Columnist.
American presidents have greater leeway on foreign policy than on domestic issues. Just see how President Obama is forging ahead to an agreement with Iran opposed by large majorities in Congress and among voters. A president's personal predilections and core assumptions can have much more of an effect on his foreign policy than on domestic issues. You can draw a straight line from Obama's 2008 judgment that Iraq was a "stupid" war to the decisions that have led to the mess we see there today. So it's useful for voters to get as much insight as possible during campaigns about a potential president's thinking on foreign policy. Unfortunately, they didn't get much from the "announcement" speeches this past week of two candidates with prominent political pedigrees, Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton.
Lyndon Johnson used to say that some of his colleagues were so politically inept they couldn't find their posteriors — actually, he used a coarser word — with both hands. Last week Barack Obama showed that, as a legislative strategist, he belongs in that category. It's a given that he can't achieve most of his legislative goals with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress. But on trade promotion authority — legislation to require up-or-down approval without amendments of trade agreements — he has fumbled even though, as demonstrated on roll calls, his position is supported by a supermajority in the Senate and a majority in the House. TPA is necessary for successful completion of Obama's Trans-Pacific Partnership and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations now skillfully conducted by U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman. Other nations won't reach agreement if Congress can pass amendments requiring further concessions.
Another election, another surprise. Actually, two elections, in two countries last weekend, with surprisingly pleasant surprises. And in two very large countries: Turkey (population 82 million) and Mexico (119 million), both very important to the United States. In the runup to the Turkish election, speculation in English-speaking publications centered on whether President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AKP party would get a large enough majority in the parliament to amend the constitution without a popular referendum. The AKP, usually described as mildly Islamist, has been in power since 2002. In some respects it has compiled a record that compares favorably with those of the secularist party coalitions that came before. The AKP liberalized the economy, to the point that its vigorous economic growth made Turkey's bid for membership in the European Union seem plausible. Erdogan also pursued rapprochement with the nation's Kurdish minority.
"Despite everything," the often interesting analyst Jamelle Bouie writes in Slate — "everything" includes "the email controversy, foreign donors and the Clinton Foundation" — "Hillary is in good shape." Good enough to leave her party "still positioned for victory." Bouie is writing in response to the ABC News/Washington Post and CNN/ORC polls released last week, which show Hillary Clinton's favorable/unfavorable numbers plunging. ABC/WaPo puts them at 45-49 percent negative, the lowest since April 2008. CNN/ORC puts them at an almost identical 46-50 percent negative, the lowest since March 2003. The most significant thing about these results is that Clinton evokes favorable feelings from less than 50 percent of respondents. Bouie is right to say that it is unrealistic to expect Clinton to be as favorably regarded as she was when she held the relatively unpolitical office of secretary of state. But it's a stretch to say that a candidate with 100 percent substantive recognition but less than 50 percent favorables is "positioned for victory." Such a candidate could win, especially if her opponent has exploitable flaws. But there is a nontrivial possibility she will lose.
Are we seeing a reversal of the 20-year decline in violent crime in America? A new nationwide crime wave? Heather Mac Donald fears we are, and as a premier advocate and analyst of the policing strategy pioneered by Rudy Giuliani in New York City and copied and adapted throughout the country, she is to be taken seriously. And the statistics she presented in an article in last weekend's Wall Street Journal are truly alarming. Gun violence is up 60 percent in Baltimore so far this year compared to 2014. Homicides are up 180 percent in Milwaukee, 25 percent in St. Louis, 32 percent in Atlanta and 13 percent in New York in the same period. Why is this happening? Mac Donald writes, "The most plausible explanation of the current surge in lawlessness is the intense agitation against American police departments over the past nine months."
Is there any way to reverse the trend to ever more intrusive, bossy government? Things have gotten to such a pass, argues Charles Murray, that only civil disobedience might — might — work. But the chances are good enough, he says, that he's written a book about it: "By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission." Murray has a track record of making seemingly outlandish proposals that turn out to be widely accepted public policy. His 1984 book "Losing Ground" recommended the radical step of abolishing all welfare payments. A dozen years later, the federal welfare reform act took a long step in that direction. Murray was prompted to write "By the People," he says, when a friend who owns a small business was confronted by OSHA inspectors and had an experience similar to one recounted in Philip Howard's "The Death of Common Sense."
American colleges and universities, long thought to be the glory of the nation, are in more than a little trouble. I've written before of their shameful practices — the racial quotas and preferences at selective schools (Harvard is being sued by Asian-American organizations), the kangaroo courts that try students accused of rape and sexual assault without legal representation or presumption of innocence, and speech codes that make campuses the least rather than the most free venues in American society. In following these policies, the burgeoning phalanxes of university and college administrators must systematically lie, insisting against all the evidence that they are racially nondiscriminatory, devoted to due process and upholders of free speech. The resulting intellectual corruption would have been understood by George Orwell. Alas, even the great strengths of our colleges and universities are threatening to become weaknesses. Sometimes you can get too much of a good thing.
Over the past year, I've been reading books inspired by the centenary of World War I, a war with horrific casualties painful to contemplate. What helps in comprehending the scale of the slaughter is a book by one of Bill Gates' favorite authors, the Canadian academic Vaclav Smil, "Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact." Smil leads the reader through the invention and development of electricity, oil production and distribution, the automobile, steelmaking, the telephone, the airplane and the production of synthetic ammonia — to his mind the most important because without it agriculture couldn't feed the world's 6 billion people.
Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992 by running as a different kind of Democrat from previous nominees. Hillary Clinton, Anne Gearan of The Washington Post reports, is hoping to win the presidency in 2016 by running as the same kind of Democrat as the current incumbent. There's a certain logic in that. President Obama did win twice, while the five pre-Clinton Democratic nominees lost five of the six previous elections. But maybe it's too logical. There's also magic to presidential elections, something no arithmetic formula can capture. It's not clear that a 69-year-old Hillary Clinton in 2016 can inspire the enthusiasm that the 47-year-old Obama did in 2008. Camp Clinton's assumption is that their candidate can count on and expand Obama's "coalition of the ascendant" (The Atlantic's Ronald Brownstein's term). In particular, "non-whites" are an inevitably increasing share of the electorate, and Clinton strategists expect that share to grow from 28 percent in 2012 to 31 percent next year.
This spring it seems as if there have been two-point-something Republican presidential candidacy announcements per week. And, since she made her own announcement April 12, Hillary Clinton has answered an average of about two-point-something questions from the press each week. Those (imprecise) statistics illustrate the asymmetrical nature of the presidential race. One party has so many candidates that media sponsors can't figure out how to get them all in a presidential debate. The other has one candidate who attends events with hand-picked audiences and has little to say about anything. One solution for the Republican debate problem is to adapt something like the practice in the recent British election, where party leaders were questioned separately. Perhaps four hour-long debates, each with four candidates picked by lots.
"The world may have a polling problem." That's the headline on a blogpost by Nate Silver, the wunderkind founder of FiveThirthyEight. It was posted on 9:54 ET the night of May 7, as the counting in the British election was continuing in the small hours of May 8 UK Time. That was an hour after the result in the constituency of Nuneaton made it clear that all the pre-election polls were wrong. Nuneaton, in the Midlands just east of Birmingham, was No. 28 on a list of 42 marginal two-party contests. Projections based on pre-election polls were that Labour would win 35 of these 42 seats. Instead, Conservatives won 34 of them. Nationally, the pre-election polls predicted that Conservatives would win about 280 seats, barely ahead of Labour and far short of a 326-seat majority. The exit poll pegged them at 316. They ended up winning 331.
Conservatives Beat Labour — and the Polls
Skeptics about democracy in the 18th and 19th centuries argued that the enfranchised masses would use their votes to seize the property of the relatively few rich. What could be more natural? But it hasn't happened, in this country or abroad, to anything like the extent that those would-be Cassandras feared. Nonetheless, we continue to hear calls for economic redistribution, the clinical term for public policies transferring money from the relatively few rich to the much more numerous non-rich. We also hear cries of frustration from advocates of such polices. The latest example is Thomas Edsall, the longtime Washington Post reporter now writing for the New York Times. Unlike most other liberal reporters, who are optimistic cheerleaders for their team, Edsall has long been alert to signs of liberalism's weakness.
Some of Hillary Clinton's defenders have taken to saying that voters shouldn't pay attention to the latest Clinton scandals — the gushing of often undisclosed millions to the Clintons and their organizations by characters seeking official favors — because the charges are just one more in a long series: Whitewater, the Rose law firm billing records, the Buddhist temple fundraising, the Lippo Group. So, the theory goes, because the Clintons have been accused of so many scandalous doings before, people shouldn't be concerned now about Secretary Clinton's actions that helped certain donors turn over 20 percent of U.S. uranium reserves to a state-run Russian company.
Next week, Britain votes in its first general election in five years. Some aspects of its politics will be familiar to Americans. Polls show voters are dissatisfied with politicians of both parties, cynical about whether they will keep their promises and closely divided between two major parties, which have been in existence for more than 100 years. But there are differences as well, in contrast to decades when British and American politics seemed to move in tandem — the 1980s of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the 1990s of Bill Clinton's New Democrats and Tony Blair's New Labour. The most vivid difference is that while American party politics is increasingly polarized, British party politics is increasingly fragmented. Americans, even if they like to say they're politically independent, increasingly vote faithfully for one party or the other. Many don't think kindly of those who vote the other way.
Like spring, bipartisanship is busting out all over. Even more so maybe: Washington in a time of alleged global warming is suffering through a chilly, wet springtime, but bipartisanship is sprouting up like gangbusters. Exhibit A is the Corker-Cardin legislation, passed unanimously in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, providing for limited congressional review of negotiations with Iran over its nuclear weapons program. Exhibit B is the legislation combating human trafficking, passed unanimously by the Senate last Wednesday. Exhibit C is the elimination of the annual "doc fix," engineered by Speaker John Boehner and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. These legislative achievements came despite great partisan differences. Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker, R-Tenn., worked out a deal with ranking Democrat Ben Cardin, D-Md., that overcame many Senate Democrats' reluctance to buck the Obama administration on this issue. Obama withdrew his veto threat in the face of the committee's unanimous vote.
It was sort of inevitable that on his first day of campaigning as an announced candidate for president earlier this month, Rand Paul would be asked whether he supported a ban on abortions in cases of rape or incest. Reporters have been asking Republican candidates that question ever since 2012, when the Missouri Republican Senate candidate said he supported such a ban and added that pregnancies were unlikely in cases of "legitimate rape." But Paul's reply wasn't what the reporter expected. "Why don't we ask the (Democratic National Committee) is it OK to kill a seven-pound baby in the uterus? You go back and go ask (DNC Chair) Debbie Wasserman Schultz if she's OK with killing a seven-pound baby that's just not born yet.
"I would bet on globalization slowly being in abeyance," tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel said in a video interview with George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen. "I think with the benefit of hindsight, we will realize that 2007 was not just the peak year of the finance boom, but also the peak year of globalization, like maybe 1913." It's a tantalizing thought, and Thiel is well worth a listen. He is the co-founder of PayPal and the first outside investor in Facebook, selling his initial $500,000 investment eight years later for $1 billion. His record for spotting future trends and flexion points is impressive. His reference to 1913 was surely meant to be — and should be — chilling. That was the last full year before the outbreak of World War I, a conflict in which about 16 million people died. In its wake, Communists took over Russia and Hitler took over Germany. The war made the world safe not for democracy, as Woodrow Wilson had hoped, but for totalitarianism.
Presidents are inevitably shaped by the circumstances in which they campaign for — and come into — office. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt called for "bold, persistent experimentation" and followed through once in office. Had Roosevelt run in another year, or had there been no Great Depression, he would have campaigned and governed differently. The same can be said, to varying degrees, of the presidents who won open-seat contests since, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, the two George Bushes and Barack Obama, and of those who unseated incumbents, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. The Republicans who have announced their candidacies so far — Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio — have similarly framed their appeals in contemporary context. That's made easier by the fact that none was in Congress when Barack Obama was first elected in 2008. We can expect something similar from other Republicans.
Two weeks ago, Ted Cruz announced his candidacy for president at Liberty University, and last week, Rand Paul announced at the Galt House hotel in Louisville, Kentucky. Marco Rubio is expected to announce this week at the Freedom Tower in Miami. Others will follow. So what have we learned about the race for the Republican nomination for president so far? 1.) Nobody is running away with it. In no national poll of Republican primary voters this year has any one of the dozen or so candidates tested received more than 20 percent of the vote. And only twice has any candidate received more than 20 percent in the multiple polls conducted in the four early states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.
