Whither Morsi, So Goes the Mideast

Reprinted from National Journal

Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi and his Islamist brethren next door, the Palestinian leaders of Hamas, have made errors of political judgment in recent weeks that were as serious as anything we’ve seen since,  well, Mitt Romney discovered how badly he’d misread the American electorate a month ago.

The common mistake made by Morsi and Hamas was to fail to understand the political mood around them. Both thought they had more support than actually existed to pursue radical agendas. Morsi issued an astonishing edict assuming near-absolute powers (though he claimed it was only temporary) and declaring his right to legislate without judicial oversight, only to find he faced street protests almost as angry as the ones that took down Hosni Mubarak two years ago. Hamas launched rocket attacks thinking the Israelis would hesitate to respond with a sympathetic Islamist government in Egypt, and post-Arab Spring jihadists rising around the region. Instead, Israel responded with a fierce air assault, assassinated Hamas’ military chief, Ahmed Jabari, and proved the efficacy of its “Iron Dome” missile defense system, creating a powerful deterrent against future attacks.

The question now is whether both Morsi and Hamas will learn from these mistakes. If they do, and if the Obama administration plays its role of reluctant enforcer well, then the entire future shape of the Mideast could look different.

U.S. officials, and some Israelis, believe the fulcrum of the future is Morsi himself. For now, he is the key figure both in setting the direction of Egypt—whether as legitimate participatory democracy or retrograde dictatorship—and in brokering a more enduring ceasefire between Hamas and Israel that could portend a future of new hopes or new hostilities. As the first elected Islamist head of state in Arab history, Morsi is the subject of an unprecedented experiment in whether radical jihadists in power can adapt to the modern world. Will the Muslim Brotherhood leave behind its unrealistic dreams of imposing sharia religious law and learn to govern pragmatically, which means linking up Egypt’s impoverished economy to the global system? Can an Islamist head of state renounce jihadist violence in practice instead of theory, in contrast to al-Qaida or its many offshoots, as well as Hamas and Hezbollah? Can Morsi can work with the international community rather than consistently defy it, like the Iranian regime?

In the longer term lies the question of whether radical Islamists can begin to edge ideologically toward what was once taboo: accepting the existence of Israel. Morsi has already moved in this direction tacitly by pledging to President Obama, who has some $1.5 billion in foreign aid and promises of debt relief as leverage, that he will observe the Egypt-Israel peace treaty. Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood offspring, has consistently refused to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist; that stance, along with the group’s continued sponsorship of terrorist attacks, has resulted in a permanent standoff in which neither Israel nor Hamas will negotiate with each other.

But even some Israeli officials are hopeful that this ceasefire will have more impact simply because Hamas is dealing with Morsi rather than Mubarak or another secular Arab autocrat.

 “There is a relationship there that should mean much more to [Hamas] than if they made promise to Mubarak,” says a senior Israeli official who spoke to National Journal on condition of anonymity. “So to a certain extent it gives Israel more confidence that the ceasefire will have longevity. Now there’s Israeli deterrence. That is an important factor. And Hamas made a commitment, and we don’t think they want to burn their bridges with Morsi.” It was no accident that after the Israeli counter-attack began Hamas leader Khaled Meshal took refuge in Cairo and effusively praised Morsi – the “dear, brave Egyptian president,” as he called him – over his role the ceasefire.

Another question is whether Hamas—and Morsi—have now taken on the responsibility for reining in other Islamist groups that are even more radical, like Islamic Jihad. One thing Hamas did achieve with its rocket assault was to further marginalize the rival Palestinian Authority in the West Bank (though it was the latter that led a bid for “non-member observer status,” a slight diplomatic upgrade for the Palestinians, at the U.N. this week). At the same time, however, Hamas is being forced to prove its legitimacy to its own people all over again. The democratic revolution in the Arab world is an unpleasant reminder to the Palestinians that Hamas effectively seized power in Gaza in 2006 despite getting only a plurality in the election.

And now Hamas “has made a commitment to the Egyptians to keep everything quiet. What’s going to happen down the line --it could be just weeks -- when under inspiration from Iran, Islamic Jihad starts the second round? Will Hamas restrain them?” says the Israeli official. “Hamas has a foot in the Iranian camp, and a foot in with Morsi. Which way will Hamas go? … The jury is still out on Morsi as well. He’s been playing his cards very carefully over the last three months. But I have to tell you the way he behaved in this crisis gave us confidence that things could be OK.”

Egypt, in the person of Mohamed Morsi, has become once again the center of gravity in the Middle East. The decisions he makes over the coming months could make all the difference

Obama Plays Nixon

Reprinted from National Journal

Robert Lieberman, the maker of the critically acclaimed documentary, They Call It Myanmar – Lifting the Curtain, tells a story that exposes some of the cynical reality behind President Obama’s historic visit to politically imprisoned Myanmar on Monday. Shortly after Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Prize-winning democracy activist, was released from two decades of house arrest in November of 2010, Lieberman was invited to show his film at a Yangon festival that Suu Kyi was organizing called “The Art of Freedom.” Thoughtfully, he informed the U.S. Embassy of his plans. Their reaction? Near-panic.

“They basically said, ‘No way should you do this. You cannot show a movie without it being cleared by [Myanmar] censors. We respectfully request that you remove any reference to the embassy, so it won’t seem to anyone that we helped you,’” says Lieberman, a Cornell University professor. Deferring to his government’s wishes, Lieberman showed his movie at the British Embassy in Yangon instead, without incident. “The British had guts,” he says.

There you have the Obama administration. It will defend human rights and democracy, but only when it’s convenient. And usually when lip service to human rights serves some other end. We saw a similar dynamic play out in the first year of the administration, when Obama’s “outstretched hand” to the Iranian regime led him to slight the “Green Movement," a precursor to the Arab Spring uprisings that was subsequently crushed. In this case, the administration was just gearing up for a major strategic shift aimed at encircling China with allies old and new, and Myanmar, long isolated by Western sanctions, was deemed a key player. All of which suggests that if there is any president that Barack Obama most resembles right now on foreign policy, it is probably Richard Nixon, the master practitioner of cynical realpolitik. Except rather than opening China to outmaneuver the Soviets, 40 years later he’s opening Myanmar to outmaneuver the Chinese. And just as Nixon and his foreign-policy impresario, Henry Kissinger, never paid much attention to human rights, Obama is treating them as an afterthought as well.

Obama, of course, is describing Monday’s trip to Burma—the first-ever by a U.S. president—in very different terms. At a news conference in neighboring Thailand on Sunday, he sounded defensive after being attacked by human-rights activists. The harsh fact is that the long-repressive junta is giving up only a little power and has rigged its constitution to retain what it has and keep Aung San Suu Kyi from the presidency. Most recently the junta demonstrated this with a bloody crackdown on the Muslim minority, the Rohingya. Obama insisted he was ready to use economic leverage and said,  “If we waited to engage until they had achieved a perfect democracy, my suspicion is that we’d be waiting an awful long time.”

It sounds fairly self-serving. Yet the historical odds are that Obama’s gambit – the short-term sacrifice of human rights for a longer-term triumph of American influence in the region – will work in Asia. First, China’s Communist mandarins are hardly in a position to aggressively counter U.S influence-building. Under newly anointed leader Xi Jinping, Beijing is in a delicate transition of power and will, perforce, be even more inwardly focused now than it has been for the past several decades. China’s great growth machine is slowing down, and its leadership is tarred by headline-grabbing corruption scandals. Now the Chinese Communist leadership, which has stayed afloat (long after the Soviet Union collapsed) by supplying three decades of astonishingly fast growth, faces a politically harrowing game of trying to act like a rising economy when it is becoming a maturing one—of continuing to stoke enough export growth to keep its population happy enough to avoid another Tiananmen Square-type protest.

It desperately needs U.S. and Western markets for that. Meanwhile, under Obama, the United States is simultaneously beefing up its partnership with India, renewing military ties with the Philippines, and assembling a trans-Pacific trade partnership that doesn’t include China (but could, if Beijing agreed to tougher labor, intellectual-property, and environmental restrictions that it has previously spurned). The strategy also explains the opening to Myanmar, which lies on China’s southwestern border.

U.S. officials refuse to call the policy “containment” or “encirclement.” Instead, James Steinberg, the former deputy secretary of State, says the new “paradigm is that the best way to positively engage China is from a position of confidence and strength,” demonstrating that Beijing “is not going to have the option of pushing people around.” Obama hopes to get the same sort of result his erstwhile GOP opponent, Mitt Romney, promised during the presidential campaign: a China that does a better job of observing international norms, whether on trade or human rights.

And what of China’s vaunted financial leverage? (As Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton put it in a now-famous conversation with Australia’s prime minister published by WikiLeaks, “How do you deal toughly with your banker?”) Strategists believe that China’s financial power is exaggerated as well: In truth, Beijing owns only about 8 percent of U.S. debt. And Japan, a reliable U.S. ally that’s likely to remain one, recently moved back past China as the largest holder of U.S. debt.

As World Bank President Robert Zoellick writes in the current issue of Foreign Policy, quoting Bob Carr, Australia's foreign minister, "The United States is one budget deal away from restoring its global preeminence."

As far as change to Myanmar goes, the country is still run by an ex-general, Thein Sein, who likely still answers to another general, Than Shwe, the officially retired senior junta leader. It is also clear that Suu Kyi has weakened her resolve somewhat from the early days when she demanded the regime give up power and restore her party's place after it won an overwhelming electoral victory in 1990. Now,  Suu Kyi will be working with her captors rather than defying them, and America will be welcoming another set of repressive dictators into its circle of trust. A gradual lifting of U.S. sanctions will permit eager U.S. businesses to rush into the impoverished but mineral-rich country.

Yet despite the marginal pressure being put on the regime now, history shows that engagement works much better than isolation. The key to the destruction of the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence, the East bloc, lay as much with the Helsinki Final Act signed by President Ford in August 1975 as it did with Ronald Reagan’s arms buildup. As part of an agreement, Moscow signed onto vague promises of “human rights and fundamental freedoms” that eventually inspired “Helsinki monitoring groups” in East-bloc countries, most famously Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia. Thus, Helsinki helped to engender the dissident movements that blossomed in the 1980s and eventually destroyed the Soviet bloc.

So, despite the outcry from human-rights activists who oppose Obama’s visit, even filmmaker Bob Lieberman thinks the president’s policy is right, despite his snub from the U.S. Embassy. “I think it’s a good idea that he is going,” says Lieberman. “It forces them into the 21st century.”  If Obama is right, the same thing will happen to China.

Petraeus-gate: A Tale Full of Sound and Fury, But Probably Signifying Nothing

Reprinted from National Journal

They were said to be generals cut from the same cloth, David Petraeus and John Allen: whip-smart, adaptable, erudite and above reproach. Indeed Allen was Petraeus’s hand-picked successor in Afghanistan, having served as deputy commander at Centcom in Tampa, Fla., first under Petraeus, then under Marine Gen. James Mattis. Petraeus and Allen, the soldier and the Marine, represented, in other words, the very best that the U.S. military has to offer.

And yet, in less than a week, the careers of two very different men may be ruined as a result of alleged inappropriate behavior with women.

It was scandalous enough when Petraeus stepped down as CIA director after an FBI investigation uncovered his extramarital affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell. The latest hairpin plot twist came early Tuesday when the Defense Department abruptly announced that the nomination of Allen, the outgoing commander in Afghanistan, to be commander of NATO forces was “on hold” pending an investigation by the FBI and the Pentagon inspector general related to his relationship with Jill Kelley – the woman who kicked off the FBI probe by reporting threatening emails she had received from Broadwell, and who has denied having any relationship with Petraeus beyond family friend.

A senior U.S. defense official told National Journal on Tuesday that investigators are now looking into “potentially inappropriate communications” between Allen and Kelley, 37, a doctor’s wife who worked at Centcom in Florida. According to The Washington Post, in the course of the Petraeus-Broadwell probe, the FBI uncovered between 20,000 and 30,000 documents — most of them e-mails —shared between Kelley and Allen.

The new wrinkle raised fresh questions about Kelley’s role, and also about what is still a pervasive culture of sexual exploitation inside the military, in which senior officers freely engage in extramarital affairs, often with women who fall under their authority, often to relieve stress or simply because they are no longer getting the emotional or physical connection they need at home. “You present people with an impossible situation. They have to deal with overwhelming psychological stress. In that testosterone-fueled, mostly male environment, the way people are relieving their stress anxiety is through sexual behavior. Thus it has ever been,” says Robert Weiss, a national expert on sexual addiction and recovery who specializes in men in power acting out.

The allegations about Allen’s relationship with Kelley also cast  Broadwell’s alleged suspicions of the Florida woman in a new light. Before the Allen story broke, Broadwell’s father, Paul Krantz, told the New York Daily News at his home in Bismarck, N.D., that “there is a lot more that is going to come out…You wait and see. There’s a lot more here than meets the eye.”

To those in the media who communicated with her, Broadwell was no hapless victim. She was passionate, highly intelligent and, above all, an eloquent defender of Petraeus, his strategic thinking and his reputation in history. “She was territorial when it came to Petraeus,” says one former Army officer who knew them both, and who says he is not surprised by the FBI probe of allegations that Broadwell might have sent threatening emails to Kelley.

In conversations and emails in 2011, a half year before the publication of her book, All In: The Education of General David Petraeus, Broadwell often sounded more like an adoring press agent than a biographer. Questioned whether Petraeus, then commander in Afghanistan, was losing faith in his faltering counterinsurgency program there, she replied in one email to National Journal: “Your sources must be smoking something.” Petraeus, she insisted (or “P4,” as she called him), knew exactly what he was doing and what the pitfalls of his strategy were. At the same time, it was clear that Broadwell was no mindless mouthpiece who was acting blindly out of love. By spending a lot of time with Petraeus and his staff, she had developed a deep and sophisticated understanding of that strategy, even if she occasionally punctuated her comments with smiley-face emoticons. 

Asked whether a pared-down “counterterrorism“ (CT) strategy of killing off al Qaeda had displaced a more ambitious counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy intended to rebuild Afghanistan, Broadwell responded that both tactics were being used. “It's not a CT vs. COIN argument. If you get that right in your article, you'll have reached the graduate level of comprehensive COIN comprehension!” she wrote. “The ideal outcome, if you can visualize it, is the spread of a wet inkspot on a napkin... the secure area will get bigger and bigger, ideally connecting to other inkspots until important corridors are secure (picture a big long ink streak!) :)”

For his part Petraeus,  while widely admired for his intellect and integrity, was hardly immune to the charms of an adoring public—especially, it seems, when they appeared in the form of an attractive fellow West Pointer, Broadwell, who was as addicted to physical fitness as he was. Although the celebrity general surprised many observers by keeping a low profile after he became CIA director in September 2011, Petraeus had long been known as a "performer" who loved positive press, in the words of a former senior civilian official in the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.

That reputation accompanied his rise to prominence and power in the 2000s. I observed Petraeus's political skills up close while flying with him above the Iraqi city of Mosul in a Blackhawk helicopter in early 2004, when Petraeus still commanded the 101^st Airborne Division. Speaking through headphones over the loud whirring of the helicopter engines, Petraeus gave then-Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer III an early view of his emerging “counterinsurgency” doctrine—how he was winning hearts and minds in his sector.

Petraeus pointed out how many satellite dishes had popped up on Iraqi homes, courtesy of the American occupation. He touted his “Mosul’s Most Wanted” TV show as a means of encouraging locals to call in with tips on finding insurgents, and proposed that Bremer develop a national version of it. Petraeus also called in a large press gaggle to observe training exercises at his local Iraqi military training academy.

Afterward, back in Baghdad, Bremer shook his head in an interview and laughed indulgently. "He loves headlines," Bremer said. "But he's very good."

There’s no doubt that Petraeus was very good at what he did. And that Broadwell was very ambitious. And that what Broadwell called Petraeus’s “open-door policy” to those eager to tout his accomplishments led, ultimately, to a more intimate relationship between them. The question is whether this sad and salacious story amounts to anything more than another episode in the long saga of human failings, with the apparent destruction of two or more careers as a result.

It probably doesn’t. According to FBI officials quoted by The New York Times on Monday, the bureau’s investigation into whether Petraeus had compromised security in any way found that he had not. Similarly, the timing of the FBI probe suggests that it reached its final stages just as the U.S. presidential election was coming to a close, rather than being held up for political reasons. Although Broadwell was said to be in possession of classified material, she denied that it came from Petraeus, and given her wide network of contacts, it could have come from the same places that journalists often get such material.

This week, news reports also suggested that Broadwell revealed classified or sensitive information when she said in an Oct. 26 Denver speech that the fatal attack on the CIA site in Benghazi on Sept. 11 was retaliation for the detention of Libyan militia members, and that Petraeus knew “almost immediately” that the attack was launched by terrorists and had requested assistance. But the allegations of possible terrorist involvement were publicly known at the time, posted on Facebook, and the details about Libyan militia had been reported earlier that day by Fox News. Beyond that, in the last two weeks the CIA has effectively discredited charges made in the same Fox News report that it was slow in responding.

In the end, Petraeus’ downfall marks the formal finish to a career that had in some ways passed its peak. The influence of his signature contribution to U.S. military doctrine—expensive counterinsurgency programs that take years to implement, with little to show in the way of results, as in Afghanistan —has been fading.

As for Allen, his tenure in Afghanistan is proving at least as troubled as Petraeus’, beset by “green-on-blue” attacks by Afghan soldiers and officials on allied troops, and a stubborn Taliban supported by Pakistani elements across the border. 

During a visit to Afghanistan I made last May, he came across as sober and largely humorless in manner as he described in intellectual terms his strategic plans in Afghanistan. “There is this sense, and it’s a very Western sense I think, that there is a Napoleonic decisive battle that tends to end wars. In counterinsurgency, it’s much less about that than about creating an enduring capacity that grows and compounds on itself over time," Allen said. "And that’s what’s happened.”

He was far less of a glamorous or show-boating figure than Petraeus. Nevertheless, he’s now one of the leading men in a national soap opera.

How Romney Blew It

Reprinted from National Journal 

Mitt Romney could have won. By Tuesday night, it was certain that 48 percent of the country no longer believed in the portrait of hope and change that Barack Obama offered up in 2008—if any ever had. Like the picture of Dorian Gray, the reality had grown somewhat repugnant to vast numbers of voters unhappy with a stagnant economy, even as Obama continued to portray himself as the good-guy savior (from George W. Bush, that is) in the White House.

But in the end, Obama secured a second historic election victory—in the face of staggering unemployment—largely because the alternative portrait that Romney presented to the country was far too incomplete. By failing to fill in critical details that would have fleshed out both his personality and his policies, the Republican challenger gave the American people a mere pencil sketch of a candidate. It wasn’t enough, and it was much too abstract. Too many voters couldn’t figure out which Romney would show up in the Oval Office. Would it be the Massachusetts-moderate redux they saw in the last six weeks of the campaign, or the right-wing ideologue from the Republican primaries who embraced a small-government zealot, Rep. Paul Ryan, as his running mate?

That’s not to underrate the savvy, and very savage, campaign that the Obama team ran, one that ruthlessly exploited all of these Romney weaknesses and cost the GOP candidate critical blocs of female and Hispanic voters who didn’t buy the reality of Moderate Mitt. For all of the fretting about how $5 billion in campaign spending left the nation with something close to the status quo ante—a Democratic president and Senate, a GOP House—perhaps the most successful chunk of advertising money ever spent in modern American political history was the initial $50 million or so the Obama team devoted last spring to defining Romney as an exploitative, job-exporting Wall Street plutocrat.

In a dynamic that played out much like 2004, when Democratic challenger John Kerry failed to respond to the Republicans’ “Swift Boat” attacks, Romney never responded effectively to the fat-cat charges. And he never overcame that image, as a blanket of Obama ads kept up the attack through Nov. 6 in the battleground states. “I think they were very smart in defining him early. The early ads paid off,” says GOP strategist Rick Tyler, who helped Newt Gingrich defeat Romney in the South Carolina primary by portraying him similarly. “I don’t think he ever really recovered.”

The Obama attack successfully neutralized Romney’s main argument that as a businessman and numbers whiz, he was best suited to fix the economy. Postelection polling suggests that even though Romney had slightly higher numbers on economic performance than Obama in some polls, his advantage there was eclipsed by doubts about the soundness of his policies and his evenhandedness. According to pollster John Zogby, while most voters on Tuesday cited the economy as their top issue, as expected, 52 percent said that Romney’s policies would favor the wealthy, while a plurality of 43 percent said that Obama’s policies more greatly benefit the middle class.

In addition, despite Romney’s impressive fundraising record, the Obama campaign was always ahead in organization, especially in maintaining its superb precinct-level ground game from 2008. This produced high turnout in the battleground states, even in the face of economic disillusionment. “It’s very tough to take out an incumbent president,” Tyler says. “Obama’s team just created a firewall in the battleground states.” The Obama campaign’s computer models also appear to have read
the electorate far more accurately than Romney’s did.

The biggest mistakes of the 2012 election campaign were made by Romney himself.

Finally, Romney kept committing unforced errors, and Obama made very few. Romney’s gaffe-strewn tour of Britain and Israel in July; his callous exploitation of Ambassador Chris Stevens’s killing in Benghazi, Libya, on the day of his death (Sept. 11, no less); above all, his mind-boggling videotaped dismissal of “47 percent” of the country as bloodsucking government dependents—it all played into the Obama team’s portrait of him as a clueless, not-ready-for-prime-time player. By the time the Republican nominee regained his footing with a powerful performance in the first debate on Oct. 3 and began to run a fairly smooth campaign, it was too late to overcome an image of incompetence, aloofness, and lack of definition.

All of this best explains how Obama set a postwar political record by getting himself reelected despite a 7.9 percent jobless rate (no president since FDR had done it with the jobless rate above 7.2 percent), favorable ratings barely hovering at 50 percent, and a majority of Americans saying the country was headed in the wrong direction. The president squeaked into a second term by persuading critical pockets of voters in battleground states who appeared to appreciate his efforts on the economy (especially in the industrial Midwest, which was grateful for the auto bailout), and weren’t as bad off as the nation as a whole—such as Virginia, with its 5.9 percent unemployment rate, and Ohio, a big beneficiary of the auto bailout, with a 7.2 percent jobless rate that was well below the national average.

HELD CAPTIVE

To be fair, the jumbled nature of Romney’s campaign was not entirely his fault. He was also somewhat boxed in by his party. A “small c” conservative who never completely won over the GOP’s restive, tea party-driven base, Romney faced one of the stiffest primary challenges in recent history. As a result, he felt pressured to run to the right of GOP rivals Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, and Newt Gingrich, staking out extreme positions on immigration (when he promised to make life so miserable for those here illegally that they would “self-deport”) and social issues (pledging to eliminate Planned Parenthood and overturn Roe v. Wade) that later fatally cost him those Latino and female votes. Considering the weakness of Romney’s primary opponents, and his considerable advantage in money and organization, his decision to lean so far rightward was almost certainly an error. It made the distance he had to travel to get back to the middle just too great, and he didn’t leave himself enough time, delaying his “Etch A Sketch” shift to the center until the first debate.

Whether the party itself will recognize all of that, and make the doctrinal adjustment toward the middle and a greater inclusiveness that eluded Romney, is another question. (The most astonishing number: 71 percent of Hispanics, many of whom tend to be conservative, voted for Obama, according to exit polls.) Some Republican pundits, of course, are already beginning the process of casting Romney into the outer darkness as a candidate who was always doomed to failure because he wasn’t a true believer, while GOP pragmatists are beginning to reckon with the reality that their party is no longer in touch with the nonwhite coalition that Obama mastered to win. The outcome of that fight will probably be the next big story in American politics.

But, finally, the biggest mistakes of the 2012 election campaign were made by Romney himself. Party politics don’t explain why he refused to produce more than two years of tax returns, or to talk forthrightly about how he made his money at Bain Capital, or to provide any details at all about which tax deductions he would eliminate to close the deficit—based on an economic plan that virtually every economist said would instead explode the debt.

Despite the lack of a clear second-term agenda from Obama, Romney’s campaign also suffered from a dearth of fresh ideas. His $5 trillion tax-cut plan rested on a hoary and largely debunked concept from the Reagan years that tax cuts for “wealth creators” boost the economy. The evidence is that they don’t. Going back to 1945, the Congressional Research Service says, there is no “clear relationship between the 65-year steady reduction in the top tax rates and economic growth.” CRS concluded: “Analysis of such data suggests the reduction in the top tax rates have had little association with saving, investment, or productivity growth.” Most recently, the giant Bush tax cuts created zero job growth in the “lost decade” of the 2000s, the slowest 10-year growth in the post-World War II period.

MIDWESTERN BLUES

Romney also suffered from a credibility gap on many issues—blatantly misrepresenting his opposition to the Obama bailout that saved Detroit in 2009, for example. Indeed, one reason the election was decided surprisingly early on Tuesday night, even though the popular vote was close nationally, was that Romney, the self-described “car guy” who grew up in Michigan, lost key Midwestern industrial states that benefited from Obama’s auto bailout. These included his own native state and Wisconsin, where the jobless rate is only 7.3 percent. Following their near-collapse, the U.S. auto companies have rebounded substantially, adding some 250,000 jobs.

Romney just never found a home in those blue-collar states. Beginning during the GOP primaries, when he awkwardly sought to identify with autoworkers by boasting that his wife “drives a coupla Cadillacs,” Romney was bedeviled not only by his aloof, patrician image but also by his infamous 2008 op-ed headlined “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” Candidate Romney sought to argue that he had favored only a “managed bankruptcy” that depended on private financing, not dissolution of the auto industry. But on Tuesday, voters in the Big Three heartland apparently remembered that private credit was not in the offing in those years; only government money was, as Obama argued.

Despite the lack of a clear second-term agenda from Obama, Romney’s campaign also suffered from a dearth of fresh ideas.

The Republican made yet another serious misstep in the final days of the election, when his campaign aired a series of flagrantly false ads about the auto bailout suggesting that General Motors and Chrysler were sending jobs to China at the expense of U.S. workers. The ads provoked embarrassing rebuttals from executives of both companies.

That aside, Romney was a very effective campaigner in the final six weeks, even taking the lead in some national polls. Yet his lurch to the middle was so dramatic that his perennial problem of definition came back to haunt him. In the final debate, on foreign policy, after 18 months of ultra-hawkish rhetoric, Romney suddenly began making a case for restraint (typically vague) that was all too Obama-like, saying he would steer clear of military involvement in hot spots such as Iran and Syria. Again and again, Romney retreated from hard lines he had drawn during the GOP primaries. He even appeared to endorse Obama’s policy in Afghanistan, saying, “The surge has been successful,” and, “We’re going to be finished by 2014.” But in making this strategic shift, Romney rendered almost moot any serious differences he might have with Obama over foreign policy. And that raised the question: Why replace the man in the Oval Office?

In the final days, Obama was also helped by chance and Mother Nature. The “October Surprise” of this campaign was delivered up by Hurricane Sandy, which helped Obama look very presidential and remarkably bipartisan in the closing days. With New Jersey taking the brunt of the storm, Americans were treated to the remarkable spectacle of Gov. Chris Christie, the keynote speaker at the Republican convention and one of Obama’s fiercest critics, embracing and thanking the president in effusive terms.

The so-called superstorm also dramatically resurrected the campaign’s buried issue of climate change and reminded voters of Romney’s smug mockery in his convention acceptance speech of Obama as the president who “promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet.” Given the role that the rise of the oceans appeared to have played in Sandy’s devastating impact, even New YorkCity Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a former Republican and no fan of Obama’s, publicly abandoned Romney after that.

In the end, however, the most compelling argument in the president’s favor was that neither his opponent’s personal profile nor his campaign promises added up to a compelling picture. Despite a powerful performance in the first debate that reassured many people—and produced a huge surge for him in the polls—it came far too late for Romney to lay to rest a legion of doubts about his character and views.

Rescued by the Rust Belt: How Obama Won on the Economy

America’s Rust Belt, its political loyalties always fickle, came through on Tuesday night for Barack Obama.

With unemployment nationally at 7.9 percent, Obama wasn’t supposed to be able to win reelection on the strength of his economic performance (no president since FDR has done it with the jobless rate over 7.2 percent). But one of the big stories of the 2012 presidential election emerged from critical pockets of voters in battleground states who were doing better economically than the rest of the country as a whole. And that was especially true in the industrial Midwest, where voters overwhelmingly favored Obama’s 2009 auto-industry bailout.

Indeed, the first grim sign for Mitt Romney that election night wasn’t going his way came early Tuesday evening when the self-described “car guy” appeared to be lagging in key Midwestern industrial states most dependent on the auto industry. These included Ohio, where the unemployment rate is 7.2 percent, and Wisconsin, where it is 7.3 percent.

Following their near-collapse, the U.S. auto companies have rebounded substantially, adding some 250,000 jobs.

Romney, meanwhile, never found his footing in those blue-collar states. Beginning during the GOP primaries, when he awkwardly sought to identify with the blue-collar base by noting that his wife “drives a coupla Cadillacs,” Romney was bedeviled not only by his aloof, patrician image, but by his infamous 2008 op-ed in The New York Times, headlined “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt,” outlining his opposition to government support for the collapsing industry.

Romney later sought to argue that he had only favored a “managed bankruptcy” that depended on private financing, but voters in the Big Three heartland apparently remembered that private credit was not available in those years; only government money was.

The Republican nominee made yet another serious misstep in the final days of the election when his campaign aired two ads that wrongly suggested that General Motors and Chrysler were planning to send jobs to China at the expense of U.S. workers. The ads provoked embarrassing rebuttals from executives of both companies.

In the end, while Romney commanded large majorities of white male voters in much of the country, the popularity of the auto bailout allowed Obama to hold on to a few more of them and ultimately to win Ohio.

Tuesday's Unhappy Choice: Bad Ideas Vs. No Ideas

Reprinted from National Journal

Where do you even start in picking the worst of the really bad, discredited ideas that form the core ofMitt Romney’s presidential campaign? My personal favorite is the moment when the GOP nominee, during his acceptance speech in Tampa, Fla., smugly dismissed climate science, even as it was about to make him look like a buffoon. “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet,” Romney said, pausing with a studied deadpan as the crowd chortled at this obvious liberal mush. “My promise ... is to help you and your family.”   

Two months later, Sandy—transformed from a storm into a superstorm partly by the rise of the oceans, according to scientists—wreaked havoc on millions of families on the Eastern seaboard and left more than 100 people dead and millions powerless or homeless. It also amounted to the last bit of proof that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg needed before he turned his back, finally, on the party of fantasists and fanatics he used to call home. “I want our president to place scientific evidence and risk management above electoral politics,” the former Republican wrote last week in endorsing President Obama.

Then there is the central plank of Romney’s plan for reviving the U.S. economy: more tax cuts. We’ve been hearing about the healing properties of this economic elixir at least since Ronald Reagan’s day, but for the past several decades Americans have also been conducting a real-world experiment that has put it to the test. And the evidence is in: It’s snake oil. Tax cuts for “wealth creators” simply don’t grow the economy any faster. Going back to 1945, there is no “clear relationship between the 65-year steady reduction in the top tax rates and economic growth,” according to a September report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. “Analysis of such data suggests the reduction in the top tax rates have had little association with saving, investment, or productivity growth.” Most recently, we know the giant Bush tax cuts created zero job growth in the “lost decade” of the 2000s, the slowest growth decade in the postwar period. Deficits have gone up more in the Republican presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush than under Democrats, and Romney’s neverland plan guarantees the deficits will explode once more. 

Yet Romney and other leading Republicans who support him are still playing the mountebank, foisting their fraudulent products on the public. And they will not brook facts to the contrary. Recently, in an act that was unprecedented for the Congressional Research Service, senior Republican senators pressured its deputy director into squelching that very measured September report on tax cuts, which was removed from the CRS website. Its author, public-finance specialist Thomas Hungerford, says he was not even contacted by his superiors before the GOP’s Ministry of Truth shoved his report down the memory hole. (Hungerford has since been asked to explain his use of certain variables, but he said in an interview with National Journal that this will not change the conclusions of his report. A CRS spokeswoman, Janine D’Addario, said that “the entire report is being reviewed,” and “I don’t want to speculate on whether it is going to be put back up” on the site.)

This is no longer real economics, or even real political debate (during Reagan’s day the GOP at least engaged in a healthy battle between supply-siders championing tax cuts and traditional fiscal conservatives worried about deficits). It is cultism, even intellectual fascism. Even the relatively conservative Economist--“a newspaper with no love for big government,” as it describes itself--decided recently it could not endorse the “cloud-cuckoo-land” thinking being proposed by a Republican candidate who “wants to start with huge tax cuts (which will disproportionately favor the wealthy), while dramatically increasing defense spending.… Mr. Romney has an economic plan that works only if you don’t believe most of what he says. “

So that’s what you have on one side. You may be impressed with Romney personally, but it’s important to know you’re going to be electing the intellectual equivalent of Galileo’s grand inquisitor and the discoverer of Piltdown Man. 

What about the other side? The degeneration of conservative thinking into flat-earth nonsense may be distressing, but the intellectual vacuum within the Democratic Party doesn’t offer much hope either. After withering criticism, Obama finally decided to issue a “Blueprint for America’s Future” in late October. But it really just amounted to a recycling of the intellectual small ball he’s been playing for the last two years since the heyday of his health care reform and stimulus package (the only two big new things he’s done on the economy: the latter being an emergency measure; the former being Ted Kennedy’s idea, via formerly moderate Massachusetts Mitt). 

Yes, you have to give Obama a lot of credit for cleaning up the Augean mess left behind by George W. Bush’s own bad ideas, and for stealthily importing some good investment-for-the-future ideas like the promotion of green technology (albeit not Solyndra, obviously) into his stimulus and other policies. 

But there’s been little since. Obama blames this on Republican resistance, but frankly I’m still not quite sure what he means by “nation-building at home.” If he wins reelection, it won’t because he has great alternative ideas to Romney—his virtual silence on climate change during the campaign is more good evidence—but largely because he is simply a default choice for many unenthusiastic voters.

For the Democratic Party, this bespeaks a larger problem here that goes beyond Obama’s second term. Even leading Democrats such as Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley say the party has failed to set the agenda for the past 30 years--to come up with a powerful new message to counter “Reaganomics.” “Since Reagan [the Republicans] have done a very good job of setting the frame,” O’Malley, one of a small handful of leading Democrats who are spoken of as potential successors to Obama in 2016, told me in an interview before the Democratic convention. “That the enemy is government. The enemy is taxes. …. Too many of us started trying to adopt their message and repackage it as our own.”

Hence in the last two years Obama has allowed Republicans to make the deficit (most of which is George W. Bush’s) the central topic of discussion, just as Bill Clinton was once forced to “triangulate” against big government. Fearful of the big-government stigma, the Obama campaign has even shrunk from trying to promote its signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act, to the American people, despite vindication from the Supreme Court, which upheld the health care law in June.  

Can Obama manage to coast back into office on nothing more than a promise of play-it-safe pragmatism? How many really bad, debunked ideas can Romney stand for and still be elected president? I don’t know the answers to those questions. We’ll find out on Tuesday. But either way, it’s not a happy choice.