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Bookshelf: Thomas Barnett's Blueprint for Action
Tweet Share on Facebook November 15, 2005 CommentThomas Barnett won a lot of attention back in April 2004 with his book The Pentagon's New Map. Now he comes forward with a sequel, Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating. Barnett's PowerPoint presentations have attracted many in the Pentagon and defense establishment, and rightly so. His analysis in New Map of where we stand in the world is original and illuminating. His policy prescriptions in Blueprint I find not entirely convincing, but others will disagree, and they are at least worth thinking about.
Barnett divides the world into the Functioning Core and the Non-integrating Gap. The Core consists of the developed countries with the rule of law and is held together by globalization, by trade and mutual economic dependence. It includes what Barnett called the New Core—China, India, Brazil, etc. The Gap consists of the parts of the world not linked to the global economy and plagued by war and conflicts of various kinds—splotches of Latin America (the Andean countries, Central America, the Caribbean), sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa, much of the Balkans, the Middle East and Central Asia, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The goal of policy—diplomatic. military, and economic—should be to expand the Core and shrink the Gap. Barnett argues in Blueprint that progress is being made—in the Balkans, in Iraq, in Southeast Asia and Indonesia.
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More thoughts on the polls and election results
Tweet Share on Facebook November 14, 2005 CommentHere is my Creators Syndicate column for this week. It's called Politics Puerto Rican Style.
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'I think it's a lie to say that the president lied'
Tweet Share on Facebook November 14, 2005 CommentThat is what John McCain said in response to Bob Schieffer's question on Face the Nation yesterday, "Do you believe it is unpatriotic to criticize the administration's Iraq policy?" Here's McCain's reply in full:
"No, I think it's a very legitimate aspect of American life to criticize and to disagree and to debate. But I want to say I think it's a lie to say that the president lied to the American people [boldface added]. I sat on the Robb-Silberman commission. I saw many, many analysts that came before that committee. I asked every one of them–I said, `Did–were you ever pressured politically or any other way to change your analysis of the situation as you saw [it]?' Every one of them said no. Now was there a colossal intelligence failure? Of course, there was. Is there still a lot that needs to be done to improve that? Are we winning the war on terror? I think it depends on your parameters. But to assert that the president intentionally lied to the American people is just wrong."
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Sam's Club Republicans
Tweet Share on Facebook November 11, 2005 CommentI mentioned in passing the piece by Ross Douthat and Reigan Salam in this week's Weekly Standard on Sam's Club Republicans. It's a very thoughtful and creative attempt to sketch out, or at least give direction to, a new conservative Republican agenda. Bush Republicans, Douthat and Salam argue, have delivered rather little to the modest-income, culturally conservative voters who have provided absolutely indispensable votes for their agenda. Moreover, the Bush agenda, announced and campaigned on in 2000 and again in 2004, has mostly been either (a) accomplished or (b) effectively stymied. The agenda cupboard is bare. These two 20-somethings suggest some items for filling it up again. They haven't put their proposals through a think-tank analysis—they're two young guys who work for the Atlantic and the New York Times—but others can do that. What they have supplied is a political direction. Public-policy agendas for political parties should be good policy and good politics. The Bush 2000 agenda was. Now something new is needed. The Weekly Standard should make sure numerous copies get over to the White House.
I have been thinking of this article especially as I have been pondering the California election returns and the defeat of Arnold Schwarzenegger's four ballot proposals. There was little in them for the Sam's Club Republicans, and the margins favoring them in the Inland Empire and the Central Valley were tepid—far lower than the percentages there for the recall of Gray Davis two years ago. I was out in California before that election and interviewed voters. In Bellflower, once a white working-class suburb near Long Beach and now heavily Latino, I interviewed downscale voters and found half of them ready to recall Davis. They especially opposed Davis's car-tax increase. I recall especially one Latino guy who was furious about the tax increase: He had to pay it on his three motorcycles. Republicans were giving him something to vote for in 2003. They weren't in 2005. Douthat and Salam suggest they had better do so in the future if they want to win elections in 2006 and 2008 as they did in 2000, 2002, 2003, and 2004.
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Ahmad Chalabi speaks
Tweet Share on Facebook November 11, 2005 CommentOn Wednesday, I went to the American Enterprise Institute to see Ahmad Chalabi. He is often denigrated in the mainstream media and has been the target of many in the CIA who consider him a dangerous man. I take a different view. As head of the Iraqi National Congress for many years, he risked his life seeking freedom for Iraq, and he showed great skill in creating a united front of Iraqis. He returned to Iraq while major military operations were going on and attempted to recruit a brigade of Iraqi soldiers early on—something that we should have encouraged him and others to do much sooner than we did. Last year, he was distinctly out of favor, not just with Arabists/peacenik career folks at State and CIA but also with Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon. Charges were made that he gave intelligence to Iran.
Today he is the deputy prime minister of Iraq, and on his visit to Washington this week he got an audience with Rice and other top administration officials. At AEI, there were a few demonstrators with bullhorns out front (outnumbered, so far as I could tell, by members of the press), and in the question-and-answer period, David Corn of the Nation and a couple of mainstream media reporters sought to get him to admit he and the INC gave phony intelligence to U.S. officials before the war. He refused to comment except to recommend that they read Page 108 of the report of the Silberman-Robb commission on prewar intelligence.
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California: Arnold loses
Tweet Share on Facebook November 10, 2005 CommentWith 100 percent of precincts reporting (but, possibly, many absentee ballots remaining to be counted), all eight of the propositions on the California ballot, including the four supported by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, have been defeated. There's a general rule in California politics that when in doubt voters tend to vote no, and that surely accounts for the defeat by wide margins of two prescription drug and one electricity regulation propositions, on which Schwarzenegger did not take a stand. And that may have contributed to the defeat of the four on which he did. But there is no way to spin away from the conclusion that this was a big defeat for Schwarzenegger and a big victory for the public employee unions.
Start with the ballot proposition, not supported by Schwarzenegger, which came closest to passing: Proposition 73, parental consent for abortion. In most states this would have been supported by a solid majority. But in culturally liberal California it lost 53-to-47 percent. This map tells you why: huge majorities against it in the San Francisco Bay Area, lower margins in favor in the Central Valley and Inland Empire.
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New York City mayor
Tweet Share on Facebook November 10, 2005 CommentNew York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was re-elected, evidently by a 59-to-36 percent margin. (I can't find detailed election figures on the Web; the New York Times used to run them on the Thursday after the election but evidently doesn't deem them Web-worthy now.) This is an even bigger win than Rudolph Giuliani's re-election in 1997.
National significance? Democrats are correct in pointing out that Bloomberg was a Democrat, a pretty liberal Democrat, until he changed parties to run for mayor in 2001, and that he has governed in some respects like a liberal Democrat—he raised property taxes, for example. But on the one central issue in New York, he has been on the same side as Giuliani and on the opposite side of many vocal New York City Democrats and the liberal opinion-setters on the New York Times editorial page. That issue is crime control. Giuliani was attacked for years as a racist, even called Hitler, for his crime control policies. Bloomberg has followed a similar course, and the attacks have died down, in volume at least. One reason is that Bloomberg is less confrontational than Giuliani.
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The New Jersey results
Tweet Share on Facebook November 9, 2005 CommentFirst, a complaint about the way New Jersey officials post election results on the Web—and a caveat about what follows. New Jersey didn't start posting election results on the Web until after I went to bed last night, and its current postings are more incomplete than the returns reported by the Associated Press. Also, New Jersey, for no good reason, posts the returns for each candidate on separate pages, which makes calculations of percentages tedious (thank goodness there are only 21 counties!), and each candidate in this case includes not only Democrat Jon Corzine and Republican Doug Forrester but all eight nuisance party candidates, who among them received about 3.5 percent of the vote. I say about because these returns are incomplete. I find that turnout in Hudson County was down 38 percent from 2001—highly unlikely—and that turnout in Atlantic and Cape May counties was down 10 percent. That probably means that most of the precincts left to report are in those counties. Since Hudson County is heavily Democratic and Atlantic County leans that way, while Cape May County is usually Republican, that means that Corzine's final percentage will probably be a little higher and Forrester's a little lower than the numbers I've used here. Also, I've calculated these percentages in tenths but report them rounded off as whole percentages. Given the fact that at least some of them will be different when the final results are in, I think that reporting percentages in tenths is an exercise in spurious precision.
With that in mind, let's go.
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The election results
Tweet Share on Facebook November 9, 2005 CommentThere's a ritual, a kind of kabuki dance, to interpreting the results of the two gubernatorial elections, in Virginia and New Jersey, that are held the year after the presidential election. If one party wins both elections, its spin doctors claim that they are a verdict on the national administration—up if the national party's candidates win, down if (as in such elections going back now to 1989) the national party's candidates lose. The spin doctors of the other party quote Tip O'Neill's adage that "all politics is local" and say that the results were due to state and local issues and have no relevance to national politics.
There's some truth on both sides. State elections are, after all, about state issues—why else would we have, as we do now, Republican governors in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont (John Kerry's three best states) and a Democratic governor in Wyoming (George W. Bush's No. 1 state in 2000 and No. 2 in 2004)? And yet the trends in national politics are sometimes echoed in the results in elections for governor. Issues that work for one party in state elections sometimes work for them in federal elections as well. I don't hold with the traditional view that governors have great power to deliver votes for their party's nominees in presidential elections. But state elections do have some implications for national politics.
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The elections today
Tweet Share on Facebook November 8, 2005 CommentFor the latest poll results, see www.realclearpolitics.com.
On balance, these elections seem likely to be good news for Democrats.
