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Republican Graybeards: ‘Let Romney Be Romney’
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The scene is the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention in Reno, Nev. Enter Mitt Romney stage right, dressed as Rambo.
This typecasting goes with the territory for Republican presidential aspirants. None going back to Richard Nixon has been able to resist it because that is what the base wants. The base wants to believe that their man will bound on the world stage with a dagger between his teeth, swathedin belts of ammo, an assault weapon at the ready and a brace of grenades on his belt, ready to toss at anyone who does not toe the line
The most dangerous part of this metaphorical macho get-up for Romney is the one that is not seen. It is the script by the likes of John Bolton, George W. Bush’s U.N. ambassador, with editing by an assortment of Bush-era neo-cons, and some old-time Cold War warriors from the Bush and even Reagan era.
One of these men, a former secretary of defense, told me at the time of the Iraq invasion: “At least the Arabs will respect us now.”
In truth, the Arabs got quite a different lesson. It is one that all empires learn eventually: When you invade, you reveal yourself in ways you would rather not have.
One of the many sad lessons of the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions is how after brilliant military performances, we fell apart in both countries with inter-agency squabbling, a lack of planning and terrible naivety in the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Agency forInternational Development. Worse, the CIA either did not know or was not heeded about conditions on the ground in either country. Is it possible that no one told George W. Bush about the Sunni dominance of the Shia majority in Iraq? But that is true. Money, lives and respect have been lost.
Conservative foreign-policy thinking is, it seems to me after decades of talking with conservatives about foreign policy, unduly influenced by two aspects of history, both British.
The first is the British Empire. I was born into it and spent the first 20 years of my life in one of its last embers, Rhodesia. Conservatives are right to admire much of the British Empire. It was a great system of trade, education and, much of the time, impartial justice.
It rested on two planks: military superiority and huge confidence in British superiority. Call it British exceptionalism. Its unwinding in Asia and Africa had different causes that led to the same result.
In Asia, and particularly in India, which then included what are now Pakistan and Bangladesh, the end came when the idea of the British as a kind of super-race with their “show” of ceremonies, from tea to parades, plus military and civil skills died. Indians started traveling to Britain, particularly in Victorian times, and were appalled at the squalor they found in British slums. These people were not that super.
In Africa, the end came because of a general sense after World War II that self-determination was the way of the future.
What hastened everything was not only a change in moral perception but also the proliferation of small arms.
Churchill famously said: “I did not become the King’s first minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire.” But it was dissolving. Britain’s main loss, looking back, was to its pride.
The other British history lesson that is misread by conservative foreign-policy analysts in the United States is Munich.
Certainly when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waved his piece of paper on Sept. 30, 1938 and declared, “peace for our time,” he was a hero. He was a hero because just two decades earlier, the British Empire had suffered 3.1 million casualties in World War I.
Churchill knew that this wound was open. He did not refer to the courage and sacrifice of that war when seeking courage and sacrifice in a new war. Also, Britain was not ready for war; rearmament, urged by Churchill, was still in its infancy.
Many old-line Republicans tell me that Romney is not a man who will be marched around by those who brought us Vietnam, Iran Contra and Iraq. He is smarter than that.
They believe that when the time comes, if it comes, President Romney will be Romney. Not Rambo. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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Universal Health Care — It’s Addictive
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Opponents of President Obama's health care legislation were wise to attack it preemptively in the courts on constitutional grounds. If they hadn't attacked now, they would've learned that universal health care systems – sometimes a hybrid of public and private and sometimes single-payer national systems – are wildly popular in other countries. So popular that politicians can do no more than fiddle at the edges, as they have done in Britain recently and are about to do in France. No leader, not even that incontrovertible defender of private enterprise, Margaret Thatcher, dared or even thought, to privatize health care. In the industrial democracies, from Canada to Japan, people complain about their health care systems and would defend them to the death. Once universal health care is introduced and people are relieved of the fear of illness, leading to financial ruin, it is unrepealable. The opponents of Obamacare must know this, or they wouldn't have been so anxious to test it in court on the grounds of the constitutionality of the individual mandate. Kill it before people love it was an imperative. Now it's widely believed, after three days of hearings, in which conservative justices sounded more like they were conducting a congressional hearing than a judicial one, that Obamacare will be thrown out before it has ever been sampled by the public, which wouldn't come until 2014. It's been a bit like the Chinese and democracy: Don't let them try it, they might like it. So how is it the Republicans have been able to so demonize Obamacare? Partly, it's because the administration has done an appalling job of selling its own program. It's almost as though it's ashamed of its offspring because it isn't the child they really wanted: a simpler bill with a public option and such goodies as interstate insurance sales. The administration is frequently bad at trumpeting its achievements. As health care reform is its defining domestic issue, the fact that Obama and his cabinet have not extolled the virtues of the bill amounts to a curious dereliction, a sin of omission. Most people have been persuaded, if they know anything about the bill at all, that it's socialized medicine (it is not); that it will double expenditures on health care (it won't); that it's an enormous new dictatorial intrusion into individual liberty (it's not). It's not a great bill, but a good start. We in the United States spend about twice as much as other countries on health care – about 18 percent of our gross domestic product. Why? Everyone knows there's excessive testing and waste. The quick answer is to defend against lawsuits. Another answer is that doctors have no incentive to save money and through their investments in testing companies, often they have an incentive to order up the tests. Mostly, I suspect it's just indifference; the medical equivalent of not turning the lights off. I don't like Obamacare because it only does half the job and I'm uneasy about the individual mandate. Just two cheers from me. The uninsured should be assigned an insurer and the premium collected through the tax system. That way the insurers would compete for the most desirable prospects, young adults, and a real pool would operate. Another question that isn't asked: As new technology usually brings down costs, why does this not apply in health care? Why are CAT scans and MRIs not getting cheaper, as they would if they were in a different framework? Why not use the Republican idea of health vouchers as an incentive to keep patients from frivolous use of services – not as the substitute for insurance, but rather as an incentive mechanism. Pay them to stay healthy. We suffer from a failure of imagination in health care. There are good reasons to be ambivalent about Obamacare, but it's a start, a building block. Our medicine is without peer, but our concepts of care are quite sickly. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate - no responses
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On Tax Cuts, GOP Should Think like Business
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Mythology in Washington holds that when it comes to economics, Republicans know best. The root of this myth is another myth, which goes like this: When it comes to business, especially small business, Republicans know best.
All of this doesn’t matter until you get to taxes, when the Republicans, buttressed by their mythological understanding of these things, believe they know best.
And what the Republicans believe they know best is that when you cut taxes, everything gets better: Government shrinks, business booms and tax revenues go up.
It’s not that there aren’t shards of truth here; it’s just that everything has to be in the right conjunction to get one or all of these benefits.
Business doesn’t go along with these myths but, like everyone else, it hates paying taxes, so by and large it endorses the Republican position.
The thing is, business believes in a more durable truth: price.
Price means revenue, and business, therefore, believes and practices aggressive pricing. When business needs to exceed the gap between cost and revenue, it increases the price. If the market refuses to pay the price, business exits that market or fails.
Sometimes, however, and increasingly in these hard times, business pulls a con. It lowers or maintains the price, but adds other charges to gain income. The airlines are doing this. The banks make as much or more on fees than they do on consumer loans. Catalog companies do it with “shipping and handling” fees.
Publishers have experimented more with price than most businesses, and their conclusion is to stay on the high side. If the market rejects your high-priced publication, so be it.
I’ve spent a lifetime studying pricing in publishing. All I’ve learned is this: Defend your price.
In London, Rupert Murdoch engaged his Times in a costly price war with Conrad Black’s Daily Telegraph. In the middle of fierce cost-cutting, Murdoch’s camp, with more resources, was triumphant.
Cheap papers were selling.
But when it was all over, the relative positions of the publications had not changed by much and millions of British pounds had been lost. The hope had been that the victor, Murdoch’s papers, would gain so many more readers that they could make up the circulation revenue losses with higher advertising rates. It didn’t work.
Taxes are different, the GOP has averred. Not really. If they’re too high, they will stifle business, choke enterprise and cause businesses to go offshore. Clearly, marginal rates that exceed some magic number (well south of 50 percent) would stifle business.
At one point after World War II, they reached 90 percent in Britain with disastrous results and a few comical ones. The titled, moneyed families fled to Kenya and Rhodesia and the show-business types took up residence in Switzerland. Actor David Niven and playwright Noel Coward were among these.
Now that the tax cuts enacted in the early days of the George W. Bush administration are about to expire, it may behoove us to examine these with a question: What would business do? Things looked pretty bright when these cuts were enacted with the prospect of years of surpluses. But that was before 9-11, two big wars and a recession.
Therefore, if you looked at the tax issue from a boardroom point of view, the unanimous decision would be to go for the revenue and review the result later. Boardroom-loving Republicans ought to know this.
In business, they laugh at people who believe that lower prices automatically will produce compensating revenue. The joke goes something like losing a little on everything and making up with volume.
Many years ago, I had lunch with George Will and Trent Lott. All three of us were speakers at the American Petroleum Institute’s annual meeting in Houston. At the time, Lott and Will agreed that we were an under-taxed country, given the demands on government.
Back then, Republicans thought like business people.
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President Obama’s Troubles
May 20th, 2013
Guests Brian Kelly, U.S. News & World Report; Olivier Knox, Yahoo! News; Joe Davidson, The Washington Post
The Future of Drones
May 13th, 2013
Guests Claude Salhani, journalist and Amitai Etzioni, The George Washington University
Europe; its Problems and its Promise
May 6th, 2013
Guests Annette Heuser, Executive Director, Bertelsmann Foundation; Darren Gersh, Journalist; Arnaud de Borchgrave, Center for Strategic and International Studies
What’s Ado in Washington
April 29th, 2013
Guests Joe Madison, SiriusXM Radio
A Discussion of the Anti-terrorism College at the National Defense University
April 22nd, 2013
Guests Michael Bell and Sebastian Gorka, College of International Security Affairs, National Defense University