TPMCafe

The Unapologetic Republicans

2012-02-26T02:00:06Z

I'm sorry, but the apology controversy is a sorry-**sed sorry affair (latest coverage here and here). If this is going to be taken seriously as campaign issue, it needs to be looked at from both directions. The Republicans shouldn't get a free pass to put the president on the defensive. We need to hear more about how this Americans-do-no-wrong thing works. We've heard plenty of President Obama's opponents' shock and dismay. The Republicans have been scathing about the current commander in chief, cocksure they'd do a better job. Well okay, we have two cases here: the careless destruction of sacred texts and friendly fire that claimed the lives of two dozen troops who were on our side. What would the would-be commanders in chief say to the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan? As far as I can tell, it's along the lines of "forget you.

Smothering Iran Diplomacy With Support

2012-02-23T16:26:16Z

When you boil it down, much of the recent right-wing commentary on Iran consists of variations on the theme of just how futile diplomacy is. President Obama's handling of Iran has been subject to intense cross-pressures --and plenty of second-guessing -- at every step along the way. And now, having painstakingly built an international coalition for economic sanctions far more stringent than ever before, the president's skeptics are no less impatient with him. Which leaves us with a policy / political debate skewed dangerously toward military confrontation.

I was particularly interested to see a blog post by Peter Feaver over at ForeignPolicy.com's Shadow Government, in which he declares his support for renewed diplomacy with Iran yet with utterly impractical conditions attached.

In comparison with the GOP candidates, who would have voters believe Obama is helping Iran get the bomb, Feaver does give a more sympathetic and realistic take on Obama administration policy. But then, that sets the level-of-discourse bar pretty low. Wrapped within the fair-mindedness, however, is a policy prescription that would more likely doom diplomatic efforts to failure than help them succeed.

Feaver wrote in response to a New York Times op-ed by former architect of Obama policy Dennis Ross, who argues that the intensified pressure of recent sanctions could change how Iranian leaders calculate cooperation versus defiance toward the rest of the world. The moment could be ripe for a peaceful solution, and we must give diplomacy a chance. Now in Feaver's reaction to Ross, look at the way he gives with one hand and takes away with the other:

He rightly points out that the current Obama strategy on Iran was to squeeze Iran with sufficiently painful sanctions so that Iran's cost-benefit calculation would change, making the regime decide that the costs of the nuclear program were not worth the gain.

...then a few sentences later...

All current sanctions must be maintained at the current level of pressure throughout, until a deal is struck that will verifiably prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

According to Feaver, the key to a diplomatic solution is to resist ratcheting the sanctions back even a single notch until a final deal is reached. The United States and the other nations imposing sanctions shouldn't relent in the slightest until Iran's total cooperation has been pocketed. (Please note: the strongest current sanctions are those being imposed bilaterally by various countries, with the UN Security Council resolution merely providing a framework.) He is imagining a diplomatic process -- imagine being the operative verb -- in which all of the significant moves come from one side, while the other sits impassively until fully satisfied. This leads me to a critique I've made many times: the right wing's inability to make a crucial distinction between cooperation (or concessions) versus capitulation. In their imaginary diplomacy, you can insist on outcomes that meet your every wish and give the other guy nothing. But back here in the real world, negotiation is based on give-and-take, not take-and-take.

At one point in his post, Feaver writes, "As Ross surely knows, the Iranians have a standard approach for alleviating the kind of sanctions and isolation they currently face." Feaver then goes on to note Iran's past success in blaming sanctions for undercutting diplomacy, which has indeed helped Iran fend off pressure and barrel ahead on its nuclear program.

But if Ross and presumably his former Obama administration colleagues "surely know" this, then what is Feaver's point? I really have to flag how brazen it is to tell President Obama how to manage the unprecedented set of sanctions that he's put together. Given that Feaver's been trying to argue that all of President Obama's policy successes stem from his adoption of Republican ideas, it's no surprise that Feaver would short-change the very un-Bushlike diplomacy needed to get the sanctions.

And oh by the way, I don't have much patience for critics who claim utmost concern about Iran while shrugging off the US-Russia reset; whatever else can be said about the reset, it had everything to do with the cooperation on Iran that Moscow has provided. Likewise it's totally hypocritical for Republicans to be staunch advocates of sanctions and then complain about high oil prices, which are being driven upward mainly by the Iran standoff.

So even though Feaver didn't really mean it, yes, the Obama administration knows very well that Iran must be kept from wriggling out from under the international pressure. Let me remind everyone that President Obama pressed ahead with the pivotal UN sanctions resolution in June 2010 in rejection of a deal brokered by Brazil and Turkey, based precisely on the argument Feaver presents. The administration's policy for three years has put the clear burden of proof squarely on Iran, a strategy that Feaver acknowledges but can't quite affirm.

I'll conclude by focusing on what a ridiculous false choice Feaver presents, with his idea of keeping every sanction in place until Tehran capitulates. A fuller outline of the choices includes Feaver's prescription, his straw man, and the sensible approach:

A) refuse to reciprocate any Iranian moves short of a final agreement

B) trade significant elements of the sanctions in exchange for trivial Iranian concessions

C) gradually ease sanctions in response to any meaningful Iranian steps to prove the civilian nature of their activities (if and only if they materialize)

Contrary to the right wing's over-the-top alarmism, President Obama is not foolish enough to adopt approach B. Sadly, Republicans are too ideological to go for option C. And the ultimate irony is that option C was the key to President Bush's success in getting Ghaddafi to abandon his nuclear program.

Has Iran Decided to Build the Bomb?

2012-02-18T06:55:24Z

Senator Lindsey Graham is convinced the goal of Iran's nuclear program is military, and the contrast between Graham's certainty and the more judicious view of President Obama's director of national intelligence highlights critical points for a peaceful resolution of the issue -- or a war. Hat tip to Eli Clifton over at Think Progress for flagging an exchange between Sen. Graham and DNI James Clapper at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing earlier this week. The bottom line of Graham's position is that a diplomatic solution is impossible, and a military confrontation is inevitable.

Clifton's post focuses on the key elements of the intelligence assessment. Here's how Director Clapper described where Iranian policy stands in terms of building the bomb:

I think they're keeping themselves in a position to make that decision but there are certain things they have not yet done and have not done for some time.

Underneath the careful vagueness of this statement lies a crucial point.

There is a clear logic for Iran to hone uranium enrichment techniques that would make it a near-nuclear power, yet still remaining a non-nuclear weapon signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty -- which is Tehran's stated policy. Of course that leaves the questions of how far down the nuclear technology road Iran goes and how the outside world will verify that Iran's nuclear activities are civilian, questions that will have to be addressed as part of any diplomatic solution.

Now let's look at the logic for Sen. Graham to assume the worst about Iranian intentions. I can only assume Graham reached his conclustion through an assessment of Iranian governmental players and his information on the nuclear program. And yet ... I can't help noticing that Graham's position fits the familiar Republican tougher-than-thou formula as most GOP foreign policy positions.

So with this view of Iranian intentions, Lindsey Graham presumably dismisses Iran's official line about a keeping on the civilian side of the nuclear line. My question, then, is whether it's smarter for the United States and others to toss aside Iran's promise not to build a bomb, or hang onto that pledge as the standard by which we measure their behavior. Aside from political posturing, is it really in America's interests to completely discount Tehran's stated intentions?

Let's be clear about what our alternatives are here. When I argue against assuming the worst, I'm not saying that we take Iranian statements about remaining a non-weapon state at face value. Like I said a few paragraphs ago, the point of diplomatic negotiations is to define -- and verify -- the parameters of Iran's civilian nuclear activities. In fact, I look at President Obama's policy on Iran as an effort to keep the burden of proof on the Iranians. Now over on the side of assuming the worst, that seems to me like a conclusion that diplomacy is futile. If Senator Graham and other conservatives believe Iranian leaders are determined to build the bomb, does that mean war is inevitable? I think so.

And this is the point of the other quotation from the national intelligence director cited in Eli Clifton's Think Progress post, that Iran's course is not yet set and still susceptible to diplolmatic pressure:

We judge Iran's nuclear decisionmaking is guided by a cost-benefit approach, which offers the international community opportunities to influence Tehran. Iranian leaders undoubtedly consider Iran's security, prestige, and influence, as well as the international political and security environment, when making decisions about its nuclear program.

The very possibility of a peaceful solution hinges on whether you believe an Iranian n-weapon is still an open question in Tehran.

But the issue at the heart of legislative efforts by Senator Graham and others is a different one. Recalling once again, negotiations with Iran must specify how far down the nuclear technological road they are, i.e. the fate of Iran's uranium enrichment activities. For the hard-liners in the Senate, the only acceptable answer is that Iran will be not one step down the nuclear road -- that they must walk their technical efforts all the way back. It is a Boltonesque approach that insists on the other side's total capitulation.

As the clamor for war with Iran grows louder and louder, we must be clear what's at stake. If you were paying only faint attention to this debate (as most voters probably are), you'd think it's about keeping Iran from building nuclear weapons. But senators have been pushing to set the bar much higher, the kind of stringent requirements that make diplomacy impossible and war inevitable. Americans need to know the real question here: are you willing to go to war in order to stop Iran from spinning their centrifuges to enrich uranium?

Ten Deep Thoughts on the All-Male Panel on my Vagina

2012-02-16T19:53:57Z

House Oversight Committee Chairman, master car thief and generalcriminal Darrell Issa held a hearing today on the Obama administration's new regulation requiring employers and insurers to provide contraception coverage to their employees. Claiming that the the hearing was "not about reproductive rights and contraception but instead about the Administration's actions as they relate to freedom of religion and conscience," Issa barred a progressive woman from testifying, as that would have ruined the all male conservative religious anti-Obama motif he was going for. This led three democrats to walk out of the house (which must have been extra hard, because their panties were all up in a bunch). But I watched the hearing. And here are some thoughts.

1. I guess I should give the GOP props for voting against the Violence Against Women Act, since it would be hypocritical to condemn violence against women, while at the same time advocating ultrasound rape.

2. This is a really beautiful image of small government and big family values.

3. I'm really glad women aren't allowed to testify at this hearing, which is about their bodies. It's a dangerously slippery slope and I think we all know what comes next: box turtles are allowed to testify. It's also really hard to be objective and have a vagina at the same time.

4. Rep James Lankford should recuse himself from abortion discussions, as he, himself, is a fetus.

5. Given what men of the cloth are known to do in this position, I'm kind of relieved when a clergy member testifies that he gets on his knees every morning and prays for the president.

6. Joe Walsh shouldn't be speaking or even here. He has way overdue child support to pay.

7. An objective Darrell Issa throws the panel a real hard ball and asks them, "do you think this hearing was a sham?"

8. That hearing was good, but having Fred Phelps there would have made it even better.

9. That hearing was good, but having it in Salem in the 17th century woud have made it even better.

10. I'm holding a hearing in which an all female panel will testify for weekly colonoscopies performed on the male clergy and GOP members who participated in today's hearing. We will also discuss Virginia State Sen. Janet Howell's amendment requiring men to have a rectal exam and a cardiac stress test before obtaining a prescription for erectile dysfunction medication.

Fareed Zakaria Rips Apart Pro-Iran War Arguments

2012-02-16T18:27:29Z

Writing in today's Washington Post, columnist Fareed Zakaria does a terrific job destroying some arguments for war with Iran. He does it by, of all things, citing history.

First, Zakaria takes apart the argument, often made by Israeli Minister of Defense Ehud Barak, that the "window" to stop Iran from developing a nuclear capability is closing and that rushing to war — without, of course, knowing how a war would play out — is essential. Zakaria explains that this is one of the oldest justifications for war in the book:

The most famous example, of course, was Germany's decision to start what became World War I. The German General Staff believed that Russia — its archenemy — was rearming on a scale that would soon nullify Germany's superior military strength. The Germans believed that within two years — by 1916 — Russia would have a significant, and perhaps unbeatable, strategic advantage.

As a result, when turmoil began in the Balkans in June 1914, Germany decided to act while it had the advantage. To stop Russia from entering a "zone of immunity," Germany invaded France (Russia's main ally) and Belgium, which forced British entry into the war, thus setting in motion a two-front European war that lasted four years and resulted in more than 37 million casualties.

Zakaria then cites the Israeli argument that Americans cannot understand their fears because "Iran is an existential threat to them."

But in fact we can understand because we have gone through a very similar experience ourselves. After World War II, as the Soviet Union approached a nuclear capability, the United States was seized by a panic that lasted for years. Everything that Israel says about Iran now, we said about the Soviet Union. We saw it as a radical, revolutionary regime, opposed to every value we held dear, determined to overthrow the governments of the Western world in order to establish global communism. We saw Moscow as irrational, aggressive and utterly unconcerned with human life. After all, Joseph Stalin had just sacrificed a mind-boggling 26 million Soviet lives in his country's struggle against Nazi Germany.

Then there was the mad rush to war in Iraq:

Many in Washington in March 2003 insisted that we could not wait for nuclear inspectors to keep at their work in Iraq because we faced a closing window — the weather was going to get too hot by June and July to send in U.S. forces. As a result, we rushed into a badly planned military invasion and occupation in which soldiers had to endure combat in Iraq for nine long and very hot years.

In short, millions have been killed in wars that were based on faulty premises and lies. Happily, on the other hand, the ultimate war (a U.S.-Soviet war that might have ended civilization) did not come to pass because policymakers on both sides decided to contain the respective nuclear threat rather than blow up the enemy.

It is unlikely that Senators Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), Bob Casey (D-PA), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) gave much thought to these historical precedents when they decided to introduce a resolution — promoted by AIPAC — that rules out "containing" the Iran nuclear threat in favor of going to war.

Their resolution is best described on Lieberman's website: "All options must be on the table when it comes to Iran — except for one, and that is containment."

The senators elaborate in a joint statement:

The resolution we intend to introduce will put the Senate on record as opposing containment in the strongest and clearest terms, detailing why the consequences of a nuclear-armed Iran cannot be 'contained' like the threat of the Soviet Union.

Forget for a minute that there is no clear evidence that Iran has decided to build nuclear weapons, let alone even the slightest indication that Iran is prepared to commit national suicide by using any possible weapon it develops. Focus only on the fact that these senators are seeking to rule out containment in dealing with the eventuality that the Iranians succeed in developing a bomb.

They would prohibit the one policy the U.S. has successfully employed in the case of every other unfriendly regime that has developed nuclear weapons.

But for some reason, the Iranian case is different. In the senators' joint statement opposing containment, they specifically assert that "a nuclear-armed Iran cannot be 'contained' like the threat of the Soviet Union."

Their thinking is that unlike Stalin's Russia, Mao's China and North Korea's dynastic and reckless leaders, the Iranian regime is suicidal. Although use of an atomic weapon would lead to its own annihilation, the hawks claim Iran will happily commit suicide for the sheer pleasure of taking Israel down with it.

But no nation has ever committed suicide and Persians, whose pride in their own culture and sense of nationalism knows no bounds, are clearly among the least likely candidates for the course of self-immolation. (Assuming they hate Israel so much that they would happily self-destruct, there is also the matter of the Palestinians who would also die in any nuclear attack on Israel. It's difficult to believe that, in the name of Palestine, Iran would slaughter the Palestinians.)

No, the campaign that surrounds Iran is about Israel's fear that a nuclear Iran would inhibit Israel's freedom of action throughout the Middle East, taking away its ability to do whatever it wants whenever it wants to. Israel fears precisely what happened to the United States after the Soviets got the bomb — that both countries would be constrained by a fear of the other. A 'balance of terror,' as it was called during the half-century that the two nuclear superpowers avoided war.

There is no alternative to containment (not even regime change, considering that even opponents of the regime support Iran's nuclear program).

Even if Israel and/or the United States attacks Iran's nuclear facilities, the attack would only set back Iran's nuclear program by a few years. It would also probably end any debate in Iran about developing a nuclear deterrent; having been attacked, the regime would almost surely commit to building a bomb as soon as possible. And they would succeed.

Then what? Iran would have a bomb and we would have no choice but...containment.

So the only question is whether we adopt the policy of containment before a war or after. The answer should be obvious.

Of course, we might be able to avoid the question of containment if we commenced comprehensive negotiations with Iran with a goal of preventing development of a bomb (while permitting enrichment for civilian purposes), normalizing U.S.-Iranian relations, ending its support of terrorism against Israel or anyone else, and dropping the sanctions that punish ordinary Iranians and not the regime.

That is exactly what we would do if every policy could be made absent the powerful lobby that fears diplomacy more than war and is so effective at hamstringing U.S. policy with devices like the Lieberman-Casey-Graham resolution.

Do Voters Care About America's Global Image?

2012-02-10T15:47:47Z

A recent post over at The Economist's Democracy in America blog says the Syria showdown at the UN between the US, Russia, and China demonstrates a crucial yet underappreciated success of Obama foreign policy:

Ten years back, America often found itself isolated, struggling to pull together "coalitions of the willing" packed with small client states. Lately, we have been finding ourselves in the majority, along with the democratic world, while Russia and China front a dwindling coalition of the unwilling.

Yes, President Obama has shown a remarkable ability to forge a united international front on issue after issue. The quantum increase in support for US positions and initiatives is a much bigger deal than media assessments have acknowledged. As other nations have become more welcoming toward the United States' global role, the president can make a strong claim to have rehabilitated American leadership.

Actually if I'd fault the Economist writer for anything, it's that s/he lacks the courage of her own optimism.

I disagree when the blogger says it's too bad Obama can't use this part of his record as a plank in his reelection platform. Voters recognize the importance of international goodwill toward the United States just as readily as the writer does. If not, then why do you think the public was so horrified to see Bush and Cheney defiantly thumbing their noses at the rest of the world? (The big mystery to me is why on earth the current crop of candidates have tacked back toward Cheney-esque chest-thumping.) More to the point, though, all signals from the White House put this success in their "top three" foreign policy achievements of the first term: winding down the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, decimating Al Qaeda, and greater receptivity and trust around the world of US leadership.

Interestingly, James Fallows of The Atlantic makes the exact same underestimation of voters in his rigorous new assessment of Obama's presidency. Here's how he concludes a graf stressing the importance of America's improved standing in the world:

These changes can make a real difference for American ideals and interests, but it is hard to mention them in American political debates without sounding "French."

Okay, let me try this in my very best American accent (whatever that is). It is very difficult and sometimes impossible to accomplish America's international aims -- disrupt terror networks, keep the global economy strong, stem the spread of nuclear weapons -- without the support and help of others. Is the common sense of this really so hard to get across to the voting public?

One key point is how the importance of international support applies across a wide range of issues. You can see this within the Democracy in America post, which is ostensibly about the nations aligned with America in opposition to a butcherous Syrian regime but also notes the Southeast Asian countries grateful for US help in resisting China's territorial claims in the South China Sea. In other words, those who pigeonhole such forward-leaning diplomacy as "soft power" are missing the point.

Which brings us to the problem of Iran. Whenever you hear about President Obama's success in ratcheting up the toughest set of sanctions ever imposed on Iran, you should think about the massive diplomatic effort required to accomplish this. And it is ongoing. Our friends at Center for American Progress, for instance, remind us that discussion of Iran with China has continued throughout the past three years and is bound to be on the agenda for Vice President Xi Jinping's visit next week.

Given America's difficult history with Iran and close alliance with Israel, there's been a tendency in the international politics of the Iranian nuclear program to view the issue as a pet cause of the United States -- rather than a truly shared nuclear proliferation problem. This is the essence of the challenge, and of the Obama administration's success, in recasting American leadership. A measure of an effective foreign policy is to convince others that the United States is upholding important norms of the international community -- preserving a social contract -- and not just a big bad superpower. That's the point of President Obama's frequent references to the obligations and responsibilities of nations, including our own (e.g. the New START nuclear arms treaty).

After reading this skepticism in The Economist and The Atlantic about America's improved international image as a campaign theme, I looked back at some of my own posts from four years ago. In 2008, candidate Obama could aim his foreign policy argument at a public deeply unsettled at how out of step with the rest of the world we had gotten -- and acutely aware what trouble it could cause us. In 2012, President Obama runs for re-election having put these ideas about a more conscientious style of global leadership into action. And his record shows that they work.

Israel Firster First Used by Brandeis President In 1960

2012-02-08T20:32:58Z

For the past month or so there has been a series of coordinated attacks on me, my employer Media Matters and the Center for American Progress for labeling those who place the interests of Israel over the United States "Israel Firsters." This piece by Spencer Ackerman was accompanied by an illustration of Hitler (natch) inventing the term.

Some right-wing pseudo-researchers actually investigated the provenance of the phrase and announced that it originated with fascist anti-Semites in the 1980's. Therefore anyone who used it today was an anti-Semite. Including Jews!

It was the usual blah-blah from the usual suspects: Israel Firsters all.

I was not bothered by the attacks (they always come from the same crowd) but I did want to go on record as to why I consider the term important, which I did here. The bottom line is that it is the Israel First crowd (pretty much identical with the neocons who played such a sterling role in the run-up to the Iraq war) are the people working around the clock to get the United States either to go to war with Iran or to support an Israeli attack on Iran. You know, the John Bolton/Jeff Goldberg/Commentary crowd and, above all, AIPAC.

These people want the term Israel Firster banned because, once war begins, they do not want anyone even considering that they might have engineered it to benefit Binyamin Netanyahu. Hence, call the term anti-Semitic. (Even though the term refers not to Jews in general who overwhelmingly oppose war with Iran but to a tiny subset of neocon outliers and non-Jewish allies).

In any case, their game ended yesterday.

It turns out that courageous journalist Phil Weiss at Mondoweiss did some serious investigating and discovered that the term Israel Firster was first used in 1960 by Abram Leon Sachar, the founder of Brandeis University, a major Zionist, and the most prominent American Jewish historian. (With the possible exception of his son, Howard M. Sachar).

Apparently, the elder Sachar was disturbed that some people in Israel and here in the United States were suggesting that Jewish life in America was of secondary importance to Jewish life in Israel and that American Jews should pack up and move there. Sachar, addressing a major Jewish organization, responded this way. He said that there is no room "for Israel Firsters whose chauvinism and arrogance find nothing relevant or viable in any area outside of Israel."

Chauvinism and arrogance. That's about right. And that was before AIPAC hijacked our Middle East policy.

Does this change anything? Not much. The Israel Firsters will still try to steamroll us into war. Only now we can call them out for what they are and not worry that they will get our bosses on the phone to have us fired!

Besides calling objects by their proper names is a step in the direction of truth. The people trying to get us into war with Iran are doing it for Bibi.

In March AIPAC will gather 10,000 people in Washington to really put the pressure on. And, thanks to our campaign finance laws, they have all the money in the world to convince Congress (Democrats are at least as bad as Republicans) that another Middle East war is just what we need.

They will probably succeed? When have they not?

NOTE: Jeff Goldberg, most aggressive in promoting war with Iran as he was with Iraq, has a new device. Every day or so, he tells some terrible story about how Iran is about to launch a second Holocaust but adds the caveat that he opposes war. Today he tops himself with a silly story about some random Iranian who may, in some way, have a random connection with the regime who calls for Jews to be eradicated. Goldberg's Iranian counterparts probably quote Pam Geller as the voice of U.S. policy. In any case, read Goldberg, the most effective warmonger of them all.

Presented By:

2012-02-08T20:32:58Z

Why the Yale Quarterback's Rhodes Fumble Wasn't Really About Football or Sex

2012-02-07T10:30:17Z

Although this column is about how Yale handled its star quarterback Patrick Witt's pass on a Rhodes Scholarship interview, it's really about what the business-corporatization of old American colleges has done to republican leadership training. It's about what former Harvard College Dean Harry Lewis calls Education Without a Soul.

Only two weeks ago Witt's decision of Nov. 13 to decline a Rhodes scholarship interview so that he could lead his team against Harvard on Nov. 19, the only day Rhodes was willing to interview him, seemed the result of his straightforward reckoning with a real dilemma.

But it wasn't so real. In a years-long quest for gridiron glory Witt had transferred among several high schools and from the University of Nebraska to Yale, which made his Rhodes decision seem over-determined. It seemed even more so when The New York Times reported on Jan. 27 and more fully on Feb. 4 that "The Rhodes Trust had informed Yale on Nov. 1 that it was suspending Witt's candidacy" because of a complaint of sexual assault against him by a female fellow student and that it had informed Witt directly on Nov. 4.

"Suspended" is "a very reasonable characterization of what happened," Rhodes official Eliot F. Gerson told the Times, exploding Witt's insistence that the paper's account was wrong. Only if Yale had re-endorsed Witt would the interview have remained an option. There was no chance of that. Yale had just weathered the embarrassment of having to fire his own Yale coach and mentor, Tom Williams, for claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he, too, had once chosen a football game over a Rhodes interview.

And when we consider that the sexual-misconduct complaint had been lodged against Witt in September, before the deadline for Yale to submit his Rhodes application, we do have to wonder how all this has been handled.

But what really troubles some of us who teach at Yale and other old colleges is that Witt's and Yale's bumbling reflect what has happened to certain qualities of character -- can we still call them virtues? -- that those colleges once cultivated more reliably than many now want to recall. Believe it or not, Yale did that even in how it invented and played American football, as I'll show in a minute.

Yet Witt's dilemma feeds a large, perverse appetite these days for exposes of Ivy colleges' inherently elitist, racist, sexist past and of their more colorful, polymorphous-perverse present. It's all-too easy to forget something in these old colleges that is still worth cherishing and emulating at other institutions.

There's no need to romanticize or obfuscate what's been wrong to find what's invaluable to a republic and, arguably, to democracy's fragile global prospects. Witt and Yale have fumbled this pass from the past in ways that suggest that neither understands this mission. For that we can't blame Witt, but we do have to take a closer look at Yale.

Let me try to get at what's missing by drawing what might seem an unfair contrast between Witt's nationally hyped "honor" and an older, humbler instance of the real thing by citing a missive more than a century old:

"Dear Mr. Peabody: Your letter came today and you don't know how sorry I am that anyone should get the idea that I was what is commonly known as a 'dirty' football player," begins a letter dated October 27, 1898, from Yale freshman F. Gordon Brown. He is responding to a note from his old Groton School headmaster, Endicott Peabody asking about a complaint that had reached him about Brown's moves on the field.

Football, invented 20 years earlier at Yale by Walter Camp as a muscular Christian rite of passage to civic leadership and statesmanship, had captured the national imagination, not only in the games themselves but in wildly popular exploits of the fictional Yale football captains Dink Stover and Frank Merriwell, the latter an exemplar of "square and manly dealing" and civic uplift, as Lewis Lapham once put it with only a slight smirk.

Frank Merriwell's creator Gilbert Patten intended his character's very name to signal frankness, good humor, and good health, and it's fair to characterize Yale students of those years as neither iconoclasts nor autocrats but what Isaiah Wilner, in The Man Time Forgot, portrays as American boys who prided themselves "on being good teammates and knowing how to win. Believing success was virtuous, they respected and rewarded dedication and 'grit,' ... Valuing tact and consideration, they subjected their personal interests to those of the group."

So, too, did the students at many of Yale's feeder schools, including Groton graduates Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Averill Harriman, Dean Acheson, McGeorge Bundy, and other future framers of the American Century. They'd all had to play football at Groton, in something like the spirit that Lapham and Wilner describe.

Small wonder that in his letter, Gordon Brown -- who would later help to found the Boys Club for poor youths that still stands opposite the northwest corner of Manhattan's Tompkins Square Park, where I've sat writing part of this column -- meticulously recapped his moves on the field and insisted, "It is very unfair thing to say of Yale that she sacrifices her honor to win. If she can't win by good, fair, straight playing she does not want to win at all ...."

Although Brown was probably channeling Merriwell, then at a peak of popularity, he could just as well have been anticipating (unwittingly, of course) Garry Trudeau's renderings, in Doonesbury three-quarters of a century later, of the more laid-back, ironical, yet stoical Yale quarterback "B.D.," drawn from the real Brian Dowling of my own Class of 1969. The moral fortitude shown by Merriwell and B.D. in adversity had little in common with Witt's forfeiting a chance at a Rhodes for a chance at football.

To understand what's really at stake in this comparison, suppose for a minute that there had been no sexual-misconduct complaint against Patrick Witt and no suspension of his Rhodes candidacy. It would still have been a mistake to lionize Witt for choosing only the rite of passage, football, over its intended outcome, the civic leadership cherished by Cecil Rhodes and, once upon a time, by Yale. Even when Witt's choice seemed credible, it got Merriwell's and B.D.'s priorities backwards.

Worse still, Witt's conduct reinforces a growing perception that administrations at Yale and other once-venerable colleges handle students' crises of character with the soulless, self-protective legalism of business corporations that are interested only in defending their brand names and market shares. College administrators have lost the grace and conviction they really did show more often decades ago as they struggled to balance humanist Truth-seeking with republican Power-wielding and capitalist Wealth-making, all in order to deepen their undergraduates' liberal education and, yes, character development. That required an inter-generational dedication, not an obsession with legal liability and image-protection.

Thanks partly to their insularity, the old Ivies did produce some FDRs and other Platonic guardians, men who would fall on their swords to defend the republic: Richard Nixon's Attorney General Eliot Richardson, who resigned rather than help cover up Watergate, or Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who resigned rather than countenance Jimmy Carter's raid into Iran, come to mind. So, for me, does Thomas Lamont II, an Exeter and Harvard student whose short but exemplary life and death I rediscovered and reprised here in 2006, when his nephew Ned was running an anti-Iraq War campaign against Senator Joe Lieberman.

Not that most football-playing young gentlemen at Groton and Yale proved themselves worthy of Tommy Lamont or Franklin Roosevelt. Many wound up as dray horses of the financial and legal establishments, lapping up highballs at the Yale Club across from Grand Central Station before taking the 7:07 home to Darien. A character in Owen Johnson's novel Stover at Yale derides them as products of a college "beef trust, with every by-product organized, down to the last possibility."

Yet something in the old Yale College did also produce or at least provoke a Dwight Macdonald, John Lindsay, William Sloane Coffin, Jr., William F. Buckley, Jr., Garry Trudeau, John Kerry, Howard Dean, and thousands more guardians of the republic -- most of them unsung, like F. Gordon Brown and like some who are reading this column.

Can we say the same now of colleges that have turned themselves into career-training centers and cultural galleria for a global elite that no longer answers to any polity or moral code?

The new elite drapes itself in a raiment of a "diversity" that might have no honor at all had not the old American civic-republican arts and disciplines sustained the early Civil Rights movement and the colleges themselves: At its 1964 Commencement Yale presented an honorary doctorate to Martin Luther King, Jr., who, fresh out of jail, wasn't yet popular with most white Americans, including some Yale alumni. The college helped King to open the hearts of northern WASPs whose own Puritan ancestors had made history out of the same Exodus myth that King was invoking in the South.

And now? Last week Yale released -- fortuitously, amid the Witt controversy, but also under the pressure of a federal investigation -- its first "Report of Complaints of Sexual Misconduct" in response to complaints of a "hostile sexual environment on campus" filed by 16 students' in 2011 under Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972. Almost inadvertently, the report opens a six-month window on a decades-long train of sad, unsavory attempts by the university to shunt serious complaints into hushed, non-disciplinary proceedings.

Such abuses were almost never challenged at all in the old Ivy league, of course, but today's procedures have left more than a few of the complainants feeling cheated and even violated by the universities as much as by the subjects of their complaints. While many of them do prefer confidential mediation to the harrowing risks of litigation and publicity, college administrators often swoop in quickly to play on those fears, hoping to keep things quiet for their own corporate, institutional reasons.

That strategy may have backfired now thanks not to any reckoning more noble on Yale's part than on Witt's, but thanks rather to complaints that prompted the federal investigation and Yale's report, and perhaps also to Witt's complainant, who -- presumably aroused by the litigation and dissatisfied with her own experience of the confidential process -- met the editor of the Yale Daily News and perhaps breached the confidentiality agreement in other ways.

The point to remember is that the Witt saga and similar debacles show how foolish we would be to look down so smugly on F. Gordon Brown and old Groton and Yale, from what we fancy is our much loftier moral position. By heralding Witt's choice of football over Rhodes, Yale and the news media tried to capitalize on all that should be admired in the Frank Merriwell/Platonic guardian tradition, but they wound up corrupting that tradition in what is becoming an agonizing downward spiral of deceit and cynicism.

Yale's handling of the Witt saga even has some affinities to General (now Yale professor) Stanley McChrystal's mishandling of the death of Pat Tillman, another football star, who enlisted patriotically in the Army after 9/11. Tillmann was killed in battle in Afghanistan -- not by enemy fire, as McChrystal let Americans believe when he authorized the posthumous award of a Silver Star, but by friendly fire, in circumstances the Army obscured for months with a tenacity worthy of Yale's.

"A seminar is like a team," McChrystal wrote in block letters on the blackboard his first day of class at Yale. Few Yale seminars have ever been like "teams" in any military or corporate sense, even back when almost everything else at Yale was. Yet McChrystal's dictum seems almost an improvement over the ethos described in a Yale Daily News story of 2009, "Is Yale U. Starting to Run More Like Yale, Inc.?." It noted that some university vice presidents referred to students as "customers" in memos and in meetings with at least one astonished faculty member I know.

Now a long-intimidated and dispirited Yale faculty is stirring to focus and voice its resistance to the mindless marketization of everything from Yale's dubious venture to start a new college in Singapore to its proliferating centers in national-security studies that displace scholarship with strategy by "professors" McChrystal, former National Intelligence Director John Negroponte, and even Tony Blair. Worse still, the hearts and wallets of conservative alumni have been opened to fund programs that pretend to restore the great humanist tradition by enlisting the likes of Thucydides in the American grand-strategizing for the "Global War on Terror."

The challenge facing the old colleges is to open their doors wider without failing to deepen students' civic-republican commitments. It is to throw out the dirty bathwater of elitism, sexism, and racism but not the arts and disciplines of leadership-training that instills public virtues our society so desperately needs.

Those virtues involve more than prowess and teamwork. They require an ability and an inclination not just to sacrifice oneself for a group but to enhance and, if need be, to challenge a group's goals and rules, in deliberation with others about its most vital national and global interests.

Cultivating such abilities and inclinations is hard. It requires a liberal philosophy and pedagogy that the old colleges sometimes sustained and would have to regenerate in themselves now. To do it, they would have to understand themselves not as business corporations, although they have that side, but as conservators and rejuvenators of a public mission that neither armies nor bottom-lining companies adequately nourish or defend.

They might even have to re-engage their founders' conviction that the world isn't flat, as neoliberals think, but that it has abysses, and that students need a civic faith strong enough to plumb them and face the demons in them and in high places.

Patrick Witt's detractors will dismiss him as just another by-product of the college beef trust or an ornament to the new, global retail-market university that has displaced it. But the real casualty is not Witt but any college that celebrates its Witts and McChrystals as if they were F. Gordon Browns or Pat Tillmans.

Some Ironies in Elizabeth Warren's Campaign Message

2012-02-04T22:09:02Z

There are delicious ironies in "How to Win Female Votes: What Obama Can Learn From Elizabeth Warren," a terrific piece just posted by Paul Starobin in The New Republic. Starobin reflects on Warren's message in her U.S. Senate campaign against Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown, who took the late Ted Kennedy's seat in an upset two years ago.

Starobin reminds Obama of Warren's communitarian message (I'd call it "civic-republican," but no matter), which went viral in a video of her speaking in someone's home early in the campaign:

"There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But... you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate..."

Words you haven't heard from Fareed Zakaria!

One irony here is that Starobin is, of all things, a veteran Russia correspondent, Business Week's Moscow bureau chief in the first years of the last decade, and has written about Russia ever since. On Feb. 21, he'll visit Yale as a Poynter Journalism Fellow, to talk about Russia in the eye of the global media at Calhoun College and the Yale International Relations Association. Yet Starobin, Massachusetts born and bred and back in his home state at the moment, finds Warren's race too good to miss, as do all of us who recall her frequent posts right here in TPMCafe.

A second irony is that if Obama takes Starobin's advice, he'll be learning from the woman Republicans shunted aside as his first nominee to head her brainchild, a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Poetic justice, for sure.

But the richest irony is one I'm pleased to deliver in my capacity as conscience of The New Republic. Compare Warren's message with these words by the British social historian R.H. Tawney, published under the title "Puritanism and Capitalism," in 1926, in .... (drum roll...) The New Republic:

"Few tricks of the unsophisticated intellect are more curious than the naïve psychology of the business man, who ascribes his achievements to his own unaided efforts, in bland unconsciousness of a social order without whose continuous support and vigilant protection he would be as a lamb bleating in the desert....

"The demonstration that distress is a proof of demerit, though a singular commentary on the lives of Christian saints and sages, has always been popular with the prosperous. By the lusty plutocracy of the Restoration, roaring after its meat and not indisposed, if it could not find it elsewhere to seek it from God, it was welcomed with a shout of applause."

Words to remember -- especially now, and especially if you're scribbling in Washington.

Why the "Israel First" Meme Matters

2012-02-03T19:26:15Z

I certainly set off a firestorm with my use of the term "Israel Firster." Other people use it too but I was the guy who popularized it recently and who used it hundreds of times. The others who utilize the term did so occasionally, often citing me. So I am the main "miscreant" on this score.

And I am proud that I created the controversy because it is an important one. It is important because the underlying issue is not whether the term is polite (it isn't, merely accurate) but whether or not America is going to end up at war with Iran.

First, Andrew Sullivan's short definition of an Israel Firster. In a piece called, "A Plainly True Idea," Sullivan says "When an American sides with a foreign government against his own president in a foreign country, what does one call that? Apart, that is, from disgusting."

There is no need here to describe who the Israel Firsters are. They are those people (of whatever ethnic background) who invariably support Israel's policies over those of the United States.

The Israel Firsters are represented in Washington by AIPAC, which is Israel's lobby in the United States. As this video demonstrates (just look at who is in attendance), it is perhaps the most powerful lobby in Washington and invariably gets what it wants. This past May it even got the United States to veto a U.N. resolution on illegal Israeli settlements that reaffirmed the decades-long official U.S. position on settlements! Now, take a look at its website's obsession with Iran.

It is important to note that AIPAC represents only its 100,000 members and not 6,000,000 American Jews. Newsweek/Daily Beast reported last week, basing its finding on an American Jewish Committee poll:

Every four years, Republicans vow to use Israel to pry Jews from their nearly century-old allegiance to the Democratic Party. And every four years, they fail. The reason is that only about 10 percent of Jews actually vote on Israel (a country most American Jews have never visited).

They also fail because Jews are consistently liberal and have been mainstays of the antiwar movement since Vietnam.

But the question still arises? Why is the issue of the term "Israel First" significant? For one reason: it is the same reason that the people I call Israel Firsters are hysterical over it.

The reason is simple.

Right now, there is only one interest group in the United States that absolutely opposes any diplomacy to avoid war with Iran and which insists that the United States expressly state (as it has) that war with Iran is definitely "on the table."

In fact, that interest group, AIPAC, actually got Congress to pass a bill, which President Obama signed, that bans any diplomacy with Iran without express approval of four Congressional committees in advance — as if AIPAC will ever let that happen.

Just read this AIPAC-drafted language that is now law:

(c) RESTRICTION ON CONTACT.-No person employed with the United States Government may contact in an official or unofficial capacity any person that-
(1) is an agent, instrumentality, or official of, is affiliated with, or is serving as a representative of the Government of Iran; and
(2) presents a threat to the United States or is affiliated with terrorist organizations.

(d) WAIVER.-The President may waive the requirements of subsection (c) if the President determines and so reports to the appropriate congressional committees 15 days prior to the exercise of waiver authority that failure to exercise such waiver authority would pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the vital national security interests of the United States.

Frankly, this makes me sick. Banning diplomacy almost guarantees war with Iran, a war that must not be fought.

I oppose war with Iran unless Iran attacks the United States directly. Period.

I do not want America to be dragged into a war that Netanyahu provokes and which the United States would then be dragged into. I favor diplomacy, unconditional diplomacy, with all issues on the table.

I oppose war because we lost 4400 men and women in Iraq, a war built on lies and false premises, most conveyed by the self-same people promoting war with Iran. I don't think we should lose even one solider in a war against a country that does not directly threaten the American people.

A digression. A few months ago, on a beautiful Saturday, I was walking on the grounds of the Walter Reed Army Hospital here in Washington. (A friend got me in.) There were dozens of young guys being pushed around in wheel chairs by parents, wives, girlfriends, buddies, etc. They looked like injured members of the high school football team, except that so many were missing limbs.

I approached an officer and said that these boys seemed cheerful considering their situations. He said, "These soldiers are the lucky ones. They lost limbs and, worse, often testicles [from IED's]. But not their minds. In that building over there are the brain injured. Their parents visit too but you won't see them out on the grounds like these soldiers."

And I oppose war because it would almost surely lead to missile attacks on Israel and to wider regional war that could ultimately lead to Israel's destruction.

As for an Iranian nuclear weapon, we should use diplomacy to prevent its development. But if Iran gets the bomb, we are fully capable of containing a nuclear Iran the same way we contained the Soviet Union, which for 50 years had a massive nuclear arsenal pointed our way and whose leader constantly said, "We will bury you."

I believe that pointing out who is pushing for war makes it a little less likely war will occur. If the neocons succeed in banning the term (that is their unachievable goal), they might be tempted to believe that if war starts no one will know that we were led there by Commentary, Binyamin Netanyahu, John Bolton, Jeff Goldberg, the Washington Post editorial page and, most of all, AIPAC.

I often write about the memo Steve Rosen, AIPAC's then-director of research — who was indicted for espionage (the charges were dropped) — wrote to me on my first day at work at that institution. (I broke with AIPAC after Oslo when they worked to undermine President Clinton and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's peace efforts.)

Rosen wrote: "MJ, always remember. A lobby is a night flower. It thrives in the dark and shrivels in the sun."

The term "Israel Firster" is my flashlight.

NOTE: This year AIPAC's huge Washington conference will be almost exclusively dedicated to pushing war with Iran. It takes place the first week in March.

Don't Fix What Isn't Broken

2012-01-31T17:04:25Z

Presentation by Reed Hundt, January 31, 2012, Capitol Hill

About the spectrum bill passed by the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on communications and technology: I'm here not to praise it but to hope that you bury it on this side of the Hill. I don't think it would pass on a clear up or down vote in the United States Senate.

But there is a danger that the House leadership would link the bill to something that the Senate really wants to pass into law. There's a danger that in the fog of compromise on other issues it would somehow become law, and then the FCC's long history of extraordinary successes in auctioning spectrum would be brought to an ignominious close.

I guess we can blame the Democrats for opening up Pandora's Spectrum Box. In last year, it seems that all discourse has been replaced by this trilogy: find fault, assign blame, and mete out punishment. So let's blame the Congress of 2009 which in ARRA asked for a national broadband plan.

It got from the FCC, a year later, a tremendous document that included many discrete, concrete measures to benefit all Americans by giving us a world leading common medium of information and communication, generally called broadband. These measures have to a large extent outlined the agenda of the current FCC, which is in the excellent and well-trained hands of Chairman Genachowski.

One ingenious recommendation was that broadcast spectrum that is neither used wisely nor deeply desired by broadcasters could be sold by them at a price that they set in an open auction. The sellers would get money. Then the FCC would rearrange the geographical reach of remaining broadcast signals, paying broadcasters a hundred percent of what it might cost them to rearrange their signals. The result of this repacking would be to create a great deal of spectrum that could be used for wireless broadband - downloading everything from breaking news about the Florida primary or a YouTube video about, of course, the Florida primary. That newly cleared spectrum would be sold in an auction to firms in the wireless business. The taxpayers would receive tens of billions of dollars. Even more important, still more billions would be invested, creating about ten thousand new jobs for each billion, and vastly improving through price competition and technological advance the quality and quantity of service.

The FCC put this creative, precompetitive, fair, and constructive idea to Congress, which was of course composed quite differently as of the beginning of 2011 from the group that asked for such a plan in early 2009.

On the House side what came back was in effect a repudiation of the broadband plan and its spectrum proposal. Instead the House Energy and Commerce committee produced a bill that is, sad to say, the single worst telecom bill ever passed by a House or Senate committee.

If it became law it would set back the United States communications sector relative to the rest of the world, raise prices, hurt the taxpayer, and kill job growth in wireless.

In 1995-96 a Republican Congress wrote a very good and heavily bipartisan telecommunications bill that was happily signed by President Clinton over in the Library of Congress. He chose that location because the law included the great contribution to education called the Snowe-Rockefeller measure. It modified universal service so as to provide internet access to classrooms and libraries. The result - now years later - is that the United States provided the internet to poor and rich, rural and urban children at almost the same rate. The internet was the first technology used in education for rich and poor both from its inception...the first since chalk.

In the economic downturn of the last three years the Snowe Rockefeller program, called the e rate, has provided a life saving stream of money to schools and libraries, helping some stay open in the face of savage state and local budget cuts.

The Snowe-Rockefeller proposal and for the most part the rest of the 1996 Telecommunications Act set goals and delegated authority. It did not try to write detailed regulations as the House spectrum bill does. The House approach has gone wrong in at least the following ways:

1. It would tell the FCC that auctions could be used to monopolize spectrum. Under the original authorizing language of 1993 the FCC was supposed to use auctions to promote competition. Monopoly is bad policy. Monopoly leads to more regulation. Competition and deregulation has been our national policy in communications since the early 1990s. It has worked well. Let's stick with it.

2. The House bill would tell the FCC what spectrum auction methodology to follow. The FCC has worked with expert economists to develop better and better techniques, starting in 1994. Books have been written praising the FCC's methods. They have been improved over the years. Why should one chamber of the House stop the progress toward better and better techniques?

3. It would tell the FCC not to grant unlicensed spectrum at all - that's what we use for wi fi, for example.

4. It would restrict the FCC's ability to negotiate treaties with Canada and Mexico relating to radio waves that cross borders

5. It would constrain the FCC's ability to repack the unused broadcast spectrum. Repacking requires an open debate among engineers at very technical levels. Congress shouldn't design rocket ships for NASA or cancer cures for NIH; it shouldn't tell the FCC how to arrange broadcast signals over hills and across valleys.

6. By the restrictions above, it would limit the amount of money the FCC would obtain for the taxpayers; reduce the amount of investment that could be made, and shrink the number of jobs that would be created.

7. The bill would greatly delay the necessary and important conversion of spectrum that some broadcasters would like to sell and many wireless broadband companies would like to buy. Technology delayed is technology denied; jobs not created are lives left in the lurch.

Sometimes people feel that the process of legislation is too complicated to pay attention to. Certainly there are very few forums like this one in which reasoned debate can take place. Very skilled representatives of firms find many ways to speak their piece but open and informed debate is hard to find even on the most important issues of the time.
We cannot fix everything wrong with our much-disparaged government in one forum. If this government were a company, I can tell you that every manager would be trying to change the culture, structure and operational processes - not replace the people but fix the process. Instead, with our 18th century tripartite and federal system we dwell on who is in the jobs, and not how the jobs can actually be done better. So we let broken processes go unfixed.

But let's not break more things that work.

By and large, agency government works. Where agencies have let us down, usually the reason lies in an inadequate delegation of power or a failure to consolidate authority in single agencies. Agencies, including the FCC, have made mistakes. I made some doozies when I was FCC chair. But by and large we were proud in my time to be the rule writer, referee and deregulator for a sector that created more than two million net new jobs, and grew so fast that the resulting tax revenues played a major role in producing a budget surplus. The FCC played a useful role in the 1990s because Congress passed a wise, short, and bipartisan bill that gave the FCC appropriate goals and authority.

The House bill goes in the wrong direction. It is not a statement of objectives coupled with delegated authority. Instead, it tries to do the job of regulation itself. This is unwise, for at least three reasons:

First, agency regulations follow extensive notice and comment procedures which are much more open than what occurs on the Hill, and in which judicial review is ample. Congress should set mandates and hold agencies responsible for achieving goals, but detailed regulation is best left to agencies where the open processes are mandated by administrative law.

Second, agencies have many more experts at their disposal. The FCC alone has engineers and economists that are perhaps still insufficiently numerous as against lawyers, but which have dedicated careers to the issues before the agency. These experts know their stuff. They should be used.

Third, agencies can always be overruled by Congress when and as necessary. Statutes trump regulations. Give the agency a chance, please, Congress, and if you don't like what it does, then overturn its rules. That's happened and isn't too difficult. But a bad law, more than a bad regulation, casts a long shadow over history.

One step toward creating Congressional processes that the country can admire and outcomes the American people can support is this: return to an appropriate vision of good statutes and an appropriate use of agency delegation of regulatory power. Statutes should focus on objectives, means, and metrics. They should delegate regulatory power while retaining oversight and requiring milestones to be met. This approach is necessary in particular in topic areas that are steeped in technical consideration, and that require lengthy open processes for robust debate of engineering and economic considerations. This is an approach that will help retrieve the confidence in Congress the public has lost. A good step toward this goal would be the rejection of the House spectrum bill.

Presented By:

2012-01-31T17:04:25Z

Obama, Healthcare, And Progressive Critics

2012-01-26T20:50:30Z

It is hard to read Remedy and Reaction, Paul Starr's remarkable chronicle of the hundred-year effort to legislate universal health insurance in the United States, without recalling Robert Gibbs's tortured quip that Democrats who've denounced the Obama White House for having knuckled under to Republican principles or intimidation "ought to be drug-tested." Nobody with a sense of history--that is, nobody who reads Starr's book--could doubt how sensible and brave was the president's effort to drive the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 through Congress. Nobody with a feel for the present moment should doubt how imminent is the threat to the act, how urgent it is for progressive Democrats to rally around Obama--and without all the condescending qualifications that "independents," who flock away from allegedly weak or incompetent leaders, interpret as contempt.

Starr, who teaches at Princeton and, with Robert Kuttner and Robert Reich, founded The American Prospect, has written 300-plus pages of tightly woven policy description, narrative and polemic; but one needn't be a wonk to benefit from the tutorial or detect an occasional sigh between the lines. Literary scholars speak of a pathetic fallacy, the idea that inanimate objects have intentions and feelings. Starr makes clear that various political commentators have been susceptible to a somewhat different fallacy, pathetic in its own way, that America's desires can be fathomed through polling and that the president must somehow be at fault if a desire is not fulfilled, as though flawed legislative institutions, entrenched political forces, conflicting popular incentives, regional rivalries and sheer corruption do not shape political outcomes.

Starr learned his lessons the hard way. He closely advised the Clintons on health strategy in the early 1990s (he still knows and has debriefed key Congressional staffers). The centerpiece of Remedy and Reaction is a long section, full of illuminating asides, on the frustration of the Clintons' plans. Starr shows that, even as Bill Clinton submitted his bill to Congress, some 70 percent of voters subscribed to the principles embodied in the legislation he proposed. Yet the bill didn't come close to being enacted. True, Clinton was losing altitude by then, but to suppose his failure was largely a matter of leadership--you know, that he didn't use his bully pulpit forcefully enough, the sort of gripe heard relentlessly on MSNBC, the Huffington Post and Daily Kos about Obama and the "public option"--is to suppose that willows really weep.

Obama's actions were cannier than Clinton's, but they also amounted to a profile in courage. When Obama came into office, Starr explains, only 11 percent of Americans thought reform would have a "negative personal impact," but by August 2009 this segment of the population was trending to 31 percent. Both Rahm Emanuel and Joe Biden were urging retreat. Starr writes, "Obama not only resolved to go ahead; in September and again in the new year, the president took charge of the effort to steady the health-care initiative and prevent it from careening off the tracks." Nor was the final bill anything less than what might reasonably have been expected, filling as it did the negative space left by four generations of government programs and serial compromises. Starting with clean sheets of paper was never realistic when one-sixth of the economy was at stake.

Starr's great fear is repeal of the Affordable Care Act, which would not only deny healthcare to more than 30 million people but would cast doubt on whether "Americans will ever be able to hold their fears in check and summon the elementary decency toward the sick that characterizes other democracies." Obamacare, in short, was healthcare reform's best--and last--shot, and it would be unconscionable for liberals to remain cavalier about its defense, or Obama's, for that matter. It's past time to discard the misguided assumption that in a better economy, or with more of "a fighter" in the White House, something like a Canadian-style single-payer system might have been (or might sometime fairly soon be) enacted.

Read on at the Nation's website. Or download a pdf.

Why Obama Defaulted in his 'State of the Union'

2012-01-25T22:18:36Z

In his State of the Union address two years ago, in 2010, President Obama kept alive faltering hopes for our fraudulent and now broken political system by appealing to Republicans for bipartisanship and civility. As Ryan Lizza reminds us in a New Yorker article that "everyone" is discussing, Obama had made such appeals even before his inauguration by meeting with George Will and a gaggle of Reaganite pundits.

But even in 2010 Obama was addressing a Congress -- including its Democratic-controlled House, which had been elected with him -- that was stuffed to its gills with frauds, as I put it here in "Pearls Before Swine," because it was owned lock, stock, and barrel by the banking, real-estate, insurance, oil, and myriad other corporate interests that have nearly ruined the country.

Congress still is stuffed that way, this year's State of the Union address had the slightly edgy, at times faintly desperate tone of a man who knows it better than he did in 2010. "Beyond the few measures on which there is a rare alignment of stars," I wrote two years ago, "nothing Obama called for will happen, unless his road trip unleashes a firestorm in the American people against Congress for the systemic sins mentioned above. " Here's why I wouldn't change a word now:

The only firestorm that followed Obama's road trip two years ago was the Tea Party's, which drove the Republican victories in the congressional races, all of it on steroids provided by the powerful interests I've mentioned and by some people's eternal inclination to seek scapegoats (from Kenya or from the government ) rather than to admit that they've been had and to find the real courage and discipline they'd need to stand up to the owners of the casino-finance, corporate-welfare, totalitarian credit-rating cages we're living in.

When Obama spoke in 2010, Democrats in Congress had outstripped Republicans in a race to be owned. As the political scientist Jane Mansbridge notes in "On the Importance of Getting Things Done," the lead article of the current Political Science, Democrats had rushed to prostrate themselves before finance capital.

Mansbridge cites Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson's report in Winner-Take-All Politics that "In the 2007-2008 election cycle, the Democratic Senatorial Committee raised four times as much from Wall Street as its GOP counterpart did.") For this you can thank, among others, New York Senator Chuck Schumer, who has chaired that committee and led in deregulating banks in the 1990s.

But Obama was encircled back then, as now, not only by the bought-and-paid for buffoons in Congress but also by advisers who -- as Lizza's report shows but doesn't exactly tell -- were sending him memos, framing the hard choices before him, that also reflected Obama's choices of the advisers themselves -- especially Budget Director Peter Orszag, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geitner, and National Economic Council Director Larry Summers.

Ryan doesn't discuss those hard choices of advisers or remind us of who the reasonable alternatives to these people might have been. He does report the decidedly minority, pro-Keynesian-spending view of Christina Romer, chairman of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers. But Lizza recycles uncritically the other advisers' view (which became Obama's, perhaps increasingly as he read their memos) that congressional and other political realities rendered Romer's views unrealistic.

Do they, though? Once again, we find ourselves within the conventional Beltanschauung (Beltway worldview), which holds that in our system of divided government and free markets presidents can't really lead as much as they can facilitate the system's functioning within narrow parameters, however monstrously destructive those have become, and perhaps cajole a few of the players.

In this logic, the 2010 rollback of Democratic gains at the polls "proves" that presidential speeches can't arouse or mobilize people anywhere nearly as much the political psychologist Drew Westen insisted they should in his game-changing New York Times essay of last summer, "What Happened to Obama's Passion?," which enraged the neoliberal Beltway pundits from Fareed Zakaria to Jonathan Chait, as I reported in the HuffingtonPost and here in "Bluster in the Beltanschauung.

In this Beltway view, presidents really only "preside" over most of what goes on in our free-market republic, with its system of independent branches of government; they can execute the laws but not frame or shape them. That isn't how "Decider" George W. Bush saw or did things, of course, but look where he got us! And he was really only deciding how best to advance the above-mentioned corporate interests! His Republican Party won't let Obama decide anything, and they're trying to persuade the American people to dump him.

What's stupefying is that Obama's advisers and neoliberal apologists accept this logic as binding and that Obama does, too, his rhetoric in this year's State of the Union to the contrary notwithstanding.

I sensed this as I watched him milk the Bin Laden kill and shout out some bromides about irresponsible bankers and challenge Congress to change the tax code in some ways that Republicans themselves once supported but won't now that he does, ways that he knows even the Democrats will eviscerate under the ministrations of lobbyists and a public stampeded by the Supreme Court-enhanced conservative noise machine.

Unless Obama does take the lead in offering us a counter-narrative to all this and to the fables we've been accepting about the magic of markets, his efforts will go nowhere. Most of those efforts are already dead in Congress, as one could tell just from looking at those trolls, including those who crammed the aisle like children, seeking his autograph. In his speech Obama was trying to go over their heads as much as to get to them, because he knows now, after three years' of trying, that Henry Adams was right a century ago to lament that Congressmen are hogs that can be gotten away from the trough only if they're beaten over their snouts with an iron bar.

So Obama is concentrating on getting himself re-elected. But his State of the Union didn't serve that purpose effectively, either. He, his advisers, and his apologists in the press haven't examined the possibility that one reason Democrats lost in 2010 is that everyone knew that they were just as "owned" as Republicans, and that the latter at least make a virtue of their slavery as they press the old, reliable scapegoat buttons to distract us from that slavery's ever-more intimate scars.

Nothing in Lizza's account, beyond its obligatory mentions of dissents such as Romer's and Paul Krugman's, challenges the Beltway wisdom that this is the field Obama and the rest of us must play on. That leaves the better half of Obama standing wholly alone, as he did in delivering his address to Congress.

A president can't be a prophet, but he can tell more of the truth than his advisers and apologists think he can about our entrapment in the slippery web of contracts and lies that is closing in on us even tighter every year. Everyone outside Washington knows that is facilitating this entrapment, and in his speech Obama himself acknowledged the growing divide between Washington and the American people. But he didn't describe that divide and the demons and poisons it harbors, and by defaulting on that, he left us standing alone, too.

I still think that he was put on earth to do better.

The writing has always been on the wall

2012-01-24T10:23:02Z

The human body is an amazing creation. It's not only the most complex system known to mankind, but it embodies within it signals that tell its owner that something has gone wrong. A similar signaling system exists in political bodies. Those tasked with reading the signals--be they individuals, physicians or politicians--can choose to consciously ignore the warning signs. The Middle East peace process between Palestinians and Israelis has been emitting SOS signals for decades, but only recently are those signals being received and analyzed for what they are transmitting--a clear and irreversible message that the entire paradigm of "two states for two peoples" has collapsed.

Like doctors who peddle medications instead of practicing medicine, many politicians are under the influence of their narrow political interests and prefer not to call situations by their name. After so many years of failure--political, legal, diplomatic and economic--those who are paid to diagnose and treat reality are being replaced with voices from all corners of the world, voices convincingly making the case that the entire premise undertaken by the Palestine Liberation Organization, starting as far back as 1974, is no longer feasible.

Some will say that the PLO was tricked by the West into a path that was never intended to succeed. Others may claim that the PLO had no option but to acquiesce to the pressures placed upon it to enter, more recently, the Oslo peace process, in hopes that the West (mainly the US) would then pull its weight in bringing Israel in line with international law and UN resolutions. Regardless of the analysis of the past, very few people on the ground who are intimately involved in the attempt to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli "conflict" would venture to spend any additional political credit on the notion that two independent states, Israel and Palestine, remain a way out of this man-made tragedy.

The measures were many, each of them a warning signal that sounded over and over again, but largely fell on deaf ears. The ignoring of a refugee population. A prolonged military occupation, unaccountable to the Fourth Geneva Convention. The launching of the illegal Israeli settlement project. The continued use of military force against Palestinians wherever they reside: Jordan, Lebanon, inside Israel, or the occupied territory. Assassinations and mass murder of Palestinians, from Lebanon to Tunis to every Palestinian city, in broad daylight for all to see. Seven hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians arrested and detained, many without charge and many tortured. A lopsided peace agreement (Oslo) that merely institutionalized the reality of military occupation. The election of Israeli prime ministers who, one after another, represented political programs that explicitly forbade the emergence of another state between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River. The list goes on and on. Each one of these signals emitted a deafening sound that was heard by all, and ignored by all who could change the course of events.

One of Israel's founding ministers of education and culture, Professor Ben-Zion Dinur, said it most sharply, according to the book "History of the Haganah": "In our country there is room only for the Jews. We shall say to the Arabs: Get out! If they don't agree, if they resist, we shall drive them out by force." With this theme as its explicit backdrop, it is no wonder that newly-established Israel had little chance of being a normal state among the community of nations. These words rang out long before the creation of the PLO and long before the unacceptable phenomenon of suicide bombings entered the scene.

Israel was founded on the infamous fallacy that it was built on a "land with no people, for a people with no land." Instead of acknowledging that this fallacy is a form of outright racism, Israel is legislating it into its laws. Since its inception, Israel has arrogantly refused to address the most crucial prerequisite of its establishment as a conventional state: accepting the Palestinians, those people that just happened to be living in that "empty" land that Israel was created on.

After over six decades of conflict and dispossession of the Palestinians, and after two decades of Palestinian political recognition of Israel on part of their lands, the Israeli people choose to sustain the conflict. They are bent not only on keeping their boot of occupation on the necks of Palestinians living under it, but on embarking on an accelerated path to disenfranchise, yet again, Palestinians who remained in Israel and assumed Israeli citizenship.

Today, Israel seems determined, more than ever, to forcefully prove the original premise of its statehood--an Israel with moveable borders and a Jewish-only population. Twelve Israeli prime ministers before Binyamin Netanyahu, six of them after the signing of Oslo, have failed at this nonsensical endeavor. He, too, will fail. If Israel cannot produce a leader to move the country from being a pariah to being a member of the Middle East, only Israel's Jewish population will be to blame.

This should not come as a surprise for Israelis who have studied their own history. Israel's founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, understood it well when he said, "Why should the Arabs make peace? If I were an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we came here and stole their country. Why should they accept that?" The fact of the matter is: Palestinians even accepted "that" and are still being rejected and punished.

It is clear that Israel has no plans to reach any form of lasting peace with Palestinians or concede to a two-state solution. Its spread of illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory has created new facts on the ground that make it impossible to form a contiguous Palestinian state, even on the 22 percent of historic Palestine that Palestinians have been reduced to and agreed upon.

In light of this continuing Israeli policy of outright aggression and negation of Palestinian rights, Israelis should prepare themselves for the next generation of Palestinians, a much more savvy generation interlinked with a global world and a region that values rights over an artificial border. Soon, if the current trajectory continues, Palestinians will tell Israelis: "You win! You get it all--the West Bank, Jerusalem, Gaza, the Jordan Valley, the settlements, all the water, and guess what? You get us too! Now, where do we sign up for our health care cards?" -First published 23/1/2012 in bitterlemons.org

Sam Bahour is a Ramallah-based management consultant.

Social Conservatism May Be Wrong, but it's Not 'White'

2012-01-21T15:56:12Z

Two days ago Dissent magazine ran my warning that critics of racism in Republican presidential campaigns should beware of compounding that scourge by reinforcing the Republicans' social-conservative claim on "whiteness." But that's what a January 15 New York Times essay by Lee Siegel does, intentionally or otherwise.

As long ago as 1999 I pegged Siegel for a tummler -- the Yiddish word for a character, familiar in that culture, who cavorts through the marketplace turning cartwheels and overturning pushcarts, mainly to call attention to himself -- in Siegel's case as a scourge of conventional wisdom. That appeals to punch-drunk editors staggering around in search of lampposts to light up their ratings.

Siegel works hard to elevate his antics to Dostoyevskyan brilliance. And sometimes he succeeds! But this time wasn't one of them, and somebodyhaddasayit, for this time there are serious consequences. So I've said it, and although the Dissent site doesn't take comments, responses I've gotten to it encourage me to share my warning right here.