Politics In Vivo – Political and Cultural Commentary, and Whatever Else…

You must admit some relish in watching conservative elites teeter around like defective bumper cars trying to figure out how it possibly came to be that their party is seriously considering elevating Newton Leroy Gingrich to a national presidential candidacy. It’s worth taking a little tour of the disbelief and panic setting in:

Jay Cost of the Weekly Standard provides the main case:

The problem with Gingrich, of course, is that he comes with a cargo ship full of baggage – ideological, financial, and personal. Gingrich has made a career since leaving the House as a well-connected insider; he has bona fide ethical scandals on his resume. His personal life is a total mess, and he has turned off the broad middle of the country for the last 15 years.

The “of course” is priceless.

David Frum, though not really in the good graces of the conservative elite these days, certainly shares their disdain for Newt:

Gingrich remains one of the very most disliked figures in national politics…. Over a political career of nearly 40 years, Gingrich has convinced almost everybody who has ever worked closely with him that he cannot and should not be trusted with executive power. […]

He is a candidate of talk-show hosts and local activists—and of course of Rick Perry and Sarah Palin—but not of those who know him best and have worked with him most closely. Gingrich may raise more money after his South Carolina win. But prediction: Romney will raise even more, among the great national network of Republicans who recognize that to nominate Gingrich is to commit party suicide.

Ross Douthat strikes against the core of the Gingrich pseudo-appeal: his supposed mastery of all those “big ideas”:

I have, for my sins, watched Gingrich make his pitch across what feels like seventeen thousand Republican primary debates, and I am at a loss to identify the “big ideas” and “big solutions” that he is supposedly campaigning on. […] Instead, so far as I can tell, his “idea-oriented” campaign consists almost entirely of promising to hold Lincoln-Douglas-style debates with President Obama, grandstanding about media bias and moderator stupidity, defending his history of ideological flexibility much more smoothly than Mitt Romney, and then occasionally throwing out a wonky-sounding notion (like, say, outsourcing E-Verify to American Express) that’s more glib than genuinely significant.

So how did this come to pass?

I say, Republican Establishment, quit your whining. You might not have pulled the final switch to bring the Gingrich monster to life, but you outfitted the laboratory and set all the wiring. Jon Chait explains perfectly:

The Republican Establishment, having spent three years stoking its voters into a fit of wild rage against President Obama, now finds itself in a panic over the possibility that those voters might be wild and enraged enough to go ahead and select Newt Gingrich as their nominee. There really is a lot of humor in the situation. The proposition Gingrich is offering GOP voters is just the natural extension of what they have come to believe. Obama is an ultra-radical, as well as a lightweight, who can’t speak without a TelePrompTer, so simply forcing him into a series of lengthy debates will expose his incompetence and extremism.

Exactly right. Republican party, you birthed Newtenstein 2012. Anyone who ever said the word “death panels”; anyone who ever tried to convince themselves that Sarah Palin was a worthy national political figure; anyone who ever wondered or gave cover to those who wondered where the President was born, or if he hates white people, or if he was a socialist, a Marxist, a radical anti-American, a danger, an illegitimate usurper. All the thought leaders who praised “the passion and intensity” of the base, and pandered to the low denominators of human decency in order to drum up votes. Well done, the Republican electorate believed everything you said.

Here is Newt, your frontrunner, feeding off and reflecting back your fears and resentments like Freddy Kruger:

What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together his actions? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior. This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president.

Foreign, alien, illegitimate, duplicitous, at once incompetent and mastermind of a grand national con. It’s all in there. Newt is the full-spectrum Republican.

Those establishment elites, the politicians and op-ed and magazine writers, are now waking up to the nightmare they’ve helped create. They are now engaged in a rather pathetic display of pining for what might have been, including a surprising amount of anger and contempt directed at those potential candidates who decided not to run this year.

Brett Stephens, in a very funny column in the WSJ:

Finally, there are the men not in the field: Mitch Daniels, Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, Haley Barbour. This was the GOP A-Team, the guys who should have showed up to the first debate but didn’t because running for president is hard and the spouses were reluctant. Nothing commends them for it. If this election is as important as they all say it is, they had a duty to step up.

Douthat:

[T]he decisions by various capable Republicans to forgo a presidential run this year have been a collective disgrace; …Republican primary voters deserve a better choice than the one being presented to them.

And as of this week, Bill Kristol is still trying to get Mitch Daniels to run.

Why did these bright credible Republican leaders all take a pass? Are they really disgraceful cowards who abdicated their duty to lead?

I don’t think so. I think the reason is related to the first point. It’s because none of these reasonable people wanted to expose themselves to this Republican primary electorate. You cannot spend three years stoking popular demand for a Newtenstein, then wonder how someone like Mitch Daniels comes to think that maybe this isn’t his year.

It’s a calculation made not out of fear but pragmatism. We’ve known for three years that this is not the age of Republican Reasonableness. If you were one of these talented politicians contemplating a run, would you want to compete to out-bombast and out-demogogue Newt Gingrich? Would you want to try and win South Carolina by stoking racial stereotypes about food stamps and calling the media dispicable? Would you want to debate tax policy with Herman Cain? Pander to Ron Paul’s insane idea about reviving the gold standard? Insinuate that the president is illegitimate and wants to undermine American values?

No, you probably wouldn’t. That’s why, if you ran, you’d likely have no clearer path to the nomination than Romney does, or Jon Huntsman for that matter. And why at some point in your principled rock star campaign you’d probably be labeled a heretic and a moderate for this or that mistaken bout of sanity.

You would try to play the Obama-hater, as Romney does, but your forced attempts at vitriol will be deeply unconvincing, as Romney’s is. You’ll never match Newt’s natural ease with bilious sneering contempt, or his brilliance at combining maximum condescension with maximum populist emotionalism. You’d have placed in Iowa. You’d have lost South Carolina by 12 points too. If you made it this far, you’d now be tied in Florida, wondering how it came to be that Newt Gingrich was on the verge of destroying your party. Party leaders would be contemplating new saviors.

I believe Mitt Romney will still be the nominee. But this spell of trouble has exposed how very weak he is as a general election candidate. It is not a good sign of party enthusiasm if after only three primary contests, the main feeling is one of misplaced regret and nostalgia for the candidates who didn’t run. It’s also exposed the dark depths of Republican dysfunction. I fear a Romney defeat in November will convince the party base not that it needs more moderation, more erudition, more rationality, but that it needs a stronger, better, faster, Newtenstein to set things pure and right. Sadly, we might be a few more cycles away from a credible conservative opposition.

I really enjoyed this ESPN Magazine piece (via The Browser) on India’s 15 year old, 7-foot tall basketball phenom Satnam Bhamara. His father, a farmer, is also a seven-footer, and his grandmother is 6’9”. The piece tracks his journey from his small farm village in Punjab to the elite IMG sports and education facility in Bradenton, Fla. The kid is doing well and looks to have a genuine shot at being the first Indian ever to play in the NBA.

The article is titled "One in a billion," and the theme running through it is that Satnam has the opportunity to do for basketball in India what Yao Ming did for it in China. He’s very aware of the cultural and national prestige that would accrue to his homeland if he were to succeed. And of course, if he does make it to the NBA, it won’t just be India’s collective ego that benefits, but basketball fans everywhere who will be exposed to his talent.

Reading it, I was thinking about the similar gains to be had from the ongoing rise in living standards in the developing world, and the replication many times over of Satnam’s general journey off of the farm. The analogy is not great, since Satnam’s road to success involved mostly having had the good fortune of a 6’9” grandmother.

But the hope is with increased economic development and the deliverance of hundreds of milllions of people from lives of subsistence labor and grinding poverty, that other one-in-a-billions will emerge. Rather than being athletic phenoms, maybe they will be science researchers, genius  inventors, or innovators in health care or energy or education. That the "rise" of underdeveloped parts of the world represents not just the greatest poverty-alleviation scheme in human history, but a massive potential boon to human welfare the world over.

There’s also a high-skilled immigration story here. Satnam was plucked from obscurity because the NBA happens currently to be making a huge marketing push into India. But Satnam didn’t have dreams of playing in Europe or in South America: he’s in Florida, and he’ll likely play basketball at an American university, and if things go very well he’ll become an American millionaire and make his home here. Would that we made it just as easy for other high-skilled foreigners—not only the one-in-a-billions—to come develop their talents and do their work here, pay their taxes here, raise a family here.

Liberalizing immigration laws is the closest thing we have to an economic free lunch. In my view our continuing unwillingness to do this represents our single most short-sighted national policy. That’s quite a distinction, in a strong field.

Reason #10,000 why health care is not and never will be a "market" in the free-enterprise sense:

Sarah Kliff cites a study that shows people spend far more time researching an appliance or car purchase than they do researching their choice of doctor.

Kliff notes that this is superficially surprising considering health care makes up such a large share of our annual household spending ($10,944 on premiums for a family of four). And aside from price, you’d think the stakes for doctor selection are much higher than the stakes for dishwasher selection. If you mess up your dishwasher choice, you either live with a mediocre dishwasher or you return it and get another one. But if you blow your doctor choice you can theoretically end up with Dr. Nick.

The survey finds that people don’t research their doctors because they don’t think shopping around would reduce their ultimate costs or lead them to a better doctor. They basically perceive no competition in price or quality. Which is a difficult clay from which to mold a free market. As Kliff notes, "Shopping for a doctor is a lot harder than shopping for a dishwasher. There’s no price tag for what you’ll pay, or a Consumer Report to reference on quality."

So is this all about price transparency and clear quality standards? Is there a savvy health care consumer buried in all of us, just waiting for the wonders of free market competition to be unleashed in order to drive down costs systemwide? I am skeptical.

The thing that is unique about a lot of health care consumption is it is done under conditions of emotional and physical distress. Finding a doctor for your yearly physical is probably relatively stress free, as is the physical itself; but in terms of system costs, this isn’t where the money is. Treatment for chronic disease and hospital bills is where most of the cost damage is done in this country. And these are precisely the times when people are most vulnerable and afraid and least able to make informed dispassionate choices. Patients are not consumers. If your dishwasher breaks you can wash by hand until you get around to looking for a new one. If you have a heart attack and need an emergency bypass you’re not going online to read surgeon reviews. Or just before they lay the defibrillator on you, you are unlikely to ask where everybody in the room did their residency. And you don’t really have the option of threatening to walk out if the anaesthesiologist won’t come down in price.

Various elective surgeries, and non-emergency but serious diagnoses like cancer admit of some opportunity to shop around. But only very affluent people can fly around to Boston or Houston to receive top cancer care. And cancer treatment is very expensive no matter where you go. But even if there were huge price disparities that you could theoretically take advantage of, it’s unclear that "cheapo cancer treatment" would be a big selling point to anyone.

This is where comparisons between health care and normal consumer markets really fail. If I needed a new dishwasher I’d very likely choose one in a middle price point in the good-but-nothing-special category. If I heard about amazing luxury dishwashers being produced and sold only in Boston and Houston, I wouldn’t have any inclination to travel to Boston or Houston to buy one. I’d say most consumers share my dishwasher preferences, which is why there is robust price competition and a plethora of choice in the good-but-nothing-special category. And you can find a good-but-nothing- special class of goods in pretty much every normal consumer market. This category doesn’t really exist in health care, and even if it did it’s not clear that people are very interested in it. 

But the main point is that even after you’ve somehow managed to do diligent research and find your dream doctor while actively bleeding from your eyes and ears, it turns out you are in no condition to calmly adjudicate between different complex treatment options. You just want to stop the bleeding! You defer! In no way whatsoever does this scene resemble you kicking the tires on a showroom floor.

And if we throw in the fact that a large majority of expensive health care is performed on old people near the end of their lives, the shopping around/free market theory really falls apart. I’m not sure who the Republicans have in mind when they suggest that 80-year olds should get vouchers so they can shop around on price and quality. I don’t know these 80-year olds. We’ve all had infirmed elderly relatives go to an important specialist appointment only to come out unable to recall most of what the specialist said. It’s a nightmare. You want them burdened with negotiating prices also? And thoughtfully weighing various treatment value propositions? Please.

The asymmetry of information and authority will always be profound between doctors and patients. Even clear-headed, smart, stoic sick people prefer to just defer to a doctor’s expertise. A disoriented, suffering, afraid sick person will always defer. That’s ok, it’s why society venerates doctors and pays them extremely well. But it makes any analogy to "consumers" or "free markets" disingenuous and extremely unhelpful.

One undeniable political trend over the past fifteen years or so is the way in which every policy issue eventually seems to get vaccumed up by the culture war. And once an issue enters the realm of the culture war, it really never escapes, and will likely never be considered on the merits ever again. The environment, immigration, welfare, the deficit, health care, energy, transportation, monetary policy: it’s all been sucked up and ruined by identity politics. People now know the answers to these complex policy questions not by appealing to data or to a conception of the social good, but merely by making a reflexive in-group, out-group assessment. And once a person fuses their conception of their identity with any particular policy outcome, it’s near impossible to dislodge it. I cannot think of an issue that, once recruited into the culture war, was later set free and reverted back to a “normal” issue.  (If you can, please leave it in the comments)

The culture war is as old as the Republic; or rather, even the founding itself has been absorbed into the culture war, and the poor Founders are regularly exhumed and drafted in support of belligerents on both sides. The Civil War provided the cultural-geographic template which in many ways we’re still saddled with today; and with the consolidation of the two-party system, it’s been a steady process of electorate-sorting based on various group affiliations.

In Ken Burns’ recent documentary on Prohibition, I was interested to learn about the identity coalitions that formed on either side of the issue. A dominant dynamic was City (wets) vs. Country (drys). The city was mostly poor Catholic European immigrants and Jews. The country was buttoned-up white Protestant. Liquor became a proxy for a rural WASP population to stick it to the unwashed urban immigrants who were in the process of changing the face and culture of American life forever. (In answer to my question above, I guess alcohol is one culture issue that has been defused almost completely over time. But it’s also been defused as a policy issue altogether.)

One area that’s always been resistant to culture war enlistment is foreign policy. Yet, as Noah Millman writes at the American Scene, that may be over with. Millman thinks the GOP has finally succeeded in culture war-izing foreign policy.

Sure, the “anything tough is Republican” theme has been crystallizing for a long while; I’d say its iconic modern moment was maybe, “Tear down this wall.” But the process has really accelerated since 9/11, and Millman writes that this GOP primary campaign has put it over the top:

It’s in the last two elections that the trend of foreign policy being treated as part of the culture war – at least by the GOP – has become dominant. Mitt Romney is the exemplar in this regard; his entire foreign policy argument consists of saying that he knows America is exceptional and President Obama does not, and that Obama has been making too many concessions to America’s enemies (without any clear explanation of what those concessions might be).

You can watch Romney spin his main theme here.

Millman notes that there just isn’t any objective substance with which to attack Obama on foreign policy:

[Obama has been] a competent and fairly successful steward of America’s position as he inherited it. America has suffered no meaningful foreign policy setbacks during his tenure, and has had some notable successes. The contrast to the economic situation could not be more stark. Why on earth would anyone on the other side spend their time demagoguing on foreign policy? […]

The reason has everything to do with the culture war.

Millman goes on to outline the psychological mechanism at work:

Identity politics on the GOP side of the aisle involves stoking an emotional identification between their core demographic groups, the Republican Party, and the national identity. The white working class is the backbone of the American military. Stoking an identification between the white working class and the military, and between the military and national purpose, provides the emotional fuel for political mobilization. It imbues identity with purpose and connects that purpose to politics.

There’s some truth to this, but I think it’s a bit needlessly complex. I think part of the Republicans’ insistence on attacking Obama on foreign policy is the simple Rovian innovation of going after your opponent where he’s strongest. Absent any arguments to make on the merits, the only way to get at it is through culture, which necessitates demagoguery.

The left is certainly not immune to identity politics or reflexive cultural affiliation. But I think the Republicans’ sense of grievance and resentment is today a far more fundamental mobilizing force for the right than whatever its analogue would be on the left. The 2012 America Is So Awesome Tour that we’re currently seeing on the Republican side is an outgrowth of that cultural anxiety and grievance. This sort of overt triumphalism always has such a sad “doth protest too much” quality to it. But as Millman says, this dynamic is probably not going anywhere for a while. Just add foreign policy to the ever-growing list of American team sports.

Barney Frank is retiring next year, and we’ve been seeing a lot of deserved commentaries about his famous pugnacity, his erudition, his wit. One thing I think his career shows is the importance of congressional longevity and seniority in acquiring policy expertise. Whenever the topic of congressional term limits comes up, Frank is my go-to example for arguing against the idea. However you feel about his politics (and no, he didn’t cause the housing crisis), over the last 31 years in office he made himself an expert in the U.S. financial and banking system, and in committee hearings this fluency allowed him to interact and spar with Fed chairmen, Treasury Secretaries, and industry executives as a peer, rather than as a supplicant or a grandstander or with his nose buried in a sheet of talking points written by his staff.

This isn’t a post about congressional term limits, but what term limits and short congressional careers in general do is make this accumulation of policy expertise next to impossible, and that transfers effective policy-making control to think tanks and lobbyists and outside advisors.

A freshman congressman comes to DC and first has to master the arcane norms and rules of legislative procedure. That takes time. In addition, they rarely have the policy knowledge necessary to make an immediate substantive impact. Whether their legislative portfolio is banking, foreign affairs, budgeting, energy, the military—the substance of their jobs is unimaginably complex. Most House members do not have a relevant educational or professional background to rely upon. Yet the moment they are sworn in they are faced with bills to vote on, hearings to attend, entreaties from interest groups and constituents and fellow lawmakers. You’ve got to have something to say about the topic at hand. Staff can keep you afloat, but staff can’t help when you’re alone or forced off-script.

Luckily, in Washington there is an entire industry of partisan aligned think tanks and lobbyist firms whose job it is to crank out plausible-sounding policy arguments for lazy or under-informed lawmakers. To the extent that a lawmaker lacks knowledge or command of their legislative purview, that gap is filled in by the information-industrial complex in DC. This complex will (very happily!) help you write your legislation and formulate your talking points for your afternoon hit on MSNBC, and it will help you think of things to say in your big address to the American Enterprise Institute luncheon crowd.

Of course longevity is no guarantee of policy expertise. You can make a long career out of cutting and pasting policy briefs from the Center for American Progress or the Heritage Foundation onto your congressional website. And you can amass a voting record by doing what industry lobbyists and interest groups and political consultants tell you to do. But we’d agree perhaps that this career template falls far short of the ideal, and Barney Frank was much closer to the ideal than most. Rarely does one find in public life such a combination of legislative passion and policy acumen. Regardless of your politics, we can lament that the U.S. Congress is losing a whole bunch of both.

In Thomas Mann’s short novel Death in Venice, a well known German writer takes a holiday on the Venice coast to overcome his writer’s block. At first, his staid, prudent German manners are offended by the signs of decadence and superficiality he sees in southern Europe. But over the course of the novel his intellectual restraint begins to peel away, and he soon succumbs to the sensory passions and abasements of his surroundings. The ever-present southerly sirocco wind and rumors of a cholera outbreak add to the ominous portrait of a dissolute, decaying south literally infecting the north as represented by our German protagonist.

Profligate southern Europe vs. prudent northern Europe. Sound familiar? This of course has become the dominant media and political narrative of the Euro debt crisis: Those decadently idle Italians and Greeks and Portuguese looking for rescue from the responsible and virtuous Germans.

But while this theme may have resonated culturally in Mann’s day, it does little to explain the dynamics that led to the current crisis; in fact, its implied assignation of victims and villians and heroes may well have things completely backwards. This analysis by David Frum deserves more attention:

The euro currency was not a favor done by Germany to the rest of Europe. In fact, you could much more convincingly argue that Germany was the biggest single winner from the euro — and that the time has come for Germany to pay for it.

Frum asks to imagine a world where Europe proceeded with market and labor integration but did not adopt a single currency. Let me quote at length because I cannot explain it better:

In such a world, Germany as the most productive economy would have begun to rack up large trade surpluses. As those surpluses accumulated, the value of the Deutsche Mark would have appreciated against Europe’s other currencies. The cost of doing business in Germany would rise relative to, say, the Czech Republic or Slovenia. Investors would shift their operations out of Germany. Jobs would be created outside Germany and destroyed inside Germany.

The poorer European countries would face a very different environment in our non-euro world.

Investors worried about currency risk would charge significantly higher interest rates to countries like Greece. More expensive credit would have constrained their ability to run budget deficits.

But in our actual world:

By folding all of Europe’s currencies into the euro, Germany prevented its neighbors from reducing their costs — thus enhancing German exports and preserving German jobs.

In the decade from 2000 to 2010, Germany’s share of world trade rose by almost 9 percent (most of that being exports to other European countries).

The same currency that made German exports more competitive also made the exports of other European countries less competitive. Their shares of world trade declined over that same decade — in France’s case, by a spectacular 23 percent.

But the less competitive countries did get something out of the euro: Lower interest rates. The currency arrangement that enabled Germany to sell more enabled Greece, Italy, Spain, and France to borrow more.

Germany got the jobs. Greece and the others got the debts.

If it weren’t tethered to the euro, safe and productive Germany would have eventually been open to a problem like Switzerland just faced: a dangerous appreciation of its currency due to rapid investor flight-to-quality. Of course, a few months ago the Swiss central bank stepped in and announced its intention to do whatever it took to reverse the trend. Here’s the result:

Swiss currency crisis averted. The European Central Bank, however, has indicated quite clearly that it has no intention of intervening in this way. This leaves the poorer eurozone countries stuck sharing a monetary policy that’s best suited to Germany’s interests, not their own. No wonder Angela Merkel is calling for more integration, not less. And no wonder the poorer countries see little way out of this mess other than abandoning the euro. As Frum notes:

Imagine if today’s Federal Reserve governors were jointly appointed by the governments of China and Saudi Arabia, and you get some idea of why Greeks riot in the streets.

With no monetary tools at their disposal, the eurozone countries can only fiddle with fiscal austerity measures to try and get their books in order. But as the whole world hopefully now knows, austerity reduces consumer demand and makes recessions worse, not better. The economies of Europe are so incestuously interconnected, every euro country is seemingly the largest export market for every other euro country. An austerity-induced demand shock in one country will screw every country around it. Even the rich, prudent Germans need to sell their products to someone; but if everyone stops buying, the contagion will eventually reach Berlin. With the ECB continuing its stance of willful somnolence, we are in for an ongoing, major, crushing cycle of europain. Happy Christmas Europe!

A few weeks ago I made fun of politicians’ penchant for insisting that the solutions to our most intractable problems involve nothing more than applying the correct mixture of toughness, seriousness, and boldness.

Mitt Romney has an op-ed in the WSJ today, ostensibly meant to critique President Obama’s Iran policy, but it reads more like a parody of the toughness/seriousness/boldness school of political problem solving. 

Romney writes that after Obama’s failed attempt at engagement with Iran over its nuclear program,

a serious U.S. strategy to block Iran’s nuclear ambitions became an urgent necessity. But that is precisely what the administration never provided.

So our unprecedented expansion of sanctions against the regime was indeed a strategy, but just not a sufficiently "serious" one. At the White House strategy planning sessions over Iran, someone probably asked, "should we pursue this strategy with lots of seriousness or not?" Obama must have answered, "No, not too much seriousness. Don’t overdo the seriousness." And there was the fatal misstep!

Romney goes on building his case:

Another key juncture came with the emergence of Iran’s Green Revolution after the stolen election of 2009….Yet President Obama, evidently fearful of jeopardizing any further hope of engagement, proclaimed his intention not to "meddle" as the ayatollahs unleashed a wave of terror against their own society. A proper American policy might or might not have altered the outcome; we will never know.

Obama’s policy wasn’t proper enough. Romney’s policies will all be more proper, and therefore "might or might not" be more successful. Good to know.

Ok time to get specific:

If I am president, I will begin by imposing a new round of far tougher economic sanctions on Iran.

Ah yes, I forgot the secret weapon of toughness, no doubt missing from all prior rounds of sanctions over the past thirty years. It’s good someone has finally thought to correct this.

I will speak out forcefully on behalf of Iranian dissidents.

The president spoke out many times on behalf of the Iranian opposition during the uprising. But as we are now aware, speaking out is useless unless you do it "forcefully."

I will back up American diplomacy with a very real and very credible military option. I will restore the regular presence of aircraft carrier groups in the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf region simultaneously. I will increase military assistance to Israel and coordination with all of our allies in the region. These actions will send an unequivocal signal to Iran that the United States, acting in concert with allies, will never permit Iran to obtain nuclear weapons.

The president has never taken the military option "off the table," but apparently he has left it on the table in an unreal and uncredible manner. Israel is already the largest recipient of U.S. aid, and the U.S. already "coordinates" with all of our allies in the region, so I don’t know how a symbolic increase in aid and "coordination" will combine to send a "signal" that is less equivocal than all the signals we’ve sent previously over the past thirty years.

When Iran was discovered plotting to kill Saudi Arabia’s ambassador by setting off a bomb in downtown Washington, the administration responded with nothing more than tough talk and an indictment against two low-level Iranian operatives…Demonstrating further irresolution, the administration then floated the idea of sanctioning Iran’s central bank, only to quietly withdraw that proposal.

This is a difficult one, because Romney concedes that the president’s talk was "tough" which as we know is a precondition for success. But then he introduces a new variable, irresolution. It seems that irresolution cancels out toughness. I’m not sure how it holds up against seriousness or properness or forcefulness though. Romney should devise a rock-paper-scissors game to help us learn what beats what.

Look, Romney is smart to focus on the president’s Iran strategy. It is easy enough to attack the Obama economy. But foreign policy is perceived as a big strength of this administration, what with shooting Osama bin Laden in the face and presiding over the cascade of revolutions in the Middle East. The adminstration also concluded important free trade agreements, strengthened ties with India, and announced the impending end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And for all the right-wingers out there, Obama has also continued his awesome stampede over our civil liberties, and he has deported more illegal immigrants than any of his predecessors.

While none of this stuff is likely to figure prominently in the general election (absent a major crack-up somewhere), the Republican nominee cannot just concede national security to the incumbent. But in the absence of genuine soft spots, I expect we’ll hear a lot more nonsense about toughness/seriousness/boldness masquerading as strategy. I actually had hopes that Romney wouldn’t need to resort to this sort of rhetorical vacuousness; but alas, he’s more comfortable perpetuating the fiction that American presidential edicts, sternly delivered, are the real secret key to solving world problems. Actually, maybe I’ve just stumbled on something. Someone check if sternness has ever been tried.

Apropos of my long essay below, as usual, the Onion got there first:

Nation Finally Breaks Down And Begs Its Smart People To Just Fix Everything

WASHINGTON—Overwhelmed by the frustration of being utterly unable to solve any of the numerous difficult problems it faces, a worn-out nation finally broke down Thursday morning and begged its smart people to please just fix everything now.

Admitting they had "absolutely no idea what the fuck [they were] doing," millions of Americans immediately ceased trying to manage the country’s large-scale, ongoing disasters and pleaded with U.S. scientists, economists, educators, philosophers, and inventors to intervene and make things better again. […]

Acknowledging they lacked the know-how to put anything together without it all falling apart again in a matter of seconds, millions of ordinary Americans implored the nation’s skilled individuals to just use their knowledge to end the financial crisis, manage the health care industry, determine which human beings are actually fit to hold political office, teach the nation’s children, and enact overarching policy decisions that serve the greater good.

Citizens across the nation also promised to stay completely out of the way while those people who actually have some idea what they’re doing roll up their sleeves and get down to the bottom of all this. In addition, the competent have been issued assurances they will not be hindered by irrelevant, totally uninformed opinions while they are getting things done.

"You won’t hear a single word out of us, we swear," said Chicago real-estate broker Paul Linder, mentioning that smart people can have all the time and resources they need to make the necessary repairs to society.