The Reverse Pottery Barn Rule

"We broke it, you buy it." That seems to be what the Washington Post wants to impose on the Democratic Party.

Ms. Clinton and Mr. Obama have repeatedly discussed the positions they held on the war in Iraq before it began and their pledges to withdraw most American troops, but neither has explained how the dramatic improvement in security in Iraq during the past year would be preserved if their proposed withdrawals went forward.

You mean, if we disregard the fact that we have a "surge" that is supposed to create a security situation that can be sustained with lower troop levels, and simply treat it as an escalation? Of indefinite duration?

They've promised to improve U.S. relations with the rest of the world, but they haven't said what that would mean in such regions as Africa and Latin America.

Does the Post really mean, "what that would mean"? It would mean "improved relations". Does the Post means to ask, "How would they do that?" Well, sure, we could get into specifics - as if voters really want specifics. (But the media likes to complain about how boring debates are when the candidates discuss policies of immediate relevance to voters, like health care.) Also, were our relations in Africa and Latin America so bad before Bush II?

They haven't said what they would do with critical Bush administration initiatives, such as the Israeli-Palestinian peace process or negotiations with North Korea, that are unlikely to be wrapped up by January.

The Post finds it unlikely that there will not be an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord in place by January? It's such a simple, short-term problem, and Bush has been so effective in the Middle East so far, right? And we can remain optimistic that Bush will be able to roll back the North Korean crisis to the point it was at when he took office (and ridiculed the compromises Clinton had made up to that point)?

Oh, come on.

This also presupposes a responsible media. One that won't attack Mondale for proposing new taxes, but will criticize Reagan for making what everybody believes to be a false promise. Like that'll happen. Any commitment or plan proposed on the "tough issues" will be used as a basis for attack, with media pundits leading the charge.

In Defense Of The Bush Administration (Sort Of)

Vanity Fair points out that after making the imbecilic decision to press for elections in the Palestinian territories, resulting in a Hamas parliamentary majority, the Bush Administration made yet another imbecilic decision, supporting a failed civil war in Gaza meant led by Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan. But the idea that Dahlan could be imposed as a strongman ruler in Gaza is far from new. Here's a prior example of that idea, courtesy of Robert D. Kaplan in 2002:

The post-Arafat era could usher in "Rajoubistan" and "Dahlanistan:" warlordships in the West Bank and Gaza respectively, controlled by Jibril Rajoub and Mohammed Dahlan. Notables such as Hannan Ashrawi have no power bases of their own, and their job will be, as before, merely to perform for CNN. Rajoubistan will rely on King Abdullah of Jordan, and Dahlanistan on Mubarak's Egypt. Thus, a variation of the pre-1967 reality might take hold. That would be the optimistic scenario: Hobbesian warlordships with which the Israeli security services can make deals and thus manage a cessation of hostilities.

And no, Kaplan didn't originate the idea (or the terms, "Rajoubistan" and "Dahlanistan"), either. I can fault Bush for grabbing this idea and running with it, but it's been kicking around for a very long time and did not, as the article suggests, originate with Bush.

Making Dahlan the warlord in charge of Gaza is fundamentally an anti-democratic idea, but that shouldn't surprise anybody who looks at what Bush does as opposed to what he says. Dictatorships can be much more compliant than democracies, particularly when headed by people far more concerned with their own wealth and power than with the welfare of their people, and who have no particular concern with such niceties as "human rights". Within that context, what's not to love about Dahlan?

In 2001, President Bush famously said that he had looked Russian president Vladimir Putin in the eye, gotten “a sense of his soul,” and found him to be “trustworthy.” According to three U.S. officials, Bush made a similar judgment about Dahlan when they first met, in 2003. All three officials recall hearing Bush say, “He’s our guy.”

Does that surprise anybody? Is Bush truly an atrocious judge of character, or is it instead that he goes weak in the knees when he stares into the eyes of tyrants?

Hitchens And The Dreaded "Islamist Menace"

Does Christopher Hitchens simply make stuff up, or is there something behind this seeming nonsense?

Two things, in my experience, disable many liberals at the onset of this conversation. First, they cannot shake their subliminal identification of the Muslim religion with the wretched of the earth: the black- and brown-skinned denizens of what we once called the “Third World.” You can see this identification in the way that the Palestinians (about 20 percent of whom were Christian until their numbers began to decline) have become an “Islamic” cause and in the amazing ignorance that most leftists display about India, a multiethnic secular democracy under attack from al-Qaida and its surrogates long before the United States was.

It's the political left who characterizes Muslims as dark-skinned and backward? It's the political left who was (and is) unaware of Palestinian Christians? And I'm not sure how he came up with his prattle about India. But it gets better....

And you can see it, too, in the stupid neologism “Islamophobia,” which aims to promote criticism of Islam to the gallery of special offenses associated with racism.

I only occasionally see reference to the term "Islamophobia", but I do see frequent use of the similar "stupid neologism", Islamofascist. What would Hitchens make of that....

Why are people like Hitchens so eager to scrap every value and principle of the West in order to save it from a perceived Islamic menace?

Meanwhile, we should insist on reciprocity at all times. We should not allow a single Saudi dollar to pay for propaganda within the U.S., for example, until Saudi Arabia also permits Jewish and Christian and secular practices. No Wahhabi-printed Korans anywhere in our prison system. No Salafist imams in our armed forces.

Right. Because the propaganda is so convincing, that it's worth throwing away such conceits as free speech and the First Amendment in order to protect Hitchens' sensitivities. And there's no better way to demonstrate the freedoms and resilience of Western culture than by engaging in censorship and speech bans.

A declaration at the UN of our solidarity with the right of the Kurdish people of Iraq and elsewhere to self-determination as well as a further declaration by Congress that in no circumstance will Muslim forces who have fought on our side, from the Kurds to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, find themselves friendless, unarmed, or abandoned. Partition in Iraq would be defeat under another name (and as with past partitions, would lead to yet further partitions and micro-wars over these very subdivisions). But if it has to come, we cannot even consider abandoning the one part of the country that did seize the opportunity of modernization, development, and democracy.

By what definition does "self-determination" mean, "You need to be a permanent minority population in a state that probably won't be particularly respectful of your rights, except while it remains under the point of our gun"? Ah, but true self-determination would be "defeat under another name", so sorry Kurds, Hitchens wants you to settle for this false kind, but wants you to rest assured that if you end up landlocked in the midst of hostile neighbors, and potentially excluded from your former nation's oil wealth, the U.S. will defend your borders.

Energetic support for all the opposition forces in Iran and in the Iranian diaspora. A public offer from the United States, disseminated widely in the Persian language, of help for a reformed Iran on all matters, including peaceful nuclear energy, and of assistance in protecting Iran from the catastrophic earthquake that seismologists predict in its immediate future.

Should we assume that Hitchens believes it is the political left that would ridicule his ideas for rapprochement with and massive aid to Iran?

A commitment to buy Afghanistan’s opium crop and to keep the profits out of the hands of the warlords and Talibanists, until such time as the country’s agriculture - especially its once-famous vines - has been replanted and restored. We can use the product in the interim for the manufacture of much-needed analgesics for our own market and apply the profits to the reconstruction of Afghanistan.

Sorry, Hitchens, that sounds like a... pipe dream. Which pharmaceutical companies are complaining about a shortage of opium poppies? (I will grant, if we turn the opium into medications which we then provide at bargain prices to the developing world, supply might not outstrip demand - but it'll cost us at both ends.) As Hitchens supposedly wants to support India, what would this policy do to Indian opium farmers who presently supply much of our legal demand? What will we pay for the poppies, and will that truly match what the drug cartels will pay? Will we hang around the farms afterward to provide an armed defense to the farms, whose sales will surely anger the "warlords and Talibanists" who receive money from the illicit market? How will we ever get out of this business - what legitimate crop is going to provide farmers with even a tenth of the revenues of opium poppies?

It's not that Hitchens has no valid points in his essay. But, as usual, he buries them in claptrap.

Housing Demand

Today Robert Samuelson assures us that there is no oversupply of housing - it's just that there's not enough demand. And that, he's confident, will stop being a problem as soon as housing prices drop "to a level where housing can escape its present stagnation".

It's elementary economics. Pretend that houses are apples. We have 1,000 apples, priced at $1 each. They don't sell. We can either keep the price at $1 and watch the apples rot or cut the price until people buy. Housing is no different.

If we have a few million customers, that's true. If we have 1,000 customers, that may be true. If we have one customer, cutting the price per apple to a penny probably won't convince the customer to buy them all, save perhaps if he owns a cider mill. But that's an aside from Samuelson's argument - yes, if you cut prices low enough, you will find buyers for all homes presently on the market. If Toll Brothers started selling McMansions for $1, the demand would outstrip anything they could reasonably supply.

Samuelson is correct that, as exemplified by the guy building the huge house in his neighborhood, there remains demand for housing and even for McMansions. But isn't there a bit more than that to the picture?

Builders want their profits - and some may go bankrupt or go out of business if they immediately cut prices to the point where supply and demand curves cross. Lenders who have foreclosed on houses want to cut their losses. Homeowners who are upside-down on their mortgages don't want to have to pay back the difference when they sell their homes, or hope to stay in their homes until they can find a buyer who will pay what their house is "really worth". A lot of people who aren't upside-down still want to hold onto their homes until they can get what it's "really worth". Oversupply in some pockets of the nation is real - where high-end houses were being snapped up by speculators, not by people intending to make the houses their homes, and few people presently even qualify to buy the homes.

I don't argue with Samuelson's belief that the sooner all of this shakes out, the sooner "housing can escape its present stagnation".

The understandable impulse to minimize foreclosures should not be a pretext to prop up the housing market by rescuing too many strapped homeowners. Though cruel, foreclosures and falling home values have the virtue of bringing prices to a level where housing can escape its present stagnation. Helping today's homeowners makes little sense if it penalizes tomorrow's homeowners. An unstoppable free-fall of prices seems unlikely. Slumping home construction and sales have left much pent-up demand. What will release that demand are affordable prices.

The problem for the economy and housing market is, with or without intervention, that process is likely to occur over a period of years.

An Imaginary Obama's Imaginary First 100 Days

It's Michael Gerson, so I can't tell up front if he is being mendacious or if he truly is "that stupid".

But John McCain could. As a thought experiment, consider the foreign policy achievements of Obama's first 100 days in office.

Redeeming his inaugural pledge to "pay any price, bear any burden, fly any distance to meet with our enemies," Obama's first major international meeting is with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. National security adviser Samantha Power does her best to talk tough on human rights in preparation for the meeting. But, as Henry Kissinger once said, "When talks become their own objective, they are at the mercy of the party most prepared to break them off." Having made Iranian talks "without precondition" his major foreign policy goal, Obama is left with little leverage to extract concessions, and little choice but to move forward.

And it goes on like that, but gets even sillier. In other words, we get an imbecilic caricature of a theoretical "first 100 days", that nobody with any sense or an honest bone in his body would propound. How typical of Gerson.

In Gerson's imaginary scenario, as there has been zero progress (none, nada, zilch) in the war between now and his Inauguration, Obama announces a phased withdrawal of forces.

But the next day, The Post reports stunned disbelief among the troops. A high-ranking officer observes, "The surest way to break the morale of the military is to undo its achievements and humiliate it on the verge of success."

Gerson, of course, imagines us "on the verge of success" in Iraq - he has no plan for us to get past the "verge" and actually achieve success, but he imagines that any change of course will take us away from the "verge" we've supposedly been on since 2003. It's a fundamentally dishonest argument presented by people, like Gerson, who have no idea what they are talking about, have no actual plan for success, and have no honest response to the question, "Why shouldn't we cut our losses." As is his wont, he ignores the many military leaders who have cautioned us that our continued deployment in Iraq is degrading the armed forces. Who cares about that or their ability to defend the nation, after all, if maintaining troop levels will help the Republican Party save face?

Gerson concludes,

Obama's 100-day agenda would be designed, in part, to improve America's global image. But there is something worse than being unpopular in the world - and that is being a pleading, panting joke.

Well, it's hard to argue with that. And who would know better than Gerson?

McCain Probably Would Prefer Obama, But....

Stanley Fish analyzes the presidential race and concludes, "I would bet that if McCain were pulling a lever in the Democratic primaries in Texas and Ohio, his vote would go into the Obama column." I think he's correct. But I think he oversells the reasons why that's the case and, in analyzing McCain's advantages over Obama, overlooks some key aspects of how they both came from the rear to their frontrunner positions. He speculates that McCain's position(s) on the war will transform it into a "Republican plus."

The reason is that McCain’s position on the war, as on so many other issues, looks in (at least) two directions.

On the one hand, he voted to authorize the invasion. On the other, he consistently disagreed with the administration’s prosecution of the war in general and with the judgment of defense Secretary Rumsfeld in particular. And on the third hand, he advocated for a course of action that was at last implemented in the so-called “surge,” and with some success.

I'm not sure why that argument would apply to Obama and not Clinton, but let's take it at face value. Survey after survey shows that, whatever fruits the surge may have produced, the American public wants out of Iraq. There is no sign that we're going to further escalate "the surge", and at this point we seem to have reached something of a plateau. It is not apparent that we can withdraw "surged" troops without backsliding. There is a very real concern that our commitments in Iraq are degrading our military, and there is plenty of evidence (such as the relaxation of restrictions on recruitment of people with medical ailments and criminal records) that suggests this to be the case.

But perhaps all of that is too nuanced for an election campaign? Fish imagines,

McCain can ask, Don’t you see that the situation has changed in recent months, and shouldn’t a responsible leader adjust his or her stance according to the facts on the ground?

The obvious response to this is that (a) things changed after the surge, but have not changed in recent months, and there is very little sign that Iraq is headed toward a form of stability that can be maintained without the continued presence of 100,000+ U.S. troops, and that the McCain "We could be there for 100 years" policy is a post-surge policy. As I see it, McCain does not benefit by introducing an argument that only highlights that "improvement" at best means "we're no longer losing ground", but that he has no strategy for either winning or cutting our losses. His hyperbolic overstatements that helped lead us into the war won't help him - contrast an early clip of him raving about how easy and cheap the war will be with his more recent "100 years, maybe forever" commitment to the war, and you have a powerful anti-McCain campaign ad.

And he can add, I too had my doubts about the conduct of the war, but now a policy I long advocated has been put in place with good results.

And that can be contrasted with all of the promises, "Things will be better in a few months; we'll know by the fall; we'll know in six months...."-type statements by pretty much every supporter of the surge. How does McCain respond to, "Your strategy bore some initial fruit, but we've not seen any substantial improvement for more than a year - what's your next move?" We already know his answer - I don't think it makes him electable.

The parts of McCain’s story, even with one or two twists and turns, fit nicely into a coherent narrative that brings credit to him in every chapter. I was resolute in the beginning, I demurred for a while but for good reasons, and now I am resolute again, and you can trust me because, in this area especially, I know what I’m doing. He can rehearse this narrative without apologizing for anything and then turn around to Obama and (borrowing from Clinton’s attacks on him), declare: You, on the other hand, don’t know what you’re doing, as everything you say, not only about the war, but about the conduct of foreign policy, proves. (He and President Bush are already pushing this line in anticipation of Obama’s nomination.)

And Obama can respond, "Being resolute in one failed policy or another is neither a sign of experience nor good judgment." (Perhaps Obama's ad can mention how McCain embraces one failed Bush policy after another. The Bush-McCain plot has already run off-course with the Bush Administration adopting what had to that point been depicted by McCain (and Clinton) as one of Obama's naive, silly ideas.

Fish goes on to surmise that on the issues, McCain is too much like a Democrat to inspire voters to vote for Obama instead of him.

The criticisms of McCain made by his primary opponents – he twice voted against Bush’s tax cuts, he cooperated with Ted Kennedy on immigration reform and with Russ Feingold on campaign-finance reform, he said that waterboarding was torture and should not be used, he scorned fundamentalist Christian leaders, he supported stem cell research, he opposed a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage, he expressed doubts about Samuel Alito – cannot be appropriated by Obama because these are his positions, too.

Ah yes, the various issues which cause some right-wingers to become apoplectic and call McCain a "liberal." I've already mentioned how common ground can be used to positively camaign against McCain. Ads in the states most concerned about border security describing how President Obama will be able to work with Republican leaders, such as John McCain, to break through the gridlock on immigration reform. And 527's can have even more fun, running ads about how McCain will allow the Bush tax cuts to expire so we can get back to balancing the budget - something that will likely inspire fierce denials from John "I was against tax cuts and budget deficits before I was for them" McCain.

And if you want to go negative, whatever McCain's history of distancing himself from "agents of intolerance", he's currently doing his best to embrace as many as he can reach. One set of ads can work to undermine him as a hypocrite who actually opposes religion, and wants the government to pay for stem cell research and recognize same-sex marriage; another can depict him as a hypocrite who will abandon any sense of principle or ethics to embrace hateful religious leaders, as long as it brings him votes. Without too much difficulty, he can also be forced to take a clear position on abortion rights - he's against them, but many people don't seem to realize that.

I suspect that the Bush Administration will coax the Iraqis into trying to demonstrate "progress" by passing legislation or taking other nominal steps that do not actually do a thing to improve the situation on the ground; Obama will have to deal with that type of "progress". But I also suspect that absent real progress in Iraq, McCain has nothing to offer on that issue and his commitment to indefinite war will weigh down his campaign. Whether or not Obama manages to maintain the same level of enthusiasm behind his campaign, I don't sense that there is much (if any) enthusiasm behind McCain. Am I missing something? Pretty much everything McCain could historically offer to the political center is either undermined by his more recent flip-flopping or by its alienating him from voters on the political right.

One thing that is clear from the campaign to date is that many people (myself included) underestimated Obama as a political candidate. One of the things that has impressed me about Obama is how fast he is to respond to even modest attacks, and find ways to defuse them. McCain has made himself very vulnerable to counterattack.

Let's Not Overrate Bipartisanship

David Ignatius is much more comfortable with McCain's record on "biparisanship" than with Obama's:

The Obama campaign sent me an eight-page summary of his "bipartisan accomplishments," and it includes some encouraging examples of working across the aisle on issues such as nuclear proliferation, energy, veterans affairs, budget earmarks and ethics reforms. So the cupboard isn't bare. It's just that, unlike McCain, Obama bears no obvious political scars for fighting bipartisan battles that were unpopular with his party's base.

A couple of reactions....

Bipartisanship is a great concept when your party doesn't control the government. "They may have the power and control, but wouldn't it be better if they tossed us a bone from time to time?" It's necessary when no party is in control, as otherwise you can have gridlock. But if you do have control, what's your incentive for tossing the other side that bone? The vain hope that in the future, when they regain control, they'll return the favor? (What does the Republican legislative history from 2001 - 2006 tell us about that hope?)

Also, I don't believe for a second that McCain plans to run a bipartisan government, except as necessary to advance his agenda. He may be more willing to break with the Republican Party than his recent predecessors, just as they will be more likely to break with him, but that's not about "bipartisanship" - that's about their each advancing their own agendas. The spittle directed at McCain by right-wing nutters like Limbaugh and Coulter is a reflection of that reality - the problem is not that McCain is a "liberal" as some pretend, or that he belives in "bipartisanship". It's that he'll build coalitions to do what he wants.

It doesn't worry me that Obama doesn't have a long history of reaching across the aisle. He hasn't been in national office long enough to have a long history of anything, and for the first six years of the Bush Administration "reaching across the aisle" has largely meant getting a sufficient number of Democrats to acquiesce to an item on the Republican agenda. It would worry me more if he had the opportunity to advance significant legislation without compromise, but nonetheless decided to gut it in the name of "bipartisanship". (But I don't think he'll do that.)

Ronald Reagan taught the country something about the ability of a world-class communicator to create such a new political space that defies the previous categories.

I thought we were talking about bipartisanship, so why does Ignatius evoke Reagan? At present, to be transformative, McCain would have to do a lot of reaching across the aisle. Obama, not so much.