Hyde Park Blvd

Writing in Foreign Policy, John Mearsheimer takes the measure of reality in Afghanistan and the reality of politics here at home and comes to a melancholy conclusion:

…(Obama) will increase the American commitment to Afghanistan, just as Lyndon Johnson did in Vietnam in 1965. The driving force in both cases is domestic politics. Johnson felt that he had to escalate the fight in Vietnam because otherwise the Republicans would lambaste him for “losing Vietnam,” the same way they accused President Harry Truman of “losing China” in the late 1940s.

Obama and his fellow Democrats know full well that if the United States walks away from Afghanistan now, the Republicans will accuse them of capitulating to terrorism and undermining our security. And this charge will be leveled at them for decades to come, harming Democrats at the polls come election time. The Democrats have no intention of letting that happen.

The United States is in Afghanistan for the long haul. As was the case in Vietnam, more American soldiers and many more civilians are going to die in Afghanistan. And for no good reason.

Harold Pollack, head of the Center for Health Administration Studies at the University of Chicago has had it up to here with the posturing and histrionics surrounding the healthcare debate. Writing in The New Republic, his comments are timely and important and worth repeating in full:

During the Bush years, a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government was writing a book called Savin’ it! on abstinence education in the public schools. As part of his research, he contacted then-Attorney General John Ashcroft with a request for personal testimony. His letter noted:

The book’s fourth chapter, ”Role Modelin’ It!” will feature the personal stories of abstinence heroes for our nation’s young people to emulate …I would very much appreciate if you could share your abstinence story.  I can tell by your passionate advocacy that you will have a lot to offer this book… I hope you will find the time to inspire the next generation of sex-free leaders.

I don’t know whether the author ever completed this monograph, though he did complete another book soon after.

My next health policy book will include a similar chapter on what you might call budget abstinence heroes: Men and women will proclaim the virtues of fiscal conservatism, and then actually resist the temptation to mess around in the fine print when the adults aren’t looking.

Sadly, I can’t find many self-avowed fiscal conservatives who honor the budget abstinence pledge. Consider these lines from the Washington Post:

House leaders abandoned an effort to include a public option backed by liberals that would establish reimbursement rates to providers based on Medicare. Rural Democrats strongly opposed that approach because of the potentially ruinous effect on doctors and hospitals in their districts, where Medicare rates are generally well below the national average.

Only a few lines later:

House negotiators were able to lower the price tag in part by expanding Medicaid coverage to a broader slice of the population… The adjustment reflects findings by congressional budget analysts that covering the poor through Medicaid–which pays providers far less than Medicare–is far more cost-effective than offering subsidies for private insurance policies.

To recap: Rural hospitals will be protected from efforts to reduce the deficit by imposing Medicare reimbursement rates. Urban hospitals (and patients and states) will be forced to accept a system of far lower reimbursements, in order to spare the federal government the cost of private insurance.

This is not a particular surprise, but the hypocrisy is galling. To avoid the evils of a government-run program moderates say will pay providers too little, we’ll put a markedly larger population into a government-run program that pays providers even less.

I can tolerate another giveaway to rural constituencies who profit from our peculiar political system. When the recipients of such giveaways–Mike Ross, Kent Conrad, and others–are such ostentatious advocates of fiscal discipline, it’s a bit rich.

Money and sex have a way of exposing the hypocrisy in all of us. At least when our kids are old enough to demand our personal abstinence stories, we have the decency to blush.

From Roger Myerson’s web page.  Something a little more thoughtful than the usual prattle:

A COMMENT ON THE 2009 NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

By giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama at this stage, less than one year into his Presidency, the Prize Committee has emphasized the importance of his redefining how American power will be used in the world: with manifest restraint and respect for world opinion. In his first nine months in office, without giving any foreign power a veto over America’s use of military force, President Obama has reassured the world that the military superiority of the world’s greatest superpower will used only with broad consultation and support from other nations throughout the world. This reassurance has greatly reduced international tensions, so that people can feel safer in America and throughout the world. The Peace Prize Committee may be anticipating that President Obama’s acceptance speech could become a clear statement of a new doctrine: that America can retain its position as the world’s dominant military power without serious challenges only if we exercise our dominance according to principles of restraint that the whole world can judge. If Americans embrace such a doctrine and demand that our future presidents should adhere to it, then there may be some real hope of global peace under American leadership for generations to come. In the long run, this accomplishment may be a far greater contribution to peace than mediating a resolution to one international dispute.

Roger Myerson
2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences

“Wacky stuff” is what Johnny Carson used to say about schtick that went beyond the pale (or the decorum of late-night television in the middle of the 20th century).

Now the wacky stuff is written by ex-Bush speechwriters.  Even the tone is wacky.  To wit:

My youthful exuberance cooled as I moved up the rungs of power. On Capitol Hill, I worked for a congressman who “misremembered” basic facts, such as the “Eisenhower assassination.” I worked for a senator who hid from his own staff. I was assigned to coach Republican senators on how to reach out to the media and entertainment world. (You try explaining The View to a group of 65-year-old white Republican men.) At the Pentagon, as chief speechwriter to Donald Rumsfeld, I battled an entrenched civil-service system and an inept communications team.

In 2007 I finally made it to the Bush White House as a presidential speechwriter. But it was not at all what I envisioned. It was less like Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing and more like The Office. After watching Karl Rove’s bizarre farewell to White House staffers and hearing the president dismiss the conservative movement I believed in (“I know it sounds arrogant to say,” he told me, “but I redefined the Republican Party”), I thought I could muddle through till the end. Washington might not have been the city I had dreamed of, but I figured things couldn’t get much worse.

Later on:

after chris, Jonathan Horn, and I learned about the president’s $700-billion-bailout proposal and drafted the remarks announcing it to a stunned nation, Ed said the president wanted to see us in the Oval Office. The president looked relaxed and was sitting behind the Resolute desk. He felt he’d made the major decision that everyone had been asking for. That always seemed to relax him. He liked being decisive. Excuse me, boldly decisive. The president seemed to be thinking of his memoirs. “This might go in as a big decision,” he mused.

“Definitely, Mr. President,” someone else observed. “This is a large decision.”

“See, this was fine today,” he said. “But we got to make this understandable for the average cat.” He proposed an outline for another speech that talked about the situation our economy was in, how we’d gotten here, and how the administration’s plan was a solution.

Ed and the president decided to give a prime-time address to the nation, and Vice President Cheney was sent to the Hill to argue for our bill (a bill he may or may not have believed in) and was apparently hammered by House Republicans. There were reports that only four Republicans out of nearly 200 supported the plan. From what I was starting to glean about the whole scatterbrained operation, four seemed like too many.

Additional excerpts from Matt Latimer’s book (including gems for the time capsule, such as W musing about Hilary Clinton’s fat arse, or his creative use of the nickname ‘Horny’ for his fellow staffer) about his twenty-two months with W are published on menstyle.com.

Photo by Damon in the NYT

Matt Bai brief and insightful piece in Sunday’s Times Magazine looks at Obama’s off-the-cuff approach to humor, why it endears him to as many (me included) as it repels.  Like his approach to sports (the willingness to be an unabashed fan of one team, or of a college football playoff), it speaks to his interest in calling the question about our White House — or Washington — business-as-usual expectations:

More recently, Obama sounded mystified by plans for a new presidential helicopter. “The helicopter I have now seems perfectly adequate to me,” he remarked dryly. “Of course, I’ve never had a helicopter before, you know? Maybe I’ve been deprived and I didn’t know it.” Other presidents mastered the telling of the canned political joke. Obama’s shtick is that he finds such stagecraft, the falsity and pomposity of modern politics, to be as laughable as we do.

George Friedman and the strategists at STRATFOR have issued a thoughtful re-appraisal of the politics in and around Iran.  A quick excerpt:

How Iran’s internal struggle will work itself out remains unclear. But one dimension is shaping up: Ahmadinejad is trying to position Rafsanjani as leading a pro-American faction intent on a color revolution, while Rafsanjani is trying to position Ahmadinejad as part of a pro-Russian faction. In this argument, the claim that Ahmadinejad had some degree of advice or collaboration with the Russians is credible, just as the claim that Rafsanjani maintained some channels with the Americans is credible. And this makes an internal dispute geopolitically significant.

Well worth subscribing.  Thanks to reader RS for the link.

In case you missed the original piece in the May 11, New Yorker, Gladwell weaves his usual thoughtful red thread across the ages, linking contrarian approaches to battlefields and basketball.

In the course of his wandering, Gladwell lights on Vivek Ranadive and the implications of his real-time processing work (most visible in the successful business he created, TIBCO):

The world runs in real time, but government runs in batch. Every few months, it adjusts. Its mission is to keep the temperature comfortable in the economy, and, if you were to do things the government’s way in your house, then every few months you’d turn the heater either on or off, overheating or underheating your house.” Ranadivé argued that we ought to put the economic data that the Fed uses into a big stream, and write a computer program that sifts through those data, the moment they are collected, and make immediate, incremental adjustments to interest rates and the money supply. “It can all be automated,” he said. “Look, we’ve had only one soft landing since the Second World War. Basically, we’ve got it wrong every single time.”

You can imagine what someone like Alan Greenspan or Ben Bernanke might say about that idea. Such people are powerfully invested in the notion of the Fed as a Solomonic body: that pause of five or eight weeks between economic adjustments seems central to the process of deliberation. To Ranadivé, though, “deliberation” just prettifies the difficulties created by lag. The Fed has to deliberate because it’s several weeks behind, the same way the airline has to bow and scrape and apologize because it waited forty-five minutes to tell you something that it could have told you the instant you stepped off the plane.

George Friedman at Stratfor Global Intelligence has said all along that we (the West) have a tradition of misunderstanding Iran dating back to the days of the Shah.  His perspective is important because it flies in the face of what on reads from television or Andrew Sullivan or the Twitterati:

Revolutions fail when no one joins the initial segment, meaning the initial demonstrators are the ones who find themselves socially isolated. When the demonstrations do not spread to other cities, the demonstrations either peter out or the regime brings in the security and military forces — who remain loyal to the regime and frequently personally hostile to the demonstrators — and use force to suppress the rising to the extent necessary. This is what happened in Tiananmen Square in China: The students who rose up were not joined by others. Military forces who were not only loyal to the regime but hostile to the students were brought in, and the students were crushed.

This is also what happened in Iran this week. The global media, obsessively focused on the initial demonstrators — who were supporters of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s opponents — failed to notice that while large, the demonstrations primarily consisted of the same type of people demonstrating. Amid the breathless reporting on the demonstrations, reporters failed to notice that the uprising was not spreading to other classes and to other areas. In constantly interviewing English-speaking demonstrators, they failed to note just how many of the demonstrators spoke English and had smartphones. The media thus did not recognize these as the signs of a failing revolution.

After all is said and done, Friedman sees a reshuffling, perhaps not the one we’d expect or prefer:

Tehran in 2009, however, was a struggle between two main factions, both of which supported the Islamic republic as it was. There were the clerics, who have dominated the regime since 1979 and had grown wealthy in the process. And there was Ahmadinejad, who felt the ruling clerical elite had betrayed the revolution with their personal excesses. And there also was the small faction the BBC and CNN kept focusing on — the demonstrators in the streets who want to dramatically liberalize the Islamic republic. This faction never stood a chance of taking power, whether by election or revolution. The two main factions used the third smaller faction in various ways, however. Ahmadinejad used it to make his case that the clerics who supported them, like Rafsanjani, would risk the revolution and play into the hands of the Americans and British to protect their own wealth. Meanwhile, Rafsanjani argued behind the scenes that the unrest was the tip of the iceberg, and that Ahmadinejad had to be replaced. Khamenei, an astute politician, examined the data and supported Ahmadinejad.

Now, as we saw after Tiananmen Square, we will see a reshuffling among the elite. Those who backed Mousavi will be on the defensive. By contrast, those who supported Ahmadinejad are in a powerful position. There is a massive crisis in the elite, but this crisis has nothing to do with liberalization: It has to do with power and prerogatives among the elite. Having been forced by the election and Khamenei to live with Ahmadinejad, some will make deals while some will fight — but Ahmadinejad is well-positioned to win this battle.

I spect that the fears about PWDs becoming the next hot breed are unfounded.  Don’t misunderstand me, I love our dogs Carmen and (HPBlvd mascot) Roscoe, but they are goofy looking beasts.  Bo included.

Jezebel’s usual raison is gossip and catty sarcasm, but this moving photo tells another story, that of women at a campaign rally for moderate presidential candidate Houssein Mousavi (Getty Image).