Bush/McCain Approaching Obama Foreign Policy

Josh Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo.com notes that the Bush administration and the McCain campaign appear to be adopting the policies of Barack Obama on Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran after attacking these same positions within the past few months.

McCain and now the White House (via the DOD) are moving toward more US troops in Afghanistan -- a position they've each long opposed and which Obama has been on record in support of for at least a year.

Bush and McCain have each also in different ways tried to nudge closer to Obama's position on withdrawing troops from Iraq. The key shoe falling today is President Bush's embrace of a "time horizon" for withdrawing troops from Iraq. Meanwhile, McCain's declaration of military victory in Iraq seems very much like an effort to get people thinking the troops are coming home soon within the conceptual architecture of his professed goals in Iraq.

And finally Iran. I'm not certain what McCain himself has said about Iran in recent days. But over recent months a key line of attack from the president and John McCain has been that Obama is a latter-day Neville Chamberlain for saying we should negotiate with Iran. And now over recent days we've learned that the White House is sending one of its top diplomats to negotiate directly with Iran's nuclear negotiator. And there are growing signs the White House is poised to open a diplomatic interests section (an unofficial diplomatic outpost) in Tehran.

This observation has certainly been supported by counter-terrorism experts Richard Clarke and Rand Beers in interviews at NetRoots Nation in Austin, Texas this week.

As Marshall asks, will the mainstream media notice and acknowledge this trend or is it too contrary to the accepted narratives of the campaign?

Diplomacy with Iran

Juan Cole shares this from Ambassador Gerald B. Helman on the Bush administration's apparent change of policy on negotiating with Iran on his Informed Comment blog.

The decision by the Administration to send William Burns, the State Department’s third ranking official and a career diplomat, to participate in the five power talks with Iran over its nuclear activities, certainly invites speculation as to how far the Administration has changed its policies regarding Iran.

Helman says that these talks will be similar to the diplomatic model employed successfully in multi-lateral talks with North Korea.

This new diplomatic process was not undertaken by the participants for the pleasure of sitting around a table to talk to one another. Instead it served to facilitate “multiple bilaterals,” a process and dynamic with which experienced diplomats are well aware and welcome because it provides a cover and process within which otherwise hostile countries can negotiate.

Helman suggests that the decision to send Burns was very likely made by President Bush with full knowledge that it "undercuts John McCain’s position on Iran and his claim to superior experience, and validates Barack Obama’s judgment favoring the negotiating track."

The Washington Post also reports this week that the State Department is considering opening an Interest Section office in Tehran which would place US diplomats inside Iran for the first time since 1979.

Curiouser and curiouser.

What McCain Economic Policy?

With the latest Gallup poll showing that 81% of Americans surveyed hold negative views on the state of our economy, Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post notes that John McCain is adrift on policy proposals to address the problem.

Gramm hasn't been the only McCain economic adviser to sound dissonant notes of late. Bloomberg's Al Hunt reports that Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard chief, has said that if a bipartisan coalition came up with tax increases on the rich, a McCain administration might embrace the proposal. On Tuesday, however, a campaign spokesman reiterated McCain's opposition to such tax hikes.

How to explain the McCain campaign's glaring contradictions on economic policy? Why do the policy mantras that every campaign uses and needs get so warped and so ignored? Why can't the campaign stay on message? The turmoil in management that has afflicted the campaign from the start surely deserves some of the blame, but I suspect the issues run deeper. One problem is that McCain himself has no real ideas about how to fix the economy, which leaves his tetherless surrogates free to roam the policy landscape. An even deeper problem is that standard-issue Republican economic policy has run out of plausible mantras. The ritual extolling of markets and denigration of government make no sense at a moment when a conservative Republican administration is rushing to save the markets through governmental intervention.

Programmatic Torture

Steve Clemons of the Washington Note provides a summary of the key findings from the New Yorker's Jane Mayer's new book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals.

~ The single minded campaign, born in the office of the Vice President, to legalize torture and expand the President's powers as "Commander-in-Chief" to the point of unchecked authority with the ability to violate virtually any law.
~ The first full account of the secret Red Cross report describing the detailed allegations of torture made by the CIA's top fourteen terror suspects -- all of whom are currently held in Guantanamo Bay -- and the Red Cross's warning to the United States government that this treatment unequivocally constituted "torture," exposing Bush Administration officials to prosecution for war crimes.
~ Details about the scores of innocent people the United States Government has abused -- including the inside story of a mistaken CIA "rendition," and the revelation that the CIA is investigating a half-dozen more such erroneous kidnappings.
~ Previously unpublished, shocking details showing what the CIA did to detainees to make them talk and new revelations about the growing doubts and fights within the intelligence agency over these harrowing tactics.

FactCheck: Obama Fudges on Energy

Non-partisan web-site FactCheck.org cited Barack Obama for a fib about energy yesterday.

Obama released a national ad saying he has "fast-track alternatives" to imported oil. On closer examination, those turn out to be his proposal to spend $150 billion over the coming decade on energy research. Ten years doesn't sound all that "fast" to us, and there's no guarantee that the research will result in less oil being imported.

The unofficial TSC tally of misleading or inaccurate statements in the 2008 general election campaign according to FactCheck now stands at 10 for McCain and 5 for Obama.

McCain's Fantasy

Fred Kaplan of Slate reviews the candidates' speeches on Iraq and Afghanistan from yesterday and highlights a disturbing tendency from John McCain.

It's a happy coincidence that Barack Obama and John McCain both gave speeches on Tuesday about Iraq and Afghanistan. The big difference between the two is that Obama views the wars as problems, while McCain pretty much does not. In short, while Obama's analysis has some lapses and holes, at least it is an analysis; McCain's is a bit of a fantasy.

Here's the problem: The U.S. Army is stretched so thin that, according to its own calculations, no extra combat units can be sent to Afghanistan unless the same number of units is pulled out of Iraq. There is no flexibility here. So if McCain wants to put three more brigades in Afghanistan, where is he going to get them?...If McCain wins the White House, the first thing the Joint Chiefs will tell him is that they don't have the resources to fulfill his war aims.

McCain's policies may differ from those of Bush in some areas (global warming, stem cell research, spending) but here he shows a frightening resemblance to Bush: he sees what he wants to see and dismisses credible evidence to the contrary. He dumbs down our political discourse by offering nonsensical proposals that insult the intelligence of the electorate. Faced with this absurdity, at least Kaplan actually digs into the candidates' proposals and evaluates them rather than reporting them in a mindless "he said, she said" manner that fails to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Wish I Had Said That

Thursday I join about 3000 fellow bloggers at Network Nation, where I will meet many of the folks we read and quote at The Sensible Center. One of those, Matthew Yglesias of Atlantic Monthly, had this very sane observation about the Presidential polling numbers today:

"Can I just note that I seem to live in some kind of mirror universe where the fact that Barack Obama has, for months, maintained a modest lead over John McCain in every public poll constitutes bad news for Obama and that the specific reason it constitutes bad news for Obama is that the larger political climate is favorable to Obama. The trouble of course is that given the favorable climate the expectation is that Obama will lead, so in order to "really" win, he needs to win by some gigantic margin -- merely being the first Democrat in over thirty years to secure a majority doesn't cut it. Or something."

But wouldn't it be interesting to visit an alternative reality in which the goal of a campaign is to win the election rather than to beat arbitrary media expectations? In this world, a modest-sized but stable and consistent lead would count as an indication that you're winning. And the existence of favorable background conditions for your candidacy would assuage doubts that the lead is likely to vanish over time."

In their zeal to make it look like a horse race, too many mainstream media folks continue to maximize the trivial and minimize the obvious. Only three of the last 10 Presidents have been Democrats, but recent voter registration trends favoring the Democrats and a sharp decline in the number of self-identified Republicans could make this a very different year.

Ezra Klein on Terrorism

Ezra Klein of the American Prospect nails the difference between the Obama and Bush/McCain approaches to Islamic extremism.

A few months back, Mitt Romney, who's now on John McCain's short list for the vice presidency, said, "I don’t want to buy into the Democratic pitch, that this is all about one person, Osama bin Laden. Because after we get him, there’s going to be another and another. This is about Shi’a and Sunni. This is about Hezbollah and Hamas and al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the worldwide jihadist effort to try and cause the collapse of all moderate Islamic governments and replace them with a caliphate."

The Egyptian Brotherhood isn't a terrorist group. al Qaeda, a Sunni terrorist group, hates Iran and is rivals with Hezbollah, a Shi'ite extremist sect. This statement, in other words, made no sense. It was a war against Arabs, and maybe some Persians. not a limited conflict against al Qaeda. As Obama says, one of the clear distinctions between the Left's approach to terrorism and the Right's approach to terrorism is that the Left wants to limit the scope of the conflict, while the Right wants to expand it. So though it was only al Qaeda who attacked us on 9/11, Romney and Giuliani and McCain and plenty of their colleagues want to zoom out from al Qaeda to terrorism, and from terrorism to Islamic extremism. Rather than this being an effort to hunt down al Qaeda, it becomes a war to hunt down al Qaeda, destroy Hezbollah, eradicate Hamas, overthrow Saddam Hussein, change the regime in Tehran, crush the Muslim Brotherhood, and confront Syria, and whatever else Bill Kristol thought of while eating his Cheerios that week. It is an incredibly dangerous and incoherent approach. And it marks a genuine difference between Obama and McCain.

Lessons for Liberals

Two perceptive writers point out lessons the Democrats need to learn in order to win in November. Speaking specifically about the need to break from slavish support of antiquated teachers' unions, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter suggests a perspective with broad applications.

All the criticism of Obama's moving to the center is misguided. General elections are won among moderate swing voters, many of whom would respond well to a Democratic candidate willing to show he can slip the ideological stranglehold of a retrograde liberal interest group.

Theda Skocpol delivers a similar message on TalkingPointsMemo.com.

I look back over an adult lifetime of this, of identity-oriented and single-issue groups undermining any chance for a convincing message relevant to all working middle class people. This lack of discipline and inability to sort out the fundamental from the partial is what has made it so hard for Democrats to win -- and has cost the country terribly in terms of the undermining of middle class wellbeing. Why are we doing it again? Why are we playing along with all the diversions and distractions the media wants to pursue, rather than speaking loudly with one voice for Obama and in drumbeat criticism of McCain?

I am not so sure progressives are going to do what is necessary to win -- even in this year when all the stars should be aligned. Unity and practical realism are the order of the day, and the fire must be directed outward, not inward. Can we do it?

Our right to two-handed self defense upheld

If I were abducted by aliens (not the illegal kind but the chartreuse ones with a purple eye in the side of their heads) I wouldn't tell anyone. I wouldn't even tell myself.

Unfortunate genes coupled with questionable life choices, has left me uncertain of my perceptions of reality. Somethings just never happened until I have time to verify that I'm not making the whole thing up.

Case in point: The Supreme Court's ruling declaring the 30-year gun ban in Washington D.C. unconstitutional makes about as much sense to me as Congress and the Judiciary allowing this administration to violate, with impunity, almost every other civil liberty we've got, or had, with nary a peep nor a squeak. But, hey, that's just me.

Back to green creatures and incredulity. Justice Scalia writing for the majority, noted that the handgun is Americans' preferred weapon of self-defense in part because it can be pointed at a burglar with one hand while the other hand dials the police.

I know. I know. You need some time to live with the reality of the statement, and who said it. Otherwise, the brain cannot accept the fact that this is a Justice of the Supreme Court and not a writer for The Daily Show.

Picture this. First, assume I do in fact have two hands and am asleep in my bed. I awaken to the sound of breaking glass and realize I'm being burgled.

I creep from my bed, grope under the bed for the shoebox with my gun in it. Now, I have to locate the bullets because I have grandchildren, and what fool keeps a loaded gun under the bed with children around? Well OK, lots of people do, but that's not the point.

The point is, the bullets are in the kitchen along with the burglar, and the phone is in my purse in the living room.

A handgun is the weapon of choice for most Americans because it...can be pointed at a burglar with one hand while the other hand dials the police. I bet even the NRA winced over the lameness of that one.

Sleep tight, Justice.

More McCain Bunk

Non-partisan web-site FactCheck.org nails John McCain for more false claims about Barak Obama's tax policies.

McCain has repeatedly claimed that Obama would raise tax rates for 23 million small-business owners. It's a false and preposterously inflated figure.

We find that the overwhelming majority of those small-business owners would see no increase, because they earn too little to be affected. Obama's tax proposal would raise rates only on couples making more than $250,000 or singles earning more than $200,000.

McCain argues that Obama's proposed increase is a job-killer. He has a point. It's true that increasing taxes on those at the top would leave them less money for other purposes, including investment and hiring in the case of business owners. But the number of business owners who would see their rates go up would be only a small fraction of what McCain says. Many would see their taxes go down.

TSC's unofficial fib tally (according to FactCheck) now stands at 10 for McCain to 4 for Obama. All candidates fudge a little here and there but this is getting embarassing. So much for "straight talk."

America's Huge Hidden Issue

Governor Ed Rendell (D-Pa.), the new head of the National Governors Association, has announced a totally logical---if highly unexpected-- top priority for the Association: repair of the nation's infrastructure. Here are a few very uncomfortable facts:

"Rendell rattled off a string of statistics on infrastructure that had the governors reeling. The U.S. has a $1.6 trillion infrastructure deficit, he said—that is, it will cost that much just to rebuild what it already has. The administration of President Dwight Eisenhower spent 11.5% of its budget on infrastructure; the George W. Bush administration spends 2.5%. The European Union spends six times more than the U.S. on infrastructure as a percentage of gross domestic product.

A problem for big plans like that, he added, is that such basic-needs spending is out of favor with voters. And the reason for that? “The Bridge to Nowhere,” he said, citing a pet project championed by Alaska’s Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young that was derailed following an outburst of public anger over the cost. Infrastructure “has become just a pork-barrel process in voters’ eyes,” he said."

This issue gets almost no attention from elected officials or the media and has no lobbying organization to raise public consciousness Last year's bridge tragedy in Minnesota---clearly the tip of an iceberg--- has slipped out of the public's conscience. Rendell has chosen the most logical forum for bringing this issue to the fore. We will keep an eye on it and urge our readers to report any state-level initiatives worthy of note.

Why So Close?

Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post provides some answers.

The fact that McCain trails by only four points in the poll of polls is somewhat remarkable given the developments of the last month or so.

Obama finally vanquished Hillary Rodham Clinton in the primary race, a win that provided him a huge amount of attention in the national media -- coverage that seemed to suggest, albeit it subtly, that the hard part of the race was over for the Illinois senator.

McCain, on the other hand, has weathered a series of stumbles -- his widely panned speech on June 3, an address that will forever be defined in political history by the lime green backdrop behind him, a staff shakeup, former Senator Phil Gramm's "mental recession" comments -- that have hijacked his message for weeks.

Cillizza believes that the strength of the McCain brand as a "straight talking reformer" seems to overcome the campaign's stumbles (and his own flip-flops on multiple issues according to Glenn Beck). Cillizza also suggests that independents, in particular, are not sold on Barack Obama, perhaps because of his so-called tack to the center. He concludes that the race is still in its early stages and McCain must still overcome strong hostility to Bush and the GOP.

The Blip on Obama's Big Screen campaign

Peter Keating aptly spells out the ambitious assumptions and strategy of the Obama campaign in this week's edition of New York magazine. At the same time, he zeroes in on a potential Achilles heal:

"Obama seems reactive partly because some of his key initiatives — registering massive numbers of new voters, reaching out to young Evangelicals — are happening off the press’ radar. But on some big issues, McCain has just made better pitches. He has framed the war as a question of whether the surge has brought added stability to Iraq, and Obama, unable to deny that it has, is stuck defending troop withdrawals. McCain has argued for offshore drilling as a way to use American resources for relief at the pump, and Obama’s responses have sounded retro and hackneyed. Meanwhile, Obama bungled the symbolism of rejecting public financing by letting McCain off the hook for agreeing to use public funds, then rejecting the system himself. And while Obama’s calls for faith-based programs and community service may prove resonant, his economic program has yet to viscerally connect with voters.

The key question: After Obama reintroduces himself as a non-radical, can he take control of the campaign narrative? During the last three months of the Democratic race, he simply ran out the clock against Clinton. Against a more unpredictable opponent and facing a possible October surprise, Obama will need better punches for a knockout."

Nearly one-third of voters told Pew Research over the past two weeks that they are undecided or could change their mind before November.---compared to only 21 percent at this time in 2004. This indecisiveness, is a cause of uneasiness to the Obama campaign.Further, while the numberous gaffes by McCain and his surrogates have been great fodder for us political junkies. McCain ads are reaching millions of undecided voters in several pivotal states where he reportedly is outspending Obama 3-1.

Obama is clearly looking to expand the electoral map---relying heavily on the largest grassroots campaign in modern history---but the answer to the question of who is getting their message to rank and file voters could be a major " blip" on his big picture screen.

"The conflict here will not be won with bombs but with books."

So says US Army Lt. Col. Christopher Kolenda about the fight against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the Afghan-Pakistani border region in a column by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times.

Since 9/11, Westerners have tried two approaches to fight terrorism in Pakistan, President Bush’s and Greg Mortenson’s...Mr. Bush has focused on military force and provided more than $10 billion — an extraordinary sum in the foreign-aid world — to the highly unpopular government of President Pervez Musharraf. This approach has failed: the backlash has radicalized Pakistan’s tribal areas so that they now nurture terrorists in ways that they never did before 9/11.

Mr. Mortenson, a frumpy, genial man from Montana, takes a diametrically opposite approach, and he has spent less than one-ten-thousandth as much as the Bush administration. He builds schools in isolated parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan, working closely with Muslim clerics and even praying with them at times.

Mortenson, a US Army veteran from Montana, arrived at the idea after being nursed back to health in a remote Muslim village after a failed attempt to climb the famous Himalayan peak K-2. In return, he built a school for the village and discovered a calling. Mortenson's best-selling book Three Cups of Tea describes his experiences.

He secures a commitment from a village to demonstrate "buy-in" by providing land and labor to build a school. He provides funding and building materials through his aid group the Central Asia Institute. Aside from being kidnapped for a week, Mortenson and his schools have largely been left alone by radical groups that have attacked other Western aid groups due to the stake in the schools by local people.

The project has focused on including girls since finding that educated mothers are better able to restrain their sons from joining radical Islamic groups. The Pentagon has shown interest ordering a number of copies of Mortenson's book and inviting him to speak. Kristof concludes

Military force is essential in Afghanistan to combat the Taliban. But over time, in Pakistan and Afghanistan alike, the best tonic against militant fundamentalism will be education and economic opportunity.

So a lone Montanan staying at the cheapest guest houses has done more to advance U.S. interests in the region than the entire military and foreign policy apparatus of the Bush administration.