Gerard Baker - Times Online - WBLG

Midterms blog

I'm blogging the final week of the US midterm election campaign. I shall do my level best to provoke and infuriate.  Feel free to respond in kind.

Republican angst

Seven days to go till the midterm elections and the fever is rising.

A defeat next week for the Republicans will surely result in a wrenching period of soul-searching for the party. President Bush will, rightly, get much of the blame.  But it's important that the debate be based on political reality, not on the usual misconceptions and falsehoods in which so much media discussion of American conservatism is couched.

For an example of a quite misleading piece of analysis, consider this one, a wonderfully self-regarding account in last weekend's Telegraph by Niall Ferguson, distinguished history professor at quite a few of the world's elite universities. Explaining, supposedly, what has gone wrong since Bush was re-elected two years ago, Ferguson recollects with real fondness a prediction he made at the time of the 2004 election:

"If he secures re-election," I argued, "Bush can be relied upon to press on with a foreign policy based on pre-emptive military force, to ignore the impending fiscal crisis (on Vice-President Dick Cheney's principle that "deficits don't matter") and to pursue socially conservative objectives such as the constitutional ban on gay marriage. Anyone who thinks this combination will serve to maintain Republican Party unity is dreaming; it will surely do the opposite."

Not bad predictions.

No, not bad predictions. Terrible ones.

Let's look at them

1 A foreign policy based on "pre-emptive military force".

Yes, that's exactly how Second Term Bush dealt with North Korea and Iran, isn't it?  In fact, with Condoleezza Rice in charge, the second term foreign policy has been characterised not by more unilateral pre-emption, but by an enthusiastic return to multilateral cooperation (and we've seen just how effective that is, haven't we?)

2 Ignoring the "impending fiscal crisis."

The month Mr Bush was re-elected, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the federal deficit for the 2004 fiscal year was $413bn.  In the just-ended fiscal 2006, the CBO estimates the deficit was $250bn. As a proportion of national output, the drop is even more striking - from 3.6 per cent in 2004 to 1.9 per cent in 2006.

Now, I'm not suggesting the president should get the credit for this. I've always been a bit of a sceptic myself on the more outlandish claims for the Laffer Curve. But even sceptics can’t help but notice that the impending fiscal crisis has, annoyingly, failed to materialise.

What's more, the one fiscal measure the president did spend much of his time on - and on which he wasted a large amount of political capital - was reform of Social Security, a change that, had it not been buried by Democrats and some nervous Republicans, would have cut long-term US fiscal liabilities by a mere $6 trillion over about the next 50 years.

3 "Socially conservative objectives."  Really?

The gay marriage constitutional amendment was quickly dropped after the 2004 election.
The main piece of domestic legislation Bush has pursued in the 109th congress has been an immigration reform bill that, far from pleasing social conservatives, has enraged and alienated most of them.

A Republican crackup may well be in the works. But Ferguson, like so many others, makes the lazy mistake of asserting what he thinks his ill-informed audience already believes about the direction of the US. The result is a complete failure to understand the real condition of the Republican party.

Is this the dirtiest election ever?

The answer to that question is, of course No.   I really find the ahistorical shortsightedness of so much of the media coverage of US elections quite depressing.  I would personally wager that every single election campaign since at least 1964 (remember how Goldwater was going to send us all up in a mushroom cloud?) has been reported by some media outlet or other as "the dirtiest campaign ever".

I particularly enjoy the way the Brirtish press - see this -  report,  without qualification, that the nasty campaigning is all the work of the evil Republicans.

I've just got back from a week in the Mid West.  In between watching the World Series I got a firsthand look at the Missouri Senate race for what may be the pivotal seat in next week's elections. While the media has predictably fixated on Rush Limbaugh's rather wince-making comments about the Michael J Fox commercial, it should be said that the ad is really a quite despicable piece of work.

In just 30 short seconds it manages to distort completely the entire issue of stem cell research, gloss over the science underlying the debate, make outrageously simplistic charges against the Republican candidate and imply, quite shamelessly, that a vote against the Democrats is a vote to condemn people like Fox to misery and death. Oh, and by the way, we're not supposed to criticise it because the man is evidently suffering.

If you choose to insert yourself into politics in this grotesque way, you really have to take the consequences.

My sense, from having spent a short time in some of the more conservative parts of the state, is that this ad may be helping galvanise some voters who are troubled by Amendment 2 and what it means for respect for human life to put aside their doubts and come out and vote Republican. It would be gloriously fitting if the Dems failed to take the Senate because of it.

Exiting Iraq

The flap over the evidently clumsy and inappropriate intervention by Gen Sir Richard Dannatt last weekend has missed the bigger point, underlined by today's reports about the James Baker commission.

The US is going to be extricating itself from Iraq soon anyway so the general (and his presumably even more demoralised men) will get their wish.

Consider three factors:

1 The Baker report will give Bush the cover he needs to declare "mission accomplished" and reverse course.

2 The Democrats, who it now looks certain will control at least half the Congress from January, will apply increasing pressure for a significant US drawdown.

3 None of the likeliest Republican candidates for 08 - McCain, Giuliani, Romney - will be suicidal enough to stick with a "stay the course" strategy. Indeed , watch for McCain especially to start walking back from his calls for more troops and blaming the incompetence and arrogance of the Pentagon's political leaders for creating a catastrophe that even McCain himself, and several more US divisions, will not be able to save.   

Mark Warner

His decision not to run for president is regrettable and significant in lots of ways.

I think Michael Barone nails the most important.  Whatever Warner's personal reasons, his decision does seem to reflect a view that there just isn't very much of a future right now for the enlightened moderate side of the Democratic party in the 2008 presidential race.  This is probably good news for Hillary, since it means her main opposition is going to come from the angry left, not the out-reaching right.  But that will also mean she may be forced further left in the Democatic primary by attacks from the likes of Edwards, Feingold and perhaps Gore

Remarkably the contest in the much-demonised Republican party may be shaping up to be a race between smiling, voter-friendly moderates - McCain, Giuliani, Romney. 

Could the Democrats really blunder so badly yet again?  Do bears have a sylvan approach to their lavatory needs?

North Korea

Of course it's all Bush's fault. There was I, thinking that this latest breach in the flimsy non-proliferation fence was the work of a crazed dictator in Pyongyang who starves and tortures his people so he can bolster his own global power through acquisition and threatened use of the world's most hideous weaponry. When in fact, all along, I should have known that it could have been so easily avoided if only the US hadn't invaded Iraq in 2003 and had instead "engaged" with North Korea. 

LOL, as Mark Foley might put it.

There's much talk of the need for dialogue now.  I'm all in favour of jaw-jaw. Let's see what might be achieved by talking with the nutters from NoKo.  I've no idea what they'll say to us, but here in essence, is what our message should be:

"If you so much as think about using whatever makeshift nuclear weapon you may have finally succeeded in constructing, or if we find the slightest evidence that you have tried to sell it to some of your friends in the Middle East or East London, you should know that we will quite simply, annihilate your despicable regime and everything it holds dear. And do not think that because we are civilised and you are not we will hesitate to do what is necessary even if it involves massive loss of the innocent lives you have been immiserating for decades.  We don't want to do it; but if we need to in order to save ourselves and our allies from even greater carnage, we will. We've done it before in your general neighbourhood and we'll do it again."

That should give them something to talk about.

Guns

After religion, guns are probably the single most incomprehensible feature of American life to outsiders.

School shootings such as the hideous episode in Amish country this week loom as large in the modern demonology of America that has Europe in its grip as the Iraq war or Guantanamo Bay. They suggest a callous, ruthless society of unchecked homicidal maniacs,  nurtured by a culture that glorifies a kind of violent solipsism.

Sadly, of course, in the wake of such tragedy, the British media can always be relied upon to embellish this image with lazy assertions about the reasons behind the easy availability of firearms. 

The resilience of "gun culture" is not in fact the result of the American media's desire to have lots of good murders to cover nor even is it about the supposed omnipotence of the National Rifle Association. 

It is rooted in part in a fundamentally different attitude towards government and its role in the lives of citizens. But it's a practical matter too. Guns for most Americans are necessary instruments of self-defence. Ban them and you'd leave most innocent, law-abiding Americans gun-less and most of the unlawful guns in the hands of the criminals. Stopping Americans from owning guns would be like stopping them from drinking, an exercise that was tried 80 years ago to little beneficial effect.  Only the consequences of a gun prohibition would be much more lethal.

The Looming Tower

I haven't read "Celsius 7/7", the book by Michael Gove that examines the origins of Islamist terrorism and the threat it poses to the west.

But I did read the scathing review of it in last week’s Sunday Times by William Dalrymple.

A number of writers have pointed out some glaring errors in Dalrymple’s risible little hatchet-job.  But no-one as far as I can tell has taken the man to task for his much larger and much more unconscionable falsehood. 

In the review Dalrymple deploys Lawrence Wright’s book on the history of al Qaeda,  “The Looming Tower”, as a handy implement with which to bash Gove’s book. Picking just one quote from the Wright book, Dalrymple suggests that, in contrast to Gove,  the central argument in “the Looming Tower” is that the roots of al Qaeda and 9/11 lie in US policy towards Israel and the Palestinians.

But Wright’s book (which I have read) says nothing of the sort.
It is a masterly account of the varied and complex roots of Islamist terrorism and certainly doesn’t begin to suggest it’s all the fault of US Middle East policy. In fact, in chronicling the biographies of men such as Sayyid Qutb, Ayman al Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden, Wright provides support for the case that Gove himself apparently makes that Islamic terrorism grew out of the basic dysfunction and tyranny within Moslem states such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. This environment, it is clear from Wright’s account, helped create a kind of psychosis in which radical Islamism flourished. 

Now I learn  (scroll down) that the absurd Dalrymple has become an adviser to David Cameron.   They deserve each other.

Woody reporting

What do Bob Woodward's last three big books have in common?  I'll give you a clue, their titles are: Bush at War; Plan of Attack; State of Denial.

If you said they're all in-depth accounts of the decision-making processes of the Bush administration, you'd be wrong, I'm afraid.  They don't get close. If you said they're three different components of an unfolding narrative, a trilogy chronicling events  in Washington these last five years: wrong again. They flip about and overlap, repeat and contradict.

Congratulations, if you got the right answer:  They all have three words in the title, two nouns separated by a preposition.

Sorry, but I'm darned if I can find anything else the three share. Books One and Two told a stirring tale of heroism on the part of President Bush, focused and engaged on leading America through the post-9/11 trauma.  Book Three, published this week, to the usual promotional fanfare of the Washington Post's publicity machine, is a dark tale of the same president disengaged, incurious, incompetent, bungling his way through foreign policy.

Well, you might say, not unreasonable. A lot of people thought Bush was great after 9/11 and still OK until a couple of years ago.  A good reporter will surely recount that changing verdict from insiders.  But the really odd thing is that Book Three of course, covers much the same ground as Books One and Two, chronologically speaking: even some of the same meetings and conversations that supposedly took place. In other words, either those first two books were inaccurate or this one is.  Or, strike me down for suggesting it! - perhaps all three of them are.

There are various views of the latest Woodward phenomenon.  It's been opined that he's trying to make up for the overly hagiographic nature of the first two books by writing a Bush-basher for the third - commercially wise, probably, given the tumble in Bush's approval ratings.

But there's no mystery. The Woodward style is straightforward - to get some - some, not all, I stress - important sources to speak to him off the record. So the account that emerges is one that - surprise! - ends up making those sources look good. Two years ago, these sources had a big interest in making Bush look a strong president, because they were still, in various ways, associated with him. Now, it's in the interest of those same sources to trash him.

Now, your next question: Why does anybody pay the slightest attention to this stuff?

Turning the Page

It's come to something when a politician has to claim to be an alcoholic to avoid getting into real trouble. Congressman Mark Foley's resignation and decision to check himself into a detox clinic today looks like a final, desperate act designed to smother his despicable behaviour with 16-year old congressional assistants in a thin veneer of psychological self-exculpation. 

The political fallout from the page-chasing episode is not clear.  Aside from the sheer ghastly sleaziness of it all there's a danger I think for congressional Republicans that  voters might link the preachy Mr Foley's pederastic tendencies to a broader pattern of hypocrisy.

Here's a Republican who pioneers legislation to prosecute internet predators enquring via instant messaging about the size of a 16 year old boy's member. Boy:"7 and a half",  Foley: "ummmmmmmmmmmmmmm. beautiful".

Here's a House of Representatives leadership that gleefully impeached Bill Clinton for his lies about sex with an intern looking as though it turned away when it was warned that one of its congressmen was describing to one high-school student what he would like to do with his "one-eyed snake".

If voters think there's a pattern here, they could be right. Republicans who proselytise about law and the constitution while taking fat bribes from lobbyists .  A party that trumpets the virtues of limited government while presiding over the biggest expansion in the federal government in the last 40 years.

Once again, the central problem is the arrogance of power, steadily ripened over the years into a self-image of an inviolate right to govern that justifies any word or deed because it comes from those who govern.   Republicans must be praying that voters are not in a mind to heed the words of Oliver Cromwell as they echo down the centuries:  "You have sat too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say. and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!"