After President Obama’s moving UN General Assembly speech that started with a story of who US Ambassador Christopher Stevens had been in terms of his life’s passion for the Middle East and North Africa, the Romney camp issued a statementfrom former Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky:

In his speech, President Obama listed the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process, Syria, and Iran as major challenges facing the international community. But those are three vital issues on which President Obama has unfortunately made no progress. The Peace Process is at a standstill, tens of thousands have been killed in Syria with Assad still in power, and Iran is hurtling toward nuclear weapons capability.

In his 2009 speech to the U.N. General Assembly, President Obama called for progress on the Peace Process and for an end to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Three years later, he’s failed to deliver. As has too often been the case with President Obama, the rhetoric doesn’t match the policy.

The President and his national security team do deserve criticism for how some of these portfolios have been managed. After all, Israel/Palestine had been the first major national security agenda item the President put his power and credibility behind, appointing former Senator George Mitchell to be his Envoy in seeking to secure real Middle East peace.

In a compelling but bleak New York Times assessment titled “Seven Lean Years of Peacemaking” by my New America Foundation colleague Daniel Levy, the negative results scream out. Levy writes:

One thing is clear: The years from 2005 to 2012 have been seven decidedly lean ones for peacemaking and withdrawal and seven gluttonously fat ones for entrenching Israel’s occupation and settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In these areas, almost 94,000 new settlers have been added since 2005, some settler outposts have been legalized and thousands of Palestinians have been displaced.

Obama should only get the blame for the 2009-2012 part of this portfolio — but the failure to get Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on to a credible peace track with Palestinians has enormous strategic consequences for the country.

Dobriansky tells only part of the story as it was in both 2009 and 2010 that President Obama committed substantial portions of his UN General Assembly addresses to the problems of Palestine and Israel. In 2010, he pointedly criticized the unwillingness of the parties to come together and pushed George Mitchell and others on his team to double down and get a deal done. Obviously, with the resignations of both Senator Mitchell and Dennis Ross who had been Obama’s Middle East wrangler on his National Security Team (both of whom had often worked at cross-purposes), ended Obama’s efforts thus far on securing Middle East peace.

These results deserve both to be highlighted and criticized — so thanks to Ambassador Dobriansky.

That said, would her candidate Mitt Romney do any better?

Yesterday we were given what were perhaps some of the most thoughtful comments yet expressed by Governor Romney on the turmoil in the Middle East and what can be done in response. While his comments were not Palestine-specific and this may be the first time I have heard Romney address foreign policy and not make a single mention of Israel, his broad survey of the Middle East region and his assessment of the youth cover Palestine.

Romney makes the sensible point that jobs matter, that economics is a major driver of both hope and desperation.

Work has to be at the heart of our efforts to help people build economies that can create jobs, young and old alike. Work builds self-esteem. It transforms minds from fantasy and fanaticism to reality and grounding. Work does not long tolerate corruption nor will it quietly endure the brazen theft by government of the product of hard-working men and women. To foster work and enterprise in the Middle East and other developing countries I will initiate something I will call Prosperity Pacts, working with the private sector the program will identify the barriers to investment and trade and entrepreneurship and entrepreneurialism in developing nations. And, in exchange for removing those barriers and opening their markets to U.S. investment and trade, developing nations will receive U.S. assistance packages focused on developing the institutions of liberty, the rule of law, and property rights …. The aim of a much larger share of our aid must be the promotion of work, and the fostering of free enterprise. Nothing we can do as a nation will change lives and nations more effectively and permanently than sharing the insight that lies at the foundation of America’s own economy, and that is that free people pursuing happiness in their own ways, build a strong and prosperous nation.

Whether Romney is right or not, his jobs talk and the notion of “Prosperity Pacts” are a step ahead of the rhetoric that typecasts instability in the Middle East as a function of Islamic culture and fanaticism. And the fact is that the Obama administration’s policy towards places like Egypt and Palestine, Tunisia, and Libya is to try to lay groundwork for investment, aid, and jobs.

So, Romney and the Obama administration actually are on similar tracks. But the scale of what is needed in the region is staggering — and small US programs or bland talk about job creation by the GOP presidential challenger doesn’t come near to the level of economic course correction the region needs.

The more disconcerting gap between rhetoric and action is not on Obama’s docket, however, but on Romney’s.

What it not Mitt Romney who said at a fundraiser regarding Israel-Palestine peace, “this is going to remain an unresolved problem.”

As Bill Clinton said during his Democratic National Convention speech, “it takes some brass to criticize the President for something you have done yourself.” In this case, it’s out of place to take Obama down a notch on Israel-Palestine when your own candidate has no intention of trying to resolve the geostrategically significant ulcer.

And even more disconcerting were Romney’s comments in Jerusalem about “culture” being the dividing line between the economic performance of Israel vs. Palestine. As reported by Ashley Parker and Richard A. Oppel Jr., Romney said:

“Culture makes all the difference,” Mr. Romney said. “And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things.”

He added, “As you come here and you see the G.D.P. per capita, for instance, in Israel, which is about $21,000, and compare that with the G.D.P. per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality. And that is also between other countries that are near or next to each other. Chile and Ecuador, Mexico and the United States.”

Notwithstanding Romney’s significant errors on the GDP gap between Israel and Palestine, it’s outrageous to assess Palestine’s economic potential without considering that all they have done has been done under Occupation, with barriers to travel and commerce embedded throughout their territory which Israel occupies and dominates, often brutally.

It’s easy to talk about jobs and “Prosperity Pacts”, but tougher to put them into motion in addressing the economic needs of a growing MENA youth bulge that needed a massive number of jobs yesterday.

To make this interesting, I dare Mitt Romney to test his thesis personally in the way that former World Bank President James Wolfensohn did. Wolfensohn invested his own money in an effort to get Palestinian-grown strawberries to markets in Europe and worked out deals with the Israelis and established a greenhouse project and processing infrastructure at Israel’s Karni Crossing. To make a long and sad story short, even the great James Wolfensohn failed to overcome Israeli arbitrariness in what it allowed and didn’t in terms of earnest Palestine commerce with the rest of the world.

Let’s see if Mitt Romney can devote a small bit of his fortune to getting a business up and running in Palestine. Perhaps he could meet with his new employees and hear what they have to do to connect with their families and what humiliations they go through trying to get their kids to school or trying to take products to market.

Perhaps Romney would succeed in ways others in Palestine have not, but until then, it seems that, as Dobriansky framed it, the gap between rhetoric and results on the Romney vision for the region seems insurmountable.

– Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic, where this post first appeared. Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons

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Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan has accomplished something quite important. At both conventions, in the corner rooms of Charlotte and Tampa organized by media groups and political activist outfits, serious discussions unfolded about the real state of the economy and the different policy approaches Americans needed to consider.

Paul Ryan is the most ideologically severe vice-presidential candidate in a century, a commentator said at a National Journal/Atlantic economic policy dinner done on a not-for-attribution basis. But nearly everyone credits his selection with igniting a debate about tough choices on the economy that politicians and Presidents have been ducking for decades. The clear consensus emerging out of Tampa’s GOP Convention and the DNC’s in Charlotte is that there is a real choice being offered to Americans. The first option is “rigorous austerity” that could even further gut America’s middle class and take the fallen standard of living to new lows. The second is a limited Keynesian approach that tries to reform while slashing spending.

There are also a couple of themes that aren’t getting much air time but which deserve to be kicked around.

One of these, a charge leveled by Democrats about themselves, is that the Democrats have really screwed up–twice. The argument goes like this: Back in the 90s while the economy was expanding, the IT bubble was bubbling, and capital gains churning was filling federal and state coffers, Clinton–guided primarily by his economic mentor and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin–helped ignite a financial-sector privileged wealth production machine that didn’t take into account the long-term consequences of American manufacturing decamping to foreign shores.

In other words, Clinton pushed the Uruguay Round of GATT, set up China’s membership in the WTO, and removed the important barriers that divided retail banking from securities trading. Clinton was highly influenced by the economic policy practitioners on his team who carried with them all of the biases of neoliberal economics. Those who focused on the importance of manufacturing, of the role of government in seeing to the parts of the economic environment markets would not sustain, the importance of high-wage job creation, were pushed aside.

This is also exactly what happened during the first two years of the Obama administration, where those of a neoliberal persuasion prevailed over those who wanted to concentrate first on a serious jobs and infrastructure program.

That discussion came up frequently in the meetings in Charlotte. Arianna Huffington even held a “shadow convention” (as she also did in Tampa) on the subject of what is really working and what not in job creation in the United States. She believes that the Democrats on the whole are not having a serious debate about the jobs crisis today and have not taken responsibility for their own mistakes in favoring banks’ survival over that of families losing their homes and jobs on a massive scale.

To be fair to President Obama, he inherited skyrocketing unemployment, collapsing global economy when he moved into the White House, and did take steps that stopped further, probably catastrophic implosion. He called on people like Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner in part because the world respected them and Obama needed to stop a global confidence crisis that was aggravating underlying economic instability.

But Obama allowed voices like Austan Goolsbee, Jared Bernstein, and Paul Volcker to be sidelined, while really technical financial and economic geniuses like George Soros never got in the door. Obama allowed the neoliberal, macroeconomic financial-sector-über-alles types to prevail over the micro-economic jobs, housing, and manufacturing voices.

Obama has shifted now and is pushing a jobs and infrastructure program that many Dems I spoke to in Charlotte say he should have led with in his administration. Ironically, the financial sector crowd that Obama bailed out are giving donations in droves to Mitt Romney, while many in the small donor base that previously supported Obama have lost their jobs and their homes and their willingness to send in $3.00 for a chance to play basketball or have dinner with the President.

Another of the issues being kicked around is whether Americans are indeed worse off or are better off than they were four years ago.

At the National Journal/Atlantic dinner mentioned above, a prominent pollster said that there is no doubt Americans are better off. In his view, the global economy was going over a cliff, the mounting job losses were staggering, and America was facing a genuine potential depression. He said that most today, however dissatisfied with the status quo, know that jobs are being slowly created, that the recovery is really happening albeit slowly, and that the economy is heading generally in the right direction.

National Journal’s Jim Tankersley, however, disputes that assessment in a powerful piece that should be read in full. In the opening clip, he writes:

The middle class in America today is not better off than it was four years ago, not better off than it was at the end of the Great Recession in 2009, not even better off than when President Clinton left office in 2001.

This is the truth that Democrats must confront as they anchor their national convention theme in Charlotte on vows of support for American workers: The middle class has been declining for more than a decade, including through the Obama recovery.

Inflation-adjusted median income fell by 2.3 percent in 2010 (the last year for which official statistics are available) and dipped below $50,000 per year for the first time since 1996, the Census Bureau reports. Real median weekly wages last quarter were lower than at the same time in 2002–and down 1.5 percent from the second quarter of 2010.

Ouch. Tanerksley is right. Americans are down and out, and on whole more down and out than when Obama came in, even if the original downward momentum wasn’t the president’s fault.

One of the ironies of the two conventions was to watch wealthy GOP financiers and their representatives pound the table and lecture at the podium in Tampa that America was not better off than it was four years ago — though they were personally much richer. In Charlotte, those who really were worse off were declaring that they weren’t. Bill Clinton had them yelling that they were — after all — much better off than four years ago. Orwellian.

Finally, another topic not much discussed is one that former bank CEO and credit expert Richard Vague and I have been kicking around and which I have previously written about (and was referenced in this interesting Financial Times piece by Edward Luce).

The debate between Paul Ryan & Co. with the Obama/Biden led crowd on the levels of government debt reduction necessary for a healthy economy that will grow is a false one. Vague and I show in this report that the deleveraging in the private sector in the US since the economic collapse of 2008-2009 has been minor and that Americans are re-leveraging again. In other words, private debt loads–which were not on the whole written down to reflect real values–are again piling on debt.

The real culprit therefore is not government spending, but the level of private debt that banks and financial houses should have been writing down to real values. The fact that they have not been writing it down limits the capacity of the US economy to return anytime soon to robust growth.

I wasn’t expecting much in terms of substance from the two conventions, but it needs to be noted that in Charlotte and Tampa, a serious discussion about what constitutes smart economic policy was being had.

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan may or may not win in November, but the spark that they initiated about economic policy challenges is healthy for the nation.

– Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic, where this post first appeared. Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons

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Mitt Romney has just made the same mistake John McCain made in picking a vice presidential candidate that folks will talk more about than they will talk about the top of the ticket. Romney has flip-flopped on so many issues, and seems so inchoate in his core views, that the clarity of running mate Paul Ryan will now define him.

Conversely, what has always been clear about the Obama-Biden ticket is that Obama defines in people’s minds what the ticket stands for. What is less recognized but important is that Vice President Joe Biden is the one who has built out the policy parameters of the president’s jobs and infrastructure bill, which will be the key weapon that Obama uses against the Romney-Ryan team.

The vice-presidential debate on October 11 at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, will likely be the most important of the ticket-vs.-ticket debates. This is because the divide between Paul Ryan’s political agenda, as defined by his budget, and the smart investment strategy that Joe Biden and his former economic adviser Jared Bernstein have been pushing, will be starker than any of the issues that Obama and Romney will debate.

The media are now saturated with good analyses of how Ryan’s budget would sculpt America’s budgetary future. The Washington Post‘s Brad Plumer has a particularly nice rundown showing what the consequences of the Ryan budget would be: raising $2.2 trillion less in taxes, and spending $5.3 trillion less, over 10 years than the Obama budget. To be brief, federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid would be slashed — but as Plumer points out, Ryan would cut income-security programs for the poor by 16 percent, transportation expenses and investment by 25 percent, spending on science and technology by 6 percent, and investment in education, training, and other social services by 33 percent.

At the same time, Ryan wants to reduce the Obama Administration’s cuts to defense spending growth and, along with Romney, wants to boost defense spending, perhaps pegging defense spending to a specific percentage of GDP regardless of rising or falling threats. Romney has suggested a peg of 4 percent of GDP, which would boost defense spending above current levels by another $100 billion, according to Time‘s Mark Thompson.

Back to the incumbents in the White House. One of the tensions around the president as economic policy proposals were being discussed in 2009 was a macro-economic, financial-sector revitalization track, which economic adviser Lawrence Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner advocated, and a package of combined initiatives including new regulations and micro-economic smart investments in key infrastructure projects advocated by Joe Biden’s team, particularly Jared Bernstein as well as former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker and Obama campaign economic policy adviser Austan Goolsbee.

Early in the Obama Administration, the president favored the financial sector over infrastructure, housing, and other sectors where investments could create robust long-term returns for the economy. The auto sector and some of the president’s investments in renewable energy projects are notable and important exceptions. On the whole, however, Obama and his team resuscitated a financial sector with only minor regulatory adjustments and, for the most part, allowed the failed management of bailed-out banks and financial houses to remain in place.

Within a year of Obama’s financial-sector bailout, more than 5,000 employees at bailed-out firms were receiving bonuses of more than $1 million. While I’m sure that some of these folks have donated to Obama and the Democratic Party, one can assume that a majority of those whom Obama saved in the financial sector are now fueling Romney’s fundraising juggernaut.

Three years into his administration, the president realized that the 2011 “Summer of Recovery” was a bust. The policy path that his macro-economic-focused team had charted was not generating the jobs recovery his political future or the nation needed.

So the president shifted toward a jobs-and-infrastructure set of proposals that Bernstein had taken the lead in crafting, and which built on job-generating, infrastructure-investment proposals pushed by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the New America Foundation (disclosure: I’m a senior fellow there).

His new course was the one Joe Biden had been advocating since the beginning of the administration — policies designed to keep people in their homes and working, focused on smart investments in nationally vital infrastructure projects that would deliver returns for generations. Those policies would also incrementally shift the economy away from the financial sector and toward a more balanced system that placed a premium on science and technology, inbound investment, and high-wage infrastructure platforms that the private sector alone could not produce.

Outside of economic policy, there have been a number of challenges — the war in Afghanistan, nuclear materials management and WMD proliferation, stabilizing Iraq’s political convulsions, START ratification, even gay marriage — where Biden and his team quietly defined the position Obama either adopted or evolved toward.

The contrast with the Republican ticket couldn’t be clearer. Whereas the Obama-Biden plan calls for smart investments in technology, science, and infrastructure, Romney and Ryan slash spending. Whereas Obama and Biden believe that the future of the country can’t be improved without deeper investments in education and educational reform, Romney and Ryan endorse massive slashes to education budgets.

I happened to run into Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren Sunday and asked her views on the Ryan budget — and she made a point quite similar to one I had written a while back: that the Ryan budget is a plan that forfeits the future and global leadership to China.

In August 2012, Warren lamented the pathetically low level of investment America makes in its own infrastructure compared China. Huffington Post‘s Ryan Grim wrote about Warren’s comments and Senator Scott Brown‘s lame response:

Republican Scott Brown slammed his Democratic rival for U.S. Senate on Friday, accusing Elizabeth Warren of “comparing us to China.” Warren, in a campaign ad and on the trail, noted that China spends 9 percent of its GDP on infrastructure investment, while the United States spends less than 2.5 percent.

“China is making the investments in roads and bridges and communications that will give a real competitive advantage to China’s businesses. America’s businesses deserve the same,” she said.

Warren told me yesterday that Ryan’s plan would cut $500 billion over 10 years from investments in science and technology support and basic research as well as education and training programs. She is right. Ryan’s plan, which now defines the Romney-Ryan GOP ticket, outlines a path to a much dumber America. It forfeits the future to nations like China, India, Brazil, and Turkey, which are making massive investments in educating their youth, training their middle-aged work forces, building new major infrastructure projects, and supporting science and technology advancements. Comparing America to China is vital if America wants to compete. Senator Brown gets this wrong, as does the Paul Ryan budget.

Nobel Laureate in Physics Arno Penzias once said that the Internet would make smart people smarter and dumb people dumber. The internet offers an echo chamber and a bigger footprint to any group’s views, smart or dumb.

America has budget challenges and these need to be met, but to foresake investment in the future assures a dumber future for the nation. This is what is at stake, and the debate between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan is the vital exchange that Americans must hear in deciding between a course that builds on America’s innovation strengths or one that handicaps the competitiveness of the country and delivers a much lower quality of life and hope for advancement for American citizens.

– Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic, where this post first appeared. Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons

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Romney’s Horse Ballet Deduction

Margaret Carlson gets the quote of the week for her Bloomberg commentary on Mitt Romney’s wealth blind spotsand not getting that dressage may not be the kind of business tax deduction he wants a lot of economically-strapped political independents to read about.

Dressage, or ‘horse ballet’, are not part of my normal lexicon — so wanted to share the nice write-up Wikipedia provides for those, who like me, may not be wired in to the sport:

Dressage — a French term, most commonly translated to mean “training” — is a competitive equestrian sport, defined by the International Equestrian Federation as “the highest expression of horse training,” where “horse and rider are expected to perform from memory a series of predetermined movements”[1] Competitions are held at all levels from amateur to the World Equestrian Games. Its fundamental purpose is to develop, through standardized progressive training methods, a horse’s natural athletic ability and willingness to perform, thereby maximizing its potential as a riding horse. At the peak of a dressage horse’s gymnastic development, the horse will respond smoothly to a skilled rider’s minimal aids. The rider will be relaxed and appear effort-free while the horse willingly performs the requested movement. Dressage is occasionally referred to as “Horse Ballet”.

Now for the zinger quote from Margaret Carlson whose full article you should read:

A presidential candidate who takes a huge tax deduction for such an elitist sport exhibits a cluelessness bordering on contempt. Romney has argued that dressage helps his wife’s multiple sclerosis. That’s all to the good, but dressage is to therapeutic horseback riding as caviar is to Spam.

Emphasis added.

– Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic, where this post first appeared. Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons

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Official White House Photo/Pete Souza

Vice President Joe Biden never apologized to President Obama for getting a “bit over his skis” in endorsing gay marriage before the president did — and according to very senior White House sources, Obama didn’t ask for or want an apology from Biden.

But google “Joe Biden”, “apology”, and “gay”. On May 10, 2012 the official White House position — as fed to the media — was that Joe Biden apologized to the president.

What did happen is that Obama White House staff and campaign advisers went nuts and angrily denounced Biden for triggering what they thought would be a gay marriage political nightmare after comments on a Sunday morning talk show. Jay Carney, spokesman for the president and former spokesman for Biden, was widely acknowledged to be an exception to the tension and was working hard to bridge the mutually angry camps.

The heat was so strong that Biden staff scrambled to construct a gesture, which was a falsehood, that Biden apologized to the president for getting ahead of him on gay stuff. Biden staff put out word that Biden apologized — but the truth of this matter is that never happened.

Or did it? Biden himself never said “sorry” to the president for his principled stand on the leading civil rights issue of the time. That would be a bit like Lyndon Johnson tucking it in and apologizing to JFK for being about nine steps ahead of the Kennedy clan on black civil rights in the country (which LBJ was).

However, when staff do something in the name of the principal for whom they work — the question is whether that constitutes truth or not. In political or financial scandals, one of the techniques that politicians frequently use is to blame the transgression on an aide working for the pol, arguing that the principal had no knowledge of the illegal act. However, when things are going smoothly and well, Senators and Congressmen count on their aides to generate legislative and political successes for which they can take credit in their own name.

Very little in the Congressional Record for that matter, that is the digest of all that officially transpires on the floor of the House of Representatives and Senate, actually happens. There are tributes, commendations, long speeches that read as if they were given and which appear in the record — but even a bleary-eyed replay of C-Span video will never yield the commentary being given.

Typically, a legislative assistant will write a speech on some topic for his boss, a senator or representative, let’s say on the subject of stopping Iran’s nuclear program. Then the legislative director will approve the speech, and it will be transmitted by the staff member down to the floor clerk for inclusion in the Congressional Record. The senator or House member, on most occasions, never sees the commentary that will appear under his or her name. The system works on trust and the subordinated credentialing of staff who are given the authority to speak, think, and write in the name of their employer.

But when it comes to communications between the president of the United States and the vice president — two people who meet regularly and privately and who have a ‘deal’ that Biden will be the last person in the room with Obama when major controversial issues, particularly of war and peace are discussed — the rules should be different, particularly when it comes to personal beefs or grievances between them.

After Biden made his comments saying that he was “absolutely comfortable” with gay marriage on NBC’s Meet the Press and a firestorm erupted over the gap between Biden’s gay-hugging humanity and Obama’s ‘evolving’ views on the matter, a senior White House official confided that Biden was one of the few people aware of the president’s thinking on the matter — and that what was at issue was not that Biden was out of sync with the president substantively but rather the political timing of the president’s announcement.

In my view, Biden said nothing to change or disrupt Obama’s position, which was then official White House policy — but anyone who knows Joe Biden and his complete, authentic affection for both straight and gay couples, married or not, knows that he held the views which he articulated. Similarly, Vice President Cheney was ahead of George W. Bush on gay marriage — arguing in contrast to Bush that states should govern the issue, not the federal government.

The good thing is that no matter how they got there, both Joe Biden and Barack Obama now publicly endorse gay marriage. This was not true — and was painfully apparent when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, introduced to standing ovation craziness by Sarah Jessica Parker at last year’s Human Rights Campaign Dinner, blasted by implication President Obama’s stance supporting civil unions over ‘marriage.’

But at another level, when the history of gay rights and the Obama administration is written and the president’s pivotal leadership on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is explored, along with the Obama team’s decision to abandon legal defense of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), and the president’s important endorsement of gay marriage, it will be contestable (and wrong) to include the vignette that Biden apologized to Obama for a principled and important civil rights view that Biden personally held.

What happened and can be written is that Biden’s staff apologized to Obama’s staff — and whether such fabricated truth is really truth is worthy of debate.

If he reads this or is pushed by the media or public on it again (think presidential debates) Obama should give a full-throated embrace of his vice president and his leadership on gay issues and should apologize for these staff theatrics that sullied Obama’s step forward.

Frankly, I applaud Obama’s gay marriage evolution, but when he should have looked BIG for the move — this apology kabuki backfired and made the president look smaller and more petty than he should have appeared at such a historic moment for his presidency and the nation.

– Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic, where this post first appeared. Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons

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David Ignatius reveals this morning that US Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter has fought hard and ultimately failed to maintain ultimate ‘country authority’ over the CIA’s drone attacks inside Pakistan.

Ignatius writes:

As America’s relationship with Pakistan has unraveled over the past 18 months, an important debate has been going on within the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad over the proper scope of CIA covert actions and their effect on diplomatic interests.

The principals in this policy debate have been Cameron Munter, the U.S. ambassador since October 2010, and several CIA station chiefs who served with him. The technical issue was whether the ambassador, as chief of mission, had the authority to veto CIA operations he thought would harm long-term relations. Munter appears to have lost this fight.

Munter is no ordinary campaign-contributing pal of Barack Obama and didn’t buy his perch in Islamabad like so many other US Ambassadors.

Munter is one of the few career foreign service officers who has stacked up respect not only from his State Department colleagues — but across other agencies and departments, particularly the Department of Defense for his pivotal work in securing Congressional approval of NATO expansion during the Clinton administration, and from the various intelligence agencies for his ‘smart power approach’ to trying to simultaneously win the hearts and minds of citizens in Pakistan while also understanding that some targets require deployed hard power.

According to Ignatius’ interesting report, Munter has fought the significant expansion of drone attacks, particularly when US-Pakistan relations are on the verge of catastrophic rupture.

Ignatius also reveals that CIA Director David Petraeus has often sided with Munter and his concern about an increasingly zealous drone targeting program — and that Petraeus and the chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, whose name is classified and is referred to as “Roger”, have had substantial disputes with each other over drone targeting and attacks.

The possible implications of this report on Munter’s frustration and political loss is that this punctuates a larger set of failures.

First, Hillary Clinton, in her launch of the QDDR (Quadrennial Diplomacy & Development Review), made a statement at the time that the Department of State was re-asserting itself as the “statutory lead” in America’s conflict situations abroad. This statement that she made at the launch of the QDDR was seen as part of a strategy to rebalance the powers between the military/intel part of America’s power equation with the diplomatic/economic elements of statecraft.

It seems that by allowing the drone-deployers to prevail over the diplomats, the Obama White House is pushing tactics over strategy. Some may debate this — and I welcome that debate — but a drone triumphalism seems to be dominating over other key strategic equities that the U.S. should be concerned about.

Secondly, the Petraeus revelations remind one a bit of the privileged, off the grid activities organized by David Addington in the Bush/Cheney White House. It is one thing to see that the Department of State is predictably losing another national security power struggle in the White House; it is an entirely different thing to see that an operation inside the CIA is resisting and bucking the authority of that agency’s director, perhaps because the Counterterrorism Center sees its reporting line directly to the White House and President.

David Addington always felt that his off-grid work in creating a Kafka-esque system of secret prisons and policies surrounding combat detainees was done with the direct authority of the President (and Vice President).

David Ignatius’ article is titled “Drones vs. Diplomacy“. The consequences for the nation, during the presidency of a Democrat who once opposed many of the Bush administration’s anti-terror methodologies, of letting ‘drones’ win could be enormous.

– Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic, where this post first appeared. Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons

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The anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death has spiked public interest in the foreign policy positions of President Obama and Mitt Romney — particularly with regards to fighting terrorism and the war in Afghanistan. Over the last couple of days, I have done a number of shows across the networks — but mostly have the clips from Current TV and MSNBC and want to post here (on next page).

I argue that Barack Obama deserves enormous credit (and political bragging rights) for the decision he made to send the Navy SEAL Team 6 in to get bin Laden. He would have owned the disaster had things gone badly. Mitt Romney’s views — or those he held previously criticizing the resources Obama was expending tracking down bin Laden — are not shameful or unpresidential. Those views were held by some around the President; some felt the risks were just too high to invade Pakistan’s territory and attack the secret bin Laden compound. President Obama overruled those on his team who conveyed their doubts.

The Bush/Cheney team took its eye off the bin Laden ball and turned attention and resources away from attacking bin Laden and al Qaeda and went after Saddam Hussein and later Iraqi insurgent forces instead. Al Qaeda metastasized globally during that period – and Obama’s national security team which meets every morning with him has been working one by one through the key al Qaeda commanders and plot integrators and attacking them. The President has been at the helm of this process — guided essentially by the work and focus of John Brennan, Denis McDonough, and NSC Advisor Tom Donilon.

Finally, Obama is connecting the anniversary of bin Laden’s death to a pivot point in America’s engagement with Afghanistan. In other words, America — completing substantially its strategic goal of decimating al Qaeda — is now framing the enstate of its presence in Afghanistan.

The strategic deal signed yesterday by Hamid Karzai and President Obama is binding but unspecific. Lots can go wrong with the vaguely constructed document which essentially promises that the United States will not abandon Afghanistan after combat troops fully end their mission in 2014. But the President achieved what he wanted which was to fasten Obama’s death and the general collapse of the core al Qaeda movement to a strategic shift for the United States.

Presidents find it very hard to end wars — but Obama seems well on his way to ending America’s overextension in Afghanistan as he did in Iraq.

– Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic, where this post first appeared. Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons

The post Romney, Obama, and Afghanistan appeared first on The Faster Times.

Right wing, and anti-gay provocateur Bryan Fischer, Director of Issue Analysis for Government and Public Policy at the American Family Association, wrote in early 2011 that Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee were just carrying too much baggage to win the GOP nomination and run for the presidency in 2012.

So, he said a second tier of candidates would probably break through — listing “Tim Pawlenty, Mitch Daniels, Haley Barbour, John Thune, John Bolton, Mike Pence, and a possible “dark horse” (his term, not mine), Herman Cain.”

Ultimately, Fischer said that in the end it would be a hard choice between Herman Cain and Mike Pence. He never gave a thought to Rick Santorum. And as we now know, Mitt Romney is the presumptive nominee — though Newt Gingrich hasn’t tucked it in yet.

About John Bolton, Fischer wrote in January 2011:

John Bolton belongs in the next conservative administration, but not as president. He will be needed in the areas of national security and intelligence, and is a pretty smart fella when it comes to all that. But most of the American people have no idea who he is, and nobody knows where he stands on almost the entire range of domestic issues.

Perhaps Fischer just wasn’t tuned in when John Bolton made clear in September 2010 that he ‘could live with’ gay marriage — and said this on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell:

“I don’t think there is any good answer to the question why shouldn’t gays and lesbians who want to serve their country be allowed to do it.”

I have significant differences with John Bolton’s international affairs views but I give him great credit for not being the kind of bizarre cookie cutter hard right zealot that Bryan Fischer is. Bolton has not only supported the rights agenda of gay and lesbian Americans, he has been a great boss and mentor to a number of gay people — including the very capable and doggedly results-focused Richard “Ric” Grenell who served Bolton as spokesman during Bolton’s tenure as a recess-appointed Ambassador at the United Nations; his long-time aide in many incarnations Mark Groombridge; and others.

Bolton gets my respect for this — and I have little patience for those who disparage the competency or qualifications of anyone based on any other issue than merit.

Bryan Fischer’s anti-gay bigotry, coughed up of late on Romney for hiring Richard Grenell deserves widespread repudiation and scorn by sensible folks on the right and left. Fischer tweeted yesterday:

Romney picks out & loud gay as a spokesman. If personnel is policy, his message to the pro-family community: drop dead

Fischer didn’t say the same about John Bolton who was already quite “out” about his support of gay Americans — and if Fischer scooted through his roster of Republican possibilities, he’d see that nearly all of them had high level, plugged-in, highly competent gay and lesbian staff.

It’s Fischer who is the odd man out in American politics; probably irritated that Mitt Romney punched through Fischer’s incorrect political analysis of last year. One hopes that Romney stands strong — and stand by the competence and capacity of people like Grenell — and that we spend our time battling each other over issues that really matter to the nation.

There I have many differences with Romney, as well as Obama — but today, Romney gets a salute from me for hiring Grenell.

– Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic. Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons

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Tanaka’s argument is mathematical at its core. He argues that if Japan does not find a way to ‘turn on’ its now shuttered nuclear energy reactors, not only will Japan’s already sluggish economic condition be crushed with much larger oil and gas imports from Russia, Southeast Asia and the Middle East — but because of the costs and risk uncertainty — Japan’s powerful manufacturing base may begin pulling out of the world’s third largest economy. In a morning meeting with me last week, Nobuo Tanaka said that if Japan didn’t get its domestic energy production back on line soon, Japan would experience serious ‘deindustrialization.’

Tanaka explained that at current levels, Japan consumes about 5 million barrels of oil a day. Without domestically produced nuclear energy — for which Japan has stockpiled for decades the world’s largest non-weaponized highly processed plutonium reserves — Japan falls about 10% or half a million barrels of oil short of what it must have.

Japan has 54 nuclear energy reactors — only two of which are running at the moment and both of which are scheduled for regular check ups and will shut down either late this month or in early May 2012. As regular maintenance has required shutting down plant after plant, none of Japan’s governors has allowed the nuclear energy plants to be returned to operation.

On top of the post-Fukushima nuclear plant disaster, global tensions with Iran are threatening Japan’s dependence on Iranian oil exports, which Japan’s share amounts to about 300,000 barrels a day.

This makes Japan’s current potential daily energy deficit about 800,000 barrels per day.

Tanaka, who after leaving the International Energy Agency is biding his time now as Global Associate for Energy Security and Sustainability at Japan’s Institute of Energy Economics, acknowledges that the Saudis have offered Japan, Europe and others who are jittery about the growing tensions with Iran more of its own domestic capacity, which most put at about 2 million barrels a day. Tanaka says the problem is that that’s just not enough to manage global shortfalls if there is a strike on Iran and oil flows are interrupted — and he believes that the Saudis will favor European needs over Japan’s.

On top of the gloom about nuclear energy supply doldrums in Japan, the hard consequences of tensions with Iran, there is a third area of concern Tanaka has: the weather. He said that if Japan has a very hot summer — which some are projecting — Japan will run another 10% short of supplies on top of the shortages it already projects.

But even all this is not the end of the squeeze.

Japan’s other partial energy option is the importation of liquified natural gas (LNG) — which it imports from Malaysia, Brunei, Qatar, UAE, Indonesia and Australia. Japan needs to further boost imports if it can but prices for LNG are surging. The combined energy deficit Japan is facing would require a net increase, according to Tanaka, of LNG and oil that would run about $40 billion a year — wiping out completely Japan’s trade surpluses and more.

In meetings hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies this past week, Nobuo Tanaka made an appeal for the US to export some of its cheap LNG supply to Japan. The price of LNG in Japan is currently four times the price in the United States.

However, House of Representatives Natural Resources Committee Ranking Member Edward Markey has over the last several months been agitating in speeches and correspondence with Energy Secretary for the US to restrict LNG exports — thus keeping prices low in the United States and leaving key strategic allies like Japan vulnerable to surging global LNG prices and to the geostrategic flirtations from Russia. Tanaka said that with Russia, about which the US has increasing concerns about its mercantilist global energy behavior, Japan may be forced to build new grid and pipeline infrastructure with Russia given the cold shoulder the US is thus far showing Japan.

Tanaka told me that one high-ranking Chinese official recently approached him asking if and when Japan would turn its nuclear reactors back on — as Japan’s massive energy needs now were disrupting supply patterns and costs and could affect China’s energy investment picture if Japan’s needs were to become structurally permanent.

To some degree, without the Pulitzer and best-selling energy reality books to his name, Nobuo Tanaka is the Daniel Yergin of Japan and has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the patterns and vectors of energy production and consumption by all the major global energy actors. His warnings matter — and yet Japan’s political leaders, he believes, have not honestly talked with the Japanese public about the hard choices it faces and a possible economic unraveling that comes with the status quo national nuclear energy allergy.

Tanaka thinks that the U.S. could play a constructive role in helping Japan weather its challenges — not just in exporting cheaper LNG but it helping bridge the ‘trust gap’ between Japanese citizens and their government.

The former senior Japan Ministry of Economy Trade & Industry official joked that the only place in the world where an elected legislature may be less popular with its citizens that the US Congress is Japan — where government incompetence and false statements made during and after the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear plant disasters have collapsed Japanese trust in their officials. And trust wasn’t high before these incidents.

Tanaka realizes that there is a legitimate debate to be had about the safety and management of Japan’s nuclear energy facilities and that standards need to be improved and a national conversation has to take place — but that a total rejection of nuclear energy will send Japan over a cliff as deindustrialization is triggered by energy shocks.

One solution he thinks is for former US Nuclear Regulatory Commission commissioners and other US-based, respected nuclear energy experts form an ad hoc commission designed to consult with the Japanese nuclear energy industry and political authorities — and to create what would be a bilateral, or perhaps even an international, peer review structure. This might allow Japanese citizens to possibly fasten their trust in the international Commission even if doubtful about the solvency of their own business, political, and energy leaders.

It’s an interesting proposal — one that gets to the core issue of trust and lurking uncertainties about nuclear energy in Japan. Some critics could argue that creating such a US-Japan or international commission would allow Japan to push this needed debate under the rug and cover up dangers lurking in Japan’s energy system.

Maybe so — but it also seems that Nobuo Tanaka could be right that Japan’s economic future further unravels if it doesn’t figure out some way to get safe nuclear energy back online.

– Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic, where this post first appeared. Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons

The post Japan’s Energy Nightmare appeared first on The Faster Times.

Although the Obama administration did get some financial sector reforms through, like Dodd-Frank, the result seems to have been not a rewiring of the system to change the balance of power between economic stakeholders, particularly consumers and workers, but rather a resuscitation of the old system with some fig leafs (like this $26 billion foreclosure settlement) designed to cover up the corruption.

The editors write:

When it comes to helping homeowners, banks are treated as if they still need to be protected from drains on their capital. But when it comes to rewarding executives and other bank shareholders, paying out capital is the name of the game.

And at a time of economic weakness, using bank capital for investor payouts leaves the banks more exposed to shocks. So homeowners are still bearing the brunt of the mortgage debacle. Taxpayers are still supporting too-big-to-fail banks. And banks are still not being held accountable.

National Journal Chief Correspondent Michael Hirsh concurs, writing along these lines a few days ago, “Has Wall Street Really Changed?” as well as his “A Tale of Two Financial Heroes” which pivots off The Atlantic‘s Economy Summit that brought together the likes of Paul Volcker, Robert Rubin, Sheila Bair, Lawrence Lindsey, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Lawrence Summers, Gene Sperling, Laura Tyson, Allan Meltzer and others.

– Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic, where this post first appeared. Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons

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