Columnist.
There were two extraordinary disclosures in Thursday's testimony of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey before the Senate Armed Services Committee. One is that there was no communication between them and Barack Obama or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the seven hours of Sept. 11, 2012, when Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were attacked and murdered in Benghazi. This is a vivid contrast with those photos we've seen of the president and his leading advisers watching the video of the attack on Osama bin Laden.
The House Republicans, in serious trouble with public opinion as they blinked facing the "fiscal cliff" over New Year's, seem suddenly to be playing a more successful game -- or rather, games -- an inside game and an outside game. The inside game can be described by the Washington phrase "regular order." What that means in ordinary American English is that you proceed according to the rules. Bills are written in subcommittee and committee and then go to the floor. When the House and Senate pass different versions -- likely when Republicans control the House and Democrats have a majority in the Senate -- the two are taken to conference committee to be reconciled.
Our major public policies are based on the assumption that America will continue to enjoy growth. Economic growth and population growth. Through most of our history, this assumption has proved to be correct. These days, not so much. Last week, the Commerce Department announced that the gross domestic product shrunk by 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012. And the Census Bureau reported that the U.S. birth rate in 2011 was 63.2 per 1,000 women age 15 to 44, the lowest ever recorded. Slow economic growth and low population growth threaten to undermine entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. Despite contrary rhetoric, they are programs in which working age people pay for pensions and medical care for the elderly.
Yesterday, as Barack Obama called for a bipartisan immigration bill in Las Vegas and Sen. Marco Rubio called for one on Rush Limbaugh's program, the chances for passage look surprisingly good. But in some quarters -- mostly from the right, but also from liberals like blogger Mickey Kaus -- comes a complaint that deserves to be addressed. We tried this once already, they say, in the 1986 immigration act. We were told that in return for legalization of illegal immigrants we would get tough border control and strict enforcement against employers who hired illegals. We got the amnesty, these folks say, but we didn't get effective border control or workplace enforcement. We got instead a huge flow of illegals, who number 11 million now.
These days, our political parties are defined by their presidents. Their policies and their programs tend to become their respective parties' orthodoxies. And the perceived success or failure of those policies and programs tends to determine how the parties' candidates, even those who don't support many of them, do at the polls. This has been especially true in the past two decades, in which fewer Americans have been splitting their tickets or changing their minds from election to election than was the case from the 1950s to the 1980s. For years, white Southerners voted Republican or for a third-party candidate in presidential elections and Democratic in congressional and state contests. Now they're solidly Republican.
Commentators both left and right agree that Barack Obama's second inaugural speech Monday was highly partisan, with shoutouts to his constituencies on the left and defiance of his critics on the right. Obama quoted the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and made brief reference to Abraham Lincoln's sublime Second Inaugural ("blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword"). But there was not much in the way of "with malice toward none, with charity for all." There were more references than in many inaugural speeches to specific programs and policies. One interesting question is what the practical effect they will have in the next few years.
Have the House Republicans come up with a winning strategy on the debt ceiling and spending cuts? Or just a viable one? Maybe so. They certainly need one that is at least the latter, if not the former. Barack Obama is up in the polls since the election, as most re-elected presidents have been. The most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows him with 52 percent approval and 44 percent disapproval. Other public polls have similar results. In contrast, the NBC/WSJ poll reports that only 26 percent have positive feelings about the Republican Party and 51 negative feelings. Toward Speaker John Boehner only 18 percent have positive feelings and 37 percent negative feelings.
To judge from his surly demeanor and defiant words at his press conference on Monday, Barack Obama begins his second term with a strategy to defeat and humiliate Republicans rather than a strategy to govern. His point blank refusal to negotiate over the debt ceiling was clearly designed to make the House Republicans look bad. But Obama knows very well that negotiations usually accompany legislation to increase the government's debt limit. As Gordon Gray of the conservative American Action Network points out, most of the 17 increases in the debt ceiling over the last 20 years have been part of broader measures. Working out what will be in those measures is a matter for negotiation between the legislative and executive branches. That's because the Constitution gives Congress the power to incur debt and the president the power to veto.
It's often good fun and sometimes revealing to divide American history into distinct periods of uniform length. In working on my forthcoming book on American migrations, internal and immigrant, it occurred to me that you could do this using the American-sounding interval of 76 years, just a few years more than the Biblical lifespan of three score and 10. It was 76 years from Washington's First Inaugural in 1789 to Lincoln's Second Inaugural in 1865. It was 76 years from the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse in 1865 to the attack at Pearl Harbor in 1941. Going backward, it was 76 years from the First Inaugural in 1789 to the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, which settled one of the British-French colonial wars. And going 76 years back from Utrecht takes you to 1637, when the Virginia and Massachusetts Bay colonies were just getting organized.
Barack Obama, we have been told by his admirers on the left and right, is an instinctive centrist, a moderate always ready to negotiate compromises, a politician deeply interested in the nuances of public policy. His image as a centrist took hold at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, where he gave a speech hailing not the blue states or the red states but the United States of America. But over the course of Obama's first term, this analysis increasingly sounded like wishful thinking. And never more than during the past week, with the nomination of Chuck Hagel to be secretary of defense and with Speaker John Boehner's revelation that in his negotiations last month Obama repeatedly insisted that "we don't have a spending problem." Obama went ahead with the Hagel nomination even though Hagel has been greeted with sharp criticism from many of his fellow Republicans and with eloquent silence by elected Democrats.
Over the next year, we will probably see much controversy over the implementation of Obamacare. Health insurance is something that almost every adult has some acquaintance with, and there seem to be glitches aplenty in the legislation, much delay in issuing regulations and some possible changes resulting from litigation. We're likely to see or hear less about the operations of the Dodd-Frank financial regulation legislation, passed four months after Obamacare. Most of us don't work at banks or financial institutions, which will have to grapple with its myriad provisions and the regulations to be issued thereunder, and we tend to toss out those disclosure forms our bank sends out.
Demographics buffs get a special Christmas present every year courtesy of the Census Bureau: its annual estimates of the populations of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. This gives demographers a chance to see where the nation is growing and where it is not, and to get an idea of the destination of immigrants and of the flow of people into one set of states and out of another. Nationally, the Census Bureau estimates that the United States has grown from 308 million people when the Census was conducted in April 2010 to almost 313 million in July 2012, a rate of 1.7 percent. If that continues through the decade, the nation's population will rise at a lower rate but by a larger number in this decade than it did in 2000-2010.
There's a natural human impulse to help people who need a hand. In the political world, that often translates to an impulse to have government help people who need a hand. Who wants to argue with that? But experience tells us that it's not always easy to help. Individuals' good intentions go awry. Government programs sometimes produce unintended consequences that make things worse for the intended beneficiaries. Consider what could be called the three H's: health care, housing and higher education. Over the last generation and more, government has stepped in to help ordinary individuals and those with special problems on all three issues. The results have been, well, not as good as intended.
In combing through the results of the 2012 election -- apparently finally complete, nearly two months after the fact -- I continue to find many similarities between 2012 and 2004, and one enormous difference. Both of the elections involved incumbent presidents with approval ratings hovering around or just under 50 percent facing challengers who were rich men from Massachusetts (though one made his money and the other married it). In both cases, the challenger and his campaign seemed confident he was going to win -- and had reasonable grounds to believe so. In both elections, the incumbent started running a barrage of negative ads defining the challenger in the spring. And in both elections, the incumbent had at least one spotty debate performance.
Last week, Republicans proved they are not a governing party. Next week we will see whether Democrats are. A governing party would have, reluctantly, passed Speaker John Boehner's Plan B, which would have preserved the current tax rates on everyone with incomes under $1 million. Passage would have put Senate Democrats on the spot, since they voted for a similar measure in 2010. They might have engaged in negotiations with Boehner that could have been more productive than his negotiations with Barack Obama this month and in the summer of 2011. Then, as Bob Woodward reports in his book "The Price of Power," Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid fashioned an agreement after Obama had broken off his grand bargain talks with Boehner by increasing his demands.
On Monday, the U.S. Senate got its newest member and lost its most senior member. The newest senator is South Carolina Rep. Tim Scott, whom Gov. Nikki Haley said she would appoint to fill the vacancy caused by the pending resignation of Jim DeMint. The most senior senator was Hawaii's Daniel Inouye, who died at 88 just a few hours after Haley's announcement. Much has been made of the fact that Scott will be the only black senator and the first black Republican senator since Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, who was elected in 1966 and 1978.
Democrats in Washington declare that they will absolutely, positively allow no changes whatever in the nation's unsustainable entitlement programs -- Social Security and Medicare. But out in the states, politicians of both parties aren't averting their gaze from impending fiscal crises. They are working to change policies that put state governments on an unsustainable trajectory. The most obvious example was the passage of a right-to-work law last week in Michigan, the birthplace of the United Auto Workers union. This was retaliation for a failed power grab by both the UAW and public sector unions -- Proposition 2, which would have enshrined collective bargaining in the state constitution.
Is Barack Obama bluffing when he threatens to go over the fiscal cliff if Republicans refuse to agree to higher tax rates on high earners? Some analysts think so. Keith Hennessey, a former top staffer for the Bush White House and Senate Republicans and a veteran of budget negotiations, argues that Obama's whole second term would be blighted if he allows the fiscal cliff tax increases and sequestration budget cuts to take place next month. His argument is based on three assumptions. One is that going over the fiscal cliff would trigger a sharp recession and a weak economy thereafter. Many economists agree. Some disagree. I leave that argument to them. Hennessey's second assumption is that Obama has other second term policy goals -- immigration reform, cap-and-trade legislation, tax reform -- that would be difficult to achieve if he breaks sharply with Republicans.
Is mass migration from Mexico to the United States a thing of the past? At least for the moment, it is. Last May, the Pew Hispanic Center, in a study based on U.S. and Mexican statistics, reported that net migration from Mexico to this country had fallen to zero from 2005 to 2010. Pew said 20,000 more people moved to Mexico from the United States than from there to here in those years. That's a vivid contrast with the years 1995 to 2000, when net inflow from Mexico was 2.2 million people. Because there was net Mexican immigration until 2007, when the housing market collapsed and the Great Recession began, it seems clear that there was net outmigration from 2007 to 2010, and that likely has continued in 2011 and 2012.
The fiscal cliff negotiations seem to be foundering on Barack Obama's insistence on higher tax rates on high earners and House Republican leaders' insistence on opposing them. The president believes he has a mandate from voters for his position, and House Republicans believe they have a mandate from voters for theirs. The real argument here is over the size and scope of government. Under Barack Obama, federal outlays -- the technical term for federal spending -- have increased to 24 and 25 percent of gross domestic product. That's a higher level of federal spending than in any year since 1946, when we were demobilizing after World War II. And the Obama budgets envision federal spending to continue at such levels more or less indefinitely.
