On the other hand, there’s the argument that the message was sent anyway; that incumbents better not cross labor less they make your life miserable. Perhaps, but I think the people pushing this line the hardest are looking at the situation through rose-colored glasses. The bottom line is that incumbent re-election rates are very high in the U.S., and they’re downright astronomical for sitting Senators in primaries. And, of course, Blanche Lincoln is now a mark in favor of re-election. So even if we assume that labor or other factions of the party can give an incumbent a headache in the primary, the simple fact remains that the incumbent is overwhelmingly likely to win the primary, and much more likely to get beaten in a general election (especially if they’re in a conservative state) than in a primary. For someone who’s only concerned about getting re-elected, this isn’t really a tough call to make at all.

On the other hand, there’s the notion of the White House’s ability to pressure Senators, which Greenwald raises again in typically dense fashion. Yglesias and Bernstein dispose of the nonsense in good fashion, but I’d simply add that, again, there’s a very simple balance of power here; while troubled incumbents may want White House backing in elections, it’s at least technically possible for them to win without it. On the other hand, the White House can’t get its agenda through Congress without sufficient votes from members. With 40 Repuplicans lined up to oppose his agenda no matter what, Obama had to keep every Democrat on board for healthcare reform. If Blanche Lincoln refused to support the bill, that was it. There was no clever way out of things; it was get Blanche Lincoln to support the effort or give up on comprehensive reform. Period. The leverage between individual Senators at the tipping point of votes and the White House is always going to tilt in favor of the Senators (at least in domestic policy) because they have votes in the Senate, and you have to get votes in the Senate to pass bills. The question is how do you get those votes. Greenwald wants to imagine a world where you get them by beating marginal Senators with sticks until they’re cowed like powerless children into doing what you want them to, but that world quite simply doesn’t exist. Senators just aren’t powerless, and thanks to the filibuster, they’re holding the trump card more often than not. The national party or various factions of the party might be able to make life difficult for them, hell they may even be able to slay the dragon, but that vote in the Senate means that the Senator is going to be able to return the favor and then some as long as they have it.

And losing primary challenges does nothing to alter that balance.

Technorati Tags: Bill Halter, Blanche Lincoln, Glenn Greenwald, Labor

Let me offer a ludicrously premature opinion: Barack Obama has sealed his reputation as a president of great historical import. We don’t know what will follow in his presidency, and it’s quite possible that some future event–a war, a scandal–will define his presidency. But we do know that he has put his imprint on the structure of American government in a way that no Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson has.

It’s of course possible that an unpopular war or scandal or something could diminish Obama’s historical narrative, but it’s worth pointing out that, bad as Vietnam was, it didn’t really diminish LBJ’s legacy so much as it diminished the affinity liberals feel for him today. But Vietnam notwithstanding, Johnson is still the President who helped shepherd the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, and the rest of the Great Society’s social welfare programs through Congress, and played a substantial role in breaking the hold Southern racists held on Congress as an institution. So far as 20th century Presidents go, Johnson is easily amongst the top 3 in terms of lasting consequence, along with FDR and Teddy Roosevelt (you could throw Reagan in the mix too, but he left office less than 25 years ago, so you’d expect to see some lasting effects from hs policies, even if they’re mostly forgotten 25 years from now). Given out habit of attributing major legislative victories to Presidents, Barack Obama has just achieved a sweeping reform of the health insurance market that rationalizes the individual market, provides coverage to some 30 million previously uninsured, and provides basic consumer protections to everyone. It is easily the most monumental piece of social policy legislation since 1965, and it guarantees that, no matter what happens, Barack Obama’s Presidency will be a major point in the arc of progressive advancement in the United States.

I don’t really understand what’s so hard to get about this idea:

President Barack Obama is planning to host a televised meeting with Republican and Democratic congressional leaders on health care reform.

The Feb. 25 meeting is an attempt to reach across the aisle but not a signal that the president plans to start over, as Republicans have demanded, a White House official said.

 “I want to come back [after the Presidents Day congressional recess] and have a large meeting — Republicans and Democrats — to go through, systematically, all the best ideas that are out there and move it forward,” Obama said in an interview with Katie Couric during CBS’s Super Bowl pre-game show Sunday.

The idea strikes me as pretty straight-forward; the White House is hoping to re-create the dynamic from the House GOP retreat. That is, the Republicans will throw out a lot of false, insane, claims, and Obama and healthcare experts will be right there to deftly bat them down. The goal being, to make Obama look good, and House Republicans look ridiculous, just like in Baltimore. And by announcing it so publicly, Obama has put the GOP in a bit of a bind; if they don’t show up, the White House will be further able to paint them as the ‘party of no” and point out that they aren’t offering alternative solutions. Not that any of that matters, of course, at the end of the day, it’s just an attempt to get something on C-Span, and create some political theater that generates some momentum for Democrats on the hill to pass the bill. I really don’t understand why we’re pretending not to get this.

But that pales in comparison to what Obama did today. Going to House Republicans at their retreat in Baltimore, Obama fielded questions from the most vehement of his opposition, the House Republican caucus, and he ran circles around them. One thing I don’t think conservatives realize is what talk radio has done to their attachment with reality. You can toss something around the echo chamber, unchallenged, and it starts to sound pretty good. When someone a lot smarter than you is handling the nonsense in real time, to your face, well, that makes you look quite a bit dumber (and it doesn’t help that House Republicans are really dumb to begin with). When you couple this with the address Wednesday night, it’s been a very good couple of days for the White House. They’re clearly back on top of the political world, at least for now.

What does it mean on a substantive level? It’s hard to say, but something has clearly had an impact on Congressional Democrats. Nancy Pelosi is absolutely determined to pass healthcare reform, and even Kent Conrad and Ben Nelson are holding out the possibility of going to reconcilliation to pass a bill.  A lot of Democrats clearly understand that they have to do healthcare reform, for political, policy, and moral reasons, and the momentum seems to be back, at least somewhat. Is that because of the White House? Maybe not, but something has lit a fire under very key players in the caucus to make this happen.

There’s hope yet.

Ezra had a post this morning examining the fact that the bill likely to pass the Senate looks very much like the plan Obama ran on, with some exceptions, to which Marcy Wheeler responded by noting that the exceptions were fairly important. I think Wheeler is exaggerating the effect a little bit, after all, the bill is very large, and has hundreds of moving parts, so all things considered less than 10 things isn’t that much, but I do think she’s right to point out that they’re fairly important things, and they are largely the things that people are focusing on, some with more merit than others (that the excise tax on high cost insurance plans has drawn any criticism from the left is extremely depressing). Ezra had a fairly nice response, noting that Obama basically came around to the consensus of Democratic opinion on the matter:

Another way of saying this is that president is a follower who leads. Take health-care reform. Marcy Wheeler doesn’t agree with me that the reform bill we’re likely to pass is similar to the reform proposal that Obama campaigned on. She emphasizes the differences between the two, but consider for a second the size of those differences. Obama proposed, at least on the coverage side, a Massachusetts-style structure. So too did John Edwards and Hillary Clinton. The difference was that Obama initially fought the individual mandate.

In the end, he ended up supporting a … Massachusetts-style structure with an individual mandate. In other words, he moved from the Massachusetts-plan with one real variation to the Massachusetts-plan — towards the consensus, not away from it. The move wasn’t to Medicare for All, or a Clintonian managed care within managed competition, or Wyden-Bennett, or some approach that Obama dreamed up in consultation with Peter Orszag and Tom Daschle. It was just the consensus campaign approach with some concessions to the realities of the policy and the demands of Congress. Wheeler may think that’s a lot of movement. I’m surprised by how little of a stamp Obama chose to put on this policy, particularly given the work that past presidents, like Clinton, have put into developing an approach that is uniquely theirs.

I think Ezra’s on to something, and it is good to point out that there are some unique features to healthcare reform relating to the fact that so many center-left and leftist types have been chasing that goose for so long. Barack Obama is a politician who has been on the national scene for all of 5 years, but he’s surrounded by people who have been in Washington thinking about healthcar reform for twenty years, give or take. And some of those people are in Congress (I’m looking at you John Dingell). The Democratic Party’s committment to universal healthcare goes back to before Obama was even born. It is, in other words, a fairly odd situation at the intersection of party and issue, and Obama is in the odd position of being a President who, to a large degree, is simply overshadowed by the achievement itself, but to an even larger degree, he’s walking into a governing situation where a lot of key players in Congress have spent a long time working on this issue, and aren’t necessarily inclined to suddenly cede ground to the White House on putting the bill together, particularly a President who is as new on the scene as Obama. Allowing Congress to take the lead on the bill was probably a smart move, if for no other reason than Congressional Democrats probably weren’t going to allow the situation to play out any differently.

Another way of looking at it is outlined by Matt Yglesias:

I think that most people vastly overrate the President’s ability to influence this kind of thing. But one reason that people overrate it is that presidential candidates encourage unrealistic expectations. Obama didn’t canvass the country saying “I will use my agenda-setting powers to encourage congress to take up comprehensive health reform and then meekly accept whatever the 60th-most-liberal senator is willing to agree to.” Primary candidates competed with one another to offer the most aggressively sound climate change plans instead of acknowledge that this was all wishful thinking and congress would constrain the limits of the possible. Obama in particular encouraged the idea that he could and would deploy his undeniable skills at set-piece speech delivery to cause legislative action.

I’ve made the point for some time that the way we act as though Congress simply doesn’t exist, with pretty much every candidate declaring that, “when I’m President, we’re going to get…” obscuring the broader point that these things have to go through Congress, clear the filibuster in the Senate, and so on. And while Matt frames this as the fault of candidates, I don’t really think it is, and all else being equal I think legitimate candidate, anyway, would very much like a campaign that was more reflective of the systemic reality. Rather, I think the problem is pretty much exactly what you see playing out right now; voters want a Presiddent to “lead,” and acknowledging the primacy of Congress doesn’t seem much like leading, especially since most Americans generally don’t much like Congress. So as long as a certain number seemingly legitimate candidates are willing to play along, everyone else is basically forced into the game as well. I mean, imagine the reaction John McCain would have gotten if instead of putting out policy white papers or trying to discuss healthcare or climate matters with Barack Obama he just acknowledged that it was highly unlikely he would be able to pass anything with a Democratic Congress. And that, I think, is te fault of a political media who, largely ignorant of the way American government works, plays along with the charade instead of putting on the brakes and trying to inform their viewers, because arguments between Presidential candidates that are presented as being crucial make for better television I guess.

An article about efforts against Al Qaeda in AfPak that makes my spider-sense tingle, from the WaPo:

U.S. and international intelligence officials say that improved recruitment of spies inside the al-Qaeda network, along with increased use of targeted airstrikes and enhanced assistance from cooperative governments, has significantly reduced the terrorist organization’s effectiveness.

A U.S. counterterrorism official said that the combined advances have led to the deaths of more than a dozen senior figures in al-Qaeda and allied groups in Pakistan and elsewhere over the past year, most of them in 2009. Officials described Osama bin Laden and his main lieutenants as isolated and unable to coordinate high-profile attacks.

More from the article:

The most important new weapon in the Western arsenal is said to be the recruitment of spies inside al-Qaeda and affiliated organizations, a long-sought objective. “Human sources have begun to produce results,” Richard Barrett, head of the United Nations’ al-Qaeda and Taliban monitoring group, said Tuesday. Barrett is the former chief of Britain’s overseas counterterrorism operations.

Current and former senior U.S. officials, who spoke about intelligence matters on the condition of anonymity, confirmed what one former CIA official called “our penetration of al-Qaeda.” A senior administration official said that success had come “because of, first of all, very good intelligence capabilities . . . to locate and identify individuals who are part of the al-Qaeda organization.”

Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair referred obliquely in an interview with reporters earlier this month to the use of spies, saying that “the primary way” that U.S. intelligence determines which terrorist organizations pose direct threats is “to penetrate them and learn whether they’re talking about making attacks against the United States.”

Now this is the part where I fervently hope that this revelation is psychological warfare against the Taliban and AQ to paralyze them with paranoia over moles in their organizations. It is a very effective tactic, see: James  Jesus Angleton. Given the incredible difficulty of inserting an intelligence officer into AQ, or even getting one of their members to flip and become a double agent, revealing that information for political reasons would border on the criminal.

Recent claims of significant success against al-Qaeda have become part of White House deliberations about U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, centering on a request by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American and NATO commander there, for an expanded counterinsurgency campaign that will require more U.S. troops. Discussions began in earnest Tuesday as senior national security and military officials met with President Obama.

Those within the administration who have suggested limiting large-scale U.S. ground combat in Afghanistan, including Vice President Biden, have pointed to an improved counterterrorism effort as evidence that Obama’s principal objective — destroying al-Qaeda — can be achieved without an expanded troop presence.

And in the first paragraph we have the reason that the White House leaked this story to WaPo. McChrystal’s public demand for tens of thousands of extra troops, which really are necessary if we are going to nation-build the way the Hillary-Holbrooke axis wants to, has put Obama in an awkward position, because the Congress doesn’t particularly want to do that.  The bright side is, they do seem to be rethinking their strategy of just throwing more soldiers into the meatgrinder. Cyncial as I am, I don’t want to think that this is just a stall to twist arms on Capitol Hill.

I don’t want to give the impression that I believe McChrystal (and Clinton and Holbrooke) are right.  Nation-building will never work in a place like A-stan; I wrote an article about it a few months ago. Joe Biden has the right strategy, though he has so far lost the internecine battles: A smaller number of American troops, mostly composed of Special Operations and Special Forces operators with close air support, in a strictly counterterrorism role. So, despite the fact that this article is disingenuous, if it helps stop a counterproductive and downright disastrous troop escalation, I’m willing to take that.

Technorati Tags: Afghan Surge, Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Islamists, Pakistan, Taliban, Usama bin Laden, War on Terror, Washington Post

From the article  “Obama’s Iran Trap” in Foreign Policy:

The conventional wisdom on last week’s astonishing revelations about Iran’s secret uranium-enrichment site, tucked in a mountainside near the holy city of Qom, holds that Barack Obama has just pulled off a diplomatic coup, raising the pressure on Tehran going into a critical Oct. 1 big-powers meeting and finally getting the Russians to agree to U.N. sanctions with real bite.

First off, you should treat any paragraph that begins with “the conventional wisdom” with deep skepticism, because what it really means is “what the chattering class thinks” and that’s never a good barometer of reality.  Secondly, how in the world is the fact that Iran has multiple sites for its nuclear program an astonishing revelation? Even cable news has been talking about this for four years, how airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear installations would involve hundreds of sorties on dozens of targets. Is the fact that President Ahmadinejad disclosed the existence of just one of the numerous sites that even the public knows exists, let alone the CIA or Mossad, really all that jaw-dropping?

Don’t be so sure. Obama may not have had much choice given that Iran had just notified the International Atomic Energy Agency of its new nuke plant, but the U.S. president is the one with a problem now. By revealing this information, he has painted himself into a corner and made an Israeli strike more likely.

Obama has not painted himself into any sort of corner with this declaration. Here’s why. This “astonishing” announcement is just yet another in a series of posturing United Nations pressers that have been going on since former president Bush threw down the gauntlet concerning the Iranian nuclear program years ago, and almost all of it has been for naught.

And the chance of an Israeli strike on Iran  against the wishes of  Washington is virtually nil. A little known story is that at the end of the Bush Administration, then-Prime Minister Olmert had decided that Israel would take out the nuclear facilites at Natanz and other sites with, of all things, nuclear bunker-busters, to reach the facilities deep underground. Apparently oblivious to the irony, the Israelis approached the Bush White House with a request for the latest in air-dropped tactical nukes, and Olmert was told in no uncertain terms by Bob Gates and Condi Rice that the United States would not support it. The strikes, which were far enough along that pilots were already flying practice sorties, were quietly  scrapped.

Besides that, an Israeli attack into Iran would require traversing Iraqi airspace. Under the new Status of Forces agreement, Iraqi airspace actually belongs to the Iraqis again, and their Shi’ite-dominated government is very buddy-buddy with the mullahs.

For one thing, it’s not clear that “the Russians” have really agreed to sanctions. Yes, President Dmitry Medvedev emerged from his meeting with Obama last week to suggest he was on board. And we know that U.S. national security advisor James L. Jones pulled aside Sergei Prikhodko, his Russian counterpart, to tell him the news about the second Iranian plant. (Officially Medvedev’s advisor, Prikhodko is really Putin’s top foreign-policy boss, and chances are he accompanied Medvedev to New York to be the prime minister’s ears and eyes on the ground.)

What we don’t know is what Putin thinks. But as demonstrated last year when the prime minister abruptly left the Olympics to supervise the war with Georgia, he’s still very much in charge. (Right on schedule, a Russian foreign ministry source reportedly said today that everyone should “calm down” over Iran’s latest missile test and “not give way to emotions.”) And then there’s China, which came out with a typically milquetoast statement after Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy made their dramatic announcement Thursday morning at the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh. Everyone knows that serious sanctions mean fuel, as Iran, for all its oil, still has to import a great deal of refined petroleum (just how much is disputed) to make its economy run. But the Chinese get 15 percent of their oil from Iran. Needless to say, getting meaningful sanctions through the U.N. Security Council is far from assured.

It really doesn’t matter whether or not sanctions are actually pushed through the Security Council, Iran has been under sanctions for well over a decade and doesn’t seem too distraught about it. The only sanctions that would truly hurt them would be oil sanctions, but there is no way in hell China or especially Britain would ever go for that. The faux-dramatic press conference is just the usual dog-and-pony show while the real action takes place in the smoky back room.

The real dope is that whether or not the Russians will support tougher economic sanctions against Iran, they are in a position to make Iran’s life difficult in much more meaningful ways. They are their main arms supplier and have been supplying them with nuclear tech and know-how. The deal that was struck to scrap the anti-ballistic missile system in Eastern Europe seems to have been a straight-up horse trade with Medvedev (well, Putin really, as the article points out): Russia gets breathing room in the Near Abroad, and America gets transit rights involving Afghanistan and a stronger public stance from Moscow on an Iranian nuclear breakout. How much pressure Medvedev is willing to apply outside the auspices of the UN is the real question.

. . . .[T]he Iran issue is going to become a major headache for Obama. It’s going to strengthen Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s argument that Iran’s nuclear program, not West Bank settlements or the plight of the Palestinians, is the real crisis in the Middle East. It’s going to put wind in the sails of neoconservatives and Republicans in Washington, who are all too eager to paint the U.S. president as weak and ineffectual when Tehran doesn’t buckle. What is Barack going to do then? Bomb Iran himself and wreck his Middle East hopes? Let Iran go nuclear and turn the nonproliferation regime into a sick joke? Give sanctions “time to work” — and consign a generation of Iranians to radicalism, growing ethnic strife, and crushing poverty?

I’m not sure how much of a headache it’s really going to be, considering that no one in any position to affect American foreign policy should give a tinker’s damn what the American neoconservatives or the Likudniks (the Israeli neocons), especially Netanyahu, after seven years of watching that failed ideology drive our country’s national security and international clout off a cliff. Of course, there is a valid point to the observation, because our Very Serious journalists in the op-ed pages and cable news will hang on the prognostications of Bill Kristol et al. as if they have any credibility left after being spectacularly wrong about everything since 2002.

The one thing I wholeheartedly agree with is that Obama does not really have any good options concerning Iran, at least not if people expect the endgame to be Iran giving up their nuclear program. Like chess, where there are scores of possible opening moves but only a few that won’t result in your quick defeat, the president doesn’t have many diplomatic options to choose from. The absolute best-case scenario is that Iran only wants to attain a status like Germany and Japan, with no actual atomic built but the capability to put one together in a couple weeks if necessary. The more likely scenario, given that an Iranian nuclear breakout is virtually assured unless someone goes to war over it, is that America will have to switch its priorities from nonproliferation to counterproliferation, keeping Iran from selling its knowledge to even nuttier and more unstable Third World countries.

Technorati Tags: Barack Obama, Benjamin Netanhyahu, Dmitri Medvedev, Ehud Olmert, Iran, Islamists, Israel, nuclear breakout, Russia, sanctions, United Nations, Vladimir Putin