Blogs

Paul Krugman’s polemical bulldozer rolls along, smashing buildings, automobiles and anything else that evinces even a hint of conservatism. On Friday, the New York Times columnist turned his bulldozer toward GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The issue was Romney’s unfortunate word choice in talking about where he would place his economic focus. The now-famous quote: “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there.”

What Romney was trying to say was that his primary economic goal as president would be to get the economy growing in order to extricate the middle class from its current squeeze. As he said, “I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90 percent, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.” And ultimately he says the goal is to “get this economy going for them.” Eureka! He actually got to economic growth. But, as the Wall Street Journal editorialized, the wait was “excruciating.”

So Romney asked for it with his artless articulation, and he certainly got it. Liberals went after him like foxhounds on the scent. As for Krugman, most of his column offers a solid liberal critique that focuses on past Romney expressions regarding that safety net, a defense of federal transfer payments and an attack on the distribution of largess in Romney’s tax plan. So far, fine.

Writing in the Washington Post, foreign-policy writer Fareed Zakaria touts his own book, The Post-American World, in a column addressed to GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. He suggests Romney should rethink is oft-expressed criticism of President Obama for believing “that this next century is the post-American century.”

The theme of America moving into a less hospitable world less subject to American power is getting a lot of attention. And, based on Zakaria’s past writings, it’s safe to speculate that his book makes a worthy contribution to this literature.

But he pulls from the book a quote that should give any geopolitical analyst pause: “This is a book not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else.”

This can’t be. While societies can generate new wealth through wise economic policies, they can’t generate political power. A fundamental rule of politics, as ironclad as the law of gravity, is that every polity has a finite quantity of political power. The only question is how it will be distributed. This is true of the local school board, the Vermont legislature, the United States of America and the world of nations.

Although Christopher Preble is right that Secretary of Defense Panetta’s statement about NATO forces transitioning out of a combat role in 2013 is long overdue and leaves important unanswered questions about U.S. troops in Afghanistan during the next three years, this transition is definitely a step in the right direction. Some of the questions that still need to be asked involve why any further costs and casualties should be incurred to obtain some result that is ill-defined and may not be achievable anyway. But as each week on the calendar goes by, the difference between the most prudent possible withdrawal from this expedition and what the Obama administration seems to have in mind gets less and less.

Michael Kinsley famously defined defined a gaffe as something a politician inadvertently says that is true but also embarrassing. Mitt Romney's remark this week about his not being concerned about the poor may fall into that category. It reinforces the perception that he is the $200 million man—a politician who truly is out of touch with common folks. Will the comment prove fatal? Hardly. But it does suggest that Romney continues to have a penchant for making gaffes even as he struggles to seem more spontaneous.

It would have been fine if Romney had said that he wants to focus on the middle class. But why did he go on to make the distinction with what he called the "very poor"? He's supposed to be running to become president of all Americans, not just the middle class. Anyway, empathy is the paramount virtue in an Oprahized culture. Coming across as a nakedly venal Scrooge McDuck wallowing in his lucre is not. The worst thing a politician can do is say he isn't concerned about something or someone. It's old school.

And why did Romney make it sound hunky-dory that there are government programs to take care of them? After all, the standard conservative credo is that government help is not OK. That, in fact, it hampers the poor from attempting to alter their circumstances. This must be one of the few times in recent memory when a conservative Republican, which is what Romney says he is even as conservatives doubt it, has endorsed welfare programs.

Secretary Panetta’s announcement that the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan will end as early as mid-2013 is a positive development. But it is long overdue and still leaves too many questions unanswered. After more than ten years of war in Afghanistan, the administration should follow through on its commitment to end combat operations and withdraw all troops by 2014. Continuing to narrow our objectives will make this war winnable.

Politically, this makes perfect sense for the Obama administration. It is a shot across the bow of his political opponents and those wishing for an indefinite combat mission in Afghanistan. Secretary Panetta’s announcement allows the administration to get on the side of voters who want to draw down in Afghanistan. By opposing any drawdown, his critics side with the much smaller segment of the American people who still support the nation-building mission.

President Obama is in a position similar to the debate over Iraq in his 2008 presidential campaign. He argued in 2008 that he would end a grinding war he inherited. The president can claim victory (and vindication) in Iraq and argue that if you liked the first act, you’ll love the second. He will end another grinding war he inherited—and conveniently gloss over the fact that he sent more troops to Afghanistan than President Bush ever did.

Thursday’s Washington Post contains a Dan Balz column that demonstrates why Balz remains one of the country’s most respected campaign analysts. He makes the point that, yes, this has been a singularly unpredictable political year, as many have noted over the months of fluctuations in the political fortunes of Republican presidential candidates. But one thing has remained constant—the campaign strategy and operational discipline of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

Now, says Balz, this constancy has paid off in Romney’s position as the almost prohibitive front-runner.

There are two noteworthy aspects of this piece. The first is Balz’s smart and sharply analytical portrayal of the thinking of Romney and his campaign operatives, from the beginning, through the early contests and down to the present. No retrospective revisionism. Few political writers have Balz’s breadth of knowledge on the inner workings of politics, and almost nobody spends more time traversing the country in pursuit of inside interviews on the unfolding drama. Thus his rendition of what the Romney folks were thinking during the planning stages has credibility.

The second notweworthy aspect is Balz’s suggestion that Romney now enjoys a commanding lead that will be difficult for anyone to obliterate—except perhaps Romney. At this stage in any presidential nomination battle, when a front-runner seems emergent, many commentators and pols cast about for possible scenarios that could upend that front-runner—possible stumbles, a dramatic change of fortune in Illinois or some such place, a late entry into the race, a late surge by someone already in the race. Yet these things never seem to materialize.

As many expected, Islamist parties will form a dominant majority in Egypt’s first freely elected parliament. The Islamists are here to stay, and fearmongering over their rise is unproductive, since Egyptians will judge for themselves whether Islamists are delivering on their promises. Moreover, understanding the dynamics that brought religious parties to power should be the real goal and will ultimately prove more useful to those engaging this nascent democracy.

“Take a vacation!” “Buy more yachts!” “Hire everyone!”

No, these responses aren’t the fodder of impulsive, giggling adolescents when asked how to solve the myriad issues of our global economy. They are reactions from thirteen esteemed thinkers and intellectuals in Foreign Policy’s January/February 2012 special feature “13 Out-of-the-Tinderbox Ways to Save the Economy.”

The allusion to quick, “out-of-the-box” solutions shouldn’t have permitted suggestions so theoretical and unrealistic that they can never be applied. Tinderboxes fell out of use when matches were invented because they were unwieldy and impractical. This feature’s ideas are equally useless when one gets down to the real work necessary to “firestart” the global economic system. They range from tangential (Daniel Dennett’s three-month-long vacation for everyone), to unrealistic (James Galbraith’s nearly doubling minimum wage), to the unthinkable (Paul Kedrosky’s mass default).

All of these minds are accomplished. The central problem of this symposium lies in what must have been an overly-simplistic prompt: The global economy is a fragile, complex system. Please craft an unusual, decidedly unwonky solution in 1,500 words or less.

Many international negotiations start with diplomatic dances that involve—ostensibly and/or really—preconditions to the negotiations themselves. Preconditions, or complaints about them, can be used for various purposes. A party that does not really want to negotiate can impose arbitrary conditions that it does not expect the other side to accept. Complaining about preconditions is a way of arguing that the other side doesn't really want to negotiate. Preconditions also might be manipulated to placate domestic constituencies or to try to gain an early advantage in the substance of the negotiations.

What functions as a precondition is not to be equated with what is explicitly labeled as a precondition. And attempts to manipulate the terms of a future agreement should be distinguished from what is necessary to negotiate any agreement at all. Israel, for example, portrays itself as wanting to negotiate without preconditions with the Palestinian Authority and complains about the PA imposing a precondition about ceasing the expansion of settlements in occupied and disputed territory. But the PA understandably sees the continued unilateral colonization of disputed territory through settlements as directly contrary to the whole concept of bilaterally negotiating the future of the disputed territory. Israel's no-conditions posture quickly melts away when the subject is negotiation with Hamas, even though the prior declarations about Israel that are being demanded of Hamas (besides the fact that Israel itself has never made any similar declarations about Hamas) are not needed for those two parties to negotiate agreements on issues that divide them—as demonstrated by the complicated agreements they have already reached on exchanging prisoners.

It is often said, even by many of his admirers, that at any one time Newt Gingrich will have one hundred ideas, of which five are pretty good. Falling into the latter category was his remark last week that defense budgets “should be directly related to the amount of threat we have.”

Although Gingrich, on his 95 percent side, imagines many dire dangers, it seems to me that the United States lives in an environment that is substantially free from threats that require a great deal of military preparedness. (A more extended discussion is here.)