How Obama's Sandy 'Timeout' Could Reverse the Momentum

Reprinted from National Journal

One really has to ask the question: When you can manage to have the keynote speaker at the Republican convention -- the man who accurately predicted that Mitt Romney would turn things around in the first debate -- publicly expressing gratitude to you and tagging along while you conduct a very presidential-looking tour of disaster areas just six days before the election, is Mother Nature on your side?

It’s certainly not a question that Barack Obama or his campaign team would ever dare raise themselves, so I thought I would do it. I don’t want to get mystical, and I certainly don’t want to make light of the devastation, death, and anguish caused by Hurricane Sandy. But the long-anticipated October Surprise that some of us thought might come from the Israelis (an attack on Iran) or Obama himself (retaliatory action for Benghazi, perhaps?) seems to have been delivered up by Nature.

And it’s all very likely to redound to the president’s credit.

With both campaigns on hold for two days, the Sandy effect has been almost like a timeout in a hard-fought basketball game, when the losing team stops the action to change the momentum. The president’s supposed to be a savvy basketball player, but the elements called this particular timeout for him. Until Sandy, Romney seemed to have the Mo. In particular, Obama’s effort to remind voters that the surging Moderate Mitt of the last month had once been the Right-Wing Romney of the primaries wasn’t working very well. “You’re all over the map”—Obama’s signature line against Romney’s constant shape-shifting—just wasn’t resonating. Nor was his awkward coinage, “Romnesia.”

Now, all of a sudden, several things have happened at once to alter the political landscape as well as the New Jersey coastline. For Obama, a tour of the battered Jersey shore on Wednesday with Gov. Chris Christie, one of Romney’s key champions and the president’s most eloquent critics, provides a bounty of campaign optics that even super PAC ad money can’t buy.   

And early reports indicate that the much-maligned FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has delivered a mostly competent response to the disaster, eliciting lavish praise from Christie himself. (“FEMA Goes from Goat to Glory,” enthused one ABC News account). So the president now seems to have a dramatic real-world illustration of the argument he has been trying, and largely failing, to make: Our federal government can work. The same kind of government Mitt Romney andPaul Ryan have been relentlessly denigrating for months. Bipartisan government. My government.

It helps considerably, of course, that the Obama team has widely circulated Romney’s dismissive response to a question about FEMA from June 2011, when the GOP nominee, who was then fighting to stay ahead of his far-right rivals in the primaries, appeared to support cuts to federal disaster aid. That has supplied a more compelling reminder of the old Right-Wing Romney than anything the president could say. And it hasn’t hurt that the buffoonish face of George W. Bush’s failed Hurricane Katrina response, former FEMA director Michael Brown, rose from political oblivion all on his own to suggest that Obama responded to Sandy too “quick.” (Once again: Heckuva job, Brownie!)

At the same time, Romney appears to have run his campaign juggernaut into a ditch this week in critical Ohio. His campaign’s all-too-transparent effort to turn a political event into a Sandy “relief rally” fell flat. And a series of flagrantly false ads about Obama’s auto bailout elicited embarrassing rebuttals from executives of both GM and Chrysler, who until a few days ago had to be considered pillars of the Romney base.  

Couple that with the resilience of Obama’s numbers among white male voters in Ohio, with whom he has closed Romney’s lead considerably (and remained five points ahead in the overall poll) thanks in large part to the success of the auto bailout, and the Obama campaign has a compelling closing-days argument that the federal government can really be useful in times of crisis. The president’s argument.

Will these days of disarray--Obama’s timeout-- be enough to swing the momentum? Things could still go badly for Obama, especially if millions of people continue without power through Tuesday (or more precisely, news accounts of millions of people going without power continue through Tuesday). But for the moment,  Mother Nature appears to have weighed in on the president’s side, intentionally or not.

Why the 'Scandal' over Benghazi Doesn't Add Up

Reprinted from National Journal

It was, from the start, about as hard an intelligence problem as you can find. The date was Sept. 11, and the CIA was stretched thin, monitoring anti-American protests in no fewer than 54 countries that day, according to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Post-Qaddafi Libya itself was still chaotic, caught up in the fog of war, and indeed Ambassador Chris Stevens, at great personal risk, had journeyed to his old Arab Spring-era stomping ground in Benghazi to assess the situation himself. Still, Clapper recently told an annual conference of intelligence professionals that there was no warning to Stevens or anyone else that he was about to be targeted by an organized extremist attack.

So in the ensuing days, the fog lifted only very gradually. The intelligence community did not see a clear way to explain the deaths of Stevens and three other Americans. And as the probe advanced they began shifting their assessment dramatically. Four days after the attacks, on Sept. 15, intel briefers sent U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice off to tape the Sunday talk shows with talking points that suggested Stevens’s death was the result of “spontaneous” protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo against a short film made in California lampooning the Prophet Muhammad. And that’s what Rice said on CBS’s Face the Nation “based on the best information we have to date,” as she put it. Rice added, however, that “soon after that spontaneous protest began outside of our consulate in Benghazi, we believe that it looks like extremist elements, individuals, joined in that—in that effort with heavy weapons.”

“It was clear from the outset that a group of people gathered that evening. A key question early on was whether extremists took over a crowd or if the guys who showed up were all militants,” said an intelligence official involved in the Benghazi assessment. “It took time—until that next week—to sort through varied and sometimes conflicting accounts to understand the group’s overall composition.”

By the following week, however, the DNI came to believe that there had been no protest at all. “That was genuine fog of war issue,” the intelligence official said. “Press reports at the time indicated there had been. It took about a week or so to iron that out.” On Sept. 28, Shawn Turner, spokesman for Clapper’s office, said in a statement that as U.S. intelligence learned more about the attack, “we revised our initial assessment to reflect new information indicating that it was a deliberate and organized terrorist attack carried out by extremists.”

To supporters of Republican nominee Mitt Romney in the chattering classes and in the House of Representatives, where an investigative committee has been hard at work probing the attacks and, apparently, leaking information, there is a lot more going on here. They see a deliberate effort by the Obama administration to play down evidence that new al-Qaida-linked terrorist groups were at work killing Americans. After all, one of the president’s big talking points in a tough election race is that he’s killed Osama bin Laden and decimated al-Qaida.

It sounds very plausible. There’s only one problem with that view: No evidence has surfaced so far to support the idea that the Obama administration deceived the public deliberately. On Wednesday a new spate of stories emerged, quoting unclassified e-mails sent to the White House and State Department only hours after the attacks that indicate the extremist Libyan militia Ansar al-Sharia had asserted responsibility. “Smoking gun!” Jennifer Rubin, a conservative blogger, tweeted. “The White House cover story—namely that CIA got it all wrong and the White House (in urging us to believe the murder of four Americans was the result of a video riot gone bad) was telling us what it knew, when it knew—has been severely undercut,” she added on her blog. “Three e-mails sent to the White House within two hours of the attack identify it as a terrorist operation and inform the White House that local jihadists with al-Qaida connections claimed responsibility.”

But that story doesn’t hold up well either. The e-mails in question contained nothing more than “raw” intelligence, uncorroborated and unverified, that often flows in after an event. Intelligence officials typically don’t deliver their assessments until they have “finished” reports based on multiple sources, and corroborated evidence, and Obama officials such as Rice certainly would not have been out in front of the TV cameras citing raw intelligence. And as the government’s most senior officials say, the Benghazi case has taken them a long time to finish. “People forget that a Palestinian group was the first to claim credit for 9/11,” the intelligence official said. “There was no message from the field in those first hectic days that would have eliminated questions or proven who was behind the attack.”

Indeed, as White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters, all that Wednesday’s stories reported was “an open-source, unclassified e-mail about a posting on a Facebook site. I would also note I think that within a few hours, that organization itself [Ansar al-Sharia] claimed that it had not been responsible.” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in separate remarks on Wednesday, also said that “posting something on Facebook is not in and of itself evidence, and I think it just underscores how fluid the reporting was at the time and continued for some time to be.” 

Even now, intelligence officials say, the full story is not known. It is not even clear that the video-inspired protests in Cairo were unrelated to the attack in Benghazi, because some of the extremists who attacked Stevens and his colleagues may have been provoked by watching the demonstrations on TV. Officials say they are still compiling a list of suspects.

"The bulk of available information still supports the early assessment that extremists—many with ties to Ansar al-Sharia, AQIM [Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb], or other groups—didn’t preplan the attack days or weeks in advance, but launched their assault opportunistically after they learned about the violence at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo,” the intelligence official said.

Interestingly, even Romney seems to have grown a bit tired of the Benghazi story, as he indicated on Monday night when moderator Bob Schieffer made Libya question No. 1 in his final debate with President Obama and the GOP nominee basically ignored it. Nonetheless, the story of what senior administration officials knew and when they knew it doesn’t seem to go away. Perhaps it will after Nov. 6.

Mitt Romney, Peacemonger

Reprinted from National Journal

More than anything else, Mitt Romney needed to reassure Americans in the final presidential debate on Monday night that he was not a reckless warmonger. At that the Republican nominee largely succeeded, mentioning his desire for “peace” so many times that he might have been the late George McGovern.

But in making a vague and restrained case for a stronger America that would nonetheless steer clear of military involvement in hot spots such as Iran and Syria, Romney rendered almost moot any serious differences he might have with President Obama over foreign policy. All of which only raised a question not helpful to Romney’s case: Why replace the man in the Oval Office?

Indeed, perhaps the most striking moment of the 90-minute debate came when Romney, far more than he has in the past, in effect endorsed Obama’s policy in Afghanistan, saying “the surge has been successful ... we’ve seen progress ...” and “we’re going to be finished by 2014.” That was a contrast to Republican talking points in recent weeks suggesting that Romney might not hold tightly to Obama’s withdrawal deadline. And again and again, Romney retreated from the hawkish rhetoric he often favored during the GOP primaries. “We can’t kill our way out of this mess,” he said of the Mideast.

In the end, almost as if they both recognized that their meager foreign-policy differences would never decide a too-close-to-call election, both candidates spent almost as much time turning the discussion back to their serious differences over the domestic economy and jobs as they did on the ostensible subject of the debate.

Startlingly, Romney even failed to resurrect his most familiar attack of recent weeks, over Obama’s allegedly deceptive handling of the attacks in Libya that killed the U.S. ambassador on Sept. 11.

The Republican nominee’s criticism of Obama was, almost to a word, familiar. Romney resurrected his attack on the president’s alleged lack of leadership in the Middle East and Asia, saying Obama has failed to avert “chaos” in the region and hasn’t stood up to China.

“I look at what's happening around the world, and I see Iran four years closer to a bomb. I see the Middle East with a rising tide of violence, chaos, tumult. I see jihadists continuing to spread, whether they're rising or just about the same level, hard to precisely measure, but it's clear they're there. They're very strong. I see Syria with 30,000 civilians dead, Assad still in power. I see our trade deficit with China, larger than it's--growing larger every year, as a matter of fact.”

But apart from a couple of minor differences—for example, Romney’s pledge to have Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad indicted—the GOP candidate offered very few specifics as to how he would handle any of those problems differently. In fact, the two often sounded more like running mates than opponents, especially after Obama made a powerful case that Iran’s economy is “shattered” thanks to the tough sanctions he has orchestrated, and noted the rise of China’s currency and the doubling of exports since he came into office.

Even when it came to Israel, a key Obama vulnerability because of the president’s tense relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Romney sounded far more amiable than he has in the past, appearing to agree with Obama on how to deal with the threat to Israel from Iran. “I want to underscore the same point the president made … we will stand with Israel. And if Israel is attacked, we have their back, not just diplomatically, not just culturally, but militarily.”

While Romney sought to look presidential, Obama was far more on the attack, pointing to Romney’s inconsistencies on troops in Iraq, and he got in some good shots at Romney’s standard criticism about cuts to the U.S. military: “You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916,” Obama said. “Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military's changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.”

In their closing statements, the two candidates again resorted to what has become their bottom-line arguments for election. Obama focused on the mess left to him by George W. Bush, both on the economy and foreign policy, and said, “Governor Romney wants to take us back to those policies.” Romney repeated what has been his campaign staple, that the country can’t afford four more years of poor leadership.

Very few votes are likely to be changed by what happened in Boca Raton on Monday night.

RIP, Newsweek

I can't let this day pass without noting the passing of a once-great magazine that was my professional home for 16 years. Though it will supposedly enjoy an afterlife as "Newsweek Global" online--and under a paid subscription model (good luck with that, Tina!) -- the nation and the world have lost a once-brilliantly edited news magazine, one that employed an unparalleled staff of great Washington correspondents and writers, a superb foreign and domestic correspondent corps, the gutsiest and most noted photographers in news, and the best and brightest in the business up at its New York headquarters. Reprinted above, as a kind of memorial, is an international cover I'm particularly proud of (I helped report it from Washington and wrote it, but it was inspired largely by fantastic reporting from Ron Moreau and Sami Yousafzai on the ground in Afghanistan). It was the first big account in any publication, in late September of 2006, to detail the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan. The article was so far ahead of the curve that it prompted a 12-point rebuttal from Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department, which was still insisting at the time that Afghanistan was doing just fine.

True, there is a sense of inevitability about this move, given the decline of print, but that's not the real story. Personally, I've happily moved on, but part of me will always remain a heart-and-soul Newsweeker. So I want the real story to come out. Two articles in recent years have done a better job than any others in detailing the magazine's decline. They are linked below. Read and, if you harbor any lingering sympathy at all for the erosion of great journalism, weep a little:

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/newsweeks-depressing-decline-2012-08-24?link=home_carouse

http://observer.com/2010/06/newsbleak-or-is-it-grahams-succumb-to-panic/

Romney: I Only Need to Tie Tonight

Reprinted from National Journal

A senior aide to Mitt Romney says the Republican nominee and his team believe that he only needs to come away with a tie in Tuesday night’s second debate with President Obama in order to continue his surge in the polls, and Romney is prepared for the president to “lash out” at him despite the more genteel town-hall format.

“He does not need to take home the same performance” as in the first debate in Denver on Oct. 3, in which Romney was widely considered the dominant debater, the aide, who is involved in the debate preparation, told National Journal on Tuesday. He said that the Romney team is preparing for a fierce attack from Obama on all fronts even though a town-hall format generally requires candidates to address questioners from the audience more than they do each other.

“They can’t afford another debate where they don’t lash out,” said the aide, who would speak only on condition of anonymity about internal debate preparations. “So we’re ready for it: the ‘47 percent’ comment, Bain Capital, the Cayman Islands” tax shelters, all of which have been staples of the Obama ad campaign in recent months.

While the aide’s comments smacked of the usual lowering of expectations before a debate, they also suggested a  high level of confidence in the Romney camp. 

An Obama campaign official responded in an email that the president is aware that “this is a town hall, so the focus will be the voter. But, when necessary, the president will keep Mitt honest though that could take all night. Regardless of style, which Mitt will perform well no doubt, he carries a burden of explaining things that have been fully and thoroughly debunked – like how he’ll pay for his tax plan or gets the 12 million jobs to add up.”

The Romney team doesn’t expect foreign policy to dominate this debate, but they also hope to raise fresh questions over the Sept. 11 death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Libya by focusing on what they consider a misstatement by Vice President Joe Biden in his Oct. 11 debate with Rep. Paul Ryan, the aide said. Despite testimony last week from the State Department's former regional security officer that he had asked for more security at the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Biden said “we weren’t told they wanted more security there.”

White House press secretary Jay Carney said Biden “was speaking directly for himself and for the president,” and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told CNN that “the president and the vice president wouldn't be knowledgeable about specific decisions that are made by security professionals.”

The Romney aide said that despite kudos for Biden’s performance at that debate, it is the vice president’s remarks that have continued to cause controversy. “Strategically, a lot of it was a gold mine of opportunities in terms of where we can go,” he said. “Will Obama own what Biden said, or contradict him?”

The Romney aide added that the GOP candidate is especially prepared for the kind of attack that Biden delivered in his debate over questions of whether the “math” adds up in Romney’s plan for 20 percent marginal tax cuts, which the GOP ticket has maintained would not increase the deficit because Romney would eliminate unspecified tax deductions, credits, and exemptions. Asked about a new report from the bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation that concludes eliminating all itemized deductions would result only in a 4 percent decrease in income tax rates, he said the campaign will go back at the president by making “arguments against Obama that he has not answered for what his plan for a second term will be, beyond letting Bush’s tax cuts for the upper income expire.”

In the first debate, Obama criticized the Romney tax plan, but he focused mainly on a figure from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center that concluded the Republican nominee’s scheme would cut taxes by $5 trillion, which Romney promptly denied.

“He did it pretty well last time," the aide said of Romney. “He prosecuted the case against Obama quite well but had a smile on his face.”

Obama's Biggest Challenge Tomorrow May Not Be Romney

Reprinted from National Journal

In little over a week, Barack Obama has gone from being a likely two-term president (according to the polls) to an imperiled incumbent who faces a must-win situation in Hempstead, N.Y., on Tuesday when he confronts Mitt Romney at Hofstra University in their second debate. The president apparently understands this, telling a radio talk show last week that he was “too polite” to Romney last time and that there will be “more activity” in Hempstead. White House press secretary Jay Carney, asked about the challenge, said that Obama realizes “the stakes are tremendously high” and that he must present “a very clear contrast.”

Obama’s biggest problem, however, may not be Romney but the debate’s format, which couldn’t be more difficult for an incumbent mounting a comeback. The second debate will be town-hall-style, where a selected audience of undecided voters asks the questions, many of which will likely focus on the president’s tenure.

Hence, Obama must figure out how to defend his record before the crowd, focusing most of his attention on his individual questioners, while at the same time attacking Romney—and all without overdoing the negativism that typically doesn’t play well in such formats. Pulling that off may be the only way the president can prove to the millions of Americans watching on TV that he can do what he failed to accomplish last week in Denver: effectively counter the insurgent across from him on the stage.

Strikingly, perhaps the gold standard for performance in a town-hall format, which was inaugurated in the 1992 election campaign, was set by the man who has been showing Obama the way to reelection recently: Bill Clinton. According to Larry Sabato, a politics expert at the University of Virginia, at that first-ever town-hall debate in Richmond, Va., then-challenger Clinton swiftly mastered the setting while President George H.W. Bush famously bungled it by looking impatiently at his watch. “Clinton managed to answer questions in a way that both directly addressed the questioner but also reflected upon Bush’s shortcomings,” says Sabato, who attended that debate.

Obama has been criticized on all sides for his weak performance at the first debate, which has led to an extraordinary comeback in national and swing-state polls for Romney that reflects both newfound confidence in the Republican nominee and fresh doubts about the president’s ability to defend his record. Obama has little choice but to go at his opponent this round. The question is whether he can do it in such a way that he doesn’t alienate the people asking the questions, wins over viewers at home, and puts him back in the race.

In a town-hall format, an attack strategy  risks annoying the audience, Sabato says. In Richmond, he adds, “members of the audience could be seen openly rebelling when the candidates got too negative.”

According to the sponsoring Commission on Presidential Debates, the Hempstead face-off will be similar to other town-hall formats: The audience will be made up of undecided voters selected by the Gallup Organization, with questioners free to address both foreign and domestic issues. “Candidates each will have two minutes to respond and an additional minute for the moderator to facilitate a discussion,” the commission said.

In recent days, Clinton has again given the president a sample of how a successful counterpoint could work, telling a Democratic rally in Las Vegas: “I had a different reaction to that first debate than a lot of people did. I thought, ‘Wow, here’s old moderate Mitt. Where ya been, boy?’ ”

Obama must also confront Romney with at least a soupçon of the flair that Clinton brought to his widely praised speech at the Democratic National Convention, where he delivered a fierce point-by-point rebuttal to Romney and the Republican Party on virtually every aspect of Obama’s record.

The biggest difference between 1992 and today is that Clinton was the challenger back then; he didn’t have to spend a great deal of time defending his own record and was thus free to attack Bush. Obama, as the incumbent, will have to deal with Romney’s attacks on his tenure while at the same artfully highlighting what Democrats see as the GOP nominee’s inconsistencies since he launched a broad move to the middle—taking more moderate positions on such issues as taxes and regulation—in the Denver debate.

Hempstead will also be Obama’s last chance to mount direct attacks on what he sees as his opponent’s inconsistencies on these domestic positions, especially Romney’s controversial tax-cutting plan, one of the central issues in the election. The last debate, scheduled to take place on Oct. 22 at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla., will focus on foreign policy.

Obama has proved effective in town halls in the past. If he handles this showdown deftly, the format could also play to his characteristic ability to engage an audience while obliquely jabbing at opponents, as then-Sen. Obama did effectively against Hillary Rodham Clinton and other primary candidates in 2008.

Romney could also falter, as he has previously when speaking off the cuff before audiences (bettingTexas Gov. Rick Perry $10,000 at a GOP primary debate, for example).

“We’re making history now, and it’s pretty exciting,” the moderator at the 1992 debate, ABC’s Carole Simpson, said at the outset of that event. Obama won’t be looking to make history on Tuesday. Progress will do.

Good Call, Nobel Guys: What Wall Street Doesn't Get about the Euro

Reprinted from National Journal

The Nobel Peace Prize committee has not exactly covered itself in glory in recent years. In 2009 it awarded the prize to Barack Obama for simply being Not-Bush, even as the new president was hinting to the world (during his acceptance speech in Oslo, no less) that he was about to embark on a fierce killing campaign against Islamist bad guys. Now the committee has decided that the European Union, basically an entire continent—and a decidedly strife-torn one where enraged Greek protesters are comparing the current German government to the Nazis—is worthy of recognition for bringing peace to the world.

Is this foolish? Perhaps not. The Nobel committee usually has some kind of agenda in awarding this prize, and it has no less of one now. It seems to understand something that Wall Street and other financial markets that tend to bet against the survival of the euro currency do not: the struggle to preserve European unity and its principal bonding agent, the euro, is about far more than economics. The peace of the world may be on the line--the legacy of hell that Europe bequeathed to the world by being the birthplace of the worst wars in history. As the chairman of the Nobel committee, a noted Europhile and former Norwegian prime minister named Thorbjorn Jagland, said in announcing the award: “Everybody knows why the EU came, the awful background." 

This “awful background” is really the raison d’etre for the 27-nation European Union and the 17-nation euro zone at the heart of it. The 1957 Treaty of Rome that created the EU, and the 1992 Maastricht Treaty that created the euro zone, may have been drily economic in their particulars, but the unspoken subtext was always unmistakably political: Europeans had to unite, if only because continued disunity, or even a loose free-trade zone, would keep them at the edge of the abyss. Two world wars, and scores of millions dead, were the ghosts in the monetary union's machine.

To put it more bluntly, everyone else in Europe (especially the French, the original architects of the European Union) wanted to be protected from the Germans, and even the Germans wanted to be protected from themselves, as then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl used to suggest publicly during the ‘90s debate over Maastricht. The German decision to support the European Monetary Union was also a quid pro quo with the French for permitting German reunification: If you allow us, the Germans, to be powerful again, we will hitch our future permanently and peacefully to a larger Europe. Kohl, who became one of the euro's most important champions, was strikingly direct about this. The question of a monetary union, he said repeatedly in the 1990s, was one of "war or peace."

Economically, the monetary union was a direct descendent of the seminal Coal and Steel Community of 1950 and the European Common Market that followed. But it was also conceived as a political Rubicon. EMU permanently and inextricably bound together nations that had once torn each other apart. It was a club you could join but not quit, and that was always intentional. The designers of Maastricht deliberately avoided an escape clause, thereby drawing a determined line between the future and the awful past. 

That question has now reemerged in a way no one thought possible a few years ago. As part of the global tremors of the 2008 financial crisis that are still being felt, the survival of the euro zone remains in doubt, and the risks are growing, the International Monetary Fund says in a new “global stability” report. “Although significant new efforts by European policymakers have allayed investors’ biggest fears, the euro area crisis remains the principal source of concern” in the world, the IMF said. “Capital flight and market fragmentation undermine the very foundations of the union: integrated markets and an effective common monetary policy.”

 The major governments are all but paralyzed and continue to put off the true fix—a more effective fiscal union that would surrender another huge chunk of national sovereignty—and now the only person stepping into the breach is Mario Draghi, the head of the European Central Bank. After playing coy for months, Draghi recently defied the powerful German Bundesbank in announcing an unlimited bond-purchase program that should help stabilize the debt crisis in countries such as Italy and Spain, at least for now.

 But this giant experiment in geopolitical engineering—the European Union—still faces an existential crisis, one that the entire world has little choice but to hope will be resolved in favor of peace.  Economically, the euro zone probably should fail, but politically European leaders know they can't allow that to happen. And yet they must act. The EU has transformed most of Europe "from a continent of wars to a continent of peace," Jaglund said in introducing the award. If the euro doesn’t survive, it is still possible that process could be reversed.

Good job, Nobel committee.

The Veep Standoff: Why Biden Lost

Reprinted from National Journal

Vice President Joe Biden had one task in his debate with Rep. Paul Ryan on Thursday night: to regain the offensive against the Republican ticket after his boss, Barack Obama, all but relinquished the stage to Mitt Romney in the first presidential debate last week.

Biden failed in that goal, for the most part, though the sometimes gaffe-prone vice president certainly did not embarrass himself. 

What the 69-year-old vice president needed to do in this debate was to use his vastly greater experience in public office—four decades’ worth—to show up his 42-year-old rival’s inexperience, especially in foreign policy. But Biden at best battled Ryan to a standoff. In particular, Biden was not terribly effective in countering the anticipated Republican script, which involved a move to the moderate middle less than a month before the election. Ryan, who for much of his young career has been a hero to conservatives, managed to successfully portray himself and Romney as defenders of the middle class and responsible stewards of foreign policy who would not get America into another war.

Biden certainly tried hard to catch Ryan out. He spent much of the 90-minute debate grinning in seeming disbelief at Ryan’s answers, which covered a mind-boggling range of issues from Afghanistan and Syria to the future of Medicare and Social Security. And unlike the president, who was perceived as “too polite” (Obama’s own words) in his first debate with Romney, Biden sought to highlight Romney’s most embarrassing moments on the stump, in particular the GOP nominee’s now-infamous comment that “47 percent” of the country had no sense of personal responsibility for their lives. “I’ve had it up to here with this notion,” Biden declared, saying that Republicans like Romney and Ryan needed to take responsibility for the harm their proposals would bring to the middle class and to investments in America’s future.

But Biden for the most part failed to add enough substance to his stock phrases of dismissal --“That’s a bunch of malarkey." ... “Not a single thing he said was accurate.” ... “This is a bunch of stuff” -- to embarrass Ryan. In particular, Ryan managed to neutralize the issue of whether Romney's proposed 20 percent cut in marginal tax rates would favor the rich, despite the lack of specifics of which deductions and loopholes the Republicans would eliminate. Biden did not effectively challenge those ambiguities in the GOP plan, even as Ryan followed the presidential nominee in dramatically shifting position on that plan toward the middle, highlighting Romney’s “bipartisanship.”

On critical domestic issues, namely the radical Ryan budget plan that embodies a fiercely pared-down concept of government, Biden for the most part failed to make the case that a Romney-Ryan administration would undercut the middle class and further enrich America’s wealthiest citizens, despite a Congressional Budget Office study earlier this year that concluded it 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.

Biden, like Obama before him, missed opportunities to point up inconsistencies in Romney's and Ryan’s prior positions. At one point in the debate, Ryan repeated a line that has become a staple of Republican talking points: that America’s seniors would see their benefits reduced because of a $716 billion cut in Medicare. Biden failed to point out that Ryan himself had embraced those reductions in his own budget plan.  

Although the moderator, ABC’s Martha Raddatz, spent a substantial portion of the debate on foreign policy—presumably a Biden strength since he formerly served as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and has been enormously influential on such issues inside the administration -- the vice president did not decisively get the better of the well-prepped Ryan, who has little experience in this area.

Raddatz began by asking about the administration’s handling of Libya and the death of U.S. Amb. Chris Stevens a month ago. Both candidates turned that into a broad discussion of the Obama administration’s handling of issues from the Middle East to Afghanistan. But there was no clear winner there either.

Biden effectively countered the Romney-Ryan criticism that Obama had been weak or indecisive in addressing the nuclear threat from Iran, but he also failed to bring up the latest news that tends to vindicate the administration’s sanctions policy: a broad-based collapse of Iran’s currency, the rial

Moderate Mitt Goes Abroad

Reprinted from National Journal 

Mitt Romney moderated some his formerly hawkish rhetoric Monday in what was billed as a major foreign policy speech and sought to reassure Americans that he wants to avoid war. At the same time, however, the GOP nominee persisted in taking a tougher line against Russia and China, and he suggested that he’d like to see U.S. troops back in Iraq.

Invoking one of America’s greatest statesmen, Gen. George C. Marshall, at the former secretary of state’s alma mater, Virginia Military Institute, Romney spoke of Marshall’s  “commitment to peace …  born of his direct knowledge of the awful costs and consequences of war”  and quoted him as saying: “The only way human beings can win a war is to prevent it.” 

Romney's speech continued a broad move to the rhetorical middle that he signaled during his first debate with President Obama last week. Yet in toning down his language—for example, by backing away from earlier suggestions that he was ready to go to war with Iran—Romney revealed that his actual policy differences with Obama are almost undetectable in many areas.

The Republican candidate, in a speech focused almost entirely on the Mideast and Iran, continued his standard attack on the president’s leadership, saying Obama was “at the mercy of events” rather than directing them. Yet even as he declared “it is time to change course in the Middle East,” in almost every case Romney largely reaffirmed courses that Obama has already taken.

Romney said he “will put the leaders of Iran on notice that the United States and our friends and allies will prevent them from acquiring nuclear weapons capability.” That is already Obama’s policy, though some might quibble about the difference between stopping an outright weapon versus stopping the “capability” for one, which is closer to Israel’s rhetoric. Romney declared he “will not hesitate to impose new sanctions on Iran, and will tighten the sanctions we currently have.” That is Obama’s policy too—one that has recently caused a currency collapse in Iran. Romney also said he will “work with Israel to increase our military assistance and coordination.” Yet the Obama administration has already taken military cooperation with Israel to its highest level in history.

Romney, again moderating his formerly harsh rhetoric on the stump, shifted course on the Palestinians, saying he “will recommit America to the goal of a democratic, prosperous Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with the Jewish state of Israel.” But that has been Obama’s policy too, and only last month Romney said the Palestinians had “no interest” in peace. As Romney well knows, there have been no negotiations because the Israelis refuse to negotiate with Hamas, the violent extremist group that controls politics in Gaza. Since Romney declared in his speech Monday that there can be no “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel, presumably a President Romney would not negotiate either.  

Romney asserted there is “a longing for American leadership in the Middle East,” and he called for more help to the beleaguered Syrian rebels, invoking a Syrian woman whom he quoted as saying: “We will not forget that you forgot about us.” Yet Romney shrank from saying that, as president, he would send arms himself to the Syrian rebels, and he was careful to say that he would “work with our partners to identify and organize those members of the opposition who share our values,” which is also what the Obama administration is doing. Oddly, Romney pointed out that, in the aftermath of the murder of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Libya on Sept. 11, “tens of thousands of Libyans, most of them young people, held a massive protest in Benghazi against the very extremists who murdered our people,” without acknowledging that the pro-American protest was largely in response to Obama’s intervention in Libya last year through NATO.   

On Afghanistan, the GOP nominee said he “will pursue a real and successful transition to Afghan security forces by the end of 2014.” But that, too, is fundamentally Obama’s policy. 

Despite his newfound caution on policy, strong neoconservative overtones remained in Romney’s speech. “The 21st century can and must be an American century,” he said, embracing the call to arms of American “exceptionalists” who see the nation’s role as bringing freedom and democracy to all corners of the globe, even though such efforts have now bogged the nation down in 11 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In one of the differences with Obama that he didn’t retreat from, Romney suggested that he might want troops back to Iraq, saying that “America’s ability to influence events for the better in Iraq has been undermined by the abrupt withdrawal of our entire troop presence.” And he directed harsh criticism at Moscow, saying it “casts a long shadow over young democracies” in Europe and that he would show “no flexibility with Vladimir Putin” when it comes to “effective missile defenses to protect against threats,” albeit without repeating his controversial description of Russia as America’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe.” Romney also managed to criticize Obama’s “pivot” toward Asia as an abandonment of Europe while at the same time calling for more U.S. leadership in Asia, where “China’s recent assertiveness is sending chills through the region.”

Romney said again he will avoid the “deep and arbitrary cuts to our national defense that would devastate our military,” even though the defense sequester that looms was agreed to by both parties -- and both parties want to avoid it.

For the most part, however, Romney spoke of “reaffirming” and “recommitting” to policies that are already in place. As with his domestic policy shifts, one big question remained: which Romney would America get as president? The former hawk who for months has embraced ultra-hawkish views across the globe, or the new moderate who likes to quote George C. Marshall?

Let's Ask Again: Which Mitt Do We Get?

Last March I wrote a piece, "Which Mitt?" that concluded that "voters today can't really know whether they're pulling the lever for the pragmatist or the newly minted ideologue."

Six months later we face the same question.  My take from Wednesday night:

Barack Obama couldn’t be bothered to notice—he seemed to think he was at a White House news conference, not a debate—but while the president was acting so veddy, veddy presidential on Wednesday night, his challenger, Mitt Romney, decisively made his long-anticipated leap to the center. And if the GOP nominee stays there, he may yet have a chance to take Obama’s job away from him.

Out on the stump, Obama and his team probably would never have let Romney get away with his performance at the first presidential debate. No doubt, the Obama-ites would have instantly labeled him a flip-flopper yet again and trotted out all his campaign’s extreme positions on the budget and tax cuts, tying it up neatly with a reissue of Romney’s infamous “47 percent” remark.

But Romney got away with it in Denver. It’s not that the president didn’t see what his challenger was up to. At several points, the GOP candidate, playing a theme that he and his campaign had obviously agreed upon beforehand, made the case that the Romney who has spent the last 18 months pandering to the party’s government-slashing right wing was, once again, the bipartisan Gov. Romney ofMassachusetts—that he was ready to fund education and job-training programs and bring Democrats and Republicans together on “Day One ... as we did in my state.”

Obama responded in his wry way: “Well, first of all, I think Governor Romney’s going to have a busy first day, because he’s also going to repeal ‘Obamacare,’ which will not be very popular among Democrats as you’re sitting down with them.”

But it was too subtle, too civilized. Romney was far too fierce and on his game, while Obama was excessively polite and even seemingly indifferent in his responses. Both candidates twisted the facts a bit, but that didn’t matter. Romney managed to avoid any gaffes that suggested he didn’t know real America—the $10,000-bet kind of stuff. Above all, Obama permitted him to continue a stealth move toward moderation that Romney has hinted at in recent weeks, suggesting that big banks are bad, that he won’t reduce taxes on the rich after all, and that he’s proud that Massachusetts manages to provide health care coverage for all its citizens (thanks to the same individual mandate that right-wing Romney had inveighed against for the previous year).

Hence, we heard the same candidate whose economic plan declares that “a Romney administration will act swiftly to tear down the vast edifice of regulations the Obama administration has imposed on the economy” deliver up an eminently reasonable, centrist position in Denver in which he said no fewer than six times in one answer that he actually likes regulation.

Romney was even effective in neutralizing the fallout from the 47 percent comment (which Obama, startlingly, failed to bring up) by recasting his tax plan as a deliverance for beleaguered small businesses. While Obama tepidly sought to make the same case that Bill Clinton had so powerfully delivered at the Democratic convention in Charlotte—that Romney’s “math” didn’t add up—Romney simply kept repeating that he’d never raise taxes on the middle class. The GOP candidate still wasn’t delivering on specifics—which loopholes he’d actually close—but he seemed to understand far better than the president that this was political theater, not a policy session.

Romney also had some obviously well-practiced answers ready to powerfully make a case highlighting the middle-class and job-producing dimensions of his plans. “It’s not just Donald Trump you’re taxing. It’s all those businesses that employ one-quarter of the workers in America; these small businesses that are taxed as individuals,” he said. “And if we lower that rate, they will be able to hire more people. For me, this is about jobs.”

In his characteristic way, Obama was often sharp and funny. “For 18 months, he’s been running on this tax plan,” he said of Romney at the outset. “And now, five weeks before the election, he’s saying that his big, bold idea is, ‘Never mind.’ ” At another point, Romney sought to win over seniors by assuaging them about his plans to voucherize Medicare, saying they won’t be affected: “So if you’re 60 or around 60 or older, you don’t need to listen any further.” Obama retorted,“If you’re 54 or 55, you might want to listen.”

But, in the end, Romney’s zingers were zingier than Obama’s. The president was simply too many steps behind, languidly seeking to admonish Romney for shifting position but mostly on the defensive as the GOP candidate attacked him frontally. “You’ve been president four years. You said you’d cut the deficit in half. It’s now four years later. We still have trillion-dollar deficits,” Romney said at one point. “We’ve had this discussion before,” Obama said dismissively.

If he wants to win, Obama can’t stop doing what his campaign has done so effectively: hammering away at the issue that has dogged the GOP candidate for so long. Which Romney is the country likely to get? Is it the pragmatist from Massachusetts, or the party panderer? Asked by moderator Jim Lehrer to give “the argument against repeal” of Obamacare, the president could have attacked Romney’s flight from his own plan in Massachusetts. Instead, Obama dove back into his own private wonkland, apparently infatuated with the details of all he thinks he’s achieved in three years: “We’re essentially setting up a group plan that allows you to benefit from group rates that are typically 18 percent lower … ”

Presidential small ball is not going to work, not in an election in which Obama’s record still has so many vulnerabilities. Romney managed to hit at most of them on Wednesday. Obama acted as if the debate didn’t really  matter, while Romney was clearly playing to win big. If the Republican nominee continues to do that by appealing to the center—and, in effect, to the entire country—he may in fact transform the race.

Originally appeared in print as Middle March

This article appeared in the Saturday, October 6, 2012 edition of National Journal.

Note to Mitt: Iran Sanctions May Be Working--At Last

Reprinted from National Journal 

The news came this week just as Mitt Romney’s attack on President Obama’s allegedly weak leadership in the Mideast was reaching a rhetorical climax: Iran’s currency, the rial, was in a state of collapse, apparently the delayed outcome of U.S.-orchestrated sanctions against Tehran.

If Iran’s increasingly cut-off economy is in fact descending into chaos—its currency has plunged by about 40 percent in the last week, leading to hyperinflation fears—then Romney may well lose what had become his most potent foreign-policy criticism of the president. And coming on the eve of Wednesday’s first presidential debate, which both Republican and Democratic pundits have argued is critical for Romney, the timing could not be worse. With just a month left in the race, the GOP nominee is desperately looking for some other issue than a mildly improving U.S. economy with which to attack Obama’s tenure.

Until now, there had been precious little good news for Obama out of the Mideast in the three weeks since Ambassador Chris Stevens’s death in Libya, and that had lent some credibility to the Romney critique. The administration’s explanations for the Sept. 11 death of Stevens, the first U.S. ambassador to be killed in the line of duty since 1979, were confused at best, inviting a tsunami of GOP criticism that the president’s hopeful narrative for the region was naïve, even deceitful. The bloody civil war in Syria raged unabated. Armed Salafist and al-Qaida groups have raised fears of an arc of Islamist insurrection along the southern half of the Mediterranean from Libya to Syria. And, above all, nothing seemed to be working to avert the worst catastrophe of all: an Iranian nuclear bomb.

All these developments appeared to bolster the critique that the Romney campaign has been coalescing around since last spring: that Obama has “has been outmatched by events” in the Mideast, as a Romney senior adviser told National Journal in April. "Obama came to power with a view of the region that would make progress in the Arab world and get the Iranians back to the table. He would deal with the Israeli-Palestinian issue, and the key to that was dealing with settlements. Instead it's been chaos."

Romney sought to pile on with an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on Monday in which he wrote that Obama lacked “resolve” and, as a result, “our country seems to be at the mercy of events rather than shaping them." He is also expected to deliver what was billed as a major foreign-policy address making many of the same points.

True, the increasing signs of economic distress inside Iran will probably not do much, at least immediately, to forestall Tehran’s nuclear plans. But Iran’s internal problems do tend to vindicate Obama’s contention that his tougher sanctions policy is working, and that he does in fact have a coherent Mideast policy. Those efforts, involving unprecedented cooperation between the U.S. and Europe, have culminated in tougher sanctions that have made it much more difficult for Iran to sell its oil. “Because of the sanctions that the president has led the world in imposing, this latest news shows how incredibly crippling this has been to Iran’s economy,” an Obama campaign official said on Tuesday, arguing that the rial’s collapse will directly affect that country’s nuclear ambitions. “The less money they have, the fewer resources they have to fund things they need for nuclear and missile, then the less they will be able to do.”

Beyond that, Romney has failed to make an effective case that outcomes in the Mideast would have been different had he been in charge. His op-ed, titled "A new course for the Mideast," did not deliver that at all, several critics said. "There's nothing 'new' in it, and it provides no 'course for the Middle East,' " former Mideast negotiator Aaron David Miller wrote in Foreign Policy. "If anything, it takes us back to the kind of muscular nonsense and sloganeering that has wreaked havoc on our credibility in recent years."

Even pundits on the right have a hard time accepting the idea that more assertive American leadership would produce more compliant, pro-American leaders out of the Arab Spring, rather than Islamist empowerment, which many Mideast experts say was historically inevitable. Romney has not spelled out what he would do very different on Iran, beyond going to war. Nor has he said specifically how he would navigate the problem of arming the rebels in Syria, which he has argued for, when what diplomats call the “end user” problem has not been solved. And that question—whose hands would such weapons ultimately fall into?—has been brought into greater relief by the appearance of violent jihadist, possibly Qaida-linked groups in post-Qaddafi Libya that led to Stevens’s death.

In a rebuttal to Romney on CNN's website on Tuesday, former Defense Undersecretary Michele Flournoy, who has become the administration's chief point person on foreign policy, wrote along with two coauthors that Romney "has failed to outline any policies to go after al Qaeda and its affiliates. There is a reason for this: On the president's watch, Osama bin Laden is dead and more al Qaeda senior leaders have been taken off the battlefield than at any time since 9/11."

The Obama team also argues that the news is not all bad out of the Arab Spring, and the Romney alternative is to retrace the hawkish steps by the George W. Bush administration during Bush's first term. For example, some 30,000 Libyans recently demonstrated in support of America after Stevens's death—an impossible thing to imagine in postwar Iraq, where Washington’s horrifically expensive, nearly decade-long involvement has left little pro-American sentiment. “Romney backed the war in Iraq, the biggest foreign policy disaster in a generation, and his advisers—the people who would populate the national security establishment in a Romney administration—are a Who's Who of the war's architects," Flournoy and her coauthors wrote. "Not only did that war cost more than 4,400 American lives, leave more than 32,000 Americans wounded and cost taxpayers nearly $1 trillion—it empowered Iran and Syria and undermined U.S. credibility in the region and around the globe."

Until the debacle surrounding Stevens's death, Obama had done an effective job of neutralizing what has traditionally been a GOP strong point: national security. With the latest news out of Iran, he may have gotten his mojo back again.