Presidential politics goes nuclear

This "daisy ad" from 1964 is infamous, though it aired only once (but see also this ad for more context from that campaign cycle). I've showed this ad many times in my classes:



A super-PAC supporting Hillary Clinton is going to run the following ad in a number of swing states this election cycle -- Florida, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina, and Ohio.


I'm not 100% sure that ad is all that effective. Read this piece and watch the accompanying videos to understand the context for this ad. People who have paying attention to the campaign for months (high information voters) already know this material, but those not paying attention (low information voters) won't get enough content from the new ad.

Will it resonate emotionally?

I'll close by quoting a (former?) Republican hero:

“A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used. But then would it not be better to do away with them entirely?”
Ronald Reagan, 1984 State of the Union


H/T to Patrick Caldwell. 

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A Democratic Majority?

Photo Credit: WhiteHouse.gov

Yesterday, Democrat Barack Obama was inaugurated for his second term as U.S. President. His party, in fact, has won at least a plurality of the votes in five of the past six presidential elections. On average, Democrats have received about 4.5 million more votes than Republicans in every presidential election since George H.W. Bush won decisively in 1988. Was that the end of the Reagan era?

The Democratic party has also controlled the U.S. Senate since the 2006 midterm elections. Indeed, in the fifteen years between January 2001 and January 2015, Democrats will have controlled the Senate for all but four and one-half years. That's roughly two-thirds of the years to-date of the twenty-first century.

Republicans currently control the U.S. House of Representatives, but this is thanks largely to gerrymandering and quirks of political geography. Democratic candidates in the 2012 elections received one million more votes than did Republicans. Indeed, FairVote.org has estimated that Democrats were actually preferred roughly 52-48% by the electorate in the most recent elections. The Democrats controlled a majority of the House from January 2007 until January 2011, which means they have won a meaningful majority of votes cast in three of the past four congressional elections.

Why mention these facts? Well, it is interesting how quickly political reality can change. Remember when some pundits and insiders were predicting a "durable" majority position held by the Republican Party?

That alleged majority was built largely on the Republican control of the south and the exurbs. To get a taste of the era, consider the following analysis that I found while going through old drafts of posts that were never posted on this blog. The piece was written by Ronald Brownstein in the February 2006 issue of The American Prospect. The columnist was reviewing four contemporary books about the South and American politics:

The South now furnishes the decisive votes for Republican control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House. Outside the South, Democrats still hold the advantage in the competition on all three fronts. But the Republican dominance of the South has grown so pronounced that it swamps the Democratic strengths elsewhere and provides the GOP with its margin of majority for both Congress and the White House.

Consider the Senate. In the 11 states of the old Confederacy plus Oklahoma and Kentucky -- the generally accepted political definition of the South -- Republicans hold 22 of the 26 Senate seats. In the rest of the country, Democrats control seven more Senate seats than the GOP....

The same is true in the House. Outside the South, Democrats hold a 152-140 edge in House seats....The imbalance is even more pronounced in the race for the White House. In 2000, Al Gore won just over 70 percent of the Electoral College votes at stake outside the South. But George W. Bush narrowly won the White House because he swept all 165 Electoral College votes in the 13 southern states. Four years later, John Kerry won 68 percent of the Electoral College votes outside the South. But Bush won because he again swept the 13 Southern states -- this time worth 168 Electoral College votes after population growth measured in the 2000 Census.

In my review of the 2004 presidential election results, I noted some "ongoing demographic changes" that were already influencing voting patterns in Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Virginia. I described these as a "good sign for Democrats for 2008 and beyond," even though they had just experienced their most disappointing election of the past quarter century.

I suspect, somewhere, Republican analysts are looking at the most recent voting and demographic data in an effort to find some pathways to victory in 2016.


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Bear cam

Have you wasted any time viewing Bear cam? This Wired story explains:

Media company Explore has teamed up with Alaska's Katmai National Park to install webcams that will deliver live video feeds of brown bears catching salmon in a popular feeding ground.

Each year, around a hundred bears travel to a stretch of Brooks River to fill their bellies with salmon. Now anyone with an internet connection can witness this gathering thanks to four high-definition cameras that have been set up in this remote part of Alaska. 

One camera is positioned at Brook Falls, where the larger male bears fight it out for salmon that are desperately trying to leap their way upstream.

This is the link to that camera: Brown Bear & Salmon Cam - Brooks Falls - Bears - explore

Warning: this is highly addictive.

Compare that to this 1980 Reagan campaign commercial to see how far we've progressed in our tolerance for bears (right?):




Yesterday, I watched as two bears postured somewhat violently towards one another. Meanwhile, a nearby bear was dining on salmon. This demonstrated that the two in the foreground learned nothing from the 2012 Republican primaries.


Note: Cross-posted at Duck of Minerva.

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Hot Duck

Today, on the Duck of Minerva group IR blog, I posted "Libya: R2P or Regime Change?" R2P means responsibility to protect, a framing of the authorized intervention that is too rarely used by American media.

On Thursday, I posted "Nuclear Disarmament: Looking Back at Reykjavik." Nearly 25 years ago, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev both offered proposals to disarm offensive nuclear arsenals within 10 years. Declassified documents reveal that this aim was prevented by U.S. desire to research and potentially deploy anti-ballistic missile.



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Boren on Bipartisanship

Monday, I went to a talk on campus by former Senator David Boren (D-OK) who was promoting his new book (all proceeds go to scholarships). This blurb is from the book website:

Bipartisan cooperation on behalf of national interests needs to replace destructive partisanship, and we should not rule out electing a president independent of both existing parties.

At a different local event covered by the newspaper, Boren discussed his vision of bipartisanship (as he did at the campus interview too):

"It is time for those in office to stop underestimating the American people," he said.

Boren, now president of the University of Oklahoma, said the country has gone wildly off course in the past 20 or 25 years as Washington politics have become more polarized and partisan.

He called for whoever is elected as the next president to build a truly bipartisan Cabinet -- and not just pick a token from the other party as interior secretary.

And he said we need to return to the days of smoke-filled rooms where the country's leaders -- outside the eyes of the public and the media -- can work together on the biggest issues of the day.

"It needs to happen," he said. "Government worked when it happened."

While the anti-democratic aspects of the smoke-filled rooms bother me, I'm also very troubled by Boren's call for bipartisanship.

Boren pointed out that since 1980, the federal debt had climbed from $1 billion to $10 billion and that the wealthiest 10% of Americans now hold 54% of America's wealth. The post-war average through 1982 was 34%. You can see a charter for yourself here (p. 6 in the pdf).

The last time the wealthiest 10% controlled this much wealth was 1929.

Boren didn't connect the dots, but the Republican (Reagan) Revolution largely explains both these facts. Reagan and Bush administrations cut taxes on the wealthy and dramatically increased borrowing to pay for defense spending and tax cuts. During the Clinton years, the top 10% did se their share of the national wealth increase from about 40% to around 45%, but Republicans controlled Congress for all but two of those years.

So, why should a number of Republican class warriors be brought into an Obama administration? Boren wants to strike deals with the extremists who have transformed America's political economy. Boren made an explicit and unfavorable comparison between the US and Brazil, where the wealthy (he claimed) have to hide in their homes behind the protection of armed guards.

Elsewhere, Matt Yglesias makes a case for partisan government.


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RIP Jeane Kirkpatrick

Former UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick died on December 7. I've linked to The Washington Post obituary, but you won't have to google very long to find others.

At first glance, Kirkpatrick was a political schizophrenic. As a youth, she was a Columbia-educated Marxist who became a fervent anti-communist in Washington. Though it is not a transformation of that magnitude, she also worked for Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and Ronald Reagan in 1981.

By the 1970s, Kirkpatrick was an ardent cold warrior. In 1979, she published her best-known work, a very famous piece about democratization and human rights for Commentary magazine, "Dictatorships & Double Standards." The piece offered a blistering critique of Jimmy Carter's foreign policy -- and an ideological defense of America's cold war alliances with various right-wing autocrats throughout what was then commonly called the "third world."

Though today's neocons supposedly owe Kirkpatrick a huge intellectual debt, and the administration of George W. Bush is often-said to be heavily influenced by her thinking, it seems obvious to me that the neocons and Bush people should go back and read her 1979 article:

Although most governments in the world are, as they always have been, autocracies of one kind or another, no idea holds greater sway in the mind of educated Americans than the belief that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances. This notion is belied by an enormous body of evidence based on the experience of dozens of countries which have attempted with more or less (usually less) success to move from autocratic to democratic government. Many of the wisest political scientists of this and previous centuries agree that democratic institutions are especially difficult to establish and maintain-because they make heavy demands on all portions of a population and because they depend on complex social, cultural, and economic conditions.

...Decades, if not centuries, are normally required for people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits.

Here's another zinger from that article:

Vietnam presumably taught us that the United States could not serve as the world's policeman; it should also have taught us the dangers of trying to be the world's midwife to democracy when the birth is scheduled to take place under conditions of guerrilla war.

Despite these warnings that resonate in contemporary politics, Kirkpatrick was primarily arguing that some right-wing autocracies had eventually evolved into democracies while there were no examples at that time of a "revolutionary 'socialist' or Communist society being democratized."

This implied (a) that the U.S. could justify its alliances with right-wing autocrats because they were not necessarily permament; and (b) that the U.S. should overtly support these right-wing autocrats because they were vulnerable to pressures applied by Marxist revolutionaries. If the latter came to power, she argued, the new government would be worse than the autocracy it replaced.

In this article, the "Kirkpatrick doctrine" justifying support for right-wing autocrats did not directly begat the "Reagan doctrine," which justified American support for anti-communist insurgencies in places like Nicaragua and Afghanistan. But as the US Permament Representative to the UN for four years, Kirkpatrick certainly supported that policy. And the Commentary piece does criticize the Carter administration for its failure to attempt to undermine any communist states.

Let me note one other prominent Kirkpatrick statement. At the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas that re-nominated Ronald Reagan for president, she delivered the famous address that criticized the "San Francisco Democrats" (the party had just had its national convention in that city) that would "Blame America First" for various ills in world affairs.

In her public life, Jeane Kirkpatrick was both a skilled politico and a scholar. Not many have bridged those two worlds.

My personal experience confirms both her political skills and intellectual prowess. Ten years ago, I spent significant parts of two working days and a long evening with Kirkpatrick and a few other colleagues. Given the stark differences between her politics and mine, I was not really expecting to like her very much. However, I found her to be a very skilled advocate for her positions. She was also quite charming. And entertaining.

And maybe just a little bit flirty.

One final note: As my Duck of Minerva colleague Bill Petti has pointed out, the latest move by the neoconservative crowd is to "Blame America Last." It is clear from Kirkpatrick's 1979 critique of Carter's foreign policy that she was quite willing to place blame on America when she thought its leaders were doing a poor job and creating instability and new threats.

Thus, I'd like to think she would reject this latest twist.


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Filed as: Jeane Kirkpatrick

Bush administration ethics, cont.

Former Admiral John Poindexter was appointed to head the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness Office sometime before February 12, 2002. He resigned August 12, 2003.

This is from the "Executive Summary" of the Iran-Contra Report by the Special Prosecutor, August 1993:

...the Iran operations were carried out with the knowledge of, among others, President Ronald Reagan, Vice President George Bush, Secretary of State George P. Shultz, Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger, Director of Central Intelligence William J. Casey, and national security advisers Robert C. McFarlane and John M. Poindexter; of these officials, only Weinberger and Shultz dissented from the policy decision, and Weinberger eventually acquiesced by ordering the Department of Defense to provide the necessary arms;

Poindexter in April 1990 was convicted by a jury on five felony counts of conspiracy, false statements, destruction and removal of records and obstruction of Congress.

...[White House Chief of Staff Donald] Regan in 1992 provided Independent Counsel with copies of notes showing that Poindexter and Meese attempted to create a false account of the 1985 arms sales from Israeli stocks, which they believed were illegal, in order to protect the President.

The White House, February 25, 2002:

MR. FLEISCHER: Let me just say about Admiral Poindexter, Admiral Poindexter is somebody who this administration thinks is an outstanding American and an outstanding citizen who has done a very good job in what he has done for our country, serving in the military....The President thinks that Admiral Poindexter has served our nation very well.

Note:

The convictions were reversed in 1991 on the grounds that the prosecution's evidence may have been tainted by exposure to Poindexter's testimony before the joint House-Senate committee investigating the matter, which testimony was compelled by a grant of "use immunity".

That was then....this is now

There's so much talk about ethics in Washington, I thought it would be useful to examine the Bush administration in a bit more detail.

In the next few days, I'm planning to look back at the FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL FOR IRAN/CONTRA MATTERS (Lawrence Walsh), August 4, 1993.

And then I'll provide an update as to the whereabouts of the individuals under discussion.

Let's start with Elliott Abrams. This is from Walsh's "Executive Summary":

[O]n November 25, 1986...Attorney General Meese announced that Justice Department officials had discovered that some of the proceeds from the Iran arms sales had been diverted to the contras.

When these operations ended, the exposure of the Iran/contra affair generated a new round of illegality. Beginning with the testimony of Elliott Abrams and others in October 1986 and continuing through the public testimony of Caspar W. Weinberger on the last day of the congressional hearings in the summer of 1987, senior Reagan Administration officials engaged in a concerted effort to deceive Congress and the public about their knowledge of and support for the operations.

...Abrams pleaded guilty in October 1991 to two counts of withholding information from Congress about secret Government efforts to support the contras, and about his solicitation of $10 million to aid the contras from the Sultan of Brunei.

December 24, 1992, George H.W. Bush pardoned Abrams.

The White House, February 2, 2005:

Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Stephen Hadley announced today the appointment of Elliott Abrams as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy...

In his capacity as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy, Mr. Abrams will assist Mr. Hadley in work on the promotion of democracy and human rights, and will provide oversight to the NSC's directorate of Democracy, Human Rights, and International Organization Affairs and its directorate of Near East and North African Affairs. Working with Secretary Rice and Mr. Hadley, he will maintain his involvement in Israeli/Palestinian affairs.

From 1996 through 2001, when he wasn't working with colleagues at the Project for a New American Century, Abrams was President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Snicker.

Ideas

The blogosphere is a great place for people to test ideas. Granted, a lot of blog entries merely link without comment to interesting news stories, but a fair number of posts come with analysis and critique, the bedrocks of political debate.

I decided to do a short run around the blogosphere -- pointing to interesting points bloggers have made, or ideas that merit more consideration. Some are more serious than others. At the moment, most bloggers I read regularly are focusing on either the so-called "torture memos" or the legacy of Ronald Reagan.

I haven't yet blogged about the most recent development in the prisoner scandal, the leaked memos, but others have. Mark A.R. Kleiman asks the key question about the Bush administration's latest position:

Let me be sure I have this straight: we're not torturing anyone, but revealing our legal position on what we can and can't do would weaken the fight against terror?

Phil Carter explains that a key torture memo's claim that "authority to set aside the laws is 'inherent in the president'" directly conflicts with the Constitution's "affirmative duty [on the President] to enforce the laws" (found in Article II, Section 3).

In passing, Gary Sauer-Thompson equates prison torture with terror. Given that hundreds of apparently innocent people were released from those prisons, this seems like a legitimate point.

Chris at Explananda fears that administration officials will not be held to account for their alleged misdeeds, and that this reflects the sad fact that a "separate law applies to people in power."

Because Bush's lawyers (no, not his private attorney consulted about the Plame affair) are talking about the so-called "Nuremberg defense" (just following orders), Digby has this perfect quip:

George W. Bush has been making comparisons between the "War On Terrorism" and WWII. I didn't realize that in this sequel we were the Germans.

Naturally, quite a lot of bloggers have been thinking about the Reagan legacy.

Dwight Meredith of Wampum has a long, but well-done, post on "Ranking the Reagan Economy." I don't want to spoil his conclusion, but let's just say some other (recently) re-elected presidents did better. Politus found a great quote that puts Bush's economy in perspective.

Actually, since Kevin Hayden of the American Street already did a nice run around the blogosphere about Reagan, I'll cut this short. Hayden has several of Reagan's less famous quotes:

In retaking People's Park from the Berkeley students, Reagan sent in the National Guard, proclaiming: "If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with!"

"The state of California has no business subsidizing intellectual curiosity." was another thing he actually said as governor.

Another Reagan quote of note: "History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap."

Tex at UnFairWitness had a short post on "The Reagan loonie?" that just might create a bipartisan consensus for a Reagan coin.

Happy reading.

Reagan

I don't have much to say about the passing of Ronald Wilson Reagan. Instead, I'll write a little bit about how his life influenced mine (it is my blog after all).

My graduate career (and, thus, my professional life) started in 1983, well into the Reagan presidency.

Ultimately, my dissertation was inspired by the Reagan administration. My thesis focused primarily on missile defenses (and the importance of public audiences in shaping policy), as did a few of my earliest journal articles. One piece, in fact, specifically analyzed a speech delivered by Reagan on March 23, 1983. At the time, this was known as the "Star Wars" speech, even though the President didn't use that term.

In fact, the average listener probably wasn't exactly sure what Reagan was discussing when he turned somewhat ambiguously to strategic defenses. Reagan included the relevant paragraphs at the end of a lengthy speech on "Defense and National Security." Throughout the overwhelming majority of this speech, Reagan outlined the need for elevated defense spending. As you might expect, a great deal of the speech was dedicated to outlining Soviet weaponry. That's how the arms race was justified in the US: they build, so we have to build.

Of course, as in the recent debate about Iraqi WMD, the threats were often inflated.

Here's an interesting quote from the March 23, 1983, speech that might have been useful in the 2002-2003 Iraq debate:

The defense policy of the United States is based on a simple premise: The United States does not start fights. We will never be an aggressor.

Then again, America's actions have long been justified as defensive even when many observers might see them as offensive. In this address, Reagan mentioned US concerns about an airfield in Grenada with a 10,000-foot runway built with Soviet financing. In October of that year, American forces invaded Grenada and deposed Maurice Bishop.

Perhaps you saw the mediocre Clint Eastwood movie about it.

Anyway, back to the March 23 speech. Reagan was accusing the Soviets of "acquiring what can only be considered an offensive military force" and calling for greater American defense forces to counter it. Ultimately, he proposed strategic defenses:

After careful consultation with my advisers, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I believe there is a way. Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope. It is that we embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive. Let us turn to the very strengths in technology that spawned our great industrial base and that have given us the quality of life we enjoy today.

What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?

I know this is a formidable, technical task, one that may not be accomplished before the end of this century. Yet, current technology has attained a level of sophistication where it's reasonable for us to begin this effort. It will take years, probably decades of effort on many fronts. There will be failures and setbacks, just as there will be successes and breakthroughs. And as we proceed, we must remain constant in preserving the nuclear deterrent and maintaining a solid capability for flexible response. But isn't it worth every investment necessary to free the world from the threat of nuclear war? We know it is.

In the meantime, we will continue to pursue real reductions in nuclear arms, negotiating from a position of strength that can be ensured only by modernizing our strategic forces. At the same time, we must take steps to reduce the risk of a conventional military conflict escalating to nuclear war by improving our nonnuclear capabilities.

America does possess -- now -- the technologies to attain very significant improvements in the effectiveness of our conventional, nonnuclear forces. Proceeding boldly with these new technologies, we can significantly reduce any incentive that the Soviet Union may have to threaten attack against the United States or its allies.

As we pursue our goal of defensive technologies, we recognize that our allies rely upon our strategic offensive power to deter attacks against them. Their vital interests and ours are inextricably linked. Their safety and ours are one. And no change in technology can or will alter that reality. We must and shall continue to honor our commitments.

I clearly recognize that defensive systems have limitations and raise certain problems and ambiguities. If paired with offensive systems, they can be viewed as fostering an aggressive policy, and no one wants that. But with these considerations firmly in mind, I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.

Tonight, consistent with our obligations of the ABM treaty and recognizing the need for closer consultation with our allies, I'm taking an important first step. I am directing a comprehensive and intensive effort to define a long-term research and development program to begin to achieve our ultimate goal of eliminating the threat posed by strategic nuclear missiles. This could pave the way for arms control measures to eliminate the weapons themselves. We seek neither military superiority nor political advantage. Our only purpose -- one all people share -- is to search for ways to reduce the danger of nuclear war.

My fellow Americans, tonight we're launching an effort which holds the promise of changing the course of human history. There will be risks, and results take time. But I believe we can do it. As we cross this threshold, I ask for your prayers and your support.

Thank you, good night, and God bless you.

Despite what Christopher Hitchens wrote at Salon, Reagan did not end this speech "with the lame quip, 'May the force be with you.'"

In fact, Reagan apparently used that line when astronauts were about to fly in the space shuttle, which actually seems appropriate. Even Reagan's "evil empire" speech does not use the phrase inspired by that movie. Reagan referred to totalitarians as evil, but did not utter the word "empire" in the address.

And it was Reagan's foes who called the program inspired by the March 23 speech "Star Wars." The administration called the program the Strategic Defense Initiative.

In short, the Reagan legacy is complicated; informed (like the former President was) by myths and half-truths. My coauthored journal article about the "Star Wars" speech argued that it was an excellent response to the nuclear freeze movement, but a poor way to initiate defense policy given the negative reaction that could be expected from significant numbers of "defense intellectuals" and allies. After all, supporters had been proposing "anti-missile missiles" since the Soviets launched Sputnik -- typically in the face of significant opposition that was able for decades to hold off repeated efforts to secure deployment.

Ultimately, the SDI program also died before deployment, but when urged to do so by political leaders, the US body politic still regularly engages in debates about whether to deploy missile defenses. One of the Clinton-Gingrich confrontations that closed the government was partly about the appropriation of funds to deploy missile defenses. Donald Rumsfeld may have been named Bush's Defense Secretary because of his misleading Commission Report that inflated missile threats from proliferants.

You get the idea.

I ultimately broadened my scholarly interests by turning to questions about global environmental politics and international institutions. But the public debates about threats in the nuclear age, and the appropriate US responses to them, are ongoing and interesting.