Barack Obama has been president for just under 10 months but he’s added two trillion to the national debt and will double it by the end of the decade.  CBS’ Mark Knoller:

This latest milestone in the ever-rising journey of the National Debt comes less than eight months after it hit $11 trillion for the first time. The latest high-point is not unexpected, considering the federal deficit for the just-ended 2009 fiscal year hit an all-time high at $1.42-trillion – more than triple the previous year’s record high.

Much of the increase in the deficit and debt is attributed to government spending outpacing revenue – both exacerbated by the recession and the government response to it – including hundreds of billions in bailouts and stimulus spending and tax cuts along with decreased tax revenues due to rising unemployment.

[...]

The National Debt has increased about $1.6 trillion on Mr. Obama’s watch, though less than $4.9 trillion run up during the presidency of George W. Bush.

But the White House budget review issued in August projects that by the end of the current fiscal year on Sept 30th, the National Debt could top $14 trillion.  It gets worse. The same document projects that by the end of the decade, the National Debt will hit $24.5 trillion — exceeding the Gross Domestic Product projected for 2019 of $22.8 trillion.

According to the Treasury Department, the debt stood at $5.727 trillion on January 19, 2001, Bill Clinton’s last day in office, and $10.627 trillion when Bush left office eight years later.  That’s $612.5 billion (or $0.6125 trillion) a year, during which we fought two major wars, had the 9/11 attacks, and at least two major bailouts to deal with a global financial crisis.

We’re thus far averaging $1.92 trillion a year under Obama, or a factor of 3.146 more.   And the government is projecting that we’ll continue spending at this crisis rate for the next decade, more than doubling the current record level?

That ain’t good.

Presumably, we’d have had another major bailout had Bush stayed in office for a third term (were that Constitutionally or politically possible) or had John McCain been elected.  So spending and thus the debt would have escalated substantially regardless.  But we likely wouldn’t be talking about adding a massive health care payment on top of the pile.

“Obama Has Failed the World on Climate Change,” blares a Spiegel op-ed by Christian Schwägerl.  The essay is another data point in the growing notion that the new American president’s aura is fading on the other side of the Atlantic.

But, as I argue in my New Atlanticist essay “Obama Disappoints Europe Ahead of Copenhagen,” this was all too predictable.  Indeed, Bob Manning and I both predicted it before Obama was inaugurated.   Obama is, like George W. Bush before him, president of the United States.  Our priorities are simply different from those in Western Europe.

Obama’s personal ideology on climate change and other environmental issues is much closer to that of the European leaders than was his predecessor’s.  But there’s simply no way that Obama is going to swim upstream on this one in the midst of two shooting wars, a global recession, and a major fight to reform the healthcare system.

[...]

Obama is a cautious, pragmatic politician.  This is a fight he can’t win.  He’ll therefore avoid entering the ring.

None of this will prevent Bruce McQuain and others from enjoying some well-deserved Schadenfraude.

Pollster Glen Bolger (a founding partner at my wife’s firm) looks at the data in the Virginia governor’s race and concludes that Barack Obama hurt Democrat Creigh Deeds.

At the end of tracking, we added some questions paid for by the Republican National Committee specifically to measure the Obama effect.

[...]

The dominant national issue at that time (and still) is health care. Only 44% of likely voters support the Obama plan, while 50% oppose it. Intensity is strongly against — 29% strongly favor/42% strong oppose. The question was worded:

“As you may have heard, President Obama and the Democrats in Congress are preparing a plan to change the health care system. From what you have heard about this plan, do you favor or oppose Obama and the Democrats’ health care proposal?”

We also asked a message question that was stunning for two reasons. One, it was stunning in its rejection of the notion of the Democratic wave of 2006-08 is any lasting move, and it was stunning for how close it was to the final election margin:

“I’m going to read you two statements, and please tell me which one comes closest to your opinion.

Some/Other people say it is more important to elect a Governor who will help President Barack Obama implement his agenda.

Other/Some people say that it is more important to elect a Governor who will serve as a check and balance to President Barack Obama.”

Voters opted for the check and balance by a 55%-35% margin. Independents (who voted for Obama by one point in 2008 in Virginia) opted for a check and balance by an overwhelming 58%-25% margin. Throughout our tracking, we regularly found open-ended comments from Independent voters saying they wanted to balance the overwhelming power that the Democrats have in Washington. Given the absolute power the Dems have in DC, that is a very strong message for GOPers running in 2010.

We tested the impact of the Obama endorsement — 24% said they were more likely to vote for Deeds, while 32% were less likely. The minus eight increment on that can not be encouraging to the White House.

Finally, we tested a simple agree/disagree: “Creigh Deeds’ policies are too close to the policies of President Barack Obama.” Fully 52% agreed and only 30% disagreed. By intensity, 30% strongly agreed and only 9% strongly disagreed. Revisionists on the left are blaming Deeds for not embracing Obama enough, but Virginia voters did not agree. Among Independents, it was 52% agree/28% disagree.

His bottom line is that Obama’s “policies have put fiscal and economic messages back into play for Republicans.”

Presumably, by 2010, it will be even harder for Democrats to run against George W. Bush or the Republican Congress of 2006.  The degree to which Obama will be an asset or a liability to his party will, of course, depend on intervening events.  If we’re still looking at 10 percent unemployment next November, it’ll almost certainly be the latter.

My first piece for ForeignPolicy.com, “Europe’s Obama Fatigue,” is online.

Despite George W. Bush’s defiant “you’re with us or you’re against us” public stance, he actively solicited advice and input from his NATO partners. Obama, by contrast, is saying all the right things in public about transatlantic relations and NATO but adopting a high-handed policy and paying little attention to Europe.

[...]

It would be ironic, indeed, if the Europeans started longing for the good old days of the Bush administration. But that nostalgia is closer than you might think.

Supporting arguments at the link.

UPDATE: As one might expect, this piece is generating some strong rebuttals.

Daniel Larison argues:

You cannot gauge the importance or unimportance of Europe to the United States on the largely cosmetic, superficial and procedural clashes Washington has had with various European states in the last nine months. Under the previous administration, Europe continued to be “important” to the U.S. even when major EU powers opposed administration policy in very public, dramatic ways. To the extent that Obama is losing ground with Europeans, he had far more goodwill and support to lose; in almost every European country, he continues to rate higher after the drop-off from unrealistic expectations than Bush did at almost any point. Obviously relations were and remained far more strained under the last administration than they have been so far under this one. We notice the minor clashes that have taken place because there was a widely-shared, unreasonable expectation that amity and concord with Europe would prevail under Obama.

[...]

European and especially German interests were flatly ignored by Bush when it came to handling Russia. Promises to Ukraine and Georgia of eventual membership in NATO were given over strenuous German opposition. Were European interests and opinions being heeded then? No. The missile defense ploy prompted Moscow to threaten abandoning its commitments under the European conventional forces treaty and elicited a great deal of bluster from Medvedev about targeting Russian missiles on European soil. Was European security strengthened by any of this? No. What matter then if Bush went through the motions and observed the right formalities when he was getting the major decisions wrong?

Most western European allies were not seriously consulted, nor were their objections given much weight, when the Bush administration decided to push ahead with the missile defense plan. In all of the new commentary claiming that Europe has soured on Obama, this seems not to count at all.

Judah Grunstein adds:

[I]f George W. Bush learned to listen to Europe, and in particular NATO, it was largely after he’d been chastened by the failure of the Iraq war and the 2006 mid-term elections. Up until his final NATO summit, Bush continued to talk loudly about the largely unpopular measures of NATO expansion and missile defense. He listened in the sense that he allowed the alliance — led by France and Germany — to turn him back, but it was out of weakness, not out of strength. There was no movement at all when it came to climate change, which is a major driver of public opinion here.

As for Obama’s handling of Europe, I’d agree with the characterization of his aloofness, especially with regard to the current Afghanistan strategic review. But while my sympathies would normally be with Europe on this sort of thing, I do think that Obama invited the NATO allies last April to assume greater ownership of the Afghanistan war. Given their refusal to do so, I don’t blame him for the freeze-out now. That said, Obama’s brush-off of the U.S.-EU summit is inexcusable and reflects a myopic view of the EU’s potential, especially with the advent of the Lisbon Treaty.

I actually don’t disagree with either Dan or Judah on most of these points and think some of the disagreement comes from the provocative  title the FP folks chose.  My argument is neither that the Europeans have tired of Obama or even that Bush was particularly adept at transatlantic diplomacy.  Rather, it is that Bush cared more about Europe — and particularly the UK and New Europe — than Obama and therefore invested more of himself in the relationship.

It’s true that Obama’s stance on, for example, missile defense and NATO expansion is more popular in some quarters than Bush’s.  Indeed, I prefer his approach on the latter and quibble with him on the former mostly on how the rollout was done vice the policy itself.  But the policy differences are  a reflection of Obama’s prioritizing Russia’s views over that of Europe, especially East and Central Europe.   I think Bush was ultimately wrong in his zeal to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO but it was a policy preference motivated by the stated ideals of the Alliance of “a Europe whole and free.”

As widely expected, the Powers That Be have declared the recession  over, while cautioning that the economy still has a long way to go.  And, of course, the Obama administration is crediting its stimulus packages for the good news.

It might not feel like it to most voters, but the U.S. economy is growing again after a more than a year of contraction.  The nation’s gross domestic product grew at a seasonally adjusted rate of 3.5 percent for July through September – the first growth since the spring of 2008, the Commerce Department said Thursday. That marks a sort of unofficial end to the recession that has bedeviled President Barack Obama since he took office. Economists credited the growth to consumer spending – up 3.4 percent – fueled in part by government stimulus, such as the popular Cash-for-Clunkers car-buying program.

But Obama economic adviser Christina Romer stopped well short of declaring victory. “The U.S. economy is moving in the right direction. However, this welcome milestone is just another step, and we still have a long road to travel until the economy is fully recovered,” Romer said in a statement.

That’s because more than 15 million Americans remain out of work, and a jobs report is due next week that’s likely to show the nation’s unemployment rate continues to creep upward toward 10 percent. That means the White House and politicians on the Hill will be very careful about declaring the recession over, even if the economy has finally started growing again.

The Obama administration said its analysis found that the $787 billion stimulus program contributed between 3 and 4 percent points to the GDP growth – meaning the nation’s output would have risen little, if at all, in the past quarter without it.

Now, taking credit for good things that happened on their watch is simply what presidents do.  Bush took credit for his recovery, Clinton for his, and Reagan for his.  Naturally, few presidents take the blame for bad times, which they attribute variously to the business cycle, their predecessors, the Congress, or a national malaise.

But it’s rather clear that neither the $787 billion stimulus nor the Cash for Clunkers programs had much to do with the recovery, such as it is.   Aside from the disputed AP report claiming that the administration’s report used some fuzzy math and bizarre calculations, the fact of the matter is that the recession was global and so, too, is the recovery.  Things happening all over the world, generally, are not explainable by small gestures made in a single country — even a hyperpower.

Cash for Clunkers, most agree, simply moved up sales that would have happened later in the year.  That’s not such a bad thing so far as it goes, except that many dealers are still waiting to get paid.  It’s hard, then, to credit money that hasn’t been distributed for stimulating the economy.  But, yes, condensing several months’ sales into a single month does boost the books for that quarter.

Ditto the “stimulus” package, almost all of which has all along been targeted for out years.  Again, very little of that money has been spent and therefore it’s impossible for it to have done much stimulating, aside from whatever psychological impact the government’s “doing something” may have had.  Most of the “stimulus” will presumably be spent well into the recovery, making it more akin to ordinary “pork.”

Again, this isn’t a partisan attack on Obama.  He inherited an economic crisis and is doing what politicians do under the circumstances.  And, yes, I similarly rejected George W. Bush’s claims that his modest tax rebate ended the recession he inherited from Bill Clinton.  For that matter, I didn’t blame Bill Clinton for said recession nor overly credit him for the economic boom that took place over much of his tenure.  He had the good fortune of being in office during the Internet boom and post-Cold War booms and the good sense not to screw it up.   Presidents have some impact on the economy but not nearly as much as we attribute to them.

As to the recovery itself, the administration is right to downplay expectations.  NPR’s Kevin Whitelaw:

“We’re no longer simply on the roller coaster to hell,” says Donald Luskin, the chief investment officer for Trend Macrolytics LLC, an economics consulting firm. “But the idea of returning back to normal growth levels? That will be well into next year.”

[...]

“In a normal recession, the leaves fall off the trees because it’s autumn,” Luskin says. “In this recession, the leaves fell off the trees because there was an enormous forest fire. It’s a little bit of uncharted territory to know how long it will take to come out of that.”

This time, the damage was so severe that companies and consumers alike appear more reticent to return to their old habits. With Americans still adjusting to the tough new economic realities, consumer spending might not recover for quite some time.

“We have seen a permanent change in consumer behavior after seeing their retirement savings and home values go down,” says Gus Faucher, the director of macroeconomics at Moody’s Economy.com. “People are going to be more cautious coming out of this recession than they have in previous recessions because of the depth of the downturn.”

“Permanent” is the wrong word here.  Consumer confidence always rebounds.  We’ve had numerous booms and busts since the Great Depression, after all.  But not only was this recession deeper than any in quite some time it was this first major economic crisis in today’s 24/7/365 media climate and therefore the most hyped in history.  It’ll naturally take longer to recover.

And some significant percentage of the 10 percent unemployed — a figure that’s all the more staggering after decades of record employment — will never get their old jobs back.  Most will eventually land somewhere but this is a serious shakeup of the composition of our jobs base, not the standard business cycle.

Photo credit: For Granted

Interesting-if-true fact from Patrick Gavin:  President Obama has already played as many rounds of golf after nine months in office as President George W. Bush did in eight years.

President Barack Obama has only been in office for just over nine months, but he’s already hit the links as much as President Bush did in over two years.

CBS’ Mark Knoller — an unofficial documentarian and statistician of all things White House-related — wrote on his Twitter feed that, “Today – Obama ties Pres. Bush in the number of rounds of golf played in office: 24. Took Bush 2 yrs & 10 months.”

Interesting but irrelevant.  It’s mildly amusing, I suppose, as a retort to the “Watch this drive!” nonsense and general kvetching about how much time Bush spent on leisure activities that he should have instead been devoting to Iraq/Afghanistan/Katrina.   But two sillies don’t make a smart.

The bottom line is that people need down time in order to be effective.  That’s doubly true of leaders.   While it’s possible to overdo it, I’m perfectly happy to have my presidents golfing, horseback riding, brush clearing, or whatever else it is that allows them to blow off steam and get their minds off the job for a couple hours.

I do, however, wish someone would take Obama shopping for some new pants.  First, the mom jeans and now pleated, baggy chinos?  C’mon!

Mark Liebowitz had a piece for NYT over the weekend titled “Man’s World at White House? No Harm, No Foul, Aides Say.” At first blush, it reads like some feminists are genuinely concerned about a male-dominated culture in the West Wing. After awhile, however, one begins to suspect it’s a PR exercise to make President Obama seem more manly.

President Obama and golf partners, including the White House assistant chef Sam Kass, right, during his vacation in August. Jewel Samad/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Does the White House feel like a frat house?

The suspicion flared in recent weeks — and not for the first time — after President Obama was criticized by women’s advocates and liberal bloggers for hosting a high-level basketball game with no female players.

The president, after all, is an unabashed First Guy’s Guy. Since being elected, he has demonstrated an encyclopedic knowledge of college hoops on ESPN, indulged a craving for weekend golf, expressed a preference for adopting a “big rambunctious dog” over a “girlie dog” and hoisted beer in a peacemaking effort.

He presides over a White House rife with fist-bumping young men who call each other “dude” and testosterone-brimming personalities like Rahm Emanuel, the often-profane chief of staff; Lawrence Summers, the brash economic adviser; and Robert Gibbs, the press secretary, who habitually speaks in sports metaphors.

The technical foul over the all-male game has become a nagging concern for a White House that has battled an impression dating to the presidential campaign that Mr. Obama’s closest advisers form a boys’ club and that he is too frequently in the company of only men — not just when playing sports, but also when making big decisions.

Uh huh.

“Women are Obama’s base, and they don’t seem to have enough people who look like the base inside of their own inner circle,” said Dee Dee Myers, a former press secretary in the Clinton administration whose sister, Betsy, served as the Obama campaign’s chief operating officer. Ms. Myers said women have high expectations of the president. “Obama has a personal style that appeals to women,” she said. “He is seen as a consensus builder; he is not a towel snapper and does not tell crude jokes.”

Ooh, so he’s not only a Guy’s Guy, but he’s mature and sensitive, too? Oh, my!

Mr. Obama, in an interview with NBC on Wednesday, called the beef over basketball “bunk,” saying that the players were largely picked from a regular Congressional game and that the list of invitees was reviewed by women on his staff. “I don’t think it sends any kind of message or signal whatsoever,” said the president, who often points out that he is surrounded by strong females at home (where he is the only non-canine male). He added, in the interview, that he had hired women into “some of the most important decision-making positions in this White House.”

OK. He loses a couple of Man Points here for 1) blaming the selection of his basketball team on female staffers and 2) having female staffers pick his basketball team.

Mr. Obama is hardly the first commander in chief whose penchant for sports and other guyish stuff (comic books, “Star Trek”) has become part of his presidential persona. The first President George Bush presented himself as a horseshoe-playing, pork-rind-eating Texan. He was followed by the Big Mac-gobbling, cigar-chomping Bill Clinton and the brush-clearing, bike-busting George W. Bush. It worked to good effect, said Mark McKinnon, a media adviser and mountain bike companion of the latter Mr. Bush.

Aside from perhaps the brush-clearing, is there any reason to believe any of this is affect? There’s every reason to believe Bush 41 likes horseshoes and pork rinds and Clinton liked hamburgers and cigars. And all these men were demonstrably avid sportsmen in their day.

As to the merits of the culture clash issue, these passages put it in perspective:

In interviews, five women who work in the White House or advised officials there described the culture with more of a collective eye-roll than any real sense of grievance or discomfort. One junior aide, who like the other women spoke on the condition of anonymity because of concerns about appearing publicly critical, said that the “sports-fan thing at the White House” could become “annoying” and that her relative indifference to athletics could be mildly alienating. And while this is not uncommon in any workplace, sports bonding can afford a point of entree with the boss.

[...]

Recreation is only one source of affinity within a White House culture, people there say. Obama veterans describe a camaraderie forged over a grueling campaign and a merciless nine months at the White House. It is not about gender, they say, but shared experience. “Many of us have known each other for a long time, and we have brother-and-sister kind of relationships,” said Jen Psaki, the deputy press secretary, who works in an office with seven other spokesmen under 35, all “brothers” from the campaign.

[...]

Ms. Dunn said that she recently hosted a baby shower for an administration official and that no men from the office were invited. She is comfortable with that — just as she is fine with never playing basketball with the president. “That is just part of the culture here that I am excluded from,” she said. “And I don’t care.”

Quite right. Women are in very powerful roles in this administration, as they have been in the last several administrations. That’s the direction our culture has taken over the last three decades or so. But it doesn’t mean that men and women aren’t going to still tend to have different interests.

Just once, I’d like to see Obama break out of campaign mode and give an honest answer to silly questions like this. He’s a very good basketball player, especially for a middle aged Harvard Law graduate with a busy schedule. Unless he’s going to invite elite level women’s players (i.e., people good enough for the Olympics or the WNBA) they’re not going to be very good competition. For that matter, aside from pre-pubescent children, who ever heard of co-ed basketball teams?

No worries, though, Obama invited Melody Barnes, his chief domestic policy advisor, to play golf with him Sunday.  Which, naturally, was widely reported.

Paul Krugman continues to demonstrate that brilliance in one field doesn’t necessarily translate into sound insights into others. He’s upset that some Republicans took pleasure in President Obama’s embarrassment in not landing the Olympics for his adopted Chicago and their cynicism in positioning themselves as the defenders of Medicare in order to fight his health care reform proposals. His explanation for both: “the G.O.P. opposes anything that might be good for Mr. Obama.”

But that’s rather silly. The Olympics matter was one of schadenfreude. I know plenty of people who voted for and continue to support Obama who nonetheless question his hubris and the cult of personality that surrounds him. And the Medicare issue is one of tactics, choosing a politically expedient means to an end.

Moreover, Krugman continues this to Friedmanesque extremes.

How did one of our great political parties become so ruthless, so willing to embrace scorched-earth tactics even if so doing undermines the ability of any future administration to govern?The key point is that ever since the Reagan years, the Republican Party has been dominated by radicals — ideologues and/or apparatchiks who, at a fundamental level, do not accept anyone else’s right to govern. Anyone surprised by the venomous, over-the-top opposition to Mr. Obama must have forgotten the Clinton years. Remember when Rush Limbaugh suggested that Hillary Clinton was a party to murder? When Newt Gingrich shut down the federal government in an attempt to bully Bill Clinton into accepting those Medicare cuts? And let’s not even talk about the impeachment saga.

Reagan won landslide victories and was still opposed by Democrats at every turn, often in vitriolic terms. Who can forget the late Teddy Kennedy’s vicious harangue against “Robert Bork’s America”? And goodness knows, George W. Bush wasn’t exactly treated with kid gloves. Our politics have taken a nasty turn this generation — hardly unprecedented in our history but magnified by a changed media climate — and now it’s Obama’s turn to feel the heat.

The only difference now is that the G.O.P. is in a weaker position, having lost control not just of Congress but, to a large extent, of the terms of debate. The public no longer buys conservative ideology the way it used to; the old attacks on Big Government and paeans to the magic of the marketplace have lost their resonance.

Only because the Democrats have long since embraced the same rhetoric, forcing the Republicans to either adopt extreme positions or be “Me Too.” They’ve done some of both.

Yet conservatives retain their belief that they, and only they, should govern.The result has been a cynical, ends-justify-the-means approach. Hastening the day when the rightful governing party returns to power is all that matters, so the G.O.P. will seize any club at hand with which to beat the current administration.It’s an ugly picture. But it’s the truth. And it’s a truth anyone trying to find solutions to America’s real problems has to understand.

Again, this has been equally true of Democrats when they cycle out of power. It requires blindness or sheer partisan hackery to think what Obama’s facing now is any more ruthless or impolite than what Bush did during his eight years.

Howard Fineman piles on to the burgeoning — if thus far unfounded — Obama overexposed and Obama fatigue memes with an uncharacteristically harsh column.

In addition to contending Obama gives too many speeches with too little substance, her goes further:

There is only so much political mileage that can still be had by his reminding the world that he is not George W. Bush. [...] Members of Obama’s own party know who Obama is not; they still sometimes wonder who he really is. In Washington, the appearance of uncertainty is taken as weakness—especially on Capitol Hill, where a president is only as revered as he is feared. Being the cool, convivial late-night-guest in chief won’t cut it with Congress, an institution impervious to charm (especially the charm of a president with wavering poll numbers). Members of both parties are taking Obama’s measure with their defiant and sometimes hostile response to his desires on health care. Never much of a legislator (and not long a -senator), Obama underestimated the complexity of enacting a major “reform” bill. Letting Congress try to write it on its own was an awful idea. As a balkanized land of microfiefdoms, each loyal to its own lobbyists and consultants, Congress is incapable of being led by its “leadership.” It’s not like Chicago, where you call a guy who calls a guy who calls Daley, who makes the call. The president himself must make his wishes clear—along with the consequences for those who fail to grant them.

It’s not entirely clear what “consequences” the president can mete out to members of his own party in an independent branch of government who fail to do as he wishes.  Aside from petty exclusion from the reindeer games that surround the Head of State trappings of the White House — signings, dinners, awards ceremonies, and the like — he needs them more than they need him.

The reason Obama needs to more clearly articulate what he wants isn’t to scare the Congress but rather to inspire the people.  By “going over Congress’ heads,” presidents can leverage their popularity to put pressure on the legislature.

But the truth may well be that, as personally popular as Obama remains, people aren’t necessarily enamored with the specific policies he wants and can’t be talked into changing their minds.  If that’s the case, then going on TV more won’t help.  But it’s not clear what else would.

William McGurn, head speechwriter for most of President George W. Bush’s administration, takes to the WSJ today to discuss what a failure former junior speechwriter Matt Latimer was at his job.  Oh, it truly pains McGurn to write this about a young man he hired — indeed, he “would have taken them to the grave” — but Latimer is now peddling a book about what buffoons his former employers were and McGurn could not in good conscience let it go by without fighting fire with fire.

While I could understand, say, The Daily Beast or Huffington Post going with this, it strikes me as rather lowbrow for a prestige outlet like WSJ.  An op-ed by McGurn defending the administration from Latimer’s charges, sure, but a frontal assault on a junior staffer?  That just seems petty.

Bruce Bartlett explains why he’s not a Republican anymore using a time-honored refrain:  He didn’t leave his party; his party left him.  While he now considers himself an “independent,” he’s more than non-partisan; he’s “anti-Republican.”  Why?

I still consider myself to be a Reaganite. But I don’t see any others anywhere in the GOP these days, which is why I consider myself to be an independent. Mindless partisanship has replaced principled conservatism. What passes for principle in the party these days is “what can we do to screw the Democrats today.”

[...]

I think the Republican Party is in the same boat the Democrats were in in the early eighties — dominated by extremists unable to see how badly their party was alienating moderates and independents. The party’s adults formed the Democratic Leadership Council to push the party back to the center and it was very successful. But there is no group like that for Republicans. That has left lunatics like Glenn Beck as the party’s de facto leaders. As long as that remains the case, I want nothing to do with the GOP.

It’s true that moderates have largely been driven from the leadership ranks of the Republican Party.  But they’ve also been driven from the leadership ranks of the Democratic Party. The combination of gerrymandered districts and the permanent campaign have incentivized polarization.

Still, John McCain, the GOP nominee in last November’s election, was from the moderate wing of the party, beating out a slew of more ideologically pure contenders. George W. Bush, the standard-bearer in 2000 and 2004, ran as a “compassionate conservative.”  Mushy moderate Mitt Romney is the most probable nominee for 2012.

The idea that Glenn Beck is somehow the leader of the party is absurd. Given that the United States lacks a shadow government, the out-of-power party has no obvious leader.   Who was the leader of the Democrats after John Kerry lost in 2004?  Certainly, it wasn’t Barack Obama, who was a mere state senator and U.S. Senator-elect.

Also rather silly:

I see no way a Republican can retake the White House for the foreseeable future. Both CBO and OMB are predicting better than 4% real growth in 2011 and 2012. If those numbers are even remotely correct Obama will have it in the bag.

So, the “foreseeable future” is the same as “in the next election”? Yes, barring serious scandal, Obama is likely to be re-elected if the economy is good.  Incumbent presidents always win re-election when the economy is good! Indeed, their party tends to hold power even if the incumbent can’t run again.  At worst, they lose in close and controversial contests as in 1960 and 2000. But that doesn’t tell us anything about the state of the opposition party.  Voters simply prefer to keep the current team on when things are going well and to change horses when they aren’t.

Also, Republicans have to find a way to win some minority votes because it is not viable as a whites-only party in presidential elections. That’s why I wrote my Wrong on Race book, which no one read.

Well, why would anyone bother to read a book whose take-away is a sentence?  And an obvious one at that?

But it’s really a truism, isn’t it?  As non-whites increase their share of the electorate, naturally a successful candidate will need to appeal to non-whites.  But, guess what?  Successful candidates do.  Bush won 46 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004.   McCain did far less well among Hispanics.  Then again, he did far less well among whites.

While I share Michael Tomasky’s disdain for people carrying signs about “the blood of tyrants” while protesting democratically elected leaders, he goes too far here:

There was an election. One guy one, another guy lost. It wasn’t disputed. It wasn’t decided by an ideologically divided Supreme Court, which gave the win to the guy who won fewer votes. This election wasn’t even particularly close. It means that the side that won is entitled to try to pass its agenda. But the protesters don’t respect the result of the election.

To be sure, there are people, like the Birther conspiracists, who don’t in fact respect the result of the election.  But so what?  So long as they don’t actually engage in criminal conduct to express that disrespect, they’re entitled to be sore losers.

But winning an election doesn’t mean you get to do whatever you want for the term of your office.  Not in America’s system with it’s complicated checks and balances and divided government.  No, winning merely means you have better leverage on the wheels of power, not complete control.

George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004 by a comfortable margin and his party had control of both Houses of Congress.  Rather quickly, with the Katrina debacle and the emergence of a full-blown insurgency in Iraq, his administration got stuck in the mire.  His vaunted “political capital” was gone and he was unable to enact such things as the massive Social Security reforms on which he campaigned.

Beyond the practicalities of enacting public policy, the very idea of a “mandate” is rather silly.  Yes, Barack Obama won and yes, he was and is quite popular.  Yes, he campaigned on fixing health care and yes, fixing health care is popular.  But those who voted for Obama did so for a wide variety of reasons.  Similarly, those who like Obama and who want to “fix” health care may nonetheless disagree, vehemently even, with the particular set of fixes that are being bandied about.  Surely, they’re entitled to let that be known?

Just as surely, those who lost the last election are entitled to try to rally the troops and persuade independents to give them another chance.  That’s the essence of free speech.

Dick Cheney is breaking the mold on how recently-departed vice presidents act. First, he immediately went into attack mode against President Obama. Now, he’s going after President Bush, too. Bart Gelman for WaPo:

Cheney’s disappointment with the former president surfaced recently in one of the informal conversations he is holding to discuss the book with authors, diplomats, policy experts and past colleagues. By habit, he listens more than he talks, but Cheney broke form when asked about his regrets.

“In the second term, he felt Bush was moving away from him,” said a participant in the recent gathering, describing Cheney’s reply. “He said Bush was shackled by the public reaction and the criticism he took. Bush was more malleable to that. The implication was that Bush had gone soft on him, or rather Bush had hardened against Cheney’s advice. He’d showed an independence that Cheney didn’t see coming. It was clear that Cheney’s doctrine was cast-iron strength at all times — never apologize, never explain — and Bush moved toward the conciliatory.”

The two men maintain respectful ties, speaking on the telephone now and then, though aides to both said they were never quite friends. But there is a sting in Cheney’s critique, because he views concessions to public sentiment as moral weakness. After years of praising Bush as a man of resolve, Cheney now intimates that the former president turned out to be more like an ordinary politician in the end.

Gawker’s The Cajun Boy is quite amused:

Now, only Dick Cheney could ever possibly reflect on the “stay the course” presidency of George W. Bush and somehow come to the mangled conclusion that it was conciliatory in just about anything that it did. If there’s one thing that objective people can probably agree almost universally on when assessing Bush as a president, it’s that he and his administration were hopelessly, tragically stubborn.

But Cheney’s actually quite right here. As I’ve been arguing for months, Bush’s foreign policy returned to the Realist roots he campaigned on over time. Wolfowitz, Feith, and the gang were gone in 2005 and Rumsfeld followed them in late 2006. Gelman:

Cheney’s imprint on law and policy, achieved during the first term at the peak of his influence, had faded considerably by the time he and Bush left office. Bush halted the waterboarding of accused terrorists, closed secret CIA prisons, sought congressional blessing for domestic surveillance, and reached out diplomatically to Iran and North Korea, which Cheney believed to be ripe for “regime change.”

This apparently not only hurt his feelings but, more importantly, a shift away from a national strategy Cheney legitimately thought necessary to protect his country. As Kevin Drum intimates, it’s amazing that he thought we were on the right course.

But Cheney himself seems to have changed his mind on a matter of honor. He’s now working diligently on a tell-all book to set the record straight.

Some old associates see Cheney’s newfound openness as a breach of principle. For decades, he expressed contempt for departing officials who wrote insider accounts, arguing that candid internal debate was impossible if the president and his advisers could not count on secrecy. As far back as 1979, one of the heroes in Lynne Cheney’s novel “Executive Privilege” resolved never to write a memoir because “a president deserved at least one person around him whose silence he could depend on.” Cheney lived that vow for the next 30 years.

As vice president, according to one witness, Cheney “was livid” when the memoir of L. Paul Bremer, who led the occupation of Iraq, made the less-than-stunning disclosure that Cheney shared Bremer’s concern about U.S. military strategy. A Cabinet-level Bush appointee recalled that Cheney likewise described revelations by former Treasury secretary Paul H. O’Neill and former White House spokesman Scott McClellan as “beyond the pale.”

“If he goes out and writes a memoir that spills beans about what took place behind closed doors, that would be out of character,” said Ari Fleischer, who served as White House spokesman during Bush’s first term.

Yet that appears to be precisely Cheney’s intent. Robert Barnett, who negotiated Cheney’s book contract, passed word to potential publishers that the memoir would be packed with news, and Cheney himself has said, without explanation, that “the statute of limitations has expired” on many of his secrets. “When the president made decisions that I didn’t agree with, I still supported him and didn’t go out and undercut him,” Cheney said, according to Stephen Hayes, his authorized biographer. “Now we’re talking about after we’ve left office. I have strong feelings about what happened. . . . And I don’t have any reason not to forthrightly express those views.”

I’m generally with Old Dick Cheney on this one. Unless one resigns in protest, one owes a certainly loyalty to those whom one serves. Cheney is one of the more controversial and important figures in recent American political history, though, and getting his considered reflections on why things unfolded as they did should be fascinating.

UPDATE: I appeared on Russia Today to talk about this issue.

Ezra Klein and Steve Benen are recirculating this somewhat interesting chart on political polarization in America by political scientists Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal.

Ezra argues that “this level of polarization makes it virtually impossible to govern in a system that is designed to foil majorities and require a constant three-fifths consensus. It’s not good if the country is virtually impossible to govern.”  Steve says this is especially true when, pace Harold Meyerson, the opposition party “is dominated by Southern neo-Dixiecrats.”

Given this situation, Ezra observes, “Problems don’t stop mounting while we try and figure things out. We could respond to this by making it easier for the majority party to govern and thus less likely that we have some sort of massive crisis that totally realigns our politics.”  He’s not talking about amending the Constitution but rather implementing unspecified rules changes in Congress that would strip power from the minority to get in the way.

Newt Gingrich made a bunch of changes in 1994. Democrats made a bunch of changes in 1975. John F. Kennedy made some big changes in the early 1960s. FDR changed the way Congress worked, and so too did Woodrow Wilson. This isn’t something invented by a bunch of bloggers in the early 21st century.

My recollection of both the Gingrich and post-Watergate reforms is that they were aimed at breaking down the power that came with seniority and to deal with public perception that Members were unduly influenced by outside interests rather than the ability of the opposition party to shape or block legislation.   And I’ve got no idea whatever of what Kennedy did to reform Congress; indeed, I’m not sure how he would have done that from the White House. In the cases of FDR and Wilson, they simply seized power for the presidency during extreme national crises with the acquiescence of Congress.

Regardless, as Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein document, there have been numerous and nearly-continuous efforts to reform Congressional rules over the years.  And I’d be quite happy, for example, to do away with or seriously limit the use of the filibuster, secret holds, and various other measures which make it easy for the minority to block even relatively minor legislation.  Those are extra-constitutional at best and are not supposed to be used routinely as they now are.

At the same time, however, I disagree with the underlying premise of Ezra and Steve’s complaint.  The fact that we’re more polarized on politics as a nation than we have been in decades, by definition, means that there’s little national consensus.  That’s simply not a time for radical policy changes.  Ramming through unpopular programs in a very polarized nation is a recipe for more polarization.

George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004 along with Republican majorities in both Houses of Congress.  Among the signature programs he ran on was a radical overhaul of the Social Security retirement system that included a private option.   Once we got to the legislative phase, however, and the public saw the actual program rather than an abstract notion, it became decidedly less popular.  And the Democratic minority in Congress was able to block it.   We may well be on the road to the exact same thing happening on health care reform, with the public option failing to catch on for now.

That is how our system is supposed to work.  It’s precisely designed not to allow big change based on a small majority.

Furthermore, the Democrats have a reasonably comfortable margin in both the House and the Senate.  To the extent that they’re failing to get things done, it’s not because “Southern neo-Dixiecrats” in the minority party are using dastardly tricks to foil the popular will but because of fissures within the Democratic coalition.   Which, incidentally, the Republicans faced, too, back when they had the majority.

The nature of putting together a governing coalition in a politically polarized country is that getting over the top requires winning seats in states and districts that are either closely divided or are usually won by the other party.  “Blue dog” Democrats are no more in line with the Progressive wing of their party than the Northeastern Republicans of yore were with the Southern Conservative wing of theirs.

Michael Gerson pronounces the Obama Doctrine of engagement DOA:

But even lacking an ideology, the administration does have a doctrine. The defining principle of President Obama’s foreign policy is engagement with America’s adversaries. Much of the president’s public diplomacy has been designed to clear a path for such talks — expressing respect for legitimate grievances, apologizing for past wrongs and offering dialogue without preconditions.

Six months on, how fares the Obama doctrine? Concerning North Korea and Iran, the doctrine is on its deathbed.

North Korea responded to administration outreach by testing a nuclear weapon, firing missiles toward U.S. allies, resuming plutonium reprocessing and threatening the United States with a “fire shower of nuclear retaliation.” During congressional testimony, Clinton admitted, “At this point [it] seems implausible, if not impossible, the North Koreans will return to the six-party talks and begin to disable their nuclear capacity again.”

The Iranian regime’s reaction to engagement was to cut the ribbon on a nuclear enrichment facility, add centrifuges, conduct a fraudulent election, and kill and imprison a variety of political opponents. Regarding administration overtures, Clinton recently told the BBC, “We haven’t had any response. We’ve certainly reached out and made it clear that’s what we’d be willing to do . . . but I don’t think they have any capacity to make that kind of decision right now.”

I agree with Mr. Gerson’s view that President Obama actually believes his campaign rhetoric. However, as James has chronicled effectively, President Obama ran successfully against President Bush’s foreign policy c. 2003 but as president affirmed Bush’s foreign policy c. 2008 with astonishing regularity. The Obama presidency is still in Act I and he’s been fortunate so far to have escaped serious foreign policy challenges.

They will come. And when they do perhaps a recalcitrant North Korea or Iran will come to the bargaining table. Or President Obama may doggedly try to continue to dance with the one that brought him, however ineffective it might be.

Or he may successfully redefine himself as he has done with protean facility throughout his adult life. Stay tuned.