Archive for: Philip Hughes

U.S. News & World Report

Among the U.S. State Department’s perennial challenges is to live down the hackneyed sobriquet of “striped-pants cookie-pushers,” with its implied weakness, elitism and ineffectual foppery. Another is to overcome what it sees as its perennial under-funding.

Trying to kill two birds with one stone, the department has for some years styled itself as the nation’s first line of defense, an indispensable contributor to our national security. Its less-than $30 billion budget, dwarfed by U.S. defense and intelligence expenditures, looks like a national security bargain. And so it is.

But since talk is cheap, to bolster its case, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton innovated the State Department’s first-ever Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) – a direct lift from the 1997 Defense Authorization Act’s mandate for a Quadrennial Defense Review. Hillary’s QDDR called forth a whole raft of monitoring and evaluation initiatives “for evidence-based decision-making.”

The aim is clear: simultaneously improve the State Department’s internal management while bolstering its case for adequate resources through a quantitative demonstration of effectiveness. And so, now, to implement this “QDDR mandate,” beltway contractors are queuing up to devise these evaluation schemes and then apply them to the State Department’s and USAID’s (the U.S. Agency for International Development’s) programs.

This is all so self-evidently sensible and managerial. How could anyone object?

Well, first, this is just the kind of thing that’s instantly attractive to spendthrift Democrats whenever they drift into a thoughtful, reflective moment. It’s a “two-fer”: It enables them to posture as eagle-eyed stewards of taxpayer money while equipping themselves with data and statistics to spend even more of it. But more than that, Hillary’s seemingly unobjectionable initiative – assuming it’s really implemented in a serious, not a haphazard, fashion – could end up further dumbing down American diplomacy.

How? Unlike the military programs from which the QDDR is copied, diplomacy involves many intangibles – combinations of private communication and public rhetoric; maneuvers with friends and allies, neutrals and others, bilaterally and in multi-lateral organizations; blandishments of different inducements and expressed or implied consequences – all sequenced strategically and tactically in time.

It’s not quite as straight-forward as determining whether a new tank procurement is on schedule, on budget, and meeting its performance targets, or whether a new aircraft design can achieve its maximum operating ceiling, turn rate, or payload capacity.

A lot has to do with time – specifically when the evaluative judgments and assessments are made. Take, for instance, President Reagan’s bold arms control approach with the Soviet Union. Assessed in, say, the election year of 1984 – when the Soviets had walked out of the Geneva Strategic Arms Reduction Talks for over a year due to Reagan’s intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) deployments to Europe and his Strategic Defense Initiative, and when talks on an INF agreement to ban all such U.S. and Russian weapons were similarly on ice – Reagan’s arms control diplomacy looked to many like a failure.

But fast-forward to 1987 – the year after the spectacular collapse of Reagan’s and Gorbachev’s Reykjavik Summit – when Reagan signed an INF weapons ban with Gorbachev in Washington. Then Reagan’s tough stance looked pretty smart. Fast-forward another few years, to Moscow in July, 1991 where George H.W. Bush and Gorbachev signed a START I nuclear arms treaty embodying the dramatic reductions, throw-weight and multiple-warhead limitations that Reagan demanded, and Reagan’s policy looked inspired. Fast-forward less than six more months more, to Christmas of 1991 and the dissolution of the USSR, and Reagan’s policies looked like genius.

Or consider the Clinton Administration’s years-long, torturous military-intervention-cum-diplomacy in former Yugoslavia that finally put an end to Serbian atrocities and genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. Take a snap-shot at any point up to the conclusion of the Dayton Peace Accords and you’d probably have, at best, a qualified, if not a negative or doubtful, verdict. Put that snapshot in the hands of partisan detractors and you’d have headlines – as unhelpful abroad diplomatically as they will be at home politically.

Of course, if you’re not attempting something as bold and gutsy as staring down the Soviet Union over nuclear arms reduction during a Cold War or facing down a genocidal, nationalistic thug like Slobodan Milosevic, maybe getting your bureaucracy to write you a diplomatic report-card that rewards things like “leading from behind” and “preserving the relationship” – and likely penalizes risky, high-stakes measures against today’s thugs, like Kim Jung Un or Bashir Assad – well, that might look good all the way around, politically and budgetarily.

The trouble is that someday we may have a president with a larger, longer-range strategy and the ambition and capacity for strong international leadership. It would be too bad if Hillary’s little diplomacy report-card idea turned out then to be a stumbling block.

U.S. News & World Report

The Catholic Church has received ample focus in the last two months, between Pope Benedict’s surprise resignation and the election of Argentine Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio as Pope Francis, the first pope from Latin America.

These dramatic events have evoked torrents of commentary about the Church, ranging across issues far beyond the papal succession. And, predictably, a good many of those commentaries have revealed Catholicism’s remarkable capacity to drive some otherwise sane men (and women) absolutely nuts.

Take Bret Stephens’ March 14 Wall Street Journal column, “A Church, If You Can Keep It.” Stephens, to my mind, is an almost unfailingly insightful columnist whose arguments are generally penetrating and trenchant. More often than not, I agree with his analysis, and I almost never fail to learn from his columns.

To be fair, Stephens opened his pre-papal-election commentary with the admonition that non-members of a religion should comment on it in much the way that porcupines make love: very carefully. So, while carefully tripping through Catholicism’s recent years of sex abuse scandals and revelations—as heart-breaking and dispiriting for the faithful as they’ve been lucrative for trial lawyers and glee-filled for those who glory in sneering at others struggling to live righteously—Stephens came to this startling curative: “The obvious and needful solution is to abolish the celibacy of the priesthood, a stricture that all but guarantees the sorts of sordid outcomes” that he had just chronicled.

But wait a minute! The John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s exhaustive study of sexual misconduct by Catholic priests, commissioned in 2002 by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (and accurately cited by Stephens) makes clear that just over 80 percent of the victims in these abuse cases are males, mostly between the ages of 11 and 17. In the 52 years between 1950 and 2002 (with most cases having occurred between 1960 and 1984), the 4392 priests against whom at least one abuse allegation had been made represented 4 percent of the total number of priests serving in the U.S. during those years. This is roughly the same rate at which sexual misconduct charges against men occur in society at large and is comparable to the experience of clergy of other faiths.

The priestly abuse problem has clearly and preponderantly been a homosexual one. So, the solution is … married priests? Or at least permitting priests to marry? Certainly,  nobody thinks that homosexually inclined men are going to be ‘converted’ by marriage. Apart from being contradicted by all experience, such a notion would be laughable to adherents of the contemporary cannon of homosexual ideology. What a quaint and condescending notion!

Enlarging the pool of ‘eligibles’ to those who want to marry might make it easier for the Catholic Church to say ‘no’ to homosexual candidates for the priesthood. But, ironically, the Church—thanks to lawsuit settlements and moral imperatives—is being impelled toexclude homosexuals from ministry at a time when, in every other walk of life, the impetus is to include homosexuals in everything and to prevent discrimination against them.

And what of the implication that homosexual priests manifestly prey on and victimize underage young men? How is it that this is such an acute problem only when homosexual men train in seminaries and are ordained? Because it’s a cardinal tenet of contemporary social policy and jurisprudence that homosexuals pose no danger, moral or otherwise, to the welfare of children. To suggest the contrary—something that only the bravest or most foolhardy would do—would imply that today’s widespread homosexual adoption and child-rearing would be tantamount to state-sanctioned child endangerment, another anathema within homosexual ideology. This ‘sleeping dog’ implication of the priestly sex abuse scandals will, predictably, remain undisturbed.

Of course, marriage would completely change both the economics and the priorities of Catholic priesthood. Every married man’s family must be his first priority. This means satisfying the economic needs and demands of wife and children—a fundamental challenge to the cost-structure of ministering to the Catholic faithful. Priesthood would become much like any other job, with motivations for higher paying positions and ways to eke more money out of the role taking precedence. Pondering this possibility reminds us of one of the chief reasons—besides sacrifice, mortification, discipline and tradition—that Catholic priests are unmarried in the first place: their first and over-riding priority is ministering to the faithful. Changing priests’ civil status will change their priorities, inevitably.

Naturally, those who suggest abolishing the stricture of priestly celibacy claim to have only the best interests of the Catholic Church in mind, helping it save itself from a tradition-bound cul-de-sac freighted with recurrent, tragic implications. But in light of the paradoxes and contradictions between the nature of the problem and the proposed remedy, and the implications of that remedy for the Church’s future operation, it makes one wonder.

US News

Last week, Democratic California Rep. Barbara Lee introduced the Peace and Nonviolence Act—a bill to create a cabinet-level department dedicated to these laudable goals. And that’s where the Washington fun begins.

The congresswoman’s office got to issue high-minded, pious-sounding press releases and declarations about how this initiative is needed to address not only wars and conflict abroad but every sort of violence—criminal, gang, domestic, mass murderers—here at home.

Fox News Channel got to run a morning show segment decrying the expense and waste that would be involved—a cabinet secretary and under secretary, seven assistant secretaries, plus other officials and staff. Its commentators could mock the hopeless idealism of supposing that world and domestic peace, no less, can be brought about by the advising, educating, and policy-kibbitzing activities of a federal department.

Presiden Obama’s antiwar constituency can be appeased; conservatives can be appalled. But what’s really appalling is the cynicism of all this.

First of all, the idea is not new. It’s old. Ultra-liberal Democrat Rep. Dennis Kucinich has introduced this bill in every Congress since two months before the 9/11 attacks. (He was lucky, in 2001, to get it in under the wire; if he’d waited another eight or 10 weeks to introduce it, he’d have looked like a cross between the biggest squish imaginable and an active protector of Osama bin Laden—at the moment when the entire country was screaming for retaliation.)

Second, the idea is completely redundant. For 30 years, we’ve had an almost entirely federally-funded U.S. Institute of Peace. It occupies a shiny new building next door to the State Department on the National Mall. Originally dreamed up as a counterweight to the Pentagon’s War Colleges and defense think tanks, studying how to make war (instead of peace), it’s programs have long since expanded beyond interstate conflict to research, teaching, and training on sources of and antidotes for societal violence— including forays into more effective approaches to policing. Practically everything Representative Lee’s new federal department would do, the institute already does. But the proposal isn’t to elevate the institute to cabinet rank; it’s to build something new on top of it. Just the thing to do in a time of out-of-control deficits and run-away debt.

And then there’s the fact that we already have a “Department of Peace.” It’s called the State Department. Ask anyone who works there—or ever has. They’ll tell you: It’s their professional mission to keep the United States at peace and to achieve its aims in the world peacefully.

Finally, of course, there’s the recognition by everyone in this little Washington footnote drama that there is virtually zero chance of Ms. Lee’s bill becoming law at all—at least for now. It’s well-known that only 2 percent or so of bills submitted by our 535 enterprising legislators ever get enacted. (After all, that’s how the U.S. Institute of Peace got started—a 1976 Senate bill to create a “Peace Academy” that went nowhere until it became a 1979 Carter-era study and, finally, a law acceded to by President Reagan in the midst of the Soviet’s election-year-long boycott of the START nuclear arms talks.) So tossing this little feel-good bone to the antiwar left is costless.

But is it costless? Our nation remains in crisis: over four years of unemployment hovering between 7.5 and 8 percent; sluggish economic growth; run-away deficits, ballooning national debt; a federal government operating without a formal budget for four years, and near gridlock in Congress and between the executive and legislative branches. At such a time, that Rep. Lee apparently felt no inhibitions about introducing a transparently frivolous, wastefully duplicative piece of legislation during the run-up to last Friday’s sequester deadline underscores that attitudes in Washington really haven’t changed. Members of Congress still act like they can propose spending on anything from a vanity project back home to a symbolic fillip to a core constituency and the taxpayer will foot the bill.

Lofty goals proffered from the most cynical of motives. Sacred cow projects that nicely provide fodder for the 24-hour news channels’ outrage mills—whether of Fox or MSNBC. No wonder the American public is alienated and cynical about Washington. It’s hard to find a starting point to address such a profound and wide-spread … dare we say malaise?. But one small step might be for congressional leaders to drive a stake through the heart of Rep. Lee’s proposed new federal department.

The original article can be found here.

U.S. News & World Report

Who would have thought that the most frequently quoted person at a weekend-long leadership retreat of a venerable conservative intellectual society would have been Hillary Rodham Clinton?  How could it be that, one after another, these pillars of the conservative movement—people who, in an earlier time, Hillary dismissed as “a vast right-wing conspiracy”—would be citing her rhetoric?

It wasn’t her credentials as a former “Goldwater girl” who came to town to take her first job with Ed Feulner, the soon-to-retire president of the Heritage Foundation, in one of his early Washington roles that made her top-of-mind for this assembly.  It was something she said more recently—last month, in fact—that everyone found so memorable.

“What difference at this point does it make?!”  That was the Hillary Clinton quote on everyone’s lips this past weekend in Annapolis. Hillary’s remark from her appearance the week before last before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, trying to explain and justify the Benghazi tragedy, wasn’t being cited admiringly.  Nor was it being used as a sign—or sigh—of despair about the political and social trends that cause conservatives to agonize so these days.

No one was copying Hillary. They were mocking Hillary. For those attending, her remark was the apotheosis of self-serving cynicism and irresponsibility. (In other words, precisely what you’d expect of a Clinton about to check out from long service in the Obama administration.)

From her performance before the Foreign Relations Committee senators, it’s not obvious whether Hillary’s memorable moment was coached in advance during prep work with her staff or something that came spontaneously—like that supposed demonstration in Benghazi! What is clear is that it was intended to be the sort of climactic “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” moment that attorney Joseph Welch used to effectively shut down Sen. Joseph McCarthy almost 60 years ago—a sharp rebuff that puts the “inquisitors” on the defensive and deflects the “inquisition.”

The trouble is: The answer to Sen. Ron. Johnson’s question about the true origin and nature of the Benghazi attack really does matter.

It matters for security planning.  No one can reliably predict when some Internet posting or cartoon contest will so enrage some public somewhere—most likely in the Islamic world—as to start a riot that can overwhelm an isolated U.S. consular outpost—or even an embassy in a less-than-cooperative capital.  If that’s the problem, achieving actionable warning and ensuring “adequate” security in outposts like our leased Benghazi facilities would be almost impossible. But if the challenge is the threat of deliberate and organized terrorist attack—also tough to detect in advance and prepare for, especially in places like Benghazi—you nevertheless plan and prepare for it differently. And correctly diagnosing the security challenge up front is key to formulating the right security posture. No competent manager could miss this.

It also matters for pubic credibility. Benghazi played out in the midst of a presidential election campaign. An administration that had consciously minimized the George W. Bush’s global War on Terror and portrayed the terrorism threat, post-bin Laden, as substantially defeated, now had four dead bodies on its hands—one an American ambassador, the first such humiliating loss since 1979, under Jimmy Carter. We probably shouldn’t be flabbergasted, under the circumstances, that Obama’s administration had trouble getting its story straight.  But Susan Rice’s famous appearances on the Sunday talk shows five days later and President Obama’s United Nations address two weeks later, still sticking to the “spontaneous demonstration” narrative, look like dishonesty and dissembling.  Since Hillary earned her spurs in the Watergate investigations, you might have thought that she’d attach some importance to telling the truth—to the American public and to the rest of the government.

But Hillary has also adopted the posture of the “stand-up” leader in the Benghazi debacle, claiming, “As I have said many times, I take responsibility, and nobody is more committed to getting this right.” But nowadays, in the consequence-free society we seem to now inhabit (on which I’ve remarked previously in U.S. News), Hillary’s (or any other Washington official’s) claim to take responsibility sounds a lot like comedian Rich Little’s old Watergate satire of Richard Nixon.  In it, Little’s Nixon character explains, “I am responsible. But I am not to blame. What, you may ask, is the difference? People who are to blame go to jail.” Or, in the case of Cabinet members, at least resign—on the spot, not months later, on their own personal political schedule. What’s the consequence for Hillary? None. She left the State Department in her own sweet time and under her own steam, lionized by the mainstream media and with accolades even from some of the Republican senators grilling her about Benghazi.

Will any of this evasion be remembered as 2016 rolls around? I doubt it. This sad spectacle of shrugging off responsibility while pretending to embrace it is likely to be buried as deeply in the mists of memory as those Rose Law Firm records Hillary couldn’t find for so many years. After all, she’s become Saint Hillary.

The Council of American Ambassadors – the association of current and former Presidentially-appointed non-career U.S. Ambassadors – is about to celebrate its 30th anniversary. Anticipating the anniversary, the State Department’s State Magazine invited the Council to contribute a testimonial reviewing its first 30 years. WHWG Senior Director Philip Hughes, who serves as the Senior Vice President and Secretary of the Council, contributed the following testimonial:

In 1983, three distinguished former U.S. envoys—Ambassador to Switzerland Marvin Warner, Ambassador to Austria Milton Wolf and Deputy Permanent Representative to the U.N. William vanden Heuvel—saw the need for an organization for former presidentially appointed noncareer U.S. ambassadors. With few exceptions, these appointees, on completing their service, returned to private life. Beyond the occasional memoir or re-appointment, their knowledge, skills and experiences were lost to the U.S. foreign affairs community and they lost touch with that community themselves…

The rest of the article can be found here.

U.S. News & World Report – February 26, 2013

On Sunday, February 10, the New York Times reported prominently that President Obama’s State of the Union address would feature a renewed drive by the president for nuclear weapons reduction toward his avowed goal of a nuclear-weapons-free world. There were ample details: U.S. nuclear forces to be cut by one third, taking our arsenal of actively deployed weapons down to a level of 1,000—well below the New START goal, ratified in 2009, of 1,550 such weapons by 2018.

There was a quote: Obama “believes that we can make pretty radical reductions—and save a lot of money—without compromising American security in the second term. And the Joint Chiefs have signed off on that concept.”

A game-plan was outlined: Obama would reach “an informal agreement” with Russia’s Vladimir Putin for mutual reductions within the New START framework. Ratification would be unnecessary. No need for the Senate to get involved.

National security adviser Tom Donilon would travel next month to Moscow, following on Vice President Joe Biden’s recent confab with Russian leaders attending a security conference in southern Germany, all to pave the way for a pair of Obama-Putin summit meetings this summer.

That was quite a wind-up. And then came the pitch: “At the same time, we will engage Russia to seek further reductions in our nuclear arsenals, and continue leading the global effort to secure nuclear materials that might fall into the wrong hands …”

That’s it?! That’s all President Obama had to say about his cherished goal of world-wide nuclear disarmament—the commitment that, largely, won him a Nobel Peace Prize—in his first State of the Union address after his historic re-election? What happened? How could the venerable Times have gotten the story so wrong?

Well, what happened is North Korea! Evidently its new dictator, Kim Jong-Un, doesn’t read the New York Times. Or perhaps he just has a timetable of his own. Because on the morning of the president’s speech, news reports around the world headlined North Korea’s third nuclear weapons test.

Well, that certainly must have “put the cat among the pigeons” in the White House preparations for the president’s address that same night. As a veteran of past administrations’ State of the Union “drill”, I can readily imagine the paragraphs of visionary, high-minded, man-of-peace prose, prefigured by advance reports like the Times‘s, being ripped out and tossed on the cutting room floor overnight before Obama’s speech. You can just hear the White House advisers muttering, “We can’t have the president looking so out-of-step with reality.” Even if he is.

North Korea’s blast underscored exquisitely the most fundamental contradiction of Obama’s nuclear disarmament ambitions. Its cornerstone rationale is to minimize and reverse the incentives for nuclear proliferation by the world’s ‘wannabe’ nuclear powers—mainly rogue states like Iran and North Korea implacably hostile to the United States and the West.

It just wouldn’t do to have the president announce his next down-payment on this idealistic goal right on the heels of North Korea, the biggest Non-Proliferation Treaty violator, taking another unmistakable step closer toward nuclear weapons capability, complete with bellicose threats against the United States and South Korea. To boot, eight weeks earlier North Korea launched a long-range missile, ostensibly a space launch, obviously intended to eventually threaten the United States with nuclear attack. Against this backdrop a big play on nuclear weapons reduction in the State of the Union address, justified as heading off precisely what had just happened, risked making Obama look dangerously naïve.

As it happens, the over-80 percent reduction in U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals since their Cold War peak in 1986—and the 50 percent reduction in U.S. deployed and nondeployed nuclear weapons ordered by President George W. Bush after the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty—have had no impact on Iran and North Korea. But that’s not the only contradiction in Obama’s nuclear policy.

The rationale for further nuclear reductions rests heavily on the end of the Cold War—but Obama’s approach to nuclear arms reductions is completely rooted in the Cold War. It remains an entirely bilateral exercise between the United States and Russia, just like in the Cold War days. Other “lesser” nuclear powers—China, India, Pakistan, whose arsenals become more significant with each round of U.S.-Russian cuts—get to “sit this one out.” And there’s no pretense of trying to bring rogue proliferators like Iran and North Korea—the principal dangers—into any kind of multilateral bargain exchanging U.S.-Russian reductions for the unwinding of their nuclear programs.

The Obama team holds out the prospect that U.S. nuclear deterrence will protect our friends and allies abroad in case North Korea and Iran ultimately fulfill their manifest ambitions to deploy offensive nuclear arms. But how is this supposed to work when, at the same time, Obama’s policies continue to whittle down and weaken that deterrent force?

So, will Obama temper his quest for still further nuclear arms cuts in the face of North Korea’s latest provocation? Surely not. This is among the highest priorities of his national security strategy. But with the Senate losing its most knowledgeable and articulate voice on these issues as a result of Sen. Jon Kyl’s  retirement, and with Obama’s nomination of former senator Chuck Hagel—co-author of a “Global Zero” report advocating unilateral reduction of the U.S. nuclear deterrent—to be secretary of defense, the question is: Will anyone emerge in the Senate willing or able to apply the brakes?

The article appears here.

Del Sur al Norte, December 2012 – The magazine of the Fundacion Centro de Estudios Americanos (Center for American Studies Foundation) of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The following article by Senior Director G. Philip Hughes was featured in the ‘Special Edition on the 2012 Elections in the United States’ issue. (Article available here in Spanish: Elecciones Presidenciales)

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.  At least not for Republicans.  And not according to Republicans.

A failed President – one who had presided over nearly four years of 8%+ unemployment; over the weakest economic of the postwar period; over economic growth barely above 1% and annual trillion dollar budget deficits – re-elected for another four year term!  A President whose major accomplishments in office have been pushing through a still-highly-unpopular national health care scheme and winding down wars in Iraq and Afghanistan according to pre-announced deadlines – a policy regarded by many national-security-minded Americans as a thinly disguised ‘cut and run’.  Defeating a Republican nominee with a successful business record and demonstrated ability to turn around troubled operations – one whose sole experience in elected office was as the moderate Governor of arguably the nation’s most liberal state, a state dominated by Democrats in which bipartisan compromise offered the only path to achieving anything whatever.

Not only did Obama win a second term; his Democrats, with twice as many Senate seats to defend as their Republican opponents (22 to 11), actually expanded their Senate majority by a net of two seats.  Practically the only consolations for Republicans were successfully defending their majority in the House of Representatives — despite a net loss of 11 seats, the Republicans retained control of the chamber by a comfortable 233-199 majority – and expanding (by 1, to a total of 30) their record number of Republican Governorships.

Republican and Republican-leaning commentators predicted a very different outcome.  Karl Rove, architect of George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 election victories and organizer of American Crossroads, a major independent group supporting 2012 Republican candidates, wrote in The Wall Street Journal on October 31: “My prediction: Sometime after the cock crows on the morning of Nov. 7, Mitt Romney will be declared America’s 45th president. Let’s call it 51%-48%, with Mr. Romney carrying at least 279 Electoral College votes, probably more.”  Michael Barone, author of The Almanac of American Politics, wrote in The Washington Examiner on November 2: ”Bottom Line: Romney 315, Obama 223.  That sounds high for Romney.  But he could drop Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and still win the election.”

Fat chance!  As it turns out, Obama won all but one of the so-called battleground states: Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, Nevada, Iowa, New Hampshire, Wisconsin.  Romney won – barely — North Carolina, a ‘battleground state’ that went for Obama in 2008.

How could this happen??!!  That’s the question many Republicans were asking themselves on Tuesday night, November 6, and in the days and weeks afterwards.  Obama won by only about 3 million votes, out of slightly less than 122 million votes cast for the two major parties’ candidates (62,611,250 to 59,134,475) but racked up a compelling advantage in the Electoral College (332 to 206; 270 are needed for election).  Republicans could console themselves that Obama’s vote total was some 9 million fewer than in 2008 – a record turn-out election year – suggesting that his support had slipped.  But Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, polled some 3 million fewer votes than John McCain – considered a weak Republican candidate –  received four years earlier.  If everyone who voted for McCain had turned out for Romney, he would have won.  So thought many Republicans.  If Obama’s margin could have been so easily overcome, how significant could his victory have been?

The answer is: very significant!  The close popular vote suggests the election was not as epochal or the total vindication that partisan Democrats may claim.  But neither was it a fluke or a merely temporary setback.  The election revealed – or, better, threw into relief – crucial demographic shifts in the American electorate with profound implications for future elections – the strategy, the tactics, the possible outcomes.  And it may have re-written the ‘play-book’ for U.S. electoral campaigns going forward.

So … what happened??!!  Let’s review the series of factors contributed to Obama’s victory, to Romney’s defeat, and to the Democrats’ success in fighting the Republicans to a virtual electoral standstill nation-wide.

Grand Strategy, Conventional Wisdom, Unconventional Tactics.  The contrast between the respective theories of and strategies for the campaign of the Obama and Romney teams was striking.  From all indications, the Romney camp’s theory of the campaign, and strategy for winning it, were based on very conventional thinking.  For them, the campaign was about one big, overarching issue: the economy.  It was lousy.  Obama had been President for four years.  However constantly Obama blamed his predecessor, George W. Bush, for the ‘economic mess’ he inherited, he couldn’t escape responsibility it.  Pocketbook issues are famously decisive with American voters.  Obama’s job approval ratings hovered persistently below 50%.  Polls consistently showed majorities of Americans thought that the country was ‘on the wrong track’ on the bell-weather polling question.  No incumbent President since Franklin Roosevelt had been re-elected with unemployment above 7.5% for over 40 months.

All the Republicans had to do, it seemed, was to present a plausible, non-polarizing alternative to Obama and Obama would get ‘fired’ by the electorate.  A resume of business experience and of successful ‘turn-around operations’ might help.  Emerging in May from a 6-months’-long, bruising Republican primary contest, Romney seemed like he might be ‘the right man for the job’ – of beating Obama.  Although his moderate record as Governor of Massachusetts and his ‘flip-flops’ on key issues left conservatives with lingering doubts, Romney generated, ironically, high ‘voter intensity’ among Republicans.  He also polled well with independents – a key to defeating Obama, who had carried the independent 52% to John McCain’s 44% in 2008.

All of this was fairly conventional thinking and strategizing – a page straight out of the standard playbook of American politics.

As it turned out, the Obama campaign wasn’t following the textbook of American politics; they were writing a new one.

Saddled with a weak record on the economy and an unpopular ‘signature accomplishment’ health care program, Obama’s campaign recognized that they needed a big theme, since the ‘big issue’ – the economy – worked against them.  That theme – “Forward” – conveyed the positive impression of progress while implying that the alternative was a return to ‘the bad old days’ of George W. Bush.  As a theme, it had the additional merit of offering no insight whatsoever into Obama’s goals and plans for a second term.  Remarkable!  A Presidential re-election campaign without a second-term agenda!

The solid block of states predictably supporting the Democratic candidate in national elections – California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey and Maryland; the New England states; the Pacific Northwest and Hawaii – enabled Obama’s team to focus on the battleground states mentioned earlier.  But, given recent demographic shifts in the electorate, Obama’s people saw the opportunity to build coalitions of minority voters – Hispanics, Asians and women to complement their traditional strength among blacks and Jews.  This, along with liberal white Democratic voters, ultimately proved more than enough to offset Obama’s losses among independent voters and Romney’s supposedly energized Republican base.

To reach these voters, Obama’s team assembled an enormous database of information on voters nationwide – not merely names, addresses, zip codes (a proxy measure of affluence), voting and political contribution histories, but also information derived from credit agencies about consumption patterns and property ownership – all geared to identifying and targeting their voters.  And they put together a team of ‘quants and stats’, an assemblage of quantitative analysts and statistical experts to analyze and ‘mine’ this data to maximize Obama’s vote.  Along the way, Obama’s team was able to identify sub-issues – even ‘non-issues’ – that resonated with subsets of voters.  (For instance, Obama’s team used the issue of women’s access to contraception – shown to resonate with urban single women in places like North Carolina and Virginia — to mobilize their voters and ‘turn them off’ to Romney’s appeal, even though no one and no issue in the election threatened this access in any way.)

By contrast, Romney and the Republicans deployed a much more conventional array of political campaign advisers and strategists who, working from more aggregate, ‘macro’ numbers, plotted their strategy through states whose combination could produce a majority in the Electoral College.  Cleverer and more unconventional than the Republican’s approach, Obama’s targeted ‘micro’ strategy simply beat Romney’s ‘macro’ one.

Character Assassination as High Politics.  According to press reports, Jim Messina, Obama’s chief campaign strategist, approached the President in late spring with a bold and unconventional advertising strategy.  Realizing that Romney was about to emerge as the Republican nominee after the long, costly primary battle – but with depleted coffers to cover the months between May and the August Republican convention — Messina urged Obama to ‘spend big, now’, especially in battleground states. The idea was to ‘define’ Obama’s opponent by savaging his business record (his principal ‘selling point’) before Romney could gather the resources to respond.  This bold stroke contrasted with the conventional wisdom – as practiced by the Republicans this year — of husbanding the campaign’s dollars so that they could ‘carpet bomb’ the battleground states with advertising in the campaign’s concluding 10 weeks.

Messina may have been inspired by the ‘Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’ campaign, launched against Democratic nominee, Senator John Kerry, by his former comrades-in-arms during George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign.  The book and advertising campaign sponsored by this independent veterans group during the ‘August lull’ in the campaign impugned Kerry’s Vietnam War record and undermined his fitness to serve as Commander-in-Chie in the midst of on-going wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But even if Messina was inspired by the 2004 episode, he took the idea much further.  The attacks started much earlier – as soon as it was clear that Romney would be the Republican nominee – and went on all summer, not merely for a month.  They were highly targeted in battleground states.  And they were directly funded by Obama’s re-election campaign – then echoed by other supportive operations.  As post-election survey data subsequently revealed, Romney’s image in these states never fully recovered from this barrage.  And the Republicans’ ‘conventional wisdom’ advertising strategy couldn’t undo the damage in the campaign’s closing weeks.

Inside Your Own Echo Chamber.  For decades, conservatives and Republicans complained of one-sided, Democrat- and left-biased news reporting and commentary by the major U.S. broadcast networks and nationally important newspapers and maagaazines.  With the advent of conservative talk radio two decades ago and of Fox News Channel roughly 15 years ago, conservatives and Republicans found a series of media outlets more congenial to their viewpoint.  These outlets, however, may have done as much harm as good for the Republican cause in this election cycle.  While they helped focus attention on some issues helpful to Romney and harmful to Obama – e.g., the deaths of four diplomats during the destruction of the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya – their steady predictions of Obama’s defeat and their scenarios for a Romney victory helped blind Republican strategists and activists to the potency of Obama’s actual campaign plan.

Where Was the Tea Party?  Two years ago, when Republicans swept the mid-term elections on a wave of opposition to Obama’s first months in office, the stage seemed set for a Republican re-capture of the Senate and the White House in 2012.  Obviously, that didn’t happen.  The 2010 ‘wave’ election for Republicans was largely fueled by the voter activism and turn-out generated by the Tea Party (an acronym for ‘Taxed Enough Already’ that also evokes a Boston episode that led to the American revolution).  But in 2010, by backing of a handful of strictly conservative candidates over moderates with state-wide vote-getting appeal, the Tea Party may have cost the Republicans control of the Senate.  Tea Party Senate candidates – notably in Delaware, Colorado, and Arizona – lost.  So, the 2010 record of the Tea Party was mixed: Republicans couldn’t have swept the election without them, but couldn’t win the Senate with their candidates.

In 2012, Republicans reaped all of the Tea Party’s negatives with few of its benefits.  Tea Party-backed Senate candidates went down to defeat in heavily Republican Indiana and in Missouri, where the Senate’s most vulnerable Democrat hung onto re-election against a Tea Party candidate who pronounced, before the election, that women’s bodies had a natural defense mechanism against conception in cases of rape.  This candidate’s medical ‘epiphany’ triggered unanimous appeals from the Republicans leadership to withdraw from the race.  He refused.  Instead, he lost.  At the same time, the Tea Party apparently failed to generate the voter enthusiasm and turn-out for the Republican ticket that it contributed in 2010 – noticeable in Romney’s disappointing showing among white working-class, ‘blue-collar’ men.  So, between lost Senate opportunities and a disappointing voter mobilization, in 2012 the Tea Party fizzled.

Bottom Line.  In the 2012, President Obama’s campaign engineered a brilliant tactical victory – one that will be long studied and may well re-make the way future U.S. elections campaigns are fought.  Republicans misapprehended what Obama’s people were up to and underestimated the effectiveness of his tactics.  Whatever other mistakes Republicans may make in the future, they won’t repeat the ones of 2012!

Inter-American Dialogue’s Latin America Adviser

“Venezuela’s devaluation of the ‘strong bolívar’—the fifth of Hugo Chávez’s presidency—is but further testimony to the abysmal economic failure of Chávez’s ’21st Century Socialism.’ For a nation with a roughly Texas-sized population and a territory a bit smaller than Texas and New Mexico sitting astride the world’s largest proven petroleum reserves to be running a $30 billion fiscal deficit on a roughly $330 billion GDP and experiencing food shortages in practically every staple category is evidence of economic mismanagement on a scale that makes Venezuela’s previous unhappy and wasteful economic experience pale by comparison. The devaluation provided a prehomecoming ’proof of life’ for ailing protodictator Hugo Chávez, since the government reportedly produced his signed authorization for the move. It permitted the government, at a stroke, to close its fiscal gap and avert default. However, the devaluation also will further fuel Venezuela’s 22 percent inflation rate, now the highest in Latin America, squeezing Venezuelan consumers more tightly, nicking the profits of the major multinationals that continue to operate there and inevitably exacerbating shortages. It has also confirmed that, regardless of Chavista rhetoric, citizen and consumer welfare is quite low on the  Chávez regime’s list of priorities—now obviously endorsed by his successors-inwaiting. How severely will the government crack down on firms raising prices? Who knows? Steeper inflation means price increases—literally. Which firms are singled out, and when, to be victimized for bowing to the inevitable will be a function of cynical and opportunistic political calculation, as in the past.”

The original article can be found here.

U.S News & World Report

Reports last week that President Barack Obama leads Republican nominee Mitt Romney in the polls are confounding many Republican analysts and Obama critics. Nationally, the Real Clear Politics average shows Obama up by almost 4 points, and polls in a dozen battleground states show him leading in 10, by margins ranging of 2-8 points, and Romney up in only two. How is Obama doing it? Given his record, what is keeping the president afloat politically?

The litany of Obama failures is by now all too familiar: unemployment over 8 percent in every month since Obama took office; weakest economic recovery in modern U.S. history; $5 trillion added to the national debt during his term so far, with trillions more to come if we don’t change course; the downgrading of the U.S. credit rating. Even his signature domestic accomplishment—Obamacare—is so widely unpopular that the Democrats only dared refer to it obliquely during their convention. And in foreign affairs (an area in which voters give him better marks), Obama’s critics see a trail of weakness, fecklessness, “leading from behind,” and retreat—of which the burning of our consulate and the murder of the U.S. ambassador in Libya are but the latest, most tangible reminders.

So what’s going on? Why are so many American voters seemingly willing to “give Obama a pass” at this stage of the campaign? Why the indications that they might give him another chance come November?

Many explanations have been offered, ranging from Obama’s likeability to suggestions that he’s being protected—again—by the mainstream media. Romney’s detractors charge that Romney’s weaknesses are the explanation. And obviously ‘Obama-crats’ claim that his record of supposed ‘successes’—”GM is alive and Bin Laden’s dead” was the pithy summary at the convention—provides the answer.

I’d like to offer three other factors that may be supporting Obama’s polling numbers.

Cool. A dozen years ago, after the Florida recount, Michael Barone used a particularly apposite phrase at a Heritage Foundation program—and perhaps elsewhere in his voluminous writings—in describing the undeclared ‘culture war’ that’s been raging for four decades in American society. He called it a contest between “the beautiful people and the dutiful people.” In this election, there’s no question which candidate represents which camp. Obama is clearly the candidate of the ‘smart set’—the media and entertainment elite, celebrities, academics and intellectuals, and gays, as well as traditional Democrat constituencies. By contrast, Mitt Romney is clearly the candidate of the traditional values coalition, of the business community (and particularly small business), and of advocates of fiscal responsibility.

But, above all, Obama is cool—certainly to many younger voters, to urban audiences, to those who want to be ‘hip.’ Romney—and the constituencies he represents—are exactly the opposite. Being ‘cool’ helps Obama, I’m convinced—and so far Republicans and conservatives haven’t found the antidote for ‘cool.’

Race. In voting for Obama in 2008, many independent and cross-over voters were clearly motivated by the opportunity to perform a ‘righteous act’—to make an electoral choice that at once promised to propel America into an era of post-racial—even post-partisan—politics while helping to exorcise the specter of racism that’s haunted American society for generations. If Obama’s race helped him—certainly with these voters—in ’08, it would be a reasonable hypothesis that it might desert him as an advantage four years later. With a disappointing record of performance on the economy—the ‘pocketbook issues’ that famously determine so many voters’ choices—it would be logical to expect that, having performed their ‘righteous deed’ four years ago, these voters could now safely vote for more competent management—for a candidate offering to deliver better results to their individual ‘bottom line.’

But not so fast. It may well prove to be that, for many of these voters, they can’t see themselves deserting Obama despite his poor economic performance and other short-comings. To desert him now may, for them, actually vitiate the ‘righteous act’ they performed four years ago. If so, Obama’s race may enable him to turn his failures into his own ‘insurance policy.’

What difference does it make? All around us, in recent years, we’ve seen the indications—and the dividends—of the consequence-free society. This has two manifestations—both corrosive. One is the fatalistic sense that, no matter what choices we make—particularly about public life—nothing will end up being very much different. This is either because the ‘system’ is rigged or it is so enormously complicated and beyond individual control or influence that you’ll get the same outcome no matter what you do. The other is the (rather adolescent) lesson that, no matter what bad choices you make—e.g., getting over-extended on personal debt or making risky but rewarding financial deals with other people’s money that later threaten to bring down the entire economy—if your predicament becomes a big enough political problem, someone or something will come along to bail you out—and your life will go on more or less undisturbed.

This, predictably, introduces into the logic of everyday life a very dangerous question: What difference does it make? A lot of individual—and corporate—decision-making in recent years has had this question lurking as an ingredient of the choice. And that’s whether it applies to signing up for a too-big student loan to go to a too-expensive university for one-too-many degrees, or to the purchase of a too-big house with a too-big mortgage, or to plunging into a series of too-risky deals or trades that turn out to backfire on your company’s share price—or on the entire economy.

But it’s a persistent question—because, lately, we’ve developed the habit, as well as the means and mechanisms, for insulating ourselves from the consequences of our mistakes.

Which brings us back to Obama’s poll numbers. If today it’s more important to be cool than to be competent; if the moral motive of a choice outweighs the tangible measures of performance and concrete results; and if, in any case, ‘What difference does it make?’ becomes the yardstick for expected outcomes … well, that thinking will really boost Obama’s poll numbers despite his miserable record in office.

Which makes Mitt Romney’s task all the harder. He has to find a way to break through the ingrained irresponsibility that is increasingly our contemporary reality. He has to redouble his efforts to drive home the point, made repeatedly during the Republican convention: The stakes for America’s future in the 2012 election could not be higher.

U.S News & World Report

In Tuesday night’s debate, President Barack Obama was asked what misperception about himself he would most like to dispel. His answer? That he was someone who believed “government creates jobs, that that somehow is the answer.” On the contrary, Obama said. ”That’s not what I believe. I believe that the free enterprise system is the greatest engine of prosperity the world’s ever known. I believe in self-reliance and individual initiative and risk takers being rewarded.”

After his now-famous ‘you didn’t build that’ verdict on small businesspeople and entrepreneurs, it’s obvious why Obama would want to restyle himself as a devotee of the private sector, a disciple of the marketplace. The trouble comes when he actually starts talking about markets and economics.

Take last Tuesday night’s exchange on energy policy. Romney alluded to the doubled price of gasoline during Obama’s term—seeking to tar the president with consumers’ pain at the pump. Obama retorted with a market-based explanation: with the economy in free-fall when he took office energy demand was obviously way down so prices were much lower. Rising gasoline prices reflect the rising demand of a (supposedly) recovering economy. Score one for Obama. A glimmer of recognition of the marketplace at work.

But a few seconds later, challenged by Mitt Romney about his administration’s sharp curtailment of energy exploration permits and leases on federal lands, Obama first tried to claim credit for growing overall U.S. energy production—on private lands—for which his policies were in no way responsible. Romney called him on it. Nice try, Mr. President.

But then Obama went on to explain that he determined to apply a ‘use it or lose it’ rule to oil and gas exploration permits on federal lands. If the oil companies didn’t invest and develop their concessions, Obama decided to take them away. But whether and when a concessionaire decides to develop an energy lease and begin producing is largely a function of the marketplace. Will the prevailing, and projected, price of oil or gas make an investment in developing a new well or field profitable? If so, it gets developed; if not, oil companies wait until market conditions justify the investment.

But, judging from his answer, Obama thinks like a fair number of populist/socialist leaders in Latin America and elsewhere in the third world on this point. Companies should invest in and develop energy properties, not when market conditions make them profitable, but when politicians find their benefits—jobs, revenue, improved supply conditions, export earnings—useful. No appreciation for the market there, Mr. President. That’s pure command economy-style thinking.

Vice President Joe Biden displayed a similarly inconsistent mentality—this time regarding U.S. intelligence and national security—in his debate the previous week. At one point, Biden took a break from his manic giggling to assure Americans that, when it comes to Iranian nuclear weapons development, we will know—our intelligence services will tell us—when Iran reaches the critical threshold of developing an actual weapon. And we’ll know in plenty of time to stop them.

Never mind that this requires a highly accurate ability to predict the future. Never mind all of Iran’s efforts to prevent the outside world knowing exactly what they are up to. Never mind Iran’s secret, concealed, buried nuclear facilities and its careful control of international inspectors’ exposure to them. We will know, claims Uncle Joe.

Then, minutes later—practically in the same breath—Vice President Biden blames this same U.S. intelligence community for the Obama administration’s misleading attribution of the fatal attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, to a local reaction to a provocative, anti-Islamic YouTube video trailer. In this case, the U.S. intelligence community wasn’t up to the challenge of accurately determining what had happened or what washappening. But when it came to predicting when, precisely, Iran would cross the threshold to nuclear weapons, our intel community would ‘nail it.’  (Just like they did with India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Iraq—right?!)

No wonder we can almost hear the strains of the William Tell Overture playing in the background as the mainstream media rides to Obama’s rescue, with soft-ball appearances last week on David Letterman and Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. If this is the best that foreign policy and national security expert Joe Biden and self-professed private sector groupie Barack Obama can manage, they need all the help they can get from their friends.

Few listeners probably paid close enough attention to the debates to tease out these inconsistencies. But when you think about them, it does make you wonder: how stupid do these guys really think we are? One minute the intel community will save us; the next minute, it can’t predict yesterday’s weather. When markets work for us one minute, we’re all for them; we pretend to understand and respect them. But when, the next minute, market results are politically inconvenient, disregarding market discipline and intervening comes as naturally as breathing.

So how stupid do Obama and Biden and their team think we are? The answer, I fear, is very. After all, a majority of Americans already elected them once.