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Streetwise Professor posts on half measures in Syria.
… Perhaps this is just a dodge, and the Saudis, Qataris, and others are going to provide weapons that will permit the rebels to combat more effectively the heavy weapons, artillery, and fixed and rotary wing aircraft that the Syrian military has in its arsenal while the US retains sort of plausible deniability. But maybe this is just another example of Obama’s lead-from-behind, half-in, half-out approach to military matters, Afghanistan being another prime example. Commit enough to generate significant casualties, but not enough to achieve any decisive or lasting result.
Unless the objective is to encourage a protracted and brutal civil war in Syria, such half measures are catastrophic, both as a matter of policy and as a matter of humanity. Strengthening the rebels some, but not enough to overcome the government, will prolong the suffering, and also prolong the uncertainty in the region, which is the last thing it needs.
As Fisher (or was it Macauley?-sources disagree) said: moderation in war is imbecility. As Napoleon said (no disagreement about attribution here): If you want to take Vienna-or Damascus-take Vienna-or Damascus.
But that’s probably the nub of the problem. Obama doesn’t know what he wants, or if he knows, is unwilling to take any political risk to get it. So he continues the cynical game of leaking information about his “secret” military aggressiveness, while failing to make hard decisions about what to do with Assad. This moderate course is a recipe for stalemate-which will condemn thousands to death and injury. We know by hard experience that we cannot dictate outcomes in that region, but we can influence them. No outcome is likely to be all that desirable, but letting things go on their own without a more robust attempt to influence them seldom works out well in that part of the world.
James Pethokoukis says Obama’s recovery is not only worse than Reagan’s but also worse than Teddy Roosevelt’s and Grover Cleveland’s. Each of those followed financial crises.
Some great charts from economist John Taylor putting the weak economic recovery in some deep historical perspective. First, here is the three-year old Obama recovery. As Taylor points out, “The gap between real GDP and potential GDP (CBO estimates) is not closing at all. That is the main reason why unemployment remains so high.” It’s just not getting better:
Next, here is the Reagan recovery after the 1981-82 recession. Again, you have severe drop, but then the output gap between is closed.
But let’s go much further back and look at two recoveries that occurred after financial crises. Here’s the recovery after the Panic of 1907, a downturn which led to the creation of the Federal Reserve:
Finally, here is the Depression of 1893:
No Federal Reserve stimulus. No $800 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. And yet, 100 years ago, the U.S. economy somehow managed to recover after two nasty downturns, each marked by a banking crisis.
Maybe we’re not doing it right.
Richard Cohen, one of stable of WaPo liberals, is disgusted by Harry Reid.
In “The Godfather Part II,” a senator from Nevada is portrayed as corrupt. His name is Pat Geary. In real life, a senator from Nevada is a jerk. His name is Harry Reid.
Reid is where he loves to be: the center of controversy. He has accused Mitt Romney of paying no taxes for 10 years. Romney denies the accusation and challenged Reid to put up or shut up. In an apparent response, Reid repeated the charges on the Senate floor. Countless aides have echoed their boss. They and he attribute their information to a source they will not name.
Whether such a source exists, really, is beside the point. It could be that someone did indeed tell Reid that Romney paid no taxes for 10 years. Journalists get that sort of tip all the time, and their responsibility is (1) to check it out and (2) identify the source. Reid has not done the latter and apparently has not done the former, either. The truth is that Reid doesn’t really care if the charge is true or not. He would prefer the former, but he’ll settle for the latter.
For Reid, this is yet another brazen and tasteless partisan attack. As majority leader, he has managed to sink the public image of the Senate even lower than it would otherwise be. He contributes to bad feelings, gridlock and the sense — nay, the reality — that everything is done for political advantage. Reid is a crass man, the very personification of the gaudy and kitschy Las Vegas Strip.
Still, he is not some backbencher, but the Senate majority leader. He is the face of the Democratic Party in the Senate and the ally of President Obama. Yet, not a single Democrat has had the spine to rebuke Reid. The White House has been given the chance and explicitly ducked its duty. Other members of the Senate have run for cover. They fear Reid and, if truth be told, sort of like what he’s doing — constantly needling Romney, keeping him on the defensive about taxes and his insistence on releasing only two years of his returns.
The politics of this squabble are delightful. But Reid has managed to draw both his party and his president into the gutter with him. When Reid accuses the Republicans of being overly partisan, he now lacks all credibility. For a long time it’s been difficult to believe anything he says. Now, it’s impossible.
As for Obama, he is tarnished by this episode. The fresh new face that promised us all a different kind of politics is suddenly looking cheesy. The soaring rhetoric that Obama used in his first campaign has come to ground in the mud of Harry Reid’s latter-day McCarthyism.
When Obama goes down to defeat in November, one of the causes will be the delicious irony he cannot manage money. Just like he has mis-spent trillions of dollars in our economy, on a smaller scale he has mis-spent millions in the campaign. As George Will might say; a condign punishment. NY Times has the story.
President Obama has spent more campaign cash more quickly than any incumbent in recent history, betting that heavy early investments in personnel, field offices and a high-tech campaign infrastructure will propel him to victory in November.
Since the beginning of last year, Mr. Obama and the Democrats have burned through millions of dollars to find and register voters. They have spent almost $50 million subsidizing Democratic state parties to hire workers, pay for cellphones and update voter lists. They have spent tens of millions of dollars on polling, online advertising and software development to turn Mr. Obama’s fallow volunteers corps into a grass-roots army.
The price tag: about $400 million from the beginning of last year to June 30 this year, according to a New York Times analysis of Federal Election Commission records, including $86 million on advertising.
But now Mr. Obama’s big-dollar bet is being tested. With less than a month to go before the national party conventions begin, the president’s once commanding cash advantage has evaporated, leaving Mitt Romney and the Republican National Committee with about $25 million more cash on hand than the Democrats as of the beginning of July.
Despite Mr. Obama’s multimillion-dollar advertising barrage against Mr. Romney, he is now being outspent on the airwaves with Mr. Romney benefiting from a deluge of spending by conservative “super PACs” and outside groups. While Mr. Romney has depleted much of his funds from the nominating contest, he is four weeks away from being able to tap into tens of millions of dollars in general election money. And many polls show the race to be very close.
Mr. Obama’s cash needs — he spent $70.8 million in June alone, more than half on advertising and far more than he raised — have brought new urgency to his campaign’s fund-raising efforts. His advisers have had to schedule more fund-raising trips than originally planned to big-money states like New York, according to donors involved in the effort. The super PAC supporting his campaign, Priorities USA Action, is enlisting former President Bill Clinton as a rainmaker, hoping to counter its conservative counterparts.
While Mr. Obama will also have access to general election money in September, he is unlikely to have the same spending advantage over Mr. Romney as he had during the primary season, when Mr. Romney spent much of his money battling Republican rivals. …
Maybe the Obama campaign will conserve cash by not paying their bills. Andrew Malcolm reports they are stiffing the city of Newport Beach, CA.
Here’s how much financial trouble Barack Obama’s presidential campaign appears to be in:
He’s stiffing the California city of Newport Beach $35,000 for extra security costs incurred when the campaigner-in-chief held a fundraiser in the oceanfront community early this year.
The bill is already nearly two months overdue. The Democratic National Committee and Secret Service are giving the city the old “Talk to them, No, talk to them” routine that would immediately get any real business operation on the Better Business Bureau’s “Do Not Hire Again” list. …
Speaking of California, Walter Russell Mead posts on its future.
… Once again, California’s dysfunctional governance has utterly failed the state’s residents. California can’t afford to enforce its own laws: an absurd and even insane position for a state to be in. California needs laxer laws that lock fewer people up, or it needs a bigger prison budget but there are no sane grounds on which the status quo can be defended. Forced by the US Supreme Court to do something, the state has acted with its characteristic fecklessness and passed the buck: handing the problem off to local governments, which, we should add, are facing serious fiscal problems of their own and are ill-equipped to deal with new prisoners.
California is in a hole but can’t seem to stop its compulsive digging. Schools, universities, prisons, pensions, cities and towns: the state has lost the ability to manage even the most basic elements of communal living. But foie gras is now illegal there, grandiose plans for white elephant fast trains built with borrowed money waft through the air, and the state continues to boost the self esteem of affluent and cause-oriented gentry liberals by scattering scarce resources to the four winds, hunting unicorns when the cupboard is bare.
Someday, perhaps, California will be governed by people who care about governing: that is to say, educating the kids, balancing the books, enforcing the law. Until then, it offers the rest of us a spectacle and a warning. It is some spectacle and some warning. California remains awesome, even in decline.