Sunday Question for Conservatives

What's the worst foreign policy/national security mistake that Barack Obama has made? By "worst" I mean the one with the most important consequences, so I'd also like to know what you think it has major effects.

(And technically: I'm asking for the worst mistake by the US government, or at least the presidency/exec branch, during the Obama presidency. It's always difficult to know, especially in this realm, which are presidential decisions and which are not. But the shorthand is okay most of the time).

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Felicia Day, 34.

And quickly to the good stuff:

1. Dan Drezner wishes everyone would go on vacation.

2. Scott Lemieux has more on Shelby County.

3. Wow, Stuart Rothenberg goes medieval on a piece which was, to be fair, well deserving of it.

4. Ann Friedman on speaking as a woman.

5. And Patrick Egan on public opinion, Roe, Loving, and Windsor.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Ken Howard, 69. Do people even know about the White Shadow?

A little good stuff:

1. Doug Ahler, Jack Citrin, and Gabriel Lenz on polarization and the new(ish) primary law in California.

2. Conor Friedersdorf on drones.

3. Dan Larison makes an obvious but overlooked point.

4. And welcome to the news media, 2013 edition.

Sunday Question for Conservatives

In which direction, if any, is the GOP moving on foreign policy and national security? In the next presidential nomination fight, what kinds of rhetoric and what kinds of promises will candidates likely need to make to win support?

Ignore Those Polls! (Or At Least Be Wary)

Remember, most people do not have strong opinions about most policy options. Therefore, the way they answer survey questions about issue positions can be massively affected by current news events, opinion leadership, question wording, and pretty much everything else. The effect probably grows larger the less people know -- and think -- about the issue. Something that's a long-standing policy question, or something that is part of ordinary life, might produce relatively stable views; those issues which are rarely in the news, or highly abstract, are likely to produce less stable answers. That is, answers which are even more highly dependent on recent information flows and on question wording.

Example: both Conor Friedersdorf and Dan Larison had posts up before the debate last night emphasizing the reluctance of the American people to get any "more involved" in "Middle East leadership changes." That's from a recent Pew poll. But in early September, just before the attacks in Benghazi, Pew found strong pluralities approving of the intervention there (44/33) and of Barack Obama's overall handling of Libya (49/32). 

In other words, current opposition to the abstract notion of US "involvement" in "leadership changes" turns out to utterly fail to predict reactions to something that sure appears to fit that characterization. At least, when things were going well -- or, I should say, at least when no apparent bad news was visible.

For candidates, I think this suggests that for low-salience issues such as these, there's probably a way to phrase things so that they don't sound objectionable to most voters. That is, if you want to, say, intervene in Syria in a particular way, there's probably a way to describe the underlying principle that would support such a move that can produce polling majorities. Unfortunately, there's also a way to describe it that will produce polling majorities against the policy.

For presidents, the most obvious point is that what matters on low salience items such as these isn't so much how something polls going in, but whether the policy actually works or not. Or at least avoids damage that would show up on the front pages of newspapers, especially damage clearly linked to the policy. Of course, that's probably true for all policies; presidents who believe, for example, that policies which poll badly will yield strong economic growth should almost certainly pursue those "unpopular" policies. At least as long as there's enough time for payoffs before Election Day.

All of which is to say that if Friedersdorf and Larison believe that, say, an intervention in Syria would be bad policy, then that's the best electoral basis for opposing it. Not what people told Pew about some abstract question about intervention.

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Norm! Happy Birthday to George Wendt, 64.

Morning-after good stuff:

1. Tim Carney has good fun with Barack Obama's foolish lobbyist ban -- and foolish reporters who bought it. My view? The only thing that's any good about the ban are all the waivers granted to allow good people to work in the administration.

2. Excellent post by Mark Blumenthal about reading the polls in a close race.

3. Fifty years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, from Heather Hurlburt.

4. I suppose everyone saw this already, but I do have to link to my brother's gotcha on "binders full of women."

5. And of course it's not an official debate without Ann Friedman's GIF version. 

Elsewhere: Unraveling, Old Ideas, Electoral College

Three things today. My column at Salon for the weekend is already up. I looked at Paul Ryan's assertion that Barack Obama's foreign policy is "unraveling" and noted that it's substance-free, concluding that it's yet another consequence of the closed information loop.

At PP, I said that I'm ignoring the electoral college. Which, really, I am. To the extent I pay attention to state polls, it's as signals to what's happening nationally, mostly as helpfully translated by the better aggregator sites.

And over at Greg's place, I riffed off of Joe Biden's line that "Their ideas are old, and their ideas are bad."

How about a non-existent link? I started writing a post about Martha Raddatz, but it wound up getting long and dull before getting to the point. Which is basically: excellent grade for moderating style, questions could have been a good deal better. So I'll just drop that in here and spike the longer post.

Romney and the Rally Effect

I said yesterday that Republicans don't appear to read political scientists on the subject of the effect of the economy on elections. But I've always suspected that sometime in the 1990s Republicans did read Richard Brody's classic article about the "rally effect" -- in which he found that "rally around the flag" effects depend on the reaction of the out-party, not (for example) whether the event in question is successful or not. If the out-party immediately criticizes the president, then he doesn't get a bump in his approval ratings; if they support him or stay quiet, then there's a positive bounce.

So if you're the out-party, always attack, right? That might be what was going through the minds of Mitt Romney and his campaign last night and this morning, and -- I speak here purely in terms of electoral politics, nothing more -- that's not a terrible instinct, based on the research.

But: why don't out-party politicians simply always attack the president on everything? Ah, that's a good question, and one that Team Romney might have asked itself before it jumped. The main reason is paradoxical, in a fun way. Out-party politicians often hesitate to attack during a foreign policy crisis because they're afraid that they'll be branded partisan during a time of national unity, for one thing. Those potential attacks might be unfair -- as Democrats during the Bush years correctly said, it's patriotic to dissent if you believe that the nation's policy is wrong -- but nevertheless, politicians must reckon with a national political culture that sometimes (and not entirely predictably) can turn against partisanship. The paradox part is that out-party politicians may refrain from attacking out of fear that the president's handling of the event will prove wildly popular, when it's the restraint from normal partisan attacks which actually signals to voters that the president did the correct thing and therefore makes the president's actions wildly popular.

That's one reason. The other reason is that out-party politicians are operating, usually, at a severe information deficit. Indeed: during events such as those in Libya and Egypt, the president himself often doesn't know what's happening; a campaign relying on CNN or, I don't know, its twitter feed maybe, is even more apt to get things wrong. And while no politician wants to be exposed as not knowing what he or she is talking about, presumably that's an even greater caution flag for a presidential candidate. Especially one without conventional foreign policy and national security credentials.

(Once again: this is all just about electoral-type politics and motivations. It's of course possible that out-party politicians might support the president because they believe that it's patriotic to do so during a crisis, or because they actually do support what the president is doing, and attacks could be because they really do believe the president has erred. Those things can happen! But they're beyond the scope of this post).

At any rate: none of this has much to do with whether Romney made the best choices last night and this morning, or whether the way he carried out his attack on Obama was well-done. I wrote a little about it over at PP, so there's more there. Here, I'm just thinking about the incentives that play into what he might be thinking.

Sunday Question for Liberals

Still thinking State. If Barack Obama is re-elected, he'll presumably have to fill an opening for Secretary of State. Do you have a candidate? Anyone you really don't want to see?

Also: if she would take it, Hillary Clinton for Treasury? What do you think?

Sunday Question for Conservatives

Let's talk Secretary of State, should Mitt Romney be elected. Who would you like to see at State? Who do you want him to avoid?

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Santiago Casilla, 32. I've always thought he was a good pitcher, although as with most of us I didn't always think he was Santiago Casilla (check out the b-r url, by the way). Currently a poster boy for the closer thing, but he's been a good pitcher for a long while, whichever inning he's tossed into.

On to the good stuff:

1. Spencer Ackerman studies Mitt Romney's foreign policy speech, and thinks he's found some substance in it. Interesting.

2. Excellent point by Seth Masket about politicians vs. experts. I fully agree with him, as regular readers might guess.

3. Dahlia Lithwick and Raymond Vasvari make the case against the case against disclosure. I don't think they really convinced me that it's an example of the same thing as the stuff in the first few paragraphs, but just ignore that and get to the disclosure argument.

This Offer Is Unrepeatable

Mitt Romney gave a speech billed as a major foreign policy address today, just before he embarks on a quick world tour.

I may get around to the substance later (here's Dan Drezner's quick reaction post), but I noted several comments about target audiences just after the speech. Drezner figures it's aimed at domestic constituencies, and notes that "swing voters don't care about foreign policy," which is no doubt true; indeed, it's hard to find very many Americans who care much about foreign policy, certainly as a voting issue. Chuck Todd said it sounded aimed at Republican voters. Seth Michaels speculated that Romney had to keep selling to those Republican voters, since they still don't trust him. And Heather Hurlburt had my favorite one: "#Romney speech specifically aimed at greatest generation voters, given lack of references to post-1945 developments."

So: who should presidential nominees be targeting with their foreign policy speeches?

That's easy. Since Drezner is correct that voters mostly don't care at all about foreign policy, there's no point at appealing to them. So foreign policy talk, even more than any other policy talk, should be targeted squarely at elites. That is, in this case, the foreign policy and national community expert community. The goal? For normal non-incumbents, it's very simple: to prove competence.

Here's the chain. Voters probably don't care about foreign policy -- but they may care about the possibility that the person they're electing is totally incapable of dealing with those issues. Partisan voters will naturally absorb the views of partisan opinion leaders from their side, who of course are going to give the partisan-appropriate answer. However, very weak partisans or true independents may soak up impressions of less partisan general opinion leaders. In turn, those less partisan opinion leaders will probably absorb the impression of non-partisan or at least not-very-partisan foreign policy and national security experts.

So, sell the experts that you're not a moron, and they'll sell the David Gergens of the world, and you'll be fine.

What complicates this for Romney is the distance on some issues between Republican partisans on national security and, well, everyone else. It's hard to say something that will please both John Bolton and Dan Drezner. The likely result in such situations is mush, and for the most part that's the direction Romney is taking.

Sunday Question for Conservatives

What, if anything, are you hoping for out of Mitt Romney's overseas trip?

Celebrated Summer

Dan Drezner and Dan Larison have been going back and forth and back about Mitt Romney's announced plan to take a prestige-building foreign trip this summer. Both of them agree on a few things: Romney has been an embarrassing hack on foreign affairs so far; foreign policy isn't apt to be a plus for Republicans this year, presumably whatever Romney does; and anyway, the election won't turn on foreign policy and national security. It's a good discussion.

I'll add a couple of things. It's not likely that Romney's trip will have any effect at all on what foreign policy specialists think about him. For that, he would need to actually outline policies that impress them -- which is unlikely, since there's a very small overlap of foreign policy ideas that conservative orthodoxy would allow and what's generally popular, and my guess is that whatever fits into that very small corner is some sort of mindless demagoguery that would leave policy specialists not pleased at all. However, it certainly could impress nonspecialist reporters and pundits -- at least enough to keep them from talking about foreign policy as an important weakness of the challenger. If it does that, it's a reasonable use of time.

Which gets to the second point: opportunity costs. What he gives up for a foreign trip are some campaign appearances. But we're talking late July here; I think it's highly unlikely that a couple dozen campaign appearances several months have any effect at all. Sure, if he has nothing better to do, he might as well campaign in front of voters; it's not as if there's apt to be much harm in it, and so why not? But if there's anything actually worthwhile to do with his time, losing stump minutes isn't a reason to avoid it.

The only significant reason I can really think of that a foreign trip could be a campaign error would be the possibility of an effect on the candidate's health and stamina going forward. Don't forget, we're talking about a 65 year old candidate, and even much younger politicians have had minor health difficulties keeping up with the demands of the campaign trail (I'm thinking of Nixon in 1960, who had an ill-timed cold or flu or something like that, and Clinton in 1992, who repeatedly lost his voice). I assume Romney will travel in much more luxurious conditions than Nixon did in 1960, but still, it's a factor to consider.

Other than that, however, I'd say it's a reasonable choice.

Sunday Question for Liberals

How do you think Barack Obama has done with regard to the uprisings and revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa over the last year plus?

Sunday Question for Liberals

A variation of the question for conservatives: what foreign policy or national security policies are you most concerned about if Republicans win the presidency in 2012?

Catch of the Day

Can I call it a CotD if it catches something that hasn't quite happened yet? I don't see why not, especially if it's good enough, as this great Spencer Ackerman post certainly is. "The Post-Gadhafi Journalism You Will Read In The Next 72 Hours." I'll just give you a taste:

1. Why Gadhafi's Death Vindicates "Leading From Behind" (Tom Friedman)
2. Gadhafi's Death Shows The U.S. Was Never Really "Leading From Behind" (Anne-Marie Slaughter)
3. There Is Still More To Do In Libya (Any Washington Post op-ed)

Excellent fun; do click through for the rest. There is a relatively difficult challenge to all of this; while we certainly don't respect analysis that is never willing to admit mistakes, we also don't really want analysis that discards all previous claims as soon as new events show up. Of course, if one subscribes to big picture ideas that consistently produce bad predictions, one might want to modify or abandon those ideas; at the same time, getting one prediction wrong isn't (generally) a good reason to modify or abandon well-supported ideas.

Meanwhile, to get an excellent context for Libya written before today's events, I recommend Fred Kaplan's latest on "The New Interventionism." I think Kaplan is overly optimistic about how stable the stuff he describes really is -- he treats the current GOP candidates as some sort of odd quirk, but I think he undersells how much a hold Cheneyism still has on the party and may have in the future -- but otherwise it's good stuff.

Sunday Question for Conservatives

Do you have a good sense of the differences, if any, between what Rick Perry and Mitt Romney would do as president on foreign policy?

Campaign Rhetoric and Foreign Policy

Jonathan Chait is right that regardless of what Republican rank-and-file voters say now, they'll almost certainly support the next foreign intervention...undertaken by a Republican president. But I don't think he's on firm ground on this one:

It's true that some Republicans are sounding anti-interventionist notes now. George W. Bush himself ran in 2000 as an anti-interventionist, attacking the Clinton administration for its nation-building and promising a more "humble" foreign policy. The Republican fear of reckless American intervention disappeared as soon as Clinton did, and it will disappear again as soon as a Republican takes the oath of office.
This is, to be sure, a bipartisan phenomenon. Barack Obama and many other Democrats sounded far more anti-war while running for office than Obama has governed. The point is that campaign rhetoric about foreign policy, while interesting in its own right, does not provide an accurate guide to how a party would contact foreign policy from the White House.

Obama may have "sounded far more anti-war" in 2008 than he turned out to be in office, but I think it's a closer call than Chait here implies. He ran to the hawkish side of John McCain on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and on bin Laden (and, by implication, directly attacking other terrorist leaders); he's governed basically that way. On Iraq, he's basically more or less done as he promised. One could certainly argue that the Libya operation is consistent with Obama's campaign calls for multilateral, rather than unilateral, action.

What I think one can say about foreign policy and elections is that the issues are perhaps a lot less predictable than in domestic policy. It's hard to assess how to translate Obama's campaign rhetoric into how he should act in Libya because the context is so radically different than anything he was asked about in 2008.

In general, however, the thing to pay attention to, the thing that is probably most predictable from the campaign, is the set of foreign policy advisers that a candidate is likely to listen to once in office. If in fact it's the case that Republican elites are still as interventionist as ever, then that suggests that, indeed, any winning GOP nominee will wind up following policies similar to those of George W. Bush. Of course, one can also point to differences within Bush's administration, and I do think that the president's personal feelings and temperament probably matter in some cases, but still: personnel are a good indication of policy.

I think that would have worked pretty well for Obama, by the way. It's true that some wishful thinkers on the left seem to have envisioned him as a less flaky Dennis Kucinich, but my memory is that Obama's foreign policy staff during the campaign was well within the Democratic mainstream -- strongly internationalist, if quite a bit less hawkish than Bush's team.

Catch of the Day

Andrew Sullivan finds Barack Obama's "new" wording on 1967 borders -- you know, the wording that throws Israel under a bus or some other such nonsense -- in a six month old joint statement from Secretary Clinton and....Prime Minister Netanyahu.

I do think that there's something real at stake in the latest flap; I'm not sure that Matt Yglesias is completely correct that Netanyahu and other Israelis simply want to keep all the land they seized in 1967, but I do think that there are real differences in what the Israeli government wants and what the United States wants, and that those are reflected in bickering over meaningless words. But, yeah, the specifics of this latest business is just a typical Fox News phony scandal (with Bibi showing that if nothing else, he knows how to play that game).

Nice catch.

By the way, I haven't had an item that gives me a chance to link to an excellent point Jonathan Chait made last week about Israel's security and the 1967 borders: that the old idea of "defensible" borders is basically obsolete in the present context. I hadn't heard that before, and it's very smart. I'd add that prospect here is only of a demilitarized Palestine, which makes the "columns of troops" idea even less likely to happen (and, unlike the Brits and French of the 1930s, the Israelis would surely move quickly, and with considerable muscle, if Palestine obtained even a single tank). Now, under the Yglesias way of looking at things, that's irrelevant; the old rhetoric about defensible borders is essentially a cover for Israel keeping what it considers its own territory. Could be! However, I think it's just as likely, at least for many involved in this debate, that they're just trapped within the old way of thinking -- since the defensible borders thing really was a major issue for twenty years (and, while I don't remember pre-1967, I certainly do remember honest concern about a conventional military defeat for Israel in the 1970s, and the perceived value of the 1967 victory as providing a very useful buffer against that).