G-20: Rejecting “the Pond”

“The Pond” is an expression suggesting “no distance between the U.S. and Europe.” I wish it would go away. Perhaps, it was an innocent-enough exaggeration when the two continents were coming together in the 1970s, with the introduction of Concorde New York-London flights of 3-1/2 hours. But after 27 years of never really catching on, the Concorde ceased service in 2003. The distance then grew greater, not ever shorter as we once had expected. But “the Pond” phrase lives on.

Obama has jumped “the Pond” to London for the latest G-20 meeting. The G-20, as its own website says,

brings together important industrial and emerging-market countries from all regions of the world. Together, member countries represent around 90 per cent of global gross national product, 80 per cent of world trade (including EU intra-trade) as well as two-thirds of the world's population. The G-20's economic weight and broad membership gives it a high degree of legitimacy and influence over the management of the global economy and financial system.

The G-20’s impressive statistics combine numbers from all of Europe, something the G-20 gets away with because one of the G-20 members represents the entire “European Union,” even though EU members Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy are also G-20 members. Add the U.S. and Canada, and 7 of the G-20’s members are of “the Pond.”

The term “the Pond” especially bothers me because it re-enforces the East Coast-based American elite’s obvious admiration for Europe at a time when, under Obama, we are drawing closer to European-style democratic socialism—government control of industry, high taxes, powerful unions, government-financed underclass, nanny-state regulations, national health insurance. Our elite loves Europe.

Conservative scholar Charles Murray recently laid out his case against Europe and for continued American exceptionalism. Murray said in Stockholm, Amsterdam, London, Paris, “the people don’t seem to be groaning under the yoke of an evil system. Quite the contrary. There’s a lot to like—a lot to love—about day-to-day life in Europe.” But he also suggested, “the European model can’t continue to work much longer. Europe’s catastrophically low birth rates and soaring immigration from cultures with alien values will see to that.”

Here’s the heart of Murray’s case against Europe (my summary):

“A life well-lived” has meaning. It brings “deep satisfactions”— what we look back upon when we reach old age. Such a human activity has to have been important; to have required a lot of effort (hence the cliché “nothing worth having comes easily”), and; you have to have been responsible for the consequences.

Few activities can satisfy those requirements. If we ask what are the institutions through which human beings achieve deep satisfactions in life, the answer is that there are just four: family, community, vocation, and faith. Nobody has to make use of all four institutions, but the stuff of life—the elemental events surrounding birth, death, raising children, fulfilling one’s personal potential, dealing with adversity, intimate relationships—coping with life as it exists around us in all its richness—occurs within those four institutions.

The goal of social policy should be to ensure that those institutions are robust and vital. And that’s what’s wrong with the European model. It doesn’t do that. It enfeebles every single one of them.

Almost anything that government does in social policy can be characterized as taking some of the trouble out of things.
The problem is that every time the government takes trouble out of performing the functions of family, community, vocation, and faith, it strips those institutions of their vitality.

Families are not vital because raising children and being a good spouse are fun, but because the family has responsibility for doing important things that won’t get done unless the family does them. Communities are not vital because it’s so much fun to respond to our neighbors’ needs, but because the community does important things that won’t get done otherwise. When the government says it will take the trouble out of doing the things that families and communities evolved to do, it takes action away from families and communities, and the web frays, and eventually disintegrates.

When the government takes the trouble out of being a spouse and parent, it doesn’t affect the sources of deep satisfaction for the CEO. Rather, it makes life difficult for the janitor. A man who is holding down a menial job and thereby supporting a wife and children is doing something authentically important with his life. He can take deep satisfaction from that, and be praised for doing so. If that same man lives under a system that says that the children of the woman he sleeps with will be taken care of whether or not he contributes, then that status goes away.

“The Europe syndrome” goes something like this: Human beings are a collection of chemicals that activate and, after a period of time, deactivate. The purpose of life is to while away the intervening time as pleasantly as possible. Work is not a vocation, but something that interferes with leisure. Why have a child, when children are so much trouble—and, after all, what good are they, really? Why spend time worrying about neighbors? What could possibly be the attraction of a religion that says otherwise?

Murray hopes America will have “a Great Awakening” that will take our elite away from modern day Europe and back to our roots in family, community, vocation, and faith.

Israel: looking for the silver lining.

One has to be concerned about peace prospects under Israel’s proposed Binyamin Netanyahu government. It does include the moderate Ehud Barak, still head of a deeply-divided and less-powerful-than-ever Labor Party, as Defense Minister. But the racist Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the rightwing Israel Beiteinu (Israel is Our Home) Party, will show Palestinians and other Arabs an unfriendly face as Foreign Minister. Moderates had hoped to avoid having Lieberman part of the power structure, even though his party finished third. But Lieberman had to be part of Netanyahu’s government once Kadima's Tzipi Livni, whose party actually holds one more seat than Netanyahu’s Likud, choose to go into opposition rather than become Likud’s junior partner.

Pierre Atlas, an American academic, has written that “The best-case scenario--for Israel and for the prospects of resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict--would have been a grand coalition of the Israeli mainstream: Likud, Kadima, and Labor.” This is the coalition many, including myself, had been hoping against hope for. Not to be.

Yet Arab American Institute chief James Zogby, a person with an obvious interest in Middle East peace, points out that hardliner Netanyahu and the hardline Palestinians of Hamas will probably have to be part of any peace agreement that works. So why not have negotiations that include those most resistant to peace? It did work in Northern Ireland, finally.

Offered without comment.

Obamaspeak for “Tax Increase”

During his second, all-network primetime press conference Tuesday, Barack Obama told us how he plans to spend his way out of bad times:

We invest in the renewable sources of energy that will lead to new jobs, new businesses, and less dependence on foreign oil. We invest in our schools and our teachers, so that our children have the skills they need to compete with any workers in the world. We invest in reform that will bring down the cost of health care for families, businesses and our government.

These things all cost money. “Invest” is Obamaspeak for “spend.” Obama, as I have said, is trying to lift us out of depression using the Roosevelt World War II strategy. His enemy isn’t Nazi Germany, it’s Republicans who would block spending on big government, renewable energy, education, and health care. But the point is to spend, spend, spend. This year, federal spending will top $4 trillion—28.5% of GDP, a level exceeded only at the height of World War II. And Obama plans to sustain this spending throughout his administration. Breathtaking.

“Politico” reporters John Harris and Jonathan Martin, confounded by Obama’s audacity in saying he will fight deficits by enlarging them even more, did a little “he said, he meant” thing to explain Obamaspeak:

What he said: “At the end of the day, the best way to bring our deficit down [isn’t by continuing] policies that have led us to narrow prosperity and massive debt. It’s with a budget that leads to broad economic growth by moving from an era of borrow-and-spend to one where we save and invest.”

What he meant: There is no way I am going to lose the language wars in a budget battle. My budget may borrow more and spend more than any in history. But I am going to frame this plan with appeals that emphasize sobriety and responsibility.

In other words, “I’m going to lie bigtime.”

My take. Obama isn’t lying. He’s just holding back part of the truth. The deficits he will run up to pull us out of recession and to invest in America’s “new deal” could be gigantic, or they could be brought under control through higher taxes. We need higher taxes. Sooner or later, Americans will see the wisdom of raising taxes to close the deficit. One (huge) step at a time, though.

Democrats’ Meritocracy Paradox

Secular liberals (“Here on earth, God’s work must truly be our own.”) believe in meritocracy. What gives some of us, acting through government, the right to rule over the rest? Answer: the leaders have succeeded by doing well at the best schools, then landing through their school networks the best jobs. In the “free market” of ideas, the best and the brightest—whether the products of law school, consulting firms, academia, foundations, or the media—usually prevail. The point is, the power elite, the meritocracy, begins with academic competition that sorts out the best from the rest.

And where is this meritocracy born? Well, in the private schools or exceptional public schools that feed the better universities. Much less often, the best come from the average or poor public middle and high schools that seem to be “dumping grounds" for those whose parents can’t or won’t pay for private school. Public schools, often poorly led, almost always employ teachers that in the most anti-meritocracy way possible, make no distinction between good and bad in how they pay or retain staff. Unions dedicated to employee security fight every effort mounted to reward good teachers and fire bad ones. In the better schools, it’s about the students. In most public schools, it’s about protecting teachers’ jobs.

Teaching used to be an honored profession, dominated by women with few alternative employment prospects, women who made public education work. But as good teachers left for greener pastures in the 1970s, as bussing and forced integration made schools more about social engineering than education, the replacement teachers put their energy into protecting themselves from termination based upon any lack of student performance. They formed and joined unions that became so dominant in the Democratic Party that by 2008, 10% of the Democratic convention delegates were teachers. So today, security-before-ability teachers unions dominate education, when if Democrats were true to their core beliefs, schools would instead honor meritocracy; rewarding its best teachers and terminating the worst, in the cause of properly educating tomorrow’s workforce.

Congress Stepping Back from 90% AIG Bonus Tax

Since I called out George Stephanopoulos when he wrongly predicted Tom Daschle would survive, let me note his latest prediction, on ABC News Friday and repeated today, that Congress will in the end kill its effort to punish AIG (and other) bonus payment recipients by taxing them at 90% punitive rates. Stephanopoulos is going against the conventional wisdom that says an enraged Congress will push the punishment bill through. I think Stephanopoulos is right; the bill won’t pass the Senate.

Can Rhee Succeed?

New York Times’ liberal columnist Nicholas Kristof writes about what may be the Stalingrad of education reform battles within the Obama administration—Michelle Rhee’s effort to improve the District of Columbia’s wretched school system. Rhee, 39, has fired 1/3 of District principals, and, Kristof says,

created untold enemies, improved test scores, and — more than almost anyone else — dared to talk openly about the need to replace ineffective teachers. “It’s sort of a taboo topic that nobody wants to talk about,” she acknowledged . . . “I used to say ‘fire people.’ And they said you can’t say that.”

According to Kristof, Rhee is driven by research suggesting that great teachers are far more important to student learning than class size, school resources or anything else. One study suggests that if black kids could get teachers from the profession’s most effective quartile for four years in a row, the achievement gap would disappear.

Rhee herself notes that if she succeeds, “we will take away from all the other school districts and schools across the country the excuse that because the kids are poor, minority, whatever it might be, that they can’t achieve at the same high levels.”

In an understatement, given the importance of Rhee’s effort in the overall battle to improve urban, largely-black schools, Kristof concludes, “It would help if President Obama firmly backed Ms. Rhee.”

It’s about jobs.

The Economist makes these sobering points about unemployment in its March 14 “leader” (editorial):

➢ the world in its deepest recession since the 1930s and global trade shrinking at its fastest pace in 80 years.

➢ an American who loses his job today has less of a chance of finding another one than at any time since records began 50 years ago, something especially worrying when the finances of many households depend on two full incomes.

➢ governments must intervene energetically to help, avoiding Europe’s rigid post 1970s and early 1980s recessions labor-market that kept unemployment high for decades.

➢ even if the recession ends soon (and there is little sign of that happening), the asset bust and the excessive borrowing that led to it are likely to overshadow the world economy for years to come. Yesterday’s jobs, from Spanish bricklayer to Wall Street trader, are not coming back.

➢ we need flexible labor markets, since the more easily jobs can be destroyed, the more easily new ones can be created. Programs that help today by keeping people in existing jobs will tomorrow become a drag.

➢ unemployment will blight millions of lives for years. The politicians’ task is to make sure the misery is not measured in decades.

Healthcare Hero Ron Wyden

We may have healthcare reform, and we may have it coming out of the Senate Finance Committee, the place where universal healthcare has previously gone to die. In an interview at the “Real Clear Politics” website, Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a leader of the bipartisan health reform initiative, spells out what the package may look like. Noting that health care costs -- which accounted for less than 8% of America's economy in 1990 and less than 12% in 2000 -- now account for more 17% of GDP, Wyden says, “fixing health care and fixing the economy are two sides of the same coin. . . the reason the take home pay of the American worker never goes up is because health care is gobbling up everything in sight.”

Wyden makes these points:

➢ containing health costs is absolutely pivotal. Make sure individuals are able to pool their funds, so they can be part of a larger group with bargaining power.

➢ stop the insurance market from discriminating against people who are sick. Have insurers compete on the basis of price, benefit, and quality rather than cherry picking.

➢ give people a choice. Even if they have employer coverage, most don't have a choice of plans. Give them the ability to benefit from careful selection of their coverage

➢ More than $700 billion is wasted on administrative paperwork and health care services that do not help people feel better or prevent future illness.

➢ fee-for-service reimbursement rewards doctors and hospitals for volume -- not keeping patients healthy or being efficient. Patient decision aides can guide people through their treatment options for surgery, chemotherapy, and hospice. Pay for performance will send costs down, rewarding areas that deliver quality.

➢ Bundling services, paying a flat rate for a set of services, helps squeeze waste out of the system.

➢ We need tough insurance reforms, and tough malpractice reforms. Democrats are usually for the insurance reforms and Republicans for malpractice reforms. Both are going to have to accept changes.

Wyden believes Democrats have been right on the idea of covering everybody, because if you don't cover everybody then the people who are uninsured will shift their bills to the insured. And Republicans understand you shouldn't turn everything over to the government; that there should be a wide berth for the private sector, for private marketplace choices. But now, Wyden thinks Republicans are saying we have to get everybody covered for economic reasons—that's how you hold down costs; that's how you stop cost shifting. And Democrats are saying look we know what happens if you freeze innovation, if you have a one size fits all governmental standard.

So it looks like a bipartisan bill might work. As he says, “Reformers are very much. . . in agreement . . . [First,] you have to cover everybody. Second, you ought to be able to keep the coverage you have. Third, you've got to reform the private insurance markets, because it's broken. Fourth, you've got to reward prevention. Fifth, would be the value of Health Information technology, which we pursued in the stimulus.”

Finally, Wyden supports a straightforward discussion about how to die without incurring huge costs. He believes we should provide as many choices as possible to American families; no federal government dictating to families what ought to be done or setting up intrusive federal bureaucracy as the arbiter of end-of-life judgments.

“The Class”

François Bégaudeau plays himself in this French movie about the trials of teaching middle school students in the working class 20th arrondissement, Paris. The movie, France’s nominee for best foreign film Oscar, is based on Bégaudeau’s own book and seems extraordinarily real. His students are Arab, African, Caribbean, Chinese, and white—a mixture on the scale one finds in urban public middle schools throughout the U.S. Bégaudeau tries to connect with his teenagers by being their friend. It doesn’t work. He tries and tries, and they don’t learn. Well, some learn, but the characters who dominate the story [picture, hands up] don’t seem to.

I loved “Stand and Deliver” (1988), a movie about Bolivian teacher Jaime Escalante who was able to connect with his East LA Hispanic math students. Escalante was successful, in part, because he was of their culture, of their world. France wants its students to be French, to embrace one grand (and it is) culture. Bégaudeau’s troublemakers are having none of that.

I’m seeing urban public schools as a dumping ground, where children end up because their parents can’t or won’t pay for a private education—an education that works. Some children will make it out; their parents insist that they do. The majority correctly see they are parked in school by a system that has nothing better for them to do between childhood and adulthood. Naturally, they don’t like it.

In France, in the U.S., the system is broken. We know the solution is to create public schools of choice, schools students go to because they want to be there. Many of the successful teachers in these choice schools will be people of their own culture, and they will learn together, parent, teacher, student.

The old way: top-down, middle class to working class, white to minority. The only way: schools that serve their customers or go out of business.

Top 15 Countries and Global Cities

In November, I looked at how my list of the Top 15 countries squared with the G-20 group that met in Washington to tackle the global economic crisis. We found significant overlap. Let’s now look at another list—Foreign Policy’s global cities index. Since global cities are about population and political and economic clout, there should be considerable overlap between the two rankings.

And there is. Every “country” (I count the European Union as a mega-country, and give it two slots in my Top 15) has at least one global city on Foreign Policy’s list of 60, with the exception of Iran. While Tehran is big, it isn’t “global” in its connections. Otherwise, the overlap is complete.

And do the global cities overlap with the top countries? Well, of the top 20 global cities, all are located in my top 15 countries except for:

➢ Singapore, ranked #7 and associated with neighboring Indonesia (#9 on my list), while Indonesia’s biggest city, Jakarta, ranks well behind Singapore at #48;

➢ Seoul, ranked #9, capital of South Korea, which though outside the top 15, is in my top 20 countries, and;

➢ Sydney, ranked #16, and Australia is a G-20 member.

Also, the next 19 cities (21-39) are all in countries in my Top 20 or the G-20. To a great extent, therefore, Foreign Policy’s index of global cities affirms my Top 15/Top 20 and the G-20 lists of countries.

Hoping for Failure

Democrats say they are making Limbaugh into the Republican they love to hate because Rush said,

I've been listening to Barack Obama for a year and a half. I know what his politics are. I know what his plans are, as he has stated them. I don't want them to succeed.

Limbaugh wants Obama’s program to fail. That’s certainly bad politics; most of the country wants Obama to succeed in righting our crippled economy.

Still, one has to note that Democrats outraged at Limbaugh’s statement are kettles calling the pot black. As FOX News’ Bill Sammon found, James Carville [picture] said of Bush, just before 9.11, "I certainly hope he doesn't succeed." And in 2006, 51% of Democrats wanted Bush to fail, according to a FOX News/Opinion Dynamics poll.

Dems’ Latest Bogeyman

Democrats are stuffing and mounting Rush Limbaugh as the new “monster trophy” for their party to rally against. Vilifying a targeted conservative to win elections worked for Democrats in 1996 and 1998 (Newt Gingrich), in 2006 (Tom Delay and Mark Foley), and 2008 (Bush). Why stop now?

From Debra Saunders, San Francisco Chronicle:

As Politico.com reported last week, Demo gurus James Carville and Stan Greenberg first concocted the idea of making Limbaugh the GOP albatross last year after a poll showed that among younger voters Limbaugh's ratings were in the toilet. White House adviser David Axelrod and Press Secretary Robert Gibbs joined in the get-Limbaugh gambit, while White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel called Limbaugh "the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican party" on CBS' "Face the Nation." The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee jumped into the act and sent out an e-mail instructing recipients to send an "urgent call" for GOP senators "to denounce [Limbaugh’s] shameful rhetoric."

The Best War

If World War II was “the good war,” Obama’s version of the war to reshape America is “the best war.” In his view, we finally have our priorities right—government organizing to transfer resources from the rich to those below them, not wasting our resources in some overseas killing venture. Total war means government in full control. As Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."

The conventional view of why the Great Depression lasted so long—1938, nine long years after the ’29 crash, was almost as bad a year as the Depression’s 1933 low point—is that Roosevelt stopped spending too soon. Government should have spent more. We needed the gigantic government spending we had in World War II. Here’s how prominent Keynesian economist Paul Krugman sees it: “What saved the economy, and the New Deal, was the enormous public works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy’s needs.” Krugman wants Obama to undertake a World War II-like commitment to spending to pull us out of our current mess.

Michael Goodwin of the New York Daily News has seen what Krugman sees, and more bluntly proclaims, “the Obama administration is on a war footing. Make that a class-war footing.”

In The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes’ highly-readable book on the Great Depression, Shlaes says (p.31) Herbert Hoover, the president who didn’t understand depressions, believed “life was like wartime, and that government ought to plan more, as if at war.” Even Hoover, but certainly Roosevelt, wanted the country on a war footing to fight the Depression.

Obama seems after the biggest possible warlike effort at home, one that could transform America into a European-like welfare state.

But didn't government control of the economy end up throughout the world being the 20th Century’s most notable failure?

Market Keeps Dropping

"Nobody wants to get in the way as the freight train comes down the embankment," said one Wall St. trader. The market has fallen 14 of the last 18 sessions, and is now in a range where, like My FOX INDEX, which measures the distance from a healthy market (12,000 Dow, 1,300 S&P, 2,500 NASDAQ) to nil, nada, nothing, it hits new lows daily. Yesterday the FOX INDEX arrived at a new bottom of -7,223, now 46% of the way from healthy to zero [see chart]. Oh my. Freight train going down the embankment.

When Will Housing Hit Bottom?

My FOX INDEX, which measures the distance to a healthy market (12,000 Dow, 1,300 S&P, 2,500 NASDAQ), hit a new bottom of -7,013 (we run the 7-months-old FOX INDEX whenever it hits new lows), 44% of the way from healthy to zero [see chart]. That’s bad. The market hasn’t been lower in 12 years.

To be contrary, let’s suggest reasons to be calm. What’s happening in finance pretty much makes sense. In the late 1990’s, people said there was too little reason for the dot.com boom to keep ballooning. They were right. Dot.com went bust in 2000.

In 2005, people warned low interest rates and subprime financing were pushing housing prices to unnatural highs. They were right. Housing ballooned in 2005-6, and went “pow!” in 2007-8. Now we are paying the price. Markets move in cycles. Boom-bust-boom-bust. Good times follow bad, and we always overshoot in both directions. When will we hit bottom? When we do, the bottom will be irrationally low. It always is.

Robert Samuelson writes about the problem with the current housing crisis:

➢ home prices are down 26% from their peak. Since late 2007, housing-related jobs -- carpenters, realtors, appraisers -- have dropped by 1 million, a quarter of all lost jobs.

➢ the problem is too much supply chasing too little demand. Huge unsold homes inventories depress prices and construction.

➢ housing may be more affordable now than in decades, thanks to lower prices and falling mortgage rates. The National Association of Realtors’ "affordability index" estimates the family income needed to buy a median-priced house is now the highest since the index's start in 1970.

Samuelson speculates as to why lower prices don’t spur demand. He blames deflationary psychology: if yesterday's $250,000 house is now $200,000, it may be $175,000 by June. Waiting is better.
This deflationary psychology is self-fulfilling since the more buyers wait, the more prices fall. Samuelson wants to bribe prospective buyers not to wait by giving them a 10% tax credit, up to $15,000, on a new home purchase.

Whatever the specifics, government does have to act to break the deflationary spiral before our recession becomes a depression, and the wait for the next boom costs us all too much.

Cable: FOX Rules

Obama may be president, and CNN and MSNBC may be the news networks of the “in” party. But in the ratings, conservative-slated FOX News still rules. FOX leads in every demographic, in every time period, with every news program. In fact, the only places where FOX News’s audience is less than the combined CNN + MSNBC audiences is with 25-54 year olds, and with the 9 pm (Hannity) and 10 pm (Greta) FOX shows. Overall, and in total prime time, FOX’s audience is larger than CNN + MSNBC combined.

China-Taiwan Peace Agreement Possible?

A Taiwan commentator has figured out how China and Taiwan can sign a peace agreement without China having to recognize Taiwan as a separate entity. Recognition is a big stumbling block, since China is determined to deny Taiwan any national government status.

It turns out that just as Deng Xiaoping wanted to get back Hong Kong before he died, China’s current leader Hu Jintao wants to solve the Taiwan problem before his term as party boss runs out. The Taiwan commentator, Joe Hung, notes the civil war that drove China’s Nationalists to Taiwan was a fight between two political parties—the Kuomintang (Nationalists) and the Communists—over who should rule China. Now, the solution is for the two feuding parties to sign a document agreeing to settle their differences peacefully (as do most other political parties).

Hu could sign for China in his capacity as party chief. On Taiwan’s side, the Kuomintang—which controls the government—would put the question before Taiwan’s people in a referendum. The referendum would pass, because Taiwan’s people want peace.

Would China go along? Joe points out that Hu met with Kuomintang leader Lien Chan in Beijing in 2005, and both pledged to work toward a peace agreement. The Taiwan peace agreement would trigger further steps toward reunification, steps blocked as long as Taiwan’s population fears China will settle reunification by force, instead of peacefully.

Joe doesn’t mention another point: Hu could tell the Chinese military and hardliners wary of dropping the use-of-force option that no party-to-party agreement carries the weight of an international treaty. In fact, though, easing the Taiwan population’s fear of invasion is the best way for China to move reunification forward.

Movie’s Powerful Message

“All Quiet on the Western Front.” “M*A*S*H.” “Platoon.” Now comes “Waltz with Bashir” [picture]. They are stories of ordinary people caught up in the horror of war. As such, they bring the costs of war home to us in a powerful way that can’t be ignored. War IS hell. Experiencing the hell of war via a movie helps drive a population away from war as an option, as it should.

What works best, I think are stories of average people ripped out of civilian life, and sent off to war whether or not they wanted to fight. In other words, draftees. It’s why “Waltz with Bashir,” about ordinary Israelis who find themselves in Lebanon in 1982, comes across with so much force, and why Hollywood’s series of anti-Iraqi films all bombed. However “ordinary” our soldiers and marines in Iraq are, they all volunteered for service, including the benefits military service provides families today. None were draftees. Huge difference.

Still, “Waltz with Bashir” is so very current, immersed as it is in the primary challenge the world faces today—the willingness of Palestinian, Arab, and other Islamic terrorists to die for the cause of ridding the Muslim world of secular or non-Muslim modernists allied with the West. No nation has worked harder to cope with this threat than Israel. “Waltz with Bashir” shows how much more difficult the struggle has become since 1982 for that small nation of just 5.3 million Jewish people.

Female Foreign Policy

Women are the future
All the big revelations. . .
I dont wanna talk about wars between nations
Not right now

--U2, “Get on Your Boots”

Victor Davis Hanson, among others, is saying “enough” to the Obama administration’s repeated bad mouthing to foreign audiences of Bush and his “mistakes”. What is it with the new people? You won, now govern, and govern by being tough on bad people, and kind to fellow Americans when addressing foreigners. Right?

The intellectuals who run the Democratic party advocate a female foreign policy. Democrats are the party of women and minorities. The party’s enemy are macho, muscle-brained warriors who fight senseless wars overseas that drain resources needed to help folks at home. Masculine means fighting for a cause greater than yourself, maybe in the name of God. Masculine means making your own way at home, being willing to compete in an economy where success is its own reward, and failure teaches lessons that can produce future success. Men were farmers, steelworkers, small businessmen, soldiers. Now they are often lost, unemployed, in prison.

Today, women make up half the workforce. They tend to work for government, for non profits, to be paid to care for others. They believe government exists in part to rebalance the country away from the men who previously enslaved women through custom and law. Women tend to be pacifists who believe wars start not overseas, but within clubrooms at home—begun by men who want war. These women believe men find enemies overseas that a) don’t really exist, or b) are so weak they should be ignored.

During the Bush years, the female-dominated Democratic party and the media found allies in the war-weary nations of Western Europe. To me, Jacques Chirac and his friend Gerhard Schroeder, the French and German leaders at the time we liberated Iraq from Saddam Hussein, were bad men. Chirac knew French businesses were taking money from Saddam that was supposed to feed the Iraqi people, and selling Saddam weapons instead. Schroeder traded on anti-Americanism (anti-Bush sentiment) by opposing intervention in Iraq in 2002 to help win an election he was expected to lose. Democrats and the media, looking abroad for support for their anti-war views, jumped on the Chirac-Schroeder bandwagon.

Now Europe has changed. Iraq has changed. Terrorism still threatens us. We need a masculine foreign policy with masculine allies in Europe to deal with the Afghanistan-Pakistan area and Iran. Bad timing for a Democratic-feminist foreign policy.

Obama Struggles to Spark Stock Gains

President Obama said his economic recovery plan has “three legs.” One is the stimulus package he signed yesterday, as the Dow dropped 298 points. One is treasury secretary Tim Geithner’s plan, announced a week ago, to revive the banking sector. That plan bombed immediately, sending the Dow down 382 points.

The final leg Obama announced today. It seeks to help homeowners facing foreclosure to remain in their homes. At least today, the market didn’t plunge. Nevertheless, my FOX INDEX [chart] settled at its lowest point since last November, when Obama’s naming Geithner his treasury chief sharply lifted the market.

The FOX INDEX, which measures the distance to a healthy market (12,000 Dow, 1,300 S&P, 2,500 NASDAQ), hit its bottom of -6,179 (index is 6 months old) last November 20th. It’s now one bad day from a new low, and 89% of the way toward the eleven-year low the market reached in October 2002.

Can we hope for a near-term market turnaround? Richard Dickson, market strategist at Lowry Research in Florida, said unless we have a rebound rally soon, the market should drop below its November lows. "A failure of demand to develop would suggest the market is vulnerable to another leg lower in the still-ongoing bear market," Dickson wrote in a note to clients.

Japan & the U.S.: Lost Economic Leadership?

Robert Samuelson in the Washington Post makes some stark points about Japan’s “lost decade” and its implications for the U.S.:

➢ in the 1990s. . . Japan experienced a listless, boring prosperity. Its economy expanded in all but two years, although [u]nemployment rose to 5% in 2001 from 2.1% in 1990. Not good, but hardly a calamity. . .[Yet f]rom 1956 to 1973, Japan had grown 9% a year; in the 1980s, it was still growing at 4%.

➢ Japan's economic reverses reflect deeply held social and political values. The same might be true of us. Japan has . . . a "dual economy." On the one hand, export industries are highly efficient. They face intense global competition. On the other, many domestic industries are inefficient and sheltered from local competition by regulations or custom.

➢ this system broke down in the mid-1980s. The rising yen made Japanese exports costlier on world markets. New competitors -- South Korea, Taiwan -- emerged. Japan lost its engine of growth and hasn't found a new one. That's Japan's central economic problem. . . Even now, the economy is trade dependent; in December, exports dropped 35% from a year earlier, pushing Japan into a deep recession.

➢ Since the early 1980s, American economic growth has depended on a steady rise in consumer spending supported by more debt and increasing asset prices (stocks, homes). . . the present U.S. slump signals the end of upbeat consumption-led growth. . . its legacy is an overbuilt and overemployed consumption sector. . . [Is] our system. . . adaptive enough to create new sources of growth to fill the void left by retreating shoppers[?]

Yikes. Are we permanently in the trough along with Japan? Probably not, but the U.S. isn’t the place to look for the folks who'll get us out of the ditch. The next center of growth is likely to be Asia and its middle class. As the World Bank says, “a new engine of private demand growth will be needed, and we see a likely candidate in the still largely untapped consumption potential of the rapidly expanding middle classes in the large emerging-market countries.”

Israel: Tough Times, Tough Choices

Israel had an election that moved the country markedly to the right. I have been wrong about politics in Israel and in Palestine. This time, I want to be careful.

The Israeli politicians attempting to form a new government now have to deal with
Avigdor Lieberman [picture], leader of the Israel Beiteinu ("Israel is our home") party which came in an alarming third, behind Tzipi Livni’s Kadima and behind Likud, headed by Binyamin Netanyahu, the likely next prime minister. Lieberman favors a sharper division between Jews and Arabs that would push Israeli citizen Arabs out of Israel into Palestine. It sounds awful—like apartheid, with echoes of Judenfrei Nazi Germany.

The Israeli press doesn’t seem so horrified, sort of treating Lieberman as a politician who knows how to win votes. Nevertheless, there is discussion of the coalition that would work best for the U.S. under the circumstances—one headed by Netanyahu and including Labor (Ehud Barak) along with Kadima, and pointedly leaving out Lieberman and the smaller right-wing and religious parties. At least this slightly moderate option is under consideration.

Understanding Obama’s Victory

69.5 million votes! “Obama's raw popular vote margin of victory (9.5 million) was the largest ever for a non-incumbent presidential candidate.” In fact, Obama got 7.4 million more votes than the previous all-time top vote getter—Bush in 2004. Obama won as a black in a still-white country, with just 43% of the white vote. He’s the first northern Democrat (liberal) elected president since Kennedy in 1960, and Obama-Biden is the first all-northern Democratic ticket to win since Roosevelt-Wallace in 1940.

The Obama campaign is, of course, the first to ride to the White House on the back of the internet. Esquire’s profile of David Plouffe tells how Plouffe built a “fulsome pulsing beast” from 13 million e-mail addresses; a beast that raised money, generated volunteers, and delivered votes, again and again and again. A list of 13 million. And Obama wins with 10.4 million more votes than Kerry in 2004. The internet built that increase.

And money. Obama, of course, inspired the unprecedented giving of money and volunteer time. Especially money. $533 million worth. In 2004, Bush’s 62 million votes came from raising $367 million, or $5.92 a vote (Bush, unlike Obama, observed federal campaign spending limits). In 2008, Obama won 12% more votes than Bush while raising 45% more money than Bush. Obama spent $1.47 more a vote—25% more for each vote—than Bush. Looked at another way, however, if Obama reached Bush’s 62 million votes by just matching Bush’s $5.92 a vote, he still had a whopping $22.38 per vote left over to “gain” each new vote beyond 62 million.

Also, please remember: 3/4ths of Obama’s money came from those who gave over $200—not your typical student donation.

McCain spent less in 2008 than Bush did in 2004, paid less per vote than Bush, and received 97% of Bush’s 2004 vote—at 60 million, the highest vote total ever for a loser. So McCain largely held onto the GOP base, while Obama reached new voters.

Obama inspired giving; his effective organizing brought the money home. And yes, money still is “the mother’s milk of politics.”

Understanding Palin

Yuval Levin in Commentary has a lot to say about Sarah Palin. He correctly viewed Palin and Obama as the dominant 2008 election figures. And Levin made several other points that ring true to me:

➢ some criticisms of Palin were entirely appropriate. She had no experience in foreign or defense policy and very little . . . command of either. In a time of war, with a 72 year-old presidential candidate who had already survived one bout with cancer, this was a cause for very real concern. And Palin did perform dreadfully in some early interviews. . . But the more common visceral hostility toward her seemed to have little to do with these objections. . . The attempt to destroy Sarah Palin by rushing to paint her as a backwoods extremist was not a show of strength, but rather a sign of desperation.

➢ the Palin episode [was] really about. . . the age-old tension between populism and elitism in our public life, which is to say, between the notion that we are best governed by the views, needs, and interests of the many and the conviction that power can only be managed wisely by a select few. In America. . . the distinction between populism and elitism is further subdivided into cultural and economic. . .

➢ The Republican party has been the party of cultural populism and economic elitism. . . traditional values, unabashedly patriotic, anti-cosmopolitan, non-nuanced Joe Sixpack, even as they pursue an economic policy that aims at elite investor-driven growth. . . Republicans tend to believe the dynamism of the market is for the best but that cultural change can be dangerously disruptive. . .

➢ the Democrats have been the party of cultural elitism and economic populism. . . Democrats identify with the mistreated, underpaid, overworked, crushed-by-the-corporation “people against the powerful,” but tend to look down on those people’s religion, education, and way of life. . .Democrats tend to believe dynamic social change stretches the boundaries of inclusion for the better but that economic dynamism is often ruinous and unjust.

➢ intellectual elitism is actually fairly new in America, though it has been a dominant feature of European society. . . entry to the American intellectual elite is, in principle, open to all who pursue it. And pursuing it is not [difficult]. . . most of this elite’s prominent members hail from middle-class origins and not from traditional bastions of American privilege and wealth. . . the worldview of the intellectual elite begins from an unstated assumption that governing is fundamentally an exercise of the mind: an application of the proper mix of theory, expertise, and intellectual distance that calls for knowledge and verbal fluency more than for prudence born of life’s hard lessons.

➢ the intellectual elite want the government to serve the interests of [lower-middle-class families, but] do not want those people to hold . . . power. They see lower-middle-class populists . . . as profoundly ill-suited for governance, because they lack the accoutrements required for its employment—especially in foreign policy, which. . . is thought to be an intellectual exercise. [That’s why] Barack Obama, who actually has far less experience in executive governance than Palin, was not dismissed as unprepared for the presidency. Palin may have been elected governor of Alaska, but his peers in Cambridge had elected Obama editor of the Harvard Law Review. . .

➢ those who reacted so viscerally against [Palin] evinced little or no appreciation for an essential premise of democracy: that practical wisdom matters at least as much as formal education, and that leadership can emerge from utterly unexpected places. The presumption that the only road to power passes through the Ivy League and its tributaries is neither democratic nor sensible, and is, moreover, a sharp and wrongheaded break from the American tradition of citizen governance.

Yet in the end, Levin concluded that “Palin’s reformism, like McCain’s. . . offered no. . . coherent policy ideas that might actually address the concerns of American families.” But then Levin failed to strike the main point: voters wanted a president who could fix a bad economy. As Levin said above, Republicans stand for “economic elitism.” At a time when the “economic elite” failed America, McCain and Palin had nothing to say. No wonder the Democrat “cultural elite” won in 2008.

1981 (reprise)

Just finished watching Obama’s press conference. As I suggested last October, Obama plans to replay the New Deal, when Roosevelt used the failures of his predecessor, large Democratic majorities, and a heightened sense of national crisis to transform America into an economy run by Washington intellectuals/bureaucrats instead of the businesspeople that conservatives know actually generate jobs.

But the parallels between Obama today and February 1981, the time Reagan took over, are striking as well--as I also said last October. Reagan had a Republican senate and a house with enough “Boll Weevils” (southern Democrats) to provide him a working majority. Reagan’s enemy was inflation, the crisis that empowers Republicans the way job loss empowers Democrats. His predecessor produced the problem that Reagen called in his early February first TV address to America on the economy, “the worst economic mess since the Great Depression.” Reagan, a great communicator like Obama and Roosevelt, would use his persuasive powers and political strength to downsize government and cut taxes—as Obama will upsize government and, eventually, raise taxes.

Reagan’s sledgehammer approach drove unemployment up to 10.8%, and cost Republicans in the 1982 congressional election. But by 1984, the economy recovered, Republicans had licked inflation, and Reagan won a massive re-election victory. “Morning in America.”

It’s likely Obama knows the history pretty well.

Hate Bush, Love Obama

Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution speaks for many conservatives when he wonders about the intense and lasting hatred of Bush. He makes these points:

• Bush hatred and Obama euphoria . . . reveal more about those who feel them than the men at which they are directed[. They] are opposite sides of the same coin [representing] the triumph of passion over reason . . .Those wallowing in Bush hatred and . . . Obama euphoria frequently regard those who do not share their passion as contemptible and beyond the reach of civilized discussion. . . And it is disproportionately members of the intellectual and political class in whose souls they flourish.

• Bush hatred and Obama euphoria are particularly toxic because they . . . have been promoted by the news media, whose professional responsibility, it has long been thought, is to gather the facts and analyze their significance, and by the academy, whose scholarly training, it is commonly assumed, reflects an aptitude for and dedication to systematic study and impartial inquiry.

• by assembling and maintaining faculties that think alike about politics and think alike that the university curriculum must instill correct political opinions, our universities cultivate intellectual conformity and discourage . . . reason . . .[T]hey infuse a certain progressive interpretation of our freedom and equality with sacred significance, zealously requiring not only outward obedience to its policy dictates but inner persuasion of the heart and mind. . . [transforming] dissenters into apostates . . . and leaders into redeemers.

Why such hatred? Why such euphoria? I think it’s because the American political system is now so efficient. The two parties used to be mushy combinations of disparate interest groups—southern conservative Democrats alongside big-city liberals, isolationist Republican farmers voting with Yankee internationalists. Now the two parties divide by ideology, with each side having built a coalition that holds together quite effectively. It’s because the parties work so well that the battles are close, competitive, crucial. . . and bitter.

Daschle Bye Bye

So Daschle has withdrawn his name, as I suggested he might a few hours ago (midnight Hawaii). I knew liberal commentator Marie Cocco had a powerful case against him, knew George Stephanopoulos, in saying on "ABC World News" last night that Daschle would survive, provided the amazing reason that many of his Democratic colleagues also had cars with drivers and didn’t want that a basis for dropping Daschle (such an “inside the Beltway” justification screams the guy’s in trouble), and knew from Nina Easton of Fortune that White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was drilled by reporters at yesterday’s press briefing who kept saying "Well, is there any amount of back taxes that is too much?”

But what I didn’t know was the New York Times had called for Daschle’s withdrawal in this morning’s paper. Obviously, Daschle and the Obama people still have to listen to the “Times”.

Daschle's Legacy

Obama has undermined what was supposed to be a central tenet of his administration: that he would sweep away the rules under which Washington cossets itself in a surreal bubble where lobbyists, members of Congress, industry heavyweights, fat-cat donors and other insiders do their own bidding first and put the people's interests last.

--Marie Cocco, Washington Post

Cocco is a liberal, a Hillary supporter. Obama may have had a great inauguration, but it’s been a rough two weeks since. What do you bet Tom Daschle withdraws as health and human services secretary-designate to save Obama further embarrassment?

I think Daschle can pull out without undermining his stealth strategy to push through national health insurance. If anything, Daschle’s troubles may cause the Obama team to work even harder on health insurance as a memorial to Daschle’s efforts.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel documented the strategy’s key elements:

1. In a 2008 book outlining his health-care reform, Daschle offered Democrats two pieces of political advice: Move fast, before there can be a public debate, and write as vague a bill as possible. By the time America wakes up to what's happening, it'll be too late.

2. Democrats first passed a State Children's Health Insurance Program double in size, making eligible kids whose parents make $65,000 a year, covering pregnant women, and automatically enrolling their new arrivals. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates 2.4 million individuals will drop their private coverage for the public program.

3. Now the $820 billion stimulus package dramatically expands the number of Americans who qualify for Medicaid. It covers Americans who have lost their jobs, their spouses and their children, those who lost jobs early last year, and those who will lose their jobs up to 2011. The federal government is footing the whole bill, while mostly forbidding states to apply income tests. CBO estimates: an additional 1.2 million covered in 2009.

4. The stimulus package also expands Cobra, the program that lets unemployed retain access to their former health benefits for 18 months. Now any former employee over the age of 55 can keep Cobra until Medicare at 65. And while employees previously paid their Cobra premiums, the feds now will pay 65%. CBO estimates: 7 million more Americans under federal coverage.

5. And the package makes the government the national coordinator for electronic health records, able to certify what platforms are acceptable, and cutting out a growing private market that is competing to improve transparency and let consumers compare providers and costs. Obama’s folks believe only government should be publishing (and setting) health-care prices.

As Strassel notes, “Democrats may move 10 million more Americans under the federal health umbrella -- in just four weeks!” And there’s more. Democrats are “gearing up for a Medicare fight, [planning] to lower the eligibility age to 55, [which] they'll pay for by slashing the private Medicare Advantage option.”

National health insurance by stealth, thanks to Daschle—dead or alive.

Obama = Progressive = Collective

The Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne is a liberal who sees where the president is going:

Barack Obama intends to use conservative values for progressive ends. He will cast extreme individualism as an infantile approach to politics that must be supplanted by a more adult sense of personal and collective responsibility. He will honor government's role in our democracy and not degrade it. . . Obama pronounced debates about the size of government as irrelevant. What matters is "whether it works." Quietly but purposefully, he [is] overturning the Reagan revolution.

Dionne believes Obama’s “communitarian vision” fits poorly with "the stale political arguments" between liberals and conservatives that Obama frequently condemns, because the outdated arguments are about “two varieties of individualism.” Now, it’s time for the collective.

Conservative commentator David Frum of the American Enterprise Institute reached a similar conclusion. After listening to Obama’s inaugural, Frum wrote that “the age of big government, re-regulation, multiculturalism, and process-oriented diplomacy has come roaring back.”

Like Dionne, Frum invoked Reagan, but as a positive example. Frum believes Obama will follow the Gipper’s style:

Reagan showed a president can hold fast to a strong ideological line while still practicing a more congenial style. . . Reagan. . .was a conciliatory radical who always followed the old Roman maxim: “Suaviter in modo, foriter in re.” Gently in the manner, strongly in the substance.

To Frum, the Reagan-Obama path is “just a more polite way of demanding the whole damn field.”

“Communitarianism,” here we come.

China Basher?

Here’s a headline you don’t want to see: “Beijing says 10m Chinese have lost their jobs since [financial] crunch began.”

And here’s a story behind that headline that’s similarly hard to digest. James Pethokoukis of U.S. News & World Report writes:

Timothy Geithner, our probable next treasury secretary, [just took] a swipe at China . . . for manipulating its currency. Now first, Obama should be praying that the current economic slowdown in China doesn't lead to political chaos in the Middle Kingdom. It already appears that economic activity there has fallen off the cliff and unrest is rising. Second, helping shepherd China to being a full-fledged democratic-capitalist nation is what Geithner should be focusing on and talking about.

Here's how JPMorgan Chase economist Jim Glassman puts it: "China isn’t manipulating, it’s managing its currency to manage its way out of poverty. China’s living standard is 10% of the U.S. level. China isn’t taking advantage of the U.S. If China is successful, it will be able to reform its financial sector, eventually float its currency, and create a new market with opportunity for everyone. We should be cheering China’s progress not complaining about its currency. A stable yuan is a means to a better future for China and for the U.S., too."

Amen. In Henry Paulson, we had a Treasury Secretary who, if he didn’t turn out to be “master of the (financial) universe,” did know how to help China. Now comes Geithner.

Great Brains (III)

With Zelizer, we see again how Vietnam laid down a fault line between those who see war as an extension of politics and those who believe civilization has moved beyond war. Zelizer writes:

Sometimes Obama's team has articulated a new national security agenda—talking about multilateralism and diplomacy and "Smart Power" . . . But at other times, his team has attempted to show that Democrats can be equally aggressive on defense—appointing Bob Gates to secretary of defense and talking tough about a significant escalation of force in Afghanistan.

To Zelizer and others, “tough” is bad. Zelizer wants Obama’s “best and brightest” to commit to “smart power,” Joseph Nye’s attempt to save his appallingly-misnamed “soft power” from oblivion. In the Los Angeles Times, Nye himself discusses the importance to the Obama team of “smart power”, and shows how “smart” is the son of “soft”:

President Obama reminded us Tuesday that "our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint." A week ago. . . Hillary Rodham Clinton said: " We must use what has been called 'smart power,' the full range of tools at our disposal."

Smart power is the combination of hard and soft power. Soft power is the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments. . . soft power [includes] culture . . . values . . . and policies . . . Of course, soft power is not the solution to all problems.

No kidding.

Nye then describes how he saved his “soft power” by teaming with former Bush administration official Richard Armitage of the generally hard-line Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) to form a “CSIS Commission on Smart Power.” Armitage, Mr. Hard (until he left Bush over Iraq policy), and Nye, Mr. Soft, therefore produced Ms. Smart for new Secretary of State Clinton [picture at State Department].

So here we are. The last time “the best and brightest” were in charge during war, Kennedy was president, his team believed in being tough (“hard power”), American policy was to contain Communism by force if necessary, and we went to war in Vietnam. This blog is full of entries (here’s one) paralleling Kennedy to Bush. To Zelizer, Nye, and other academics, the Vietnam Tragedy is the great lesson of their lives. They want to make very sure Obama doesn’t follow Bush into some wrong war. So it’s time to take on directly Kennedy’s “best and brightest.” Say no to “hard power.” Say yes to “soft,” er “smart power.”

Great Brains (II)

Democrats are about, as Obama said in his Inaugural, government that works.

Of course, the phrase “best and brightest,” made famous by David Halberstam in his book of that title, drips with irony because it’s about the brains who produced the Vietnam mess. The Woodrow Wilson School’s Julian E. Zelizer is out with a timely warning to the Obama folks to avoid what he calls three big mistakes of the Kennedy era’s “best and brightest”:

1. "Whiz Kid" Robert McNamara [picture] was too certain he could figure out a way to make Vietnam work; his confidence causing him to downplay strong warnings from the military, certain administration officials, and many legislators.

2. Kennedy’s people were too afraid of the political damage Republicans produced in the "Who Lost China" debates of 1952 and 1956 (well, actually not an issue in 1956), so too determined not to lose to Communists again.

3. Kennedy's people were believers in the "imperial presidency," so ignored legislators, such as Georgia's Richard Russell and Idaho's Frank Church, who opposed Vietnam escalations.

Zelizer specifically warns Obama not to ignore the “wisdom of veteran legislators such as Vice President Joe Biden.” That thought alone brings Zelizer’s whole analysis into question. Biden is quickly becoming Obama’s biggest embarrassment—more wiseacre than wiseman.

But back to Kennedy’s “best and brightest.” Their chief failure was ignoring people with Asian experience who knew how difficult it would be to win in the jungles where nationalist hero Ho Chi Minh had vanquished the French a decade earlier. Mike Mansfield, a senator unmentioned by Zelizer, served with the Marines in China and taught East Asian history at the University of Montana. Mansfied was the first U.S. senator (1962) to warn Kennedy the US should avoid further involvement in Vietnam.

McNamara’s doubts about Vietnam show clearly throughout The Pentagon Papers. Beginning in mid-1966, McNamara used his first team, Alain Entoven’s Systems Analysis numbers crunchers, to document that Vietnam was unwinnable—Vietnamese forces had the initiative in 85% of clashes with Americans. While 1966 may seem late, most American deaths in Vietnam occurred after that date.

One big reason European types dominated “best and brightest” decision-making is that the “who lost China” McCarthy-era purges of the State Department left it bereft of China experts. China turning Communist was a tragedy that birthed a second tragedy—waging a costly war in Vietnam without China expertise (see Barbara Tuchman's Pulitzer Prize winning Stilwell and the American Experience in China). Bush made the same mistake in Iraq, avoiding area expertise, until Petraeus took over.

Zelizer somehow misses The Best and Brightest’s chief lesson: listen to folks who speak the language.

Great Brains (I)

The New York Times' David Brooks reminds us that the rational, Keynesian model of economics hardly explains the current financial crisis. As Brooks puts it, how is it that “so many people could be so stupid, incompetent and self-destructive all at once”? Brooks points to new thinking about how the mind works—irrationally. He writes:

each person’s mind contains a panoply of instincts, strategies, intuitions, emotions, memories and habits, which vie for supremacy. An. . . unconscious process determines which of these internal players. . . control[s]

Brooks sources the work of Andrew Lo of M.I.T., who found that if stock traders make a series of apparently good picks, “the dopamine released into their brains creates a stupor that causes them to underperceive danger ahead.” People pick out those bits of data that make them feel good because the data confirms their prejudices.

Yet by contrast, in another piece published four days later on politics not economics, Brooks leans the other way, longing for the rational old days of Kennedy, when it was believed “Keynesian models would . . . scientifically regulate the economy.” Brooks brings back Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology, published in 1962, to show how Obama is seeking to undo the ideological politics since the late 1960’s that have weakened social norms and produced fierce battles ever since, as groups vied to create new standards. As Brooks writes, “Personal became political. Groups fought over basic patterns of morality.”

Brooks says Obama’s challenge will be to translate the social repair we have seen over the past decade (lower crime, less divorce) into political and governing repair. According to Brooks, Obama sees himself as “a pragmatist, an empiricist,” someone “tackling the issues that require joint sacrifice — like reducing deficits, fixing Medicare and Social Security and reforming health care.”

Almost exactly Obama’s age (a week younger) and therefore unable to remember Kennedy’s “Camalot,” Brooks started out as a liberal, likely attracted to Keynesian rationality, Bell’s end of ideology; the Kennedy era’s “best and brightest.” Just like Obama.

Iraq

Bush leaves tomorrow. The economy is in terrible shape, and it went down on Bush’s watch. Bush is in danger of being remembered as 2008’s Herbert Hoover. Bush oversaw the federal relief effort after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the feds, along with Louisiana and New Orleans officials, share responsibility for that mess. One can safely say Bush earns bad grades for both the economic downturn and Katrina’s problems.

Then there is Iraq. Democrats and the media fixated on Iraq from the beginning as Vietnam II. After Vietnam, we were supposed to be smart enough not to start a counterinsurgency. Yet Bush did. Sure Congress, including lots of Democrats, authorized the war. But Bush made the decision to go in, and it was so wrong. Or was it?

Now we know Iraq wasn’t Vietnam II. The U.S. made serious mistakes in Iraq in 2003-04, mistakes that led directly to 2006’s escalation of violence between Sunnis and Shiites. But as we did in World War II after failures in North Africa and Anzio, in Korea after misjudging Chinese intentions there, and in Vietnam after watching Westmorland’s “search and destroy” strategy fail, we adjusted in Iraq after 2006. Under David Petraeus, we turned defeat in Iraq into victory in about 18 months.

It makes a gigantic difference that we won in Iraq and al Qaeda and Muqtada al Sadr’s militia lost. Saddam Hussein is gone. Democracy may indeed stand a chance in the Arab world. The U.S. military has won again—Marines can add another line to their hymn. I don’t buy the stuff about how hard the victory was. You can’t say so publicly, but the total number of Americans killed in action is so much below that reached in previous tough wars, and our military gets better and better at reducing the number of civilian casualties they cause (as opposed to terrorist killings of civilians).

Bush took on al Qaeda after 9.11, defeated them in Afghanistan (though not yet in Pakistan’s Northwest frontier region), defeated al Qaeda and al Sadr’s militia in Iraq, and kept America free from the follow-on terrorist attack we all expected would come. Eventually, history will accord Bush credit for his most important work.

Cave in to Hamas?

Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl’s [picture] analysis of what’s going on in Gaza provides real insight on how liberals look at the world. Diehl writes:

The war against Hamas is proving — once again — that the Middle East's extremist movements cannot be eliminated by military means. . . Israel must choose [between] attempting to drive the Islamic movement from power (which would be costly and leave its troops stuck in Gaza indefinitely). . . or withdrawing without any assurance that rocket fire against its cities would cease. . . [Israel’s] larger fallacy is the persistent conceit among Israeli leaders that Hamas can somehow be wiped out by . . . force of arms.

Actually, as we saw earlier, Israel doen’t have to “wipe out” Hamas to “drive” it “from power.” Israel can degrade Hamas’ capabilities to the point where Gaza’s people prefer the Palestinian Authority’s more moderate approach to Hamas’ ineffective extremism. But warfare working would be a blow, it seems, for Diehl. In Diehl’s eyes, Israel must lose because Hamas embodies the will of the people, presumably as did the Vietcong in Vietnam, and as Shiite militias did in Iraq. (Oops, our side may have won there.) As Diehl says:

Hamas is not merely a terrorist organization but a social and political movement with considerable support. Its ideology. . . is shared by a considerable slice of the population in every Arab country from Morocco to Iraq.

And Hamas enjoys the support of the media. Perhaps since Diehl is of that power group himself, he sees the media’s role as decisive:

the anger generated by the endless, graphic and one-sided coverage of the Middle East's satellite television channels [means that e]very day this war continues, Hamas grows politically stronger. . .

Here’s the counter-argument on war. The world is full of bad guys who believe they can win if “good people” will do nothing. “Good people” prevented us from defeating Hitler in 1936-38, at much less cost. “Good people” agitated for an end of the Cold War in the 1950’s (“Ban the Bomb”), in the 1960’s (“Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!”), and in the late 1970’s-early 1980’s (Nuclear Freeze), before we finally won in 1989. Nearly 70% of Democrats in congress (and 83% of senate Democrats) voted against liberating Kuwait by force in 1991. “Good people” agitated against invading Afghanistan in 2001, and “good people” proclaimed Iraq a disaster and demanded a withdrawal from 2003 to 2008.

So why listen to Diehl? Hope Israel doesn’t.