and shares power or co-exists with a miscellany of militias that trample on rights, run things their own way in their territories, and generally prevent the country from acting  as a coherent state or functioning economy.   And the rationale for the intervention (the “responsibility to protect” doctrine – in this case protect Tripoli against a boastful Gaddafi threat that was aimed at frightening people not to support rebel forces) in retrospect is a mockery in light of the slaughter in Syria where we have deemed it impossible go protect anybody or anything.

     Let us look specifically at the components of the light footprint strategy.  The use of Special Forces may be desirable and useful in the context of a broader engagement.  But Special Forces cannot be used in all sorts of situations where there is not a major U.S. national interest and the logistical backup that would guarantee success and the safety of the troops.  As David Sanger points out in his new book on Obama’s foreign policy, the President asked his advisers how many troops would be needed to seize and hold Syria’s chemical weapons facilities.  He was told 75,000.  This could not be an operation involving a small number of Special Forces but nothing short of another conventional war (which of course the President was not willing to consider for understandable reasons). 

     Second, the use of the computer virus against Iran’s centrifuges was astonishingly risky for a country whose economy is so dependent on the use of the Internet in banking, transport, energy, etc. and which is at the same time so vulnerable to disruption.  Attacking our information infrastructure would seem an ideal instrument of asymmetric warfare for any country unable or unwilling to challenge us in conventional military terms.  Why should we be the nation that takes the lead in state-sponsored computer subversion when we have so much to lose?  How can we take the lead in trying to get an international convention to protect the Internet when we have acknowledged our own not so clandestine subversion?  I can see how the short-term advantage in persuading the Israelis that Iran can be stopped or slowed down by actions short of a military strike, but we are paying a rather heavy price.  Let the Israelis engage in such subversion themselves or better yet call their bluff and tell them we won’t support any military action while we are still negotiating. 

       Third we come to the use of drones which the Obama Administration, in an astonishing breach of security and good sense, boasted about in the campaign.  The increasing use of drones is alien and odious to the American experience, and has dramatically complicated and worsened relations with Pakistan and seems bound to the same with other allies.  Asserting that there are careful review, including presidential approvals, does not help the situation.  It makes it worse.  Hence I disagree with David Cole’s suggestion in the current issue of The New York Review of Books that the Administration and the Justice Department should lay out a transparent set of criteria for the use of drone and targeted assassinations.  This only furthers the impression that our leaders actually spend their time plotting assassinations.  To the world we are the Evil Empire raining down technological death on third World peoples.  What are we saying – that we have the right to kill anybody, anywhere, anytime, apart from any theater of war?  It does no good to claim that we now only blow up the wife and children and maybe a few close neighbors because our science and technology have made such progress.   

     There are other aspects of the whole problem that need to be addressed, like the transformation of the CIA into a quasi-military agency rather than an intelligence agency.  But I will leave those for a future blog.  Certainly the country needs more focus on diplomacy and fewer military interventions, but let’s drop the nonsense that there is something magical, low cost, and risk-free in pursing a light footprint in the world if we truly want to remain relevant in the world.

-- Bruce L. R. Smith

    

      

My Plan to Avert the Fiscal Cliff

Before I lay out my “fiscal cliff” plan I should explain why I’m resuming the blog.  I am told that Philip Roth has posted a sign on his frig saying “No More Books!” and that he feels enormous relief every time he sees it.  Diane Ravitch, who is slightly younger than I am, has apparently decided to call it quits on big books.  She cheerfully blogs away and says she enjoys it because she doesn’t give a damn who might be offended or object to her remarks.  I have to confess to a similar feeling.  After dashing off (hardly the word—bleeding out through sweat and agony) scholarly tomes for more years than I should admit to I have recommended to friends that I be shot if they catch me starting off on another book project.  I have finished (no doubt much work lies ahead should I manage to get a publisher) a major effort and am totally exhausted.  It is just too much work at my age.  I will see this one through if it kills me – and it may – but I hereby swear with Mr. Roth, “No More Books!”

Feeling thus liberated, I now embark on spelling out how to solve the fiscal cliff.  Notwithstanding the fact that I class myself unapologetically with the fiscal scolds (a favorite Krugman term) the metaphor is really unfortunate.  It is not a cliff, but more like a slope.  This does not take away from the seriousness of the problem but it helps us not panic.  Panic is clearly the strategy that the Obama Admin has relied on – panic or a stampede of the Republicans into accepting more taxes and forgetting about cuts.  It matters from a psychological standpoint to act soon, but there is not going to be a recession because of the cliff even if negotiations drag on for months.  It appears that both sides are not going to negotiate seriously until we actually go over the cliff.  So relax and get used to the idea.  Going over the cliff or sliding down the slope will give new urgency to the process but also at the same time reassure everybody that the sky is not falling.   (Pardon my metaphors!)  What will happen with the cliff/slope?  Initially… not much.  You don’t pay your taxes until April and then you are going to pay at the 2012 rate.  There will be an increase in the withholding on your paycheck but probably not right away.  It will take the IRS a while to issue the new tax tables to employers.  The increase (the end to the decrease decided on last year) in withholding will come into play quickly, but again employers may not immediately jump to the increase/return to status quo ante until the dust settles and the IRS decides it must issue the guidance.  The Pentagon will not immediately cancel any contracts.  Federal employees will not be laid off; though they will certainly be a hiring freeze (I have seen dozens of hiring freezes by this or that agency).  What Wall Street will do is anybody’s guess, but it appears that the drop of 600-700 in the Dow since the summer suggests that Wall Street has anticipated and already reacted to the uncertainty of the cliff.  I don’t want to say that further drops will not occur, but if Wall Street had taken Political Science 1 it wouldn’t be so damned silly and overreact so much.  There will be a deal – there always is – and the politicians will not be as dumb as the editorial writers always declare that they are.  The deal will come but not until the President drops his nonsense and swaggering and gets down to business.  The Republicans are eager to deal.  Prezy has certainly maneuvered the Repubs into a corner, but it boggles the mind to imagine that the Repubs will go for revenues without any actual cuts or even a modest down payment.  The “revenue now but cuts maybe sometime in the future” approach is absurd.

Revenues:  let the income tax rate on the very top go up to the 39% (say, $500k and above but I’d be prepared to cave at $300 if shoved hard).  Cap deductions at $40,000 for all taxpayers.  $50,000 sounds better but won’t raise enough revenue.  State and local governments won’t suffer that much, but charities might but this can’t be avoided if we are serious about the problem.  Deductions include mortgage interest, state and local taxes. Charitable giving, whatever the individual taxpayer wants.  Being above $40 or $50k would mostly hit the top earners.  The mortgage on modest mortgages would still be there and the shock to the real estate industry would, I think, be manageable by the industry.  I believe that we have to go the route of capping deductions because you could not fight every single deduction item by item.  The lobbies/interest would beat you flat.  Some more “means testing” on Part B Medicare would be included in my package, even though there is plenty of means-testing in Part B already!  If you have Social Security at age 67 as is gradually happening, converting Medicare to the same age makes some sense (providing that you are phasing it in over 30 years).  Whether corporate tax changes should be included in this initial “down payment” I’m not sure but the alternative minimum has to be addressed very soon, and inheritance, dividends, capital gains, corporate income very soon, too.

Expenditure cuts:  First, it goes without saying that none of the above will happen unless the accompanying cuts or the down payment are simultaneously agreed to.  The minimum down payments cuts include these; cost of living adjustment for Social Security and federal pensions of the very modest sort that has been fully explicated should be adopted.  It boggles the mind to see a 25 year old as likely to take to the barricades if his or her social security check is $10 or $20 less a month forty years from now that it might be under the current, slightly inflated COLAS under the present formula.  Some down payment cuts in Medicare are in order, including a small rollback of some parts of the Affordable Care Act.  A parsimonious definition by CMS of the minimum package allowed on the exchanges set up buy states.  Some trimming of food stamps (which has gotten out of hand with everybody and his uncle jumping in and getting eligibility even when it is obvious the program wasn’t intended for them).  The down payment must then be supplemented by an ironclad agreement that the House leadership and the Senate leadership will present serious, fleshed out proposals for long-term tax reform and entitlement reform by April as proposed recently by David Brooks.  The dreaded sequester thus will still loom over the scene and will return – for real, this time – at the end of 2013 if tax and entitlement reform is not enacted by the fall of 2013.  Reporters who declare that the deal is a fake, a phony, should be sent to Gitmo, and anyone using the metaphor “kicking the can” should be “keel-hauled” for abuse of language.