Columnist.
Is the tide turning against President Obama's purported nuclear weapons deal with Iran? One sign that the answer is yes is the devastating opinion article in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal by former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz. The architect of Richard Nixon's opening to China and the partner of Ronald Reagan in his negotiations with the Soviet Union are diplomatic in their criticisms. They pay passing tribute to their successor John Kerry's "persistence, patience and ingenuity." But they have many disturbing questions -- I count 16 question marks in the article -- about the deal. Certainly it falls far short of what Obama himself cited as minimum requirements as recently as December 2013. The Fordow underground facility will not be eliminated; the heavy water Arak reactor won't be closed down; and Iran will be allowed thousands of centrifuges unnecessary for any peaceful nuclear power program.
It's springtime, and the Census Bureau has released its population estimates for counties and metropolitan areas as of July 1, 2014. Initial analysis has focused on year-to-year movements or changes since the 2010 Census -- subjects worthy of attention. But it's also interesting to take a longer look, to see where population has been booming over the 14 years since 2000, one-seventh of the 21st century. The headline here is that growth has been concentrated in relatively few large metropolitan areas. Overall, there are 52 metro areas as currently defined by the government (except that I conflate Los Angeles-Riverside and San Francisco-San Jose, which seem to me to flow together) with populations over 1 million. Four have crossed that mark since 2000 -- Raleigh, Salt Lake City, Grand Rapids and Tucson.
There has been a great ruckus about Indiana's recently passed religious freedom law. Some, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, see it as endorsing anti-gay bigotry. Democratic Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy has banned state employees from traveling to Indiana, even though Connecticut has a similar law even more favorable to claims of religious objectors. Perhaps he should ban state employees from remaining inside Connecticut. The Indiana law is substantially identical to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed by Congress by a near-unanimous vote in 1993 and signed with brio by Bill Clinton. It was a response to a Supreme Court decision upholding an Oregon drug law against members of the Native American Church who had claimed their religion requires drug use.
There are still nearly two years left in Barack Obama's presidency, but historians looking back on his record in foreign policy will surely identify one costly error: his refusal to follow through on the implied threat in stating that the Syrian regime's use of chemical weapons would be a "red line." That statement was made in a press conference on Monday, Aug. 20, 2012. The president was not scheduled to appear; press secretary Jay Carney said, "Looks like there's a surprise guest here." After fielding questions on other topics (Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin, Mitt Romney's attack ads and tax returns, friendly fire deaths in Afghanistan) Obama responded to NBC's Chuck Todd's question on whether he envisioned using U.S. military to keep Syria's chemical weapons in safekeeping.
Our kids, at least many of them, are not doing very well. The reason, writes Harvard professor Robert Putnam in his just-published "Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis," is the "two-tier pattern of family structure" that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s and continues to prevail today. Starting in the late 1960s, rates of divorce, unmarried births and single parenthood rose sharply among all segments of society. About a decade later, they fell and leveled off among the college-educated, who almost entirely raise their kids in Ozzie-and-Harriet style families today (except that Mom usually works outside the home).
Rahm Emanuel heads into a runoff April 7 in his bid for a second term as mayor of Chicago. He's the favorite going in, having won 46 percent in the Feb. 24 first round against longtime local officeholder Chuy Garcia's 34 percent and topping 50 percent in recent polls. Emanuel, President Obama's first White House chief of staff and architect of the Democrats' 2006 takeover of the House, is politically astute, energetic and profane. Given all that, it's surprising that his support is down from the 55 percent he won in the first round in February 2011. And it's interesting that his strongest support comes from gentry liberals: high-income, high-education whites. In February, he won absolute majorities in only eight of Chicago's 50 wards, six on the Lakefront running north from the Loop almost to the city limits and two just inland.
"Firing up America" is the cover line on the March 20 issue of The Economist, heralding a 16-page special report on America's Latinos. Its tone is resolutely upbeat -- perhaps a bit too much so. "America is lucky to have millions of energetic young people filling its schools with kids who will eventually pay taxes and fund pensions and health care for the old," The Economist writes. "Like other immigrants, they talk a lot about the American Dream. By that they mean the baby boomers' hopes of home ownership, a college education and upward mobility." Unfortunately, it's not clear how many young Hispanics will achieve those elements of the American dream or whether they'll provide quite as bounteous a source of funding for Social Security and Medicare as The Economist's cheery summary suggests.
In her brief press conference at the United Nations, Hillary Clinton led off with a denunciation of the letter to Iranian leaders signed by 47 of the 54 Republican senators. This was in line with Democratic talking points -- a sign that the former secretary of state was, perhaps a bit nervously, taking care to curry favor with the Obama administration. Clinton's criticism was more muted than that of many Democrats, administration spokesmen and the president himself. Democrats encouraged supporters around the country to sign an online petition calling the letter "treason." The letter in question, spearheaded by freshman Tom Cotton, simply pointed out that any agreement signed by President Obama but not approved by Congress would not be binding on the next president.
The controversy over Hillary Clinton's emails and her unconvincing press conference at the United Nations have gotten many Democrats and others thinking the unthinkable: Clinton may not be the Democrats' 2016 nominee for president. And it has many asking the question -- scary for Democrats -- of who else could be. It's not a strong field. Vice President Joe Biden is 72 and has low poll ratings. Elizabeth Warren inspires the Democratic left, but says she's not running -- perhaps for fear of exposure of her dubious claim, when seeking prestigious law school jobs, of Cherokee ancestry. Others are even less likely. Bernie Sanders, age 73, is a self-described socialist. The interesting Jim Webb is out of sync with an increasingly leftist party. Martin O'Malley couldn't get his lieutenant governor elected to succeed him in a 62 percent Obama state.
On Wednesday the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in King v. Burwell, the case challenging the IRS's decision to pay subsidies to lower-income health insurance buyers in states with federal insurance exchanges -- even though the Obamacare legislation authorizes subsidies only in states with exchanges "established by the state." The Obama administration is thus in the uncomfortable position of arguing that the president's signature law says what it doesn't say. Nevertheless, initial analyses of the oral argument suggest the government might win. The four Democratic-appointed judges seemed determined to advance arguments that, if you look at the statute as a whole, Congress wanted to pay subsidies to lots of people, even if it didn't say so. A similar argument was made with considerable invective in a dissent in an identical case by D.C. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, a Democratic-appointed judge who otherwise during a long career encouraged consensus and civility in a once-rancorous court.
If anyone had any doubts that most members of Congress oppose the Obama administration's proposed nuclear deal with Iran, they can put them aside after viewing the response to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech before Congress Tuesday. Fifty-some Democratic members chose not to attend. Joe Biden arranged to be out of town, and Barack Obama let it be known that he didn't even have time to watch on television. But the House chamber was packed, the galleries were filled and Netanyahu was interrupted multiple times not only with applause but boisterous cheers. In negotiations with Iran, continued beyond two previously proclaimed deadlines, Obama has dropped demands that Iran disassemble centrifuges needed to produce nuclear weapons material. And he has proposed a 10-year time limit on the deal.
"Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus," wrote Robert Kagan in "Of Paradise and Power," published in 2003, just as the United States went into Iraq. Americans, he wrote, see themselves in "an anarchic Hobbesian world," where security and a liberal order depend on military might, while Europe is "moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and co-operation." A dozen years later, Europeans and not a few Americans have been asking how well Mars has been working out for America. But Americans and an increasing number of Europeans should also be asking -- when they think enough about it to ask -- how Venus is working out for Europe. Not so well, is the obvious answer. If America's economic growth has been sluggishness, with high unemployment and withdrawal from the work force, most of Europe hasn't been growing at all, with unemployment, especially among the young, remaining perpetually high in much of the continent.
In reflecting on relations between the United States and China, Henry Kissinger in his 2011 book, "On China," notes that since he and Richard Nixon ventured to Beijing more than 40 years ago, "Eight American presidents and four generations of Chinese leaders have managed this delicate relationship in an astonishingly consistent manner, considering the difference in starting points." Kissinger diplomatically avoids saying that almost every presidential candidate over the years has campaigned against the Nixon-Kissinger policy and is perhaps taking pride in the fact that every president has continued it. Forty-plus years is a long time for a democracy to have maintained the same controversial policy.
Like it or not, the 2016 presidential race is now well under way. Republican candidates are flocking to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, while Hillary Clinton, in-between $200,000 speeches at universities, is reported to be in seclusion developing her economic policies. It's easy to get overwhelmed by minutiae, but sometimes a twist of events turns out to be important, even 12 months away from the first caucuses and primaries. And of course, always keep in mind that most minutiae turn out to be trivial. Amid all this, it's important to keep in mind changes in the broader political environment -- changes which could make this electoral cycle different in some non-trivial way from the small number of electoral cycles in the recent past. I see two broad developments which could make 2016 different.
Reckless disregard. It's a phrase in legal writing that means "gross negligence without concern for danger to others." And it's a phrase that characterizes much of the attitude toward law of an administration headed by a man sometimes described as a constitutional scholar. The most recent case in point is the decision by federal district judge Andrew Hanen in Texas enjoining the operation of Barack Obama's order barring prosecution of something like 4 million illegal immigrants. The administration has a plausible legal argument: the president is ordering immigration authorities to exercise discretion, just as a prosecutor does not bring all possible indictments. In his 123-page opinion Judge Hanen disagrees. "The DHS cannot reasonably claim that, under a general delegation to establish enforcement priorities, it can establish a blanket policy of non-enforcement that also awards legal presence and benefits to otherwise removable aliens."
Do Republicans have a realistic chance to win the next presidential election? Some analysts suggest the answer is no. They argue that there is a 240-electoral-vote "blue wall" of 18 states and D.C. that have gone Democratic in the last six presidential elections. A Democratic nominee needs only 30 more electoral votes to win the presidency, they note accurately. A Republican nominee, they suggest, has little chance of breaking through the blue wall. He (or she) would have to win 270 of the 298 other electoral votes.
"We will extend a hand if you are unwilling to unclench your fist," President Obama proclaimed in his inaugural address in January 2009. He characterized those to whom this was addressed in negative terms, but the implication was that this president, unlike his predecessor, would be willing to negotiate with and make concessions to unfriendly nations. It is a promise he has striven to keep, with Russia initially and Cuba more recently, but most of all to the Islamic Republic of Iran. The hand has been extended, more than once. But has the fist come unclenched? That question has become increasingly uncomfortable and pressing as negotiations over nuclear weapons drag on. In a 9,000-word article in Mosaic magazine, former Bush staffer Michael Doran makes a powerful case that the answer is no -- and that "a grand bargain with Iran" has been and remains the central goal of Obama's foreign policy.
John Judis, co-author of the book "The Emerging Democratic Majority," now says in an article in National Journal that that majority has disappeared. His title: "The Emerging Republican Advantage." The original book, published in the Republican year of 2002, forecast accurately the groups that would make up the Democratic majority coalition that emerged in the 2006 and 2008 elections: blacks, Hispanics, gentry liberals, single women, young voters. But as Judis writes now, that coalition has come apart. That's partly because of diminished support from millennials and Hispanics, but mostly because of additional white working-class defections and erosion among suburbanites unhappy with higher government spending and taxes.
Can a single speech at an Iowa political event change the course of a presidential nomination race? Maybe. It actually has happened. Barack Obama's November 2007 speech at a Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Des Moines is generally credited with giving him a lift toward winning the caucuses there two months later and putting him on the path to the presidency. Perhaps it happened again, ten months earlier in the 2016 cycle, when Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker spoke January 24 at the Freedom Summit sponsored by Citizens United and Congressman Steve King in Des Moines.
Word comes that Barack Obama's budget will, not surprisingly, call for ending the sequester spending limits now in effect. That's not surprising. White House aides proposed the sequester, but Obama thought it wouldn't go into effect because Republicans couldn't accept its sharp limits on defense spending. But with voters recoiling against foreign military involvement, they could and did. At the time, Keynesian economists predicted that the sequester -- "austerity" -- would squelch economic growth. And they predicted that Republicans' failure to continue extending unemployment benefits beyond 26 weeks would result in mass misery.
