Jacob Heilbrunn
God Bless George F. Will
"Republicans who think America is being endangered by `appeasement' and military parsimony have worked that pedal on their organ quite enough." So says George F. Will in his column today. To which one can only respond: Amen.
Will's column amounts to a vivisection of Mitt Romney, who has made a number of ostentatious claims about how he would restore the American preeminence that has allegedly been squandered by the Obama administration. His principal point is this: traditionally, the GOP has held an edge over the Democrats when it came to national security. Democrats were seen as temporizers, unable to face up to the fact that America actually had an adversary (the Soviet Union) that was determined to surpass it. As a result, Republicans, at least since 1972, battened on the public's perception that Democrats were weak and soft and feeble when it came to foreign affairs.
Now, in an attempt to portray Obama as the latest manifestation of Democratic pusillanimity, the GOP has taken to bewailing the exit from Iraq and the looming one from Afghanistan. Those policies may be popular and common sense, but Romney will have none of it. "We should not negotiate with the Taliban," says Romney. "We should defeat the Taliban." Great. But how? Should we stay for several more decades in an effort to create an Afghanistan in America's image?
Will notes,
Do Republicans think it is premature to withdraw as many as 70,000 troops from Europe two decades after the Soviet Union’s death? About 73,000 will remain, most of them in prosperous, pacific, largely unarmed and utterly unthreatened Germany. Why do so many remain?
Since 2001, the United States has waged war in three nations, and some Republicans appear ready to bring the total to five, adding Iran and Syria. (The Weekly Standard, of neoconservative bent, regrets that Obama “is reluctant to intervene to oust Iran’s closest ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.”) GOP critics say that Obama’s proposed defense cuts will limit America’s ability to engage in troop-intensive nation-building. Most Americans probably say: Good.
Just because they say it's good, of course, does not mean that this is actually the case. Republicans will argue that they are following in Ronald Reagan's footsteps, and that sometimes it's courageous to take stands that not everyone may be gung ho about but that will be vindicated in time, just as Reagan's tough policies toward the Soviet Union were vindicated (though the history of Reagan's approach toward the evil empire does become somewhat selective, but that is another matter). It's also reasonable to quibble about whether American troops should be withdrawn en masse from Europe. And America's role as a global power is not going to end any time soon, in large part because it redounds to our economic benefit. The costs of not maintaining a global free-trading system would be far higher than any current outlays.
The real problem with the GOP approach is that it maintains the illusion of omnipotence. It leaves behind great-power status for the "I am the greatest" approach. The GOP worships unilateralism. This has less in common with Reagan than George W. Bush. Now war with Iran—and Syria?—is preoccupying the minds of the neocons. But knocking out Iranian nuclear facilities, as the estimable Walter Pincus reminds us today, is no simple task. In pushing for a strike, or even regime change, the GOP, to borrow from Talleyrand, has "learned nothing and forgotten nothing."
The point, to put it another way, is that the policy of bombast but not bluff—which is to say that America really has invaded several countries in the past decade at great cost—has largely failed. If the GOP could point to great successes in Afghanistan and Iraq, it would be one thing. Instead, it is a party stuck in default mode. Even though Obama is clearly not a wimpy Democrat on foreign affairs, leading Republicans persist in trying to depict him as dangerously complacent about American national security. Meanwhile, Obama is trimming the size of the military and reorienting it towards Asia, both sensible and overdue moves that will do more to enhance America's prosperity and security than any of the rodomontade about appeasement.
Obama's Bad Education Ideas
President Obama announced in his State of the Union address that no one should be allowed to drop out from high school under the age of eighteen. Obama's desire to raise graduation rates is laudable. But simply raising the age limit is not. In fact, it's a dumb idea.
Whether students drop out at age sixteen or age eighteen is largely immaterial. The truth is that teachers shouldn't be forced to try and teach students who don't want to be taught. Instead, they pose a disruptive presence inside public schools. Obama is proposing to identify the schools with the highest dropout rates, close them and then transfer students to better districts. But is that simple a recipe for adding troublemakers to districts that are performing well? Yes, the administration should work to improve schools and lower dropout rates. But don't try to enforce it by executive fiat, which is what raising the dropout age would represent. You can't legislate your way to better results. Schools have to produce them.
The other idea that the Obama administration proposes is even worse. Far worse. It is embracing high technology as a panacea for teaching students. In a scorching column in the Los Angeles Times, Michael Hiltzik points out that the administration is peddling moonshine. U.S. education secretary Arne Duncan is pushing for a major infusion of iPads into school classrooms. Who's eager for this to happen? Apple computers, naturally. It stands to make big bucks. The claim is that iPads are studier than textbooks, can be updated and are cheaper in the long run. Baloney, says Hiltzik. For one thing, you can drop a textbook, but an iPad? It's finished.
Most important: there's no compelling evidence that technology, in any form, has substantially aided basic learning. On the contrary, the studies that Hiltzik cites suggest that it can retard it. Yet Duncan, together with FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, is pushing for high-tech solutions.
Hiltzik, notes,
Does Duncan ever read his own agency's material? In 2009, the Education Department released a study of whether math and reading software helped student achievement in first, fourth, and sixth grades, based on testing in hundreds of classrooms. The study found that the difference in test scores between the software-using classes and the control group was "not statistically different from zero." In sixth-grade math, students who used software got lower test scores—and the effect got significantly worse in the second year of use.
The idea that technology can substitute for old-fashioned teachers has been around for decades. And it's always been wrong. Good teaching costs money. There are no shortcuts. Students need to read books. Did Gibbon need an iPad? According to Hiltzik,
Almost every generation has been subjected in its formative years to some "groundbreaking" pedagogical technology. In the '60s and '70s, "instructional TV was going to revolutionize everything," recalls Thomas C. Reeves, an instructional technology expert at the University of Georgia. "But the notion that a good teacher would be just as effective on videotape is not the case."
The Obama administration is not the first White House to fall prey to the malarkey that pervades the education establishment. It is simply the latest. But that's no excuse. The administration, like its predecessors, is tying education to competitiveness. No doubt America has to improve. But Obama should educate himself more about education before trying to sell the American public a bill of goods.
Romney's Gaffe Problem
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.
Romney's remark has provoked much consternation on the right. As TalkingPointsMemo reports, a phalanx of right-wing commentators, including Jonah Goldberg and Eric Erickson, are rubbing their collective foreheads in disbelief at comrade Romney's spontaneous ability to insert his foot in his mouth. But maybe Romney is telling the truth. He really isn't much concerned about the poor (though he did qualify his remark by including the modifier "very." So an argument could be made that he does care about the poor, just not the very poor. For whatever that's worth). In that case, the Kinsley rule would be confirmed. Romney blurted out what everyone suspects about him—he's a coddled rich kid. But my hunch is that something more is at work. Romney is just a challenged campaigner. He's not a great politician. He might be a good or even great president. But it's clearly going to be an extremely difficult task for him to persuade the electorate that he is one of them. As Jonah Goldberg put it in National Review, "great politicians on the morning after a big win, don't force their supporters to go around defending their candidate from the charge that he doesn't care about the poor. They just don't."
No, they don't. Romney sounds like what he decries—an elitist. In an era when great wealth has become suspect—when Balzac's phrase that behind every great fortune lies a crime has again come into vogue—Romney is going to have a hard time distinguishing himself as an elitist all that different from President Obama. The conservative mantra, enunciated almost daily by the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which appears to view Romney as a potential liberal mole, is that to accomplish that task he needs to become even more conservative.
In fact, he needs to move toward the middle, at least by the time the Republican convention rolls around. His political opponents are trying to prevent that metamorphosis from occurring. Newt Gingrich, who has become a warrior on the capitalism front, is flaying the supposedly hard-hearted Romney for his lack of a social conscience. Gingrich will remain a thorn in Romney's side, but it seems unlikely that he can inflict serious pain on Romney. Nor can Rick Sanotrum or Ron Paul (with whom Romney, according to a new report in the Washington Post, is buddies). By this point, only Romney can do that to himself. The candidate himself needs to become as disciplined as his impressive campaign.
Image: Gage Skidmore
Newt Gingrich and the Rebirth of the GOP
Newt Gingrich's victory in South Carolina didn't simply expose the weakness of Mitt Romney but also that of the GOP establishment. For several decades, the establishment and movement conservatives have coexisted. But all along, the Right has sought to extinguish the influence of establishment moderates. Now it may be on the verge of accomplishing this decades-long goal, one that began with the Goldwater run for the presidency in 1964, continued with the election of Ronald Reagan and, two decades later, with George W. Bush.
Gingrich's victory has elicited much concern among those Republicans who see him as a volatile and unpredictable force. They are correct. Gingrich's volatility and unpredictability have been evident for several decades. But they are also the very qualities that propelled him to the House speakership in 1994. He is a guerrilla insurgent, a Republican Maoist who seeks to topple the old order. In an era where the ancien régime is looking fragile, Gingrich is most representative of the populist anger that many Americans feel toward Wall Street and the political establishment, both of which Mitt Romney, no matter how much he disclaims it, represents.
There is no small dose of hypocrisy in Gingrich's pious asseverations about Romney's record as a capitalist fiend. Gingrich, who claims he has not been a lobbyist but merely a historian advising Freddie Mac for $1.7 million during his recent years in Washington, appears to have belatedly discovered a social conscience. But Romney's problem remains himself. For one thing, the credentials of a former Paul Tsongas supporter are inevitably going to be suspect to conservatives. Romney has undergone the presidential equivalent of confirmation conversion, blithely jettisoning positions on healthcare and global warming and abortion that he once enthusiastically endorsed. His perceived inauthenticity may be deadly in at a moment when the public is smarting over the shenanigans of political and financial leaders. Gingrich nailed Romney's conundrum on Face the Nation, saying "he's been dancing on eggs trying figure out how to find out a version of Romney that will work."
Gingrich, by contrast, can pose as someone who has been to the abyss and is now seeking redemption. It's a narrative that any Hollywood producer would understand. He may have checked his principles at the door in the past, but now he's come back home to save the family ranch from the local bank president who wants to confiscate it. In essence, conservatives, you might say, fear that Romney will do to the GOP what he did with Bain—act like a takeover artist who guts the innards of an enterprise, marks it down and walks away with a smile. Romney, in other words, might compromise as president in order to boost his own popularity. A Romney presidency, they fear, would leave a shell of a GOP at the very moment that it seems about to return to the old-time doctrines of conservatism that were watered down for decades by moderates such as Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush. As Liz Cheney told the New York Times, "He demonstrated the kind of fighting spirit that people out there who are really worried about a second term for Barack Obama really want to see."
What would a Gingrich nomination actually look like? In foreign policy, he would be pure neocon. In domestic policy, he would push hard for further tax cuts. But throughout, his unbridled nature would probably terrify the broad mass of voters. Unless Gingrich was able to reinvent himself again, he could lead the GOP to an electoral disaster not only in the presidency race but also in Congress.
President Obama And California's High-Speed Rail Fiasco
President Obama has been pushing high-speed rail as one of the answers to America's technological future. Republicans have been pushing back, saying that it's a classic big-government boondoggle. They may be onto something. If California is anything to go by, the high-speed-rail project may be too ambitious and, ultimately, a fiscal disaster.
In California, unlike in many areas of the country, it's not really a partisan issue. The basic problem is whether the idea is fiscally feasible. Mounting evidence suggests it is not and the Obama administration, along with Governor Jerry Brown, is backing a bogus project that will saddle the state with enormous debts and never be completed on time. "We won't be dissuaded by the naysayers and the critics," Transportation Secretary Roy LaHood announced in December at a congressional hearing. He says private investors will help pay for the project, over and above the $4 billion promised by the federal government. Who are the investors? He doesn't say, most likely because he has no idea who would.
For a start, the estimates of the cost of the project in California, which is supposed to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles—a worthy aim—has tripled. As the estimates continue to soar, the popularity of the project is sinking. Although voters approved a $9.9 billion bond measure for the project in 2008, they're now getting cold feet, according to new polls. And well they should.
For another questionable aspect of the project is the estimated costs of not performing it. The champions of rail say that the alternative—increased use of highways and airports--would be about $171 billion. But as the Los Angeles Times reports,
Already, transportation researchers, government officials and watchdog groups are saying the $171-billion claim is based on such exaggerated estimates, misleading statements and erroneous assumptions that it is "divorced from any reality." "There is some dishonesty in the methodology," said Samer Madanat, director of UC Berkeley's Institute of Transportation Studies, the top research center of its type in the nation. "I don't trust an estimate like this." Until November, California High-Speed Rail Authority officials were asserting that the alternative cost of highway and airport construction would be $100 billion. Earlier predictions were billions lower. When the estimate for the bullet train project recently hit $98.5 billion, the authority ratcheted the highway and airport cost up to $171 billion.
Who's supplying the numbers for these costs? Private contractor Parsons Brinkerhoff, the Times says, which helped pay for the campaign for the bond fund back in 2008. It also has 108 employees working on the rail project in California. At a minimum, conflicts of interest would seem to be rife.
None of this appears to have deterred the Obama administration. President Obama wants to head into the 2012 campaign by bragging about the progress his stimulus package has made in preparing America for a new, high-tech future in California and elsewhere. Rail can be an effective way to move people in dense urban areas and cut down on pollution and congestion. The idea of high-speed rail is enticing and attractive. Its a laudable aim. But it's not one that the California project appears on track to perform.
Ron Paul and Charles Krauthammer
Charles Krauthammer has a great column today on Ron Paul. He notices what not enough people have noticed about the New Hampshire primary, which is that Paul came in second. He earned 21 percent of the vote in Iowa and 23 percent in New Hampshire. I think it's safe to say that Krauthammer is not an admirer of Paul. But his analytical conclusions mirror my own.
The first observation is that this election is not really about Paul himself but about his son. He wants to establish a family dynasty. And, to a remarkable extent, he appears to be succeeding. His son Rand, a senator from Kentucky, is being groomed to lead the avid disciples that his father is cultivating. Come 2016, a more suave Paul will champion the fight for the libertarian cause of shrinking big government. And, if Obama is elected, there probably will be more to shrink, at least in theory (in practice, of course, it never happens. Neither the GOP nor the Democrats have the stomach to cut back entitlements or restrain spending). But put that aside for one moment.
Krauthammer's related point is that Paul could upend the Republican convention. If he keeps campaigning, and there's no cogent reason he should not, then Paul could demand a prime-time slot. Krauthammer observes,
The Republican convention could conceivably feature a major address by Paul calling for the abolition of the Fed, FEMA and the CIA; American withdrawal from everywhere; acquiescence to the Iranian bomb—and perhaps even Paul’s opposition to a border fence lest it be used to keep Americans in. Not exactly the steady, measured, reassuring message a Republican convention might wish to convey. For libertarianism, however, it would be a historic moment: mainstream recognition at last.
Put aside your own view of libertarianism or of Paul himself. I see libertarianism as an important critique of the Leviathan state, not a governing philosophy. As for Paul himself, I find him a principled, somewhat wacky, highly engaging eccentric. But regardless of my feelings or yours, the plain fact is that Paul is nurturing his movement toward visibility and legitimacy.
It would be difficult to disagree. Paul has, by and large, weathered the accusations that have been leveled at him about the farrago of newsletters that appeared under his name. He's simply dismissed them, and his dismissiveness appears to have relegated them to the status of a curiosity. Paul's ambition is to inject liberatarianism into the bloodstream of the GOP. He's pure Tea Party. He's been tea partying before the party itself ever emerged. The rest of the primary season will offer further clues to the depth of the popularity for his twin calls for abolishing the Federal Reserve and for retreating from the rest of the world. Even as Iran threatens to shut down the Persian Gulf, Paul is, essentially, saying that America is at fault.
If Paul can win a substantial vote in South Carolina and other states, it would suggest that the GOP is in greater ferment than anyone predicted.
Image: Gage Skidmore
Why Are The Republican Candidates Bashing China?
The Republican primary keeps getting wilder. The wildest statements—at least the most recent ones—have emanated from former senator Rick Santorum and Texas governor Rick Perry. Santorum said he believes that the entire West Bank belongs to Israel. It's filled with Israelis, in his view, ergo it is Israeli territory. Meanwhile, Perry announced that not only was it a bad idea to remove American troops from Iraq, as President Obama has, but that he, as president, would reverse the decision. He would send troops back to Iraq so as to counter the influence of Iran in the region.
But perhaps the most troubling aspect of the GOP primary isn't the effusions of Santorum or Perry but the fact that Mitt Romney has been attacking China. Romney has stated that Obama has allowed China to "run all over us" when it comes to taking American jobs. For good measure, he's added that he would force China to appear before the World Trade Organization for manipulating its currency. Why should this be of concern? The problem is simple: Treat China like an enemy, and it will become one. And make no mistake. The Republican field, as James Traub points out in a vital essay in the January/February issue of the Washington Monthly, is doing just that.
As Traub notes, America—no, the world—needs China. China is an essential partner on the global economy and climate change. Yet Republicans are emphasizing that it's essential to confront China. But this could backfire, provoking Chinese nationalism, with no descernible benefit to America. Traub notes,
It is an article of faith among Republicans that the twenty-first century, like the twentieth, will be an American century—which is to say, not a Chinese one. But 'communist China' is an absurd archaism, and China is not likely to windup on the ash heap of history. Treating the world's premier rising power like the Soviet Union in the 1960s would be a mistake of historic proportions.
It would be difficult to disagree. No doubt China will often be a competitor of America; at other times, it may well have interests that are congruent with ours. But the one thing it doesn't have to be is an adversary. The truth is that there has been an unseemly search for a new enemy among conservatives ever since the end of the Cold War. In the 1990s, China was touted by some as America's enemy. Then came the 9/11 attacks. China was put on the back burner. But is it purely concidental that now that the war on terror is winding down, or at least being conducted in a more prudent fashion, that bellicosity about China has become fashionable among Republicans?
China has long been a bugaboo on the Right. In the early 1950s, conservatives implausibly claimed that the Truman administration had "lost" China by capitulating to the communists. But it wasn't America's to lose. What D. W. Brogan called the illusion of American omnipotence flourished in the '50s—the notion that bad things could only occur abroad as the result of a domestic conspiracy. Otherwise, America was too virtuous and powerful to be stopped. Of course this illusion was shattered in Vietnam—at least temporarily, until it was resuscitated by the George W. Bush administration as it went to war in Iraq.
Today a Republican president who actually followed the prescriptions being enunicated during the primaries would wreak havoc in foreign affairs. The truculence of the candidates, apart from Ron Paul, suggests that they have learned little or nothing from the Bush era. It's a testament to hubris or obduracy, or perhaps both at the very same time. Whether a new sobriety would prevail once a Republican candidate was actually in office is another matter. It's hard to believe that Romney, for one, actually believes what he is saying. But there is no gainsaying the fact that bashing China is acquiring a new and unfortunate respectability among Republicans.
Image: Gage Skidmore
Are There Too Many Millionaires in Congress?
"Who wants to be a millionaire?" is the title of the popular American television show hosted by Meredith Vieira, who presumably qualifies for the designation herself. The more honest question in America is: who doesn't? For a country that seeks to efface, or at least elide, class distinctions, there has recently been an awful lot of talk about whether millionaires are a plague or a blessing, a sign of a country that has run amok or one in which the free-enterprise system rewards those who take risks that can result in great rewards.
Today both the New York Times and the Washington Post add a new dimension to the debate: They focus on Congress. The Post declares that "Congress looks less like the rest of America." The Times states, "Economic Slide Took a Detour At Capitol Hill." The gist of each article is that Congress never had it so good. Millionaires abound. Half of Congress now consists of millionaires. To have true clout means that you have to be worth around $100 million—Nancy Pelosi territory. The rest of the millionaire members are mere pikers.
Is the abundance of the wealthy a bad thing? Has Congress become a new Richistan, divorced from the concerns of common folk? Both articles suggest that worry is in order. But is it?
To the extent that members of Congress are prospering from their service in government, it should be. If members are engaging in insider trading, then apprehension is warranted. But the mere presence of millionaires is not. For one thing, there seems to be little indication that members are actually voting on the basis of their own wealth. Sure, Republicans favor tax cuts, which they argue end up promoting economic growth. But Democrats, many of whom are also millionaires, are not arguing that the wealthy should be exempt from higher taxes. Instead, they espouse policies that Republicans allege would suffocate growth. The Post contends,
The growing disparity between the representatives and the represented means that there is a greater distance between the economic experience of Americans and those of lawmakers.
Not necessarily. It's possible that a Congressman began his or her career with little or no economic means and then, either through luck or assiduity, became wealthy. An argument could also be made that a wealthy lawmaker might be more independent of business or other interests than one who was wholly dependent on donations from lobbyists and corporations. But it's also the case that, more often than not, it takes a lot of money to run for Congress. If voters were really apoplectic about wealth disparities, then they would fundamentally alter the manner in which elections themselves are conducted, drastically shortening the campaign season and forbidding most advertising on television and the radio. Another way to ensure that Congress is not simply a preserve for the wealthy would be to curtail its legislative session, something that Texas governor Rick Perry appeared to endorse. But these are all improbable suggestions that will never be enacted.
The real problem with well-heeled Congressmen is that the optics are bad. When the country is suffering, it doesn't like the idea of what amounts to a modern-day Roman patrician class. Whether the concerns about prosperity in Congress will get much traction might prove another barometer of the concerns about wealth inequality in America, which have been mounting over the past year. The wealthy form a convenient target for populist animus—Franklin Roosevelt announced that he welcomed the brickbats being hurled by plutocrats—"I welcome their hatred," he said in 1936 at Madison Square Garden.
But in America, concerns about the wealthy have proven spasmodic. Overall wealth inequality has diminished somewhat since the 1990s as a result of the gyrations of the stock market and the battering the real-estate sector has suffered. It's unclear that personal wealth has greatly altered the stance of either political party. Congress deserves to be flayed for many reasons, but its wealth is probably not one of them.
Why Is Mitt Romney Flip-Flopping On the Iraq War?
Mitt Romney keeps getting more interesting. It's no secret that he's been steadily flipping and flopping his way to the Republican presidential nomination. Abortion? He was for it before he was against it. Global warming? Ditto. But underneath he's always conveyed the impression, even as he contorts himself into conservative positions, or what passes for them, that he knows better.
The latest instance, as Jonathan Chait points out in New York magazine, is the Iraq War. Romney now indicates that he doesn't think it was a good idea. Had George W. Bush known that weapons of mass destruction were not in Iraq, he told NBC's Chuck Todd, America would have acted differently:
If we knew at the time of our entry into Iraq that there were no weapons of mass destruction, if somehow we had been given that information, obviously we would not have gone in.
No, no, no. This is not the standard GOP talking point. The standard point is what Romney himself said earlier—four years ago, to be precise:
It was the right decision to go into Iraq. I supported it at the time; I support it now.
What Romney's latest statement assumes, of course, is rationality on the part of vice president Dick Cheney when it came to Iraq. That's a mighty big assumption. And its further testament to Romney's own common sense. But weapons of mass destruction, as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz put it, was never more than a policy that everyone could agree on—it was the fig leaf to justify the invasion. Iraq was supposed to be a demonstration shot, a Jacksonian "don't tread on me" moment. And it was supposed to launch a wave of democratization in the Arab world—even as Iraq now appears to be succumbing to its fissiparous ethnic tensions. But never mind.
The good news is that Romney clearly has a lot of trouble staying on message when spouting the neocon line about foreign policy. One problem may be that, at bottom, he doesn't really believe it. Romney has always been steeped in moderation. In his new book Rule and Ruin, the historian Geoffrey Kabaservice points out that George Romney almost landed the GOP nomination in 1968 and would have taken the party in a very different direction than that followed by the neocons and the movement conservatives. Mitt is surely running in part to redeem his father's failed quest. Perhaps this is also explains why he hasn't truly imbibed the neocon gospel on foreign affairs. Chait concludes,
Nothing about Romney’s attempts to ingratiate himself with the right hint even slightly of genuine conversion. It is patronizing appeasement.
Indeed it is. Consider Romney's performances at the GOP debates. It's difficult to shake the feeling that he has palpable contempt for the other candidates, whom he regards as a bunch of noodles. I've never been able to conclude anything other than that he feels like he's soiling himself even to appear on the same stage with the likes of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry. Romney is far more intelligent and has greater accomplishments than any of them. Romney's arrogance also came through during his controversial interview with Brett Baier of Fox News, who pummeled him with questions a few weeks ago.
Of course Romney's self-confidence pales next to the voluble Newt Gingrich, who leaves you with the feeling that if no one else is around he probably lectures to the mirror in the room. But Romney's confidence is rooted in his own record of success. Gingrich sends up a cloud of verbal obfuscation to disguise his own shallowness. As the campaign progresses, it will be fascinating to observe Romney's evolution. How long will it take before he sheds his current conservative incarnation, which hasn't really persuaded anyone, and returns to his moderate views?
Image: Lexicon, Vikrum
The Mad World of North Korea and Kim Jong-il
A stock tip for the New Year: if you own shares of Hennessy Paradis cognac, you might want to consider selling. The dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong-il, who just shuffled his mortal coil, was one of its biggest buyers.
The demise of Kim is something of a loss for foreign-policy experts. He made for good copy. He knew how to live it up in the grand, dictatorial style, reminiscent, in a way, of old Hollywood, where money is no object and a potentate can indulge his every fantasy. The women (sometimes kidnapped from Japan), the booze, the swanky home near Pyongyang that apparently had a racetrack and an artificial lake. This is in marked contrast to Stalin and Hitler, both of whom led fairly ascetic lives and were consumed with power rather than its perks and its privileges. It was their subordinates—Beria driving around Moscow at night to kidnap women, Yezhov with his collection of women's panties, Hermann Goering with the feudal hunting estates—who lived as large as they could.
Now his third son, Kim Jong-un, is supposed to keep the claptrap enterprise known as the state of North Korea going. He has not displayed any of his old man's prodigious appetites. On the other hand, he has not had the chance. If he successfully stakes his claim to power, he might prove quite different from his father.
For one thing, will he become a reformer? Around the world the dicatator business is not what it was. The opportunities are fewer and less inviting. The Arab world is changing. The House of Assad looks to be crumbling. Even the Burmese Generals appear to be throwing in the towel. Vladimir Putin himself may be headed for retirement sooner than he would like. Admittedly, North Korea holds some special cards. For one thing, it has remained virginal when it comes to the Internet. Its population, cowed into submission, has been infantilized about the outside world. The country is more Stalinist than Stalin's Russia ever was.
What would really need to be arranged to create a soft landing in North Korea is a buyout. South Korea, Japan and the United States would have to create a fund to ensure a cozy retirement for the ruling magnates. The danger is that they will engage in increasingly provocative behavior to secure their hold on power. For South Korea, the ultimate nightmare is a sudden collapse in which millions of refugees come streaming over the border to sample the delights of the West that their leaders have denied them for decades. Of course, the last thing China or Japan wants is a single Korea—a geopolitical nightmare for both. In this case, two is better than one.
For President Obama, the likelihood of a succession crisis could be a disaster. It introduces a new imponderable into the election that could well make the debate over Iran look like a sideshow. An active military conflict between North and South Korea would throw the world into a new Great Depression and draw in outside powers. Just as America pulled out of Iraq, a new potential hotspot looms in Asia. How Obama handles it could prove the biggest test of his presidency.
