Lexington's notebook

The beginning of the end

Thu, 23 May 2013 21:43:33 +0000

SOMETIMES a heckler can be a politician’s best friend. Giving his fullest account of counter-terrorism policy for some years in an hour-long speech to the National Defense University on May 23rd, President Barack Obama was repeatedly and loudly interrupted by a woman protester demanding the immediate closure of the Guantánamo Bay prison camp and greater respect for the rule of law.

The heckling helped Mr Obama, whose speech had until then felt like an address to a straw man—some imaginary citizen of tender conscience who needed to be assured that America was right to target terrorists with lethal drone strikes in Pakistan or Yemen, and needed reminding that it was not that easy to close Guantánamo or put terror suspects on trial in mainland American courts.

True, left-wing supporters of the president are upset with his use of armed drones, and hate the idea that American guards and doctors are force-feeding more than 100 detainees on hunger strike in Guantánamo. But most ordinary Americans tell pollsters that they thoroughly approve of killing suspected terrorists with remote strikes in the badlands of Afghanistan, Pakistan or Yemen. The most potent political challenges to the president’s conduct of the war on terror have to date come from the Right.

Republicans delight in portraying Mr Obama and his government as being soft on Islamic extremists, most recently denouncing his attorney-general, Eric Holder, for allowing the surviving Boston bombing suspect to be read his civilian legal rights. In the view of several conservatives in Congress, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should have been thrown into the legal limbo of Guantánamo and interrogated, without any nonsense about lawyers and a right to remain silent.

Mr Obama took office in 2008 vowing to close Guantánamo's prison camp swiftly, transferring many detainees back to their home countries and putting others, including high-profile suspected al-Qaeda leaders, on trial in federal courts on the mainland, rather than at military tribunals in the international limbo of an American naval base on Cuba.

The president signed an order to that effect in 2009 but the effort was starved of funding by Republicans in Congress, joined by scores of Democrats, fearful of being seen as soft on security. Congress finally passed a law banning any transfer of detainees to America, even for trial.

In his speech today, Mr Obama acknowledged that Guantánamo remained a knotty problem, as it held detainees “known” to have taken part in terror attacks but who could not be prosecuted in civilian courts for lack of admissible evidence. With more solemnity than substance, the president once again called on Congress to lift restrictions on detainee transfers from “Gitmo” (as he called the camp, using a military abbreviation), and pledged to seek a location in America to hold military commissions. At the same time the president said he would lift his own moratorium on sending detainees to Yemen.

The president stopped several times to allow the lone heckler, from the anti-war movement Code Pink, to berate him over his policies, and suggested that the situation at Guantánamo Bay was unsustainable and un-American. “Look at the current situation, where we are force-feeding detainees who are holding a hunger strike. Is that who we are? Is that something that our founders foresaw?” he asked.

The meatiest part of the speech covered instruments of war and remote-controlled force that are fully in the president’s power, starting with the armed drones strikes with which Mr Obama has killed dozens of terror suspects. Those killed include four American citizens, a death toll only fully revealed on the eve of the president’s speech.

His defence of such strikes was not really aimed at the American public. It was aimed at the curious coalition of critics who charge him with killing terrorists who would more properly be captured alive: a coalition made up of left-wing Democrats, foreign politicians and right-wing Republicans bent on finding ways to attack a president who they despise.

The president defended drone strikes as more precise than conventional attacks from the air, and less dangerous than operations involving American “boots on the ground”. The raid by special forces in Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden “cannot be the norm”, he said. The risks had been immense, with a healthy dose of luck helping to prevent civilian casualties or an extended firefight.

Though strikes by distant drones were legal and had saved lives, Mr Obama announced that he had signed a new framework of guidelines, oversight and accountability governing the use of force against terrorism. Describing the deaths of civilian bystanders in drone strikes as “heartbreaking tragedies”, the president pledged that drone strikes would only be used when the capture of terror suspects was impossible, when terrorists posed a “continuing and imminent threat to the American people”, when no other government was capable of effectively addressing that threat and when there was a “near-certainty” that no civilians would be killed or injured.

In a reminder that the majority of the American public takes an essentially parochial view of drones, Mr Obama also found time to address the paranoid concern raised by such Republican senators as Rand Paul and Ted Cruz that the government might send armed drones to prowl the skies over America, to take out Americans suspected of terrorism without a trial. For the record, Mr Obama said, he did not believe it would be constitutional for the government to target and kill any American citizen—whether with a drone or a shotgun—without due process. Nor should any president deploy armed drones over American soil, he added.

But he defended the killing of Anwar Awlaki, accusing him of plotting to blow up airplanes, and saying that when an American goes abroad to wage war against America and cannot be captured before carrying out a plot, his citizenship should no more shield him than a sniper shooting on a crowd should be protected from police marksmen.

The president’s tone was more pedagogical than bombastic. He sounded like the man that he has become: a former constitutional law professor of liberal instincts, turned commander-in-chief of a superpower that aspires to global respect, but must keep vigil against those who hate it with murderous intensity.

After more than a decade of intense war-fighting, he described a world of more diffuse, local threats from affiliates of al-Qaeda, extremists in loose regional networks or radicalised individuals, including American citizens or legal residents already in the country. The scale of the threat resembled the dangers that faced America before the September 11th 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, DC, he said.

The real message of the president’s address is that the global war on terror begun on a sunny day in September 2001, in the horror of sudden attack, must and will end. He explicitly acknowledged a legal and political headache that privately alarms his closest advisers—the threadbare legal authority underpinning the war on terror, that dates back to a few phrases of war-making authority passed by Congress just days after September 11th.

That war-making authority needed to be refined, and ultimately repealed, the president said, suggesting that the fight against terrorism had to become less an armed conflict, and more an ongoing effort to dismantle terrorist groups. He vowed not to sign any law expanding the 2001 mandate further. “This war like all wars must end,” Mr Obama said. “That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.”

(Photo credit: AFP)

Rand Paul's presidential chances

Thu, 23 May 2013 15:44:16 +0000

MY PRINT column this week considers Rand Paul's viability as a presidential contender.

Lessons from three scandals

Thu, 16 May 2013 15:52:51 +0000

MY PRINT column this week considers the three scandals lapping at the doors of the White House this week. It suggests that Republican rage over Benghazi is overblown, and that this explains why President Barack Obama's opponents have switched tack, and started denouncing him as a bullying tyrant.

No American cavalry for now

Wed, 15 May 2013 14:37:27 +0000

FOR all the warm words about coordination and shared approaches, when David Cameron and Barack Obama talked Syria at the White House on May 13th, striking differences could be heard. The British prime minister’s tone was urgent, even impatient. History is being written in the blood of the Syrian people “on our watch”, he sorrowed. More can be done to help and thus shape the Syrian opposition, and to that end Britain would push for tweaks to an EU arms embargo. To “those who doubt that approach”, Mr Cameron argued that if the world did not work with moderate rebels willing to respect Syria’s minorities, it should not be a surprise if extremist elements grew.

If the president’s ears were burning, it did not show. For it is Mr Obama who has imposed a sense of deep caution on his administration’s Syria policy. Once the Furies are unleashed in a situation like Syria, the president told his British guest, it can be hard to put things together. He talked not of arming rebels but of the daunting task of crafting a peaceful political transition that leads to Mr Assad’s departure while respecting Syrian minorities and religious groups and fending off meddling from Iran or Hezbollah. A “combustible mix”, Mr Obama gravely concluded.

To a remarkable degree, that White House encounter was a replay, in public, of private arguments now roiling Team Obama. Some of the president’s top aides, including the secretary of state John Kerry and senior members of his national security staff, have grown increasingly alarmed that the crisis in Syria may be tipping into dangerous instability. The list of worries is topped by two possible disasters: Mr Assad’s chemical weapons falling into extremist Islamist hands, and turmoil in next-door Jordan, the pro-American kingdom creaking under the strain of housing waves of Syrian refugees. Senior figures fret too about American credibility, after a limited, murky use of chemical weapons tested a “red line” set by Mr Obama, but so far only triggered calls for further investigation.

Even these relative hawks are not pushing for no-fly zones, heeding military advice that creating such safe havens is harder than it looks: preventing Mr Assad’s warplanes from bombing civilians is one thing, but helicopter gunships are a trickier target, and preventing artillery strikes almost impossible without American or allied forces becoming deeply entangled. Syria has stronger, Russian-supplied air defences than Libya, it is noted, even if Israel recently pulled off targeted air strikes. And American officials see no discrete swathe of territory controlled by rebels that could be declared a safe zone: for the moment, the opposition controls scattered strongholds.

Those pushing Mr Obama to do more are focused on arming moderate rebels, and some sense the president edging in their direction. Their goals are threefold. First to boost General Salim Idris, chief of staff of the Free Syrian Army and a leading moderate, by channelling materiel through his chain of command. Second to give America a lever to demand coordination from other nations, such as Saudi Arabia or Qatar, currently sending arms to their favoured rebel factions. Third, to send a message to Russia—Mr Assad’s main backer at the UN—that it needs to get serious about a diplomatic track.

Sceptics, including many at the Pentagon and in American spy agencies, think this approach naïve. General Idris is incapable of controlling flows of deadly weapons, they fret (Mr Kerry, it is murmured, has been chastened by some of his contacts with rebels). Next, the Saudis and other external supporters have no interest in a joint approach with the Americans that leaves a pro-Western pluralistic regime in place. Finally, the gloomiest Washington hands suspect that Russia is more concerned that America should fail, than it is about creating a stable Syria.

In repeated rounds of debate, Mr Obama’s stance has been to signal caution, then wait for aides to convince him he is wrong. The president wants to know whether more hawkish options would change Mr Assad’s calculus about clinging to power, and why they would not make the crisis worse. To date, he has not been convinced, and a decision to provide rebels with lethal aid is not a done deal, senior figures say. The gulf between Mr Obama and allies is growing wider. Other countries, such as Britain and France, respect his painstaking approach, but worry that the situation may worsen to the point that the West will have to act, at higher cost.

The president does not see the passage of time as wholly bad, with his staff pointing to signs that General Idris’s supply chains are growing stronger, in part as non-lethal American aid and humanitarian supplies have flowed through them.

On chemical weapons, Obama allies say his red lines were set out last year mostly to deter what looked like preparations for imminent strikes. The recent reported use of sarin, a ghastly nerve agent, is shrouded in mystery, and is too small-scale and murky to trigger an American response now. Nor do all Mr Obama’s advisers accept the argument that inaction in Syria will be read as weakness by other countries facing American warnings of red lines, notably Iran over its nuclear-arms programme. It is too crude to read across from one situation to another, it is argued. Countries are navel-gazing, and think of their relations with America in isolation.

The biggest gap, however, concerns the use of military force itself. Mr Obama’s government thinks Syria is militarily a stalemate, a senior official says. The Assad regime is not strong enough to stamp out the rebellion. The opposition is not strong enough to topple the regime. Thus there must be a negotiated settlement in the end.

The pressure on Mr Obama to change course is growing by the day. But his inaction is of the decisive sort, defenders say. He is not dithering, he just has a theory of the case which sees greater risks in action. Massive investments of blood and treasure in Iraq did not impose order on that unhappy country: nobody thinks the American public ready to spend anything like as much on Syria, so why should American “leadership” prove as magical as outsiders seem to think.

Show that intervention would not make things worse, has been Mr Obama’s question from the start. That visibly frustrates friends like Mr Cameron, but for now, America’s president is not budging.

(Photo credit: AFP)

Barack Obama's "Brigadoon" problem

Fri, 10 May 2013 13:18:34 +0000

MY PRINT column this week ponders why President Barack Obama finds it so hard to push through his agenda, even in policy areas where he speaks for a nationwide majority. It draws a parallel with the 1947 Broadway hit (and not terribly good 1954 film) "Brigadoon".

Barack Obama's best 2012 friends: enthusiastic black pensioners, and apathetic white youths

Wed, 08 May 2013 22:45:41 +0000

THE US Census Bureau published its definitive guide to turnout and voting trends in 2012 this afternoon, and the headline for many will be the fact that African-American turnout exceeded white turnout for the first time in 2012.

In fact, as Michael McDonald of George Mason University points out, that milestone may well have been passed in 2008, if you adjust for the fact that black respondents are more likely to refuse to answer survey questions about how they voted.

Either way, the census numbers confirm something politically important about both of President Barack Obama's victories, and which explains much of the current soul-searching within the Republican Party about immigration reform. The 2008 and 2012 elections were the first in which minority votes were not just helpful to the winner, but were decisive.

A preliminary study by the Associated Press, released last month and based on exit polls from November 2012, concluded that Mitt Romney would have won the election if whites had turned out at the same rates as they did in 2004. The new census bureau numbers buttress those AP conclusions, but add some fascinating details about the age breakdown of the 2012 electorate.

The interesting new finding that jumps out of the census data is the fact that two groups, more than any other, changed their voting behaviour between 2008 and 2012. And though each shift was to Mr Obama's advantage, the long-term implications for the Democrats are not necessarily that happy.

Between Mr Obama's first win and his second, turnout overall fell slightly. That is not a great surprise. The 2012 election was being run at a time of economic gloom, and can fairly be described as a contest between a disappointing incumbent and an unconvincing challenger. Only one group of voters increased their turnout rate by a really statistically significant margin: blacks aged 65 and over, who increased their voting rate by 6.7%. Given that blacks voted for Mr Obama by a whopping margin (he scooped 93% of black votes according to exit polls), that was a clear boost for the incumbent.

That number merits further investigation: this is just a blog posting, not a reported article. But it would be fruitful to probe whether some of that increase was a response to the widespread perception that Republicans in several states in 2012 were trying to make it harder for blacks, the poor and the elderly to vote, either by introducing rules demanding that voters show driving licences or other photo-IDs to cast ballots, or by trying to curb early voting in ways liable to hurt Democrats, eg, on Sundays before election day, when many black churches in particular traditionally drove parishioners to vote in minibuses or volunteers' cars (the so-called Souls to the Polls tradition). Anecdotally, when reporting from such swing states as Ohio or Pennsylvania last autumn, Lexington certainly found African-American voters, activists and pastors angrily accusing Republicans of racially-tinged voter suppression, and vowing to fight back.

A second group jumps out of the census report: the young, aged between 18 and 24, whose enthusiasm for voting fell sharply between Mr Obama's two presidential bids. Part of that, again as your correspondent noted on the campaign trail, involved the inevitable disenchantment felt by young people who had placed extraordinary faith in Mr Obama in 2008. I lost count of the number of students or young Democrats at rallies who told me that 2012 could never be as exciting as 2008, now that the president had been revealed as just another politician (even if many then quickly said how he had been left a bad inheritance by George Bush).

Within that group, the sharpest fall-off involved young whites, whose voting rate dropped by 7.4% between 2008 and 2012. That plunge in the white youth vote presents more of a mixed picture for Mr Obama and Mr Romney.

Overall, Mr Romney won about 60% of the white vote according to exit polls, so that white apathy in general was a problem for him. The new census data does pick up signs of such apathy: overall, non-Hispanic whites were the only ethnic group whose turnout rate fell by a significant margin between 2008 and 2012 (by 2% across all ages).

But Mr Obama won 60% of the overall youth vote, again according to exit polling, so apathy among the young was also a headache for the Democrats.

To offer a tentative conclusion, Democrats should be a bit nervous if Mr Obama's best friends in 2012 were black pensioners galvanised to vote for him in response to sharp-elbowed Republican tactics, and apathetic young whites who could not face voting for Mr Romney. Not every future Democrat may be able to tap into the same enthusiasm among African-American voters. And Mr Romney, a stiff, gosh-darn-it plutocrat and grandfather, was pretty much the worst Republican candidate you could imagine for turning out young voters. It is possible to imagine young rural whites, say, being more excited by a folksier, more populist conservative candidate.

On the other hand, the general trends on demographics are there to see in the census data. In 1996, non-Hispanic whites accounted for 79% of Americans eligible to vote, and 83% of those who actually cast ballots. In 2012, they accounted for 71% of the eligible population, and 74% of those who cast votes. And that spells long-term trouble for any party that fails to connect with minority voters. The title of the census report, "The Diversifying Electorate", says it all. Republicans have their work cut out, too.

Dithering in Syria

Thu, 02 May 2013 20:42:11 +0000

MY PRINT column this week is on Syria and Barack Obama's foreign policy.

Time to save a transatlantic trade pact

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 20:21:35 +0000

MY PRINT column this week urges leaders in America and the European Union to save a transatlantic trade pact that makes great sense but is in serious trouble.

A week of violence, and responses to violence

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:19:04 +0000

MY PRINT column this week considers America's response to the Boston bombings, and the failed Senate vote on gun control.

The strains of staying non-partisan

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 15:49:35 +0000

IN HIS brief statement hours after the fatal bombings at the Boston marathon, President Barack Obama quite properly struck a bipartisan note. "I've updated leaders of Congress in both parties, and we reaffirmed that on days like this there are no Republicans or Democrats," he told press gathered at the White House. "We are Americans, united in concern for our fellow citizens... We still do not know who did this or why. And people shouldn't jump to conclusions before we have all the facts."

On the surface his call for bipartisan restraint is being heeded. All major political figures have confined themselves, so far, to sober statements offering their sympathies and prayers for the dead and injured. About the only puzzling detail for a foreign visitor tuning in must be the repeated exchanges between studio guests, anchors and pundits about whether the president should have called the bombings an act of terror in his first press conference after the attacks. (He did just that today, saying, "Anytime bombs are used to target innocent civilians, it is an act of terror.")

Yet beneath the surface, the usual partisan forces seethe. Listen carefully to all the coverage, and there is a lot of code being used. Figures on the left and right have been prefacing their remarks with the caveat: of course, we don't know who did these awful crimes, and we must let the investigation run its course. Then comes the "but".

Watching CNN in the first hours after the blasts, it was striking how the station's anchor and at least one guest, William Keating, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, noted that April 15th was the tax-filing deadline as well as Patriots' Day, a civic holiday celebrating the opening moments of America's revolutionary war. That could point to domestic, anti-government extremists, suggested Mr Keating, a member of the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee.

Over on overtly liberal MSNBC, the anchor Chris Matthews had this to say, as he asked a guest whether he was leaning towards a domestic explanation:

And would you as an expert be thinking domestic at this point? I don't think tax day means a lot to the Arab world or Islamic world or certainly not to al Qaeda in terms of their world. It doesn't have iconic significance.

Jump to the conservative end of the spectrum, and there was a detectable difference, with anchors and guests much more ready to discuss the possibility of Middle Eastern terrorism, possible links to al-Qaeda and the reports of a Saudi Arabian student being guarded by police as he underwent treatment at a Boston-area hospital. Thus the Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Mike McCaul of Texas, drew a different conclusion from Patriots' Day, saying:

It is very reminiscent of the Times Square bombing. And the fact that it's Patriots Day, I think has maybe some significance. As you and I were talking about earlier, there are reports, earlier reports that there were ball bearings used in these explosive devices, which is very consistent with IEDs. This is a preferred method and route of choice for the terrorists to kill Americans.
So again, it's very early stages in the investigation. But if indeed there turn out to be ball bearings, I would consider that a significant factor in terms of this being a sort IED device that's very similar to what the terrorists used overseas in the Middle East.

There are other examples of this on both sides, but the overall impression is of a non-partisan Washington straining to be unleashed once more information is obtained.

In crude terms, Democrats are waiting to defend the good that government does, should the attacks turn out to be the work of a far-right, anti-government extremist. Here, just for a pre-taste, is Barney Frank, the retired Democratic congressman from Massachusetts:

In this terrible situation, let's be very grateful we had a well-funded, functioning government. It is very fashionable in America, has been for some time, to criticize government, belittle public employees, talk about their pensions, talk about what people think is their assessment of health care. Here we saw government in two ways perform very well... No tax cut would have helped us deal with this or will help us recover. This is very expensive. At a time like this, no one thinks about saving pennies.

In contrast, should the attacks turn out to be the work of foreign and/or Muslim fanatics, expect at least some Republicans to turn on a dime and denounce Mr Obama for being weak, apologising for America and essentially inviting murder in the streets of America. That, for what it is worth, explains the obsession with whether the president should or should not have called the attacks terrorism. Here, for example, is Bill O'Reilly of Fox News criticising the president for calling Boston a tragedy yesterday evening:

The president called the attack a tragedy. It was not. It was a vile act of violence designed to kill innocent people, including children.

Though, to be fair, other Fox News reporters, as well as Ari Fleischer, the former press secretary to George W. Bush, did jump to the defence of the White House, saying that the president had good reason to be cautious in his language and not fuel early speculation. To a foreigner switching on CNN in some far-flung hotel room, it must seem a bit odd to hear this debate. Of course bombs going off in a city are an act of terror. Why all the fuss?

Well, it is code for Benghazi, the complicated and tragic tale of the fatal attacks on the American consulate in that Libyan city that left the American ambassador and three colleagues dead. Benghazi is one of those stories that has attained iconic status among conservatives, who zeroed in on the initial reluctance of the Obama administration to call the attacks an act of terror, with officials instead suggesting that the ambassador was killed by a mob angered by an American-made anti-Islamic film.

The story never really took off across the partisan divide, with many Americans puzzled by the complexity of the scandal. For many on the right, though, it was simple. In their view, an American president ashamed of his country tried to cover up his hollow claims of taming al-Qaeda by shifting the blame for the attack. Some now see a similar dynamic at work.

What matters, amidst these tangles of inside-the-Beltway charge and counter-charge, is this: the current bipartisan truce over the Boston bombings means nothing, and will last only until the perpetrator is identified. Then every prejudice, pre-existing bias and partisan dislike will come thundering down on one side or the other, and it will not be a pretty sight.

(Photo credit: AFP)

The Democrats' Texas-sized dilemma

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 21:25:21 +0000

MY PRINT column this week comes from Texas, and ponders a question obsessing Republicans and Democrats alike: with Hispanics on course to become the largest single group in the state by 2020 (and a majority about a decade later), does that mean that Texas can be switched from deep-red Republican to purple, or even blue?

The column goes into the arguments on both sides, including the cautionary warnings from left and right in Texas that any political transformation will take a long time. It was 1994 when the Democrats last won a statewide office, and politicians from both parties agree that the Democratic machine in the state is in disarray. Winning state-wide will take money and lots of boring, gritty organisational work. It will also require high-quality candidates, with the life-stories, talent and charisma to overcome the "why bother" problem that Democrats face in a state so dominated by Republicans.

As mentioned in a brief posting from Texas last week, that puts pressure on two stars in the state's Democratic firmament, the twin brothers Julián Castro (the mayor of San Antonio, the state's second most populous city) and Joaquín Castro (the newly-elected congressman for the west of that city).

With a big push underway from national and regional Democrats to turn Texas into a battleground state over the next few years, the party faces a dilemma. On the one hand, the work of building a new, vote-winning progressive movement cannot advance very far or fast without exciting candidates. But on the other, they do not want to waste the Castro twins by pushing them to run too soon.

After years of duff candidates, it is hard to overestimate the hopes being invested in the 38-year old twins by local Democrats. Over breakfast in Austin, a few steps from the state capitol, a sharp Democratic thinker joked that the Castros' potential is limited only by their modest height (American voters have long favoured tall presidential candidates). Locals on the left long to see Mayor Castro run for governor, perhaps against George P. Bush, the half-Mexican son of Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor. The younger Mr Bush recently announced his desire to stand as the Republican candidate for Texas Land Commissioner in 2014, a job that brings a useful state-wide profile. As for Congressman Castro, Democrats would love to see him challenge Ted Cruz, the tea-party darling, former Texas solicitor general and verbal bomb-thrower elected to the Senate in 2012.

Nobody imagines that the state can be turned blue, or even violet, by 2014, when the next gubernatorial election will be held. But if Mayor Castro waits until 2018, some fret, George P. Bush may have stolen a state-wide march on him.

I asked Mayor Castro about his plan later that same day, just before he appeared on stage with his brother at the Lyndon Johnson Library in Austin. I met the mayor in a deserted LBJ museum. Finding him involved making a right at a hulking presidential limousine, complete with bonnet flags, riding a lift then making a left by a display of Lady Bird Johnson's dresses and a 7/8-scale replica of the Oval Office. Adding to the odd atmosphere, a biblical hailstorm erupted at that same moment, turning the skies black and sending museum staff hurrying to mop up water pouring under entrance doors.

I put it to the mayor that he owed it to his party to run in 2014.

"That's too soon," he said, then paused, perhaps sensing how blunt he sounded. Mr Castro quickly broadened the conversation to a general one about the party in 2014. There needs to be more of a foundation built, he said cautiously. A great candidate might accelerate the transition to a Democratic Texas, but candidates may not wish to take that risk.

But don't Democrats need someone big to run, even if they lose, I asked him? Isn't it like the first world war, where someone has to run onto the barbed wire for the greater good?

The mayor offered a rhetorical question by way of retort. I just heard of this great internet start-up, he said. How about quitting The Economist to join that?

As brush-offs go, this was not bad. It had the merit of conceding that politicians inhabit a universe of calculation, ambition and self-interest (not unlike journalists), rather than piously hiding behind talk of wanting only to serve.

For the record, both brothers were asked whether they would run in 2018 at their public meeting downstairs in the LBJ auditorium. The mayor gave his usual caveats about wanting to serve folks in San Antonio, but then finally admitted that he would "consider" running for governor in 2018. His brother noted that he had only just been elected to the House of Representatives, and was "focused right now on serving San Antonio". But, he added, whoever runs against Ted Cruz for the Senate will be able to point out how the Republicans' positions are "badly out of step" with where Texas is now, and in the future.

So 2018 it is then. Will that be too early or too late for the Castro brothers and their party? Will two young politicians cope with the weight of expectations being piled upon them? Almost inevitably they will disappoint their starry-eyed supporters at some point, on some issue.

But leaving aside questions of policy and politics, the attention they are receiving is natural. They have the right background and image for the new Texas that is coming in the next few years (they are centrists, Hispanic, Ivy League graduates, have a nice line in jokes, and neat and polite enough to take to a grandparental tea). For the next five years, at the very least, they will be worth watching.

(Photo credit: Lauren Gerson, LBJ Library Photo)

Running from Goldwater's ghost

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 22:30:10 +0000

RAND PAUL, the libertarian pin-up and Republican senator from Kentucky, today travelled the short distance from Capitol Hill in Washington to Howard University, a historically black college, to pose an important question. How, Mr Paul asked a distinctly sceptical audience of students, did the party of Abraham Lincoln and emancipation come to lose black votes to the point that 95% of them went to Barack Obama in 2012?

According to press reports, some students chided Mr Paul for spending so much time dwelling on the past. But had he been bent on giving a history lesson, he would have had to answer his own question—at least in part—by discussing his party's "Southern strategy". Under that strategy, such Republican leaders as Richard Nixon set out to woo white southern voters angered by the civil-rights movement. As Mr Paul, a Kentuckian, knows well, the effect was a sort-of pre-Copernican shift in American politics, with black and white southerners remaining fixed in their respective ideological positions, while the two national parties rotated around them, leaving white Democrats and Dixiecrats (including such ardent foes of civil rights as Strom Thurmond) to become Republicans, and African-Americans to become Democrats.

Instead, Mr Paul was surely talking about himself. If the senator is to make a run for the White House in 2016, he needs to square away some bumpy moments from his early political days, notably a series of confused interviews that he gave in 2010 about the Civil Rights Act. At the time Mr Paul seemed to suggest that he did not think it proper for the federal government to order private businesses to drop racial discrimination, even if he himself deplored such racism. And it is that last caveat, I suspect, that is the problem. Mr Paul, a staunch libertarian who gives every impression of being a decent man, wants to argue that a purist libertarian position is compatible with supporting racial equality. But that is a difficult task. Here is how he tangled himself in knots in 2010, telling NPR's Robert Siegel:

Dr. PAUL: What I've always said is that I'm opposed to institutional racism, and I would've, had I been alive at the time, I think, had the courage to march with Martin Luther King to overturn institutional racism, and I see no place in our society for institutional racism.
SIEGEL: But are you saying that had you been around at the time, you would have hoped that you would have marched with Martin Luther King but voted with Barry Goldwater against the 1964 Civil Rights Act?
Dr. PAUL: Well, actually, I think it's confusing on a lot of cases with what actually was in the civil rights case because, see, a lot of the things that actually were in the bill, I'm in favor of. I'm in favor of everything with regards to ending institutional racism. So I think there's a lot to be desired in the civil rights. And to tell you the truth, I haven't really read all through it because it was passed 40 years ago and hadn't been a real pressing issue in the campaign, on whether we're going to vote for the Civil Rights Act.
SIEGEL: But it's been one of the major developments in American history in the course of your life. I mean, do you think the '64 Civil Rights Act or the ADA for that matter were just overreaches and that business shouldn't be bothered by people with a basis in law to sue them for redress?
Dr. PAUL: Right. I think a lot of things could be handled locally. For example, I think that we should try to do everything we can to allow for people with disabilities and handicaps. You know, we do it in our office with wheelchair ramps and things like that. I think if you have a two-story office and you hire someone who's handicapped, it might be reasonable to let him have an office on the first floor rather than the government saying you have to have a $100,000 elevator. And I think when you get to solutions like that, the more local the better, and the more common sense the decisions are, rather than having a federal government make those decisions.

Amid much public comment Mr Paul quickly reversed his position, making clear that he did not endorse segregated lunch counters or other examples of private discrimination. But at today's event the question of civil rights still provided a challenge. Defending both his party and himself, he said:

No Republican questions or disputes civil rights. I have never waivered in my support for civil rights or the civil rights act. The dispute, if there is one, has always been about how much of the remedy should come under federal or state or private purview.

He noted, as he did in 2010, that the 14th amendment of the constitution clearly allows the federal government to weigh in when states deny certain fundamental rights, from voting to property ownership, to all citizens:

Many Republicans do believe that decentralisation of power is the best policy, that government is more efficient, more just, and more personal when it is smaller and more local.
But Republicans also realise that there are occasions of such egregious injustice that require federal involvement, and that is precisely what the 14th amendment and the Civil Rights Act were intended to do—protect citizens from state and local tyranny.

But at this point Mr Paul was in a pickle. Given that he had decided not to mention the Southern strategy, and given that he had argued that Republicans' attachment to devolved government did not blind them to racial injustice, that left the senator needing to find an alternative explanation for the black electorate's drift towards the Democratic Party.

This is what he came up with:

I think what happened during the Great Depression was that African Americans understood that Republicans championed citizenship and voting rights but they became impatient for economic emancipation.
African Americans languished below white Americans in every measure of economic success and the Depression was especially harsh for those at the lowest rung of poverty.
The Democrats promised equalising outcomes through unlimited federal assistance while Republicans offered something that seemed less tangible—the promise of equalising opportunity through free markets.

Really? Is that the best that Mr Paul can come up with as he prepares for a national run? Because that explanation fails in two important ways. First, at the level of pure campaign politics, it sounds uncomfortably close to crude conservative arguments in which Republicans suggest that Democrats buy the support of black and minority voters with "gifts" (cf, Mitt Romney's post-election analysis of his defeat by Barack Obama). No doubt Mr Paul would contest that reading of his comments, and argue that he was merely contrasting equality of outcomes, a leftish dream that requires punishing success, with the sounder conservative goal of ensuring equality of opportunities.

But secondly and more seriously, Mr Paul surely heads into perilous territory when he accuses blacks of being "impatient for economic emancipation". In the context of race-tinged equality, patience is a loaded term. From Jefferson wringing his hands about slavery to Kennedy hesitating to enact civil-rights legislation, history is full of the privileged urging the oppressed to be more patient, and not to advance rash claims for equality.

Republicans have been here before, when they nominated their only true libertarian candidate for the White House, Barry Goldwater. And if you go back to Senator Goldwater's own manifesto, "The Conscience of a Conservative", you find the urtext of all libertarian arguments about civil rights, and the tensions between racial justice and states' rights. Goldwater's argument ignored reality back then, and it sounds even worse today.

With apologies for one last quote, here is Goldwater commenting on the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in favour of public-school desegregation:

It so happens that I am in agreement with the objectives of the Supreme Court as stated in the Brown decision. I believe that it is both just and wise for negro children to attend the same schools as whites, and that to deny them this opportunity carries with it strong implications of inferiority. I am not prepared, however, to impose that judgment of mine on the people of Mississippi or South Carolina, or to tell them what methods should be adopted and what pace should be kept in striving towards that goal. That is their business, not mine. I believe that the problem of race relations, like all social and cultural problems, is best handled by the people directly concerned. Social and cultural change, however desirable, should not be affected by the engines of national power.

Patience, Goldwater was urging, patience. And even in 1960 that argument sounded hollow. In those angry, dark days it was simply not possible to praise equality of opportunity, deplore racism and then oppose the only force—federal intervention—capable of overcoming segregationists bent on denying equal opportunities to black schoolchildren.

Mr Paul did not cite Goldwater in his speech to Howard University today. That is a shame. There is a great deal to admire and debate in libertarian thought. But the movement's weakness has always been a sense that—when weighing the trade-offs between freedom and basic justice—libertarians are just a little too quick to dismiss calls for equality as folly or special pleading. Goldwater's ghost hung over all that Mr Paul said about civil rights, federal power and black impatience.

Mr Paul arrived at Howard University today congratulating himself, telling the students that some might think him "brave or crazy to be here today". A brave speech would have wrestled honestly with the history of civil rights and conservatism, equality and Mr Paul's own libertarian philosophy. This was not that speech.

(Photo credit: AFP)

Revealing tributes

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 01:04:16 +0000

AMERICAN politicians of right and left paid Margaret Thatcher a rare compliment today. They praised her for her record at home and abroad but also—unusually—hailed her as a spine-stiffening friend who had at vital moments nudged America to be true to its own self. At the same time American politicians and strategists broke with tradition in pondering future lessons that Britain’s first female prime minister might offer Americans seeking leadership positions in their parties or in the country. Not every foreign leader is accorded such memorials in America, a country that is as self-sufficient as it is mighty.

In Republican memory, Lady Thatcher cannot be divided from Ronald Reagan, the conservative movement’s secular saint. Her death prompted pride in the two friends’ parallel achievements, as political leaders who pulled gloomy, pessimistic countries back from a sense of inevitable decline, with a robust faith in individual endeavour and freedom that pulled both democracies firmly to the right. Her passing prompted thanks for the two allies’ joint triumphs, most notably in speaking useful truths about the cruelty and weakness of the communist system, just as the Soviet bloc was collapsing under its own contradictions—even as American obituarists recalled the tensions as each pursued national interests in Grenada or the Falklands.

But today’s Republican leaders—who are currently struggling to reconcile a stern faith in core principles with a need to broaden their party’s appeal after successive election defeats—found something else to praise in Lady Thatcher’s record: her prickly obduracy, and her disdain for the vagaries of opinion polls or headlines. Such praise is telling, from a party which never tires of hailing Reagan for his common touch and sunny charm, but which is currently struggling to muster Reaganite levels of optimism in its own dealings with the American electorate.

The Republican minority leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, called Lady Thatcher a great ally who “never hesitated to remind Americans of their own obligations to the cause of freedom and of the need for political courage and confidence in the face of long odds.” The speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, remembered the former prime minister as a “grocer’s daughter” who “stared down elites, union bosses, and communists to win three consecutive elections, establish conservative principles in Western Europe, and bring down the Iron Curtain.”

But Mr Boehner, who has struggled to impose his will on his own fractious Republican troops, saw something else to praise, saying in a lengthy statement: “There was no secret to her values—hard work and personal responsibility—and no nonsense in her leadership. She once said, ‘Defeat? I do not recognize the meaning of the word.’”

One of the Republican Party’s small band of senior women, South Carolina’s governor, Nikki Haley, offered a similarly spiky tribute, saying: “The ultimate Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, independent, strong, loved, and loathed died this morning at the age of 87. We have lost an amazing leader.” Meanwhile Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida who is widely seen as a future Republican presidential contender, declared that Lady Thatcher’s legacy would “always live on through the leadership lessons that defined her career”.

Democrats similarly dug into Lady Thatcher’s record as a guide for their own party. If an unpopular, often strident figure like Thatcher could win while making the case for free markets and individual liberty, it had to be assumed that Reagan’s success went beyond his avuncular charm and eloquence. “Everybody knew that Reagan was such a great showman and there was no question that he was very talented," Al From, founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, told Politico. "But what he exposed and what Thatcher exposed in the UK was that [the Democrats] were selling products nobody really wanted to buy. They made us come up with our new ideas.”

Pundits assessing Hillary Clinton's future drew rather harsh comparisons between the ex-prime minister and the former secretary of state. In vain did Bill Clinton, in a statement, hail Lady Thatcher as a breaker of glass ceilings. Instead, commentators noted Lady Thatcher’s contempt for trimming, as when she said: "If you just set out to be liked, you will be prepared to compromise on anything at anytime, and would achieve nothing." This was compared—not favourably—to Mrs Clinton’s more flexible approach to ideology and principle.

Barack Obama's tribute was only partly convincing. Echoing Mr Clinton, the president hailed Lady Thatcher as “an example to our daughters that there is no glass ceiling that can’t be shattered”—a statement that is both factually accurate and unlikely to be one that the former prime minister would have endorsed with warmth. His words seemed intended for a different audience: the young or unmarried women who form such a key part of his coalition, and who care little that Lady Thatcher herself was so impatient of feminism or calls to sisterly solidarity.

Wrapped up this week in fresh battles with Republicans over the budget, Mr Obama could fairly have noted that as prime minister, Lady Thatcher was never a supply-side zealot who put tax-cutting above balancing the budget. Indeed she disagreed with Reagan's willingness to tolerate large deficits, and herself raised VAT (a form of sales tax) even as she cut income-tax rates.

Instead, in the part of his statement that was at least recognisably about Lady Thatcher, Mr Obama offered praise for an assertive and determinative worldview that he does not really share, saying: "Here in America, many of us will never forget her standing shoulder to shoulder with President Reagan, reminding the world that we are not simply carried along by the currents of history—we can shape them with moral conviction, unyielding courage and iron will."

(Photo credit: AFP)

Being right is not enough

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 19:32:55 +0000

MY PRINT column this week looks at the rise of various centrist and bipartisan movements trying to temper the partisan ferocity of American politics, and argues that some are wiser than others.

Texas by numbers

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 21:23:32 +0000

LEXINGTON is in Texas, researching a question with large implications for this large state but also for national politics. With Hispanics on course to become a majority of the Texas population within the next few years, can this solidly Republican-red state be turned blue, or at least purple?

A proper piece will follow soon but after several days of haring around south and central Texas here are some numbers that jumped out. They suggest that (a) the Democrats face an uphill battle but (b) demography really is changing this state and (c) Team Obama are deadly serious about this endeavour.

A first number: 1994. That is the last year that any Democrat won a state-wide office in Texas. No other state can match that sort of a Democratic losing run.

Watching a public meeting with two rising stars of the Democratic Party in Texas, Julián Castro, the mayor of San Antonio, and his twin brother Joaquín, a new US congressman for San Antonio, the brothers noted that they were 20 years old when their party last won a state-wide race.

The second numbers also came up at the Castro event in Austin, organised by the Texas Tribune at the Lyndon Johnson presidential library. They were cited by the moderator and come from Steve Murdock, the former state demographer of Texas who now runs the Hobby Center for the Study of Texas at Rice University. It is one thing to know that Hispanics recently overtook Anglos (non-Hispanic whites) as the largest single block in the population. It is another to hear Dr Murdock's projection for Texan children under five in 2040. At that date, he estimates that 69.9% of under-fives will be Hispanic, and 17% will be Anglo.

The final numbers come from a meeting of Battleground Texas, a new grassroots organising effort started by the former national field director for the 2012 Obama campaign, Jeremy Bird, and run by the Ohio 2012 campaign boss, Jenn Brown. Addressing a packed union hall in Austin, Ms Brown told the crowd that the project ahead of them might take until 2020, and would involve registering, persuading and turning out millions of voters. But here is how we did it in Ohio, she explained. For all the talk about new digital technology, the real secret was finding new ways to do something old-fashioned: to talk to voters. The trick was to use new techniques for helping volunteers to find people like them.

The old way of organising involved hiring 250 field organisers. On a given day before an election they might knock on 50 doors each, meaning that they knocked on 12,500 doors. The new method refined and rolled out by Team Obama in 2012 involves one paid field organiser organising perhaps five neighbourhood team leaders. Each of those volunteer team leaders might then recruit eight volunteers, recruited from a particular neighbourhood. They might all be parents from a single school catchment area, or people with similar work backgrounds or interests.

Miss Brown then clicked on her next slide. With 250 such organisers, overseeing five neighbourhood team leaders, marshalling eight volunteers each, you can knock on 500,000 doors. It is, she noted cheerfully, "unbelievably exponential". Nor is this a theoretical finding. On each of the last four weekends before the 2012 election, Miss Brown's Ohio campaigners "talked physically" to 100,000 voters. That is the same as President Barack Obama's Ohio margin of victory.

Numbers alone do not win elections. None of this is to dismiss the importance of policies and candidates. But these are numbers that grab the attention.

America's gun divide

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 15:49:46 +0000

"NOTHING is more powerful than millions of voices calling for change," President Barack Obama said on March 28th, as he pushed—perhaps more for form's sake than with any hope of success—for tighter gun controls in the wake of last December's school shooting in Newtown. The truth is that gun control is going nowhere, and one reason is that the millions of Americans in favour of gun control do not live in the right places. Support for gun control is geographically and racially concentrated in ways that sap the movement of political power. And that disparity of opinion is linked to another reality: there is no national consensus on guns because different bits of America experience such wildly differing rates of harm from guns.

A valuable and sobering piece of research by the Washington Post on March 24th put some hard numbers behind the reality that everyone in the gun debate knows but finds hard to discuss. Rural and urban Americans, as well as blacks and whites, might as well live in different countries when it comes to their exposure to gun violence. After crunching the data, the Post found the following death rates per million people per year: gun homicides with black victims—151 per million, gun homicides with white victims—15 per million. When the 50 states are examined one by one, the disparities are even more stark: rates of fewer than ten gun homicides per million whites are recorded in Idaho, Wyoming and Utah. In Missouri, the research found a gun homicide rate of 308 per million blacks.

That helps explain polling that finds 78% of blacks supporting stricter gun controls, as opposed to 48% of whites.

These disparities are worth bearing in mind when examining the latest opinion polls which show support for gun control falling sharply in specific groups after a brief post-Newtown peak. CNN's analysis notes:

"Opinion on gun control was fairly steady over the past few years, but seemed to spike after the Connecticut shootings," CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said.... "In the immediate aftermath of the shootings in Connecticut, the number of rural Americans who supported major gun restrictions rose to 49% but now that support has dropped 22 points," Holland said. "Support for stricter gun laws dropped 16 points among Americans over 50 years old in that same time."

One way of describing post-Newtown opinion is that a shocking event briefly closed the divide between Americans who live with high rates of gun homicide and those who do not. But now the gap has re-opened. Tellingly, a minimum-ambition alternative offering on gun control being crafted by Senator Charles Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, will reportedly focus on tougher federal controls on criminals who smuggle guns to other criminals (ie, a form of gun control seen as aimed at urban gangs, far from Iowa), and tougher school security (addressing a form of rare gun violence that inspires disproportionate fear nationwide).

So should rural or white Americans care about gun murders? Yes, if they care about their fellow Americans. But if that is not enough, the recent number crunching has brought more precision to another bleak reality. If whites in rural Wyoming do not kill each other with guns very much, they kill themselves at horrible rates. The Post's analysis found gun suicide rates of 162 per million whites in Wyoming, and found that overall suicides are more common in states with high levels of gun ownership.

Nationally, the gun suicide rate is 75 per million whites per year in America, and 27 per million blacks, according to the Post's numbers.

A caveat. Suicide is a complex problem, and deserves more analysis than can be fitted into a single blog post. Suicide rates are affected by everything from demographics to economics, culture and mental-health-care provisions. But there is a lot of research to indicate that death rates are affected by the availability of methods of suicide that leave no chance for second thoughts (eg, by calling an ambulance after taking an overdose).

A final note. Even looking only at white and rural Americans, these are still high rates of gun death.

Gun-rights advocates are often angered by comparisons with Britain, a country in which handguns and semi-automatic weapons are essentially impossible to own privately, since a spate of mass shootings in the 1990s. A cottage industry has grown up explaining that America's many thousands of gun homicides a year include a few hundred cases of justifiable homicide, and that some noisy British television presenters working in America have understated British gun murder rates.

It is also important to note that democratic deference must be paid to the overwhelming majority of Americans who broadly support the right to bear arms privately. America is America, and its history and culture must be respected in any discussion of gun control.

But here are some numbers, for comparison, that do support an observation that this reporter has made before: the form of gun control that works involves no guns, even if that is not the sort of gun control that will ever be agreed in America.

Fatal injuries involving firearms offences in England and Wales in 2011: 42. Homicides in England and Wales involving firearms in 2011: 39. Suicides involving firearms in England and Wales in 2011: 90.

The population of England and Wales in 2011 was about 56.1m. That gives the following rates: firearm crime fatalities—0.75 per million; gun homicides—0.7 per million; gun suicide rates—1.6 per million.

Or put another way, residents of England and Wales have a gun homicide rate 21 times lower than that among white Americans, and 215 times lower than that among black Americans, and a gun suicide rate 47 times lower than that among white Americans.

Other forms of murder and suicide do not make up the difference. The overall American homicide rate in 2008 was 54 per million inhabitants per year. The overall homicide rate in England and Wales in 2011 was 9.6 per million. The overall suicide rate in America in 2009 was 117 per million. The overall suicide rate in England and Wales in 2011 was 87 per million.

Two political earthquakes

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 20:05:10 +0000

MY PRINT column this week looks at parallels between the debate on gay marriage and the push for comprehensive immigration reform.

Why Fox News is less to blame for polarised politics than you think

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 18:38:31 +0000

AMERICAN pundits spend a good deal of their time pondering partisan intensity, and how it has sharply increased over the years. At some point in such discussions, it is traditional to note that the sorting of America into ever-more flinty conservatives and ever-more liberal progressives has coincided with the rise of cable television and the internet. The problem, it is asserted, is that too many Americans consume their news from inside an echo chamber that reflects their existing prejudices. Oh, for the time when the nation settled down around the TV to watch the network news from Walter Cronkite and his peers, who delivered a broadly centrist diet of news from home and abroad in a tone of take-your-medicine seriousness.

Some of that hand-wringing is to the point. Attend Republican or Democratic campaign rallies, and you certainly hear the same talking points from many activists there, and many of those soundbites and factoids come from cable, talk radio and the same handful of partisan blogs. What's more, when Americans are asked by opinion pollsters where they get their news, a significant proportion cite cable news (with about one in five citing Fox News, for instance).

But is much of the alarm overblown? A number of political scientists think so, after digging into the numbers. Markus Prior at Princeton has been chewing away at the problem longer than most. His latest academic paper (hat-tip the Monkey Cage political science blog) is well worth a look. Mr Prior starts with the important point that we know surprisingly little about the real audience for cable news.

The headline numbers issued by the Nielsen Company, based on samples from set-top boxes in households across America, suggest that Fox News, the highest-rated cable news channel, has an average primetime audience of about 2m, or about 0.7% of the population. But ratings are not very helpful, he writes, because they average over long portions of the day when most people are asleep or at work, and "even the average audience for individual shows in primetime obscures the number of regular viewers because it only gives full weight to someone who watches the entire show every day it airs."

TV folk are often more interested in the cumulative audience for a show, or "cume", representing the total number who watch at least a fixed number of minutes of a show or channel over a specified period, it turns out. After a lot of rootling around for non-published data, some of it relating to short snapshots of time such as a single week in March 2008, Mr Prior comes up with a more useful estimate of who watches Fox News, MSNBC, CNN and the rest:

The share of Americans who watch cable news at a rate of 10 minutes or more per day is probably no larger than 10-15 percent of the voting age population and rises modestly when an exciting election approaches. Even this estimate may be high because adding up separate cume estimates for each cable news channel amounts to double-counting people who watch more than one channel

Is that a large enough pool of viewers to explain the growing ferocity of American democracy? Surely not, though at the margins it is likely that cable news outlets turbo-charge the existing partisan fervour of their core viewers. Yet that does not explain the big national shifts that have accompanied the rise of cable news, internet blogs and other varieties of choice.

Mr Prior has an indirect suggestion for solving the puzzle. His advice is to think about the vast majority of Americans who do not watch Fox or CNN or MSNBC (even if some of them fib to opinion pollsters and say that they do) and ponder how they consume news. His depressing suggestion is that many hardly consume news at all.

In the glory days of network television, in the 1960s and 1970s, he writes: "Even people with little interest in news and politics watched network newscasts because they were glued to the set and there were no real alternatives to news in many markets during the dinner hour." However once viewers had a greater array of choices, those bored by politics gratefully turned to more entertaining channels and shows, he suggests: "The culprit turns out to be not Fox News, but ESPN, HBO, and other early cable channels that lured moderates away from the news and away from the polls."

That is an elegant thesis that needs some caveats. Turnout in presidential elections has fallen less than is commonly supposed, going by the proportion of those eligible to vote who actually cast ballots. But in other races, whether mid-term congressional elections, local races or party primaries, turnouts in America are often much lower than in other rich democracies. In such a low-turnout environment, the co-existence of a news-shunning majority and a fired-up minority of partisan news junkies is a problem.

The echo chamber exists, in short. But the main link between cable news and partisan politics may be the sheer number of Americans who cannot be bothered to tune in. To give Mr Prior the last word: "The median voter has never been so bored".

The price of detachment

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 20:43:07 +0000

MY PRINT column this week asks a question about President Barack Obama's foreign policy: If America grows unwilling to carry a big stick, will speaking softly work? Written as the president was on the way to the Middle East, it looks forwards to his speech in Jerusalem today, in which he seized the chance to address the Israeli public directly over the heads of their political leaders, urging them to agree that their rational self-interest lies in pursuing peace on the basis of a two-state settlement with the Palestinians.

The column is not an argument for brandishing a big stick, or indulging in lots of military adventures. It attempts to pose a narrower question, looking at the compatibility of Mr Obama's two main foreign policy instincts. His first instinct, according to officials and diplomats, is to avoid foreign entanglements and, by stepping back, make other powers share more of the burden of running the 21st-century world order. The second involves urging other countries to see where their rational self-interests lie, in a long series of settings.

Both those instincts may be quite rational, the column suggests. But what if the right to advise must be earned through engagement? If America is unwilling to play global policeman, can it still be a global scold?

Are white Americans unusually individualistic?

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 22:59:25 +0000

THERE is no mystery about the Republican Party's ambitions to win more Hispanic votes. Since the presidential election last November, Republicans have been arguing about whether new policies are the key to wooing Latinos, or whether—to borrow an old Ronald Reagan line—Hispanics are conservatives who just don't know it yet. Lots of bigwigs seem to be coming round to the idea of a hybrid approach, combining new policies on immigration with more familiar appeals to piety, love of family and hard work, all of which are hailed as natural Hispanic values.

The Republican debate about the Asian-American vote is at a much earlier stage. A panel at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference saw Asian voters mentioned in passing, but mostly as an example of the Romney campaign's failure to micro-target its message to different groups. This is a constituency that conservatives should be able to appeal to, argued John Fund, a conservative journalist. They constitute 3% of the overall electorate and are concentrated in some important swing states, he said, and both George Bush senior and Bob Dole won a majority of Asian-American votes in the 1992 and 1996 elections. But after that the vote steadily declined to the point that Mitt Romney won only 26% of that demographic. Mr Fund suggested a lack of effort might be to blame: Republicans only made a "full-court press" on the Asian vote in one state, Nevada in 2012, with multi-lingual campaign messages tailored to Asian community concerns, such as school choice.

Other conservatives seem a bit baffled by Asian-Americans, especially those whose affluence or small-business backgrounds make them look like natural Republicans.

In part, bafflement is a reflection of the block's diversity. Rock solid exit polling is hard to come by, but this large survey by the Asian-American Legal Defence and Education Fund (a broadly left-leaning group) points to big cultural and geographic differences in the 2012 presidential vote, reporting:

While three-quarters (77%) of Asian Americans polled voted for Barack Obama for President, as many as 96% of Bangladeshi Americans voted for Obama, compared to 44% of Vietnamese Americans. Support for policies including immigration reform also varied by ethnic group.
In addition, while Asian Americans in the Northeast voted for Obama at high levels (89% in PA and 86% in NY), as few as 16% of Asian Americans polled in Louisiana voted for Obama

This is a complex puzzle, which cannot be settled by a single blog posting. But a recent report by National Public Radio described a piece of academic research which, if at all accurate, may offer a partial explanation for the phenomenon of entrepreneurial, tradition-minded Asian-Americans resisting Republican messages.

The report by NPR's Shankar Vedantam—who has a knack for digging up interesting social-science research—pointed to experiments by sociologists at Stanford University, designed to test how different groups of Americans respond to appeals to consider the greater good rather than individual endeavour. One of the experiments in particular sounds intriguing. In Stanford's description:

In the third experiment, designed to test these motivational effects in relation to a pressing social issue, students were asked to give their opinions about a class on promoting environmental sustainability after viewing a website about the course.
When the course description emphasized interdependent behavior – working together, being adaptive and taking others' views into perspective – white American students predicted they would put less effort into the course and were less likely to agree that taking the course should be a university requirement than when the course description emphasized independent behavior – taking charge, being unique and knowing your own perspective.
Students also said they would be less motivated in the class, which explained why they supported the course less when their participation was framed in terms of interdependence rather than independence.
The researchers also found that, across the three studies, the motivation of Asian American students did not vary when interdependence or independence were invoked.
The authors noted that bicultural Asian American students are exposed to both mainstream American culture, which stresses independence, and East Asian culture, which stresses the value and importance of interdependence. As a result, appeals to think and act interdependently or independently were equally motivating.

A single piece of academic research cannot explain the voting behaviour of millions of Americans. Immigrant communities are also anything but static, evolving in complex ways over time. But the findings are worth pondering because the themes of liberty and individualism are so dominant in today's Republican Party. If at least some Asian Americans are actively resistant to such rhetoric, it may be a while before a conservative presidential candidate sweeps the Asian-American vote again.

Hillary Clinton's farcically late conversion on gay marriage

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 22:47:32 +0000

OUTSIDE the annual Christmas messages from Queen Elizabeth to the Commonwealth, you will struggle to see a more regal broadcast than the video of Hillary Clinton released today, announcing her conversion to the cause of gay marriage.

The former secretary of state embarks on her screeching u-turn with a moment of self-congratulation, noting her long commitment to gay rights. The idea is to suggest that her views have been changed not by petty considerations such as opinion polls or the pro-marriage declarations of rival politicians. Mrs Clinton reports instead that she was converted by a lifetime of distinguished service and her deep empathy—or as she puts it: "by people I have known and loved, by my experience representing our nation on the world stage, my devotion to law and human rights and the guiding principles of my faith."

Making no mention of her earlier support for federal legislation defining marriage as between a man and a woman, Mrs Clinton instead presents herself in the manner of a national matriarch and living icon of liberalism, happily astonished by an unexpected turn of public opinion. She says:

For those of us who lived through the long years of the civil rights and women’s rights movements, the speed with which more and more people have come to embrace the dignity and equality of LGBT Americans has been breathtaking, and inspiring

The former senator and first lady could have added one more adjective to that last list: mortifying. American opinion on gay marriage has changed with such speed that the swing has left even canny politicians scrambling. A new ABC News/Washington Post poll records a 26% jump in the number of Americans who think gay marriage should be legal since 2004, to 58% now.

In several ways, the manner of Mrs Clinton's announcement looks cautious to the point of cowardice. It is not convincing to argue, as her supporters do, that she is only free to make her views known now that she has stepped down as America's chief diplomat. Her successor at the State Department, John Kerry, has publicly supported gay marriage since 2011, and has not been stoned as a blasphemer on any of his stops around the world to date.

Then there is the fact that she had her husband, ex-president Bill Clinton, prepare the way for her conversion, writing a piece for the Washington Post earlier this month in which he said he regretted signing the Defence of Marriage Act in 1996. There is the detail that she issued her statement in a recorded web video for the Human Rights Campaign, a well-funded lobby group for the gay establishment, thereby shutting down any possibility for pesky questions, as Politico's reporter notes. Finally there is the detail that Mrs Clinton was beaten to her conversion by a lengthening list of conservatives, most recently Senator Rob Portman of Ohio.

But the most damaging aspect of her belated conversion involves something else: where it places Mrs Clinton generationally. The real divide in America on gay marriage is not along party lines (though Republicans are much warier than Democrats). The widest gap involves age. As the new poll notes, a thumping 81% of Americans under 30 back gay marriage. With numbers like that, it is less that the debate has been won among the young, and more that a whole stratum of Americans cannot comprehend what there is even to argue about.

This is at heart a question of visibility. Decades ago, a certain sort of music fan could not see for the life of them why that nice Mr Liberace had never married, let alone imagine that they might know or be related to someone gay. Now, even people in small towns have discovered that some of their sons and daughters are gay. And as Senator Portman explained when he announced his conversion, when he learned that his own, much-loved, son was gay, that changed everything.

In short younger Americans have the eyes to see what was previously hiding in plain sight. Mrs Clinton surely has the same powers of sight, not having spent the past six decades on a farm in Iowa, embroidering Biblical samplers. In coming so late to the wedding party, she thus looks opportunistic and insincere. But worse than that—given that she will be 69 in 2016, were she to run for the Democratic presidential nomination—Mrs Clinton has made herself look older than she really is.

Republicans want some of Obama's coalition of voters, but what price will they pay for them?

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 21:54:16 +0000

TO CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference now in its 40th year. To call the mood serious would not do it justice. The conservatives gathered here are hungry, in the narrow-eyed, intently-focused manner of lions who spent all day stalking prey but missed at the last moment. Not only are they hungry, but they can see a vast, tempting herd on the far horizon: the diverse voter coalition that handed President Barack Obama victory last November.

The conference's opening day has seen open competition between party heavyweights with credible claims to running for the presidential nomination in 2016.

A political scientist examining their speeches would point to clear ideological differences. Marco Rubio, a young senator from Florida, offered a blend of social conservatism (with explicit nods to the pro-life and traditional-marriage wing of the party) and a sort of Reaganish paean to America's can-do, free-market spirit. He talked of the resilience of hard-working folk pressed by globalisation. He vowed that the country could and should continue to lead the world, if a limited government let its people "do what they have always done".

Rand Paul, a senator from Kentucky (and son of the libertarian hero, Ron Paul), offered the conservative libertarian case, with nods to gun-rights and small government (mocking such government-funded research as a study of rattlesnake behaviour involving a robot squirrel).

Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, praised his state's record of job-creation and fiscal thrift, and denounced Mr Obama for expanding government through such large programmes as Obamacare.

A political strategist would describe the speeches more simply. Mr Rubio made a pitch to be a new face pitching familiar ideas with more skill and empathy than Mitt Romney. In case the audience missed this point, he told us towards the end of his address that "the left" would accuse him of offering no new ideas in his speech, by which he actually meant that Rand Paul, to his libertarian right, would level that charge. "We don't need a new idea," he said, pleasing the half of the audience that had snowy hair and presumably dismaying the other half, which was dominated by the sort of young people who attend CPAC (think college students in bow-ties and blazers, alongside slightly grungier types in Stand With Rand t-shirts). "The idea is called America, and it still works," Mr Rubio said, to cheers.

Mr Paul essentially made a pitch that—the Republican establishment having failed in 2012—it was time to try his blend of liberty-loving populism. He quoted Montesquieu, called for a 17% flat-rate income tax and said awkward things about America's global war on terror. But he also brought props and cracked jokes, saying that he might repeat his Senate filibuster over American drone policy (he waved binders of material to last him 13 hours). He showed that he can throw populist punches, attacking the Republican party of old that had grown "stale and moss-covered", and denouncing Mr Obama for sending new funds to Egypt, despite that country's apparent hostility. "I say not one penny more for countries that burn our flag," he shouted, and the crowd roared.

Mr Perry's pitch was to be the grown-up, competent conservative with real-world experience of running a big state. His toughest punch came early, when he attacked those who say the Republican Party had to change its conservative principles. That might be true if it had selected conservative candidates in 2008 or 2012, he scoffed.

But none of that captures what each of the three contenders was really up to. Each used his 15 minutes at CPAC to explain why he knew how to peel off and capture elements of that Obama voter coalition, lumbering tantalisingly across the horizon.

Mr Rubio barely needed to explain his selling point: he is the rising Hispanic star with the up-by-the-bootstraps life-story, able to make a classic case for free markets and equality of opportunity that blue-collar or immigrant voters will heed.

Explicitly, Mr Paul explained that he could bring the votes of the young. He boasted of his understanding of the "Facebook generation", and swore a bit to show his authenticity, saying that they did not want to be told "crap". (Though this middle-aged reporter thought that real young people long ago tired of Facebook, after they found their grandparents friending them on it).

Mr Perry also suggested that he knew how to win Hispanics, but with brisk, Texan talk of economic opportunity, not tear-jerking empathy. They say we have to change our party in order to appeal to Hispanics, he cried. ("Boo", shouted some in the audience, which was not very 2013 of them). Let me tell you want Hispanics in Texas want, Mr Perry went on smoothly, explaining that Hispanics are small business conservatives who want Republican things.

None of the three quite nailed it. Mr Rubio actually does have some new ideas, as one his party's boldest voices on immigration. But he seemed stale today, and cautious. Mr Paul delighted the hundreds of devoted young fans who had come to CPAC to hear him. But winning the presidency of America requires 60m votes. Clever and bold though Mr Paul is, there are not 60m American votes for his blend of flat taxes, civil liberties, gun rights and legal pot. Mr Perry? Well the Texas governor is not to everyone's tastes, and blew the 2012 primaries with his mid-debate brain-freeze when he forgot which government departments he planned to abolish. But watching him today he was the grown-up in the room, and it was once again possible to see why he got quite a long way in 2012.

It is traditional to mock CPAC as a festival of conservative eccentricity. And yes, you can pop downstairs and visit stands run by social conservatives wearing strange cod-mediaeval cloaks with roaring lion pins (it's to symbolise Christian martyrdom and sacrifice, one of the cod-knights explained). And yes, there are books on sale about how America is about to embrace serfdom, or how Mr Obama is secretly controlled by Communist mentors. And yes, it is disconcerting to wait in line for coffee next to tea party folk in tricorn hats and 18th century knee-breeches.

But as said before, the mood is not wacky but hungry. The conservative movement on display is not united, and does not even agree on whether it has to change in order to win. But it sees the coalition assembled by Mr Obama and it wants some of those votes. That, at least, is an improvement on dismissing Mr Obama's voters as dependent "takers" who are a lost cause.

The curious strength of the NRA

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 17:15:21 +0000

MY PRINT column this week considers the likelihood that the gun lobby is about to beat back post-Newtown gun curbs, despite polls showing the lobby out of touch with majority public opinion.

Why the NRA keeps talking about mental illness, rather than guns

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 22:00:49 +0000

"WE DON'T go around shooting people, the sick people do. They need to be fixed." So said the gun-owning pensioner in the Korean War veteran's hat, demonstrating outside Connecticut's state capitol on March 11th. He was holding a sign reading: "Stop the Crazies—Step Up Enforcement of Current Laws", and like many of the gun-rights supporters rallying in Hartford this week, he wanted to talk about how improving mental health care was the proper response to massacres such as December's school shooting in Newtown, an hour's drive away.

Your reporter was in Hartford to report on the gun lobby, and its campaign to push back against state and federal gun-control plans proposed after Newtown's horrors, which saw 20 young children and six staff murdered. The politics of gun control will form the basis for this week's print column, but this posting is about something more specific: the gun lobby's focus on mental illness as the "true" cause of such massacres.

The message discipline of the National Rifle Association and congressional allies has been impressive. After an initial period of silence, the NRA came out with a consistent narrative about mass shootings. The problem, said such spokesmen as Wayne LaPierre, the NRA's executive vice-president, was that criminals and the dangerously ill can get their hands on guns.

At moments, the NRA and supporters almost sounded like liberal gun-control advocates. "We have a mental health system in this country that has completely and totally collapsed," Mr LaPierre told NBC television on December 23rd last year, days after the Newtown murders. The NRA backs the FBI-run instant background checks system used by gun dealers when selling firearms, Mr LaPierre noted. It supports putting all those adjudicated mentally incompetent into the system, and deplores the fact that many states are still putting only a small number of records into the system.

On the chill streets of Hartford this week, that same sentiment went down well with the Korean War veteran and his fellow demonstrators. All of which is perfectly sensible, yet puzzling. For the demonstrators, holding signs that read "Stand and Fight" and "Feels like Nazi Germany", made clear their deep distrust of government. Did they really support a large expansion of officialdom's right to declare someone mentally unfit, trumping their right to bear arms under the constitution's second amendment? In Hartford the question provoked some debate. But most demonstrators followed the NRA's line in opposing any talk of moving to "universal" background checks: jargon for closing the loophole that currently allows private individuals to buy and sell guns without any checks on the criminal or mental-health records of buyers. Almost 40% of gun sales currently fall through that loophole.

Mr LaPierre's line is both clear and not. He supports improving the quality of the federal database used for background checks, but opposes using that same database more often, calling any talk of universal background checks a ruse paving the way for the creation of the national gun register that the government craves, so it can confiscate America's guns.

He talks of improving mental-health treatment, but then uses the harshest possible language to describe the mentally ill, telling NBC:

We have no national database of these lunatics... We have a completely cracked mentally ill system that's got these monsters walking the streets.

So what is really going on? Interviewing the Democratic governor of Connecticut, Dannel Malloy, he accused the NRA of a "bait-and-switch", in which the gun lobby is trying to appear constructive without allowing any gun rules to change.

The argument quickly drifts into party politics. Marco Rubio, a Republican senator from Florida, casts the debate about post-Newtown gun controls as an either/or question, in which gun curbs and improved mental health are somehow antithetical. Responding to President Barack Obama's calls for ambitious gun controls in the wake of the school shootings, including a renewed ban on assault weapons, Mr Rubio said:

Nothing the president is proposing would have stopped the massacre at Sandy Hook... Rolling back responsible citizens’ rights is not the proper response to tragedies committed by criminals and the mentally ill.

On the Democratic side, the new junior senator for Connecticut, Chris Murphy, asserts that the general public are not buying such arguments, which he calls a "smokescreen". People understand that a mental-health system that can pick out mass murderers before they strike is a "policy illusion".

On balance, the talk of a gun lobby smokescreen is fair. Examine the NRA's arguments more closely, and Mr LaPierre demolishes his own suggestions even as he makes them. In a ferocious speech to supporters in Salt Lake City on February 23rd, he predicted that criminal records and the mentally incompetent would "never" be part of a background check system, which was really aimed at "one thing—registering your guns".

Instead, Mr LaPierre and allies paint a picture of an American dystopia, in which hand-wringing liberals, having closed down mental hospitals during the civil-rights era, refuse to put dangerous criminals behind bars:

They’re not serious about prosecuting violent criminals... They’re not serious about fixing the mental-health system. They’ve emptied the institutions and every police officer knows dangerous people out there on the streets right now. They shouldn’t be on the streets, they’ve stopped taking their medicine and yet they’re out there walking around...
The powerful elites aren’t talking about limiting their capacity for protection. They’ll have all the security they want... Our only means of security is the second amendment. When the glass breaks in the middle of the night, we have the right to defend ourselves

Such rhetoric has effects far beyond the world of gun rights. Both in Congress and in state legislatures around the country, politicians are debating proposals for increased supervision of the mentally ill, and mandatory reporting of those seen as posing a danger to themselves or others.

New York state has already passed a package of gun-control measures that includes a requirement for mental-health professionals—from psychiatrists to social workers and nurses—to report anyone deemed likely to seriously harm themselves or others. A report triggers a cross-check against a database of state gun licences and police may be authorised to find and remove that person's firearms.

Such intense attention to mental illness—for years the forgotten Cinderella of public-health policy—both pleases and alarms doctors and academics working in the field. Professor Jeffrey Swanson of Duke University has written a commentary for the Journal of the American Medical Association, examining the "promise and the peril of crisis-driven policy", and arguing that in a nation with constitutionally protected gun rights, the "real action in gun control is people control", or preventing dangerous people from getting their hands on a gun.

That carries risks, he writes:

The first is overidentification; the law could include too many people who are not at significant risk. The second is the chilling effect on help seeking; the law could drive people away from the treatment they need or inhibit their disclosures in therapy. The third is invasion of patient privacy; the law amounts to a breach of the confidential patient-physician relationship. Mental health professionals already have an established duty to take reasonable steps to protect identifiable persons when a patient threatens harm. However, clinicians can discharge that duty in several ways... For example, the clinician could decide to see the patient more frequently or prescribe a different medication. Voluntary hospitalization is also an option for many at-risk patients

Reached by telephone as he waited for a flight, Professor Swanson elaborated on a fourth risk, that of over-estimating the small proportion of violent crimes carried out by the mentally ill. What's more, he noted, the mental-health system is good at describing behaviour patterns but very poor at predicting specific acts by specific people. With hindsight, mass shooters are often described as obviously disturbed, he notes. "But you can't go around locking up all the socially awkward young men."

In one area—suicide by gun—mental illness plays a very strong role, Professor Swanson says, and closer supervision could do real good, despite the risks. In 2010 suicide accounted for 61% of gun-injury deaths in America.

Such statistics do not fit the narrative of the gun lobby, of course, with their insistence that a gun in the home makes citizens safer. Yet even here, where improved gun controls linked to mental health could do real good, it is vital to get the details right and avoid "knee-jerk" law-making, says Dr Harold Schwartz, chief psychiatrist and director of the Institute of Living, one of the oldest psychiatric hospitals in America, founded in Hartford in 1822.

The post-Newtown national discussion about mental health is distinctly double-edged, says Dr Schwartz. It may increase access to some programmes. But the debate is also being used by those with other motives. Mental illness is ubiquitous, he notes, with rates of schizophrenia or bipolar disorders more or less the same around the world, with some rare exceptions. Yet rates of gun violence differ dramatically between America and comparable countries. And those differences tally closely with differences in the accessibility of weapons. To Dr Schwartz the diagnosis is straightforward: "the NRA is demonising mental illness to distract from the obvious, in-your-face relationship between the availability of guns and murder rates."

Opponents of gun controls may respond with familiar flurries of statistics. In Hartford, for instance, several pro-gun demonstrators cited the same talking point, claiming (falsely) that home invasion rates soared in Australia after that country banned the most powerful forms of guns in 1996, following a mass shooting. Actually, home break-in and robbery rates have fallen sharply in Australia since 1996, as have gun-death rates, with no corresponding rise in other forms of homicide.

The most recent Australian crime statistics may be found here, and set out the historical trends clearly. As this newspaper noted shortly after the Newtown killings:

America’s murder rate is four times higher than Britain’s and six times higher than Germany’s. Only an idiot, or an anti-American bigot prepared to maintain that Americans are four times more murderous than Britons, could possibly pretend that no connection exists between those figures and the fact that 300m guns are “out there” in the United States, more than one for every adult

Mr LaPierre of the NRA is a proud patriot. But when he talks of mentally ill "monsters" and "lunatics" walking the streets in such numbers that all prudent citizens must arm themselves to the teeth, he is slandering both them and his country, just as surely as any American-hating bigot.

(Photo credit: AFP)

When not in Rome

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 22:45:45 +0000

MY PRINT column this week notes that American politicians scorn Europe as a symbol of dysfunction, and suggests that—in that case—they should stop copying the trait that best explains EU paralysis: mutual dislike between different regions and voter groups.