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Charles Krauthammer wants Romney to go large.
.. Even his counterpunching has gone miniature. Obama has successfully painted Romney as an out-of-touch, unfeeling plutocrat whose only interest is to cut taxes for the rich. Romney has complained in interviews that it’s not true. He has proposed cutting tax rates, while pledging that the share of the tax burden paid by the rich remains unchanged (by “broadening the base” as in the wildly successful, revenue-neutral Reagan-O’Neill tax reform of 1986).
But how many people know this? Where is the speech that hammers home precisely that point, advocates a reformed tax code that accelerates growth without letting the rich off the hook, and gives lie to the Obama demagoguery about dismantling the social safety net in order to enrich the rich?
Romney has accumulated tons of cash for 30-second ads. But unless they’re placed on the scaffolding of serious speeches making the larger argument, they will be treated as nothing more than tit for tat.
Make the case. Go large. About a foreign policy in ruins. About an archaic, 20th-century welfare state model that guarantees 21st-century insolvency. And about an alternate vision of an unapologetically assertive America abroad unafraid of fundamental structural change at home.
It might just work. And it’s not too late.
Jennifer Rubin posts on the dissembling about Benghazi coming from the administration.
Late Friday afternoon the spokesman for Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James R. Clapper Jr. released a statement in which the intelligence head tried to fall on the administration’s sword on the Libyan-consulate debacle. But the problem was that Clapper’s statement did not absolve the administration of repeatedly making false statements after intelligence agencies knew this was a planned al-Qaeda terrorist attack.
The Post’s Glenn Kessler got things started with a devastating timeline of the Libya events. Then Fox News’s Bret Baier put together an extremely useful video account of the sequence of events.
And the New York Times followed suit:
“The Obama administration’s shifting accounts of the fatal attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, have left President Obama suddenly exposed on national security and foreign policy, a field where he had enjoyed a seemingly unassailable advantage over Mitt Romney in the presidential race.” …
David Ignatius, one of WaPo’s liberals is unhappy with Obama’s abdication during the campaign.
It’s embarrassing when President Obama’s risk-averse refusal to engage on foreign policy issues becomes so obvious that it’s a laugh line for the president of Iran.
“I do believe that some conversations and key issues must be talked about again once we come out of the other end of the political election atmosphere in the United States,” President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said cheekily in an interview last Sunday. I hate to say it, but on this matter the often-annoying Iranian leader is right.
Less than six weeks before the election, the Obama campaign’s theme song might as well be the old country-music favorite “Make the World Go Away.” This may be smart politics, but it’s not good governing: The way this campaign is going, the president will have a foreign affairs mandate for . . . nothing. …
… To be blunt: The administration has a lot invested in the public impression that al-Qaeda was vanquished when Osama bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011. Obama would lose some of that luster if the public examined whether al-Qaeda is adopting a new, Zawahiri-led strategy of interweaving its operations with the unrest sweeping the Arab world. But this discussion is needed, and a responsible president should lead it, even during a presidential campaign.
Perhaps the most disheartening example of a topic that has been deep-sixed during campaign season is the war in Afghanistan. This month marked the end of the surge that President Obama ordered in December 2009, and troops are back to the pre-surge level of about 68,000. How fast will that number decline over the next year? Here again, we probably won’t know until after Election Day. Gen. John Allen, the commander of U.S. forces in Kabul, is preparing his recommendations, but officials say that this process of review will take . . . well, at least six weeks.
The president hasn’t really made any bones about his wait-till-later approach. He put it frankly to Dmitry Medvedev, then president of Russia, back in March when he thought the microphone was off: “This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.”
This strategy of avoiding major foreign policy risks or decisions may help get Obama reelected. But he is robbing the country of a debate it needs to have — and denying himself the public understanding and support he will need to be an effective foreign policy president in a second term, if the “rope-a-dope” campaign should prove successful.
The principled left is after Obama for the drone wars and other things. The Democracy in America Blog of the Economist posts on the latest salvo.
CONOR FRIEDERSDORF’S post yesterday at the Atlantic on “Why I Refuse to Vote for Barack Obama” is a huge internet hit. As I write, it has been tweeted 2,000 times, and has been liked by more than 90,000 on Facebook. He has struck a nerve. Mr Friedersdorf’s bill of indictment is damning, and hard to dispute:
“1. Obama terrorizes innocent Pakistanis on an almost daily basis. The drone war he is waging in North Waziristan isn’t “precise” or “surgical” as he would have Americans believe. It kills hundreds of innocents, including children. And for thousands of more innocents who live in the targeted communities, the drone war makes their lives into a nightmare worthy of dystopian novels. People are always afraid. Women cower in their homes. Children are kept out of school. The stress they endure gives them psychiatric disorders. Men are driven crazy by an inability to sleep as drones buzz overhead 24 hours a day, a deadly strike possible at any moment. At worst, this policy creates more terrorists than it kills; at best, America is ruining the lives of thousands of innocent people and killing hundreds of innocents for a small increase in safety from terrorists. It is a cowardly, immoral, and illegal policy, deliberately cloaked in opportunistic secrecy. And Democrats who believe that it is the most moral of all responsible policy alternatives are as misinformed and blinded by partisanship as any conservative ideologue.
2. Obama established one of the most reckless precedents imaginable: that any president can secretly order and oversee the extrajudicial killing of American citizens. Obama’s kill list transgresses against the Constitution as egregiously as anything George W. Bush ever did. It is as radical an invocation of executive power as anything Dick Cheney championed. The fact that the Democrats rebelled against those men before enthusiastically supporting Obama is hackery every bit as blatant and shameful as anything any talk radio host has done.
3. Contrary to his own previously stated understanding of what the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution demand, President Obama committed U.S. forces to war in Libya without Congressional approval, despite the lack of anything like an imminent threat to national security.” …
More from Clive Crook in the Atlantic Blogs.
… I can’t get to Friedersdorf’s level of certainty that the policy is evil, but he’s pulled me in his direction.
How to think this through? If drone attacks are counterproductive from a security point of view — because they kill the wrong people and stir up hostility to the United States — then we needn’t spend much time asking whether they’re legal or moral. If they don’t work, no dilemma arises. But do they? I don’t know and the truth is, neither does Friedersdorf. At best, he says, the increase in safety is small. That might be true but how are we supposed to know? The dangers of blowback are clear, but with little or no public information about the targets, outsiders can’t judge whether the campaign is making Americans safer.
The question of legality is complicated because there are so many variables: context (is this an “armed conflict” in the legal sense?); the decision-making process (how were the targets chosen?); necessity (were there alternatives?); proportionality; and so on. Legality matters but it shouldn’t be the main concern. Lawyers can’t tell us what’s just or right. If I thought the drone war was immoral and legal, I’d say let’s not do it. If I thought it was moral and illegal, I’d say let’s change the law.
In principle (I don’t know if Friedersdorf would agree) the drone attacks could be moral, but the net security gains have to be very impressive. If the targeting is as poor as Friedersdorf thinks and the execution as imprecise, then it’s hard to see how the policy could be justified. If “signature targeting” as described in the Stanford/NYU report is really going on — that is, not attacking known terrorists but striking on the basis of “behavior patterns” observed from high altitude — I’d need a lot of persuading that this wasn’t recklessness to an immoral degree (as well as being most likely illegal, by the way). …
More on polls. This time from one of our long time favorites, Michael Barone.
As a recovering pollster (I worked for Democratic pollster Peter Hart from 1974 to 1981), let me weigh in on the controversy over whether the polls are accurate. Many conservatives are claiming that multiple polls have overly Democratic samples, and some charge that media pollsters are trying to discourage Republican voters.
First, some points about the limits of polls. Random-sample polling is an imprecise instrument. There’s an error margin of 3 or 4 percent and polling theory tells us that one out of 20 polls is wrong, with results outside the margin of error. Sometimes it’s easy to spot such an outlier; sometimes not.
In addition, it’s getting much harder for pollsters to get people to respond to interviews. The Pew Research Center reports that it’s getting only 9 percent of the people it contacts to respond to its questions. That’s compared with 36 percent in 1997.
Interestingly, response rates are much higher in new democracies. Americans, particularly in target states, may be getting poll fatigue. When a phone rings in New Hampshire, it might well be a pollster calling.
Are those 9 percent representative of the larger population? As that percentage declines, it seems increasingly possible that the sample is unrepresentative of the much larger voting public. One thing a poll can’t tell us is the opinion of people who refuse to be polled.
Then there is the problem of cellphone-only households. In the 1930s and 1940s, pollsters conducted interviews in person, because half of households had no phone or (your grandparents can explain this) a party-line phone. …
William Jacobson says one of Warren’s defenders is throwing in the towel.
Soon after my original post, Elizabeth Warren’s law license problem, Mark Thompson at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen wrote a post taking an opposite view, No, Elizabeth Warren Did Not Engage in the Unauthorized Practice of Law.That post by Thompson was cited far and wide, including at Memeorandum as well as at friendly conservative blogs which wanted to present the case for Warren to provide balance.
In light of my post this morning that Warren represented a Massachusetts client in Massachusetts on an issue related to Massachusetts law, Thompson has concluded in a new post today:
“Professor Jacobson has uncovered this morning a case in which Elizabeth Warren entered an appearance in a federal appellate court as a representative of a Massachusetts client in a case that appears to have clearly implicated Massachusetts law. Although this is still a federal appellate court, because we’re dealing with a Massachusetts client and issues of Massachusetts law, this looks really, really bad for Professor Warren. With this bombshell, I would no longer view the case against her as weak.” …