Columnist.
One of the nice things about human history is that no matter how much people or their leaders misjudge events and make a hash of things, within a few centuries, the debris is cleared away, and we can have another go at getting things right. Yes, I am thinking about the Middle East. Whether or not there is a message in that turn of events, I'll leave it to theologians.
Sunday on "Meet the Press" Colin Powell blamed divisive, poisonous Washington politics on the media and the Tea Party. The essence of Powell's argument was: "Republicans and Democrats are focusing more and more on their extreme left and extreme right. And we have to come back toward the center in order to compromise. ... The media has to help us. The media loves this game, where everybody is on the extreme. It makes for great television. ... So what we have to do is sort of take some of the heat out of our political life in terms of the coverage of it, so these folks (Congress) can get to work quietly. ... But the Tea Party point of view of no compromise whatsoever is not a point of view that will eventually produce a presidential candidate who will win."
As we approach the festive season -- the elongated, enchanting month from Thanksgiving through Christmas to New Years -- my mind has been drifting through various memorable past holidays. Some have been personal -- the last one with my father before he died. But one that stands out for historic reasons was Christmas 1991. It was precisely on Dec. 25, 1991 -- 20 years ago next month -- that the Soviet Union expired. Mikhail Gorbachev resigned his office, and the godless Soviet Union formally ended its existence. On that Christmas Day -- of all days -- mankind was given the gift of deliverance from the half-century-long threat of nuclear annihilation. Mankind had never been more than one human misjudgment away from the unthinkable. It seemed a miracle that for all the human blundering, the crass politics of the world, the trillions of dollars spent on nuclear weapons -- we had come out the other side untouched by the long-dreaded nuclear flame.
A just released book, "Bowing to Beijing" by Brett M. Decker and William C. Triplett II, will change forever the way you think about China -- even if, like me, you already have the deepest worries about the Chinese threat. As I opened the book, I was expecting to find many useful examples of Chinese military and industrial efforts to get the better of the United States and the West. Indeed, there are 100 pages of examples of the most remorseless Chinese successes at stealing the military and industrial secrets of the West and converting them into a growing menace -- soon to be a leviathan -- bent on domination and defeat of America. The authors itemize the sheer, unprecedented magnitude of this effort. But the opening chapters dealt with human rights abuses, and my first thought as I started reading was that I wanted to get right to the military and industrial examples.
Here's a thought: The GOP presidential primaries may well prove to be inconclusive, with the nominee actually being chosen at the convention in Tampa, Fla., in the fourth week of August next year. True, it has been generations since a presidential nominating convention actually made that decision, although, admittedly, this idea pops up every four years. The last GOP contested convention that went beyond the first ballot was in 1948, when Thomas Dewey was chosen on the third ballot -- and went on to lose to Harry Truman. For the Democrats it was in 1952, when Adlai Stevenson was also chosen on the third ballot -- and also went on to lose, to Dwight Eisenhower. The longest was the Democratic convention of 1924 that went on for over two weeks and took 103 ballots to nominate John Davis, who lost to Calvin Coolidge.
Now is a particularly dangerous moment for American national security interests. Not just because threats are growing. Not just because the current administration is making a historic bungle from China to Iraq to Iran to Russia to Europe to Mexico to our historic allies in the Middle East -- both Jewish and Muslim. All that would be bad enough. But the greatest threat to our national security, at the moment, is the manifest indifference of the voting public to these foreign threats -- and the silence on them from our alleged leaders. It's understandable.
I offer up George Orwell' second quote in possibly partial defense of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's assertion on "Meet the Press" Sunday that as the United States Government orders the final, complete retreat from Iraq, the United States government remains resolved to support Iraqi democracy. Are Clinton's words designed to make lies sound truthful, or does she actually believe things she knows to be untrue?
For the past few years, fear of China's predatory mercantilism has been steadily growing in America, both amongst the public and in elite business and political circles. But last week, for the first time, one could discern the genuine possibility that America might actually do something about it -- even if it means a trade war. It's not that anything new has been revealed about China's practices, but rather that something new has emerged about the nature of Washington's opposition to it. Last week, the Senate passed a bill that would force U.S. retaliation against China's currency manipulations. The bill passed with 63 votes -- including 16 Republican votes.
How dangerous is the European financial condition? On Monday, while stock markets from the DAX and FTSE to the New York Stock Exchange were up sharply on report of French and German cooperative murmurs regarding sovereign debt negotiations (and on temporary easing of U.S. double-dip recession fears), the financial and political European press were warning of a coming financial crisis of unmatched dimensions. The ever stiff upper-lipped London Financial Times let loose with uncharacteristic wails of woe: Its five column above the fold front page headline panted: "Time is short for eurozone," while its editorial page -- in a rare single top to bottom of page leader -- shouted with a now quivering upper lip: "Save Europe's unity now."
William F. Buckley, Jr., founding father of the modern conservative movement, famously asserted his doctrine of voting for the most conservative candidate who is electable. Let me presume to add an analytic codicil: The GOP and the conservative movement have tended to support the most conservative policies only when they are understood to be conservative and are plausibly supportable by the conservative half of the electorate.
President Obama, like most American presidents, is lucky that the public pays little attention to foreign policy and rarely casts its votes on the basis of presidential foreign-policy performance. It required something as dramatic as the November 1979 Iranian seizing of our diplomats as hostages, followed the next month by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to turn Jimmy Carter's foreign policy mess into a major negative issue for him in his failed 1980 re-election bid. A political danger for presidents is that precisely because the public pays little attention to foreign policy until a explosion occurs (usually metaphoric), the White House does not get public pressure to improve the situation as it does with, say, a failing domestic economy. As the economy gets worse and worse, the public complains more and more, and the White House is on political alert to try to do something about it, usually. However, the political danger of a foreign-policy failure tends to just fall out of the politically clear blue sky on an inattentive White House.
In one of the least needed reassurances in modern political history, President Obama's top political man David Plouffe, "told Democrats late last week that the White House would not suffer from overconfidence. 'What I don't want to suggest is that we're sitting around and thinking everything is great,' he said." With the White House's own economists predicting 9 percent or worse unemployment on Election Day, the president at about 39 percent job approval, college grads unable to find jobs, a quarter of American homes under water, no credible White House policy or strategy for changing things -- and with most non-institutionalized Americans convinced we are in a recession that is going to get much worse -- it is surpassing odd that Plouffe was worried that his fellow Democrats might think the president and his men believed everything to be hunky-dory.
Since the end of World War II, in both the United States and Western Europe, the best way to win a national election has been to be the incumbent political party. But that 3-generation-old predisposition of publics in Western democracies may be coming to an end. We may well be entering a political epoch in which the best way to win a national election in the West is not to be the party in power. For the last 65 years, the world economic order has been vastly favorable to the middle-class citizens and voters in the West with their incomes going steadily up or at least flattening at a predictable and comfortable material level. Moreover, the middle-class fears of economic hardship were virtually eliminated by the existence of the welfare safety net.
In the last few weeks, leading Democrats in Congress have called Tea Party constituents terrorists, said they should go to hell and accused them of wanting to lynch black people. Last weekend, at an event attended by President Obama, the head of the Teamsters Union, Jimmy Hoffa Jr., attacked the Tea Party, screaming, "President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. Let's take these son of bitches (Tea Party members) out and give America back to an America where we belong." (Note: the president was not on the platform when Hoffa spoke.) So far, neither the president, nor any prominent Democrat has condemned such remarks -- even though the phrase "take out" is commonly used to describe an act of criminal homicide. Thus, Hoffa's statement might rise to the level of incitement to violence.
President Obama's post-Labor Day "jobs" speech will be his last chance to launch an economic policy with any chance of manifesting its effect -- both economic and political -- before the November 2012 elections. He has three options. In order of descending likelihood they are: a timid hodgepodge of previous proposals, a bold left of center initiative or a turn to free markets "nuclear option."
In the weeks during and since the debt-ceiling debate, the media, pushed by the Democratic Party, has peddled the propaganda that our government is broken -- because the Republicans in the House of Representatives negotiated a better deal than the liberals wanted. While it was President Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner who, during the debate, said they couldn't assure payments of Social Security or interest on the federal debt payments (while Republican leaders guaranteed there would be no lapse in such payments) it was the GOP that the media accused of irresponsible threats.
Except according to the Lord's plans -- which are not known to man -- the "end of the world" is not nigh, although to listen to politicians and pundits, we should be packed and ready to go by next Thursday. Recently, the headlines have read like Woody Allen's 1979 "My Speech to the Graduates": "More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. I speak, by the way, not with any sense of futility, but with a panicky conviction."
The debt deal, if it sticks, is a triumph for the bipartisan, status quo-clinging Washington establishment. Here is a prediction: Between now and January 2013, total actual spending cuts will be minimal. That will result from the following: (1) The $900 billion deficit reduction is almost all back-loaded to the years beyond 2012. (2) The select committee created by the budget deal will fail to pass a "second tranche" deficit-cut package of an additional $1.5 trillion. (3) The "trigger" will be pulled that will identify an additional $1.2 trillion. (4) The pulled trigger won't require any more deficit reductions to go into effect until 2013, when a new Congress and either a new president or a re-elected President Obama will be able to re-decide (or repeal) all these decisions. That president will also have to decide what to do with the expiring Bush tax cuts, which if extended would be scored to increase deficit by $3.5 trillion over ten years. (5) The debt ceiling will not need to be raised until 2013.
How have we arrived at this place where the fate of our federal budget -- our economy, indeed our capacity to have a functioning federal government -- seems to depend on what two men (the speaker of the House and the president) may or may not be secretly talking about in an interior room in the White House? Meanwhile, elected representatives and senators, kept ignorant of those life-and-death discussions, are forced to wait. When the two men are finished -- doubtlessly mere hours before "the world will end" -- our elected representatives and senators will be stampeded to vote yes for a deal about which no one knows the details. Cattle may need to be stampeded; elected representatives of the American people never should be so compelled.
