Memories of war

I am sorry, but this I just don’t get.

”I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”

Turns out there was a greeting ceremony. With a little Bosnian girl bearing flowers. So the story was altered a bit.

”I was told that the greeting ceremony had been moved away from the tarmac, but that there was this eight-year-old girl and I said, ‘Well, I, I can’t. I can’t rush by her. I’ve got to at least greet her. So I greeted her. I took her stuff and I left. Now that’s my memory of it.”

But then the videotape emerged, showing Hillary Clinton and Chelsea greeting the U.S. officials, stopping for photos, then moving on.

In politics, as Michael Kinsley once noted, a gaff is when a politician tells the truth. When they tell a—well, a non-truth—they misspoke. And so it was here according to campaign aids. For the candidate herself, it was a mistake.

"I made a mistake. I have a different memory."

But the purpose of the story was to impress upon listeners the candidate’s experience and bona fides to be commander-in-chief, to convey a sense that she has faced the fires of war. If the story was not true, a better explanation would have been to tell us of the experience that she was thinking about. After all, running from a plane across a tarmac under sniper fire—with one’s daughter no less—does not appear to be something that one would forget. So either she had that experience—but confused the circumstances—or she never had the experience and recalled the event from whole cloth.

This matters. After all we are in the midst of an historical period when chief executives are granted wide latitude to go to war or not. George Bush wore his flight suit for the media when he landed on the carrier Abraham Lincoln—with the banner Mission Accomplished draped as the backdrop—because he intended to convey a sense of competence to lead and seriousness of purpose. Hillary Clinton’s story of a Leader Under Fire is designed to accomplish a similar, visceral purpose.

Fair enough. Unless it is not true.

I for one do not particularly care if Hillary Clinton was under fire in Bosnia. Unless she was never under fire. Anywhere. If she was under fire, then she misspoke. If she was never under fire, she lied. And that is what matters. After all, we have three candidates from which we will chose our next president, and at the end of the day issues of judgment, honesty and integrity matter.

Palpable fear

The question is this: When we look back on this moment, will it mark the beginning of the end of this economic cycle, the market bottom of a regular, if turbulent, economic downturn. After all, the S&P500 is 20% off its highs of last fall. The yield curve, once inverted and predicting a downturn, has a strong positive slope. And fear is palpable in the markets, and in the public square. All of these can be signs of a market bottom.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps this is just the end of the beginning. With the collapse of Bear Stearns and the plummeting dollar, is what we are seeing in the flight from the dollar into hard assets just the first stage in the final reckoning, for the United States and for the world. Could this be the moment when the dollar’s slide marks more than the balancing of accounts as envisioned at Bretton Woods a half-century ago? Could this instead accelerate the movement away from the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the basis of economic transactions far beyond our shores. Is this the moment that Eurocentrism is to be put to the test, and the question raised at Versailles and put to rest at Nuremburg will once again be on the table. Is Europe really able to lead the world?

Despite the rhetoric, this is not yet the Asian century. The threat of a collapse in the American economy has given the lie to the pretense of a multi-polar world. For all of their assets, their reserves and their sovereign wealth funds, the Asian economies still live on the margin of the American economy. Nothing has made this evident than the plight of the dollar, with the emerging fears that a 3% downturn in America could become a 20% downturn in Taiwan, and the realization that China, with 500 million people living in poverty, remains a mercantilist nation decades away from being ready to turn her attention to the plight of her neighbors.

This week, all of the questions remain unanswered. Ben Bernanke has bet the house on stanching the tide of the sub-prime crisis. Tuesday, the Fed will drop the Fed Funds target rate by 75 or 100 basis points, a move that will further exacerbate the dollar's decline. The Fed has placed its bet, and would rather see the dollar go down than the banking system. This is coming in the wake of the busiest week on record for the Fed. This past Tuesday, the Fed announced a $200 billion program to take illiquid mortgage-backed securities back from the banks, and then on Friday arranged for JPMorgan—the Whitest of the old White Shoe investment houses—to acquire Bear Stearns, a firm whose roots are from a distinctly different tradition. But the Fed did more than arrange this marriage, it provided the dowry as well, agreeing to share with JP the downside risk.

Some will balk at the notion of a bailout, but the stockholders and employees of Bear Stearns would challenge that description of the deal. After all, at a price of $2 per share, the employees at Bear—half of whom stand to lose their jobs—saw the value of their 35% stake in the company fall by 99% from $8 billion to around $80 million, with much of that decline coming since the closing bell on Friday. Instead, this should lead to calls for reregulation of the financial sector, which was largely deregulated in 1999.

Ben Bernanke has given the lie to the notion that deregulation in the banking sector is a balanced policy, and it is hard to imagine who in his shoes would act differently. Faced with the looming collapse of the financial sector, the problem of moral hazard—the risk that failing to let those who made bad bets suffer will contribute to future bad behavior—will not prevent intervention. In the moment, when the world is collapsing around you, there is just too much at stake to dwell on ethical and market theory. But don’t blame Bernanke, after all, we went through Continental Illinois, Long-Term Capital and the Savings & Loan mess ad seriatum. Same story. Same result. More or less.

Thus, the question of whether we sit at the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning is not an academic one. Our country—which has been living beyond its means for decades—may actually have finally bitten off more that we can chew. With a $3 trillion war and a $2 trillion financial crisis both in full swing, and both requiring massive infusions of foreign capital, the fix this time might involve some pain. Maybe it is time to set some new rules, for the private sector and for the public sector as well.

But at the end of the day, the rest of the world has a stake in our survival—at least for the moment—because we are kind of like a big Wall Street investment bank that has done some stupid things. Many people may want us to pay the price for our conduct, but they don't want to get hurt in the process. They don't want to play a game of chicken when their own future is at stake.

So you tell me, is this the time to buy, or what?

Geraldine's moment of lucidity

What was your moment of epiphany, Geraldine, when you realized that society had bent over backward for the Black Man? What was the moment when the resentment of one caught looking upward at the glass ceiling boils over into a rage of the privileges offered to those who were offered instead the legacy of the lynching tree?

It is no fault of Hillary’s that the candidate that has emerged as her antagonist is a Black Man. Surely, Geraldine Ferraro believed that she was signing up for the Great Campaign that would pit Hillary against the best Man the system might put forward. And certainly she is not alone in having failed to truly grasp the significance of the historical moment. But in her lashing out, her words betrayed her. To suggest that being Black in American politics is an advantage is curious. Point if you will to the ranks of African American Senators or Governors, or those elected to majority White districts whose residents looked beyond color to elect the man or woman.

Our system remains rife with the symbols of centuries of the abject oppression of Black Men. Our criminal justice system educates more Black Men, by some counts, than our great universities. Affirmative action, once viewed as a critical tool to redress past and current disadvantages, lies but a shell of its former self, its demise at once a symbol of America’s commitment to egalitarian values and denial of the cruelty and ugliness of its past. But meanwhile, Title Nine lives on. Ironically, it is OK to offer White Woman a free ride for their prowess at lacrosse but not to the descendents of the African slave trade.

I would have thought that the intellectual prowess of the icons of the Women’s Movement would have shown greater insight. To condemn Obama’s rise as one more manifestation of the Old Boy’s Network rising up to defend the status quo against the rise of a woman warrior fails the tests of intellectual honesty. Why not instead move the conversation forward rather than backward. Why not question why America’s fixation with racial identification fails to accept Obama as bi-racial. Why not—if we are to be true to our commitment to our children who view the world with far greater nuance and acceptance of difference—let this moment deepen and animate our understanding of identity.

If Hillary loses the nomination battle, the scars will be bitter and deep for her supporters, whose belief in her is firm and deep. But Ferraro has fallen prey to her own demons. Barack Obama is not Jesse Jackson. Barack Obama’s base was not Black until Bill Clinton made it so. Before Iowa, a majority of Black voters were for Clinton. But the world of identity politics is part of Democracy, not a creature of this race. And Hillary’s strategy has been built on that reality. Clinton chief strategist Mark Penn early on articulated their calculus being to win the 48% of the electorate that is Democratic, and pull up to 20% of Republican women—and when push comes to shove, that will be the case that they will make to the super-delegates.

That is the case they will make, and the case that they are making now. Plus, they will argue, America will never elect a Black Man to be president. Despite whatever Geraldine might think.

Where's the beef?

For a fourth time, the Obama campaign seems to be gathering momentum.

On each previous occasion––after the votes in Iowa and in South Carolina, and on Super Tuesday––Hillary Clinton successfully stemmed its rising tide. Now, the contest seems to be nearing its final moments, when Clinton will either succeed in turning Obama back for good, or find her campaign overwhelmed by the historical moment.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign was built on three core strategies––Monopolize the money. Build momentum. Dominate the message––and early on her success was unarguable. During the year leading up to Iowa, the Clinton campaign locked down a large proportion of the major Democratic donors, and with that money in place the campaign built momentum on the theme of inevitability. The campaign was a juggernaut, and they fully expected Super Tuesday to mark the end of the nomination process.

Instead, the day after Super Tuesday, two legs of the strategy lay in tatters. The momentum had dissipated, and the Obama campaign stunned the political world when it announced that in January it had raised $32 million, including contributions from 170,000 new contributors.

Only Hillary Clinton’s message remains in tact, and she is looking for a Walter Mondale moment to regain the upper hand. Like Clinton this year, 24 years ago Walter Mondale was the presumptive nominee facing an insurgent challenger whose rhetoric seemed high on fluff and low on substance, until Mondale dispatched Gary Hart in a single, dramatic moment. Now, Clinton is hoping for such a moment, when she might turn to Obama in a televised debate and utter Mondale’s famous words, “Where’s the beef?”

And her campaign imagines the devastation it would wreck on Obama’s campaign as the shallowness of his response would be apparent for all to see, reverberating in the millions of YouTube replays that would follow.

But that moment is unlikely to come. Today, American's have lost faith in our political institutions––in Congress and the Presidency––and have become acutely aware that as a nation we cannot fix our problems until we fix our politics.

Over the past twenty years––since Lee Atwater and others perfected a style of politics that used wedge issues to divide Americans against themselves––political strategies and tactics have exacerbated our differences at every turn, as each party sought to find an edge in pursuit of power.

The American people now know that we have paid a steep price for the politics, tactics and divisiveness of the past twenty years, and it is now clear that these politics have failed the American people. The truth is that in a world where Americans find themselves competing with workers in China and India and Brazil, we know that we can no longer afford the luxury of the political games that have sapped our country of our ability to solve the real problems we face.

Hillary Clinton’s hope to take Barack Obama down on the basis of her greater mastery of the intricacies of policy and the superiority of her healthcare plan is unlikely to succeed. It will not succeed because the overwhelming reality is that for the American electorate today, this election is not about who has the best plan.

After all, fifteen years ago, America watched as Hillary Clinton led the Clinton administration's effort to fix our healthcare system. She had a plan then––as she has a plan now––and her plan may have been better than everyone else’s plan. But that effort ended in failure. And it was nasty and partisan and hostile.

Today, everyone has experts and everyone has a plan. But that is no longer enough. Voters are looking past the plans into the stance of the candidates toward the most fundamental problem we face: our politics.

So if she finds her moment and turns toward Barack Obama and asks him, Where’s the beef?, she should not be surprised if it does not work out as she hoped.

The fundamental difference between the Clinton and Obama campaigns is not about Where’s the beef? but rather about What is the beef? What is it that really matters if we are to move forward as a society and a nation?

Hillary Clinton believes that plans matter most. Barack Obama, on the other hand, understands that Americans are tired of perfect plans and perfect solutions that lead nowhere. Instead, they want solutions. Not perfect solutions, perhaps, but solutions that can work, that are built on comity rather than conflict, and that emerge from mutual respect rather than recrimination.

Clinton’s dilemma as she tries to slow Obama’s campaign one final time is that her message––the final leg of her strategy––is not resonating with the voters. Because the beef is no longer about detailed plans and brainpower, it is about a simple question: Can this candidate move the country in a better direction?

The American people know that we have paid a terrible price for the politics, the tactics, and the divisiveness of the past twenty years, and we know that if we make the same choices we did in the past, we can only blame ourselves if we get the same results.

No going back

And then there were three.

As Mitt Romney stepped aside, there were—with apologies to Mike Huckabee—three candidates left vying for the Presidency, each now given a one-in-three chance of taking office in January 2009, according to the futures market trading at Intrade.com. With nine months still to go until Election Day, the country—and the world—have a long time to consider what will come next.

According to a British friend, the American election has captivated Europe—much to the astonishment of the European press—and to the chagrin of the Gnomes in Brussels. This was, after all, to be the time of the Great Decoupling. This was to be the time when Europe, with a strong currency and an America besotted by war and internal division, would free itself from the economic bondage of Wall Street and the Dollar and American suzerainty.

Instead, the turmoil in the markets over the past six months has had the opposite effect. Since last August, the world financial markets have been in the grip of a liquidity and financial crisis as bank balance sheets have suffered the after effects of a massive lending bubble and credit has disappeared. While the sub-prime market meltdown has reached the front pages of the newspapers, the extent of the liquidity crisis last August that left the world markets shaken never really made it beyond the financial press, despite the firing of a bank CEO here and there and a growing public awareness that things could get a lot worse before they get better.

But with the collapse of the European equity markets two weeks ago, reality came crashing home. Early that Tuesday morning, the Federal Reserve Bank dropped its key interest rates by 75 basis points—three quarters of one percent—to buttress the markets against a spillover effect from Europe and a global unraveling. Then, a few days later, the Fed dropped rates a further 50 basis points.

The Fed actions were heretical. After all, faced with a collapsing dollar and oil at nearly $100 per barrel, the last thing that the United States can afford is a run on its currency. And that would seem to be the natural consequence of the Fed’s actions. After all, who would keep money in Dollars if the value loomed to decline further, and the interest rates were declining, rather than shifting in to Eurobonds, offering stability AND a higher yield? What oil producing country would not want to denominate oil in Euros, or some other basket of currencies, instead of in Dollars? What country holding our bonds as their reserve currency would not want to diversify?

And why not dump the Dollar? After all, each nation needs to look after itself. America had it coming, no? With our trade deficits, our budget deficits and our gas-guzzling SUVs—to say nothing of our militant unilateralism—the world was ready for new leadership. America’s time was past.

But the tell-tale signs did not emerge, and there was little evidence of a new run on the Dollar. By all accounts, the countries that have financed our deficits have not sold. Our long-term bond interest rates have gone down, not up. Asian countries and Arab countries, flush with cash from selling us cars and computers and oil have been the first in line to buttress our financial system and invest capital in our banks.

Only the Europeans have waited to the last minute to recognize the depth of their dependence on the United States. Only after their markets collapsed did the sophisticates of the Eurozone grasp what was evident to the new financial elites of China and Singapore, Dubai and Abu Dhabi: The new globalized world, the world of markets and trade and commerce and finance, remained America’s world. It was America’s creation, and for the moment, it is dependent on American leadership.

This is the world that we wanted. That we created. American foreign policy since World War II has been to lead to a world of free markets, where political divisions would give way to economic interdependency. Our objective was to see the nations behind the Iron Curtain—China, Russia and their satellite nations—and the socialist block countries of India and Egypt and their non-aligned fellow travelers, forsake military competition for economic competition.

This is the world that we desired, and it is the world that we have achieved. The closed factories of the Rustbelt. The migration of our economy from manufacturing to service. The two-income family. The end of defined benefit pension plans. The new imperative of lifelong learning. The pressure for new, non-workplace health insurance. These are all manifestations of our victory in the Cold War, and our success in creating the world of our imagination. The world of economic competition and competitive markets, in the hope of forestalling a world of resource wars and nuclear confrontation.

While much of this is old news, the past several weeks have added a new reality, a new granularity, to our picture of the world. When the Fed threw caution to the wind and reduced interest rates by 25% in one week, when they dispensed with the traditional incrementalism, they were struggling with a new reality. In a world where the Dollar has become the reserve currency, the Feds core monetary policy tools for managing our economy have lost power. Similarly, as Congress passed a stimulus package, it was clinging to an antiquated notion that the tools of Keynesian fiscal policy—spending as a tool for spurring economic growth—had more than marginal influence in a world of massive and unchecked deficit spending.

The new reality is that in a world where much if not most of our currency circulates beyond our borders, our tools of monetary and fiscal policy no longer have the power they once had. This is not just our new reality, but the reality of others as well. As central bankers in Brussels struggle with growing demands that they spur growth, while those in Shanghai struggle to contain it, each now realizes that their future—if not their currency—is pegged to ours.

President McCain. President Clinton. President Obama. One of them will inherit a world where the rules have changed, and where domestic monetary and fiscal policy tools will no longer be adequate to dictate our economic future. The new president will have to build new strategies for the coordination of economic policies that address this new and deep interdependency. China and Singapore, Dubai and Abu Dhabi know full well that a collapse of the American Dollar will bring all of them down with it. But only over the past few weeks have their counterparts in Europe come to realize that like the American people, their future will depend on the quality of leadership that emerges from our elections, and whomever that person turns out to be, they have a very real interest in their success.

The art of strategy

As February 5th approaches, the nation appears to be heading to the Clinton-McCain contest that was deemed to be inevitable before McCain’s long decline and Obama’s rise. But first, McCain must prove that he can win a primary without independent support, and Clinton has to finally bury the Obama insurgency.

McCain’s challenge is formidable, as he is seeking to break from the formula that has been the key to Republican Party electoral success in presidential contests since rising out of the ashes of Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964. For all of the fealty shown by this year’s crop of Republican presidential aspirants to the memory of Ronald Reagan, the underpinning of Republican success has not been character or charisma, but rather strict adherence to the formula set forth long ago by Grover Norquist, long-time conservative activist and President of American’s for Tax Reform.

Don’t raise taxes. Preserve property rights. Protect the Second Amendment. Support home schooling. Oppose abortion. Support communities of faith. Protect marriage.

Norquist rules have been the cornerstone of a Republican coalition that endured for decades. It brought together seven groups, each of whom were moved to vote on a single issue.

Pro-faith. Anti-tax. Pro-gun. Anti-gay. Pro-life. Anti-sex education. Pro-property.

Norquist understood that if those single-issue voters stayed together, they could control the government.

“The reason the center-right coalition holds together, the Reagan voters, the George W. Bush voters… vote and are moved by a desire not to be messed with themselves. And as long as everybody’s primary vote-moving issue is dealt with well––and that’s what Bush did, that’s what Reagan did, that’s what the next Republican nominee that gets this right will do––then the coalition is a low-maintenance coalition, because nobody in the room wants anything at the expense of anyone else on a vote-moving issue.”

“As long as the Christians don’t try and steal anyone’s guns, and the gun-owners don’t try to steal anyone’s property, and the property-owners don’t throw prophylactics at the Christians’ kids, we can all work together because nobody is in anyone else’s face, nobody is in anyone else’s pocket, and we can all go fight the Left the rest of the week.”

And it worked. And it endured.

If a Clinton-McCain contest emerges, the Republican Party will be in uncharted waters.

Despite being a traditional conservative on social issues, John McCain never bought into Norquist’s vision, and has been anathema to elements of the Republican Party for years. His campaign collapsed and was largely left for dead after his efforts to mend fences with evangelical leaders. His strength––his brand––lay in his hero status, his straight-talk persona, and his integrity. He is a big picture candidate. Pandering––the essence of Norquist’s business model––simply did not suit him.

This stands in stark contrast to Hillary Clinton’s campaign strategy, as formulated by strategy guru Mark Penn. Penn, the author of Microtrends, views America and the electorate as a quilt of distinct socio-cultural groups with their own interests and concerns, and fashioned the campaign accordingly. However, Penn’s is not a Democrat version of the Norquist strategy, as his are not single-issue voting groups, but rather archetypes built on the familiar model of “Soccer Moms” and “NASCAR Dads.”

However, Barack Obama’s campaign challenged the fundamental premise of Penn’s targeting strategy. Obama’s candidacy was not build on positions, but rather an appeal to an inchoate notion that the nation needs a different kind of leadership, that after years of the Blue-Red Civil War, it is time to rebuild the notion of Nation.

Obama’s appeal loomed to be devastating to Clinton, just as any campaign that is built on interest group politics can appear craven next to a larger appeal to the better angels of our nature. Obama’s message brought out the worst in Bill Clinton, in particular, who was reduced to inveighing against the risks of idealism and false hope. However, the emergence of race during the week after New Hampshire turned the tide for the Clinton campaign, and has been devastating for Obama.

In the Iowa caucuses––now receding deep into memory––Obama won among all voter groups except for older women, and after his victory speech the Pundit Class was building him up as a combination of J.F.K. and M.L.K. Less than a week later, despite losing New Hampshire to Clinton largely on the basis of her strong rebound among women voters, Obama continued to enjoy strength across all voter categories.

In the wake of her New Hampshire victory, however, Clinton uttered words that will become legend in the world of political strategy. Clinton embraced the King metaphor but suggested that while visionary leadership was fine, it took L.B.J. to enact the legislation that King’s rhetoric engendered.

For the week that followed, Clinton pressed the theme that she was the political leader with the muscle and finesse to tame the bureaucracy and drive a progressive agenda, while Obama was just talk. But the strategy was not intended to resuscitate the memory of L.B.J. Rather, the objective was to turn the discussion to race.

And it worked. Outrage ensued that Clinton had subordinated King’s achievements to those of Lyndon Johnson, and––even worse––that almost half a century later a visionary Black leader would still have to rely on White leadership to see their dreams come into reality.

Hillary stoically withstood days of racially charged vituperation, drawing on her and her husbands deep reservoirs of support in the Black community. But by the time a truce was called before the Nevada vote, the trick had been turned, and Obama had been transformed.

No longer was he the visionary, whose base was drawn from those eager for fundamental change––the latest in a long Democratic Party tradition that included Eugene McCarthy, Bobby Kennedy, George McGovern, Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas and Howard Dean. Now he was first and foremost a Black Candidate, inheriting the mantle instead of Jesse Jackson.

And what was wrong with that? After all, Jackson won more primaries than almost anyone on that list.

But as the Nevada vote rolled in, what was wrong became clear. In less than a week, the entire dynamic of the race had changed. Identity Politics largely displaced the debate over Change vs. Experience, and the Obama campaign was badly wounded.

For the Clinton campaign, this transformation was essential. After all, she had won New Hampshire in the wake of the Teargate episode that drew women to her banner in large numbers. While that was fine as a means of reviving a campaign that was failing, she could not allow herself to become identified as a Women Candidate.

Therefore, labeling Obama as the Black Candidate served two purposes. First, even if it ceded a major voting block to him, it marginalized his campaign and undermined its national prospects. Second, it neutralized the negative aspects of her own reliance on women, by making each candidate an identity candidate.

And what a good trade it was. In Nevada, Clinton might have lost much of her support within the Black community––which backed Obama three to one––but in exchange she gained a dominant edge among Women, Whites and Latinos.

How quickly the new politics devolved to the old. The Clinton campaign and its surrogates immediately began to spin expectations based on the logic of the newly reframed campaign. They have pronounced Obama the likely winner the upcoming South Carolina vote on the basis of its large Black vote––a tactic that in turn solidifies the image of Obama as the Black Candidate, diminishes the importance of the outcome if he wins, and magnifies the importance if she wins––while remaining silent on the corollary that they fully expected to win California and New York in the trade.

If a Clinton–McCain contest emerges, it will be a throwback. John McCain will once again be John McCain, and will run on the basis of his iconic status as a maverick and as a leader, eschewing his lapse into Grover Norquist’s world of coalition politics. Clinton, for her part, will have to choose which voice to embrace. Mark Penn long ago scripted the general election as one in which she would quilt together the Democrats' 48% Blue vote, and build a broad electoral victory by drawing in up to 20% of Republican Women.

But that was then. The successes of both the McCain and Obama campaigns reflect a public weary with the old political rules and strategies, and a desire for a future that is different from the past. Offering a future that is different from the past––a past defined by divisive national politics and twenty years with a Bush or Clinton in the White House––will be a tough sell for Hillary. Despite all of the advantages that Clinton will enjoy in this Democratic year, McCain’s stature and independence may enable him to draw support across party lines, much as Obama was able to do.

There is no small irony that this all comes to a head in the South Carolina, the state where George W. Bush buried John McCain in 2000 through a racially-charged strategy. The Clinton campaign has regained its position of dominance, and challenged Obama to respond in turn if he is to regain his momentum.

Meanwhile, Hillary has opened a new front in the campaign. In the last debate, raised the issue of Obama’s relationship with Chicago developer Antoin Rezko. It is truly a sign of the confidence that the Clintons––whose own campaign finance history includes their own unsavory moments Johnny Chung and Norman Hsu and the pardoning of fugitive billionaire Marc Rich––would take this tack, and invite a reopening of the entire saga of Clintons past.

A saga that is one of the central elements in the desire of many voters to move on.

Whither change.

“Some of us are right, and some of us are wrong. Some of us are ready, and some of us are not.”

With her voice soft and her eyes showing a hint of tears, Hillary Clinton laid herself bare to the voters. Perhaps this will become the signature look that will convey the sincerity to the public that Bill mastered when he bit his lower lip as he felt our pain.

Some of us are right, and some of us are wrong.

In this YouTube moment, Hillary brought her campaign back, laid her claim to the presidency, and set forth her creed. Blunt words hidden behind the soft voice. Steel behind the moist eyes.

While the media focused on the emotional content and visual images, the words themselves expressed sharp differences between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

For months, the contest between Clinton and Obama was largely reduced to the themes of Experience and Change. However, that characterization has been seriously flawed from the outset. After all, Clinton’s claim to “thirty-five years of experience as a citizen activist” masks a resume that boasts just over one term in the Senate as a follow-on to her years as First Lady and her legal practice in Little Rock. Her years as First Lady certainly provided great exposure to the presidency, but its relevance remains an open question.

If nominated as the standard bearer for her party, her claim to the mantle of experience will not hold up long in the general election contest, whether she faces John McCain, Rudy Giuliani or Mike Huckabee, so better to set that argument aside now. The fact is that Clinton’s resume is as thin as any presidential candidate in memory. She has completed one term in the Senate, has never served in the military or held a foreign policy position, and has never been accountable for the basics of executive leadership: setting strategy, making decisions on limited information, building on successes, addressing failures, and learning from both. And however one spins her years as First Lady, even Bill Clinton would be forced to credit Huckabee’s tenure as Governor of Arkansas as a more proven credential.

Yes, Hillary led her husband’s efforts at healthcare reform. But the upshot of that effort does little credit to her claims, as it stands as the signature policy failure of her husband’s tenure. In the wake of that failure, Hillary did not regroup and soldier on, but rather she left the stage while husband Bill beat a tactical retreat as he tacked to the center and embraced Republican welfare reform legislation. Opponents of welfare reform might reasonably argue that the poor paid a heavy price for Hillary’s leadership failure.

Hillary’s words in New Hampshire bring back to center stage a central characteristic of her leadership style that will become pivotal before the election is over. Like the man that she seeks to replace in the White House, Hillary Clinton believes that she is right, and that those who disagree are wrong. And while the facts of her resume may belie her claim to the mantle of Experience, this central aspect of her personality makes the mantle of Change an odd fit as well, particularly in terms of what Change has come to mean in this election year.

The theme pf change that emerged in the Iowa victories of both Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee was not the appeal of the outsider, but rather it was a reflection of the exhaustion of the electorate with the politics of division that have characterized the current administration, and that characterized the Clinton years as well. Whatever their differences on policy, both Obama and Huckabee are comfortable with and reach out to people whose views and experiences differ from their own. Just as Obama visited and embraced the congregation of evangelical pastor Rick Warren––and they embraced him––Huckabee connected with African American audiences that were bypassed by the rest of the Republican field. They share an optimism and humanity that resonate with voters weary of years of Red and Blue, the use of patriotism as a rapier of political tactics, and the politics of personal destruction.

The real distinction between Clinton and Obama is not about experience. It is philosophical and sharp, and Hillary laid it out in her moment of sincerity in New Hampshire.

Some of us are right, and some of us are wrong. The words and the righteousness once reserved for the minions of the vast right wing conspiracy were now leveled at her antagonist for her party’s nomination.

The question that was raised from the moment he considered running for the presidency is about to be answered. We are about to find out if Barack Obama is ready. The campaign over the weeks to come will define both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Clinton in terms of how much this fight means to her and the tactics that she will embrace. Obama by whether he can stand up against the fury of the assault that lies ahead, and whether it deepens his commitment to his core message or whether he shrinks from it.

The race is Hillary’s to lose. After all, all of the advantages are hers. Her team is experienced, and her message is simple. She is expected to do whatever it takes, so few will think less of her if when she goes on the offensive. And much of the core message has already been fleshed out, as it was delivered by Bill Clinton prior to the vote in New Hampshire:

Voting for Obama is a risk. He has no experience. His ideas are flawed. It is all an illusion. Get real.

And there will also be the subliminal messages delivered by surrogates to undermine the Obama campaign, such as the "testimonial" offered by Clinton supporter and former Senator Bob Kerry while campaigning in Iowa prior to the caucuses––and for which he apologized profusely later:

I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim. There’s a billion people on the planet that are Muslims.

Amazing, really, that after months of being the insurgent running against the inevitable nominee, Barack Obama was the frontrunner for all of two days. Barely twenty-four hours from when three polls were released showing him ahead in New Hampshire by ten points to the day the votes were counted in New Hampshire.

Then, a day after her dewy eyed performance, Hillary won by four points. And it was over.

Now we are back to where it all started. She is once again the presumptive nominee. The advantage is hers. But it will not be about Change, because we have seen this show before. Right or wrong, ready or not, this is about the real world of power politics. The question for the voters, and central to her challenger’s message will be whether we want to go back or whether it is time to move on.
 

It ain't over yet.

Markets are the dominant fact of our lives. They are pervasive and volatile, and yet we continue to be surprised as each peak and valley is upon us.

Last week, we moved to the next phase of the sub-prime mortgage “crisis” as major financial institutions began to succumb to reality, to unwind financial positions and to write-down the value of financial assets. Citibank, Merrill Lynch––the most visible brands in the financial markets––lost billions, and billions more that expected.

How? Just a lot of the same-old, same-old. We have been there so many times over the past quarter century––the Savings and Loan Crisis of the late 1980s, the Japanese market collapse of the early 1990s, the Asian fiscal crisis of the late 1990s, the Dot-com collapse at the beginning of the decade––and each time there are three distinct phases. First, there is the “Gee, it doesn’t get any better than this,” phase.

This is the home-value-as-ATM phase, the NASDAQ hitting 6,000, or the Nikkei nearing 39,000, which was epitomized to me in the late 1990s when a Merrill Lynch broker called our home to propose a product where we would take out a home-equity loan to invest in the stock market. How long had he been a broker? Just a year. This time, the exuberance was manifest in the mortgage markets, where buyers could finance 100% or more of a home purchase, and then pay less than the interest-only cost of the loan for several years.

The problem that these mortgage products claimed to solve is that housing was too expensive, and therefore new products were needed to make things affordable. But the logic was backwards. The housing was too expensive because the financing was too cheap. Take away the financing, sit tight for a while, and the markets will correct. Prices will not stay up if demand dries up. Might take time for people to let go, but reality will set in.

That is the first law of markets. They move. The interesting part of the current crisis is how eager people have been to pronounce how long the correction in the real estate markets will take. This is the “Is it over yet?” phase, and here is a simple rule: If people are still asking if it is over yet, it ain’t over yet. This is the question that keeps people holding on and resisting selling, hoping that the bottom has been reached.

It is only when people give up that the third phase arrives, the vaunted “capitulation" phase. This is when fear sets in, when hope is lost, and when, ironically, it has already become a better time to buy than sell.

In our present financial crisis, the meltdown has not come yet. Some real estate markets will not be hit so hard because they never rose so high, while others, like Manhattan, will not be hit so hard because of exogenous factors. In the case of Manhattan, the plummeting value of the dollar has already driven home prices down over 25%––in Euros––bringing foreign buyers into that market.

The shining star in this financial moment has been the Federal Reserve Bank. Over the past three years, the Federal Reserve has steadily increased the Federal Funds Rate––the rate at which it lends money to member banks and the primary tool that it uses for regulating the pace of economic activity. The Fed was raising rates not as it normally does to subdue economic growth and tame inflation, but for the simple reason that after the collapse of the Dot-com bubble and 9/11 the Fed reduced the Fed Funds Rate to 1.00% from 6.50%, and within the Fed there was great concern that if rates were not raised, they could not be lowered again in the event of a new crisis.

Yes, the logic seems odd––to raise rates for the purpose of being able to lower them––but the fear was real. If there were to be a new crisis––such as the one that is now upon us––and the Fed Funds Rate were still at 1%, the Federal Reserve would have few effective tools for addressing that new crisis and supporting the financial system.

And through it all, Japan loomed as a lesson of how bad things could get if the central bank was left with no tools in the toolbox. Japan, as some might recall, was looming as the new world economic colossus in the late 1980s with their stock market and real estate prices in the stratosphere when the bubble burst and values plummeted by as much as 75%. Faced with price deflation, Japan’s central bankers proved unable to thwart the decade-long recession that ensued––even as they pushed interest rates down to 1/10th of 1%––with devastating social and economic consequences.

Fortunately, in the months ahead, this will not be our challenge. The Federal Reserve retains control over the monetary levers that it needs and unlike the Japanese, American consumers continue to spend money through thick and thin. The difficult choices will be on the regulatory and policy side. Specifically, with a presidential election looming, Washington will be faced with the decisions of how much pain can be tolerated before the bailouts begin.

There will be hard choices ahead, but even the resources of the federal government cannot forestall the pain that comes during a major market decline and new regulation always seems to be designed to address the last crisis rather than the next one. The question that will endure––from one market bubble to the next––is whether, when faced with things that appear to be too good to be true––a no-cost mortgage for example––people might pause for a moment before they sign up and consider that maybe they are.

Winds of war

For those who might have missed the vanguard of the French New Left back in the day, the Situationists were anarchists who sought to create situations that would engender a response that would provide a critique of the system that they sought to destroy. So one day, they put up posters in the metro with pictures of a man sitting behind his desk, in the crosshairs of a gun, with a caption reading, “Wouldn’t you like to kill your boss today?”

Except, of course, that no one got it. No rash of boss-killings ensued, no national debate on the absurdity of work in the capitalist system. Just more ennui.

Osama Bin Laden, on the other hand, was more effective. Sitting in a cave in North Waziristan, his goal was to drive a wedge between the 1.4 billion Muslims and the West, as a first step toward rebuilding the pan-Islamic caliphate. His method was pure Situationist. He would attack America and sit back and wait for the response. It was not his attack that would create the outcome he sought, but the reaction of his adversary, the reaction of the all-powerful, morally corrupt Americans. They would come after him, and in so doing would go to war on Islamic soil. They would slaughter Muslim women and children in their wake, and those images would be broadcast across the world.

He tried for years before we took the bait. He attacked our embassies in Africa. He attacked the Kobar towers. He attacked the USS Cole, but we did not respond. Finally, with the ranks of Al Qaeda reduced to a few dozen stalwarts, they chose to attack the U.S. homeland in a final effort to prod the Americans to come after him.

Bull’s eye.

Six years later, even as the American military trumpets the defeat of Al Qaeda in Iraq and Dick Cheney declares that Bin Laden has been reduced to irrelevance, Al Qaeda has grown from a few dozen men in a cave to a world-wide movement, and the challenge of bridging Islam and the West has become one of the defining societal challenges of this era.

And now a second front has been joined, and we are being baited once again. Iran is working hard to goad the Bush administration to double down on its strategy of preemption and would be quite pleased with an attack, particularly the discrete assault on nuclear facilities that is contemplated in the western media. A limited strike would be the best of all possible worlds. All the benefit, so little destruction.

The Bush administration has become a wonderful foil for the Iranians. After all, little more than a decade after the revolution that brought the clerics to power, the Guardian Council was faced with a popular movement demanding openness, democracy and secularization. Efforts to repress dissent only increased that momentum of the reformists, as the modern Iran that the Ayatollahs sought to forestall grew in the public imagination.

It was the Axis of Evil rhetoric that gave the Guardian Council the latitude to crack down on reform and elevate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the Presidency. Since then, the Iranian’s have played a dangerous game, but pursued their strategy diligently, and Ahmadinejad has played the nuclear and Israel cards skillfully.

The Iranians have two goals in this game. First, and foremost, the regime wants to stay in power. This requires an external threat to the regime that can justify the repression of domestic opposition and undermining of democratic institutions, and engender nationalist support for the regime. For this goal, the Americans could not have served interests of the clerical regime any better. Oil revenues are high, Americans are arrayed along their borders beating the drums of war, and even secular Iranians and Iranian ex-patriots support the regime’s assertion of Iran’s national right to pursue its nuclear program.

Second, the regime desires to assert Shi’a leadership in the Islamic world in its struggles with the West and to counter the ascendancy of Al Qaeda. This is an issue that blends ethnic and sectarian rivalry, with substantial historical resonance. After all, the Shi’a lived under the Sunni boot for more than a millennium until the fall of the Caliphate in the 1920s, only to find a new boot appear in its stead, this one made of British and American leather. This goal requires building the Iranian brand in the minds of the far-flung Islamic nation, the Umma, and has been the purpose behind Iranian support of Hamas and Hezbollah, its assault on the Danish cartoons, its Holocaust rhetoric, and Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia University, where he took the West’s verbal assaults and gave the lie to the West’s claims of openness and tolerance.

What could be better now for the Iranian regime than to be attacked by the Americans? What better way to in one moment harden domestic resentments against a common external enemy and build sympathy and support across the Islamic world? What better way to establish Iranian bona fides as the Islamic David standing against the American Goliath?

Where in all of this is the American art of strategy in the world? Why are subtlety and nuance the purview of others? Why do we not consider what happens on day two and day three and day four after we utter our words or launch our spears?

Last month, the Iranians showed the other side of their strategy, when, at the request of Lee Hamilton, Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei ordered the release of Halah Esfandiari. Esfandiari, an Iranian-born scholar, had been imprisoned for nine months as a “threat to the Iranian state.” Her comments after her release were notable. When she protested to her chief interrogator that she was not a spy, but just “wrote articles and organized symposia,” the Iranian official replied, “Yes, and that is how it started in Ukraine and Georgia.”

The Iranians care first and foremost about the survival of their regime, and the greatest threat the regime is not guns and bullets, but words and ideas.

Now we are at another moment of decision––when we should be thinking clearly about what strategies will best achieve the goals that we seek––before we launch a new war and once again find ourselves doing the bidding of our adversaries. But even as our adversaries in the world have proven adroit at nuanced strategy and asymmetric warfare, our stance in the world has become more linear and less subtle, more bellicose and less thoughtful.

Unfortunately, bellicosity apparently plays in Peoria, so the winds of war may loom as irresistible. Among the leading Republican candidates, war with Iran has become the new national security shibboleth, and with an eye to the general election Hillary Clinton is marching in lock-step. But behind all of the heated words, is there much thought going on? About day two, about day three or about day four?

How is it that five years into the Iraq war, we might once again succumb to the drumbeat of national security populism? Is it possible that our political class has lost the capacity to think about the implications of their words, to be a little more wise and a little less warrior, and to discern whether they are being manipulated by others more thoughtful and strategic than they?

As we dig our hole deeper and deeper, we should remind ourselves that we are neophytes in this neighborhood. When he was in New York, Ahmadinejad made reference to the invasion of Greece by Darius II, over 2,000 years ago. The Sunni and the Shi’a are playing a complex game of tribe and faith that dates back a millennium. The Turks ruled the region for centuries and are loathe to be dictated to. And the Russians, the French and Brits have been contesting the region since before the battle of Yorktown.

We just might not be as smart as we think we are. And everyone else might know a thing or two. And that would be OK.

Memories of Billy Rohr

It did not take long for the grumbling to start: “Are the Red Sox ready to become the Yankees?”

A knife to the heart of those whose lives have been defined by the seasonal yearnings and disappointments inherent to the chosen path; a sharp rebuke to those whose own human frailty led them over time to root as much for the defeat of their Nemesis, as for that chimerical moment when their own heroes might emerge triumphant.

A close friend––still warm from the heat of Dustin Pedroia’s night––remarked of what the future might hold for a team whose young roster of Beckett and DiceK, Ellsbury and Papelbon, DelCarmen, Lester and Buccholtz––along with the evening’s diminutive star––have their best years before them, but was quick to add that should they sign A-Rod, she would “have a hard time continuing as a Red Sox fan.”

For such is the life. Once the yearning defines the soul, the conditionality is inevitable. We are fans, after all, not whores. We cannot be bought. After a lifetime of waiting, what is another decade? Better that than debasing the very meaning of the journey.

The Red Sox have won nothing yet this year––thought last night was a glorious night––and just one World Series to redeem the hopes of those who forty years ago saw a season begin with Billy Rohr blanking the Yankees, and who believed that with he and Yaz and Rico and Boomer, Santiago and Lonborg, the future was bright. A young roster can come to naught, as the Conigliaro brothers can attest, as the heroics of Bernie Carbo and Hendu and Pudge can so easily be taken away by Calvin Shiraldi and Johnny Mac.

It is way too soon to rest on one night’s laurels, for this may be Colorado’s year, but we learn to love the moment and to feel the warmth from the moment that Coco Crisp––a name for the ages––crashed into the wall with the ball cradled in his grasp––for Siddhartha Gautama and every Red Sox fan knows that such moments are fleeting. Each must be inhaled and savored for what it is, for the journey itself.

The moment is barely past when we are awoken from our reverie.

Unable to tolerate the moment of joy for Red Sox fans, whose torment they have so enjoyed over the decades, New York writers dig deep for a journalistic Haiku, and strike with full force.

“Are the Red Sox ready to become the Yankees? Are they ready?”

The problem of Europe

Two weeks ago, Nicholas Sarkozy launched his most direct assault on the European Central Bank. In the view of the new French President, the ECB’s tight money policies threaten to undermine his efforts to open up the French economic system and stimulate economic growth and liberalization. The ECB policies, Sarkozy suggested, were biased toward Germany’s enduring fear of inflation and against his policies of stimulating growth and international competitiveness.

The rift between Sarkozy and the ECB has been exacerbated by the trading relationship between the Euro, the Dollar and the Chinese Yuan. As the value of the Dollar has collapsed under the weight of massive U.S. current account deficits, the Euro has risen to new heights, while the Chinese currency, which does not trade freely, has only risen modestly. The result has been that European goods have become less competitive in the U.S. market. The ECB can ameliorate this problem, as Sarkozy has suggested, by reducing interest rates––at least in concert with U.S. central bankers––which would stem the pace of the Euro’s rise. But this, the Gnomes of the ECB insist, is not their job. Their job is to fight inflation. They are independent. Go away.

Sensing their inability to move the ECB to act, some European finance ministers have responded to the Euro’s rise by beseeching Ben Bernanke to raise U.S. interest rates to support the Dollar. This, however, is not going to happen. The Federal Reserve just lowered interest rates in response to the sub-prime lending crisis, and any upward move would undermine U.S. markets. The Fed’s mandate is to fight inflation and to support economic growth, and whatever is going on with the Euro is simply not their job.

More to the point, the price of Mephisto shoes might be the symptom, but it is not the problem. The problem is more fundamental. It is the problem of Europe.

The European Union is a nice idea. Like the Iraq War, it is an idea that gained momentum among many constituencies that came to support the same policy, though for different reasons. For some, who saw the emergence of Asia and the United States as two great economic forces, the European Union would create a third trading block to protect the European economies. For others, the EU represented an opportunity to assert Europe as a political counterweight to the United States imperial power in the post-Cold War era. For yet others, the EU was necessary to bind France and Germany together so tightly that a third world war between the historic rivals would become an impossibility.

The reality of creating a European Union has been a tough go. The “domestic” economic strategy of the European Union has mirrored the industrial policy of the United States over the decades. While the United States implemented policies to stimulate economic growth in its poorer states––in the south and in the west––so has Europe invested in the economies of its southern and poorer members. Neo-classical trade theories have been realized, as countries with comparative advantages in labor costs or other attributes have benefited, while growth in the Franco-German heartland has stagnated. Imagine Ireland, Portugal and Spain as the sunbelt of Europe.

However, while the rustbelt gave way in economic and political clout to the sunbelt in the U.S., the rise of new economic powers in Europe threatened the cultural identity of the members, as well as the economies of the older powers. European Unionists have implemented the attributes of nationhood before the participants agreed to become a single nation. They have centralized regulation, asserted legal hegemony and created a single currency, even as the EU constitution has failed to win ratification. The Euro-centrists have said yes, even as the people continue to say no.

In the United States, political union came first, then came the struggle to determine the extent to which the center could impose its will on the member states and undermine local law and custom. As one observer noted, the issue finally came to a head in 1863, when the two sides convened at a small town in Pennsylvania to settle matters. After three days of debate, the supporters of a strong center won the day and the matter was settled.

Sarkozy is raising the central question of how a nation that cannot control their monetary policy can seek to control their future. His policies, his presidency and the ability of France to chart a new economic path––one in which fiscal policy will play a reduced role relative to market forces––depend on a parallel monetary policy that makes capital available to a growing entrepreneurial sector.

Alan Greenspan unwittingly underscored Sarkozy’s point of the important linkage between fiscal and monetary policy during his recent book tour, when he indicated the extent to which he directed monetary policy to support the fiscal policies of the federal administrations. Far from adopting the strict constructionist stance of the current ECB, Greenspan recognized the anti-inflationary impacts of technology and deregulation, and allowed an expansive monetary policy that led to sustained economic growth, even as the Dollar and federal current account deficits might have warranted the tighter monetary stance.

Europe, for anyone who has visited recently, is not what it used to be. The quaint villages are not quite as quaint. The local bakeries are disappearing. Local cultures are ceding to the forces of economic integration. Ironically, it is France’s Hungarian-born President that is raising the central question, not just about whether France can control its economic destiny, but whether, just two years after the French voters rejected the proposed European Constitution, France has already lost its ability, and right, to be La France.

Freddy's dead

Bin Laden and Fred Thompson made it official. They both aim to influence the 2008 presidential election.

Bin Laden, in his latest video, offered a message tailored to Democratic and Republican activists alike. First, he offered an end to the war. Second, he offered a massive tax cut and a permanent flat tax of just 2.5%. Blending a message that was overtly part Muhammad and part Chomsky, he asked only that Americans discard their corrupt, corporate-controlled democratic system, and embrace Islam. Small price for a flat tax.

Fred Thompson offered no such message clarity. After six months of planning his entry into the Republican presidential contest, Thompson’s first week on the stump was not encouraging. When right-wing talk show host Sean Hannity popped “The Question,” and asked Thompson why he was running for president and what distinguished him from the other candidates, the newly minted candidate muffed. Well, Sean, the candidate dissembled, I haven’t really thought about it in those terms…

It is an astonishing thing for lay observers of the process to see candidates stumble over The Question, as it would seem to be the single question every candidate knows they are going to be asked. Unlike “How would you get us out of the mess in Iraq?” each candidate can answer this one on their own terms. But when Hannity lobbed the softball his way, Thompson missed.

The depth of the destruction that George W. Bush has done to the Republican Party is evidenced by the lack of an anointed candidate just four months before the first nominating votes are tallied. Not since 1964 have the Republicans had a wide-open contest for the party nomination, as both the party’s famed internal discipline and candidate adherence to the shibboleths––pro-Life, anti-gay, pro-gun, anti-tax, pro-faith––have come undone. Fred Thompson may catch fire, and don the mantle of Reagan that slipped from George Allen's grasp as the word macaca left his lips, but if his first week is any indication, he may never reach the levels of popularity he held before he formally entered the race.

It just isn’t supposed to be this way. The right people have not been consulted. Whether dead, disgusted or indicted, the powerbrokers who are supposed to take care of these things are nowhere to be seen, and the two leading choices for Republican primary voters are a pro-choice, pro-gay, anti-gun, multiple divorcee married to a Jew, and a formerly pro-gay, pro-choice Mormon from a family with a polygamous past.

A choice between Liberal and an Apostate. Just friggin’ great. Now along comes Fred, and he can't say why.

Among the Democratic candidates, message clarity has become the central debate, now reduced to the parsing of single words. Hillary has chosen the mantle of Experience, while Obama has embraced Change. This past week, Hillary showed her Clintonian bloodlines when she took it to Obama by questioning what the meaning of the word Change is, and claiming that she is in fact the candidate offering both Experience and Change.

God help Obama. For surely the game will be up if he loses both words.

The real word that the Clinton campaign is relying on is Inevitability. After staunching Obama’s initial momentum, Hillary now sits around 35-40% among Democratic voters in national polls and holds a 15-20% lead over Obama. In Democratic debates she has been a dominant voice and successfully stoked the emerging sense of inevitability. And it is a strategy that offers increasing returns. The more inevitable she seems, the more likely are others to drop out, temper their rhetorical attacks and pay obeisance to her as the presumptive nominee.

But the funny thing is that the closer people look, the less they seem to like. In Iowa, the first state to put their delegates on the line, five polls taken since August 1st show a very tight race: Clinton 25%, Edwards 25%, Obama 21%, Richardson 12%. Therefore, even as the fires of Inevitability are stoked, on the ground Iowa is a horse race, Nevada and South Carolina--western and southern respectively--are less naturally hospitable terrain for Clinton, and only polling in New Hampshire mirrors the national trends. Accordingly, the prospect looms that the juggernaut could derail in the early weeks of voting, a risk that can be effectively eliminated if Michigan and Florida--states in which her lead exceeds 20%--successfully move forward in the process.

What is most puzzling about the meta-debate between the forces of Experience and the forces of Change, is that Hillary is conceded the mantle of experience, while the best Obama can do is suggest that experience isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, as he proffers Cheney and Rumsfeld as his cases in point. But this is a specious argument. Experience matters deeply in foreign affairs, particularly in a world where our antagonists and counterparts, be they Osama Bin Laden, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Vladimir Putin or the Chinese Central Committee, have proven a capacity to think strategically, take a long view of history and see foreign relations a web of complex, interconnected relationships. It would indeed be reassuring to believe that our President was able to see and navigate the world in all its complexities, set forth a vision of the world twenty or thirty years down the road, engage other nations in embracing that future, and lead the world toward that end. To say the experience is not of value seems, somehow, to miss the point.

Even as Hillary is accorded the mantle of Experience, she has in fact held no executive post and stood accountable for her choices in that capacity. Like Obama and Edwards, she is a one-term U.S. Senator and a lawyer with a keen mind. And she was First Lady, and present in the halls of power for eight years. But she was neither the President nor the Vice President, and at best can sell herself as a co-conspirator for the best of her husband’s years.

The experience that Hillary can validly claim, and which should be no small consideration, is her proven ability to withstand the slings and arrows that lie ahead for whichever candidate emerges as the party nominee. From healthcare reform, to the death of Vincent Foster, to the selling of the Lincoln Bedroom, to her husband’s philandering, to the pardoning of Marc Rich, Hillary Clinton has taken the bullets, looked into the camera and never blinked. This is the Experience that Hillary brings as a candidate, and it is no small offering.

But it is not Change.

Perhaps this is what the Iowa voters see. And it is enough to give them pause.

George Tenet goes public

Dick Cheney must get a kick out of watching George Tenet and Hilary Clinton try to change the subject.

Tired of being Dick Cheney’s bitch, and remaining silent as the Vice President repeatedly and publicly blamed the decision to go to war on his assurances that Iraq had stockpiles of WMD, George Tenet is lashing back. In his new book, At the Center of the Storm, Tenet contends that the Vice President and the Administration were intent on going to war all in Iraq along, and that WMD merely served as a pretext.

This is old news. After all, in a 2003 interview in Vanity Fair magazine, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz forthrightly explained that the Bush Administration had several reasons for launching its war with Iraq––none of which, incidentally, suggested Iraqi complicity in the 9/11 events or constituted a casus belli under the generally accepted laws of war––but chose WMD as the central rationale because it was the easiest to sell.

Much to Tenet’s chagrin, the WMD narrative––including the ensuing claims of intelligence failure and political manipulation––remains central to public discourse around the history of the war, and continues to obscure the more wide-ranging motivations. Riding the talk show circuit, interviewers ignore the substance of his book––the threats the to the nation, the depth and breadth of Al Qaeda's capabilities––and return to the WMD soap opera. What did he know? When did he know it? What did others know? Did he want to apologize to the American people? [Wolf Blitzer, CNN, 5/2/07.]

Bush, Cheney and their acolytes are indifferent to the public WMD debate, however, because it was never determinative. Prior to September 11th, as Tenet suggests, the Bush Administration was intent on removing Saddam Hussein from power for a range of reasons, which reflected the perspectives of different groups within the Administration. First, there were the Neoconservatives. As typified by Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol, this group saw the institution of democratic governments in the Middle East as critical to regional stability and global security, and supported military action in Iraq as a means to establish a beachhead from which to catalyze political transformation.

Second, there was the Office of the Vice President. While Cheney was a member of the neoconservative Project for a New American Century, his strategic focus was on energy security. This group saw Saddam’s commitment to give Russian, Chinese and French oil companies leases to develop the massive Iraq oil fields––after United Nations sanctions were removed––as a fundamental threat to American commercial interests and economic security, and supported military action as a means to achieve three goals: Preventing Russo-Sino control of vital resources, establishing a regime that would direct those contracts to American and British companies, and putting boots on the ground within striking distance of both Saudi and Kuwait, to deter future threats to America’s interests in the region.

Third, there was the group whose views in many respects most closely mirrored those of the Clinton Administration that first promulgated the policy of regime change in Iraq. Led by Rumsfeld, this group saw Saddam as a proven threat to the region, and international terrorism as a growing strategic threat to America’s interests. They viewed action in Iraq as imperative both to forestall further aggression by Saddam, and to prevent an alliance with terrorist groups that had declared war on America and the west years earlier.

For each group, the attacks on September 11th escalated the urgency of acting, and Tenet’s assurance that Iraq harbored WMD provided a compelling narrative for selling a war that each group believed critical to the nation’s interests. While Tenet blames Cheney for continuing with the public charade and hanging him out to dry, others across the political spectrum have found it useful to stick to the script. Among Democratic presidential aspirants who voted for the war, the formulation of blaming bad intelligence and manipulation has become the accepted route for appeasing the Party faithful. For his part, John Edwards has elevated apologizing to a central campaign theme as he expresses his regret for trusting the intelligence rather than his own judgment, while Hillary Clinton clings to the “If I knew then what I know today…” formulation.

Hillary Clinton continues to resist John Edwards full-throated apologia because she wants to be President more than she wants to be the Democratic nominee, and this chosen path grates against her––and no doubt her husband’s––instincts. From a strategic standpoint, the clamor for an exit from Iraq is fraught with risk for the nation and the region. While not necessary a neocon-petrocentric-militarist, she is probably closer to the Administration’s world view than Edwards––and no doubt shares Joe Biden’s assessment that he is “clueless” on matters of foreign affairs. She understands that the prospect of American disengagement from the Middle East is already creating fear across the region, and leading the Sunni states––among them Egypt, Jorden and Saudi Arabia––rushing to develop nuclear programs as a deterrent to growing Iranian and Shia power, and that the next President must have a mandate to build a new strategic framework for the region. Almost alone among the Democratic candidates, she embraces Anthony Zinni's view that no Democrat, if elected, will be able to deliver on the withdrawal commitments they are now so eagerly proffering.

Politically, Clinton views Edwards’ apology-as-job-qualification as suicide for a Democratic nominee come November 2008. Edwards’ account––that as a Senator, he trusted the CIA rather than his own judgment––is simply a more convenient history to embrace than the less convenient truth that he did trust his own judgment. In the toxic political climate of the day, with the drums beating and the rhetoric flying, when it came time to vote, it was easier to fly the flag and vote Aye than to vote Nay and risk the scorn that would ensue. For Edwards the Presidential aspirant, it is better now to plead guilty to having been duped than to face the far worse indictment of having lacked the courage to vote Nay, of having chosen to vote for war and to send soldiers to die, in order to preserve––in Bill Clinton’s words––his own future political viability.

When the general election rolls around 18-months from now, neither George Bush nor Dick Cheney will be on the Republican ticket, and while Iraq looms to be a central issue, the protagonists of that war will be leaving the theatre. It is notable that even as the Democrats are being pushed to the left by their base, the Republican field is notably lacking in fire-breathing partisans, and that the Democratic debate two weeks ago included more Senators who voted for the war than the Republican debate this evening. In a sense, the Republican field may actually be less captive of the war, and may be adapting more quickly to a new political landscape where a resurgent Independent center looms to be critical once again, comprising voters for whom apologies for bad judgment will do little to win votes for the highest office, and Out Now will not suffice for a strategic vision for America’s role in the world.

Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney both understand what George Tenet seems to have missed, the WMD narrative worked––and it is still working. And Clinton and Cheney also understand that the longer it remains central to the Democratic campaign, the more it will weaken and diminish the ultimate victor, and the more likely it is that a Republican will the White House 18 months from now.

Reality Bites: Exhibit A

We have a problem accepting reality when it threatens our preferred historical narrative.

Exhibit A is Kirk Radomski.

As reported today above the fold in the New York Times, Radomski, now 37, has admitted in federal court to distributing a range of performance enhancing drugs––including anabolic steroids, amphetamines and human growth hormone––as a batboy and equipment manager in the clubhouse of the New York Mets during the period 1985-1995.

Perhaps Radomski’s admission can bring to an end the roiling debate over the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, to say nothing of the rest of professional sports. If a 15-year-old batboy was distributing drugs in the Mets clubhouse to “dozens of players,” one can safely conclude that the practice was pervasive.

This is not a Claude Rains moment. Learning of Radomski’s admission, no one can reasonably be “Shocked, shocked, that there were illegal drugs being used in baseball.” After all, any baseball fan worthy of the name read Jim Bouton’s classic Ball Four, which exposed––among other crude habits––the widespread use of amphetamines––or “greenies”––in the Yankees clubhouse during the 1963 and 1964 seasons. And while Bouton’s revelations about America’s heroes earned him the enduring enmity of his teammates and the Yankees organization, no one seriously challenged the veracity of his claims.

Today, several years after the Senate charade that marched players before the cameras to buttress the careers of the Senators and destroy those of the players, Mark McGwire is still pilloried for declining to state what everyone knew, his bash-brother Jose Canseco is still shunned for stating what everyone knew and writing a book about it, and the Baseball Commissioner and team owners who deflected questions from the Senators with the skill of cigarette company executives, still invoke the name of Senate titan George Mitchell as their agent in their efforts to “get to the bottom of the situation.”

Well, maybe the image of the 15-year-old Radomksi offering up anabolic steroids and methamphetamines to Ray Knight and Mookie Wilson and David Cone will finally allow people to come to grips with the long history of drug use in Major League locker rooms, and cease the fatuous effort to lay baseball’s problem with performance-enhancing drugs at the feet of McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds. The impact of money on the purity of America’s Game dates back at least to the Black Sox scandal in 1919, and the casual use of illegal drugs in the clubhouse dates at least to the early 1960s. The advent of free agency, and the ensuing growth in player performance-based compensation, magnified the incentives for players to seek out ways to improve their performance. And as Radomski and Bouton both suggest, the teams were co-conspirators in the effort.

Radomski’s “revelations” are particularly timely, as the ongoing steroid drama is reaching its apotheosis. One day over the next few months, Barry Bonds will break Hank Aaron’s long-standing home run record, and Bonds pursuit of Aaron’s record has become a national morality play. Hank Aaron is an historic figure in American sports, a man who endured the barbs of the civil rights struggle, and yet remains a figure of stature and grace. In contrast, Barry Bonds is, well, Barry Bonds. Surly and aloof, Bonds is widely vilified as a cheater and remains the protagonist in the steroid controversy. Major League Baseball, which profited greatly from the race between McGuire and Sosa to break Roger Maris’ single season home run record, is at a loss about how and whether to recognize Bonds when he hits home run 756. Aaron himself refuses to acknowledge Bonds, and Aaron’s disdain supports those who view Bonds as the villain in the drama.

The fact is, however, that Barry Bonds is not destroying America’s Game. America’s Game is an American game, part of our commercial popular culture, with its rules and rewards. It is possible that Barry Bonds may have outstripped his peers in his use of steroids––as he has in all other aspects of the sport––and certainly today’s Barry Bonds physically bears little comparison with the Barry Bonds who came into the League. However, the same can be said of Roger Clemens, and other players whose records are steadily displacing those of players from earlier eras.

As one looks back over the past 40 years, it is impossible to know who benefited and who did not from performance-enhancing drugs, and therefore how their records should be compared. Bonds vs. A-Rod? Clemens vs. Maddox? Ricky Henderson vs. Maury Wills. In each case, the first player seems the more likely beneficiary than the second. We only know from the testimony of Radomksi, and the supporting observations of Bouton and Canseco, that the opportunity was there, and that many took advantage. Yet no player has been targeted, vilified and ostracized like Bonds.

As the Bonds drama unfolds, we will most certainly continue to recite the preferred narrative––that Barry Bonds is a unique villain in this saga, rather than just the most recognized actor in what has been a decades-long play in which many are complicit. New York fans will certainly prefer to cling to their image of Lenny Dykstra as a hard-scrapple, tobacco-chewing, throw-back player, and view today’s story as an aberration. Others will argue that unlike Bonds, Dysktra and the other heroes of summers’ past were the unwitting victims of team doctors and trainers, and perhaps even an occasional 15-year-old batboy, pushing their wares.

But as it ain’t so. It just ain’t so.

The Jazzman's Wife

Sitting alongside her husband in Alabama this week, Hillary Clinton looked small. Diminished.

This is, no doubt, why her strategists have been determined to keep the two apart in public appearances. Not because as the publicly cuckolded and humiliated spouse she must detest him, but because seeing her sitting alongside him evokes so many images––images that do not serve her well.

Hillary is small and diminished next to Bill exactly because he is large, and larger than life. He is a titanic political figure, and as much as she struggles to emit the intellectual grasp that was one aspect of his persona, she has none of his touch of the common man. She lacks any measure of his deeply felt empathy for the individual, whether in Appalachia, the inner ring suburb or the inner city. Sitting there, as much as we might feel her pain, we know that she does not feel ours.

Worse still, sitting next him, one knows that behind all of her pretenses to being the candidate with real experience in the world, she is a one-term Senator––much as Obama and Edwards––and two-term First Lady. Internationally, she is a rock star, but the image of her sitting next to her husband reinforces, visually and viscerally, that she is the first derivative of a powerful political figure, and that her rise to Senator, and any hope she might have of the Presidency, demands that he be at her side. She had no choice to leave him in the wake of his infidelities if she was to achieve her own ambitions.

And that is the other image that strikes the observer, for Bill is nothing if not authentic, while Hillary sits as yin to his yang, the candidate who is packaged and careful and whom one never really believes that one can ever know.

As George W. Bush settles in for his last two years with approval ratings below 30%, and with America’s image in the world lying in tatters at his feet, do we really want another President who is driven to define herself against someone else, or some image of whom people think them to be? The Bush Presidency was undone in the beginning by the President and team’s rejection of all things Clinton. From their rejection of the outgoing administration’s concerns over Al Qaeda to the dismantling of FEMA, decisions early on derived from a compulsion to reject any notion that their hated predecessor––the Slick Willy who continually confounded their best-laid plans––could have gleaned any wisdom about the world during his eight years in office. Then, as Iraq loomed, the Bush Presidency was further damaged by the President’s determination to turn away from his father’s path, and to reject the entreaties of his father’s advisors, from Scowcroft’s plea to stay out of Iraq early on, to the President’s skillful marginalization of Jim Baker and the Iraq Study Group just a few months ago.

Now, Hillary looms as a candidate similarly defined by the struggle to be her own self, even as the world knows that she would never be where she is but for Him. Her struggle against the shadow of the man sitting next to her in Alabama this week was demonstrated by her overreaction to David Geffen’s suggestion that lying comes too easily to the Clintons. Rather than simply suggest that Geffen never disparaged them when he was spending the night in the Lincoln Bedroom, or that his bitterness dated to Bill Clinton’s decision not to pardon American Indian leader and convicted murderer Leonard Pelletier, Hillary lashed out at Geffen and attacked him for engaging in the “politics of personal destruction.”

Of course, it wasn’t about personal destruction. But it was intensely political, as Hillary was stuck––as she often will be as she continues on the long sprint to Iowa and New Hampshire––between her desire to leverage the patina of the Clinton Presidency, while rejecting ties to its more sordid moments. She could not give a straightforward response to Geffen, because it suggest her complicity in the selling of the Lincoln Bedroom for campaign contributions, and worse, the selling of Presidential Pardons to the likes of Billionaire tax cheat Marc Rich.

Hillary’s over-wrought reaction to Geffen, and her subsequent appearance with Bill in Alabama, do not speak well for her ability to navigate her campaign through the long months ahead. Despite an overwhelming advantage in fundraising, name recognition and organization, there is a sense of incipient panic in the Clinton camp, and tetchiness in her public comments. On the fundraising side, the Clinton finance team has threatened that donors must get on board early, or lose any credit later on, and warned them against giving to “both sides.” On the political side, bringing Bill down to Alabama showed an inability to stick to the game plan, and an astonishing lack of confidence in the candidate to deal with the problem at hand.

And the problem, of course, is Barack Obama. For months, the question on the Democratic side was who would emerge as the anti-Clinton, and over the course of 2006, several candidates took their turn in the sun. First there was Gore, then Mark Warner and then John Edwards. Each star rose and then set as the media moved on. Now, it is Obama’s turn, and he has begun to separate himself from the pack. But the Clinton campaign was not content wait to see if he would stumble along the way in the face of public and media scrutiny, perhaps because of the threat he posed to Clinton’s African American base, or perhaps just because he is so comfortable in his own skin and as such looms as such a stark contrast.

The numbers are only just beginning to justify such a strong response on the Clinton side. On Intrade, the online trading site that has emerged as a force in measuring political trends, the odds of a Clinton nomination remains around 50%, though they dropped to 46% in the wake of the Geffen dust-up. However, Obama has emerged as the clear threat, rising to 25% as Edwards odds have dropped from 20% to below 10%, and he has been lapped by resurgent Gore speculation. Polling results, which measure popularity rather than expected outcome, have been worse for Clinton, with some showing the gap narrowing toward 10%, with Obama a growing favorite among Black voters. Clearly, whatever gauge one chooses, the aura of inevitability has been pierced.



Hillary Clinton’s struggles as a candidate are just beginning. As she sat in Alabama next to Bill, the comparison did not serve her will. Unlike Maggie Thatcher, who when shown the Bronze statue of her that was unveiled before Parliament last week, commented that she would have preferred Iron, but Bronze would have to do, Hillary’s problem is that she lacks authenticity, and without authenticity, how can there be trust? When she voted for the war, was it out of conviction, or because she believed that to win the Presidency as a woman she needed to be tough? If she declines to apologize, is it because her original vote was one of conviction, or because as a female candidate she has determined that she must show a steel backbone? When all that she does reeks of strategy and tactics, how does one know who she really is?

Or, as an observer had to wonder as she sat next to Bill this week, did she stay with him because she loves him and forgave him his faults, or because she knew that without him, and the embrace of his success and popularity, she had no chance to win the White House? Is it personal, or is it just politics. Just strategy and tactics, but for which she would just be another one-term Senator with big ambitions, or more likely another Wall Street banker dreaming dreams of what might have been.

Jim Baker's last dance

Has there been a commission that has risen to rock star status before? Certainly there have been some legendary commissions, and no doubt Arlen Specter can point to his deft presentation of the Single Bullet Theory as staff counsel to the Warren Commission as the launching point for his rise to the United States Senate. But in this era of the 24-hour news cycle, James Baker and the Iraq Study Group are riding high.

And riding for a fall.

Baker did well to time the release of his memoir––whose title touts the virtue of staying out of politics––with the President’s thumping in the mid-term elections and the imminent presentation of the Iraq Study Group recommendations to the President and Congress. Baker’s reputation has never been higher, as the wiley partisan who served in the administrations of Presidents Reagan and Bush ’41, and who led Bush ’43 to the White House through the swamp that was the 2000 election, is now seen by Democrats and Republicans alike as the Man on the White Horse who might yet bring the White House to heel and chart a new direction for America’s policy in Iraq.

While on his book tour in the weeks preceding the election, Baker offered an early glimpse into the direction that the Iraq Study Group was taking. Specifically, he suggested that the United States should bring both Syria and Iran into direct negotiations over the future of Iraq and the region, and described at length the successes he achieved as Secretary of State through determined negotiations with Syria. It is, he submitted, more important to negotiate with one’s enemies than with one’s friends.

Since the election, events have proceeded at a furious pace. First, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld––viewed as a key roadblock to any recommendations that the Iraq Study Group might present––was jettisoned by the President, and former Baker aid and Study Group member Robert Gates was nominated to be his successor. Rumsfeld’s departure was immediately heralded as a victory for Jim Baker and his circle of foreign policy Realists over the Vulcans––the coterie of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Neocons––who have held Bush ’43 in thrall and led the nation into Iraq.

Then, over the past several days, Iraq Study Group members met with the President and Congressional leaders to discuss the Group’s work and to solicit ideas. The meetings and the press conferences that followed could not have been staged to provide a more deliberate contrast to the administration’s own conduct of foreign policy, as leaders from both parties praised the commission for its openness to new ideas.

Lost in all of this excitement, however, was the President’s own notable lack of enthusiasm. Speaking before the cameras, the President would only offer that he was impressed with the membership of the Iraq Study Group––which incidentally he had approved in advance––and that they asked good questions. Perhaps a stronger statement that he was growing weary with being bullied in public by his father’s team came later, when during a meeting with visiting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert the President called for greater international isolation of Iran.

Unless Jim Baker has lost the political instincts that have served him so well over the years, he must know that he is at risk of having overplayed his hand. Coming on the heels of a massive public rebuke at the polls, the performance of the Iraq Study Group prancing before the cameras and Baker’s own public admonishments on matters of diplomatic strategy have publicly embarrassed the President. Since the election and the dismissal of Rumsfeld, President Bush has been stripped bare by the media and presented as an errant child turning to his father to be bailed out of a terrible mess, and Jim Baker has been the lead agent of the President’s humiliation.

Baker’s challenge is to clean up the mess that he himself has made. President Bush ’41, who has remained silent throughout his son’s presidency, must by now have taken Baker to the woodshed. After all, it is not just the public humiliation that Baker has visited on his son, but the damage that Baker and his group have done to the nation’s interests. After all, success in foreign policy and diplomacy are rooted in credibility and leverage, and the events of the past two weeks have weakened the President’s hand considerably. Now, the President is being pushed into negotiations that he has demurred at the moment when his position is weakest, and the perception of weakness has been exacerbated by every action Baker has taken.

No one has provided more explicit testimony to the damage Baker has done to the President, to the nation and to his best friend’s son than Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the leader who has gained the most through the course of the Bush’s presidency. Seizing on his adversary’s weakness, Ahmadinejad announced this week that his nation is prepared to enter negotiations with the United States––as Baker has proffered––but only after the Bush administration corrects its bad attitude.

Since the outset of the Iraq war, the damage to the United States has been severe. Our military has been weakened, our treasury spent, and our credibility and moral standing in the world undermined. With the creation of the Iraq Study Group, Baker took on the challenge of fixing the mess that Iraq had become. Baker is no doubt correct in his stance on negotiations and building bi-partisanship, but he should have remembered that his job was to garner results, not accolades, and that at the end of the day his group had an audience of one. For two more years, President Bush will continue to be the arbiter of American foreign policy, and if Baker’s work does not convince him, it will be for naught.

The least Jim Baker and his Iraq Study Group could do is do no harm. But apparently, that moment is past. Unless he can pull a rabbit out of the hat––or perhaps produce the long-sought grand bargain that the Iranians proposed just three short years ago––Baker will only have book sales to show for his last foray into the public square.

When the election is over

The evangelical Christian community has been down this road before.

As Kevin Phillips writes in American Theocracy, at several moments in our history the nation’s large evangelical Christian community has been drawn into the political arena by politicians seeking to harness their numbers for their own political ends. Each time it has ended badly, and, with their spiritual mission compromised and their leaders seduced by power, they have withdrawn from the public square.

Once again, it is ending badly.

With only hours remaining before voting begins, President Bush is winging across the American heartland, touching down in districts that have no business requiring his attention. Long gone is the rhetoric of compassionate conservatism at home and humility abroad that he rode to the White House six years ago. Now he is the American Nativist reborn, railing against gay marriage, illegal immigration and the Democratic Threat to America’s Future.

Just weeks ago, in the wake of the 9/11 anniversary, the Republican message of Fear––Fear of Terrorism, Fear of Tax Increases, Fear of Nancy Pelosi with a Gavel and Henry Waxman with a Subpoena––seemed destined to deliver an electoral victory. In that optimistic moment, Party strategists even envisioned the war in Iraq as an issue that would play to Republican advantage.

The political ad that had been prepared––entitled The Stakes––loomed to be a centerpiece of the tri-part Fear campaign. A post-modern inversion of the famous Daisy ad that suggested to voters that the world risked nuclear war if Barry Goldwater elected without ever mentioning him by name, The Stakes showed only the face of Osama bin Laden, while in silence his words of hatred for America scrolled down the screen, followed by the words These are the Stakes. The Stakes was intended to remind voters that war is upon us and that Democrats lack the stomach to take on the threats that we face.

But few people have ever seen The Stakes. Perhaps that is because Republican strategists realized that it is hard to watch The Stakes and not question why our focus has been on Iraq all this time rather than on bin Laden, and why after all the hyperbole, the man who attacked us on 9/11 has drifted from our radar screen. Or perhaps that is because the Republican campaign came unglued in the wake of the relentless cascade of events––from Iraq to North Korea to Iraq to Mark Foley to Iraq––that left it playing defense for weeks, until John Kerry stepped in to draw the media fire.

In these last days, the President has turned his back on the political center and has focused his message at the right wing of his party. Instead of the campaign of Fear that was designed to move the votes of Americans of all stripes, he has returned to the social issues that he hopes once again will energize the evangelical Christian community that has twice supported his election and that remains his sole source of positive approval ratings.

And as the prospects for victory deteriorated, the President’s rhetoric escalated. He had no choice. From that bright morning back in Texas, when Karl Rove and Matthew Dowd charted a political strategy that eschewed the political center in favor of a strategy built around motivating the evangelical Christian community, the President was committed.

But as the President comes to them again for their support, for the evangelical Christian community the President’s words must ring hollow. For six years, the President has had total control over the levers of power, and yet his stump speech is largely about what needs to be done rather than about what he has accomplished. Like his recent strategy of quoting Osama bin Laden to engender support for the war in Iraq, his stump speech has in an odd ways become less a testament to his principles than to what he has failed to accomplish.

But worse than the lack of results has been the corruption of the movement itself, as Phllips suggested. Beginning with the Shiavo tragedy, the deeply-rooted sentiments of the evangelical community have been manipulated for personal and political gain. The wave of scandals, including Enron and Abramoff and Foley and Haggard, have each involved personalities who moved easily from piety to power to wealth to disgrace. And in the wake of each scandal, the moral clarity of the leaders of the evangelical Christian community has been further undermined, as they rose to the defense of people who did not deserve defending.

Finally, the corrupting influence of politics on the evangelical leadership was laid bare in the Foley scandal. Faced with evidence that Republican leaders had failed in their duty to protect House pages from a predatory member, evangelical leaders cast away any remaining claim to moral clarity as they blamed gay Republican staffers rather than call the House leadership to account for their failure to protect the children in their care.

If Karl Rove is wrong, and the polls and pundits have it right this time, tomorrow the President’s base will hold him accountable. He has used them and he has failed them, and he has failed the nation. At a time when unemployment has hit historic lows and the stock market has hit historic highs, the President has a better case to make than the demonization of gays, Mexicans, judges and Democrats. But instead he will go to the well one last time. And when it is over, the evangelical community will, as Phillips suggests, retreat back to their spiritual mission of conversion and personal salvation.

When George Bush embraced the strategy that Rove and Dowd suggested could build a permanent Republican majority, he fell prey to hubris. Rove provided a strategy for winning elections that was fundamentally flawed as a strategy for governance. The use of demonization as an electoral strategy undermined the President’s ability to build governing coalitions, and the paradigm of good vs. evil that suits the President so well quickly migrated from electoral strategy to the halls of Congress to civil society.

Today, Dowd’s new book Applebee's America suggests that the strategy Bush embraced may have run its course. Fully half of those in each political party are voicing disgust with the tenor of political dialogue as it has evolved and are looking for a politics of compromise and conciliation. If Karl Rove and Ken Melman are not successful in generating the turnout from their base that is the core of their strategy, the political implications will be significant for 2008 and beyond.

For the Republican Party, which has alienated New England moderates, old-school fiscal and small government conservatives, gay and pro-choice party members, changing course to tack back to the political center is unlikely. The Party is now firmly in the hands of the right wing, as there are few moderates left in the Senate or the House, and after tomorrow, Maine’s women Senators and Arlen Specter may be all that is left of the Republican Party along the long moderate arc that once stretched from Ohio through New England.

The challenge for Democrats will be to resist a move to the left just at the moment when the political center has been abandoned by the Republicans. As anti-war sentiment has taken center stage, the Democratic left is feeling its oats, and can fairly argue that it was the centrist Democrats who folded under Republican pressure. For those on the left who for years have lusted for a Rovian move to the left and argued that such a strategy would mobilize voters who now stay home, the thought of moving toward the center is anathema. At the same time, the new voices in the party may include the staunch centrists recruited to run this year by Rahm Emmanuel, people like Jim Webb, Jon Tester, Heath Shuler and Bob Casey will likely push back against a move to the left.

Such is the illogic of the moment, and the political forces that may be put into play as the polls close tomorrow. The activists in each parties will likely lay claim that the future of their party, leaving a void in the political center. Ironically, the President who embraced a strategy for victory that proved toxic for governance may have produced a political landscape where neither party is eager to embrace the large core of voters who are ready for a breather from the partisanship that has racked the nation.

And then, of course, there is the prospect that the pundits are wrong and that Rove is right. If the evangelical community that he and the President have cultivated come out tomorrow and deliver the goods for the Party, and the House and Senate stay in Republican hands, the long-term outcome is even more certain. The Republican move to the right will be vindicated, and a Democratic move to the left will be inevitable. And the paradigm of blue vs. red, and good vs. evil that have riven the nation will likely continue.