Iran and Nuclear Weapons

Today's big news item is obviously the release of the National Intelligence Estimate finding that Iran halted its nuclear weapons development program in 2003. The Washington Post argues the NIE's a blow to the Bush administration:

President Bush got the world's attention this fall when he warned that a nuclear-armed Iran might lead to World War III. But his stark warning came at least a month or two after he had first been told about fresh indications that Iran had actually halted its nuclear weapons program.

The new intelligence report released yesterday not only undercut the administration's alarming rhetoric over Iran's nuclear ambitions but could also throttle Bush's effort to ratchet up international sanctions and take off the table the possibility of preemptive military action before the end of his presidency.

Iran had been shaping up as perhaps the dominant foreign policy issue of Bush's remaining year in office and of the presidential campaign to succeed him. Now leaders at home and abroad will have to rethink what they thought they knew about Tehran's intentions and capabilities.

"It's a little head-spinning," said Daniel Benjamin, an official on President Bill Clinton's National Security Council. "Everybody's going to be trying to scratch their heads and figure out what comes next."

Critics seized on the new National Intelligence Estimate to lambaste what Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards called "George Bush and Dick Cheney's rush to war with Iran." Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.), echoing other Democrats, called for "a diplomatic surge" to resolve the dispute with Tehran. Jon Wolfsthal, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, termed the revelation "a blockbuster development" that "requires a wholesale reevaluation of U.S. policy."

But the White House said the report vindicated its concerns because it concluded that Iran did have a nuclear weapons program until halting it in 2003 and it showed that U.S.-led diplomatic pressure had succeeded in forcing Tehran's hand. "On balance, the estimate is good news," said national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley. "On the one hand, it confirms that we were right to be worried about Iran seeking to develop nuclear weapons. On the other hand, it tells us that we have made some progress in trying to ensure that that does not happen."

Hadley disagreed that the report showed that past administration statements have been wrong, noting that collecting intelligence on a "hard target" such as Iran is notoriously difficult. "Welcome to the real world," he said.

The left-wing blogosphere is having a field day with the NIE report (see Memeorandum). (Glenn Greenwald's got a rabidly (radical) anti-Bush post on the affair, "Our Serious Foreign Policy Geniuses Strike Again.")

I'm going to take a closer look at the full report, but I find the conclusions odd, based on my own reading of journalistic and scholarly sources on Tehran's march to weapons capability.

Just Sunday, Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins - authors of The Nuclear Jihadist - published a penetrating essay warning of the threat from Iran's development program:

In recent weeks, international attention has been focused on the political crisis in Pakistan and whether the military there could lose control of the nukes that Khan helped develop -- estimated at between 50 and 120 devices -- if the political situation were to spiral out of control or if radical Islamists were to take over.

But we believe the bigger threat today comes from Iran, where the country's leaders are forging defiantly ahead toward the bomb -- even as the Bush administration seems equally relentless in its determination to stop them. This is a recipe for a global confrontation that could make the Iraq war seem tame by comparison, and it has gotten to this point thanks to A.Q. Khan.

The most immediate threat is that Iran's scientists will soon complete their mastery of the uranium enrichment cycle, enabling them to produce fissile material that could fuel a civilian reactor (as they claim is their intention) or, in higher concentration, power a bomb. A Nov. 15 report by the International Atomic Energy Agency verified that 3,000 centrifuges are online at Iran's Natanz underground enrichment plant, and that Iran is in the final stages before the production of enriched uranium. While IAEA officials suggest privately that technical hurdles remain, the fact is that Iran is on the verge of enriching uranium on an industrial scale....

Even more troubling, and less noticed by the media, was Iran's admission to the IAEA in November that it had made substantial progress in testing an advanced type of centrifuge, known as the P-2. Iran's enrichment plant now uses P-1 centrifuges, but investigators have learned that the P-2, like its predecessor, the P-1, came to Iran directly from Khan. This machine would cut in half the time it takes to enrich uranium, moving up a showdown with the United States and its allies. Estimates on when Iran might be capable of developing a nuclear weapon have ranged from two to 10 years.

Iran, of course, did not simply volunteer to the IAEA that it was working on the P-2; it's never quite that simple. The IAEA's dealings with Tehran are replete with examples, ever since Iran's secret nuclear program was exposed by an exile group in 2002, of officials denying the existence of one program after another, only to acknowledge them when confronted by evidence to the contrary. The IAEA has credited Iran with cooperating on some key issues, but viewed in context, the repeated evasions undermine Iran's credibility on virtually everything it has said about nuclear issues, including whether there is a military side to its program....

The existence of the P-2 designs troubled... the IAEA, and they pressed the Iranians for months over whether they had translated them into actual machines. Eventually Iran conceded that work had been done on the P-2 by a private contractor, but insisted that the project had been abandoned. U.S. intelligence and skeptics at the IAEA doubted the claim, speculating instead that the P-2 could be the nucleus of a parallel enrichment project still hidden from the IAEA.

Fast forward to April 2006. That's when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad acknowledged to the media that Iranian scientists were indeed working on the P-2, which he boasted would quadruple Iran's enrichment capability. The IAEA had to wait until Nov. 7, 2007, for formal acknowledgment from Iran of the work. By then, Iran was running mechanical tests on the P-2s, a step short of introducing uranium hexafluoride -- the final stage before the production of enriched uranium.

The story of the P-2s is a case study in how Iran has managed to make substantial gains in enrichment technology despite international scrutiny and pressure.

Some outstanding political science research also has offered credible warnings on the consequence of Iranian nuclear capability. Colin Dueck and Ray Takeyh, in their provocative article, "Iran’s Nuclear Challenge," argued that while the timing was at issue, Iran's procurement of nuclear weapons would be a dangerous development:

Once Iran completes the necessary infrastructure, from mining to enriching uranium at the suitable weapons-grade level, and masters the engineering skill required to assemble a bomb, it could cross the threshold in a short period of time. All this would depend on the scope and scale of the program and the level of national resources committed to this task. Iran today does have an accelerated program, but not a crash program similar to Pakistan’s in the early 1970s, when the entirety of national energies was mobilized behind the task of constructing a nuclear device. In this context, Iran’s persistent determination to complete the fuel cycle—which it has a right to do under the NPT—is ominous, because doing so would bring the country close to a weapons capability.

There's certain to be further debate on Iran's program, especially since the political origins of the NIE's most recent findings are suspect. Norman Podhoretz, over at Commentary, notes his deep suspicions:

These findings are startling, not least because in key respects they represent a 180-degree turn from the conclusions of the last NIE on Iran’s nuclear program. For that one, issued in May 2005, assessed “with high confidence that Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons” and to press on “despite its international obligations and international pressure.”

In other words, a full two years after Iran supposedly called a halt to its nuclear program, the intelligence community was still as sure as it ever is about anything that Iran was determined to build a nuclear arsenal. Why then should we believe it when it now tells us, and with the same “high confidence,” that Iran had already called a halt to its nuclear-weapons program in 2003? Similarly with the intelligence community’s reversal on the effectiveness of international pressure. In 2005, the NIE was highly confident that international pressure had not lessened Iran’s determination to develop nuclear weapons, and yet now, in 2007, the intelligence community is just as confident that international pressure had already done the trick by 2003.

It is worth remembering that in 2002, one of the conclusions offered by the NIE, also with “high confidence,” was that “Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions.” And another conclusion, offered with high confidence too, was that “Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material.”

I must confess to suspecting that the intelligence community, having been excoriated for supporting the then universal belief that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, is now bending over backward to counter what has up to now been a similarly universal view (including as is evident from the 2005 NIE, within the intelligence community itself) that Iran is hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons. I also suspect that, having been excoriated as well for minimizing the time it would take Saddam to add nuclear weapons to his arsenal, the intelligence community is now bending over backward to maximize the time it will take Iran to reach the same goal.

But I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. This time the purpose is to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations. As the intelligence community must know, if he were to do so, it would be as a last resort, only after it had become undeniable that neither negotiations nor sanctions could prevent Iran from getting the bomb, and only after being convinced that it was very close to succeeding. How better, then, to stop Bush in his tracks than by telling him and the world that such pressures have already been effective and that keeping them up could well bring about “a halt to Iran’s entire nuclear weapons program”—especially if the negotiations and sanctions were combined with a goodly dose of appeasement or, in the NIE’s own euphemistic formulation, “with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways.”

If this is what lies behind the release of the new NIE, its authors can take satisfaction in the response it has elicited from the White House. Quoth Stephen Hadley, George W. Bush’s National Security Adviser: “The estimate offers grounds for hope that the problem can be solved diplomatically—without the use of force—as the administration has been trying to do.”

I should add that I offer these assessments and judgments with no more than “moderate confidence.”

One of America's top Middle East experts, Anthony Cordesman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, released an analysis of UN and IAEA reporting on Iran last week. Here's the conclusion from the synopsis:

The evidence presented provides strong indications that Iran is pursuing a
nuclear weapons program. Specifically, Iran is known to have made significant
efforts in all of the following areas, most of which have been tracked by the
IAEA for some time:

* Beryllium (neutron reflector)
* Polonium (neutron initiator)
* Plutonium separation
* Uranium enrichment
* Machining of Uranium hemispheres
* Re-entry vehicle design
* Acquisition of North Korean (Chinese) weapons design? AQ Khan network transfers
* High explosive lenses

The attached briefing shows that the IAEA has traced a pattern of
Iranian efforts that fit a coherent and consistent nuclear weapons program that
is difficult to explain in any other way, but no certainties are involved.
Moreover, major uncertainties exist in virtually every aspect of any effort to
characterize what kind of program Iran may be intending to create, when it will
have a significant stock of weapons, and how it intends to deploy and exploit
such a capability.

At the same time, there is wide range of possible
Iranian activities that the IAEA may never be able to fully address, even if
Iran does adopt the full range of NPT protocols...

The CSIS report is hefty (at 55 pages), but it notes that of 2006, Iran stopped reporting information to the IAEA under international monitoring and transparency protocols. Even Mohammed ElBaradei recognized that Iran's evasion and recalcitrance created a situation of crisis proportions.

See also Democracy Arsenal (not a neoconservative outfit in the least), which argues:

You don't want to believe the Bush Administration . . . I'm right there with you. But concern about Iran's nuclear program was not exclusively American; it was shared by every member of the Security Council and Germany.

In the end, I doubt the NIE report will provide any closure to the issue. There might be administration retreat from the march to war, but those at odds with the report will question the impartiality of the intelligence community. Peaceniks opposed to the robust exercise of American military power will rejoice that their dire warnings have beeen vindicated (and they'll continue to rail against the "neocons" and their black helicopters).

The ultimate winner is, of course, Iran, which can call for reprisals against the West as its leadership continues to work for its ultimate goal of establishing regional hegemony in the Middle East.

Oprah's Rewriting Every Line for Clinton-Obama Race

This post is a follow up to my last entry, "Going Down? Hillary Clinton on the Defense in Iowa." In that essay I noted how Barack Obama has closed the gap in Iowa, and his momentum is threatening Hillary's inevitability.

For a great follow-up, check out Dan Gerstein at the Wall Street Journal, who argues that Clinton's sorry response to Oprah Winfrey's Obama endorsement tops the recent implosion of the Clinton juggernaut:

It's tempting to write off the celebrity-endorsement bout between the Obama and Clinton campaigns - with Oprah Winfrey in Barack Obama's corner and Barbra Streisand in Hillary Clinton's--as just another episode of the Democratic Party's long-running series of superstar superficiality.

But there's actually a meaningful and telling metaphor wrapped up in this fleeting game of dueling divas, one that helps explain why Sen. Obama's much-hyped yet largely unfulfilling candidacy is finally breaking through, and why the Clinton juggernaut appears (at least for the moment) to be breaking down.

Indeed, after spending much of this year struggling to escape the experience box that the Clinton campaign had so adroitly stuffed him into, Sen. Obama could not have asked for a better, more striking contrast of surrogate symbols to draw out his major differences with the front-runner, and to drive home his increasingly trenchant argument that Mrs. Clinton is the candidate of the status quo.

Let's start with the "O-factor." Oprah is the Swiss Army knife of political validators, a spectacularly accomplished black woman who is admired by Americans across every demographic, and would thus be a boon to any candidate. But her particular potency for Sen. Obama in this contest is not her race or gender or even the sum of her many parts, but what she is perceived to be lacking--a political agenda.

More than anything, Oprah is a uniquely transcendent figure in our public life: engaged in serious debates and willing to put her money where her mouth is, yet unsullied by the ugly political and culture wars of the past two decades, and independent in her thinking and affiliations. In this, she personifies the new post-Bush, post-partisan, post-boomer politics Sen. Obama is preaching. She is the way we want things to be (at least those of us outside the narrow margins of the ideological extremes): genuine, unifying, trustworthy, aspirational.

Read the whole thing. Gerstein's play on the lyrics to "The Way We Were" is a riot! What's too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget, right?

Here's Gerstein:

So how did the Clinton campaign respond to the news that Oprah would be stumping for Sen. Obama this coming weekend? Instead of sticking to their core message, and showing the confidence of a true front-runner, they fell into the tit-for-tat trap of countering with the endorsement of the polarizing, '60s-studded Streisand - in essence, the anti-Oprah. In doing so, the Clinton camp did not just fail to blunt or dilute the O-factor, they managed to accentuate it by unwittingly suggesting Mrs. Clinton stands for--like the Streisand anthem--the way we were.

To many Democrats, that brings back broadly positive feelings of peace and prosperity. But for hard-core activists, that could also mean the misty, waffle-colored memories of triangulation, corporate friendliness and job-killing trade pacts (among other liberal gripes about Bill Clinton). And for less partisan primary voters, it could be the scattered pictures of equivocation, Whitewater, Lewinsky, and a continuation of the petty, divisive politics that have come to define the Bush-Clinton years for voters across the political spectrum.

Oh Bill...it was all so simple then! If we had the chance to do it all again...would we? could we?

You gotta love it!

Going Down? Hillary Clinton on the Defense in Iowa

The conventional wisdom on Hillary Clinton's inevitability has been holding up so long now that her newfound difficulties in Iowa seem especially interesting. Barack Obama's closed the gap in the Hawkeye State. Today's Wall Street Journal has the story:

A month before Iowa holds the first contest of the 2008 presidential campaign, a newly energized Sen. Barack Obama has opened a narrow lead here, but many Iowans in both parties say they could change their minds in the next 30 days about which candidate to support.

Mr. Obama's rising popularity was fueled by a fiery speech three weeks ago in which he vowed to turn away from the partisan battles of the Clinton-Bush years. That, plus the surprising strength of his Iowa ground organization, is galvanizing his campaign.

Over the weekend, the Des Moines Register released a poll showing Sen. Obama was the choice of 28% of Iowa Democrats likely to attend the state's Jan. 3 caucuses, up from 22% in the newspaper's October poll. That compares with 25% for the former Iowa front-runner, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, down from her previous 29%. Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, once the leader here, held steady at 23%. Given the margin of error, the race is almost a three-way dead heat.

But as critical to the outcome is the fact that over half the state's voters who have a preferred candidate say they may end up caucusing for someone else....

Since late October, Sen. Clinton has been the target of fellow Democrats' barbs about her stances on Iraq and Iran, as well as her character and her candor. The attacks were bound to raise doubts with voters and erode her lead. Moreover, Mr. Obama, with the large sums of money he has raised, has had the resources to more than match Sen. Clinton in a state that requires massive statewide organizing, as well as to surpass her in television advertising.

Among Democrats... it has long been widely believed that a decisive win for Sen. Clinton could, in effect, crown her as the nominee. Not only has she long led her rivals in national polls by double digits, but Iowa had long stood as the only early voting state where she wasn't far ahead, though her margin has tightened in New Hampshire and elsewhere.

It turns out that Clinton's attack machine is already ratcheting up the smear mode to thwart Obama's momentum. The Washington Post reports:

With a new poll showing her losing ground in the Iowa caucus race, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) mounted a new, more aggressive attack against Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) on Sunday, raising direct questions about his character, challenging his integrity and forecasting a sharp debate over those subjects in the days ahead.

Clinton has hammered Obama recently over his health-care proposal, arguing that he is misleading voters because it omits millions of people and would not lower costs. But Sunday, in a dramatic shift, she made it clear that her goal is to challenge Obama not just on policy but also on one of his strongest selling points: his reputation for honesty.

"There's a big difference between our courage and our convictions, what we believe and what we're willing to fight for," Clinton told reporters here. She said voters in Iowa will have a choice "between someone who talks the talk, and somebody who's walked the walk."

Asked directly whether she intended to raise questions about Obama's character, she replied: "It's beginning to look a lot like that"....

The new Clinton strategy, acknowledged by her senior advisers as an intentional pivot, carries significant risks and could produce a potential backlash if voters perceive her as growing too negative. The Register's poll also found that Clinton was seen by Iowa voters as the most negative of the Democratic contenders.

Obama had the support of 28 percent of respondents, up six points from the last Register poll, in early October. Former senator John Edwards (N.C.) drew 23 percent. Clinton was in the middle at 25 percent, down four points from early October. The margin of error is 4.4 percentage points.

Clinton, campaigning across Iowa on Sunday, appeared to be spoiling for a fight with her chief Democratic rival in national polls -- even at one point describing the battle as "fun."

"I have said for months that I would much rather be attacking Republicans, and attacking the problems of our country, because ultimately that's what I want to do as president. But I have been, for months, on the receiving end of rather consistent attacks. Well, now the fun part starts. We're into the last month, and we're going to start drawing the contrasts," she said.

Ron Christie, at the The Hill's Pundit Blog, sees the beginning of the end for Clinton:

To be honest, I never thought in the first few days of December I would proffer that the Hillary Campaign for President is near the end. To wit, her national poll numbers have been plummeting since she seemed unable to answer a simple question whether she favored issuing driver’s licenses to illegal aliens. She tried to be too cute on the issue by implying that she supported the issuance of such licenses before commenting that people were piling on and that she was being attacked by “the boys.”

While this might sound like a sound strategy in the comfort of campaign office suites, American voters see through such cynicism and posturing for pure political purposes. And now the Clinton strategy has backfired, and backfired badly.

After strutting around the country as the inevitable nominee who had to deal with the nettlesome opponents who were merely prolonging the inevitable, Sen. Clinton (N.Y.) has begun to realize, perhaps too late, that citizens of Iowa and New Hampshire take their role as casting the first ballots in the race for president of the United States very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that they have started to punish the “inevitable” front-runner who was awaiting coronation by rewarding former Sen. John Edwards (N.C.) and current Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) with strong surges in the polls.

And now Sen. Clinton has decided to dig a bigger hole for herself by attacking the integrity and candor of Iowa caucus front-runner Obama. And Clinton is attacking a political candidate for his integrity and candor? As “Dandy” Don Meredith used to sing on “Monday Night Football” decades ago late in the fourth quarter: “Turn out the lights, the party’s over. All good things must come to an end.” Attacking Sen. Obama, a fresh face and generally positive campaigner, with the Clinton War Machine will remind voters once again why they have tired of Clintons posturing and preening at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Turn out the lights: After losing Iowa and New Hampshire, the Clinton party will be over for 2008.

The situation is in flux, obviously. The Pew Center has Clinton 31% to 26% over Obama, although the survey's polling began November 7, and might not be reliable.

Check Memeorandum for more analysis. Expect the mudslinging character assassinations to pick up full steam in the weeks ahead. Obama's not going to be able to stay on the high road if he hopes to fend off the Clinton machine.

John McCain Could Be Last Man Standing

Eleanor Clift, in her online column, argues that John McCain's new momentum has positioned him to the front of the pack in New Hampshire:

A funny thing happened on the way to New Hampshire. John McCain got his mojo back. Meeting with reporters in his campaign headquarters, McCain, back from Iraq and on his way to South Carolina, held forth on a variety of subjects in the easy, straight-talking way that earned him a special place in political journalists' hearts in 2000, and that still sets him apart from almost every other leading contender for the presidency on either side.

He had just come from taping the Charlie Rose show, an hour's exploration of his inner feelings, he said, and he seemed eager to get to Iraq and the gains made by the buildup of U.S. troops. "John Edwards used to call it the McCain surge. He doesn't anymore. I wish he would," McCain said. With roughly half of Americans now saying the war in Iraq is going well, according to a Pew Research Center poll, McCain hopes his firmness in sticking with the war will translate into a first- or second-place finish in New Hampshire.

It's a long shot for a candidate who during the summer had to shed much of his staff and is operating on a tight budget, but McCain seems comfortable and on his game. The Republican race is so fluid that almost anything can happen. And for an electorate searching for authenticity, the new McCain is the old McCain, the candidate we saw eight years ago who speaks his mind and whose personal story brings a moral dimension unmatched by his rivals. The questions now are whether Republicans will see McCain as their most electable nominee and whether the independent voters that launched him in 2000 will return to him in New Hampshire. "His destiny is out of his hands," says Matthew Dowd, who was George W. Bush's pollster in 2000 and 2004 and is now unaffiliated with any candidate or party.

For McCain to make a comeback, several things have to fall in place. Mike Huckabee has to win Iowa or do damage to Mitt Romney. The two current GOP front runners, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, have to continue the demolition derby they kicked off in Wednesday evening's YouTube debate on CNN, jabbing each other about who's tougher on immigration and crime. The hint of scandal around Giuliani has to grow. That would leave the voters faced with Huckabee, who raised taxes in Arkansas to build roads (heresy for conservatives); a lethargic Fred Thompson, who can't seem to stir himself for the big fight, or McCain, a credible commander in chief who's always been pro-life. McCain could be the last man standing.

Reminded by a reporter at Monday's "sandwiches and scoops" session that Thompson had made fund-raising calls for him before entering the race, McCain quipped, "I'd like to see those phone lists." McCain is not coy about what he has to do. He has to win in New Hampshire, or come close enough to claim the "Comeback Kid" mantle that Bill Clinton rode to victory after finishing second in 1992. He also has a stake in how the Democratic race shakes out. If the Democratic contest seems settled by the Iowa returns, McCain would benefit because independents, fully a third of the New Hampshire electorate, generally flock to the party where the action is. In other words, if Hillary Clinton, the front runner nationally and in New Hampshire, wins Iowa, she will look like a foregone conclusion, and independents won't want to waste their vote on a race that's already over.

Voters in New Hampshire don't have to declare party allegiance until Election Day, and if the independents decide to play on the Republican side, McCain could be the beneficiary. Here's an example of how powerful this dynamic is: if it hadn't been for the excitement around McCain in 2000, Bill Bradley would have beaten Al Gore in New Hampshire, and perhaps snatched the nomination. "A Clinton victory in Iowa would be the best thing that could possibly happen to John McCain," says Bill Galston, a former domestic-policy adviser in the Clinton White House who is now with the Brookings Institution. "And if that doesn't happen, [second best would be] an Edwards victory, because Edwards is not going to be much of a player in New Hampshire. An Obama victory would be trouble for Hillary—but a disaster for McCain."

McCain is finally running the campaign he should have from the start. Will it be enough? It may. The history of presidential primary politics is littered with surprises: failed front runners, and dead-in-the-water winners.

This is interesesting. I hadn't thought about a Hillary factor on the GOP side. The case for McCain in the Granite State makes sense, of course, if New Hampshire voters can shift to the GOP primary on election day. Based on my preferences for the Republican nomination, I say go Hillary!

See also yesterday's post, "New Hampshire Union-Leader Endorses John McCain."

Public Opinion Rebounds on Iraq

In a little reported development in the mainstream press, public opinion on the Iraq war is showing continued improvement.

These findings come from the Pew Research Center's new Iraq poll out this week:

For the first time in a long time, nearly half of Americans express positive opinions about the situation in Iraq. A growing number says the U.S. war effort is going well, while greater percentages also believe the United States is making progress in reducing the number of Iraqi casualties, defeating the insurgents and preventing a civil war in Iraq.

Roughly half of the public (48%) believes the U.S. military effort in Iraq is going very or fairly well. Judgments about the overall situation in Iraq have been improving steadily since the summer. As recently as June, only about a third of Americans (34%) said things were going well in Iraq.

The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted Nov. 20-26 among 1,399 adults, finds that improved public impressions of Iraq are particularly evident when it comes to security-related issues. The number of Americans who say that the United States is making progress in reducing the number of civilian casualties in Iraq has doubled from 21% to 43% since June. The proportion saying that progress has been achieved in preventing terrorists from establishing bases in Iraq is also up substantially, as is the number saying the U.S. is making progress in defeating the insurgents militarily.

However, a rosier view of the military situation in Iraq has not translated into increased support for maintaining U.S. forces in Iraq, greater optimism that the United States will achieve its goals there, or an improvement in President Bush's approval ratings.

By 54%-41%, more Americans favor bringing U.S. troops home from Iraq as soon as possible rather than keeping troops in Iraq until the situation has stabilized. The balance of opinion on this measure has not changed significantly all year. Similarly, Americans remain evenly divided over whether the U.S. is likely to succeed or fail in achieving its goals in Iraq; improved perceptions of the situation in Iraq have not resulted in a changed outlook in this regard. In addition, Bush's overall job approval now stands at 30%, which is largely unchanged since June and equals the lowest marks of his presidency.

While we're seeing positive change, the Pew findings indicate that the public's good and tired of our long slog toward consolidating Iraq's democracy. As casualties continue to decline, however, and as more positive coverage of the war emerges in the press, we should see additional improvement in the polling numbers.

What does continued improvement in Iraq mean for the Bush administration? The Pew summary shows no changes in President Bush's poll standings. Bush has just under 14 months left in office, and while we may not see a dramatic turnaround in his support, things are definitely looking up for the administration.

Clark Judge, over at the Washington Times, argued earlier this week that President Bush will see a rebound in 2008:

For the more than a year, the Democratic presidential candidates, the mainstream media and the smart Washington money have all assumed an unpopular and discredited George W. Bush would drag down the Republican ticket, making next year's balloting a sure-thing replay of 2006. Now, amazingly, the president may be set for a comeback.

True, Mr. Bush's poll numbers long ago went to where no president — or at least no president ever succeeded by his own party's candidate — had ever gone before, and remained there. The number of Americans who disapprove of his performance has exceeded by wide margins the number of those who approve for most of his second term.

Yet more than two years of bad news for the president may have set the stage for good news in the year ahead. For months now, the president's critics have portrayed him as obstinate, deaf to the calls of the people, bullheadedly unwilling to abandon mistaken initiatives.

Exhibit A has been the war in Iraq. But almost every administration initiative comes in for such an attack. Not a Democratic candidate debate goes by without some reference to the "failed policies" of the current administration.

It has been a powerful narrative. But if the public sees those "failed" policies start to succeed, its understanding of the president could change on a dime. What was once regarded as "obstinate" would become "courageous." What was previously considered "bullheaded" would become "principled" — and "deaf to critics" would become "leadership." This kind of about-face could be in the works now....

In 1987, President Reagan's fortunes were down. The GOP had lost the Senate the year before. Iran-Contra and the defeat of Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court had followed. But then the Soviets started to give way on arms and other agreements, the economy continued to grow despite the October stock market crash and Reagan began the long climb in the polls that helped put the current president's father in the Oval Office.

The same could happen in 2008. Most of the fundamentals are in place. With one or two more developments breaking the president's way, this year's story of the stubborn chief executive could become next year's of a profile in courage.

Who would have thought it possible? George W. Bush becomes Hillary Clinton's worst nightmare.

Now that's something to look forward to!

New Hampshire Union-Leader Endorses John McCain

The New Hampshire Union-Leader has endorsed Arizona Senator John McCain in the GOP presidential primary race:

On Jan. 8, New Hampshire Republicans will make one of the most important choices for their party and nation in the history of our presidential primary. Their choice ought to be John McCain.

We don't agree with him on every issue. We disagree with him strongly on campaign finance reform. What is most compelling about McCain, however, is that his record, his character, and his courage show him to be the most trustworthy, competent, and conservative of all those seeking the nomination. Simply put, McCain can be trusted to make informed decisions based on the best interests of his country, come hell or high water.

Competence, courage, and conviction are enormously important for our next President to possess. No one has a better understanding of U.S. interests and dangers right now than does McCain. He was right on the mistakes made by the Bush administration in prosecuting the Islamic terrorist war in Iraq and he is being proved right on the way forward both there and worldwide.

McCain is pro-life. Always has been. He fights against special-interest and pork-barrel spending, and high spending in general, which ticks off liberals and many in the GOP who have wallowed at the public trough. Yet he also has the proven ability, unique among the contenders, to work across the political divide that has led our government into petty bickering when important problems need to be solved.

We have known John McCain for many years. We will write more about him in the days ahead. For now, we leave you with this to ponder:

When McCain was shot down and taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese, he was repeatedly beaten. When his captors discovered that his father was a top U.S. admiral, they ordered him released for propaganda purposes. But McCain refused, insisting that longer-held prisoners be released before him. So they beat him some more. He never gave in then, and he won't give in to our enemies now.

John McCain is the man to lead America.

Debra Saunders also boosts McCain today in her piece over at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Readers know I'm a McCain backer. Although the GOP race is looking more like a three-way contest among Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, and Mitt Romney, any of the five top candidates (Romney, Giuliani, Fred Thompson, Huckabee, and John McCain) could win in Iowa, New Hampshire, or South Carolina.

McCain's still in the hunt in the Granite State. RealClearPolitics tracking poll averages have McCain in a close third in New Hampshire.

The New Hampshire Union-Leader's endorsement might help McCain push into the state's very top-tier (although research shows a limited impact of newspaper endorsements in the contemporary electoral environment). A win or a strong second-place showing would help keep McCain's drive going heading into the February 5th round of primary voting nationally.

It's exciting, in any case.

Mike Huckabee: The Republican Frontrunner?

With just a month to go, Mike Huckabee has surged to the front of the pack in the Iowa GOP presidential horse race, as a new Des Moines Register poll indicates:

Mike Huckabee has leaped ahead of Republican presidential rival Mitt Romney in Iowa, seizing first place in a new Des Moines Register poll of likely Republican caucus participants.

Huckabee wins the support of 29 percent of Iowans who say they definitely or probably will attend the Republican Party's caucuses on Jan. 3. That's a gain of 17 percentage points since the last Iowa Poll was taken in early October, when Huckabee trailed both Romney and Fred Thompson.

Other poll findings indicate that the former Arkansas governor is making the most of a low-budget campaign by tapping into the support of Iowa's social conservatives.

Romney, who has invested more time and money campaigning in the state than any other GOP candidate, remains in the thick of the Iowa race with the backing of 24 percent of likely caucusgoers. But that's a drop of 5 points since October for the former Massachusetts governor.

Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, the frontrunner in national polls, holds third place in Iowa at 13 percent, despite waging a limited campaign in the state.

Thompson, a former U.S. senator from Tennessee who waited until September to formally enter the race for the Republican nomination, has slipped to fourth place in the Iowa Poll, at 9 percent.

U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona and U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas are tied for fifth place at 7 percent each. Four other candidates trail them. The new Iowa Poll, conducted over four days last week, has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.

The complexion of the race could easily change in the last month of intense campaigning ahead of the caucuses, which lead off the presidential nominating process. Roughly six in 10 likely Republican caucus participants say they could still be persuaded to support another candidate. Poll participant Thelma Whittaker, a retired teacher from Columbus Junction, is leaning toward supporting Huckabee in the caucuses but also could back Romney.

"I'm a very conservative Republican and I feel that (Huckabee) follows through with those ideas," said Whittaker, who is troubled by the country's moral decline. On the other hand, she wonders if Huckabee is a strong enough candidate to win the White House for the GOP.

When it comes to Romney, "I go along with a lot of his ideas,'" Whittaker said, "but he's also done some flip-flopping that scares me on issues like abortion and taxes."

Huckabee has come a long way since last May, when he languished in a tie for sixth place in the Register's poll, garnering the support of just 4 percent of likely caucus participants then.

His campaign picked up steam after he notched a surprising second-place finish in the Iowa Republican Party's straw poll in August.

The Register's new scientific poll shows Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, leading Romney 38 percent to 22 percent among those who consider themselves born-again Christians. In October, Romney edged Huckabee 23 percent to 18 percent among people in that group, which accounts for one-half of all likely caucus participants.

Similarly, Huckabee holds a 2-to-1 lead over Romney among those who say it is more important for a presidential candidate to be socially conservative than fiscally conservative.

See also the other commentaries over at Memeorandum.

This morning's Los Angeles Times has a front-page analysis of Huckabee's political life. There's some interesting nuggets in the piece, especially the Michael Dukakis moment from Huckabee's term as Arkansas governor:

Shortly after he became governor, Huckabee expressed his support for the release of a convicted rapist -- who, once freed, sexually assaulted another woman and killed her. Wayne Dumond had been sentenced to life plus 20 years in 1984 for raping a 17-year-old cheerleader. Tucker, Huckabee's predecessor, reduced Dumond's sentence in 1992, making him eligible for parole.

In 1996, according to the Democrat-Gazette, Huckabee questioned Dumond's guilt and said he might commute his sentence to time served. He also met with the parole board in a closed session. Some board members have said Huckabee pressured them into releasing Dumond; others said he did not.

Dumond was released from prison in October 1999. He chose his next victim 11 months later.

Huckabee's Democratic opponent, Jimmie Lou Fisher, seized on the issue in the 2002 governor's race, and Dumond's first victim campaigned on Fisher's behalf. Huckabee's campaign ran ads blaming his predecessor for commuting the sentence. Fisher was considered a weak candidate; Huckabee was reelected with 53% of the vote.

In other instances, Huckabee's political instincts seemed sharper. Soon after taking office, he began to lobby strongly for a one-eighth-cent sales tax to fund state parks and conservation efforts. The measure required the approval of voters, and Huckabee, an avid outdoorsman, advertised the effort by touring the Arkansas River on his bass boat - a public relations gambit that garnered significant positive press for both the governor and the measure, which voters approved in 1996.

Anti-tax conservatives don't think Huckabee's instincts on taxes are so great:

As Huckabee's stock rises in the Republican primaries, conservatives are looking closely at his record on taxes. The Club for Growth, a conservative anti-tax group, has been running ads against Huckabee, harshly criticizing his record and portraying him as "Tax-Hike Mike."'

Huckabee has responded by calling the group the "Club for Greed." He says that in addition to supporting tax increases as governor, he also called for a $90.6-million cut in income taxes -- and other smaller, more narrowly targeted tax cuts. He defends his record as that of a pragmatic governor trying to meet the needs of a poor, underdeveloped state.

More recently, Huckabee has veered back toward the party line: He signed a no-tax-hike pledge that had been presented to the candidates by Americans for Tax Reform, another conservative group. Grover Norquist, its president, said Huckabee's pledge would carry more weight if he disavowed his past decisions to raise taxes.

"I am pleased he has made a commitment not to raise taxes in the future," said Norquist. "I would feel better if he spoke of his previous record as a mistake. Instead he defends it."

Huckabee's got a big bit of balancing before him. He's wrapping up the evangelical vote, but the GOP's small-government conservatives, law-and-order types, and immigration hawks are going to hammer him on his liberalism.

This is a very interesting GOP primary race, that's for sure. Be sure to see my earlier Huckabee post, "Mike Huckabee's Coming On Strong."

The Democrats and Universal Health Care

This Los Angeles Times article provides a nice glimpse at Democratic Party authoritarian efforts to socialize American medicine. Here are the candidates' positions:

The three leading Democratic presidential contenders all propose expanding healthcare coverage but they differ in the details, particularly when it comes to whether all Americans, or just children, must be covered. All would place responsibility on individuals to make sure they, or their children, have coverage through an employer or a government program, or by buying insurance privately. Here is a look at other key points of their proposals:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.)

* Requires all individuals to have coverage.

* Healthcare providers help enforce the coverage requirement by automatically enrolling uninsured who seek treatment.

* Requires "large employers" to provide coverage or pay into a public program.

* Provides businesses with 25 or fewer employees with tax credits to encourage them to obtain or continue offering coverage.

Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.)

* Requires parents to obtain coverage for their children.

* Schools help enforce requirement by checking coverage when children enroll for classes.

* Requires all employers, except for start-ups or very small businesses, to provide coverage.

* Provides subsidies to help employers lower the cost of premiums for their employees.

Former Sen. John Edwards (N.C.)

* Requires all individuals to obtain coverage by 2012 with exceptions for extreme financial hardship or religious beliefs.

* Enforcement rules would require individuals to show proof of insurance when paying income taxes or seeking treatment.

* Individuals who refuse to participate could see their wages garnished or face penalty payments.

* Requires all employers with five or more workers to provide employee coverage or contribute 6% of payroll toward health insurance.

* Provides tax credits for families buying insurance and creates regional purchasing pools to make coverage more affordable for businesses.

Here's an excerpt from the essay:

As voting fast approaches in a hotly competitive presidential primary campaign, the battle in the Democratic field has now focused intensively on healthcare and the question of how "universal" a coverage plan must be.

The dispute reflects a key difference among the party front-runners over how to cover an estimated 47 million people without insurance. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and former Sen. John Edwards are backing requirements that all Americans be covered, and Sen. Barack Obama is supporting such a mandate for children only.

Healthcare has spurred some of the fiercest exchanges among Democrats on the campaign trail, with the Clinton campaign demanding that Obama renounce "misleading" claims and Edwards charging that neither of his chief rivals goes far enough in their reform plans.

Though the specifics of the healthcare proposals are complex, there are compelling reasons why Clinton has chosen to fight on this ground -- and why Obama and Edwards are fully engaged.

The new focus was seized by Clinton's campaign, which has struggled in recent weeks to respond to attacks from Obama and Edwards that she lacks conviction on key issues. Those attacks seemed to gain traction after an Oct. 30 debate in which she failed to clearly state her stance on granting driver's licenses to illegal immigrants.

Since then, the New York senator has seen her lead in some states shrink, and at least one new survey shows Obama with a slight lead in Iowa.

In this week's tussle, Clinton used healthcare as a way to turn the tables on her chief rival. Now she is presenting herself as the candidate with core convictions and bold ideas, and portraying Obama as an opponent of true reform who is being disingenuous with voters.

Clinton's campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, issued a letter demanding that the Illinois senator withdraw a television ad that says his healthcare plan would "cover everyone." She argued that Obama's plan would leave about 15 million people uninsured.

"Until the time comes when Sen. Obama has a plan that will cover everyone, you should stop running this false advertisement," she wrote.

The letter followed a speech earlier this week in which Clinton lashed out directly at Obama, charging that anything less than universal care would be "betraying the Democratic Party's principles" and that, despite Obama's contention that his plan offers universal care, it "does not and cannot cover all Americans."

"When it comes to truth in labeling, it simply flunks the test," Clinton said.

Obama's campaign refused to pull its ad, which has been airing off and on in Iowa and New Hampshire since September, and the senator fired back during a speech to Democratic activists here.

"I have put forth a universal healthcare plan that will do more to cut the cost of healthcare than any other proposal in this race," he said. "Here's the truth: If you can't afford health insurance right now, you will when I'm president. Anyone who tells you otherwise is more interested in scoring points than solving problems."

Read the whole thing. The Obama plan doesn't require insurance coverage for adults (now if he'd drop the children's insurance mandate, he'd really make sense).

What about healthcare authoritarianism? The Clinton plan is silent on enforcement mechanisms for people who forego health coverage. John Edwards is not, however: He'd garnish the wages of people who don't want to be told by government what to do about their own health.

Of course, there's no discussion of the likely increase in taxes, as you can see. One more reason to vote Republican next year.

The New Republic Recants Libelous Beauchamp Story

I just finished reading The New Republic's recantation of its series of war stories by Scott Beauchamp.

I didn't follow the affair closely, but conservatives know that Beauchamp invented lurid stories of American troop behavior in Iraq. The right blogosphere and conservative publications such at the Weekly Standard hammered TNR for its antiwar bias and its refusal to repudiate Beauchamp's libelous tales.

Here's an excerpt from TNR's recantation:

Beauchamp's writings had originally appealed to us because we wanted to publish a soldier's introspections. We still believe in this journalistic mission, especially as the number of reporters embedded in Iraq dwindles. But, as these months of controversy have shown, telling the story of what is happening in Iraq through a soldier's eyes is a fraught project. The more we dug into Beauchamp's writings, the more clear it became that we might have been in the realm of war stories, a genre notoriously rife with embellishment....

For the past four-and-a-half months, we've been reluctant to retract Beauchamp's stories. Substantial evidence supports his account. It is difficult to imagine that he could enlist a conspiracy of soldiers to lie on his behalf. And they didn't just vouch for him - they added new details and admitted gaps in their own knowledge....

Beauchamp has lived through this ordeal under the most trying of conditions. He is facing pressures that we can only begin to imagine. And, over the course of our dealings with him, we've tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. Ever since August, we've asked him, first though his wife and lawyer and later via direct e-mail and phone calls, to personally obtain the sworn statements that the military had him draft and sign on July 26. And, ever since then, he has promised repeatedly to do just that. We are, unfortunately, still waiting.

In retrospect, we never should have put Beauchamp in this situation. He was a young soldier in a war zone, an untried writer without journalistic training. We published his accounts of sensitive events while granting him the shield of anonymity - which, in the wrong hands, can become license to exaggerate, if not fabricate.

When I last spoke with Beauchamp in early November, he continued to stand by his stories. Unfortunately, the standards of this magazine require more than that. And, in light of the evidence available to us, after months of intensive re-reporting, we cannot be confident that the events in his pieces occurred in exactly the manner that he described them. Without that essential confidence, we cannot stand by these stories.

This is the concluding section of the article. Again, I've only read tidbits of the story, but from my reading of the chronology here it appears that TNR threw journalistic credibility to the wind in reporting a far-fetched story of alleged U.S. troop depredations, obviously in an effort to further shift public opinion against the war.

The Confederate Yankee, a website at the center of the right blogosphere's campaign against TNR's perfidy, has a post at its homepage and over at Pajamas Media. This is from the latter, which criticizes TNR editor, Franklin Foer:

Foer’s opus...attempts the impossible feat of justifying his editorial leadership at The New Republic from the lead up to the publication of Beauchamp’s work to the retraction above. Through it all, Franklin Foer has made it painfully apparent that he is incapable of admitting his own ethical and editorial shortcomings, and refuses to answer many of the key questions that still hang over The New Republic like a gallows....

The bottom line is that the Scott Beauchamp debacle was a test of editorial character for The New Republic under Franklin Foer’s leadership. For over four months, the magazine has answered that challenge by hiding behind anonymous sources, making personal attacks against critics, asserting a massive conspiracy against them, while covering up conflicting testimony and refusing to answer the hard questions.

Even to the end, Foer continues to blame everyone else for his continuing editorial failures, penning a fourteen-page excuse without a single, "I’m sorry."

The readers and staff deserve better, and it is past time for Franklin Foer to leave The New Republic.

I'll provide updates, and readers are asked to forward additional information or blog posts on the story. I'll append those here.

Hat tip: Little Green Footballs.

*********

UPDATE: Currently on Memeorandum, no liberal bloggers - not one as of 10:15pm PST - have posted any comments or retractions regarding the Beauchamp affair.

On the other hand, see Jules Crittenden's piece, "P.S.: We Effed Up," and Michelle Malkin's doozy, "Bombshell…TNR ‘Fesses Up: The Beauchamp Stories Are Bullcrap."

John Murtha's Cut-and-Run Turnaround

Bullying John Murtha's abandoned his cut-and-run retreatist agenda on Iraq, which poses some problems for Democratic withdrawal plans in Congress. Investor's Business Daily offers its take on the topic:

How exactly can House Speaker Nancy Pelosi defend the obstruction of $200 billion in emergency combat operations funding for our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan when one of her closest cronies, the Vietnam vet she tried to install as House majority leader, now believes America is winning the war there?

Murtha's "Road to Baghdad" conversion may not have knocked him to the ground with a blinding light. But it's certain to throw congressional Democrats for a loop as it exposes their years of blindness on the importance of winning in Iraq as part of the global war on terror.

Only last summer Murtha was calling belief in the chances of President Bush's new counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, with a new commander and 30,000 fresh troops and Marines, "delusional to say the least."

"I'm absolutely convinced right now the surge isn't working," and "there's no way you're going to have success," he told ABC in June. In other venues, Murtha has accused the Pentagon of lying in reporting that the surge was effective.

But in the wake of his trip to Iraq last month, Murtha said in a videoconference from his congressional district office, "I think the surge is working."

This while the congressman insists that $50 billion is all Bush will get for Iraq and Afghanistan this year.

Murtha also made the usual complaints about lack of political progress and reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites — in spite of the fact that thousands of Sunnis and Shiites are now working together manning checkpoints and conducting other security operations directed against al-Qaida in various regions of Iraq.

Two months into the new fiscal year, the Democratic Congress has failed to pass almost all its annual spending bills. Yet Democratic leaders such as Murtha, Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada don't seem to feel even a tinge of shame in whining about a society that, deeply divided ethnically and religiously for centuries, has been unable to iron out all its divisions overnight.

Representative government is alien to the Arab Middle East. What right do Democrats in Congress have to expect Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki and the various factions of the Iraqi parliament instantly to do what it took the genius of America's founding fathers and Constitutional framers many years to achieve?

Beyond the embarrassing questions now sure to be asked of Pelosi about Murtha's unexpected flip-flop, and Democrats' crass unreasonableness toward a people who risk their lives to exercise the voting rights we take for granted, there's something bigger for Pelosi, Reid and the Democrats running for president to think about:

Murtha, like so many other high-ranking Democrats in the House and Senate, and those seeking the White House, was "absolutely convinced" that surrender was the only answer in Iraq.

They were so sure of their position that when the party's 2000 vice-presidential nominee, Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, placed patriotism before the party line, they actually let someone take the Democratic senatorial nomination away from him and tried, without success, to beat him in his 2006 bid for re-election.

Democrats have invested everything in losing the war in Iraq and blaming it on President Bush, and now they've been proved wrong. Murtha has admitted it; other Democrats, one by one, will follow.

How much faith can Americans place in a party so committed to a national failure — and now so discredited?

See also yesterday's post, "Democrats Can't Get Things Right on Iraq."

Barack Obama and the Politics of Racial Bargaining

This post is a follow-up to two essays I wrote yesterday on black politics: I quoted Shelby Steele in my first essay yesterday on the African-American crisis, but I also put up a post on Barack Obama.

Now here's Shelby Steele on Barack Obama:

The first thing I ever heard about Barack Obama was that he had a white mother and a black father. I heard this over and over again, never in a snide or gossipy way, always matter-of-factly. Apparently this was the way we Americans had to introduce Obama to each other. For some reason, knowledge of his racial pedigree had to precede even the mention of his politics--as if the pedigree inevitably explained the politics.

Of course, I am rather sensitive to all this because I, too, was born to a white mother and a black father, though I did not fully absorb this fact, which would have been so obvious to the outside world, until I was old enough to notice the world's fascination--if not obsession--with it. To this day it is all but impossible for me to actually stop and think of my parents as white and black or to think of myself, therefore, as half and half. This is the dumb mathematics of thinking by race--dumb because race is used here as a kind of bullying truth that pushes aside the actual human experience.

Racist societies make race into a hard fate. So people who are the progeny of two races become curiosities not because they are particularly interesting, but because they are so unexpected. This must be an old and tiresome vulnerability in Barack Obama's life (as it is in mine), and all the more so because he has chosen a public life. One senses that his first book, Dreams from My Father, was meant to diffuse some of this vulnerability. In it he does not merely own up to his interracial background as if to a past indiscretion; he candidly explores it. And his brave self-disclosure succeeds because we no longer live in an America that wants to make mixed-race people into pariahs. That was once done to keep firm the racial boundaries of American apartheid--the mulatto's tragic exile standing as a cautionary tale meant to keep people "with their own kind." But today's mixed-race person is "fresh," a word that trails Obama like a nickname.

There is the unspoken hope that his mixed-race freshness carries a broader political originality. And, in fact, he does embody something that no other presidential candidate possibly can: the idealism that race is but a negligible human difference. Here is the radicalism, innate to his pedigree, which automatically casts him as the perfect antidote to America's exhausted racial politics. This is the radicalism by which Martin Luther King Jr. put Americans in touch--if only briefly--with their human universality. Barack Obama is the progeny of this idealism. As such, he is a living rebuke to both racism and racialism, to both segregation and identity politics--any form of collective chauvinism.

Thus, the cultural and historical implications of Obama's candidacy are clearly greater than its public policy implications. While Obama the man labors in the same political vineyard as his competitors, mapping out policy positions on everything from war to health care, his candidacy itself asks the American democracy to complete itself, to achieve that almost perfect transparency in which color is indeed no veil over character--where a black, like a white, can put himself forward as the individual he truly is. This is the high possibility that the Obama campaign points to quite apart from its policy goals.

Steele discusses Obama's struggle for belonging in society. Obama's identity gives him a chance to break free from the old black stereotypes, to appeal to "freshness." But Obama probably won't take this path. He's pulled by different forces, the need for identity and the need for acceptance. This calls for racial bargaining:

Today we blacks have two great masks that we wear for advantage in the American mainstream: bargaining and challenging.

Bargainers make a deal with white Americans that gives whites the benefit of the doubt: I will not rub America's history of racism in your face, if you will not hold my race against me. Especially in our era of political correctness, whites are inevitably grateful for this bargain that spares them the shame of America's racist past. They respond to bargainers with gratitude, warmth, and even affection. This "gratitude factor" can bring the black bargainer great popularity. Oprah Winfrey is the most visible bargainer in America today.

Challengers never give whites the benefit of the doubt. They assume whites are racist until they prove otherwise. And whites are never taken off the hook until they (institutions more than individuals) give some form of racial preference to the challenger. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are today's best known challengers. Of course, most blacks can and do go both ways, but generally we tend to lean one way or another.

Barack Obama is a plausible presidential candidate today because he is a natural born bargainer. Obama--like Oprah--is an opportunity for whites to think well of themselves, to give themselves one of the most self-flattering feelings a modern white can have: that they are not racist. He is the first to apply the bargainer's charms to presidential politics. Sharpton and Jackson were implausible presidential candidates because they suffered the charmlessness of challengers. Even given white guilt, no one wants to elect a scold.

But the great problem for Obama is that today's black identity is grounded in challenging. This is the circumstance that makes him a bound man. If he tries to win the black vote by taking on a posture of challenging, he risks losing the vote of whites who like him precisely because he does not challenge. And if his natural bargaining wins white votes, he risks losing black votes to Hillary Clinton. Why? Because Hillary Clinton always identifies with black challengers like Al Sharpton. This makes her "blacker" than Barack Obama.

There is only one way out of this bind for this still young politician. He has to drop all masks, all obsessions with identity, all his fears of being called a sell-out, and very carefully come to reveal what he truly believes as an individual. This is what America really expects from Barack Obama.

That's what I've expected from Barack Obama as well. But the Democratic candidates aren't able to do break from identity politics and transcend race. Clinton can't do it. Barack Obama has the potential...

Hillary's Hostage Crisis

The hostage episode at Hillary Clinton's campaign office in New Hampshire was a made-for-television news story (I saw it unfolding in real time yesterday). The Los Angeles Times has the background:

A man who claimed to be wearing an explosive device surrendered this evening to police, peacefully ending a more than five-hour standoff at the campaign headquarters of Hillary Rodham Clinton in Rochester, N.H.

The man stood in the street as he slowly removed what he had told police was an explosive device strapped to his waist. Appearing to be in his 40s, the man wore a tie as heavily armed police watched him lie on the ground.

There was no motive given for the incident. The man had demanded to speak with Clinton, who was in Washington.

At least five people were released from the red-brick building during the day, according to television footage from the scene.

The incident came less than six weeks before the hotly contested New Hampshire presidential primary, the first in the nation. The storefront campaign office, usually open to all comers, is a staple of the meet-and-greet politics of the state.

At an afternoon news conference, Rochester Police Capt. Paul Callaghan would only say that there was a hostage situation.

"We are very confident that we have the resources available to us to handle this situation effectively and safely," Callaghan said.

With police refusing to officially comment, details were murky.

However, television footage showed a woman and a youngish man being released after dark. A woman in a green sweater fled the building about two hours after the confrontation began about 1 p.m. Eastern time.

Earlier, an adult and an infant were freed just after the takeover began. The woman told reporters that the man entered and forced people to the floor before she and the child were allowed to leave.

The woman was carrying the child and was crying, witness Lettie Tzizik told television station WMUR of Manchester.

"She said: 'You need to call 911. A man has just walked into the Clinton office, opened his coat and showed us a bomb strapped to his chest with duct tape,' " Tzizik said.

There have been various reports giving different names for the man. People who said they were relatives described him as emotionally disturbed.

Law enforcement sources told the Associated Press that the man was named Leeland Eisenberg.

Police would not discuss whether the man had a bomb or some sort of flares. But they confirmed that they had contacted state police bomb experts.

More than 50 state and local officers were at the campaign office, located on what appears to be a typical small-town street in this community of about 30,000 near the Maine border. Campaign headquarters for fellow Democratic presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and John Edwards are nearby.

Police spokesmen said the area, which includes a school and a courthouse, had been evacuated.

"The area has been secured," said Callaghan of the Rochester Police Department. A local SWAT had taken up positions, he said.

Clinton was not at the facility and had been scheduled to campaign at the Democratic National Committee meeting in Vienna, Va. She canceled the speech she was to give to Democratic Party officials.

"There is an ongoing situation in our Rochester, N.H., office," the Clinton campaign said in a statement. "We are in close contact with state and local authorities and are acting at their direction. We will release additional details as appropriate."

Ann Althouse weighs-in on Clinton's "leadership" during the standoff, asking "Did yesterday's hostage crisis teach us anything about Hillary Clinton?"

You might think we got a chance to see how she deals with a crisis, but that's not really so. She had no executive authority in the matter. The local police had to handle the situation. We did get to see how she looks upon a crisis from a distance — or, at least, how she allows us to look upon her looking upon a crisis from a distance:

When the hostages had been released and their alleged captor arrested, a regal-looking Hillary Rodham Clinton strolled out of her Washington home, the picture of calm in the face of crisis.

Well, once the hostages were released, it wasn't even a crisis anymore, but what does it mean that she looks held-together when she strolls out for a photo-op?

The image, broadcast just as the network news began, conveyed the message a thousand town hall meetings and campaign commercials strive for - namely, that the Democratic presidential contender can face disorder in a most orderly manner.

Oh, good lord, she was not facing disorder. The hostage-taking was over, and even when it was going on, she was not facing it. She was waiting for law enforcement authorities to deal with a troubled man, which they did, without anyone suffering a physical injury.

Did she do anything? Other than canceling her appearances — which she had to do to show decent sensitivity — she made a lot of ineffectual phone calls. For 5 hours, we're told, she "continued to call up and down the law enforcement food chain, from local to county to state to federal officials." She says, "I knew I was bugging a lot of these people."

Afterwards, she used the occasion to make a show of her emotions (or did you think she was cold and mechanical?). She said:

"It affected me not only because they were my staff members and volunteers, but as a mother, it was just a horrible sense of bewilderment, confusion, outrage, frustration, anger, everything at the same time."
Is that what you want in a President? Someone who feels extra confusion because she's a mother?

But I don't believe that for one minute. I think that was just what was considered a good script. I don't happen to think it is a good script, because I don't want a President to roil into a mommyesque ball of emotion when a few people are in danger. Yet that's not Hillary. The only question is why she thought a statement like that was a good one. She probably wanted to make sure not to confirm the widely held belief that she's unemotional, and, while she was at it, delight all the ladies out there who lap up emotional drivel.

It was a vintage example of a candidate taking a negative and turning it into a positive. And coming just six weeks before the presidential voting begins, the timing could hardly have been more beneficial to someone hoping to stave off a loss in the Iowa caucuses and secure a win in the New Hampshire primary.

Oh, great. Let's just hope there aren't copycats out there ready to turn their despondent drinking binges into a day of fame that helps their favorite political candidate.

As Clinton was not in any personal danger herself, and the matter was essentially a local law enforcement problem, the story doesn't tell us much about leadership, but perhaps more about grandstanding.

Our Petroleum Future: Better Than You Thought

This post is a follow up to my ticklish post on "The Ethanol Bust."

Readers may recall that the market for corn-based alternatives fuels is collapsing (the Wall Street Journal's article is here). This might seem kind of strange, when world oil prices are currently hovering around $90 a barrel. One might think that demand for oil would decline amid peak prices, and alternatives to fossil fuels would be enjoy increased attention. This doesn't appear to be happening.

Now, I'm no economist, but I've been an energy optimist amid all the recent doom and gloom over environmental depletion and global warming.

With that introduction, check out the November/December 2007 issue of Foreign Policy and it's hip contrarian piece by Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran, "Think Again: Oil" (by subscription):

Is the world running out of oil?

Hardly. The world has more proven reserves of oil today than it did three decades ago, according to official estimates. Despite years of oil guzzling and countless doomsday predictions, the world is simply not running out of oil. It is running into it. Oil is of course a nonrenewable resource and so, by definition, it will run dry some day. But that day is not upon us, despite the fact that a growing chorus of “depletionists” argue that we’ve already reached the global peak of oil production. Their view, however, imagines the global resource base in oil as fixed, and technology as static. In fact, neither assumption is true. Innovative firms are investing in ever better technologies for oil exploration and production, pushing back the oil peak further and further.

The key is understanding the role of scarcity, price signals, and future technological innovation in bringing the world’s vast remaining hydrocarbon reserves to market. Thanks to advances in technology, the average global oil recovery rate from reservoirs has grown from about 20 percent for much of the 20th century to around 35 percent today. That is an admirable improvement. But it also means that two thirds of the oil known to exist in any given reservoir is still left untapped.

The best rebuttal to the depletionists’ case lies in the world’s immense stores of “unconventional” hydrocarbons. These deposits of shale, tar sands, and heavy oil can be converted to fuel that could power today’s ordinary automobiles. Canada, for example, has deposits of tar sands with greater energy content than all the oil in Saudi Arabia. China, the United States, Venezuela, and others also have large deposits of these energy sources. The problem is that the conversion comes at a much greater environmental and economic cost than conventional crude oil. But the very same high oil prices that doomsters claim are a sign of imminent depletion also provide a powerful incentive for the development of these mucky deposits—and for the technology that will allow us to extract them in a cleaner fashion.

How about these high gas prices? Here to stay?

Don’t bet on it. High oil prices are the result of short-term mismatches between supply and demand, a relationship seen in all commodity markets. All it takes is another global economic hiccup like the Asian financial crisis for oil markets to shift out of balance, leading prices to soften or worse, just as they did in 1997.

The key variable to watch is the spare oil production capacity maintained by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) cartel. For much of the past three decades, OPEC has been capable of pumping far more oil than it actually delivered to market, which helped it manage prices. In particular, Saudi Arabia used its cushion to act as a swing producer, flooding the market with its buffer supply when normal global output was disrupted, such as during the Iran-Iraq War and the first Gulf War. The price increases that have occurred with regularity during the past several years are chiefly the result of the Saudis’ allowing their buffer capacity to fall during the 1990s and the global failure to anticipate the growth in Chinese oil imports. To address the increased demand, the Saudis are spending tens of billions of dollars rebuilding their spare capacity, and an unprecedented wave of new oil—the result of investments made a decade ago—is now coming online in Russia, the Caspian, and West Africa.

If supply in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere surges, or if demand, particularly in China, falters, then the new price floor that many investors assume is permanent will look increasingly shaky. OPEC will, of course, seek to stabilize prices if other oil producers (or oil alternatives, for that matter) take off. But history suggests that the cartel cannot maintain perfect production discipline. Inevitably, some greedy members defy the leadership and cheat on their quotas, again undermining the future of sky-high prices.

How about the "Big Oil"? Are we being gouged by the petroleum giants?

Actually, no. Whenever the cost of a gallon at American gasoline pumps shoots up, politicians and energy activists claim oil companies like ExxonMobil and BP are fixing prices. Big Oil may appear all-powerful to the consumer, but in reality the major private-sector energy companies with the famous brand names are powerless compared with the OPEC goliaths.

The issue again is supply and demand. Unlike during the 1970s oil shocks, when most oil was sold through bilateral contracts, much of the world’s petroleum today is sold through sophisticated and highly liquid futures markets, such as the New York Mercantile Exchange. It is therefore difficult for firms to manipulate prices. And when there are suspicions of back-room dealings, market watchdogs step in.

It is true that the oil market is far from unfettered, distorted as it is by a host of subsidies and handouts. It is also true that a conspiratorial cabal does meet regularly behind closed doors to rig prices and supply. However, that cabal is not Big Oil. It is OPEC. Saudi Aramco, a charter member, holds 20 times the oil reserves of ExxonMobil, the biggest of the private-sector majors. In other words, the Western firms are price takers, not price setters.

In fact, despite the current spate of record profits, Big Oil is in big trouble. Oil-rich countries, such as Venezuela and Russia, are nationalizing their resources, just as Saudi Arabia and Iran once did. That means most of the world’s reserves, and all of the cheap or easily accessed oil sources, are no longer available to the major private companies. The Western oil firms are running out of their primary product, even though the world at large is not. And that is a development that could ultimately hurt consumers, because Big Oil is the only counterweight to OPEC we have.

Now, this query's the best: What about hybrid automobiles? Will hybrids save the planet?

Not quite. Imagine a world in which 100 percent of cars are gasoline-hybrids like the Toyota Prius, and you still have a world that is 100 percent addicted to oil. A partial move toward alternative fuels won’t ever be enough; the future actually calls for a radical shift in both new fuels and engine technologies. Condemning SUVs as environmental menaces misses the central problem: It’s not the size of the car that matters—it’s the fuel it burns. This year, two thirds of U.S. oil consumption—and half of global oil consumption—will be sucked up by cars and trucks. Reinventing the car is the only serious way to wean the world off oil. The advanced electronics found in the Prius are but the first, helpful step in the clean-car revolution now getting under way.

From Silicon Valley to Shanghai, inventors, entrepreneurs, and environmentalists are zooming ahead of Big Oil and Detroit. Today, it’s far easier for new start-ups to challenge the major automakers because key technologies are no longer jealously guarded in-house but outsourced around the world. While the auto dinosaurs dawdle, giants from other industries are investing millions to stake a place in the game. In fact, the car of the future may well be brought to you by Sony, Apple, or Intel. Perhaps it will even come from two teenage whiz kids working tirelessly in their garage on the Next Big Thing. What’s certain is that its day is near.

Vaitheeswaran's pragmatic in his conclusion. We can't live on black gold forever. There's a role for investment in new technologies, and political leaders can spur innovation with policies designed to level the playing field for new market entrants.

(I drive a Honda Civic, by the way, a vehicle that ranges around 30 MPG on the highway. Some analysts of hybrid technologies have argued that the fuel economy advantage of driving a Toyota Prius is neutralized on the freeway, when the electric motor component's not kicking-in to propel the vehicle. Driving a hybrid's a environmental fashion statement, an indicator that hybrid owners probably aren't economists themselves.)