Conventional Wisdom on 2008 Could Be Wrong

In his new column, "Hold Your Conventional Wisdom," William Kristol gives three reasons why it's wrong to predict 2008 as the year of the Democrats:

1) The Democrats' takeover of both houses of Congress last November turns out to have been a mixed blessing for them. The approval numbers for the Democratic Congress have been trending downward. It hasn't been easy for Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to keep the party's liberal base and its new supporters happy at the same time. And the Bush White House has made some adjustments. The election defeat coincided with a crisis about how to move forward in Iraq. Bush decided against Donald Rumsfeld but also against the Iraq Study Group, and for General David Petraeus and the surge. Democrats forecast an even deeper quagmire. Instead, we've seen progress -which could well continue and broaden. Meanwhile, Michael Mukasey - not Alberto Gonzales - will be making the case for the Administration on the tools it needs to conduct the war on terrorism. A respected and independent former judge, Mukasey will have credibility that Gonzales could only dream of.

2) Polls still show a hangover from November 2006, with Democrats having an advantage. But history suggests that may not hold up. Winning control of Congress doesn't necessarily signify much about the next presidential contest. The last time Congress flipped was 1994 - and that GOP sweep was followed by a Bill Clinton victory in 1996. Democrats took back the Senate (and thus control of both bodies of Congress) in 1986, and George H.W. Bush won easily in 1988. Voters like checks and balances.

It's true that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama now run ahead of the GOP candidates in matchups. But as often as not in recent presidential elections, the candidate who eventually won had trailed at some point by margins as large as those now facing the likely Republican nominees. This was true of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Bush in 1988 and Clinton in 1992. And in the two most recent elections, Republicans haven't done badly. The GOP candidate made a far closer race of it than expected in a special election in the strongly Democratic 5th Congressional District in Massachusetts, losing by only 6 points despite being outspent about 4 to 1. And 36-year-old Republican Congressman Bobby Jindal won the governorship of Louisiana with a majority in the first round of balloting.

3) Watching the Republican candidates in the debate in Orlando, Fla., I wasn't filled with dread about the general election. The Democrats are going to nominate either a one-term Senator (Clinton) or a half-term Senator (Obama), neither with much in the way of legislative achievements. Against that, the GOP will offer one of the following: a remarkably successful two-term mayor (Rudy Giuliani), a business leader as well as Governor (Mitt Romney), a four-term Senator and war hero (McCain), an effective two-term Governor (Mike Huckabee) or a Senator with as much experience as Clinton and who was a star prosecutor and has an appealing personal story (Fred Thompson).

The strength of Kristol's argument lies in his points on Iraq (where security has improved and the public has recognized the gains) and the success of Republicans in recent elections (like Bobby Jindal in Louisiana).

But I'd be careful myself in throwing too much water on the Democrats' parade. While polls show deep dissatisfaction with Congress, voters are twice as likely to view the Democratic majority favorably compared to Congress in general.

Also, there's deep unease in the country on health care and other issues. The Repubicans need to decide quickly on their nominee in the primaries - no matter which candidate ends up getting the nod. The race for the general election will be tight, but Republicans can't afford a long, drawn-out nomination battle (better to unify early around a standard-bearer), and they need to run the best presidential campaign in party history.

The Stark Truth About the Left

With Representative Pete Stark's recent anti-Bush statements as the prompt, Michael Knox Beran at the National Review offers an excellent reminder of the contemporary left's anti-American fundamentalism:

Congressman Pete Stark has apologized for saying that President Bush finds “amusement” in the spectacle of American troops getting “their heads blown off” in Iraq. Yet his comments have been embraced by many of the president’s detractors, among them bloggers at The Huffington Post and Daily Kos.

It is not hard to see why. Congressman Stark’s words are faithful to a particular way of looking at America and its place in history — are faithful to what might be called the “liberal interpretation of history.”

The liberal interpretation of history holds that the United States is not merely a flawed country — all countries are flawed — but a deeply flawed one. It was founded by statesmen who subscribed to a deeply flawed philosophy; statesmen who believed that all men are created equal, and that all men are entitled to life, liberty, and the fruits of their industry.

The founders of the United States, it is true, did not always live up to their philosophy. But by placing its principles in the Declaration of Independence, they preserved it, as Abraham Lincoln said, for all time, so that “to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.”

In the view of those who subscribe to the liberal interpretation of history, the philosophy of the Declaration is antiquated. According to the liberal interpretation, all men are created equal, except for blacks, Native Americans, Alaskan natives, Hispanics, and Asian and Pacific Islanders, who are racially challenged and must be classed apart from everyone else. (Native Hawaiians will be added to the list if the Akaka Bill becomes law.) All are entitled to life, except for those whose hearts beat in the womb; to liberty, except for those who require the supervision of the nanny state; to the fruits of their industry, except for those who have made a certain amount of money and are obligated to hand a disproportionate chunk of it over to the government each year.

Central to the liberal interpretation of history is the belief that a country founded on so flawed a philosophy cannot, as a rule, be a force for good in the world. Accordingly, when the United States acts in the world it most often acts not for good, but for evil.

Viewed in the light of such an interpretation of history, Congressman Stark’s comments become comprehensible, even predictable. President Bush adheres to the Freevangelical faith of President Lincoln, who argued that the United States has a decisive role to play in advancing the cause of freedom in the world. President Bush adheres, as well, to the belief that all human beings are entitled to liberty and the fruits of their industry: he therefore opposes the enlargement of nanny-state measures like S-CHIP when alternative measures (such as tax cuts) would promote the general welfare in a better and less intrusive way.

From the point of view of those who subscribe to the liberal interpretation of history, such heterodoxy cannot be explained rationally; the President must be not merely intellectually primitive, but morally depraved, as Congressman Stark suggested when he condemned the president for defending freedom abroad while resisting S-CHIP expansion at home.

Read the whole thing.

For more argument along these lines, see Lee Harris, "The Intellectual Origins of America-Bashing" and Cinnamon Stillwell, "The Making Of A 9/11 Republican."

Francis Fukuyama and America's Self-Defeating Power

Francis Fukuyama's got a piece up at RealClearPolitics arguing that the Bush administration's foreign policy has exacerbated global anti-Americanism:

When I wrote about the End of History almost 20 years ago, one thing that I did not anticipate was the degree to which American behaviour and misjudgments would make anti-Americanism one of the chief fault lines of global politics. And yet, particularly since the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, that is precisely what has happened, owing to four key mistakes made by the Bush administration.

First, the doctrine of "preemption", which was devised in response to the 2001 attacks, was inappropriately broadened to include Iraq and other so-called "rogue states" that threatened to develop weapons of mass destruction. To be sure, preemption is fully justified vis-a-vis stateless terrorists wielding such weapons. But it cannot be the core of a general non-proliferation policy, whereby the United States intervenes militarily everywhere to prevent the development of nuclear weapons.

The cost of executing such a policy simply would be too high (several hundred billion dollars and tens of thousands of casualties in Iraq and still counting). This is why the Bush administration has shied away from military confrontations with North Korea and Iran, despite its veneration of Israel's air strike on Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981, which set back Saddam Hussein's nuclear programme by several years. After all, the very success of that attack meant that such limited intervention could never be repeated, because would-be proliferators learned to bury, hide, or duplicate their nascent weapons programmes.

The second important miscalculation concerned the likely global reaction to America's exercise of its hegemonic power. Many people within the Bush administration believed that even without approval by the UN security council or Nato, American power would be legitimised by its successful use. This had been the pattern for many US initiatives during the cold war, and in the Balkans during the 1990s; back then, it was known as "leadership" rather than "unilateralism".

But, by the time of the Iraq war, conditions had changed: the US had grown so powerful relative to the rest of the world that the lack of reciprocity became an intense source of irritation even to America's closest allies. The structural anti-Americanism arising from the global distribution of power was evident well before the Iraq war, in the opposition to American-led globalisation during the Clinton years. But it was exacerbated by the Bush administration's "in-your-face" disregard for a variety of international institutions as soon it came into office - a pattern that continued through the onset of the Iraq war.

America's third mistake was to overestimate how effective conventional military power would be in dealing with the weak states and networked transnational organisations that characterise international politics, at least in the broader Middle East. It is worth pondering why a country with more military power than any other in human history, and that spends as much on its military as virtually the rest of the world combined, cannot bring security to a small country of 24 million people after more than three years of occupation. At least part of the problem is that it is dealing with complex social forces that are not organised into centralised hierarchies that can enforce rules, and thus be deterred, coerced, or otherwise manipulated through conventional power.

Israel made a similar mistake in thinking that it could use its enormous margin of conventional military power to destroy Hizbullah in last summer's Lebanon war. Both Israel and the US are nostalgic for a 20th century world of nation-states, which is understandable, since that is the world to which the kind of conventional power they possess is best suited.

But nostalgia has led both states to misinterpret the challenges they now face, whether by linking al-Qaida to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, or Hizbullah to Iran and Syria. This linkage does exist in the case of Hizbullah, but the networked actors have their own social roots and are not simply pawns used by regional powers. This is why the exercise of conventional power has become frustrating.

Finally, the Bush administration's use of power has lacked not only a compelling strategy or doctrine, but also simple competence. In Iraq alone, the administration misestimated the threat of WMD, failed to plan adequately for the occupation, and then proved unable to adjust quickly when things went wrong. To this day, it has dropped the ball on very straightforward operational issues in Iraq, such as funding democracy promotion efforts.

Incompetence in implementation has strategic consequences. Many of the voices that called for, and then bungled, military intervention in Iraq are now calling for war with Iran. Why should the rest of the world think that conflict with a larger and more resolute enemy would be handled any more capably?

But the fundamental problem remains the lopsided distribution of power in the international system. Any country in the same position as the US, even a democracy, would be tempted to exercise its hegemonic power with less and less restraint. America's founding fathers were motivated by a similar belief that unchecked power, even when democratically legitimated, could be dangerous, which is why they created a constitutional system of internally separated powers to limit the executive.

Such a system does not exist on a global scale today, which may explain how America got into such trouble. A smoother international distribution of power, even in a global system that is less than fully democratic, would pose fewer temptations to abandon the prudent exercise of power.

My reading of Fukuyama is that he's stuck in a pre-surge mentality.

The justification for the U.S. invasion of has been debated ad nauseum (so that's a stale rehash). Fukuyama also fails to note the recovery of international views toward the United States (public opinion in our Western democratic allies has recovered since the early days of the Iraq war).

Further, we don't need to wonder why a hegemonic U.S. "cannot bring security to a small country of 24 million people after more than three years of occupation." It is well known among security experts that the effective deployment of American military power will be most difficult in the "contested zones" of international security, in countries like Somalia in the 1990s and Iraq in this decade. In these theaters irregular forces have used unconventional tactics to neutralize the preponderant advantages of American military technology. But America has adapted, and the Petraeus counterinsurgency strategy is now bearing fruit in Iraq, with most parts of the country seeing dramatic improvements in security.

Fukuyama's right that a dramatically lopsided distribution of global power will lead to international antagonism toward the system's leading state, which is currently the United States. But we will always face opposition to the forward exercise of American power, no matter who's in office. The Bush adminstration simply shook international opinion out of its Clinton-era stupor - national populations around the world had to reckon with an American hegemon intent on deploying power in its national interest.

The result has been costly, but progress is being made. It will be interesting to see how long Fukuyama will continue to make arguments such as this. Fukuyama's a top scholar in international relations, but he's flipped-flopped in his loyalties to neoconservative theory. Perhaps he's jockeying for a prominent foreign policy post in a Democratic administration. I wish him luck, but I'll be on him when he starts backpeddling from his criticism of America's mission in Iraq, particularly amid additional signs of progress in consolidating that nation's democratic regime.

The Emerging Giuliani Doctrine

Today's New York Times discusses the development of Rudy Giuliani's foreign policy, which is getting significant input from neoconservative thinkers:

Rudolph W. Giuliani’s approach to foreign policy shares with other Republican presidential candidates an aggressive posture toward terrorism, a commitment to strengthening the military and disdain for the United Nations.

But in developing his views, Mr. Giuliani is consulting with, among others, a particularly hawkish group of advisers and neoconservative thinkers.

Their positions have been criticized by Democrats as irresponsible and applauded by some conservatives as appropriately tough, while raising questions about how closely aligned Mr. Giuliani’s thinking is with theirs.

Mr. Giuliani’s team includes Norman Podhoretz, a prominent neoconservative who advocates bombing Iran “as soon as it is logistically possible”; Daniel Pipes, the director of the Middle East Forum, who has called for profiling Muslims at airports and scrutinizing American Muslims in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps; and Michael Rubin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has written in favor of revoking the United States’ ban on assassination.

The campaign says that the foreign policy team, which also includes scholars and experts with different policy approaches, is meant to give Mr. Giuliani a variety of perspectives.

Based on his public statements, Mr. Giuliani does not share all of their views and parts company with traditional neoconservative thinking in some respects. But their presence has reassured some conservatives who have expressed doubts about Mr. Giuliani’s positions on issues like abortion and gun control, and underscored his efforts to cast himself as a tough-minded potential commander in chief.

And while Mr. Giuliani, like other New York mayors, liked to be seen as conducting his own brand of foreign policy from City Hall, he had little direct exposure to many of the specific issues the next president will confront and is still meeting for the first time with some of his advisers to develop detailed positions on particular subjects.

Mr. Giuliani has taken an aggressive position on Iran’s efforts to build a nuclear program, saying last month it was a “promise” that as president he would take military action to keep the Iranians from developing a nuclear weapon.

The article quotes William Kristol on Giuliani's neoconservative persuasions:

Neoconservatives said they were generally supportive of Mr. Giuliani’s positions and saw them as being in line with those taken by the other leading Republican presidential candidates.

“I would say, as a card-carrying member of the neoconservative conspiracy,” said William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, “that I think Giuliani, McCain and Thompson are all getting really good advice — and Romney.” Mr. Kristol said that none of the leading Republican candidates “buy any of these fundamental criticisms that Bush took us on a radically wrong path, and we have to go to a pre-9/11 foreign policy.”

Then the piece lays out the elements of an emerging "Giuliani Doctrine":

The emerging Giuliani doctrine, which is being created through conference calls, policy papers, and seminarlike meetings, contains a number of main elements.

Mr. Giuliani calls for continuing the war in Iraq and building up the military by adding at least 10 combat brigades to the Army. He takes a dim view of the United Nations, which he sees as good for little other than humanitarian and peacekeeping missions, but wants to expand NATO and invite Israel to join it.

He would continue the Bush administration’s efforts to fight AIDS and malaria in Africa, but would tailor policy toward Africa to emphasize trade over aid.

If there is a central tenet to his thinking, it may be that the United States must project strength to keep itself safe. “Weakness invites attack,” Mr. Giuliani warned to cheers in a speech he gave recently to the Republican Jewish Coalition.

On the question of diplomacy, Mr. Giuliani makes it clear that he would impose a number of conditions before opening talks with unfriendly countries. In the Foreign Affairs article, he wrote that it might be advisable at times to hold serious diplomatic talks with the nation’s adversaries, but not with “those bent on our destruction or those who cannot deliver on their agreements.”

In a recent speech to the Jewish Coalition, he went further, accusing the Democrats of putting too much stock in diplomacy. “This is the great fallacy in this now very strong Democratic desire to negotiate, negotiate, negotiate and negotiate,” he said. “You’ve got to know with whom to negotiate and with whom you should not negotiate.”

The foreign policy education of Mr. Giuliani, from former big-city mayor to would-be statesman, has played out in a series of briefings and papers and calls.

I wrote earlier on "Neoconservatives and Rudy Giuliani" (for a full statement on Giuliani's foreign policy, see his essay in Foreign Affairs).

I would second Kristol's comment, that it's indeed great news that all of the top GOP contenders evince strong inclinations toward the neoconservartive foreign policy agenda.

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UPDATE: The Washington Post has but another article on Rudy Giuliani's growing list of top policy advisors, in this case Bill Simon, a former gubernatorial candidate in California, and the founder of "Simon University," a series of seminars featuring top conservatives and neoconservatives.

Code Pink Protester Accosts Secretary of State Rice

A radical activist from the antiwar group Code Pink thrust her red-painted hands in the face of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during congressional testimony yesterday. Here's the story:

An antiwar protester ambushed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at a House hearing Wednesday, thrusting red-stained hands in her face and accusing her of having the "blood of millions of Iraqis on your hands" before being removed by police.

"War criminal! War criminal!" bellowed Desiree Ali-Fairooz, 51, a former teacher from Arlington, Texas, after a guard grabbed her wrists and another officer led her out of the Rayburn House Office Building.

The incident caused House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos (D-Burlingame) to order the removal of other CodePink members, an all-female antiwar group with a regular protest presence on Capitol Hill.

Capitol Police said Ali-Fairooz was charged with assault on a federal officer and three other counts. Police deflected questions about how she was able to get close enough to Rice to confront her but said that the incident did not constitute a security breach.

"Because it's an open hearing and the building is open to the public, anyone can come in," said Sgt. Kimberly Schneider, a spokeswoman. "However, if anyone is breaking the law, the Capitol Police will take appropriate action."

The incident provided a startling moment at the start of a hearing featuring Rice testifying about the Middle East. Witnesses sit alone at a table at the room's front facing House members, with their backs to the audience. There are no barriers between spectators, witnesses and House members. Metal detectors at the building's entrance screen for weapons and hazardous chemicals.

Wednesday's confrontation seemed to happen in an instant. Rice entered the hearing room from a side door with Lantos, an aide and State Department security.

Ali-Fairooz strode up the aisle and met Rice at the table with arms outstretched, moving her hands toward Rice's face but apparently not touching her.

After she was taken outside the hearing room, Ali-Fairooz smeared her painted hands on the hallway wall. A crew painted over the marks.

The photograph of the confrontation is here.

Next to Ali-Fairooz is Congressman Tom Lantos, the far-left California Democrat who laid into General David Petraeus during his own September testimony. Ali-Fairooz and Lantos: Same hatred, different methods.

Note Rice's calmness as well. That's dignity.

Break in Winds Give Firefighters a Chance

My wife and I attended a parent-teacher conference yesterday with my youngest son's kindergarten teacher. She's a young woman. Her husband's a firefighter with the City of Buena Park, and he was on assignment fighting the Santiago Canyon fire. Our appointment was at 8:00am. The red sunrise over Saddleback Mountain glowed ominiously through smokey sky. I'll be glad when the fires are under control. Orange County has lost its magical happiness, and it's hard to breathe.

The Washington Post has a story on the weakening Santa Ana winds:

In a disaster driven more than anything by wind, the breezes dying across Southern California on Wednesday translated into rising hope.

About 20 brush fires continued to roar, part of a conflagration that has blackened an area 10 times the size of the District of Columbia, destroyed 1,600 structures, displaced hundreds of thousands and sullied air for millions more across the region.

But gradually decreasing winds allowed the 8,000 exhausted firefighters to stand and fight the flames rather than dash from one hot spot to another. Aircraft arriving from across the country found free rein to bombard the fires from above. Blazes in Malibu, where the first fires leapt down canyons toward the sea on Sunday, were declared under control, and the Pacific Coast Highway reopened. So did many stores as a hint of normalcy crept into view.

Farther south in San Diego County, the hardest hit of the seven affected counties, a trickle of residents ventured from evacuation centers to check on homes that, in most cases, still stood. But the way was far from clear: A fast-moving blaze in the vast Camp Pendleton Marine base threatened the last remaining power lines that provide the county with almost all of its electricity.

The other major link, which ran from Arizona, was severed by another fire earlier in the week, forcing the power company to import electricity from Mexico to keep up with demand. The Pendleton blaze also leaped Interstate 5, shutting down a stretch of the state's main north-south artery for several hours while firefighters bent to yet another task.

"I wish we could control the wind," President Bush said while announcing that uninsured victims of the fires would be eligible for grants. The president was scheduled to tour affected areas Thursday.

Officials said they suspected that some of the fires had been deliberately set. Police in San Bernardino County said they shot and killed a suspected arsonist Tuesday night and arrested another arson suspect a few hours later. County officials also beefed up patrols to prevent looting after several looters were arrested in nearby San Diego County.

So far, only one death can be directly linked to the flames. But Ron Lane, the director of San Diego County emergency services, provided the first estimate of damage: $1 billion "or more."

Here's the Los Angeles Times story on the arsonist:

Amid worries of new blazes adding to the firestorm already afflicting the region, a man in Hesperia has been arrested on suspicion of arson, and police reported shooting and killing another arson suspect after chasing him out of scrub behind Cal State San Bernardino.

Law enforcement officials said today that they didn't know whether either of the men had started any of the more than a dozen large fires that have devastated Southern California in recent days, including the nearby Lake Arrowhead blaze. The brush fire in Hesperia was quickly extinguished by residents.

Investigators have said that at least two of the huge wildfires, one in Orange County and the other in Temecula, were the work of arsonists.

The confrontation that ended in the shooting death started about 6 p.m. Tuesday when San Bernardino university police spotted a man in a rural area of flood channels and scrub near the campus. University police tried to detain the man, but he got into his car and fled, authorities said. When he began to ram officers' vehicle, they shot him.

I would like to thank everone who commented on my earlier post on the fires. It's been a busy work week, and I've haven't had time to respond. Please join me in praying for the safety of all of those affected.

Runaway Train: Hillary's White House Years

Readers will recall that I've likened the inevitability of Hillary Clinton's 2008 Democratic nomination to the potential disaster of a "runaway train." I've also suggested that - like her or not - she'll bring to the White House a degree of top-level experience rarely seen in the history of the presidency.

It turns out that a plurality of the public holds a similar view on Clinton's political credentials. The background story to the new Los Angeles Times poll has the details:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has neutralized the political fallout from some of the most difficult moments of her eight years as first lady, with Democratic voters looking favorably on her failed effort to revamp healthcare and either supporting or having no opinion of her decision to remain loyal to an unfaithful husband, a new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll shows.

The positive impression of Clinton's White House years -- which is shared, though more faintly, among the broader public -- is helping propel her to a formidable lead over her rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination. Clinton leads the No. 2 contender, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, 48% to 17%.

Her support has risen 15 percentage points since the last nationwide Times/Bloomberg poll in June, while Obama's support has fallen 5 percentage points.

As a leading actor in her husband's presidency, Clinton entered the race for the White House linked tightly to his legacy of personal scandal and political polarization. But today, the Times/Bloomberg poll found, nearly two-thirds of Democrats and nearly half of all voters say Hillary Clinton's famously unsuccessful effort in the 1990s to provide health coverage for all Americans makes her better able now to deal with healthcare as president.

More than 7 in 10 Democrats, and about half of all voters, said they would welcome a White House advisory role for Bill Clinton, who jokes that he would be called "first laddy" if his wife became president.

And 42% of Democrats agreed it was the "right thing" for Hillary Clinton to stick with her husband after his affair with a White House intern, compared with 5% who said it was the wrong choice.

At the same time, the former first lady remains a polarizing figure -- viewed unfavorably by 44% of respondents. But a favorable rating of 48% is relatively high for Clinton.

Read the whole thing.

Note that Clinton has considerably high negatives, which create some problems for her general electability. Still, voters view Hillary and Bill Clinton as a team, and her husband's popularity makes up for some of the distrust toward Hillary in the polling numbers.

The Times poll also holds some interesting findings on the Republicans. While Rudy Giuliani leads the pack with national support at 32 percent (more than twice that for Fred Thompson, the next most favored candidate in the GOP field), local polls in Iowa and New Hampshire have Mitt Romney on top. In South Carolina, Thomspon's got the lead among Republican primary voters.

Also interesting is that John McCain's the leading Republican candidate in hypothetical head-to-head match-ups against Clinton. Based on such comparisons, National Review's Kate O'Beirne argued recently that McCain deserves a second look. I'm pulling for him, in any case.

As for Hillary, I hate her flip-flopping. But for an even more critical look at Hillary's candidacy, check out Gayle's blog, where she's putting up some powerful commentaries against a Hillary Clinton presidency.