Children's Rules

There is an interesting phenomenon that has occurred repeatedly in at least a few Northeastern blue states. The electorate sends a liberal legislature to do their business, but in what might seem to be a counter-intuitive twist, elects a more fiscally conservative Governor (often a Republican) to reign them in. It’s as if the electorate’s inner child wants lots of juicy government programs, but at the same time it wants an adult to control the children in the legislature so that they don’t get too rowdy.

When I look at the massive new Federal programs being proposed by the Obama administration, particularly in the context of the current recession and the already massive debt that will weigh down any recovery, I worry that the national electorate has also indulged its inner child by electing an overwhelming Democratic majority in the Congress. But it somehow forgot to put an adult in the White House to reign them in. Hence, we see irresponsible spending proposals totaling trillions of dollars, with no suggestion as to how to pay for them.

Fred Hiatt, the Editor of The Washington Post’s opinion page, and certainly no enemy of Barack Obama, comments of this situation:

"The systematic widening of budget shortfalls projected under CBO's [the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office] long-term scenarios has never been observed in U.S. history," the CBO pointed out in its usual dry style. And: "All in all, the U.S. economy could contract sharply for a long period."

Obama's response has been to acknowledge the seriousness of the problem -- and make it worse. I'm not talking about his record-breaking stimulus plan, which was essential (if not ideally shaped) given the recession he also inherited. Rather, it is Obama's long-term budget that would more than double the projected deficit over the next 10 years, to $9 trillion, by extending most of the Bush tax cuts and limiting the alternative minimum tax while creating new programs and entitlements (to college tuition scholarships, for example) and refusing to cut back on existing ones.

And that's not to mention his top priority, universal access to health care. Obama has said that reform must be paid for, and he hopes it will lead to a slowing in the growth of health-care costs. That would hugely improve the long-term budget outlook.

But the prospects of cost control are tenuous, experimental, distant and politically fraught; by comparison, creating an expensive new entitlement is easy. [emphasis mine] Obama has proposed to pay for part of universal access by collecting more income tax from the wealthy, which would make the existing deficit that much harder to close. The cost of the entitlement could rise more quickly than the revenue paying for it. There is a good chance, in other words, that whatever emerges from Congress this summer will worsen the budget prognosis.

I’d be less than honest if I didn’t admit that I’m worried about the future, and it has nothing to due with vacuous claims that Cap and Trade will somehow “save the planet” or that universal health care will magically reduce the federal deficit while at the same time improving the economy and business climate – all without raising taxes on any but “the rich.”

I’m worried because with each passing month, it appears that children—full of good intentions and idealism—are running the government. The problem is that those good intentions and idealism have to be tempered by adult common sense. You know, by real grown-ups who recognize that nothing is free, and sometimes the best approach is to do a little less than you’d like because you really can’t foresee the unintended consequences of doing it all.

No worries though. My friends keep telling me that Barack Obama is a really smart guy, and he has it all figured out. Hope so.

174 miles per hour

Many of us who had reservations about a Democratic President governing with an overwhelming Democratic majority in Congress were worried about runaway deficit spending and its long term impact on the economy, on the markets, on interest rates, and most important, on our children who will ultimately be asked to pay the debt down.

It seems that the media is far more interested in praising the Obama administration than it is in questioning whether rampant deficit spending is appropriate or wise. When asked, Left-leaning talking heads always conjure an image of their nemesis, George W. Bush, and argue that Bush spent money like a drunken sailor. How that justifies even more spending by President Obama and the Congress is a bit difficult to understand, but so be it.

The real question, however, is how much more is Obama spending?

I know, I know … the argument is that any discussion of federal spending, unless it is anecdotal (e.g., a bridge to nowhere), makes viewer’s eyes glaze over, and that’s why the networks avoid the subject. It’s all numbers, and it’s complicated, they’ll tell you privately. No one will watch.

There’s a wonderful YouTube Video that explains our spending problems in 2 minutes and 46 seconds. It uses a simple metaphor and very low budget animation that even MSNBC could afford. Take a look and ask yourself, “Should we really be going 174 miles an hour?”

Then ask yourself -- why isn't the MSM covering this issue more fully?

Three Lessons

There are three lessons that can be learned by examining the current unrest in Iran.

First, new technologies (e.g., Twitter and Facebook) have made it difficult for repressive, dictatorial regimes to control information flow. But the key question is: Do these regimes really care enough to modify their behavior? In the short term, it appears that the Iranian regime does care, but it has recruited the fanatic, Islamist, Basij militia to do their dirty work for them.

Second, those have who suggested that past warnings about Iran were nothing more than “fear mongering” have suddenly realized that the Mullahs are not nice people. Little more than a month ago, Left-leaning media and politicians argued that Iran’s threat was overblown, that there is little proof that the country has any intention of developing nuclear weapons, and that Iran's purported support for terrorist organizations through the Middle East and around the world is nothing more than neocon propaganda. Now, the Mullahs crack the heads of young protesters and everything changes. It's sort of like a small child who refuses to believe that the cook top is hot, until she puts her finger on it.

Third, those who praised President Obama’s planned effort at negotiation with Mahmoud Amadinejad and the Iranian theocracy have now become uncharacteristically quiet. As events and violence unfold inside Iran, it appears that Obama’s strategy is in shambles. It will be politically difficult, not to mention morally repugnant, to engage the Islamists who currently run Iran. Barack Obama needs a “Plan B,” and it does not appear that he has one.

Richard Fernandez (Wretchard) of The Belmont Club sums up the situation with his typical clarity:

People who reflect on this debacle may want to ask themselves, ‘why did this engagement with Ahmadinejad go so wrong’. The answer, from first principles, is that stable agreements can only be made with stable partners. You can sign a treaty with Japan, Britain, Canada or France for example, and be reasonably sure the deal will stick. Successor governments will honor the deals of their predecessors. But making a deal with Hamas, Hezbollah and Khamenei, for example, is much more iffy because you never know whether they’ll still be in the saddle the next time you look. ‘Engagement’ with Iran was always going to be subjected to contingent events.

This is why all those negotiations with Yasser Arafat and Hamas and whoever else that Jimmy Carter is so fond of talking to, had the tendency to go nowhere. It wasn’t because, as they were so fond of thinking, that we haven’t bribed them enough or the Israelis were too stingy with concessions. It was simply that their cast of characters kept changing. Their internal politics kept churning like a cement mixer on overdrive. You bought one enemy off only to see another come online. Ultimately, it became like trying to eat soup with a fork.

This doesn’t mean you can’t make deals with shady characters, but it does mean that such deals have an inherent amount of instability inherent in them. The idea that Obama was going to build his Middle East Peace on this foundation of shifting sand seems kind of funny in retrospect. I wonder whether Hillary has drawn the necessary conclusions. But maybe she was playing a different game.

All of us who have opposed negotiations with rouge regimes intuitively understand that “stable agreements can only be made with stable partners.” Unfortunately, there are many on the Left who, ironically, take an ethnocentric and anti-historical view of geopolitical negotiations.

They believe, I think, that everyone acts like a Western democracy, where agreements and promises matter. They create an anti-factual history (e.g., The canard that there was a sovereign state of Palestine prior to the existence of Israel, and it was stolen from it’s citizens—the “Palestinians”). Then, demonstrating an ethnocentrism that they roundly criticize in others and a misreading of history, they build their position. Sad.

The current lessons of Iran matter. I only hope that our President learns from all three of them.

Mistakes

As events in Iran continue unfold, little is certain. But ideological attitudes in the West have begun to change – at least for now. Michael Goldfarb comments:

There’s an amazing thing happening in the blogs over the last few days that one assumes is a fair reflection of a broader shift in attitudes towards Iran. Six months ago, few Americans would have disputed that Ahmadinejad was a thug and a tyrant, but there were many on the left who supported Obama’s push for direct engagement with the Iranian president anyway. America deals with all kinds of thugs and authoritarian leaders, and Obama and his supporters made the case that we should deal with this one, too. But the left, I think a little to their own surprise, became deeply invested in the Mousavi campaign. Perhaps you could see it most clearly on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, but much of the media liked the simple narrative of Mousavi the Obama-like reformer against Ahmadinejad the Bush-like ideologue. And after the Lebanese elections, the media was primed for a story on the “Obama Effect” in the Middle East.

When things went the other way, something changed. The left, which may have reviled Ahmadinejad but was willing to do business with him anyway, seems to have become deeply hostile to any kind of diplomacy that could be seen as legitimizing this election result. The administration hasn’t quite caught up to this reality, offering weak statements about “irregularities” in the voting but no real sign that it will stand up and support the Iranian kids who are pleading for help as they’re beaten in the streets. I suspect it will soon. If Roger Cohen [a very Left columnist for the NYT] can’t stomach seeing Obama reach out to this regime after what has happened and what is happening, then who can?

But a desire to engage with a demonstrably Islamofascist dictatorship was only the Left’s first mistake. Now, they’ve put a halo around the head of Ahmadinejad’s challenger, Hossein Moussavi.

Wretchard of the Belmont Club suggests that a halo may not be in order.

Mousavi is no more a “moderate” than Ahmadinejad according to a former Indian diplomat, M K Bhadrakumar. “Most likely, he had a hand in the creation of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Ali Akbar Mohtashami, Hezbollah’s patron saint, served as his interior minister.” That’s Mousavi, who Michael Ledeen called one the architects of the some of the most repressive features of the current Iranian regime. So why, with the elections fundamentally rigged by the state and in fact a disguised process of appointment between two members of the Iranian establishment, did the clerics choose Ahmadinejad over the man who so artfully depicted himself as a reformer and who captured the protest vote of the Iranian youth and intelligensia?

The probable answer is one word: money. Within Iranian ruling circles, Mousavi represented the economic enemies of Khamenei and Ahmadinejad according to Bhadrakumar. While Mousavi could package himself as a ‘reformer’ and to some extent genuinely capture the enthusiasm of the dissidents, the choice of between him and Ahmadinejad was really over who would get to control the economy. It was a battle between two factions of the ruling elite for the chairmanship of the board.

So … it’s not about “freedom” or “moderation” or “reform” in the sense that many in the West and some in Iran believe it is. It’s about money and power.

Would Mousavi be a better option than Ahmadinejad? I suppose. After all, the current Iranian president is a true thug.

But do not delude yourself into believing that Mousavi is a creation of Barack Obama’s outreach—a man who would sue for better relations with the west, more moderate politics within Iran, a rejection of nuclear weapons, and true freedoms for Iranians. Don’t make this second mistake, even if you made the first.

Regulations

The Obama administration is set to release a proposed set of regulations that are intended to provide better controls across the financial industry. Although the details have not yet been released, I can say, without equivocation, that their intentions are pure.

Major financial institutions, insurance companies, hedge funds, and Wall Street in general exhibited such breathtaking irresponsibility that they deserve a restrictive regulatory environment. If conservatives argue that strict regulation will slow the economy a bit, my response is that the irresponsibility of the financial community slowed the economy a lot. Worse, it wiped out the savings of those who invested wisely in a risk averse manner over many years. Unlike big banks and insurance companies, those people will never get a bailout.

President Obama commented on this recently:

"On a whole host of these issues, we want to do the minimum possible to assure that every stakeholder in the marketplace -- consumers, workers, investors, entrepreneurs -- have a clear set of rules of the road, they know what they're getting themselves into, they're making decisions based on the pursuit of profits," he said. "But we are not setting up so few rules that you have the kind of situation that we saw last year where we really were on the verge of a financial meltdown."

Gerald Seib of The Wall Street Journal comments on the regulations in broad terms:

Of course, it's hard to know what the right amount of rule-making really is, which is why the plan the president puts out Wednesday will draw fire from both his right and left.

The Federal Reserve will get more powers to oversee big financial institutions, large firms will have to raise more capital and meet higher liquidity standards, hedge funds will face higher scrutiny, and a new agency will be set up to protect consumers and small investors.

As soon as his plan is out, though, the president will have the Goldilocks problem. Some will think his proposals too hot, some too cold. Only some will think them just right.

The right rules, he [Obama] said, will allow a recovery that isn't built on speculative bubbles -- and that don't stifle financial marketplace innovations that have helped lots of small guys in recent years.

The White house is doing the right thing. Unlike some of their other ill-conceived and overly ambitious programs, this regulation is needed and should be instituted without delay.

Realpolitik

The recent Iranian Presidential election results and the Iranian power structure’s response to inevitable protests have introduced a dose of reality for those who believed that: (1) Iran was more moderate than it was, (2) the moderates would oust the hardliners, or (3) our President’s words would somehow cause a change within an otherwise Islamofascist regime.

The Washington Times is certainly no friend of Barack Obama. However, Wesley Pruden of the Right-leaning Times, makes a few cogent, if harsh, comments that are well worth considering:

If Iranian voters had thrown Mahmoud Ahmadinejad into the street, the American president would have assumed that he was the One who did it, and the American press would have led the hosannas for the messiah from the south side of Chicago. Just a few more speeches, a few more respectful bows toward Mecca, and all the rough places would be made smooth and plain. But now even Mr. Obama must wake up and smell the tear gas.

As I mentioned in a recent post, Amadinejad’s tenure is meaningless because he has no real power. It’s a small group of Mullahs who run the Iranian theocracy, wielding dictatorial power to accomplish their own ends.

It is true that reports out of Iran indicate that some Mullahs outside the inner circle are becoming upset with current events, and that change might be in the wind. But that’s a hope, not a strategy.

Fred Kaplan of left-leaning Slate writes:

Unless the violence widens the fissures in Iranian society to an unprecedented—almost unimaginable—degree, the agitation could simply peter out in the coming days and weeks as more and more protesters are beaten, detained, and even killed, with no effect on the regime's survival. In this case, it may well be, as a story in today's New York Times predicted, that the hardliners wind up more firmly in control than ever.

Yet reports have circulated in recent months suggesting that some Iranian clerics, even a few in high places, are displeased with Ahmadinejad's harsh rhetoric and his mishandling of the economy. Some evidence of electoral fraud has reportedly been leaked from dissidents from within Iran's interior ministry. The supreme leader has ordered the Guardian Council to investigate allegations of fraud—this after publicly ratifying the election's results (without, suspiciously, observing the three-day waiting period that Iranian law requires)—though it may be that this order is mere subterfuge and that the investigation will be just as fraudulent.

In other words, it is possible (how likely it might be, no one can say) that the popular revolts might sharpen the fissures within the circles of Iran's ruling elite. Of course, those circles are so opaque that few outsiders can tell whether there are fissures, much less what their boundaries are. Does the CIA or the National Security Agency know? I hope so, but I don't know.

Barack Obama has finally released a tepid critique of the current situation in Iran. Fine, at least he’s on the record. But even a supporter like Fred Kaplan, writing in a friendly media outlet states:

Given the near-certainty that Iran's election was fixed and the documented fact that protesters are being brutalized, there is no way that Obama or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could go to Tehran and shake hands with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, much less to expect that any talks would be worthwhile.

The issue here is not one of realpolitik vs. democratic idealism. Rather, it's a question about what course of action is simply realistic (in the conversational, as opposed to ideological, sense of the word).

And yet, many in the West continue to believe that if we say the right things we can bring Iran around: As Wesley Pruden correctly observes:

Some people in the West - particularly in Washington - are tempted to dismiss the Iranian president as a clown and a fool, given to writing checks ("Israel must be wiped off the map") he could never cash. But these skeptics are the fools. President Obama must now rise to the occasion to deal with Iran as it is, and not as he wishes it to be. This is the job he said he wanted.

If realpolitik does hold sway, it’s very important for our President and his Secretary of State to recognize that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the true face of the Iranian leadership. The Iranian people may be different—they may be more moderate and may truly want to live peacefully—but it's the leadership who might someday do awful things.

A Silent Breeze

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes about the “Winds of Change” that he sees growing throughout the Middle East. In a surprising hat tip to an administration he reviled, Friedman writes:

… for real politics to happen you need space. There are a million things to hate about President Bush’s costly and wrenching wars. But the fact is, in ousting Saddam in Iraq in 2003 and mobilizing the U.N. to push Syria out of Lebanon in 2005, he opened space for real democratic politics that had not existed in Iraq or Lebanon for decades. “Bush had a simple idea, that the Arabs could be democratic, and at that particular moment simple ideas were what was needed, even if he was disingenuous,” said Michael Young, the opinion editor of The Beirut Daily Star. “It was bolstered by the presence of a U.S. Army in the center of the Middle East. It created a sense that change was possible, that things did not always have to be as they were.”

So Bush—a man who was roundly criticized as a simpleton by the MSM and every Left-leaning writer around the world—stuck with a simple vision and now we see “winds of change.”

Of course, Friedman goes on to credit Barack Obama’s soft power approach. Undoubtedly, Bush was hated by Arab fascist dictators, and Obama is much more, well, much more non-confrontational. As I’ve mentioned in recent posts, his morally equivalent approach to Arab-Western conflict is not so much soft power as it is soft lies. But, if it works, maybe there’s some small benefit – a whisper of a breeze that he can credit as his own.

It is troubling, however, that the President remains strangely silent about the election results in Iran. If you can believe the reporting, millions of Iranians feel dispossessed by a fraudulent election “won” by Obama’s erstwhile negotiating partner, Mahmoud Amadinejad, an anti-Semitic, holocaust denying, Islamofascist who is the face of the dictatorship in Iran.

If we are to believe his supporters in the media, President Obama is now deeply respected throughout the Moslem world. Wouldn’t some explicit support for the Iranian “moderates” who were, it appears, robbed of an election victory, be in order? Wouldn’t that support urge the Iranian opposition to continue its “resistance?" Isn’t that in the best interests of the United States and the Iranian people?

Why the long silence? Why won’t our president take a strong position on this important Iranian election?

Update (6/15/09, 4:45pm EDT):

Michael Totten reports on the Iranian situation and provides three important pieces of information:

A reader comments at niacINsight:

“I am in Tehran. Its 3:40 in the morning. I’ve connected with you [by hacking past the government filter]. It’s a big mess here. People are yelling from their houses – ‘death to the dictator.’ They are setting up a military government. No one dares to go out. No one has seen Mousavi today. Rumor has it that they have arrested him. I don’t have an email but I will contact you again. Help us.”

This isn’t encouraging:

According to our private phone conversations with people in Tehran, hundreds of parents have gathered by a police station in Yousef Abad, now known as Seyyed Jamal Aldin Asad Abadi, with their hands raised to the sky saying “Obama, please help us, they are killing our young children.”

The United States will not help. Senator Joe Lieberman, though, at least thinks we should say something.

[T]hrough intimidation, violence, manipulation, and outright fraud, the Iranian regime has once again made a mockery of democracy, and confirmed its repressive and dictatorial character.

We as Americans have a responsibility to stand in solidarity with people when they are denied their rights by repressive regimes. When elections are stolen, our government should protest. When peaceful demonstrators are beaten and silenced, we have a duty to raise our voices on their behalf. We must tell the Iranian people that we are on their side.

For this reason, I would hope that President Obama and members of both parties in Congress will speak out, loudly and clearly, about what is happening in Iran right now, and unambiguously express their solidarity with the brave Iranians who went to the polls in the hope of change and who are now looking to the outside world for strength and support.

Indeed. As always, Joe Lieberman, appears to be the conscience of the senate. I have to wonder whether Barack Obama will heed his advice.

Null Vote

As of this moment in the late evening of June 12th, it looks like the Presidential election in Iran is too close to call. Current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a rabid anti-Semite, holocaust denier, and Islamist (sorry for the redundancy) and challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi, a somewhat more moderate (remember, this is Iran and moderation is defined on a very relative scale) politician, are in a very close election with each side declaring victory.

I'm hopeful that Ahmadinejad will be ousted, but I worry that the MSM and many Left-leaning politicians will read more into his defeat than they should. If Mousavi does win, it will be a hopeful sign that Iran is changing, but only a sign, and only a very little change.

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal online comments:

The danger is that the West, following Obama's lead, would take far more encouragement from a favorable election result than is warranted.

… The tendency to read too much into an Ahmadinejad defeat is compounded by an eagerness to see Obama's feel-good foreign-policy approach succeed. Thus an article in the Christian Science Monitor touts what the paper calls the "Obama Effect." The headline reads "Wildcard in Iran Election: Obama," but when you get deep into the story you learn that this is based on nothing but speculation:

Any "Obama factor" in Iran's presidential contest will be difficult to gauge, Iran experts say, because the overriding issue in the campaign is the economy and what is widely perceived domestically as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's poor stewardship of it.
But even in that context, Iranians who see Obama's promise of closer international ties (as opposed to the threat of deeper economic sanctions) as one avenue to economic recovery may reject Mr. Ahmadinejad's confrontational style as better suited to the era of President Bush.

Still, even some regional analysts who found strong elements in Obama's speech say they are dubious of any short-term impact as concrete as influencing an election.

But if Mousavi wins, you can bet you'll hear more about Obama's effect than about those doubts.

What difference does it all make anyway? [Roger Cohen of the New York Times] concludes his column by declaring that "the margin for the foolishness of anti-Iran hawks" has "just narrowed." (Presumably he means it will have narrowed if Ahmadinejad loses.) But Cohen is blasé about nuclear proliferation, so much so that he doesn't even mention the subject in his column about the Iran election.
If the "anti-Iran hawks" are right and Cohen is the foolish one, then a more appealing Iranian figurehead makes Tehran's nuclear threat more dangerous. Yaakov Katz in the Jerusalem Post explains why:

Due to his radical character and extremist remarks, Ahmadinejad helps garner world support for stopping the nuclear program. Due to his reformist and moderate image, Mousavi--who when he was prime minister from 1981 to 1989 helped lay the foundations of the country's atomic program--may succeed in "laundering" the program in a dialogue with the United States, the officials fear.

A Mousavi victory's likely effect would be to make it easier for the West to trust the Iranian regime without making the regime more worthy of trust.

Regardless of the outcome, the Mullahs run Iran, and that is unlikely to change any time soon. It may be that they’d enjoy a more “moderate” spokesman (that’s all the Iranian president really is) but at the same time continue supporting terror world wide, building nuclear weapons, and oppressing the true Iranian moderates who did vote for Mousavi.
We’ll know the outcome in a day or two, but beware of reading too much into it.