The New Presidential Campaign: Absurd Romney vs. Compelling Romney

It's almost like a tale of two presidential campaigns, and two Mitt Romneys. In one campaign, most things are going well for Romney and badly for Barack Obama. Hardly noticed amid the drama of the  Supreme Court's decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act on Thursday was the news that the economy grew at a tepid 1.9 percent in the first quarter. Job growth is consequently slow as well. In fact, at 8.2 percent unemployment (still several points above what the rate was when Obama took office), it probably would mark a historic victory for any incumbent to win reelection in an economy beset by such grim numbers.  And there is little doubt that Romney gets economics, even if you dispute his solutions. At Bain Capital--whatever else you might think of that firm--Romney was a data and numbers whiz who took a tiny start-up and turned it into a $4 billion giant. So in this campaign Romney is looking pretty good, and he has open running room to go straight at the president's central weakness.

This is Compelling Romney.

But now there is another dimension to the presidential campaign, a reinvigorated one that is going to be mainly about repealing the ACA since the Supreme Court declined to overturn it. The initial reaction of many pundits is to say this gives Romney a fresh issue to rally his base. But these are no longer the primaries. His biggest problem is no longer his base; it is capturing the center. And in the general election it is on this issue that Romney looks weakest, indeed pretty silly. That is because, in effect, the Supreme Court has just handed Romney the greatest compliment, and the most dramatic vindication, of his political career: your successful health care law in Massachusetts is not only effective, it is constitutional. Beyond that, most polls show that while the ACA is not popular, many voters don't really understand it and remain undecided about it, and the Obama camp will now embark on a major selling job on which its numbers have nowhere to go but up. And yet Romney is being forced to run away from his own greatest achievement as if it were a terrifying ghost from his past, which, in the context of the Right's new Dogma, it is.

This is Absurd Romney.

As an example of the Orwellian doublethink in which presidential candidate Romney must now engage, he will be forced to repudiate, day after day on the trail, the uber-competent policy-maker he so proudly proclaimed himself to be only six years ago. And he must pretend, day after day, that he is really going to repeal "Obamacare" starting on day one of his presidency, or somehow issue "waivers" to all 50 states, when that will be close to practically impossible. How many voters will believe this pledge, except for the rabid Republican base? Probably not many.  How many voters will buy the sincerity of his opposition to the law? Probably not even the Republican base. 

Which brings us to Romney's central problem. He needs to persuade the rational middle of the country--where many voters are attracted to Compelling Romney but somewhat repelled by Absurd Romney -in order  to win the presidency. Yet now the Supreme Court has ensured that Obamacare won't go away as an issue for the rest of the general election, and he has committed himself uncompromisingly to battling it. Again on Thursday, looking very presidential with the Capitol dome behind him, Romney pledged to "act to repeal Obamacare" as "bad policy." But measured against his record as governor his words sounded like something out of 1984, as they did during the primaries. Obama, in his remarks at the White House on Thursday, indicated he would be refreshing voters' memories about the two Romneys regularly when he said that a requirement to purchase health care was supported "even by the current Republican nominee for president."

The difficulty of Absurd Romney's task is pointed up by Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economist who helped Romney design his 2006 health insurance program in Massachusetts. He says that the then-governor used reasoning and language very similar to that of Chief Justice John Roberts in arguing for the necessity of an individual mandate. While Roberts said that Congress did not have the right to mandate behavior, it did retain the right to "tax and spend," including penalizing people for not buying health care.

"It's a penalty for free riding on the system. That's the way Gov. Romney talked about it," says Gruber, who later became one of the key architects of President Obama's Affordable Care Act, which was modeled in part on the Romney law. "Justice Roberts used similar language today." Back in the 2000s, when Gruber demonstrated to Romney with computer models that, absent an individual mandate, one-third of Massachusetts' poorest and sickest would remain uninsured (and drive up costs for everyone), Romney jumped on the point, instantly converted, says Gruber. Romney went at the problem "like a management consultant or an engineer" with no ideological taint, even against the advice of his conservative political advisers, Gruber says. "They were concerned about the politics of universal health care. He argued them down."

Today, says Gruber, Romney is being "completely disingenuous" in arguing against a law whose principles he once embraced.  And somewhat absurd.  Gruber says Romney's suggestion that, as in Massachusetts when he was governor, states should be permitted to decide on their health care plans is also disingenuous. Massachusetts could devise its health care law only because it had access to a large amount of federal money, a $385 million Medicaid grant that it needed to use to extend care to the poor. "He says the states could do it but not the federal government. Well, actually the states can't do it [because most don't have that grant]," says Gruber. "What he should be saying is that he 'll give the states a trillion dollars to come up with their own plans, but he's not going to do that."

On the whole, Compelling Romney has a much better shot at taking the White House.  But he now must contend with Absurd Romney through the rest of the election campaign .

Former Aide: Romney Echoed Roberts Once

An MIT economist who helped Mitt Romney design his health insurance program in Massachusetts says that the then-governor used reasoning and language very similar to that of Chief Justice John Roberts in arguing for the necessity of an individual mandate.

"It's a penalty for free riding on the system. That's the way Gov. Romney talked about it," says Jonathan Gruber, who later became one of the key architects of President Obama's Affordable Care Act, which was modeled in part on the Romney law. "Justice Roberts used similar language today" in his opinion upholding what Romney and the Republicans have since denounced as "Obamacare." While Roberts said that Congress did not have the right to mandate behavior, it did retain the right to "tax and spend," including in order to penalize people for not buying health care.

Back in the early 2000s, when Gruber demonstrated to Romney with computer models that, absent an individual mandate, one-third of Massachusetts' poorest and sickest would remain uninsured (and drive up costs for everyone), Romney jumped on the point, instantly converted, says Gruber. Romney went at the problem "like a management consultant or an engineer," even against the advice of his conservative political advisers, Gruber says. "They were concerned about the politics of universal health care. He argued them down."

Today, says Gruber, Romney has just been handed the greatest vindication of his career as a policy-maker--and he's running away from it. "He's completely disingenuous," says Gruber. "There is a total disconnect between who Romney was in Massachusetts and what we're seeing now."

Why the U.S. Favors A Stalemate in Egypt--for Now

And so it begins: an unprecedented test on the world stage of whether Islamist politics can, at long last, join modernity. Can an Islamist head of state renounce jihadist violence in practice (as al-Qaida or its many offshoots, and Hamas and Hezbollah, have been unable to do)? Can he can work with the international community rather than consistently defy it (like the Iranian regime)?

The immediate prospect for a positive solution to these questions doesn't look especially promising. Sunday’s announcement that the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate, Mohamed Morsi, won Egypt’s presidential runoff marked the first election of an Islamist head of state in Arab history. But Egypt’s quasi-junta, the Supreme Council for the Armed Forces, has already stripped Morsi’s presidency of most of its powers, with vague promises of restoring them under a new constitution.

And yet, with Morsi garnering an announced 51.7 percent of the runoff vote, there are risks posed by any new Egyptian constitution because the new president has pledged that it will be founded on the Quran, and he intends that it will impose a strict version of Islamic law, or sharia. Morsi also told The Washington Post in an interview last year that the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with its salafist or ultra-conservative version of sharia, was a good model for Egypt. But since Egypt is not a monarchy any longer, it was unclear how a new Egyptian government based on the Saudi model could be imposed other than by a Brotherhood or pan-Islamist takeover, along the lines of the Iranian model.

The most likely outcome in Egypt now is long-term stalemate and a slow muddle-through approach—and, oddly enough, the Obama administration probably favors this. That’s because the checks and balances in Egyptian democracy, such as they are, now exist mainly between the military and the Islamists, with the hopeful secular Democrats largely marginalized for the moment (and actually favoring, over the Brotherhood, the generals they once crowded the streets to oust). No one in the West especially wants either side, military or Muslim, to dominate.

Fawaz Gerges, a Middle East expert at the London School of Economics, told me on Sunday that the Brotherhood and SCAF have already reached a modus vivendi for the moment. “Morsi would not have been declared a winner without a deal with SCAF,” Gerges said. “The Brotherhood will play politics and will not take on the military. They have been burned before, a fact deeply etched in the imagination, so the Brothers will go to great lengths to wheel and deal to avoid a confrontation.”

Gerges also says that those who fear the Islamist parties will “hijack and Islamize the  political systems of the region” are alarmist. In the last three decades, he says, the majority of religious activists have evolved, matured and distanced themselves from maximalist goals, including ideal Islamic states. “As realists, Islamists also know that checks and balances exist and that the military would strike with an iron fist if they act recklessly,” Gerges writes in a new as-yet-unpublished paper. He adds: “The big battles over the future of Egypt are yet to be fought. There is a lot of dust and let’s not be blinded by it.”

Not surprisingly, the Obama administration has been consistently cautious on the election results, gingerly seeking to cultivate the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists, but at the same time not coming down too hard on the Egyptian generals. The problem: Washington finds itself unable to endorse either the interim constitution imposed by SCAF, which stripped the presidency of its powers and dissolved the legislature, or any prospective sharia-based one sought by Morsi.

In comments last week, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the Obama administration would review the U.S. relationship with Egypt if SCAF failed to restore full powers to the presidency and permit a new parliamentary election. But these official protests have remained strikingly muted: Only days after the Pentagon announced that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on June 15 "highlighted the need to move forward expeditiously with Egypt's political transition" in a conversation with Hussein Tantawi, head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the SCAF announced its legal coup. Mostly silence from the administration followed, punctuated by a few mild protests from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Morsi has expressed a willingness to work with other political parties in governing Egypt; the Muslim Brotherhood has officially renounced violence; and it has spoken of integrating Egypt’s economy with the rest of the world, all hopeful signs. And Morsi , 60, did study in the United States, earning a doctorate in engineering from the University of Southern California. But on a personal level, his U.S. stay only seemed to disgust him morally and radicalize him, as it apparently helped to do to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind who had studied in North Carolina in the 1980s. Morsi has also spoken harshly about Israel, though he has indicated he has no plans to abrogate the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty.

But whatever the obstacles, it is becoming settled wisdom in U.S. policy-making circles, except among those on the extreme right or aligned with the pro-Israel lobby, that the U.S. has no choice but to engage with the Brotherhood and other Islamist groups that, during the long era of Arab autocracy, proved to be the only alternative means of political expression. Even some of the smarter hardliners, like Reuel Marc Gerecht, are coming to realize that the Arab world may find another route to democracy—through Islamism.  

America may simply have to endure an unpleasant Islamist middle stage—and Arabs may have to experience its failure, as the Iranians have—before modernity finally overtakes Iraq and the Arab world. As Columbia University scholar Richard Bulliet has written: "Finding ways of wedding [Islam's traditional] protective role with modern democratic and economic institutions is a challenge that has not yet been met." The best hope, some of these scholars say, is that after a generation or so, the "Islamic" tag in Arab religious parties becomes rather harmless, reminiscent of what happened to Christian democratic parties in Europe.

With Morsi’s election, we finally have a real-world test of this proposition. But the experiment will take a long, long time.

Darrell Issa and the GOP's 20-year Witch Hunt

I’m sorry, but can we talk turkey – I mean Darrell Issa —for a moment? Is there any fair and balanced news commentator (honest ones, that is, not the Fox News version) who doubts what this guy is all about? Rep. Issa himself has made no pretense of his intentions: nail Barack Obama first, raise Issa’s profile second (or maybe that’s first), and get at the truth last.

Even before he took over the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, with zero evidence in hand, Issa called Obama “one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times.” In his relentless search for evidence (and headlines) since, he’s found nothing to back up that statement, making himself look like a buffoon.  (Even the Solyndra scandal turned out to be a question of incompetence, not corruption, as Issa himself has admitted.)

As Issa told my former colleague Susan Davis for her definitive profile of him in National Journal last year:  “I’m a salesman … What I’m selling is the awareness of a product.” By “product,” Issa apparently intended to mean his committee’s investigations. But clearly the main product he’s selling is Darrell Issa.

And now, having managed to tease out a loose string involving the Justice Department’s botched “Fast and Furious” gun tracking program, he’s dragged the House leadership along in voting to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress. All in a continuing search for Issa’s personal white whale: evidence of White House corruption.

As a reporter,  I’m no defender of Holder—most recently I wrote  that he was “gaining a reputation for passivity in a number of investigations,” including of Wall Street and the BP Oil spill. And Issa’s Democratic predecessor, Henry Waxman, was as partisan as he is. But at least Waxman was somewhat effective, as was a Republican committee head, former Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia. (For example, with their probes into steroids in baseball; the Bush administration’s ties to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff; and the Army’s cover-up of Pat Tillman’s death).

Not so Issa. As Davis wrote:  “Beyond its investigation of Fast and Furious, his committee hasn’t recorded any big hits despite firing—or misfiring—at almost anything that moves.”

In the current probe, Issa and the other Republicans on his committee have told melodramatic tales suggesting that border agent Brian Terry may have been a victim of the guns that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms lost sight of when it created its misbegotten sting program intended to trace weapons to Mexican drug cartels. But in their singular effort to find evidence that the Obama White House tried to cover up Fast and Furious, as Dana Milbank pointed out in The Washington Post on Thursday, the documents they are demanding are “only those since February 2011 — two months after Terry was killed and the program was shut down.”

All this has engaged the passions of nearly every Republican in the House, helped along by their mouthpiece, Fox News, on which the ineffable Michele Malkin declared yesterday that the Obama administration "let [the guns] go because they had an underlying gun-control agenda." Democratic committee member Rep. Carolyn Maloney, expressing the views of most Democrats, called the Holder contempt vote a political witch hunt and added: “It’s witch-hunting season and it won’t be over until November.”

But Maloney had that only partly right. It won’t be over in November. It’s been going on for many Novembers. Strident House Republicans have been on one continual witch hunt since the 1994 takeover of the House.

We all remember the endless (and fruitless) Whitewater investigation and the Monicagate scandal that emerged from it, like the monster baby in the cult movie “Eraserhead.” But perhaps you have forgotten all the furor in the late ‘90s when, helped along by misleading reporting by The New York Times, Republicans on the Hill pursued an endlessly snowballing series of pseudo-scandals. They began with allegations that President Clinton had corruptly permitted Democratic donor Bernard Schwartz, then head of Loral, to sell satellites to China, and culminated in the investigation into supposedly stolen U.S. nuclear secrets by a Taiwanese-American scientist, Wen Ho Lee.

One GOP witch hunt led directly to another. The Loral satellite scandal so intrigued Newt Gingrich, then the Speaker of the House--who stopped just short of publicly accusing Bill Clinton of committing treason for money--that he set up a $2.5 million commission headed by Chris Cox, R-Calif., to look into it. It was the Cox Commission that later fed the Times its Wen Ho Lee stories; the commission’s final report concluded hysterically that for more than 20 years China had stolen secret information on every nuclear weapon in the United States arsenal.

Ultimately, all of these scandal stories collapsed. Completely. No charges were ever brought against anyone in the Clinton administration, and no one resigned. Bernard Schwartz was exonerated of all wrongdoing when the Justice Department “turned up not a scintilla of evidence—or information—that the president was corruptly influenced by [him].” Wen Ho Lee was exonerated of spying charges; he pled guilty to a single count of mishandling classified data and received an apology from the judge for having been shackled and jailed in solitary for a year.

Congressional charges that the Clinton administration had been remiss in pursuing the spy investigations petered out as well—especially as it became clear how troubled the Wen Ho Lee case was, and that the president had in fact ordered a revamping of nuclear security the year before, in 1998. The Cox report was discredited for its over-the-top allegations about the dangers of a Chinese spy network.

What is going on here? Longtime think tank scholars Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann make a persuasive case in their new book,   “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism,”  that as it has moved ever more rightward—apparently trying to stay ahead of the Democrats as they shifted to the center—the Republican Party “has become an insurgent outlier in American politics.” They say the GOP is no longer capable of compromise, and therefore of effective government.

Ornstein and Mann trace the problem back to Gingrich and another ‘90s figure who has captured the party’s heart (or perhaps its manhood): Grover Norquist, whose no-tax pledge “has led to other pledges, on issues such as climate change, that create additional litmus tests that box in moderates and make cross-party coalitions nearly impossible.”

And Issa, like other Republicans in solid red districts, seems not bothered in the least that a new Gallup poll of confidence in government, while it shows waning faith in most major institutions including the presidency and Supreme Court, puts Congress in a distant last place. Respondents who evinced either a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the presidency amounted to a mere 35 percent; in the Supreme Court, 37 percent; and in Congress, an embarrassing and bottom-scraping 12 percent.

How low can Congress go? Bring on the witch hunts and we’ll see.

Message to Obama: the Diplomacy Thing Ain't Workin'

It hasn't really been a great few weeks for Barack Obama in an arena where he hopes to highlight his strengths as president: foreign policy. A series of multilateral meetings beginning with the G-8 summit at Camp David in May and ending Tuesday with the G-20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico seemed to yield mainly defiance, and not just from unruly Russians like Vladimir Putin, who's doing his own thing in helping Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad, but even from the Western Europeans.

Egypt's generals also seem rather unconcerned about what Obama thinks at the moment. Only days after the Pentagon announced that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on June 15 "highlighted the need to move forward expeditiously with Egypt's political transition" in a conversation with Hussein Tantawi, head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the SCAF announced a kind of legal coup, voiding most of the powers of the presidency and legislature.

As they did at last year's G-20 summit in France, European leaders showed some public exasperation with Obama's efforts to pressure them to resolve the eurozone crisis more aggressively. Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti noted that no one has forgotten that the biggest financial crisis started in America in 2008, and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso declared, "Frankly we are not here to take lessons in democracy." 

It's a pattern that goes back even further: at last year's G-20 summit the Germans considered Obama's appearance to be a "disaster, in the words of one senior German official.  The president spent most of his camera time blaming the Europeans (read: Berlin) for the euro crisis that could cost him his presidency. "Who did he think he was?" the official asked. "We don't lecture you about your budget problems."

Much of what dogs Obama is structural: the U.S. is just one of several big players, especially at G-20 summits, and there is frankly little that Obama can do to pressure Europe over the eurozone. On Egypt and other Arab Spring upheavals, he's caught in the geopolitical version of a rock and a hard place: caught between two equally undesirable outcomes involving the advent of either Islamist politicians or revanchist generals. 

Ironically, it is unilateral action where Obama has been most effective: drone strikes and special operations. But because that is largely covert, he can't talk about it. Or maybe just leak a little

Will President Romney be the Bain of Europe's Existence?

Something of a changing of the guard seems to be occurring at the G20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico, today, where the big developing countries are taking on the role of wise, engaged parent while our leading politicians in the U.S. and Europe continue to act like children in denial.

Consider: In TV interviews yesterday, Mitt Romney--who may now be the frontrunner in the U.S. presidential race--made clear he wants nothing to do with Europe's troubles, though they are already lapping at the front steps of the White House. Romney, sounding very much like a CEO who never really left Bain Capital in sensibility and spirit, told CBS: "I surely don't believe that we should expose our national balance sheet to the vagaries of what's going to be happening in Europe."

OMG. "Our national balance sheet?" What Romney seems to be saying is not just that he has no interest in bailing out Europe--as was reported yesterday--but also that he doesn't even want to invest in Europe. Let's avoid "exposure" in what is clearly a bad investment, my fellow men of Bain, and let the eurozoners go down together. Our "balance sheet" will be fine.

The problem with this view, of course, is that the president of the United States must oversee a globalized U.S. economy, not merely a national balance sheet, and its health is already intimately bound up in Europe's similarly globalized economy in multifarious ways. According to a report from Citigroup last year, the correlation between U.S. quarterly GDP growth and that of the largest European economies has risen to a 70 percent in the last decade, a leap upward from less than 20 percent correlation previously.

Romney's Bain-esque appraisal of Europe's problems seems even more benighted compared with that of other G20 countries such as China, Mexico and even Indonesia, which are issuing tough but well-nuanced advice to their former colonial masters.

China President Hu Jintao, in a written interview with a Mexican newspaper posted on the Chinese Foreign Ministry's website today, urged the G-20 to adopt a "constructive and cooperative approach" and "encourage and support the European efforts and jointly provide confidence to the markets," Bloomberg reported today.

Indonesian President Yudhoyono, meanwhile, expressed his hope in a speech that "our European colleagues will reach an agreement on rigorous methods to manage the crisis," because otherwise the consequences will be "unsettling."

Unsettling indeed. If the eurozone collapses, the U.S. and the world face not just the prospects of another economic downturn now, but a longer-term geopolitical future that could be far more unsettling. One only has to recall that, pre-unity, Europe turned the 20th century into one of the darkest in history, largely because of two European-generated world wars.

Will yet another American CEO president, if we end up with one, understand these stakes as well as he does America's balance sheet?    

The Tragedy of America's Wall Street-Dominated Economy, Cont.

The new Federal Reserve numbers out on the calamitous drop in Americans' median net worth--we lost 20 years' worth of prosperity in the Great Recession, folks--only tell half of the tale of a lopsided economy whose fundamental problems still go largely unaddressed. The other half of the story can be found in the overall costs to this economy of subsidizing Wall Street's (largely) unreconstructed profit machine.

Consider: while a broad group of Americans loosely defined as the middle class saw its net worth plummet from a median of $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 in 2010--largely because of the financial crisis--society as a whole was spending hundreds of billions of dollars to sustain the mortgage-bubble-engendering financial firms that cost us that middle-class income. And because Dodd-Frank and other fixes fell short, as a society we are doomed to continue to do so, again and again.

Here's proof. According to a 2010 paper by Andrew Haldane, head of the Bank of England’s financial-stability department, the financial crisis of 2008-09 produced an output loss equivalent to between $60 trillion and $200 trillion for the world economy. Assuming that a crisis occurs every 20 years -- just about what does happen --  the systemic levy needed to recoup these crisis costs would be in excess of $1.5 trillion per year, Haldane says. What that means is that overall, our unrestrained financial sector does not add any net benefit to the economy—its repeated crises cost us far more than Wall Street brings to overall economic growth.

Others have made the same observation. Gerald Corrigan, the onetime head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, told me for an article on the deficiencies in Dodd-Frank last year that high-flying banks have tended to lose whatever they gain over recent decades. He was only echoing the fears of other experts such as former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker and Adair Turner, chairman of Britain's Financial Services Authority, who wonder whether financial innovation such as derivatives has added anything at all to the real economy over the past 20 years.

Haldane, pungently, compares the trading excesses of bankers to air pollution from the auto industry. "The banking industry is also a pollutant," he writes. "Systemic risk is a noxious by-product" not unlike the damage to public health from carbon monoxide, lead and so forth. The latter problems were dealt with through taxation and occasional prohibitions or restrictions on poisonous emissions. Why shouldn't we take the same approach to the excesses of over-the-counter derivatives (now back to more than $700 TRILLION in nominal trades), credit default swaps and other ultra-complex products that cause systemic risk?  

"Banking benefits those producing and consuming financial services – the private benefits for bank employees, depositors, borrowers and investors," he writes. "But it also risks endangering innocent bystanders within the wider economy – the social costs to the general public from banking crises."

Yet no one -- no one -- in the Obama administration or the U.S. Congress has begun to talk in fundamental terms about the social costs of Wall Street.  

This festering inequity at the heart of our economy is perhaps the main reason why Barack Obama may lose in November, I think. The president, quixotically, sought to save both the poor (with Obamacare, mainly) and the filthy rich (Wall Street)--but at the expense of the bigger victim, the middle class, particularly in failing to help underwater mortgage holders. And they will be the ones to vote him out.  

Why A President Romney Would Continue Obama's Covert War

Yours truly spent 20 minutes on C-SPAN this morning trying to reconcile the almost irreconcilable: how does an administration justify and explain a new form of war--one that you can be assured a President Romney would continue -- when such a war is uniformly covert and its details are necessarily classified? Our constitutional system requires a full explanation to the American public, yet exposure will very likely jeopardize the success of these tactics.

And make no mistake: These are no longer simply tactics conducted on the side against what remains of al Qaeda. This is the way America conducts war today, a whole new kind of warfare that, as National Journal first revealed a year ago, is a logical response to the overextension of U.S. military power under the last administration. It is almost certain to be with us for years to come, under both Democratic and Republican presidents. So how do we talk about it?  

President Obama has landed himself in the middle of this quandary this week, with both senior Democrats such as Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Ca., head of the Intelliigence Committee, and Republicans such as Rep. Mike Rogers, who runs the House intel panel, calling for investigations into a series of media leaks that have revealed startling details about the administration's covert war, including its sponsorship of the Stuxnet computer virus and the drone "kill list" administered by Obama personally. 

Were the leaks politically motivated? Certainly there's a prima facie case for that, given that this administration has aggressively prosecuted other leaks and seems rather cavalier about pursuing these latest ones. There's no question that Obama's campaign strategy is to portray himself as a strong commander in chief, and he's got no better argument than his covert successes.
At the same time it is likely that these revelations, particularly about the U.S. role in cyberwarfare, will provoke other countries, especially China and Russia, to step up their own programs, heralding a new dangerous age of cyber-tactics that has Congress up in arms, and quite legitimately.

But these fears may be somewhat exaggerated. As the redoubtable David Sanger of the New York Times has written, Stuxnet was pursued in part to keep the Israelis from launching air strikes against Iran--and it may have worked. And in an article this week, "In Praise of Cyberwarfare," I suggest that:


"If there were certain restraints in place between major powers such as the U.S., China and Russia --for example, a cyber-risks reduction center, complete with early warning systems --that lessened the likelihood of accidental war, then growing cyber-capabilities could actually reduce the overall risk of war between major states in the long run. The reason is an updated version of MAD thinking, albeit without the scorched-earth, World War III aspect. In a hypothetical moment of tension between Washington and Beijing, would China be as likely to attack U.S. carriers in the South China Sea, for example, if it suspected that the U.S. could disrupt its GPS targeting? Conversely, would Washington be as ready to attack if it feared that China might shut down its satellites?


The threshold for pushing the button would be higher."

John Bolton: Too Far Right Even for Bush

If Mitt Romney plans to make even a slight move toward the middle in the general election, campaigning with John Bolton is not a great way to do it. Bolton, a key foreign-policy advisor to Romney, created a stir recently by appearing to rejoice in an op-ed in The Washington Times that talks between Iran and the U.S. and the "P5 plus one"--the U.N. Security Council members and Germany - had "produced no substantive agreement." Bolton said any talks with Iran were merely "a well-oiled trap" and declared that President Obama had become "increasingly a bystander" in Iran's development of a nuclear weapon (despite the disclosure that Obama has authorized aggressive cyber-attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities).  


“Bolton has made it clear that he’s rooting for American diplomacy to fail and has repeatedly called for a rush to war with Iran,” said Michelle Flournoy, the Obama administration’s former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, in a statement issued by the Obama campaign on Tuesday.

What is less understood about Bolton -- and what is truly one of the great oddities in the career of any diplomat in U.S. history -- is that for more than a decade the former undersecretary of State and U.N. ambassador has consistently stood fast against U.S. diplomatic efforts, to the point of regularly belittling his former colleagues at the State Department. Both as a Yale-trained lawyer and a public official, Bolton has long campaigned against U.S. fealty to international agreements and multilateral treaties, and he was so extreme in these views that he  proved to be too far right even for the George W. Bush administration, according to several former senior Bush officials. He ran afoul of senior officials including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and failed in successive bids to be named her deputy and to replace Douglas Feith as No. 3 at the Pentagon. He was given the U.N. job as a consolation prize, at the urging of vice President Dick Cheney's office, in part to keep him out of Washington, according to the former senior officials.

Even the British, America's closest ally in the war on terror, found they could not work with Bolton diplomatically. On several occasions, Britain was irked by what U.S. and British sources said were efforts by Bolton to undermine promising diplomatic openings. In 2003, U.S.-British talks to force Libya to surrender its nuclear program succeeded only after British officials "at the highest level" persuaded the White House to keep Bolton off the negotiating team, my then-Newsweek colleague John Barry and I reported at the time. A crucial issue, according to sources involved in the affair, was Muammar Qaddafi's demand that if Libya abandoned its WMD program, the U.S. in turn would drop its goal of regime change. But Bolton was unwilling to support this compromise. The White House finally agreed to keep Bolton "out of the loop," as one source put it. A deal was struck only after Qaddafi was reassured that Bush would settle for "policy change"--surrendering his WMD.

Often misidentified as a neoconservative because of his ultra-hawkish views, Bolton told me in an interview in the early 2000s that he is actually a libertarian conservative, albeit not of the Ron Paul variety. Based on that interview and on his writings, in such essays as "Should We Take Global Governance Seriously?" (Chicago Journal of International Law, 2000), Bolton has made plain that his career-long goal has been to unwind America's deep ties to the international community, including the U.N. and multilateral treaties such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which he believes is based on an unsound legal concept. Bolton believes that international law in effect doesn't exist and has no sway over U.S. sovereign prerogatives, especially whether to go to war.

At one point, Bolton even appeared to undermine the president's own wishes in pursuing his personal agenda of undermining multilateral affiliations. In a landmark speech at the National Defense University in February 2004, Bush had called for a toughened Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But Bolton, who as undersecretary for arms control was supposed to be in charge of that project, "was absent without leave" when it came to implementing the agenda that the president laid out, failing to prepare for a five-year review conference of the NPT in 2005, a former Bush official who worked with Bolton told me at the time. "Everyone knew the conference was coming and that it would be contentious. But Bolton stopped all diplomacy on this six months ago," another former official told me then. "The White House and the National Security Council started worrying, wondering what was going on. So a few months ago the NSC had to step in and get things going themselves. " Bolton also held up a plutonium disposal project that required agreement with the Russians; it was completed after he left office.

Bolton is sometimes described as the author of the Bush administration's Proliferation Security Initiative--a multilateral agreement to interdict suspected WMD shipments on the high seas. But the former senior Bush official who criticized Bolton's performance on the NPT conference said that in fact Bolton's successor, Robert Joseph, deserved most of the credit for the PSI. This official adds that it was Joseph, who was in charge of counterproliferation at the NSC, who had to pitch in when Bolton fumbled preparations for the NPT conference as well.

After he left the Bush administration, Bolton also became a vocal critic of its turn toward diplomacy, openly criticizing then-Secretary Rice's efforts to negotiate a nuclear deal with North Korea, which ultimately failed. "This is classic State Department zeal for the deal," Bolton said on Fox News. He also declared, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, that the Bush administration, having purged or sidelined most of its hardliners, was "in a state of total intellectual collapse."

And now John Bolton is back.

Why A Socialist Politician May Be Obama's Best Friend

After Nicolas Sarkozy lost the French presidential election on May 6, pundits in Washington lamented the loss of this renowned America-phile and close NATO ally, especially coming at the hands of a Socialist successor who pledged a faster pullout from Afghanistan. But Sarkozy's replacement, new French President Francois Hollande, is already proving to be a much more valuable friend to Barack Obama than Sarkozy was. He could even help Obama win in November.

But it's not for the reason the right-wing conspiracy theorists would have you think. No, Hollande and Obama can hardly be said to think alike.

It's just that, with Hollande's election, the balance of power may have shifted in Europe toward more dramatic economic stimulus and other self-saving measures for the eurozone. Within days of his election, Hollande was aggressively pursuing these policies at the G8 summit at Camp David, and he hasn't stopped talking and pushing since. Obama badly needs this support right now, as America's oh-so-tentative economic growth finds itself newly jeopardized by the imminent peril of eurozone implosion, as well as slowdown in other major countries such as China.

With the news that U.S. jobless numbers were worse than expected the last three months, and the unemployment rate is back up to 8.2 percent, nothing may be more important to Obama's election chances than the decisions made over the next days and weeks in Europe, especially at the planned EU Summit on June 22, which comes several days after the critical Greek elections. And here the president's worst adversary is Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and his best friend is clearly Hollande.

Hollande and other pro-growth governments in Europe effectively now have Germany surrounded policy-wise -- because of its lone commitment to austerity and a pared-down role for the European Central Bank --  even though they don't seem to be succeeding as yet in changing Merkel's mind.

Merkel is worried about German public opinion, which remains mulishly against bailouts, ahead of next year's election. But it seems likely she can hold out against her euro partners in such an uncompromising way for only so long.  As Der Spiegel noted after the EU summit late last month, "Merkel's world had been turned upside down. For the first time in years, the chancellor did not set the tone at an EU summit."

Thus, despite the current pessimism of the markets, it is not unreasonable to expect a grand compromise along the lines of Germany accepting a larger bailout role for the Deutschebank- dominated ECB, while France in turn accepts part of what it has long resisted: greater fiscal coordination to enforce discipline in national budgets, which Merkel wants to institutionalize.

All of which, if it happens, would add just a little relief to President Obama's life. Thanks to Francois Hollande.

The Jobs Report: A TKO for the Candidate of Hope?

Friday’s devastating jobs report for May should be greeted by rites of mourning at the White House—not necessarily for Barack Obama’s presidency, at least not yet, but rather for the man who once billed himself as the Candidate of Hope.

The grim longer-term message of the May numbers, which came in at a much-lower-than-expected 69,000 jobs and raised the unemployment rate to 8.2 percent, is that the positive economic trend that the Obama camp was hoping for as it swings into November is very unlikely to happen now.  For the third year in a row, a spring slowdown has shattered the hopes and spiked the frustrations of the Obama White House, which is trying to manage a historically tepid recovery from the Great Recession. The report was punctuated by a big stock market drop in which the Dow gave back its gains on the year.

With only several more jobs reports left before the election, pretty much all that can be hoped for is nothing worse. “It seems like the best bet, if Europe doesn’t implode, is that we’re going to remain in the status quo,” says Harry Holzer, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University and a former chief economist for the Department of Labor.

While it’s too early to say, based on polls, it’s reasonable to ask whether Obama should now be viewed once again as the underdog in this race. The president’s best chance to win now, therefore, may be to go negative in a much bigger way than he’s already done: If he is no longer the Candidate of Hope, in other words, Mitt Romney should be seen as the Candidate of Nope.

“The argument is that, if you take Romney at his word, he will end up supporting what House Republicans want: tax cuts for the rich and austerity for everyone else,” says Holzer. “It will look more like Europe and Britain. Obama should make the case that while the economy is tepid under him, under Romney it would probably be backsliding.” 

So prepare not to be inspired:  this will be a campaign of “If Worse Comes to Worst.” Could Shepard Fairey come up with a poster image for that?

Romney, not surprisingly, pounced on the new numbers, calling them a “harsh indictment” of Obama’s policies and reminding voters that the economy has now spent a record 40 months at 8-percent-plus unemployment. Sketching out an argument we will no doubt hear endlessly for the next five months—"Jobs is Job One of the president" -- Romney told CNBC that Obama and his team simply misread how severe the downturn was, got fatally distracted by Obamacare, and proved wrong in expecting unemployment to be “in the sixes” by now.

What can be done? Romney was asked. “The most significant thing we can do in the near term is to get a new president.”

The president seems to have little choice now but to make middle-class voters, especially women, African-Americans and Latinos, even more scared of what Romney will do to their futures than what he, Obama, has already appeared to do to them. That’s not an easy sell, but it’s one that has been made slightly easier by the GOP candidate’s embrace of right-wing proposals such as Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan --which a Congressional Budget Office study showed would effectively eliminate the entire U.S. government except for defense, Social Security, Medicare, children’s insurance, and interest payments.  Romney’s jobs record as governor of Massachusetts was also not very strong.

There have already been signs of this negative approach; now it will inevitably become more pronounced. As John Heilemann wrote last Sunday in New York Magazine, even before the new jobs report, “2008’s candidate of hope stands poised to become 2012’s candidate of fear.” The tack carries some risk, because so much of Obama’s self-identification was as a “transformational” figure who touted himself as different from typical politicians.  In Politico, Glenn Thrush wrote recently that the negativism in the Obama campaign, about Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital especially, was alienating independent voters and only uniting hitherto unenthusiastic Republicans around Romney.

Democratic strategist Stan Greenberg says that while Obama has no choice but to frighten voters about a Romney presidency, he also needs to do a better job of articulating his own vision for the economy—even as he drops not-so-subtle reminders of how much of his economic program, such as infrastructure investments, has been stymied by GOP opposition on Capitol Hill.  “People aren’t looking for a depressed future. They still want signs of hope,” says Greenberg. “The jobs number reinforces even more that the voters want bigger changes in the economy.”

In a speech in Minnesota on Friday, the president sought to do just that, telling the audience that “Congress should have passed a bill a long time ago to put thousands of construction workers back on the job, building our roads and our bridges.” He added that “Congress has not acted on enough” of his ideas. “There is no excuse for it.”

Greenberg adds that the Obama team can try to make clear to voters that “the Great Recession was unique on scale of damage and length of recovery, and that the Euro crisis has made recovery even harder.” But he says the campaign also needs to understand that because of the uniqueness of the crisis, “It needs a unique strategy.”

The May jobs report, while fairly bleak across the board, is not utterly without hope: one reason unemployment rose to 8.2 percent is that more people rejoined the workforce.  In addition, lower gasoline prices and interest rates could still boost the economy – and people’s hopes—by November. But probably not enough to persuade very many people that it is Barack Obama who embodies those hopes.