Rating the Republicans

The New York Times   January 16, 2015    DAVID BROOKS

If the Republican presidential campaign were ''American Idol'' or ''The Voice,'' this would be the out-of-town auditions phase. Governors across the country are giving State of the State addresses, unveiling their visions. Let's spin the chairs and grade the contenders, to see who deserves a shot at the big show.

John Kasich: A. The Ohio governor is easily the most underestimated Republican this year. He just won a landslide victory in the swingiest of the swing states. He carried 86 of Ohio's 88 counties. He won Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, and which President Obama won by 40 points in 2012.

Kasich is the Republican version of Jerry Brown: experienced but undisciplined in an honest, unvarnished way. If he shows he can raise money, and if voters want someone fresh but seasoned and managerial, he might be the guy.

The inaugural address he delivered on Monday was a straight-up values speech. But it wasn't about values the way Pat Robertson used to define them. It was traditional values expressed in inclusive, largely secular form. ''I think the erosion of basic values that made our nation great is the most serious problem facing our state and our nation today,'' he said. ''And I'm not talking about those volatile issues.''

He built his speech around empathy, resilience, responsibility and other virtues: ''You know why this happened? Too fixated on ourselves. It's all about me. And somehow we have lost the beautiful sound of our neighbors' voices. Moving beyond ourselves and trying to share in the experience of others helps us open our minds, allows us to grow as people. It helps us become less self-righteous. Did you ever find that in yourself? I do ... self-righteous.''

Kasich has a long conservative record, but in his speech he celebrated government workers, like the woman who runs his job and family services department. He argued that economic growth is not an end unto itself, especially when it's not widely shared.

Kasich, a working-class kid, spoke as a small government conservative who sometimes uses government to advance Judeo-Christian values. His mantra is, ''When you die and get to the meeting with St. Peter, he's probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small, but he is going to ask you what you did for the poor.''

Chris Christie: A-minus. Bridgegate did some damage, but it clearly wasn't fatal. Whatever can be said about Christie, he grabs attention -- essential in a crowded field.

Like all smart Republicans in the post-Romney era (yes, we're in it), Christie is working hard to prove he understands the everyday concerns of the poor and the middle class. He spent a good chunk of his address describing his efforts to work with the Democratic mayor of Camden to bring in jobs, fight poverty and reduce crime in that city. It was a bipartisan, government-efficiency pitch: ''We terminated the city police department and, partnering with the county, put a new metro division on the streets with 400 officers for the same price we were paying for 260. ... What are the results? Murder down 51 percent, in what was once called the most dangerous city in America.''

As Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post noticed, Christie defined anxiety as America's most daunting problem. He said that as he traveled the country, ''anxiety was the most palpable emotion that I saw and felt. More than anger, more than fear.'' Christie hasn't quite nailed down the nature of that anxiety, or what to do about it, but he's clearly hit on an essential theme for an era of economic growth but dissatisfaction.

Scott Walker and Mike Pence: B-plus. The Wisconsin and Indiana governors are both versions of what used to be called working-class, Sam's Club Republicanism. Walker never graduated from college.

In their State of the State addresses, both boasted about the same sorts of accomplishments: dropping unemployment rates, state surpluses, rising graduation rates, lower taxes. Walker mentioned jobs programs for people with disabilities. Pence, who has devoted more effort to fighting poverty, touted his new pre-K education program. Both have good records, but neither speech had anything that was narratively or thematically innovative or of much interest to people outside their states.

At this stage in the race it's best to evaluate candidates the way you evaluate pitchers during the first week of spring training. Don't think about polls, donor gossip or who has the front-runner label. Ask who makes the catcher's glove pop loudest. Who has the stuff that makes you do a double take?

Among the governors, Kasich and Christie have shown they can take the values of religious conservatives and use them to inform Republican economic and domestic priorities. That's essential if the party is going retain its business and religious base and also reach the struggling and disaffected.

The Keystone XL Illusion

The New York Times    January 17, 2015    JOE NOCERA

Greg Rickford, Canada's minister of natural resources, was in the United States most of this past week, on a trip that didn't get much attention in the media with so much bigger news swirling about. So let me fill you in.

Rickford spent the first two days of his trip in Washington, where of course debate over the controversial Keystone XL pipeline is underway in earnest in the new Republican-led Senate. The Republican-led House, meanwhile, has already passed a bill giving the go-ahead to the pipeline, which, if it's ever built, will transport heavy crude from the tar sands of Alberta to American refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. And of course President Obama has threatened to veto any such bill, should one land on his desk.

In Washington, Rickford met with his Obama administration counterpart, Ernest Moniz, the secretary of energy. Although the Keystone pipeline was not on the agenda, the two men talked about it anyway. Rickford paid a visit to Heidi Heitkamp, the Democratic senator from North Dakota, who strongly supports the Keystone pipeline. (In addition to the Alberta crude, the pipeline would transport shale oil from North Dakota.)

He met with State Department officials to get a Keystone update; because the pipeline would cross the U.S.-Canada border, the department has to do a review, which it has done several times, always coming down in favor of the project. In several speeches, Rickford talked up the close energy relationship between the United States and Canada, noting that Canada sends three million barrels per day to America -- more than Venezuela and Saudi Arabia combined. He mentioned Canada's new pipeline safety law. He said he thought the Keystone XL pipeline should be approved, which is essentially what Canadian officials have been saying for the past six years.

Then on Wednesday, Rickford went to Texas for two days. This is the part of his trip that really caught my attention. His main focus in Texas was on two new Canadian-controlled pipelines that became operational in mid-December. One is called the Flanagan South pipeline, which cost $2.8 billion. It covers nearly 600 miles, from Pontiac, Ill., to Cushing, Okla. The other pipeline, called the Seaway Twin, runs an additional 500 miles, from Cushing to Freeport, Tex., where the refineries are. It cost $1.2 billion. Guess where some of the oil that is going to run through those pipelines is coming from? Yep -- the tar sands of Alberta.

If you are wondering why the environmental community hasn't been chaining itself to the White House fence to protest these two new pipelines, the way it has with Keystone, the answer is that neither of these pipelines crosses the Canadian border, so they don't require the same complicated approval process that Keystone requires. (The Flanagan South line will connect with a pipeline that already crosses the border.) More to the point, perhaps, they were never the symbol that the high-profile Keystone XL became, so that even the approvals they did require never aroused the same attention from environmentalists.

Yet these new pipelines are going to be carrying some 200,000 barrels per day of the heavy crude mined from the tar sands. True, that is only a third of what the Keystone XL would be able to deliver, but it essentially helps double the amount of tar sands oil that can be exported to the United States. In addition, there will be expanded rail capacity for Alberta's oil, which is a far more dangerous way to move it than a state-of-the-art pipeline.

The point is: With or without Keystone, Canada's tar sands oil is coming to the United States. One of the stated reasons that environmental activists wanted to prevent Keystone from being built was that doing so would force Canada to stop mining the oil. Without Keystone, it was said, Canada would have no means to export it. But that has never been a particularly plausible argument. Even before the opening of these two new pipelines, tar sands oil was coming to the United States, primarily by rail. Indeed, the only thing that can slow it down now is the rapid drop in the price of oil, which is likely to make expensive tar sands crude unprofitable.

Even as the Keystone debate reaches its current crescendo, all that is left, really, is the symbolism. The Republican right claims that Keystone will create jobs. It won't, not to any significant degree. The Democratic left says that the oil Keystone will bring to the Gulf is so dirty, so carbon laden, that it will wreak havoc on the climate. It won't do that either. If the president ultimately decides not to approve Keystone, he will do so knowing full well that he has not stopped the tar sands oil in any meaningful way.

To expect another outcome is, well, a pipe dream. It always was.

Texas Is Sending You a Present

The New York Times   January 17, 2015

Rick Perry!

The man who has been governor of Texas since pterodactyls roamed the plains took his leave at the State Capitol this week. He is not saying anything for sure about running for president. Mum's the word until springtime. However, he recently told a reporter that if voters want to break from the Obama era, ''I am a very clear and compelling individual to support.''

Wow, the Republican race is getting to be like one of those crime shows where the detectives have to paste pictures all over the wall so they can keep the suspects straight. So many old friends popping up this month -- Mitt Romney and now Rick Perry. The man who drove to Canada with the family dog strapped to the car roof and the man who claims he shot a coyote while jogging. The animal lobby had better get out there and see how Jeb Bush feels about wolf hunting.

Almost everybody has a Rick Perry favorite moment. For 99 percent, it's probably the dreaded ''oops'' debate when he announced that as president he was going to shutter three federal agencies -- and then could only think of two.

And, yeah, that one was pretty good. However, I still cherish a television interview Perry did a few years earlier with Evan Smith of The Texas Tribune in which he defended abstinence-only sex education despite the state's astronomical rates of teenage pregnancy.

''It works,'' Perry said defiantly and totally erroneously.

''Can you give me a statistic suggesting it works?'' asked Smith.

''I'm going to tell you from my own personal life. Abstinence works,'' Perry replied. Smith was too discreet to press for details, but let's hope it comes up during the campaign.

Perry had been governor of Texas for more than 14 years, an all-time record. In his farewell speech to the State Legislature, he reminded the lawmakers of all they'd been through together, including hurricanes, wildfires and the tragic disintegration of the Space Shuttle Columbia over Texas in 2003, although Perry called it ''Space Shuttle Challenger,'' which blew up in 1986.

No mention of his pending felony indictment for abuse of power. Perry tried to force a county district attorney to resign by threatening to veto the money for an office she runs that investigates public corruption. It's a complicated story. First you learn that the D.A. in question had been arrested in a rather spectacular drunken-driving case, and you tilt a little toward Perry. Then you discover that two other county D.A.'s were charged with drunken driving during the Perry administration without attracting the wrath of the governor. Then you sort of get distracted by wondering what's going on with Texas district attorneys.

We've got ages to work it out.

Perry bragged about the state's economy, which he often refers to as ''the Texas Miracle.'' Really, we have not heard so much about miracles since Our Lady of Fatima. The state's record of job creation is his big calling card to the presidential league, and once he starts harping on it again we're going to wonder: Has Texas been growing so many jobs because Perry cut taxes and regulations? Or is it because Texas happens to be a state with warm weather, lots of space for cheap housing, a huge border with Mexico and massive oil and gas deposits? Is Perry a great leader or just conveniently located? Eventually, someone will repeat the old Ann Richards joke about being born on third base and thinking you hit a triple.

Perry's signature job-building initiative is something called the Texas Enterprise Fund, which aims to persuade out-of-state companies to move to Texas, or expand there. One of its beneficiaries, Texas Institute for Genomic Medicine, got $50 million in return for creating what Perry said were more than 12,000 jobs. An investigation by The Wall Street Journal revealed the fund folk had been counting every single biotech job created anywhere in the state for the previous six years. Actually the number was more like 10.

But it's great that the governor's ambitions are forcing us to think a lot about Texas, a state that deserves more attention, having been home to only three of the last eight elected chief executives. Not even half! And although lawmakers from Texas currently lead six of the committees in the House of Representatives, that's still under a third.

There's also United States Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, making all the pre-presidential-campaign stops and offering an option to all of us who are yearning for a vision to the right of Rick Perry. I once threw out the possibility of an entire Republican ticket from the Lone Star State, and many readers desperately wrote to argue that that was unconstitutional. It might be fairer to say that the Constitution isn't crazy about the idea.

We can figure that out down the line. Meanwhile, Perry and Cruz could both be in the presidential debates. Let's see who's better at counting to three.

Sorry, Kids. We Ate It All. By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Sorry, Kids. We Ate It All.

October 15, 2013 By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Eventually this shutdown crisis will end. And eventually the two parties will make another stab at a deal on taxes, investments and entitlements. But there’s one outcome from such negotiations that I can absolutely guarantee: Seniors, Wall Street and unions will all have their say and their interests protected. So the most likely result will be more tinkering around the edges, as our politicians run for the hills the minute someone accuses them of “fixing the deficit on the backs of the elderly” or creating “death panels” to sensibly allocate end-of-life health care. Could this time be different? Short of an economic meltdown, there is only one thing that might produce meaningful change: a mass movement for tax, spending and entitlement reform led by the cohort that is the least organized but will be the most affected if we don’t think long term — today’s young people.

Whether they realize it or not, they’re the ones who will really get hit by all the cans we’re kicking down the road. After we baby boomers get done retiring — at a rate of 7,000 to 11,000 a day — if current taxes and entitlement promises are not reformed, the cupboard will be largely bare for today’s Facebook generation. But what are the chances of them getting out of Facebook and into their parents’ faces — and demanding not only that the wealthy do their part but that the next generation as a whole leaves something for this one? Too bad young people aren’t paying attention. Or are they?

Wait! Who is that speaking to crowds of students at Berkeley, Stanford, Brown, U.S.C., Bowdoin, Notre Dame and N.Y.U. — urging these “future seniors” to start a movement to protect their interests? That’s Stan Druckenmiller, the legendary investor who made a fortune predicting the subprime bust, often accompanied by Geoffrey Canada, the president of the Harlem Children’s Zone, of which Druckenmiller is the biggest funder. What are they doing on a Mick Jagger-like college tour where they don’t sing, don’t dance, and just go through a set of charts showing young people how badly they’ll be hammered if our current taxes, growth rates, defense spending and entitlements stay where they are?

“My generation — we brought down the president in the ’60s because we didn’t want to go into the war against Vietnam,” Druckenmiller told an overflow crowd at Notre Dame last week. “People say young people don’t vote; young people don’t care. I’m hoping after tonight, you will care. There is a clear danger to you and your children.”

Whenever Druckenmiller (a friend) is challenged by seniors, who also come to his talks, that he is trying to start an intergenerational war, he has a standard reply: “No, that war already happened, and the kids lost. We’re just trying to recover some scraps for them.”

With graph after graph, they show how government spending, investments, entitlements and poverty alleviation have overwhelmingly benefited the elderly since the 1960s and how the situation will only get worse as our over-65 population soars 100 percent between now and 2050, while the working population that will have to support them — ages 18 to 64 — will grow by 17 percent. This imbalance will lead to a huge burden on the young and, without greater growth, necessitate cutting the very government investments in infrastructure, Head Start, and medical and technology research that help the poorest and also create the jobs of the future.

Druckenmiller is not looking to get his taxes cut. He considers Social Security and Medicare great achievements for how they’ve reduced poverty among the elderly. He and Canada are simply convinced that only a Vietnam-war-scale movement by the young can break through the web of special interests to force politicians to put in place the reforms that would actually secure both today’s seniors and future seniors, today’s middle class and the wanna-be middle class. (Watch their N.Y.U. presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbgIiAnpcPc).

Druckenmiller urges young people to design their own solutions, but, when asked, he recommends: raising taxes on capital gains, dividends and carried interest — now hugely weighted to the wealthy and elderly — to make them equal to earned income taxes; making all consumers more price sensitive when obtaining health care; means-testing Social Security and Medicare so they go to those most in need; phasing in higher age qualifications for entitlements and cutting corporate taxes to zero, so the people who actually create jobs will have more resources to do so.

At the Harlem Children’s Zone, explains Canada, “we have made a promise to all of our children: you play by the rules, do well in school, avoid drugs, gangs, crime and teenage pregnancy, and we will get you into college and on your way down the path of the middle class” and toward a future of financial security. But, he adds, “the current spending on my generation — I’m 61 — if it continues unabated, will erase any chance my children will have the safety net of social, education and health services they will need. It seems deeply offensive to me that we will be asking these poor children from Harlem to subsidize a generation that is, by and large, more well-off than they are, and then leave them deeply indebted in an America that had eaten the seed corn of the next generation.”

U.S. Fringe Festival By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

October 8, 2013   U.S. Fringe Festival   By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

There is one group of people with an even greater interest than Democrats in President Obama prevailing over Tea Party Republicans in this shutdown showdown, and that is mainstream Republicans.

What exactly are supposedly mainstream conservatives — starting with House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — thinking? If the “Ted Cruz Wing” of the G.O.P. prevails and forces the president to curtail Obamacare in any way in return for funding the government, mainstream conservatives will be staring at a terrible future. In the near term, they’ll be taking orders from Senator Ted Cruz, who would be crowned kingmaker of the G.O.P. if he got Obama to give in one iota on Obamacare. Cruz and his Tea Party allies would be calling the shots, and Boehner would become that very rare bird — a SPINO (a Speaker in Name Only).

In the long run, because this fringe would be dictating the party line, Republicans would stand zero chance of winning the White House in 2016. If the country rejected Mitt Romney’s bad imitation of a far-right conservative — one hostile to immigration reform, health care, gay marriage and a grand bargain — imagine how the real thing would fare.

Finally, given the way the Republicans have managed to gerrymander so many Congressional districts in their favor, they can easily retain control of the House under any normal economic conditions. But if they trigger a U.S. government default, a disruption in Social Security payments and economic turmoil in their effort to scuttle Obamacare — and a majority of voters blame Republicans — that could overwhelm the G.O.P.’s gerrymandered House advantage.

In other words, the only thing standing between mainstream Republicans and a hellish future of kowtowing to Ted Cruz, never seeing the inside of the White House and possibly losing the House is President Obama’s refusal to give in to the shutdown blackmail that Cruz & Co. have cooked up. The more pragmatic Republicans, who know that this is a disaster for their party but won’t confront Cruz & Co., have settled on this bogus line: “Well, sure, maybe Cruz and the Tea Party went too far, but it’s still President Obama’s fault. He’s president. He should negotiate with them. He needs to lead.”

President Obama is leading. He is protecting the very rules that are the foundation of any healthy democracy. He is leading by not giving in to this blackmail, because if he did he would undermine the principle of majority rule that is the bedrock of our democracy. That system guarantees the minority the right to be heard and to run for office and become the majority, but it also ensures that once voters have spoken, and their representatives have voted — and, if legally challenged, the Supreme Court has also ruled in their favor — the majority decision holds sway. A minority of a minority, which has lost every democratic means to secure its agenda, has no right to now threaten to tank our economy if its demands are not met. If we do not preserve this system, nothing will ever be settled again in American politics. There would be nothing to prevent a future Democratic Congress from using the exact same blackmail to try to overturn a law enacted by their Republican rivals.

The president has said that he would give the G.O.P. an agenda for negotiations that could start when the government is funded and the debt ceiling lifted. He’s ready to consider trading the medical-device tax in Obamacare for another equivalent source of revenue or having a talk about closing tax loopholes and reforming entitlements — to both lower the deficit and raise revenue to invest in infrastructure or early childhood education. What Obama will not do, and must not do, is pay an entry fee to that negotiation — say giving up the medical-device tax — just to help Boehner down from the tree. Cruz & Co. would claim victory.

The reason so many mainstream Republican lawmakers want Obama to give something to Cruz & Co. is that they want to get out of this mess, but they’re all afraid to stand up to the far-right fringe themselves — with its bullying network of barking talk-show hosts and moneymen. But Obama shouldn’t take them off the hook. Only Republicans can delegitimize the nihilistic madness at the base of their party. (I wouldn’t exaggerate this, but I think Boehner underestimates how many mainstream Republicans feel their party is being stolen from them by radicals — and hunger for a leader who will take them on.)

For their party’s sake and the country’s sake, Republicans need to go through the same kind of civil war and fundamental rethinking that the British Labour Party went through — after successive defeats by Margaret Thatcher — to produce “New Labour” and that Democrats went through — after successive defeats by Ronald Reagan — to produce “Clinton Democrats.”

Yes, it will cost them today, but it will enable them to thrive in the future. America needs a proper right-of-center conservative party to challenge a left-of-center Democratic Party. Without a healthy opposition party — one that is ready to win some and lose some and learn from its losses, one that has a real agenda for upward mobility, not just a low-tax obsession and boiling anger — our two-party system doesn’t work, and neither does the country.

The real threat to U.S. national security, By RICHARD HAASS

The real threat to U.S. national security

By RICHARD HAASS | 10/7/13 3:21 PM EDT

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/the-real-threat-to-us-national-security-97938.html

The United States faces a number of serious challenges from abroad, including a more assertive China, terrorists, climate change, a North Korea with nuclear weapons and an Iran close to having them, and a turbulent Middle East. But the greatest threat to American national security comes from within — from our own political dysfunction.

The ongoing shutdown of the federal government is only the most recent example of this reality. It comes against the backdrop of sequestration (which cuts spending without regard to its economic consequences and fails to protect investment in the physical and human capital needed to make this country competitive over the long term) and the pending vote to raise the debt ceiling, the failure of which to pass would push interest rates higher, causing both economic growth and markets to plummet.

Some observers have noted the dangers posed to U.S. security by the shutdown, citing the furlough of federal employees who provide intelligence that helps keep us safe. This is true, but the consequences of what is going on (and not going on) within Congress and between Congress and the White House threaten U.S. national security in other, even more significant ways.

Foreign policy and a country’s reputation are as much about what it is as what it does. This country sacrificed an enormous amount in both lives and treasure in trying to spread democracy to the greater Middle East. One can argue the wisdom of having tried to do so, but what cannot be argued is that we are now discrediting democracy by shutting down our own government. The appeal of the American economic model took a major hit from the events of 2008; now we are doing the same to our political model. No one should be surprised when official entreaties to Egyptians go ignored, or when elites in China and other authoritarian societies conclude that their approach, for all its flaws, is still preferable to ours.

Even more dangerous is the likelihood that political disorder here at home will lead to political disorder abroad. The most important currency for a great power is to be reliable and predictable. Friends and allies count on it, as it is their principal source of security. Actual and would-be foes also need to take U.S. capacities and commitments into account, as they know that certain actions on their part will trigger a U.S. response, possibly military retaliation. In return, the United States derives influence and a more stable world.

America’s reputation for reliability was already suffering before the shutdown, in large part because of President Obama’s uncertain handling of the Syria crisis. The eleventh-hour decision to ask Congress for the authority to carry out limited military strikes against a Syrian government that had used chemical weapons was a source of dismay even to those who questioned the wisdom of the strikes themselves – especially as most observers judged this Congress would not support such Obama’s request.

Now comes the cancellation of the president’s trip to Asia, making a mockery of the “pivot” or rebalancing to that part of the world and away from the Middle East, which was the big strategic theme of Obama’s foreign policy. The result is that small countries in the region are more likely to acquiesce to Chinese demands, while stronger countries, such as Japan, are more likely to take it upon themselves to stand up to China. One can hear the tectonic plates shifting in a part of the world destined to shape much of the trajectory of the 21st century.

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, uncertainty about U.S. behavior has led a number of longstanding partners to discount U.S. preferences and simply conduct their own foreign policy. One sees this in Saudi policy toward Egypt and Syria — and we could well see more of it in Israel’s policy toward Iran.

Speaking of Iran, it is unclear that Obama could persuade Congress to go along with any easing of sanctions, sure to be a necessary part of any deal limiting Iran’s nuclear program. The same holds for trade policy: Even if the U.S. trade representative manages to conclude negotiations with his Asian counterparts, no one can predict with confidence that an increasingly isolationist Congress would go along.

So where will divisions inside the Beltway lead us in the world outside? The short answer is that American political dysfunction is hastening the emergence of a post-American world. It is not that the primacy of the United States will come to be replaced by anyone else – no other country has the capacity or habits to take on such a role – but rather that this world will be one defined by growing disarray. A failure of governance in the United States is leading to a failure of governance in the world.

Americans are kidding themselves if they think they can insulate themselves from such a world. Globalization will visit us, whether we like it or not, whether we are ready or not.

So Americans should see the government shutdown and what it represents for what it is: a threat to this country’s national security. Those who oppose Obamacare should try to amend or repeal it thorough normal legislative processes; failing that, they should try to elect those who are like-minded. In the meantime, the government must open, including ensuring that the United States meets its obligations, financial and otherwise. If this requires the White House and the Congress meeting halfway, so be it. It is time to put country before party and politics.

Richard Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Foreign Policy Begins at Home: The Case for Putting America’s House in Order.