Continuous commentary from The American Prospect Online.
I say flabbergasting because it's kind of elementary political history that he's getting wrong here. Or maybe I'm just a huge wonk.
--Nick Confessore
In the same way that activist liberals fell for Howard Dean earlier this year because of his fiery speeches -- despite the fact that his actual record in Vermont was rather moderate -- conservatives love Reagan because he was the first president since 1930 to unapologetically promote conservative ideals.One of Reagan's most appealing attributes, both his critics and devotees say, was his blend of confidence, surety, and optimism. A similar, powerful conviction could be heard in many of Dean's speeches. This was first noticed, as far as I can tell, by Republican pollsters Hans Kaiser and Bob Moore (via, in turn, Oregonian columnist David Reinhard and blogger Chuck Currie):
Howard Dean's appeal is closer to Ronald Reagan's than any other Democrat running today. Granted, that's not saying much with this field, but there are similarities here. The Democrat party used to chuckle about Reagan and his gaffes which they believed would marginalize him to the far right dustbin of history. But when his opponents tried to attack him for some of his more outlandish statements, the folks in the middle simply ignored them. Voters in the middle looked to the bigger picture where they saw a man of conviction who cared about them and had solutions for their problems. Howard Dean has the potential to offer a similar type candidacy.The difference, I'd say, is that even with his culture-war rhetoric, Reagan's optimism required less criticism of the American mindset than did Howard Dean's. "Voters in the middle" would prefer not to have to think about, say, race-baiting, and so even Dean's conviction that the situation could be improved required too much negativity for many who might otherwise have fallen for him.
--Jeffrey Dubner
- Pennies From Heaven: He hasn't even been up there a week -- but oh, the things Ronnie has learned. By Charles P. Pierce.
- How the East Was Really Won: Enough already. The Cold War was won by Gyula Horn. Who? By Michael Tomasky.
- Losing Lansing: Unemployment soared to 17 percent; union membership plummeted; cities emptied out: The other side of the revolution. By Jim Grossfeld.
- Here Comes the Moon: Reagan made conservatism the dominant paradigm, but nothing lasts forever. By Kenneth S. Baer.
- Hatchet Man: So Reagan was the guy who saved conservatism? Actually, he buried it. By Matthew Yglesias.
- Making Nice: Democrats slog through a week of praise for a man they didn't really like -- and plot about the weeks to come. By Terence Samuel.
- Kangaroo Court: Fox's The Jury leaves everybody hung out to dry. By Noy Thrupkaew.
- Growing Apart: There's a recovery under way, but guess what? You're not included. By Jared Bernstein and Dean Baker.
- Purple People Watch: Pre-election "purging" of voter rolls in Florida; stepping up the Latino outreach in New Mexico; and more. A weekly roundup from the swing states. By The American Prospect Staff.
--Nick Confessore
ATTY GEN. ASHCROFT: I am not going to reveal discussions -- whether I've had them or not had them with the president. He asked me to deal with him as a matter of confidence. I have not invoked the executive privilege today. I have explained to you why I'm not turning over the documents.Ashcroft chased his tail this way throughout the hearing, insisting that it "is essential to the operation of the executive branch that the president have the opportunity to get information from its attorney general that is confidential" (the very definition of an executive privilege claim), but then stammering that "if I did say that I was exerting executive privilege, I don't believe I said that, and I didn't intend to say I was exerting the privilege."SEN. KENNEDY: Well, what are you invoking then?
ATTY GEN. ASHCROFT: I have not invoked anything. I have just explained to you why I am not turning over the documents.
But one Senator is going to put a stop to this foolishness. That principled champion of sunshine? None other than Missouri Sen. John Ashcroft. From May 13, 1998:
Part and parcel of the President's abuse of executive privilege is his unwillingness to acknowledge the mere fact that he has asserted the privilege. Indeed, the President's lawyers recently have attacked the Independent Counsel's office for acknowledging the Court's entirely predictable rejection of the President's assertion of executive privilege. Apparently, the President wants to be able to assert the privilege and have a court rule on it, all without the knowledge of Congress or the American people.Ashcroft's worry as a Senator? "[C]ongressional inquiries will be stymied by similar claims of executive privilege." Ashcroft's argument as Attorney General? "[P]rivate advice that the president gets from his Attorney General doesn't have to be a part of the debate."The Executive Accountability Act of 1998 addresses the problem of the covert use of executive privilege through the simple expedient of requiring full disclosure. …
And here I thought Ashcroft's problem was that he was too stubborn.
--Jeffrey Dubner
Media Matters has some more of this, courtesy of Hannity & Colmes. Not surprisingly, it is Al Gore who they have targeted, regarding his recent speech. There seems to be a belief among conservatives that it's acceptable to shamelessly distort just about everything Gore he says or does beyond recognition -- perhaps it's the realization that more voters preferred Gore to the guy currently in the White House that gives them fits. I dunno. But what's so repulsive about all this is that neither Gore's recent speeches nor his demeanor during them have been remotely out of the ordinary, let alone weird. In the particular case at hand, he delivered an energetic, critical speech, yes -- but it's telling that Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich, and Susan Estrich chose to argue that Gore was crazy rather than engage the merits of his criticisms.
Gingrich, of course, got the ball rolling back in the late 1980s with his "adjectives for Democrats" memo.
UPDATE: And how could I forget Michael Savage? See here.
--Nick Confessore
I couldn't find the article I was thinking of, but reader J.A. points me to this Web page set up by the Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee. It turns out there are plenty of examples of Bush doing this -- it's pretty shameless.
UPDATE: Thanks to the many readers who pointed me towards the article I couldn't find. It was by Robert Pear and appeared in The New York Times. The link is here.
--Nick Confessore
--The Editors
I see via the blog Ragout that the New York Times obituary for Reagan incorrectly credits his tenure with the "longest economic expansion in history." According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, it was the third-longest since they began measuring, with the Clinton expansion first and the 1960s boom second. I really doubt this was intentional deception. More likely it was sloppy reporting. But the Times is the paper of record. They should issue a correction.
Here's Atrios on Reagan's approval record, which, averaged out through his presidency, is lower than you might imagine. (Though he did leave office with the highest approval rating of any president leaving office.)
Jonathan Chait has an article here on Reagan's record, which, as I pointed out on Monday, is not quite what his acolytes and deifiers will tell you (to Reagan's detriment, in my opinion -- much of what they edit out are examples of true statesmanship and responsibility taking).
More examples as I come across them.
UPDATE: Here's a piece by David Greenberg in Slate which takes on all the Reagan myths, conservative and liberal alike (mostly conservatives', though).
--Nick Confessore
Kos is a bit wrong, though, to write "That the fiercely anti-abortion Hatch signed that letter [calling for a relaxation of restrictions] is telling." The key thing about Hatch isn't that he's pro-life, it's that he's a pro-life Mormon. All five Senate Mormons share Hatch's views -- against abortion rights, in favor of stem-cell research -- for reasons that are related to the intricacies of Mormon theology. Drew Clark explained the nuances here during the first stem-cell debate three years ago.
--Matthew Yglesias
The trouble with this, as with all of the president's other reversals on Iraq policy, is that by waiting so long he's eliminated most of the advantages that could have been gained. By going to the UN for a pre-war resolution only after the administration had made it clear that they wanted to invade come what may, they only ensured that their diplomatic task would be essentially impossible. By only crawling back for the postwar resolution after unilateralism had definitively failed, they've squandered the opportunity to obtain significant support from a wider coalition. Dumping Ahmad Chalabi months (if not years) too late, doesn't get us back the legitimacy we lost during the effort to install him as the leader of Iraq. Bringing more troops into the country after months of anarchy and insecurity, again, has done us far less good than getting it right in the first place would have. Etc., etc., etc.
This is all by way of saying that while there's much truth to the conventional wisdom that Bush's and Kerry's Iraq policies aren't all that different, the missing piece of the equation is the question of judgment. Time and again liberals have pointed to problems on the horizon in Iraq and suggested solutions. Time and again Bush has ignored us, only to see the problems arise and then, eventually, adopt the solution after it's too late. It's not, to put it mildly, a record that inspires confidence in this group's ability to handle the national security contingencies of the future.
--Matthew Yglesias
Meanwhile, it looks like I was not wrong to worry that the GOP's apparent belief that Native American voters don't count would have an effect on the election. South Dakota's Rapid City Journal reports that some people living on reservations may have been turned away from the polls in last week's House special election. More on this as it develops.
--Nick Confessore
Critics familiar with the August 2002 memo and another, similar legal opinion given by the Defense Department's office of general counsel in March 2003 assert that government lawyers were trying to find a legal justification for actions -- torture or cruel and inhumane acts -- that are clearly illegal under U.S. and international law.This argument is absurd on its face. Not only is there no general principle that the laws don't apply during wartime, but obviously if any laws are to apply whatsoever it's going to be the laws -- like the Geneva Convention -- whose sole purpose is to govern conduct during war. Nor, might I add, does the president have the authority to unilaterally alter the laws of the United States by having his underlings write memos. If Bush doesn't like the fact that torture is illegal, he needs to submit something to Congress for debate."This is painful, incorrect analysis," said Scott Norton, chairman of the international law committee of the New York City Bar Association, which has produced an extensive report on Pentagon detentions and interrogations. "A lawyer is permitted to craft all sorts of wily arguments about why a statute doesn't apply" to a defendant, he said. "But a lawyer cannot advocate committing a criminal act prospectively."
The August 2002 memo from the Justice Department concluded that laws outlawing torture do not bind Bush because of his constitutional authority to conduct a military campaign. "As Commander in Chief, the President has the constitutional authority to order interrogations of enemy combatants to gain intelligence information concerning the military plans of the enemy," said the memo, obtained by The Washington Post.
But is that really what the memos said? John Aschroft says no, "This administration rejects torture." But Ashcroft won't prove it by taking a simple step like releasing the memo to Congress so they can decide for themselves. Releasing secret information, apparently, is only supposed to be done when it can wound political opponents (Jamie Gorelick, Joe Wilson, Dick Clarke, etc.) not in order to allow Congress to perform its constitutional responsibilities:
"You are not allowed under the Constitution to not answer our questions," said Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del. "You all better come up with a good rationale because otherwise it's contempt of Congress."So we see illegal behavior piled on illegal behavior in a manner consistent with the administration's general principle that there should be no oversight whatsoever of anything the president and his appointees want to do. Fortunately, The Wall Street Journal has placed online most of the Defense Department's memo where you can learn about how much physical harm (i.e., no permament organ damage) you can get away with inflicting in the course of your torturing.Asked by Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch. R-Utah, whether the memos were classified, Ashcroft conferred for a long moment with an aide sitting behind him.
"Some of these memos may be classified in some ways for some purposes," he began.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., interrupted him.
"Mr. Attorney General, with all due respect that is a complete evasion," Durbin said. Durbin said the president either had to invoke executive privilege or Ashcroft had to cite a statutory provision allowing him to withhold the memos.
Ashcroft steadfastly refused to do either Tuesday.
"I am refusing to disclose these memos because I believe it is essential to the operation of the executive branch that the president have the opportunity to get information from his attorney general that is confidential," he said.
--Matthew Yglesias
Also on The Daily Prospect:
- The Permanent Raw Deal: We know liberals face trouble if Kerry loses. But here's the tough choice they face if Kerry wins. By Mark Schmitt.
- Disconnected: Think Judy Miller went batty on the WMD? Well, check out author Stephen Hayes and his neocon pals on the fabled Saddam-al Qaeda connection. By Matthew Yglesias.
Clinton did do a few bold or semi-bold things. He signed Welfare reform in defiance of his base (and, hence, solidifying Reagan's legacy further). He championed NAFTA (again: solidifying Reagan's legacy further). He fought an air war in Yugoslavia (I'm not sure what that says of Reagan's legacy). But with these and one or two pther possible exceptions, Bill Clinton was concerned with maintaining the affection of the public more than he was concerned with doing anything particularly special. I'd be delighted to argue that further, but my sense is this is one of these controversial things you can say about Bill Clinton and his "philosophy" of triangulation which kept his poll numbers high while losing the House, Senate and scads of state governorships and legislatures.I'm skeptical. I think Clinton and Reagan actually had pretty similar records with regard to combining a clear sense of where they wanted to take the country along with a pragmatic desire to stay popular. Both pushed some dramatic changes to the tax code through the Congress early in their terms. Both followed that up with efforts to seriously alter the nature of the American welfare state -- Social Security cuts for Reagan, universal health care for Clinton. Both had their proposals die in the Congress, both saw their parties lose ground in the midterms as a result, and both spent the ends of their administrations wrangling with a hostile Congress.Nothing could be more different than the example of Ronald Reagan, who left the GOP much stronger than when he found it. Reagan was popular precisely because he had the brass to buck the conventional wisdom, endure the scorn of the intellectual class and the media.
I think the real reason Reagan's gone down in history as a popular leader, despite his middling approval ratings, is that he followed a very long string -- Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson -- of presidents who were distinctly unloved by the time they left office. Clinton came on the heels of Reagan's two terms, and immediately followed George H.W. Bush who, for a little while after the Gulf War was the most popular president ever. Reagan's popularity, in other words, stood out as unusual, whereas by Clinton's time it seemed fairly normal.
The other difference is that liberals are a bit more realistic in their assessment of what Clinton did. People who didn't like NAFTA or welfare reform don't go around denying that those things happened. Reagan's many tax hikes and other compromises seem to have been airbrushed out of the right's accounts of what happened. And pretty recently, too. Coincidentally, soon before Reagan died I'd finished reading David Frum's jaundiced look at Reaganism in Dead Right so I was interested to see if he would have anything unconventional to say today. The answer seems to be no.
--Matthew Yglesias
Visit Moving Ideas to find out more about the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act. Bonus: Taking online action will earn you a free ice cream cone.
--Editors of MovingIdeas.Org
This marriage of power and values is the essence of the foreign-policy vision espoused by leading Democratic thinkers. Out of political caution Kerry's campaign advisors still tend to seek the safety of a Scowcroftian middle ground, but the foreign-policy advisers who would serve President Kerry have a quite different vision -- much more ambitious and expansive than anything pursued by the first Bush Administration.This disjoint between the candidate and his advisors is a bit puzzling, especially because it's not obvious to me that either approach brings any significant political benefits. As Marshall says, however, one place where Kerry and his advisors are certainly on the same page is Afghanistan, where the Bush administration has shamefully failed to follow through on the military victory by building anything that resembles either stability or democracy.
There's a fairly new report out from the GAO on the subject that, while long, is quite informative. The headline tells us that "Deteriorating Security and Limited Resources Have Impeded Progress; Improvements in U.S. Strategy Needed." I've long since given up on the notion that the Bush administration has any interest in whether or not their current strategy is working, but it's still worth keeping one's eyes on the situation, since we might get a new president one of these months. At any rate, the way you can tell the president isn't really serious about democracy in Iraq is to listen to how often he describes Afghanistan as a nation-building success story.
--Matthew Yglesias
But the Kurdish region's two military organizations, whose fighters traditionally are called pesh merga, have a different arrangement, reflecting the semi-independence that Kurdish-populated northern Iraq has enjoyed for more than a decade. About half are expected to join the national army or police forces, U.S. officials said. Thousands of others, they explained, will be incorporated into three specialized military units -- mountain troops, counterterrorist forces and quick-reaction battalions -- under the command of the Kurdish regional government that controls northern Iraq.This isn't really a militia demobilization at all. It's more like an official acknowledgment that the pesh merga won't be demobilized, and the central government had better simply accommodate itself to that fact. Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army simply remains outside the agreement. Unfortunately, the article doesn't discuss a couple of other important detail. For example, will the Badr Brigades need to break up their command structure before its personnel is incorporated into the security services, or will militia units simply be deputized wholesale? And what's going to happen to the Sunni forces to whom we've essentially surrendered control of Falluja?
Until we know the answers to those questions, we can't really tell what's going on here. The situation they're setting up in Kurdistan could be the first step toward a stable "assymetrical federalism" or it could be the first step toward national dissolution. Until we know more, there's just no way to say which it is.
--Matthew Yglesias
[T]here is an active campaign to nail into place a canonical version of Reagan's life and career. Energetic conservatives have organized a drive to glorify the former president by trying to do everything from affixing his name to public buildings in each of the nation's 3,066 counties to substituting his face for Alexander Hamilton's on the $10 bill. A similar dynamic applies here. Many of these hagiographies are written by noted conservative authors (Buckley, Noonan, D'Souza) or former Reagan staffers (Wallison, Martin Anderson, Michael Deaver), under the auspices of conservative think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (Wallison), the Hoover Institution (Anderson and Schweizer), and the Heritage Foundation (Stephen F. Hayward's The Age of Reagan, the first of two volumes).It's possible to take this line of thinking way too far, and there will be a tendency, in the years ahead, to remember Reagan's conservatism more fondly merely because the conservatism of the George W. Bush era seems so much more extreme by comparison. But I think Green gets it just about right (so to speak).One would have to go back to FDR to find a comparable example of a president portrayed in such consistently glowing terms--and the swashbuckling triumphs depicted in these books mythologize Reagan to a degree which exceeds even that. As one might expect, most gloss over or completely avoid mentioning the many embarrassing and outright alarming aspects of his presidency: from consulting astrologers to his fixation with biblical doom to the tortured rationalizations that enabled him to believe that he never traded arms for hostages. But they also do something else. Most of his conservative biographers espouse a Manichaean worldview in which Reagan's constancy in the face of liberal evils is the key to his greatness. But to sustain such an argument requires more than simply touting (and often exaggerating) his achievements, considerable though some of them were. The effort to gild Reagan's legacy also seems to demand that any accomplishment that didn't explicitly advance conservative goals be ex-punged from his record. And so they have been.
Reagan is, to be sure, one of the most conservative presidents in U.S. history and will certainly be remembered as such. His record on the environment, defense, and economic policy is very much in line with its portrayal. But he entered office as an ideologue who promised a conservative revolution, vowing to slash the size of government, radically scale back entitlements, and deploy the powers of the presidency in pursuit of socially and culturally conservative goals. That he essentially failed in this mission hasn't stopped partisan biographers from pretending otherwise. (Noonan writes of his 1980 campaign pledges: "Done, done, done, done, done, done, and done. Every bit of it.")
A sober review of Reagan's presidency doesn't yield the seamlessly conservative record being peddled today. Federal government expanded on his watch. The conservative desire to outlaw abortion was never seriously pursued. Reagan broke with the hardliners in his administration and compromised with the Soviets on arms control. His assault on entitlements never materialized; instead he saved Social Security in 1983. And he repeatedly ignored the fundamental conservative dogma that taxes should never be raised.
Though there are many reasons for the hagiography of Reagan, I think Jonathan Chait explained some of the most significant ones in this article from a few years ago, which appraises Reagan's place in conservative political culture. Subtitled, "Why the GOP still can't get over Reagan," Chait's piece seems eerily prescient now:
The Reagan presidency lives on in conservative mythology as a bygone utopia peopled by titans against whom the mortals of today must be measured. As conservative writer David Frum observed in his 1994 lament, Dead Right, "Post-Bush conservatives look back on the accomplishments of the early Reagan years the way seventh-century Romans must have looked at their aqueducts: to think that we once built all this!" When conservatives debate the Reagan legacy, it is not to dispute its merits but to lay competing claims to its mantle. Witness this year's intraconservative debate over expanding trade with China. Proponents of permanent normal trading relations pointed to Reagan's support for free trade; opponents invoked his anti-communism. Had someone dug up a forgotten diary entry laying out Reagan's position for such a future contingency, it might have settled the argument then and there. The premise underlying such debates was explicated by Reagan hagiographer Dinesh D'Souza, who wrote that "the right simply needs to approach public policy questions by asking: What would Reagan have done?"The ossification in question has been evidence throughout Bush's presidency, especially on such core ideological issues as tax cuts, which Bush pursued independently of -- indeed, in spite of -- any need for them. But as Chait cautioned:And therein lies the problem. Once it is agreed that all wisdom resides in the canon of Reagan, then the hard work of debate and self-examination and incorporating new facts is no longer necessary. On economics, defense, and morality, the Republican Party has refused to adapt itself to a patently changed political landscape for fear of acknowledging that the old ideas--the Reagan ideas--no longer work. And those who have tried to adapt have been cast out as heretics--anti-Reagan and therefore anti-conservative or even anti-Republican. When Ronald Reagan was actually president, Republicans prided themselves on being "the party of ideas." Now, as their hero fades into the twilight, his memory sits at the heart of a deep intellectual ossification.
The mortals of the present can never live up to the icons of the past. In George W., the Reaganites appear to have everything they have always wanted: a popular conservative poised to end the political exile into which his father thrust them. But at some point W.'s ideology will smack up against the hard reality of today's very different world, and either his popularity or his conservatism will give way. At that point the true believers will discover ideological deviations and conclude bitterly that the younger Bush is his father's son after all. And then, the verity of their doctrine reaffirmed, they will begin once more their search for the true heir to Ronald Reagan.I think Chait is right. Indeed, if you look at Bush's poll numbers over time, they tell the story of a president whose support was always trending downward steadily, except on three occasions when they shot up dramatically (and then began to decline steadily again): September 11, the start of the Iraq war, and the capture of Saddam Hussein. Kevin Drum posted the data on his blog here. These crises have obscured the inevitable clash between Bush's ideology and his popularity, and of course Bush has also tried hard to camoflage many of his most purely conservative proposals in a way Reagan never bothered to. If Bush loses this fall, the keepers of the conservative flame will look to his protectionism, his bloated Medicare pander, and his flim-flamming on many of the cultural war issues, and conclude that these attempts to ensure his re-election actually causes his demise.
As for Reagan's legacy, it should have been clear then, and is increasingly clear now, that for the most part Reagan the president was more popular than Reaganism the politics. One indication? The anemic response to the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project's efforts to name something after Reagan in every county on the U.S. I wrote about this a couple of years ago in The New Republic, and in the interests of efficiency (and at the risk of sounding self-important), I'm going to quote my own piece:
As the Gipper turned 90, his acolytes spoke of a veritable epidemic of Reaganmania sweeping across the land. "Ronald Reagan is loved and admired by millions of Americans, and by countless others around the world," read a House joint resolution that President Bush signed in January. "On his 90th birthday, the Gipper's influence on America today is greater than it was twenty years ago," wrote The National Review's Larry Kudlow. Anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist even testified in favor of a bill, sponsored by GOP Representative James Hansen, to memorialize the still-living Reagan on the National Mall--right there with Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. "Clearly," Norquist told a House committee, "America loved Ronald Reagan, and the Congress should recognize the will of the people by passing this bill."As I wrote at the time, I don't think all this takes anything away from Reagan -- although I think it does reflect rather poorly on the judgment of some of his acolytes.There's just one problem with this nostalgic groundswell for the Gipper: It doesn't exist. Since Norquist launched the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project in 1997--aiming to have Reagan honored in every one of the nation's 3,067 counties--the number of Reagan dedications has crept upward from eleven to about 45. And the going has been tough. In 1998 Republican Speaker Jim King (with Norquist's help) pushed legislation through the Florida assembly to rename the 312-mile Florida Turnpike after Reagan--generating so many angry phone calls that, as King later told the press, "[y]ou'd have thought I'd nominated Hitler." The Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse in Santa Ana, California, almost lost its congressional funding in 1994; when the building prepared to open four years later, it was discovered that planners had neglected to buy a likeness of the former president to adorn the new structure. To date, 38 U.S. states don't have a single Reagan dedication.
This is no particular knock for Reagan, who was, after all, among the most popular presidents of the twentieth century. But with the exception of John F. Kennedy--whose tragic death triggered an immediate outpouring of national admiration--presidential greats are memorialized well after their time, when the public feels it must reach back to the past to celebrate a cherished American value. "The Washington [Monument]," observes historian Robert Dallek, "was completed after the Civil War, when the national impulse was to reestablish unity, to recreate a national spirit.... The Lincoln Memorial didn't come along until the 1920s, after the passions of the Civil War had subsided. The Jefferson Memorial was not dedicated until 1943"--in the midst of World War II, when Jefferson served as a kind of avatar of democracy.
The Reagan memorialists have a similar purpose: the elevation of Reaganite political values as an explicit rebuttal to the Clinton presidency. It's no coincidence that the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project got started in 1997 and 1998, just as Bimbroglio played out; that the overweening nostalgia surrounding Reagan's birthday peaked just as Pardongate did; or that Norquist's allies include some of the sweatiest Clinton-haters in Washington. In a sense, Reagan-worship is Clinton-hating by other means--a way of relegating the Bubba years to a brief hallucination between Reagan II (Bush père) and Reagan III (Bush fils).
The difference, as the Reaganites have discovered, is that most Americans have far more nostalgia for Reagan than for Reaganism (as opposed to Clintonism, which they liked considerably more than Clinton). And, as a result, the impulse behind Reagan-worship has come almost entirely from inside the Beltway. Ironically, the very people who came to Washington to join Reagan in smiting the arrogant, out-of-touch, top-down liberal elite--Norquist, Hansen, Bob Barr, Dennis Hastert--have established an arrogant, out-of-touch, top-down conservative elite bent on ramming their patron saint down the country's throat. "The impulse to build [previous] memorials," Dallek says, "was the product of a long-term development of public sentiment.... What's interesting about the Reagan memorials is the extraordinary speed with which they're going about it. I mean, he's not even dead."
More in this vein later.
--Nick Confessore
The United States and its allies are winning some battles in the terrorism war but may be losing the broader struggle against Islamic extremism that is terrorism's source, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Saturday.Rumsfeld and friends have gotten no small amount of grief from Tapped over the years, so it's worth pointing out that the Secretary of Defense has, quite admirably, been much better than his colleagues on the right at recognizing how ineffective the administration's counterterrorism policies really are. Everyone ought to go back and read the "long, hard slog" memo from last October and, unlike the media at the time, look beyond the bit about the slog in Iraq. It's a quite perceptive debunking of the "lump of terrorism" fallacy that's dominated a lot of conservative thought on this issue. As Rumsfeld said:The troubling unknown, he said, is whether the extremists -- whom he termed "zealots and despots" bent on destroying the global system of nation-states -- are turning out newly trained terrorists faster than the United States can capture or kill them.
"It's quite clear to me that we do not have a coherent approach to this," Rumsfeld said at an international security conference.
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?The question of whether we need a "broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists" only needs to be asked to make it clear that the answer is yes. The more interesting question is why it is that Bush doesn't seem interested in devising one. In all honesty, most Democrats haven't been much better, but there are exceptions, like Rep. Jim Turner, who's done some great work on this issue that I wrote about here.Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
--Matthew Yglesias
Osama bin Laden could have made a good living as a political consultant if he did not choose to kill babies in stead. The al Qaeda/Ba'ath Party strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan is, at core, a political one. They seek not just to pull Iraq into chaos, but to defeat President Bush as well.Whence does Morris gain this keen insight into the mind of al-Qaeda? Evidence is lacking, but he elaborates on motives, "Al Qaeda and the Ba'ath Party want to defeat Bush to avenge his tough stance against them after the 9/11 attacks." This is sort of hard to accept; it seems to me that al-Qaeda was planning attacks before Bush's "tough stance" after the 9/11 attacks. That's how the attacks, you know, happened. Nevertheless, it's simply "obvious that Osama and his allies all want Bush out." Obvious how? Was the attack on the U.S.S. Cole an effort to get Bush in office? Nevermind.
Morris should consider contemplating the possibility that Osama's beef with the United States goes a bit beyond the content of the contemporary political debate. Nevertheless, I expect we'll hear more of this sort of thing between now and November. Note, however, that the strategy tends to lapse into incoherence:
But to fathom the al Qaeda/Ba'ath strategy, we need to remember how the Iranian militants manipulated the hostage crisis in 1979 and 1980 to defeat their bete noire, President Jimmy Carter. By dangling and then retracting the hope of releasing their hostages, they made Carter look weak and overmatched. Once Reagan won, they quietly let the hostages go.So vote for Kerry and the terrorists will leave us alone? That doesn't sound like a really effective slogan for the Bush campaign. Appeasement, after all, becomes a pretty attractive strategy if you have reason to believe that it will work. On one level, this is all very silly. On another level, however, it highlights a major challenge for the Kerry campaign. If another attack occurs between now and November, will voters rally around the president or will they hold him accountable for his failure to adequately focus on counterterrorism? Since it will be very difficult to engage in any sort of conventional campaigning in the aftermath of an attack, the time for Kerry to start reframing this issue is now.
--Matthew Yglesias
The Columnists
- David Brooks. Can't we all just get along?
- Nicholas Kristof. Bad apples everywhere.
- Jim Hoagland. If you just kind of juxtapose them, you can imply that the Iraq War is just like the liberation of France without really saying why. Try it -- it's fun!
- George Will I. I wrote this colum fifteen years ago.
- George Will II. The White House is worth a flip-flop.
- James Jordan and James Powell on the looming energy crisis.
During the 1984 campaign, Reagan stood in front of a senior citizens' project built under a program he tried to kill -- but his aides didn't care, concluding that the pictures were more important than the reporters' contrary words.If memory serves, the Bush campaign has elevated this to a standard campaign practice. I can't seem to find the link at the moment, but one of the major dailies had an extensive article about Bush administration aides were running around the country touting all sorts of government programs that Bush's own budget had tried to reduce funding for or kill altogether. And wasn't there some school or day care center Bush made a campaign stop at in 2000 which he later cut funding for?
If any helpful readers can send me the links, I will post an update.
--Nick Confessore
In the case at hand, Times to Post, the difference is not only the stronger conclusion in the Post (Bush misleads more) but a willingness to openly draw conclusions when participants in a conflict hotly contest each other's claims. Reporters in the maintream press generally don't do that. They do not openly conclude in a news account that one side is being more truthful than the other, especially in the heat of an election year struggle.I think this is a nice compromise between the standards of the patently opinionated European-style press and the increasingly ineffectual forms of American "objective" journalism. (I put that word in quotes because American journalists often mistake objectivity for neutrality, which, as Rosen rightly points out, makes them unwitting shills for other agendas.) Rosen and Stranahan say -- and I agree -- that journalism should drop value-neutral "he said, she said" journalism, and actually explain to the reader what is true and not true. (Stranahan calls it he said/she said/we said.) The results will look biased only to those who lie, spin, and deceive the most, and the public will be better served by a press that informs as much as it reports.Part of the reason to avoid conclusions like that is to avoid appearing biased, of course. The ritual called "he said, she said" is like an advertisement with that theme: both sides had their say, no bias here, trust the news you get from us. But it's slowly dawning on some in the press that it almost works the opposite way today.
When journalists avoid drawing open conclusions, they are more vulnerable to charges of covert bias, of having a concealed agenda, of not being up front about their perspective, of unfairly building a case (for, against) while pretending only to report "what happened." From this angle, avoiding summary judgment doesn't necessarily build confidence in your reporting; it may encourage them to attack you for tilting the boards, for denying you have a perpsective on things, for bias.
By the way, check out here the Bush campaign's risible attempt to rebut the Post's analysis. They simply repeat the original bogus charge; to wit, if Kerry has plans for new programs that according to outside analysts would cost $900 million, we can say Kerry will raise taxes $900 million to cover it. That's not a "fact," as the Bushies claim. That's the definition of a supposition -- that is, it's purely a guess.
--Nick Confessore
