Obama: Toughest Foreign Policy Pres Since JFK?

In an election as close as this one, it is the little intangibles—that intuitive sense of confidence (or lack thereof) about a candidate that ambivalent voters carry with them into the booth—that can make all the difference. And although we’ve heard that this election will be almost entirely about the U.S. economy and not foreign policy, President Obama will make his national-security record a centerpiece of his closing night at the Democratic National Convention next week.

Why? Because arguably no Democrat since John F. Kennedy has run as tougher and more trustworthy than the Republicans on national security, as I first wrote in National Journal back in January. Obama plans to do just that. He has chosen Sen. John Kerry—a war hero and candidate to succeed Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of State in a second term—to deliver a speech arguing that Obama “has restored America’s leadership in the world” and “has taken the fight to our enemies,” according to a campaign official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Obama campaign will contrast the president’s record with Romney’s hawkish but scattershot statements on the stump, characterizing the GOP’s usual we’re-tougher-on-defense tack as empty and dangerous rhetoric. Romney “has embraced the go-it-alone, reckless policies of the past,” the official said, adding that Democrats will seek to identify Romney with the overextensions of the Bush administration.

The Democrats’ eagerness to highlight national security is a dramatic contrast to the past four decades or so. Going back to 1968, when Vietnam dominated, Hubert Humphrey and then George McGovern ran against Richard Nixon as peace candidates. In 1976, Jimmy Carter campaigned in favor of détente and arms control with the Soviets. In 1980, Carter seemed weak after the Iran hostage crisis spurred the disastrous Desert One rescue mission. In 1992, Bill Clinton ran by touting soft power and globalization. And in 1996, Republicans called him meek for directing cruise-missile strikes and not harsher methods against Saddam Hussein, while dithering over Bosnia after the “Black Hawk Down” disaster in Somalia.

As the White House sees it, Obama succeeded where Clinton and Carter failed, undertaking an enormously risky mission to hunt down Osama bin Laden. That was only part of a broader program that Obama secretly inaugurated upon taking office, tripling the number of Predator drone strikes. He has also withdrawn troops from Iraq and begun to do so in Afghanistan, without any stellar success but also without a notable catastrophe.

Republicans still insist that Obama is weak, that he “led from behind” on Libya (giving NATO, Britain, and France the lead), and that he has hesitated in supporting democracy movements from Iran to Yemen. At the same time, however, Romney has not yet articulated a coherent vision of where he wants to take American leadership abroad, beyond advocating a stronger defense. And according to one Romney adviser who would discuss the campaign only on condition of anonymity, although the GOP candidate has a wide array of advisers, almost none of them consult directly with Romney.

Can a Democratic president really look more trustworthy on national security? With the election virtually deadlocked, Obama may not need to change many minds—only just enough.

Can Romney Achieve a 'Real Marriage' with America

Ann Romney was good, really good. Articulate, attractive and fiery, she hit her lines like a polished stump speaker even though she’d claimed never to have done anything like that before. Certainly she came off better than Chris Christie, who through all his hazy bombast seemed to be touting himself for president in 2016. Or perhaps Christie was just making a pitch for Mitt Romney as President of New Jersey in 2012. Either way, that wasn’t  supposed to be the point—and it wasn’t what needed to be said.

Indeed, the larger problem with the big kickoff speeches at the GOP convention is that they just haven’t achieved critical mass. While the economy is bad, it’s not terrible; while Barack Obama is disappointing, he’s not hated (at least not as much as the GOP base would like); and while Mitt Romney is impressive, he’s not inspirational. As much as Republicans desperately want it to be, this is simply not 1980, an era when not only unemployment was high but inflation was at 13.5 percent, when “Jimmy Cardigan” Carter had lost the faith of the country by whining about “malaise” and stumbling over the Iran hostage crisis, and when an always eloquent Ronald Reagan captured the mood decisively by asking, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

By contrast, at such an ambiguous historical moment as today, it doesn’t seem likely that Romney—or any candidate so tepid—could merely float into the White House on the pleasant cloud of policy generalities we’ve heard so far. What’s being said at the podium in Tampa may be enough for the base—they all speak in code to each other – but it hardly seems enough to persuade the dwindling but critical undecideds to switch presidential horses in mid-recovery. And though his campaign has clearly placed its emphasis on galvanizing Republicans over collecting sparse independents (thus his failure to move more clearly to the center), make no mistake: Romney will need votes outside the GOP to squeak by Obama.

It’s misleading to suggest, as Newt Gingrich did on one of the talk shows yesterday, that Reagan and Carter were neck and neck at this point, just as Obama and Romney are today. As Nate Silver has pointed out, the 1980 election featured “incredibly volatile” polling that is quite unlike the prolonged deadlock we have today between a somewhat disappointing president and a relentlessly charmless challenger. “By the summer, Mr. Reagan had a clear lead, peaking around 25 points in polls conducted immediately after the Republican convention in Detroit. Then, Mr. Carter rebounded, with polls conducted in late October showing him behind Mr. Reagan by only a point or two on average,” Silver wrote.

“Tonight, we are going to choose respect over love,” Christie told the crowd last night, echoing what seems to have become the Romney line that he doesn’t need people to love him, only respect him. “We are taking our country back… You see, we are the United States of America.”

Huh? We kind of know that already. It was difficult to grasp any message through all the verbal gauze, but boiled down, the obviously well-fed Christie seemed to be telling senior Americans they need to be ready to starve to save their grandchildrens’ bank accounts, teachers that they need to be ready to be unemployed (“They believe in teachers' unions .  We believe in teachers.” Uh, don’t teachers belong to teachers’ unions?), and the very rich that they should get ready to invest those tax-cut windfalls.

It  just wasn’t enough. Nor was Ann Romney’s gentle encomium to the man “who makes me laugh,” and with whom she has “a real marriage” rather than a storybook one. Because neither she nor anyone else in Tampa has yet done a good job of persuading undecided American voters that it’s time to divorce Obama and marry themselves to Mitt.

Ann Romney's Titanic Task: Making Mitt Lovable

Tonight's speech by Ann Romney at the RNC is a big speech—probably bigger than any would-be first lady has had to deliver for some time. After being married to him for 43 years, seemingly happily, it’s probably safe to say that Ann Romney loves Mitt Romney very much. The challenge she faces is that few other people in the country, even in the Republican Party, seem to love Mitt Romney very much. The candidate himself doesn’t put much stock in it, telling Parade magazine recently, “It's nice to be loved, but it's better to be respected.”

Yet to judge from the poll numbers, mere respect might not be enough to put Romney in the White House, particularly with the Obama campaign suggesting in a relentless ad campaign that the Croesus-rich, tax-avoiding, job-exporting Republican doesn’t deserve much respect anyway. More critically, Romney continues to be deadlocked with a far more personally popular (or “likeable”) president in most polls, and even some Republican analysts have concluded that as bleak as the economy still looks right now, that issue alone is not going to be enough to get Romney elected.

The answer of some GOP strategists is to go even more negative than the campaign has already been, launching an ugly culture war that will galvanize white voters. It is a move that will likely exacerbate racial tensions for years to come, based on numbers that show Romney gaining most male white voters, while Obama can win by just capturing a substantial majority of minority voters.

But clearly Mitt will need to elicit at least some positive feeling, maybe even love, both from his base and the general electorate, to get him over the top in November, and that is Ann Romney’s main task tonight. Her challenge is to figure out a way to re-introduce a man whose biography is somewhat well known and stellar in its particulars, but which somehow does not inspire many people. Not the way, say, the tale of Ronald Reagan’s long wilderness years as a movement conservative did, or Jack Kennedy’s war record, or Barack Obama’s biracial American Dream story.

Indeed, Ann Romney has perhaps the biggest challenge at a convention since Elizabeth Dole descended from the podium in San Diego in 1996 to rouse the audience into a frenzy about “the man I love“—the equally unlovable Bob Dole.

Ann’s problem is all the greater because there have been so many aspects of Mitt’s story that he, she and their family have proved reticent to talk about until now: his business dealings at Bain, his record in Massachusetts, his Mormonism. Pressed by Parade’s Lynn Sherr recently to reveal the “private Mitt Romney,” she spoke, as others have, of his “silly side. He loves to roll on the floor with our grandkids. And he’s a prankster.”

That’s not going to be enough. “I think you will see that my speech is heartfelt,” Romney told reporters earlier today.  It will need to be more than that. Most of these introductory speeches by candidates’ wives are mere labors of love. Ann Romney’s turn at the podium is probably a labor of necessity too.

The Odds of An 'October Surprise'

As is usually the case with the Israelis, we probably won’t know about it until the morning after.

But if an Israeli strike on Iran does occur between now and Nov. 6, it is highly likely that U.S. election politics, and how Israel weighs the prospects for an Obama second term or a Romney presidency, will be key factors — maybe even the most important factors.

Many Israelis still mistrust President Obama, despite his dramatic promise last spring that he “has Israel’s back” and will not allow Iran to get a bomb. They fear that he will grow more distant from Israel in a second term, with no more elections to worry about. And despite Mitt Romney’s close relationship with hawkish Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli officials also fear they can’t rely on his election. Romney’s foreign-policy advisory team is considered to be somewhat adrift and dysfunctional, even by some on the inside of it. The Israelis are also worried about how long it will take an incoming President Romney to get his administration and policies in place as the window for hitting Iran’s hardened nuclear centrifuge facility at Fordow slowly closes, says David Makovsky, a Middle East expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Peace and coauthor of a book with Dennis Ross, Obama’s former top Iran adviser.

Led by Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, hawks in the divided Israeli government are growing more alarmed that Fordow is rapidly reaching the point at which Israel’s military will no longer be capable of significantly damaging the facility, ceding to Iran what Barak calls an unacceptable “zone of immunity.” Meanwhile sanctions and diplomacy have not met Israel’s declared threshold for progress. The International Atomic Energy Agency is coming out with a report soon that appears to have further divided the U.S. and Israel over how much progress Tehran is making on a bomb, and diplomatic negotiations are stalemated. Iran is also seeking to fracture the international coalition against it by hosting a giant conclave of nonaligned nations this week to be attended by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

The best evidence that an Israeli attack may be imminent is that some senior members of the Israeli military and defense apparatus are speaking out against it with unprecedented public frankness. “It’s important to underscore that this is not going public because pundits are speculating about it, but because people are finishing the preparations for an attack,” says Mark Hibbs, an investigator at the Carnegie Endowment’s Nuclear Policy Program, based in Berlin. “The debate is driven by people in the military and intelligence world who clearly believe this is for real.”

One challenge the Israelis have now is that Netanyahu, Barak, and other hawks have issued so many warnings that their credibility is on the line if they don’t attack. “I think the odds have gone up over the last couple of months,” adds Hibbs. “I don’t think it’s necessarily going to happen, but you have to remember when diplomacy began in March and into April, we were all told by people in Israel that the talks had to reach successful conclusion in a small number of weeks.” Instead, the negotiations went nowhere.

The Obama White House is also clearly worried about what Dennis Ross calls Israel’s “march to war.” Ross conveyed this in an op-ed last week in The New York Times when he “urged” his former administration colleagues to “ask Israeli leaders if there are military capabilities we could provide them with — like additional bunker-busting bombs, tankers for refueling aircraft, and targeting information — that would extend the clock for them.” In addition, Ross said, “the White House should ask Mr. Netanyahu what sort of support he would need from the United States if he chose to use force — for example, resupply of weapons, munitions, spare parts, military and diplomatic backing, and help in terms of dealing with unexpected contingencies. The United States should be prepared to make firm commitments in all these areas now in return for Israel’s agreement to postpone any attack until next year."

White House spokesman Tommy Vietor, asked by e-mail whether the administration is making concrete offers to the Israelis along these lines, responded that he would not “comment on our specific conversations with the Israelis” but added that “we continue to cooperate closely with our close ally Israel on addressing all facets of the challenge posed by Iran’s nuclear program. We do not believe the Israeli government has made a decision regarding possible use of force against Iran, as the Israeli defense minister implied recently."

Obama has tried to restrain the Israelis by making clear that the U.S. will strike Iran itself if necessary, thus also neutralizing one of his GOP opponents’ chief charge of weakness against him. At the same time, Obama has sought to prevent what he considers a premature Israeli attack. It’s not clear whether such a strike would help or hinder his election campaign. On one hand, voters tend to rally around the commander in chief in times of war; on the other, Republicans have accused Obama of indecisiveness in the embroiled region, especially in dealing with Iran and the Arab Spring.

Makovsky says Israelis are in knots over what they all regard as an existential issue with no obvious solution. “While most would be thrilled if the U.S. handled this issue, the Israeli view is that you don’t outsource your most vital national-security concerns.” He thinks the odds are still about “50-50” that Israel will decide to attack by Nov. 6. “It’s a divided picture. You have two guys, Barak and Netanyahu, who clearly think if that Israel’s going to do this, it should do it before November. You’ve got skepticism among the top security establishment and a sense of ambivalence among key Cabinet members. The story here is to what extent are these two guys going to be able to prevail. Historically generals are overruled all the time.”

An 'Experience Gap' Roils Romney's Foreign Policy Team

To hear some advisers tell it, the Romney campaign is really Romney Inc., a smoothly-run organization that efficiently funnels the views of a vast array of foreign-policy advisers through a few key coordinators who brief the candidate. This is a positive contrast to the last time Mitt Romney ran in 2008. “The last time, it was me, the governor, and five other people sitting around a table. We didn’t do that well,” says Mitchell Reiss, the former head of policy planning at the State Department who is one of a substantial number of advisers Romney brought on from the Bush administration. "Now it’s a $500 million operation ... and there so many more people who have expertise.”

But other advisers inside the campaign say this expertise is still not being well employed, which may be one reason Romney appeared so amateurish during his recent gaffe-strewn tour through Britain, Israel, and Poland. According to one Romney adviser who would discuss the internal dynamics of the campaign only on condition of anonymity, there is an “experience gap” between the inner circle of people who talk to Romney directly and the many on the outside who have to funnel their views through that inner circle, especially through the young and untested foreign-policy coordinator, Alex Wong.

“A lot of people with experience in government are not in the inner circle,” says this adviser. Some of the former government officials who are nominally on Romney’s foreign-policy advisory teams say they haven’t briefed the candidate personally since 2011. Other advisers speak out or write op-eds on their own, leading to the perception that there are publicly-aired disputes inside the campaign when in truth few of these advisers are actually in contact with Romney.

The lingering sense that Romney’s foreign-policy views remain somewhat inchoate could affect not only voters’ calculations but also possibly those of the Israelis, who are believed to be contemplating whether to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities before the election. While Romney took a hard line in supporting Israel’s right to defend itself on his trip—and he is closer to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is said to favor a strike, than Obama is--he went out of his way to avoid endorsing an Israeli strike.

The disarray feeds Israeli worries about waiting. “There is a belief that whether Obama or Romney wins, everything is more complicated” for the Israelis if they wait, says David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Peace. “If Romney wins, he needs to get inaugurated, name staff, get them confirmed, and do policy reviews. That could take them till next fall,” which may well be beyond the Israeli window for action against Iran’s mountain nuclear site at Fordow, which is under construction.

Meanwhile, however, the Israelis—who are engaged in their own intense debate about whether to strike—hear a cacophony of voices in the Romney camp. “We’ve got a very big tent. You’ve got a lot of different voices,” concedes another Romney adviser. “The debate isn’t ‘Gee, can we live with an Iranian nuclear weapon,’ it’s how you structure a response.” Even so, with Romney playing to his conservative base, “there hasn’t been a big conversation of how much would he put back into a diplomatic effort” with Iran, the first adviser says.

The Romney foreign-policy inner circle starts with Wong, who bears the expansive title of “director of foreign, defense, and judicial policy” and who conducts the weekly conference call with advisers. Wong is a 2007 Harvard Law School graduate and a former associate at the law firm of Covington & Burling, but his credentials as a foreign-policy expert are thin at best, amounting to a summer internship at the U.S. mission to the U.N. in 2005 and service as a "rule of law" adviser on Iraq from 2007 to 2009. The circle also appears to include Dan Senor, the former spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq who co-wrote a 2009 book on Israel’s entrepreneurial culture, Start-Up Nation, which was cited by Romney during much- criticized remarks he made at a Jewish fundraiser in July appearing to denigrate Palestinians. Senor, who like Romney is a sometime Wall Street financier with a Harvard Business School degree, accompanied Romney on the Mideast leg of his trip last month.

Reiss is also considered by some to be close to Romney, along with former ambassador Rich Williamson, although by Reiss’s own testimony he himself doesn’t talk to Romney much. He says Wong is the “gatekeeper,” and the process works well. The internal complaints, Reiss adds, are just “sour grapes. People aren’t getting face time. They’re not getting stroked the way they might want to get stroked, but the reality is it’s a much bigger operation. There’s no requirement for us to do this in person.”

Reiss adds that “there are a number of us who have been with him for a while, that have ability to talk to directly when we feel  it’s necessary.... I think all of us refrain  from doing that unless there’s an emergency.” Wong, he adds, “gives a very accurate and honest reflection of what it is we’ re saying,” which often goes to Lanhee Chen, the head of policy, and then to Romney.

The Romney campaign is trying hard to stay on unified message. When National Journal contacted one Romney foreign policy adviser, Ashley Tellis, a former senior adviser to the State Department on India, he declined an interview, saying, “I’m not supposed to discuss this with anyone. I’m under strict instructions not to.” Another adviser, Princeton scholar Aaron Friedberg, who was former Vice President Dick Cheney’s deputy for national security, simply passed along an e-mail to Andrea Saul, the Romney campaign’s spokesperson.

Saul did not respond to a separate e-mail requesting comment.

The Not-So-Swift Swiftboaters

(Photo credit: moonbattery.com)

I think it's fair to say, with at least two big data points now in front of us (John Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2012; one could also throw in Bill Clinton, 1992 and 1996), that the Swiftboating of Democratic presidential candidates by aggrieved right-wing retired military people is a phenomenon that's not to go away.

The Swiftboating worked brilliantly against the eponymous former Swift Boat captain John Kerry, a Silver Star-decorated war hero who somehow came out looking less tough than a GOP president who had spent the Vietnam War guarding Texas and a vice president who had dodged the draft five times. That's partly because Kerry, eternally anguished about his Vietnam service, failed to fight back in time against the appalling slurs on his record made by these military malefactors.

Such slanders are much less likely to work against Obama, whose historic takedown of Osama bin Laden and successful reorientation of George W. Bush's overblown "global war on terror" into a fiercely focused assault on al Qaeda have been subject to a stealth campaign of right-wing innuendo. The new Swiftboaters have simultaneously raised doubts about 1) how much the president really had to do with the bin Laden mission and 2) the extent to which he is exploiting its success for political purposes by leaking classified information that has put military and intel lives in danger.

Part of the reason it won't hold this time is that the key figures behind the Swiftboating are swiftly imploding on their own. Chief among them is Ben Smith, a square-jawed, earnest fellow, said to be a former Navy SEAL, who appears to great effect in a 22-minute video that attacks Obama for disclosing life-endangering intel. After it was revealed that Smith is an apparently unbalanced tea partier who has also blogged that Obama is "an imposter," a "Muslim," and a "Manchurian President" who should "go back to the country you were born in," his credibility disappeared overnight, deservedly. So too with others who appeared in the video. The Romney campaign, which features a candidate who got only four deferments during Vietnam (to Dick Cheney's five), has been noticably silent.

But the Obama team is being much more forthright in making the case that the president does deserve the credit for the removal of the world's No. 1 terrorist from the field. And it has the facts amply on its side. According to my own independent reporting and that of other journalists, the bin Laden mission was entirely CIA-conceived-and-run. It came about at all only because Obama told his then-new CIA director, Leon Panetta, in 2009 to re-direct most of the agency's clandestine resources to tracking the al Qaida leader and his cohorts down, refocusing on Afghanistan and Pakistan and away from Iraq. According to two intelligence sources not affiliated with the Obama campaign, in October 2009, when the CIA put together a wish list for approval from the president--including adding more predator drones inside Pakistan; enlarging the areas in which they operated; and opening new facilities including CIA safe houses like the one in Abbottabad, near bin Laden's compound -- Obama surprised the agency by signing off on everything. "It was a sea change, in shifting the focus from Iraq," says one former official.

Beyond that, the bin Laden surveillance mission was painstakingly carried out by the CIA, at the president's direction, for more than two years. It was only in the final stages, after Obama decided on a commando raid over a bombing mission, that SEAL Team Six was "loaned" to the CIA under Title 50 of the National Security Act.

So the idea that the bin Laden killing was all the military's doing, and that Obama just got lucky -- perhaps even with George W. Bush's anti-terrorist campaign -- is sheer nonsense.  That's something you can expect to hear a lot more of from Obama surrogates as the president's campaign avoids all those Kerry pitfalls.

True, legitimate questions have been raised, by Democratic Sen Dianne Feinstein among others, about leaks that have exposed some classified U.S. activities, including the covert campaign against Iran's nuclear programs. But there is no evidence, as yet, to suggest that SEALS or other Americans have been placed in jeopardy. A controversial series of meetings that U.S. intelligence and defense officials had with Hollywood moviemakers involved little more than "going into the history of the hunt for bin Laden, and character questions about what it was like to be on the hunt," said one former official who was familiar with those discussions.

The larger point, however, is this: covert action is pretty much the way America makes war these days, all around the world. It is also very likely the way America will do so in the future--under either President Obama or a President Romney--so to some extent covert activities must be talked about and debated. Just ask the SEAL who took part in the bin Laden mission and who has authored  a forthcoming book  to be published on Sept. 11, that gives a "firsthand account" of the mission. Which would seem to discredit the idea that it is only Obama politicos who are eager to talk about America's battlefield successes. 

Newsweek: The Whiff Factor

Once upon a time Newsweek magazine had, arguably, the best political coverage in the business (full disclosure: I'm a former staffer). Stocked with star reporters, columnists and writers, it blanketed the presidential races, often set the tone for other journalists and produced a closely read election book every four years. So when Newsweek turned out a cover like "Fighting the 'Wimp Factor'" in 1987, raising questions about George H.W. Bush's character, stuff happened: pundits went into overdrive, campaign flunkies got angry, and the magazine had impact. But when Newsweek tried to do a "Wimp Factor" cover again a few weeks ago -- this time about Mitt Romney--no one seemed to care very much.

And this week, when enfant terrible historian Niall Ferguson published another over-the-top screed headlined, "Obama's Gotta Go," much talk ensued, but it wasn't about the political race. Mainly it was a lot of lamentation about how far off the mark Ferguson was, and about how far a once-great magazine, Newsweek, has fallen under the overrated and apparently overwhelmed Tina Brown, who thinks nothing of handing over a formerly coveted cover to anyone with a rant in hand.

Others have dealt amply with all the factual misrepresentations in the article; note, in particular, James Fallows in The Atlantic and Dylan Byers in Politico. I would just like to point out how much Ferguson has gotten wrong since he appointed himself keeper of America's imperial flame and began desperately playing for public attention. In his books The Cash Nexus (2001) and then Colossus (2004), he urged Americans to fulfill their obvious destiny as the next "liberal" empire spreading democracy and Anglo-Saxon legalism across the globe. "The greatest disappointment facing the world in the twenty-first century," Ferguson wrote in The Cash Nexus, is that "the leaders of the one state with the economic resources to make the world a better place lack the guts to do it." When George W. Bush invaded Iraq, Ferguson eagerly supported the war as evidence that Washington had finally shown some guts and was acting like the empire it ought to be; he also advocated a long-term occupation. But then, in later books and articles, Ferguson began to argue that the United States was succumbing to financial overstretch, having gotten deeply in debt to the rest of the world, especially China. All without any sense of irony. 

Yet Ferguson has also been wrong in sounding alarms about the latter point. In 2009, Ferguson argued that more debt issuance would lead to higher interest rates and fiscal disaster; he was wrong. Again in 2011, Ferguson argued that inflation was coming back, leading the charge for those much-feared bond market vigilantes. He was wrong again.

Barry Diller, the money man keeping Newsweek afloat, has hinted recently that its days as a print publication are numbered. It's sad to say this, but perhaps he's got it right. Conjoined to Brown's Daily Beast, Newsweek is a wounded animal, and maybe it ought to be put out of its misery. That way, maybe, those who remember the magazine at all will remember the years when it was great. And we can all get back to real journalism. 

How the Right Completed Its Hostile Takeover of Mitt

Photo credit: http://mariopiperni.com/

Romney-Ryan constitutes, very possibly, the best-looking ticket in American political history. Mitt Romney is so textbook handsome that he resembles a toy action-figure president. Paul Ryan's youthful, chiseled face and piercing blue eyes are already making hearts flutter around the political world. And no doubt Romney's bold choice for veep  - which has made most people forget, for the moment, Bain Capital and his undisclosed tax returns-- will give the Republican presumptive nominee some pop in the polls. For the moment.

But once the excitement surrounding Ryan subsides, the long, ideological slog of this presidential race will resume, and with greater force than before. The stakes will be, once again, about the stark conceptual choice that American voters now face. Romney's selection of Ryan must be seen as part of a continuum of hard-line positions that the GOP candidate, under constant pressure from an often hostile Right, has laid out on everything from immigration to health care to foreign policy.

And with his veep choice Romney is sending a message to the American electorate, more forthrightly than ever, that he won't be moving to the middle after all. He seems to be affirming that he is just about as ideologically conservative and as captured by the GOP base as Obama has been painting him.

Judging from the Obama campaign's line of attack since his speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors last April, this is just what the president wanted: an election that turns, to a very great extent, on the radical nature of Paul Ryan's budget--not so much on the numbers it lays out but on the vision it represents. The plan embodies a fiercely pared-down, pre-New Deal (or at least pre-Eisenhower) concept of government that the Congressional Budget Office (which analyzed the plan at Ryan's request) concluded would effectively eliminate, by 2050, funding for education, highways, veterans' programs, foreign aid, medical and scientific research, national parks, food and water safety, and most programs for low-income families and individuals other than Medicaid, as well as partially privatize Medicare. Ryan's tax proposal would also clearly deepen the already wide gulf in income.

Thus, this is an election that also turns on the still-lingering question: who's really in charge in the GOP? Is it Romney or the Orthodoxicrats of the tea party/Grover Norquist crowd? Bob Schieffer sought to tackle this question on Sunday in his "60 Minutes" interview of the dynamic duo. "Some people are saying you are making it [the election] a referendum on Paul Ryan's budget plan," Schieffer asked Romney. Romney responded that "I have my budget plan, as you know, that I've put out. And that's the budget plan that we're going to run on."

But in fact there is no full-blown Romney budget plan, not anything that has the operational detail of the Ryan plan. And until there is, voters will no doubt be justified in assuming that Romney still endorses Ryan's plan as he did last spring, when he called it "marvelous" --  which, as Obama himself sardonically noted in his April speech, "is a word you don't often hear when it comes to describing a budget."  

Well before the veep choice was announced on Sunday, Obama had been linking Romney directly to Ryan in a strategy that appeared to emulate Bill Clinton's successful 1996 takedown of Bob Dole, as I wrote in April. Just as Clinton successfully tied the center-right Kansas senator to the then-far-right Newt Gingrich, speaker of the House, and warned voters that "Dole-Gingrich" would cost them large parts of their Social Security and Medicare," Obama jumped on Romney's seeming endorsement of Ryan's budget last spring.

Recall the president's April speech:   "Instead of moderating their views even slightly, the Republicans running Congress right now have doubled down, and proposed a budget so far to the right it makes the Contract With America look like the New Deal," Obama said to laughter. "In fact, that renowned liberal, Newt Gingrich, first called the original version of the budget 'radical' and said it would contribute to 'right-wing social engineering.' "

For Clinton, the charges in '96 stuck not least because Dole decided to run with a zealous supply-sider, former Rep. Jack Kemp.

Romney is as welded now to Ryan as Dole was to Kemp. Still, he does have one big factor in his favor that Dole didn't: an economic crisis and record-high unemployment, all of which may give him and his vision of government the sort of validation that Dole lacked in a generally healthy economy.  

Romney's problem is that he has persistently failed to get himself over the 50 percent mark in national polls that he needs to win. He'll have to capture at least some of the middle to do that, including the broad mass of white, middle-class voters who depend on Medicare and other government programs. It's not clear that Paul Ryan, no matter how handsome and winning he may be as a personality, is the pick who's going to do that for him. 

And the Winner, By Split Decision, Is...

The July jobs report, coming so close to the election, had taken on a Delphic quality in the eyes of the many pundits anxiously awaiting it this morning. Politicos are seeking something -- anything -- that might signal which way this election is going to go.

Sorry.

As it happens, the report turned out very much like the rest of the election news and polling numbers we're getting these days: the numbers are just too close to call, but perhaps give a slight edge to Barack Obama.

Both the president and his opponent, Mitt Romney, found some juicy statistics to highlight in the report. On one hand, the 163,000 jobs created exceeded expectations and was the most since February, prompting Alan Krueger, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, to blog today that the report supplies "further evidence that the U.S. economy is continuing to recover from the worst downturn since the Great Depression." Krueger also noted that "private sector" jobs increased by 172,000--sending the double message that Obama is actually shrinking rather than growing government (or at least government jobs) and depending on the "free economy" in exactly the way Romney says has to happen.

On the other hand, the unemployment rate rounded up to 8.3 percent, leading Romney to say that the new report was a "hammer blow" to the middle class, the downtrodden but huge bloc of voters both candidates need to win. The GOP candidate also pointed out that unemployment has remained above 8 percent now for more than three years, a record length of time.

But in this election, it's the trend that's your friend, rather than the absolute numbers. It's likely that the edge in November will go to the candidate who is riding the more positive momentum--which for Obama would mean more strong total job numbers, and for Romney, the opposite. Obama's former economic advisor, Jared Bernstein, blogged hopefully today that the "nice pop" in jobs suggested that "the downshifted trend of the last few months may not be as baked into the cake as we feared."

It's a fair point. For the president, perhaps the most positive number in the report was the one that was least noted: long-term unemployment edged down to 40.7 percent of the unemployed. That's still a depressingly large percentage, among the highest on record and perhaps the best real evidence of how badly the middle class has been hit. But it's also on a fairly steady downward trend from a peak of 45 percent in 2011--the highest rate since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began counting in 1948.

But we have, as yet, at best a split decision.