Roundup: Media's Take

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Romney’s Air Kiss to Bill Clinton

E.J. Dionne, Jr. is a columnist for the Washington Post. Mitt Romney was against Bill Clinton before he was for him. There was Romney, campaigning Tuesday in Iowa, praising the nation’s previous Democratic president and casting him as far superior to the current incumbent.... So you might assume that Romney likes Clinton. But that would be wrong. Scrambling during the GOP primaries this year to explain why he had voted in the 1992 Massachusetts Democratic presidential primary for the late Sen. Paul Tsongas, Romney invoked that old GOP standby: Clinton hatred. “In my state of Massachusetts, you could register as an independent and go vote in [whichever] primary happens to be very interesting,” Romney averred. “And any chance I got to vote against Bill Clinton or Ted Kennedy, I took.”...  

Digby: Bully Pulpit for the Ages

Digby is the pen name of blogger Heather Parton.Scott Lemiuex has an interesting post up today talking about the fact that LBJ got his agenda through congress with legislative skill rather than the bully pulpit. I have no idea if he was thinking of this post of mine when he wrote it, probably not, but it made me realize that it's probably important to distinguish what it is I mean when I talk about the bully pulpit.It's not about bullying, for one. I know that Lemieux knows this but it occurs to me that some people might think it means the president shaking his fist and telling everyone how it's going to be. So no, it's not that.And I'm fairly sure that most people don't think it's something that takes the place of sharp legislative strategy. Indeed, the people who are least likely to be persuaded by Presidential speeches are legislators. It's just part of the business to them.So, what is it exactly? Wikipedia defines it like this:

David E. Sanger: Is There a Romney Doctrine?

David E. Sanger is the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times and author of the forthcoming “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power.”DURING the Republican primary debates in January, when Mitt Romney was still trying to outmaneuver the challengers who were questioning his conservative bona fides, he made a declaration about Afghanistan that led a faction of his foreign policy advisers to shake their heads in wonderment.

Gordon Crovitz: From Nuremberg to Guantanamo

Gordon Crovitz is a media and information industry advisor and executive, including former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, executive vice president of Dow Jones and president of its Consumer Media Group. In 2008, the mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and his four co-defendants said they wanted to plead guilty and requested to be executed. They bragged about killing 2,976 people at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, so the only question now is whether the world will get a trial that accomplishes enough to justify delaying their wish to be executed. The first step toward a trial began earlier this month at a chaotic arraignment by the military commission in Guantanamo Bay. Those who hoped these proceedings would remind the world of the deeds and character of the terrorists got their wish—though not in the way the legal system intended. The arraignment process, which usually takes a few minutes, became a 13-hour drama. One defendant refused to attend, so he was restrained and carried in on a chair. All the defendants refused headsets, so the judge used loudspeakers to ensure they heard the Arabic translation of the capital charges against them for murder and hijacking.

Paul Krugman: Why We Regulate

Paul Krugman is a Princeton economist and an op-ed columnist for the NYT....Why, exactly, are banks special? Because history tells us that banking is and always has been subject to occasional destructive “panics,” which can wreak havoc with the economy as a whole. ... Gilded Age America — a land with minimal government and no Fed — was subject to panics roughly once every six years. And some of these panics inflicted major economic losses.So what can be done? In the 1930s, after the mother of all banking panics, we arrived at a workable solution, involving both guarantees and oversight. On one side, the scope for panic was limited via government-backed deposit insurance; on the other, banks were subject to regulations intended to keep them from abusing the privileged status they derived from deposit insurance, which is in effect a government guarantee of their debts.....This system gave us half a century of relative financial stability. Eventually, however, the lessons of history were forgotten. New forms of banking without government guarantees proliferated, while both conventional and newfangled banks were allowed to take on ever-greater risks. Sure enough, we eventually suffered the 21st-century version of a Gilded Age banking panic, with terrible consequences....

Josh Rogin: Chuck Hagel ... Reagan Wouldn't Identify With Today's GOP

Josh Rogin reports on national security and foreign policy from the Pentagon to Foggy Bottom, the White House to Embassy Row, for The Cable. The Republican Party has drifted so far to the right and become so partisan in recent years that President Ronald Reagan wouldn't even want to be a part of it, former Nebraska GOP senator Chuck Hagel told The Cable. "Reagan would be stunned by the party today," Hagel said in a long interview in his office at Georgetown University, where he now teaches. He also serves as co-chair of President Barack Obama's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Reagan wanted to do away with nuclear weapons, raised taxes, made deals with congressional Democrats, sought compromises and consensus to fix problems, and surrounded himself with moderates as well as Republican hard-liners, Hagel noted. None of that is characterized by the current GOP leadership, he said. In his eyes, the rise of the Tea Party and the influx of new GOP lawmakers in Congress have driven the party away from common sense and consensus-based solutions... 

Mustafa Akyol: Can Islamists Be Liberals?

Mustafa Akyol, a Turkish journalist, is the author of “Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty.”FOR years, foreign policy discussions have focused on the question of whether Islam is compatible with democracy. But this is becoming passé. In Tunisia and Egypt, Islamists, who were long perceived as opponents of the democratic system, are now promoting and joyfully participating in it. Even the ultra-Orthodox Salafis now have deputies sitting in the Egyptian Parliament, thanks to the ballots that they, until very recently, denounced as heresy....But there is another reason for concern: What if elected Islamist parties impose laws that curb individual freedoms — like banning alcohol or executing converts — all with popular support? What if democracy does not serve liberty?

Michael Barone: Presidential Scenarios ... Will 2012 Be Like 2000, 1988, Or 1964?

Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner. Last week, I wrote about the standings in the presidential race and said it looked like a long, hard slog through about a dozen clearly identified target states, much like the contests in 2000 and 2004. Call that the 2000/2004 long, hard slog scenario. But I also said there were other possible scenarios. I can think of three. The 1964/1972 scenario: Challenger disqualifies himself. Barry Goldwater and George McGovern were idealistic, intelligent senators who took positions on issues that made them unacceptable to most voters in years favorable to incumbents. This could happen to Mitt Romney this year...

Ed Kilgore: Making Calculations, Making History

Ed Kilgore is a contributing writer to the Washington Monthly. He is is managing editor for The Democratic Strategist, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and a Special Correspondent for The New Republic.One of the truly interesting things about the reaction to the president’s announcement of support for same-sex marriage (sorry if it annoys anyone that I’m writing about this yet again, but it is the dominant story of this week, affecting nearly every other political “story”), particularly among those who were pleased with it, is the constant alteration between narratives emphasizing its highly tactical and perhaps even accidental nature, and narratives placing it as extraordinarily important—even magnificent—from the perspective of history. This is particularly noticeable among LGBT writers, who often seem to pause in the midst of analyzing the event dispassionately or even cynically, to marvel at how it has affected them....

Jonathan Rauch: Why Gay Rights May Be President Obama’s Biggest Legacy

Jonathan Rauch is a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution and author of Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America....Obama’s gay-marriage conversion smacks of conviction, not convenience. Waiting until after the election would have been politically safer, but if Obama loses in November, as he knows he might, a historic opportunity to speak out for justice could have slipped away. President Clinton has said he regrets having signed the Defense of Marriage Act. Obama seems to have decided not to repeat the error.“We shall overcome,” LBJ said in March of 1965, shortly after his reelection. When he said those words, he knew he was writing himself into the history books. But he also knew he would probably be writing off the South. There’s no doubt that Obama is a more cautious politician than Johnson: If he thought helping gays would have cost him the election, he wouldn’t have done it—and gays wouldn’t have wanted him to. And the political risk he is taking is not of the same magnitude as LBJ’s. The country has come far enough on marriage equality to make a stand on principle affordable. African-American equality was unique in its moral importance and political voltage, so Johnson’s gesture continues to stand as unique, and, we must hope, always will.

Natalie Bakopoulos: Is Greece Going Back to the Colonels?

Natalie Bakopoulos is the author of the novel “The Green Shore.”FORTY-FIVE years ago, on April 21, 1967, a right-wing group of colonels seized power in Greece. Tanks rolled into the center of Athens; politicians, artists and journalists were arrested; and the ensuing military dictatorship lasted for seven years.Decades after the restoration of democracy, we are again hearing echoes of the junta and its aftermath. Nationalistic slogans are uttered by right and left. The rising phoenix — the colonels’ emblem — has been featured on some candidate posters for the far-right-wing party Golden Dawn, and its leader, Nikos Michaloliakos, has glorified the period. It would be easy to dismiss him as a fringe voice were it not for the fact that his party gained parliamentary representation in last weekend’s elections for the first time. It gathered votes from the traditional supporters of the junta and the political right, but it was also the second most popular party among young voters.

Husain Haqqani: How Pakistan Lets Terrorism Fester

Husain Haqqani, a professor at Boston University, was Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States from 2008 to 2011.ON the anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death last week, Pakistan was the only Muslim country in which hundreds of demonstrators gathered to show solidarity with the dead terrorist figurehead.

Peter B. Doran and P. Bracy Bersnak: Europe's Crisis ... A Roadmap From the Past

Peter B. Doran is senior policy analyst at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and P. Bracy Bersnak is assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and Economics at Christendom College. These are rough days for the European Union (EU). What began as a sovereign debt crisis has now metastasized into a political debacle for the leaders left holding the bag. Nicolas Sarkozy's electoral defeat in France, the ouster of an austerity-minded government in Greece; and last month's collapse of the governing coalition in the Netherlands are all symptoms of a deeper problem for Europe: bloated governments are hard to tame, even when there is no money left to pay for them. This is bad news for Europe. But the political tumult on the continent is also a stunning vindication of the post-War thinkers who anticipated this outcome. These individuals, men like Friedrich von Hayek and Wilhelm Röpke, would become founding intellectual fathers behind the modern conservative movement in Europe and the United States. Even today, their foresight provides a defining roadmap for navigating away from Europe's current crisis and offers a chilling warning to the United States about repeating the same mistakes. Much like the debt crisis of our own time, the dimensions of Europe's post-War reconstruction were staggering.

Dan Whitman: At the Feet of the Master

Dan Whitman teaches Foreign Policy at the Washington Semester Program, American University. As Public Diplomacy officer in USIA and the Department of State for more than 25 years, he drafted and edited speeches for U.S. ambassadors in Denmark, Spain, South Africa, Cameroon, Haiti, and Guinea-Conakry. A senior Foreign Service Officer, he retired in 2009 from the Bureau of African Affairs, U.S. Department of State.Ten of us had Vernon Walters to ourselves, in a location in Scandinavia. Even he never predicted exactly what would happen later that year, but in 1989 he brought us fresh news of subtle changes affecting East-West relations. He’d been sent as President Reagan’s ambassador to something called the Federal Republic of Germany, which no longer exists.He was bewilderingly smart. He’d never been to college. He spoke perfect French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, and passable German. Everyone who ever met him had a Walters story. He was “General,” or “Ambassador,” depending on where he was at the time.

Garrett Epps: Bring On Less Democracy

Garrett Epps is the legal affairs editor of The American Prospect. He is a former reporter for The Washington Post and a professor of law at the University of Baltimore. His most recent book is Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post-Civil War America.Is anybody else as depressed as I am about the next four years? No matter who wins, we face the prospect of bitterly divided government, savage partisanship in Congress, and increasing executive desperation....The Framers did not foresee the rise of a two-party system. As a result, the Constitution (unlike most twentieth-century constitutions) makes no provisions for party participation in government, or party accountability in policy. But their vision of disinterested, dispassionate demigods soberly debating the public good barely survived the Washington administration; the Founding generation itself descended into partisan warfare that compares in vitriol with what we face today. No amount of wishing will make party polarization go away—as Senator Richard Lugar learned this week. And amending the Constitution to tie parties more closely to responsibility would be a chancy and dangerous process....

Lee Siegel: Death of a Salesman’s Dreams

Lee Siegel is the author, most recently, of “Harvard Is Burning.”ARTHUR MILLER’s “Death of a Salesman,” now on Broadway in a Tony-nominated revival — and starring a heart-shattering Philip Seymour Hoffman as a Willy Loman for the ages — is the most devastating portrait of punctured middle-class dreams in our national literature. Yet as I sat through a recent performance, I wondered why the play was revived at all.While “Death of a Salesman” has consolidated its prestige as an exposure of middle-class delusions, the American middle class — as a social reality and a set of admirable values — has nearly ceased to exist.

Richard Cohen: Obama Should Embrace LBJ's Lessons

Richard Cohen writes a weekly political column that appears on Tuesdays . Barack Obama has read and been influenced by Robert A. Caro’s classic biography of Robert Moses, “The Power Broker.” From the evidence, it is far from clear, though, that the president has read Caro’s other books, the latest being the fourth installment of his massive Lyndon B. Johnson biography — “The Passage of Power.” He should immediately read it. It will teach him how to be president. Maybe I should have written that it will teach him how to be a better president. Where Johnson was strong and unparalleled — personal relationships with much of Washington — Obama is frighteningly weak. Last week I asked a member of the Senate if he knows of anyone who really knows Obama. He said he does not. Washington is thick with stories about Obama’s insularity and distance.

Rishawn Biddle: Mitt W. Bush ... For Better or Worse, Romney Subscribes to Bush's Education Policies

Rishawn Biddle the editor of Dropout Nation, is co-author of A Byte at the Apple: Rethinking Education Data for the Post-NCLB Era.

Matthew Shaffer: What’s Wrong with Argentina?

Matthew Shaffer lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.When President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner initiated the nationalization and expropriation of the Argentine assets of YPF, an oil company owned mostly by Spanish interests, it came as no surprise to anyone who has visited the country recently or watched it closely. The theft, a consistent manifestation of the Kirchner personality and the mercurial character of the Argentine political class, was more a return to business as usual for the country than a shock — and goes a long way toward explaining why Argentina is poor.

Doug Bandow: North Korea: The Gulag State

Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and the Senior Fellow in International Religious Persecution at the Institute on Religion and Public Policy. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Beyond Good Intentions: A Biblical View of Politics (Crossway).North Korea is, to put it mildly, a "problem." The so-called Democratic People's Republic of Korea devotes much of its time to threatening other nations. Pyongyang spends money that it doesn't have on nuclear weapons, missiles, and bizarrely choreographed and synchronized propaganda ceremonies. It has pioneered a system of monarchical communism, passing power from one idiot son to another.Worse, at least for the North Korean People, the DPRK has created a genuine gulag state, with a smaller but still murderous "gulag archipelago," as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously called Joseph Stalin's creation. The most important political challenge facing Washington remains the North's nuclear program. But the ultimate objective is to relax Pyongyang's grip over the suffering population.That the DPRK is repressive is hardly news. However, it is difficult for anyone in the West to imagine the full extent of repression in the North....