Romney/Giuliani: Now Who's Politicizing 9/11?

President Obama's been taking a lot of flack -- even from Arianna Huffington! -- for his campaign's new Osama bin Laden anniversary ad, which offers up a Bill Clinton-narrated account of Obama's lonely decision to order SEAL Team 6 in a year ago, and then raises questions about whether Mitt Romney would have done the same.

A statement from two Romney advisors said they were "saddened" to see "the president of the United States politicize that event." Obama's 2008 opponent, John McCain, called it "a cheap political attack ad."

So it seems fair to point out that when it comes to politicizing 9/11 it's hard to beat Rudy Giuliani, who will be at Romney's side on the one-year anniversary of bin Laden's death. Giuliani and the presumptive GOP nominee plan to appear at a plainly political event Tuesday complete with New York firefighters as props. The former New York mayor was justly praised for his leadership on 9/11. But over the ensuing ten years he and his campaign grew so brazen, in political ads and speeches, about referring to his performance that day that the satirical Onion once published an article saying that Giuliani planned "to run for president of 9/11."

Romney also dismissively said today that "of course" he would have ordered bin Laden's killing and then, with his usual ear for resonant rhetoric, volunteered that "even Jimmy Carter" would have done so. But it also seems fair to point out that back in 2008 both McCain and Romney criticized Obama's aggressive statements about pursuing al Qaeda into Pakistan, which the president himself alluded to today in remarks at a photo op. And that's where bin Laden was found: in Pakistan.

"I just recommend that everybody take a look at people's previous statements," Obama said.

For political reasons or not, plenty of people will now.

A Year after OBL: A Fight on the Right over Islamism

If Osama bin Laden were still alive today, one year after he was killed in a U.S. raid, he would hardly recognize the world he knew. Nor would he see the supposed "clash of civilizations" that he tried so hard to foment over two decades of violent jihad. Instead bin Laden would see Islamist radicals on the election stump in emerging governments in Egypt and Tunisia, pledging cooperation with senior U.S. officials, and even meeting with a few neocons in Washington. He would see a U.S. administration that, having killed most of bin Laden’s confederates, is now ready to move into a post-al-Qaida era and engage with Islamist politicians as long as they renounce violence and terrorism. He would see Islamist parties that are passionately pursuing power and vested interests within their own countries (Egypt, Libya, Tunisia) rather than against bin Laden’s old “far enemy,” the United States.

But there is one small subsection of the world bin Laden would recognize well, just as if nothing had changed. He would feel happily at home among some of his dependable (if inadvertent) allies in the United States: right-wing conservatives such as syndicated columnist Cal Thomas, who seem certain that their (and bin Laden’s) cherished “war on terror” will go on forever. I discovered this after I wrote an article last week quoting a State Department official as saying “the war on terror is over.” Now, to be clear, this idea has effectively been President Obama’s policy since 2009, when he discarded George W. Bush’s old phrase, “global war on terror,” or GWOT, and sensibly refocused America’s attention on eliminating al-Qaida, which is still the only enemy that has attacked us since 9/11.

Still, many on the right were outraged by the article. “Well, if the war is over, I must have missed the peace treaty signing ceremony,” Thomas wrote. “I also haven't noticed a decline in incendiary rhetoric, or the disarmament--or at least laying down of arms--that usually accompanies the end of war.”

On the Web, other conservatives joined in: Barry Rubin, a zealously pro-Israel writer, addressing what he called the “great controversy” that  “erupted” over my article, acknowledged that Obama had discarded the GWOT. But then Rubin went on to lament how misguided this approach still was. “In this context, then, all other revolutionary Islamist groups—the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, Hamas, and so on—are not enemies. They can be won over or at least neutralized as threats to U.S. interests,” he wrote. This is dangerously naïve, Rubin concluded. The truth, he said, is that America’s “interests and allies are increasingly menaced by a growing threat [revolutionary Islamism] whose existence, meaning, and scope current U.S. policy does not even recognize yet, much less counter effectively.”

Yet Rubin’s contention no longer appears to stand up well to the developing realities in the Arab world. Not only are bin Laden and most of his senior lieutenants (except for Ayman al Zawahiri) dead; the so-called Arab Spring has opened up new channels of expression, supplying for the first time in decades an alternative to violent jihad. Experts point to fractionalizing of the Brotherhood and Salafist groups, which will be forced to govern pragmatically in the jostle for influence and power in their home countries. And what is most interesting is that some U.S. conservatives are starting to agree with this proposition, and to see things in a very different way from Thomas and Rubin. Even prominent neoconservatives such as Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer have outraged their former allies on the right by saying the U.S. has no choice but to engage the new Islamist political parties formed by the Muslim Brotherhood (which renounced violence decades ago) and other former jihadist groups.

“You have to speak to the Brotherhood because it’s now in control of parliament and it’s likely to win the presidential election,” Krauthammer said on Fox News. “It will end up sharing the power or monopolizing it with the military, depending whether the military can hang on to the part of the power it has now. So to be realistic, you have to talk to them.”

In fact, it’s not entirely clear what role the Brotherhood will play. There is even some evidence that, as the The Wall Street Journal recorded on Friday, their influence is waning in the presidential stakes. But another prominent figure on the right, Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA official who is deemed one of the most astute analysts of jihadism, wrote in The WSJ that it was always unavoidable that “Islamists who braved the wrath of rulers and trenchantly critiqued the moral breakdown of their societies were going to do well in a post secular age. What is poorly understood in the West is how critical fundamentalists are to the moral and political rejuvenation of their countries. As counter intuitive as it seems, they are the key to more democratic, liberal politics in the region.”

The Obama administration has been understandably jittery over this issue during an election year in which presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney accuses the president regularly of weakness and appeasement. So the administration has been careful to emphasize that the war against al-Qaida will go on.

“We changed this terminology back in 2009. But we absolutely have never said our war against al-Qaida is over,” National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor said in an e-mail. “We are prosecuting that war at an unprecedented pace, as is clear from the fact that key AQ figures (like Bin Laden) are no longer on the battlefield.”

Cal Thomas, who possesses nothing like Reuel Marc Gerecht’s expertise in this area, nonetheless condemned as “preposterous” Gerecht’s conclusion that the Arab world may have to make its way toward democracy and modernity through Islamism. Writing with that unerring sense of certainty that once led George W. Bush into an unrelated war in Iraq, Thomas said that “Gerecht's kind of thinking is beyond self-delusional. It is suicidal. … It is like saying the route to women's rights is through patriarchy. War is peace. George Orwell lives! Radical Islamists have made it perfectly clear they have no interest in joining the democratic process. They are at war. They are at war with the West.”

True, a deep skepticism is in order when it comes to the longer-term program of radical Islamist groups. But the fact is that many of them are coming to accept that their dreams of caliphates and sharia may have to be compromised, even in the long run. Even unreconstructed jihadists in the Muslim Brotherhood, such as Khairat el-Shater, the group’s strategist, have said they want to bring Egypt into the world economy, and to do that they will have to drop their more medieval aims. In early April, Shater and other “Brothers” played convivial hosts to Rep. David Dreier, R-Calif., chairman of the House Rules Committee, and other visiting lawmakers. “They all go out of their way to say what we want to hear,” said one official who was part of the U.S. delegation. “They are going to fully protect women’s rights, minority rights, the constitutional assembly. They all made great pains to emphasize, without being asked--Shater included—that they will respect all international agreements.”

Those agreements include, apparently, Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel, hitherto anathema to Islamists. Whether the Islamists will stick to these pledges once they take power is another matter. Judith Miller, the former New York Times Mideast correspondent who has become identified with the more conservative (and skeptical) view of Islamist intentions in the region (though she described herself in an e-mail as a “staunch political independent, not a conservative or a neo-con or a member of any other kind of political tribe”), wrote in a post on Friday that “of course Washington must engage Islamists if the MB and other so-called moderate Islamists win legitimate elections, agree to abide by their international treaty commitments, (which Hamas and Hezbollah do not, and hence, remain on Obama’s terror list), observe democratic principles (ie. agree to leave power if voted out) and don’t endorse the use of violence against minorities (ie. Christians) and those who oppose their views. Tunisia’s Ennada [party] seems to represent that kind of positive evolving Islamist force, but we shall see. It’s early.”

Yes, it is early. Nonetheless, there is a sense that we can begin to see the beginning of the end, or at least (as Churchill said) perhaps the end of the beginning. According to Richard Bulliet, a scholar of modern Arab history at Columbia University, the worst blow that the Arab Spring delivered to radical Islamism was a profound lesson in what works and what doesn’t. “If people see that assassinating Anwar Sadat changed nothing, but peacefully demonstrating changed everything, then why should anyone support jihadists any more?”


Washington is pursuing a sounder strategy than it did a few years ago. Based on captured computers and documents, we know that bin Laden always wanted an adversary who would give him more allies than he actually had in the Islamic world. He got such an adversary in George W. Bush. We know that al-Qaida’s goal on 9/11 was to draw America into a long and draining conflict and to “bleed” and “bankrupt” our country--bin Laden’s own words--by pitting us against the broader Islamist world. When Bush invaded Iraq, bin Laden’s hopes were realized.

Obama’s reorientation of strategy was simply an acknowledgement that there was really only one Islamist group that attacked the United States directly: al-Qaida. As I wrote back during the 2008 campaign, urging then-candidate Obama to abandon the GWOT: “Bush has gradually expanded his definition of the war on terror to include all Islamic 'extremists'—among them Hezbollah, Hamas, and other radical political groups that have no ties to al-Qaida, ideological or otherwise. In doing so the president has plainly condemned us to a permanent war, for the simple reason that we will never be rid of all the terrorists. It is also a war that we will wage by ourselves, since no other nation agrees on such a broadly defined enemy. As Princeton scholar G. John Ikenberry has written, ‘It is perhaps a paradox—and one that is fitting for the strangeness of our current age—that we will need to end the war against terrorism because we cannot end terrorism.'"

In the end this is just what Obama did (though not on my advice of course). And now we are indeed in a new world. One that Osama bin Laden, had he not been taken off the field a year ago, would not recognize.

Is Biden An Even More Powerful Veep Than Cheney?

Call it the Presidential Peter Principle. Joe Biden was never much good when it came to running for the top job. In fact, he was a disaster.  Back in 1988, Biden dropped out ignominiously amid allegations of plagiarism.  In 2008, when he thought he’d be a real contender after spending 36 years in the Senate, Biden received a pathetic 1 percent of the Iowa caucus vote.

But in the No. 2 job over the past three years, Biden has excelled—to the point where he now ranks as one of the most powerful and influential vice presidents in American history.  Biden proved that again on Thursday when, in the fifth in a series of what the Obama campaign is describing as “framing speeches,” Biden slammed Mitt Romney as a loose cannon on foreign policy, someone who will take a war-wear country “back to a foreign policy that would have America go it alone, shout to the world you're either with us or against us, lash out first and ask the hard questions later, if at all."

The vice president, said one campaign official, will continue to spend a lot of time on the stump focused on “issues that will be at the core of the general election in November.”  Biden speaks regularly with David Plouffe, one of Obama’s main campaign directors, and campaign officials point to his remarkable series of speeches in critical states, beginning in Toledo, Ohio in March when Biden talked up the administration’s rescue of the auto industry and gave voice to what may be the signal catch-phrase (or “bumper sticker,” as he put it Thursday) of Obama’s campaign: “Osama Bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.” Since then Biden has delivered speeches on retirement security in Florida, manufacturing in Iowa, and tax fairness in New Hampshire. And by most accounts, the Biden-Obama relationship is still strong. “The president definitely leans on the VP in many ways,” says one campaign official. “He’s going to go into the heartland.”

Obama’s heavy dependence on Biden is not new. Over the past three years Biden has insinuated himself into the White House in a way that no other vice president in memory has done. He and Obama, both consummate pragmatists though they tend to be liberal in outlook, have achieved something close to a mind meld across a whole range of issues, including foreign policy, the economy, and political strategy. He said it outright in his speech on Thursday: “I literally get to be the last guy in the room with the President.  That’s our arrangement.”  That’s no small thing in a town where power is often measured in minutes of presidential face time.

It wasn’t long ago that Biden’s predecessor, Dick Cheney, was seen as the gold -- some might say sulfurous -- standard in vice presidential power. Biden himself, ironically enough, once described Cheney as “probably the most dangerous vice president we’ve had” because of what many observers saw as Cheney’s undue influence over George W. Bush. 

But in terms of the sheer number of issues Biden has influenced in a short time, the current vice president is bidding to surpass even Cheney. It was Biden’s office that, in the main, orchestrated the 2011 handover to the Iraqis. And it is Biden’s view of Afghanistan  that has, bit by bit, come to dominate thinking inside the 2014 withdrawal plan (back during the initial debate in 2009, Biden was in favor of doing pared-down counterterrorism ops as opposed to more troop-intensive nation-building and counterinsurgenc y).  On financial reform it was Biden who prodded an indecisive Obama to embrace, at long last, Paul Volcker’s idea of barring banks from risky trading, Austan Goolsbee, formerly the head of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, told me in 2010.  The VP also tilted the discussion in favor of a bailout of the Big Three auto companies, according to Jared Bernstein, former Biden’s economic advisor.  “I think he made a difference in president’s thinking. He understood the importance of the auto companies to their communities, and throughout the country.”

In an interview with me for a profile of him in the fall of 2010, Biden could hardly contain his enthusiasm for partnership between him and Obama. The phrase “Barack and I…” fell from his lips naturally, with no hint of diffidence. He told me then that that to his continuing surprise Obama has continued to “turn over big chunks” of policy to him to handle, whether it’s Iraq, middle class issues, overseeing the recovery act.  At an early meeting, “all of sudden Obama stopped. He said, ‘Joe will do Iraq. Joe knows more about Iraq than anyone …. The [Economic] Recovery Act, he just handed it over” to Biden, according to a senior administration official who attended the meetings and would talk about internal discussions only on condition of anonymity.

All of this power makes for quite an irony. Joe Biden is, after all, a gaffe-prone guy who has spent much of his four-decade career trying to be taken seriously in Washington. The vice presidency itself is, of course, a job that has tried to be taken seriously throughout U.S. history—and usually failed. John Adams, the nation’s first vice president, bitterly derided his job as “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived.”  Like Adams, it was often men who had tasted real power who had the most disdain for the job. John Nance Garner, a former House speaker and FDR’s equally slighted No. 2, declared the job wasn’t “worth a bucket of warm spit” (it’s believed he used an even saltier term).  In modern times the vice presidency began to grow in stature, especially as the hair-trigger calculus of the Cold War required presidents to keep their putative replacements informed. But the job remained for the most part a funeral-attending, snooze-inducing post barren of almost all constitutional duties.

The previous two vice presidents, Cheney and his predecessor, Al Gore, significantly changed that power dynamic . But on Biden’s watch the “OVP”—Office of the Vice President-- has become something even more: almost a conjoined twin to the presidency, organically linked and indivisible from the Oval Office. Cheney succeeded for a time by creating a kind of shadow presidency, yet there’s nothing shadowy about Biden. Indeed Biden remains, in many respects, the anti-Cheney – the garrulous glad-hander to Cheney’s sour sphinx; the sunny champion of diplomatic engagement in contrast to Cheney’s Hobbesian  persona. 

But in two critical respects the Delaware Democrat and the Wyoming Republican do resemble each other. Both are confident to the point of cockiness in pushing their views, and both are masters of the Washington insider game.  Whereas John Adams was not invited to participate in meetings of George Washington’s  Cabinet, Biden handles so many issues that when, say, the national security team leaves the Oval Office, he is often left alone chatting with Obama because he needs to be part of the discussion when the economic team arrives to brief the president. He will also often sit down with Obama in the residence before an important NSC meeting. 

And now Biden is apparently going to be Obama’s main man in getting elected. There are risks to the strategy. Biden fell notably short of success in 2008 when he debated then-GOP veep choice Sarah Palin, though he was lucky that she managed on her own to  self-destruct. And then there is always the next Biden gaffe, always just the next speech away. On Thursday he elicted titters from the crowd when he quoted Teddy Roosevelt’s admonition to “speak softly and carry a big stick” and added: “I promise you the President has a big stick.” Biden, apparently, does too.

Through Biden, Obama Will Paint Romney as Extremist

Joe Biden in some ways is the most influential Veep ever--just in terms of how much presidential face time he gets. But now he's about to play what may be his most useful role: getting Barack Obama re-elected.


Biden plans to deliver a speech in New York City on Thursday that Obama campaign officials are portraying as the opening salvo of a tough critique of  Mitt Romney's extreme positions on foreign policy during the primary season. The speech, said one Obama official, will focus on the former Massachusetts governor's "chest thumping and empty rhetoric with no concrete plans to enhance our security or strengthen our alliances."  

I've been told the Biden speech will  foreshadow a theme of the fall campaign, during which Obama officials hope to portray Romney as someone whose irresponsible rhetoric and lack of clear, thought-out policies could possibly pull a war-weary nation back into conflict.

In various remarks during the primary season, Romney came close to calling for outright war with Iran, described Russia as "without question our number one geopolitical foe, " and decried Obama's withdrawal from Iraq as precipitous. He also opposed negotiating with the Taliban in Afghanistan despite support of that position from the U.S. military. In addition, Romney pledged to designate China as a currency manipulator and slap on tariffs -- ensuring a trade war -- "on day one of my presidency." 

Obama campaign officials would not comment on the specifics of Biden's speech, which will be delivered at New York University, except to say that the remarks will "draw the sharpest contrast yet between the administration's record on foreign policy and Governor Mitt Romney's foreign policy positions. Governor Romney has been all over the map on the key foreign policy challenges facing our nation today." 

Romney himself, on the stump, has already shown some sensitivity to the charge, telling audiences recently that he realizes that Americans have had a rough decade of war, but that nonetheless Iran can't be allowed to get a nuclear weapon. 

Asked to comment on the Biden speech, Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul reiterated the GOP line  Wednesday: "President Obama's feckless foreign policy has emboldened our adversaries, weakened our allies, and threatens to break faith with our military. In no region of the world is America's position stronger than it was three years ago."


Well, if I recall from about a year ago almost to the day, it is stronger in one place: Abbottabad, Pakistan, where on April 25, 2011 a fellow named Osama bin Laden was still living. 
 

Can Obama Safely Embrace Islamists?

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In an article in the current National Journal called "The Post Al Qaeda Era," I write that the Obama administration is taking a new view of Islamist radicalism. The president realizes he has no choice but to cultivate the Muslim Brotherhood and other relatively "moderate" Islamist groups emerging as lead political players out of the Arab Spring in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere. (The Muslim Brotherhood officially renounced violence decades ago, leading then-dissident radicals such as Ayman al-Zawahiri to join al Qaeda.)  

It is no longer the case, in other words, that every Islamist is seen as a potential accessory to terrorists. "The war on terror is over," one senior State Department official who works on Mideast issues told me. "Now that we have killed most of al Qaeda, now that people have come to see legitimate means of expression, people who once might have gone into al Qaeda see an opportunity for a legitimate Islamism." 

The new approach is made possible by the double impact of the Arab Spring, which supplies a new means of empowerment to young Arabs other than violent jihad, and Obama's savagely successful military drone campaign against the worst of the violent jihadists, al Qaeda.

Some of the smarter hardliners on the Right, like Reuel Marc Gerecht, are coming to realize that the Arab world may find another route to democracy--through Islamism.  The question is, how will this play politically at a time when Obama's GOP rival, Mitt Romney, is painting the president as a weak accommodationist?

According to a senior advisor to Romney, the campaign is still formulating how to approach the new cuddle-up approach to Islamists. But the spectacle of an administration that is desperately trying to catch up to the fast-evolving new world of the Mideast fits into the Romney narrative of a president who  "has been outmatched by events," the advisor said. "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 deaI with the Israeli-Palestinian issue, and the key to that was dealing with settlements. Instead it's been chaos."

The president may have no choice but to preside over chaos at this point--a chaos that may not be the disaster that critics say and may in fact be the Arab world's only path to modernity -- but it won't play well in the seven months between now and election day.  

The Republican Identity Crisis, Round Two

Wow. After a GOP primary season in which the George W. Bush administration was viewed as toxic -- and went all but unmentioned -- Republicans and independents who lean Republican now seem to want W's loyal national security advisor and secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, as Mitt Romney's vice presidential choice.  

The new CNN/ORC poll on favored veep choices is very early days, of course, and Condi Rice's place at the top of the list has more to do with high name recognition than anything else. (Proof: the generally respected Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, considered a top possibility, got less than one half of one percent of the vote, apparently because 67 percent of those polled had never heard of him.)

But it does take us back to the GOP identity crisis that we were obsessed with during the primary season: just what do Republicans want to be and who do they want to represent them? Never has the base been so fickle, it seems, judging from the restless search for a Not-Mitt during the primaries and the successive flameouts of Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich and finally Rick Santorum as they each sought to claim the title of champion. 

All of which points up a paradox. On one hand, there is an extraordinary polarization in  politics today: As my colleague Ron Brownstein has pointed out, the ideological gap between Democratic and Republican voting records in Congress is the widest since the 19th century. The GOP base has gravitated around more rightward views on economic and social issues.

But even as it lurches fitfully toward a unanimity of views, the base still seems utterly divided about who it wants to give voice to them (unless you count Romney, which I guess we all have to now). The party has a set of policy positions without a face.

One irony of Rice's name appearing at the top of the list is that, by the end of her time in office in early 2009, she herself had moved to the middle and became anathema to hard-right GOPers such as Dick Cheney and the truculent John Bolton (whom Newt Gingrich, in yet another failed appeal to the Right, once suggested he wanted as be his secretary of State). While Rice was considered an ineffective national security advisor and not an especially successful secretary of State around the world, at home she did manage to moderate Bush's foreign policy by his second term. She marginalized Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Bolton and the neocons, and refocused U.S. foreign policy on diplomacy and compromise. It was, perhaps, her greatest achievement.

So Condi Rice can hardly be seen as a champion of the Right. Even if Romney seriously considered her (highly unlikely), she would not be able to endure much scrutiny. We saw this same dynamic play out during the primaries. The more the base learned about the real records of its various Not-Mitt hopefuls, the less enthusiastic it got.

Romney doesn't have to put his veep choice to a vote. Unless, of course, he thinks he needs to. ...

IT'S ALIVE! The TBTF Monster Is Back

It's one of the most cliched Hollywood endings you can imagine: The monster you think has been killed always gets one more chance to lurch back to life and scare the bejesus out of everybody.

It's also become a cliched ending for Washington, DC: the too-big-to-fail problem we were told was behind us is as alive and frightening as ever. More frightening, actually: According to Federal Reserve officials quoted by Bloomberg, five banks -- JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs--now hold assets equal to MORE THAN HALF THE SIZE of the ENTIRE U.S. ECONOMY ($8.5 trillion or 56 percent). That's vastly larger than the proportion controlled by these same banks before the financial crisis (43 percent). These behemoths are now about twice as big as they were a decade ago.

As I've been writing fairly breathlessly for more than a year -- see Is Wall Street Castrated, or Just Lying Low, and The Resurrection -- the American people are today the victims of a confidence game even bigger and more elaborate than the subprime securitization scam. The Obama administration, the Congress and the Federal Reserve are all engaged in the pretense that the next big banks to get themselves in trouble won't be bailed out at taxpayer expense but instead will be "unwound" according to "living wills."

Yes, and there are zombies in real life.                                                                                     

How Obama Dropped the Ball

President Obama pushed through a historic health care law. But in so doing Obama downplayed the historic nature of the economic crisis he had inherited, and the historic depths of anger in the country caused by it. Never mind the polls (which seem to be coming out by the minute now): if Obama is defeated in November, that will probably be why.

This is one of the most salient points to come out of a fascinating exit interview given to New York magazine by retiring Rep. Barney Frank, one of the most dominant House members in recent decades and generally a dogged ally of the president. Frank says he now regrets Obama's decision to focus on comprehensive health care reform. "I think we paid a terrible price for health care," Frank said.

His comments have touched off an interesting debate at Talking Points Memo over President Obama's priorities. Josh Marshall, TPM's founder, suggests Frank is wrong because health care reform was the right thing to do. "The fundamental question is: was it right to pass reform? Everything falls out from there," he writes.

I have a lot of respect for Josh, but I disagree. No one contests that the health care system needed to be fixed. But that's like saying that the fundamental question about whether to invade Iraq was whether Saddam Hussein was evil and deserved to be ousted. No, the fundamental question was priorities. Of course Saddam had to go at some point. But the issue is whether George W. Bush took his eye off the challenge posed by 9/11, which was the problem of al Qaeda and its supporters in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We now know, beyond any reasonable doubt, that he did.

In politics too, the fundamental question is priorities. Obama's top economic advisors have  taken to calling the shock of the nation's economic and financial crisis even "larger than what caused the Great Depression," as Tim Geithner said on ABC's This Week on Sunday. So it was even worse, they say now (which is true, based on the data).  But that is just the point: given the challenge at hand, it's now clear, beyond any reasonable doubt, that Geithner and Obama's other top economic officials badly underestimated the depths of that historic crisis, on housing, income inequality and other fundamental issues. Our hoops-playing president dropped the ball.

As I posted last week, and as the New York Times features on its front page today, some of  the most striking evidence of their failure lies in the depressing fact that virtually all the income gains in the first year of this anemic recovery went to the top 1 percent, continuing a decade-long trend. What that amounts to is Reason No. 347 (or thereabouts) why, despite his truly remarkable achievement with health care, Barack Obama turned out to be no FDR. And why he could easily end up a one-term president.

Picture credit: http://enduringsense.com

The Gated Community of the One Percent

Matt Stoller had an interesting post on Naked Capitalism the other day noting that, despite Obama's populist rhetoric about restoring the Middle class, imposing a gimmicky "Buffett Rule" against millionaires and such, the top one percent have actually made out better, in percentage terms, during Obama's "recovery" of 2009-2010 than they did from 2002-07 under Bush.

The comparison, based on a paper by one of the best young economists in the country, Emmanuel Saez (winner of the uber-prestigious Clark medal), is a little unfair, since it stacks the last two years up against a five-year period under Bush, and Obama was clearly inheriting a disaster from his predecessor. But the harsh fact is that there is very little that Obama has done--or more precisely, has been able to do given the ideological paralysis in Washington and his own misguided caution--to stop the growing class divide.

This bit from Saez's paper sums it up: "From 2009 to 2010, average real income per family grew by 2.3% but the gains were very uneven. Top 1% incomes grew by 11.6% while bottom 99% incomes grew only by 0.2%. Hence, the top 1% captured 93% of the income gains in the first year of recovery." It's an astonishing figure: NEARLY ALL the income in the first year of recovery went to the one percent. As Saez dryly concludes: "Such an uneven recovery can possibly explain the recent public demonstrations against inequality."

You think? I call this the "sleeping serpent issue" of this election. The Obama camp yesterday released a video of Romney's more callous and silly remarks from the primary season, including his call to let the mortgage market "hit bottom," but the president is pretty vulnerable on this too.

So I'll sound again my old tocsin: we need new, Saez-sized thinking in Washington that will acknowledge that this administration and this Congress have barely touched the surface of what went wrong in the Great Recession. Unless they do, the upper-income brackets will continue to become a giant gated community inside America, a place so apart from the rest of us that it is looking less and less distinguishable, each passing year, from the palace of King Louis the XVI. Maybe Trayvon Martin was only an early victim.