Foxpoll:IsObamarebounding? postedat

Fox poll: Is Obama rebounding?

posted at 10:41 am on August 14, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

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Well, sort of. Barack Obama’s poll numbers have cratered of late, so any movement upward will look like a bounce — and as the Washington Post notes, there is a hook for that conclusion. According to the Fox poll, about two-thirds of Americans agree with Obama’s decision to order air strikes on ISIS to slow their roll toward the Kurdish autonomous zone:

The good news for President Obama: The American people are very much behind his decision to launch airstrikes against extremists in Iraq.

The bad news: They still think he’s really weak on foreign policy.

A new Fox News poll has a rare bit of praise for Obama’s conduct in world affairs, with Americans approving 65-23 of his decision to launch airstrikes in Iraq.

But the same poll shows that, when it comes to foreign policy in general and basically every major overseas conflict — including Iraq — Obama is still in pretty rough shape.

Actually, his job approval numbers did bounce back, at least a little. Obama gets a 42/49, still underwater, but his disapproval number is back below a majority for the first time since May, and only the second time in the past year. Two months ago, that number was 41/54, and in March it was 38/54.

However, on everything else Obama scores majority disapprovals, even while rebounding slightly in some categories. He gets a 43/51 on the economy, which is better than last month’s 40/57. On foreign policy, he scores an abysmal 35/53, but that beats 36/56 and 32/60 in Fox’s last two polls. Obama has edged up slightly on health care from 39/58 in early June to 42/53 today. Only on immigration and Israel does Obama remain mired at his nadir; he gets 33/57 on the former (from 34/58) and 30/54 on the latter (29/56 in June).

What to make of this small bounce? The airstrikes in Iraq show some spark of leadership from a President who mainly seems adrift and disengaged from events. That perception might be enough to have moved the needle and rebuilt a little confidence in Obama’s stewardship of the nation. However, this is the only poll thus far showing any kind of improvement, even as small as this is, and most of the changes are either within the margin of error or just outside of it.

Bottom line: Obama remains “in rough shape,” as the Post’s Aaron Blake concludes. He may, however, have established his floor of unpopularity, unless Obama boots another crisis.

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CNNwonders:IsObamaforeignpolicy“inarticulateor

CNN wonders: Is Obama foreign policy “inarticulate or disengaged”?

posted at 4:01 pm on August 13, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

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Our long brief national nightmare is over, I suppose, now that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama plan on “hugging it out” over the recent contretemps over the Obama administration’s foreign policy. How much of that short-lived rift was reality?  “I don’t think anyone doubted,” Molly Ball says in this CNN segment with John King earlier today, “that they had authentic, honest disagreements on many aspects of foreign policy.”

Well, perhaps; there were rumors of that during Obama’s first term, so Ball’s correct that those differences had been presumed in the past. But if that was the case, why did her latest book Hard Choices not reveal them? As President Obama himself might say, the sudden appearance of those differences at the same time that Obama’s approval rating are cratering might mean they’re, um, horse manure:

One explanation: Hard Choices was likely written for the most part before Obama began cratering in the polls, or at least when that may have seemed temporary. If the book had come out during an Obama rebound, the inclusion of harsh criticisms (or any at all) would have unnecessarily made her vulnerable rather than riding on Obama’s residual approval to the nomination. Claiming to have differences now, while Obama’s approval numbers sink to record lows, makes her memoir look even more calculated, disloyal, and dishonest.

CNN also asks a rather intriguing question in framing this rapprochement on foreign policy. Is the Obama Doctrine inarticulate or disengaged? To which many might answer — both:

It sounds like advice offered by parents to teenagers on prom night: Don’t do stupid stuff. But it also is an important guiding foreign policy principle of the President of the United States.

Ever since the President uttered the phrase during an off-the-record discussion with reporters earlier this year — the actual words were a bit saltier and later confirmed privately by administration officials — foreign policy critics have seized on “DDSS” as a crystallization of the Obama Doctrine.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is only the latest critic of the “DDSS” comment, describing the remark in an interview with The Atlantic magazine as too simplistic. …

The apparent struggle to neatly encapsulate the President’s strategy is not lost on his critics.

“I do think the administration is showing some signs of a little bit of fatigue,” Brookings Institution analyst Michael O’Hanlon said in a recent interview with CNN.

“It’s time for a little more ambition frankly because the world senses that this President is too disengaged,” O’Hanlon added.

The Obama foreign policy is both inarticulate and disengaged. Disengagement is explicitly part of the approach, which became very clear in Iraq in the rise of ISIS, but also in Syria and Ukraine. In all three hot spots, the Obama administration had to get dragged into responses, although in Ukraine and now against ISIS Obama has ended up ahead of the curve in relation to America’s Western allies. Obama tosses out red lines without preparing for the consequences when they get violated, and shrugs off threats like ISIS with sophomoric sports analogies. His policy is to react only when forced by circumstances to do so.

Again, this doesn’t seem very different from what Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy approach has been. She ran Obama’s foreign policy apparatus for most of his presidency, so that shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. The anodyne recitation of those years Hard Choices makes it very difficult for Hillary to suddenly change course and claim a different doctrine for herself, especially without articulating it other than to say it exceeds the “don’t do stupid stuff” of the White House.

And when Hillary hit the retreat button after getting a rebuke from David Axelrod, she lost what little credibility and authenticity she had, Ron Fournier argued in an update to a column praising her independence:

Maybe I jumped the gun. After weathering some pushback from the White House, including a snarky tweet by Obama consultant David Axelrod, Clinton released this statement through a spokesman:

“Earlier today, the Secretary called President Obama to make sure he knows that nothing she said was an attempt to attack him, his policies or his leadership. Secretary Clinton has at every step of the way touted the significant achievements of his presidency, which she is honored to have been part of as his secretary of state. While they’ve had honest differences on some issues, including aspects of the wicked challenge Syria presents, she has explained those differences in her book and at many points since then. Some are now choosing to hype those differences but they do not eclipse their broad agreement on most issues. Like any two friends who have to deal with the public eye, she looks forward to hugging it out when she they see each other tomorrow night.”

There are several problems with this statement. First, it’s inaccurate. She certainly did criticize his policies, if not his leadership, most directly with the “stupid stuff” formulation. Second, it’s borderline demeaning, like a subordinate trying to get back in the boss’s good graces. Clinton is an accomplished person who has challenged glass ceilings. She shouldn’t have to come even close to apologizing for her opinions. Third, her interview wasn’t “hyped,” it was covered fairly, and now she’s trying to blame the messenger. Finally, it’s too cute by half, too Clintonian. It doesn’t seem, well, authentic. She’s trying to distinguish her policies from Obama’s without upsetting all the president’s men. She can’t have it all.

All she’s doing is proving that her doctrine is as inarticulate and disengaged as Obama’s — and even less authentic.

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Hillaryantagonizingliberalsandconservativeswithforeign-policyshifts?

Hillary antagonizing liberals and conservatives with foreign-policy shifts?

posted at 1:21 pm on August 12, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

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Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive. Sir Walter Scott’s warning on the complications of dishonesty seems to apply to the recent travails of Hillary Clinton, who has spent the past week or so attempting to distance herself from the disaster of Barack Obama’s foreign policy. That’s a neat trick for someone who served as Secretary of State for four of the five-plus years of the Obama administration, and the White House and its supporters have already lashed out about it, if indirectly.

How is the project working? So far, conservatives aren’t buying the switch, CBS News concludes:

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent critique of the Obama administration’s foreign policy, seemingly in preparation for a 2016 presidential run, has some pundits on the right crying foul.

By criticizing President Obama’s handling of foreign affairs, Clinton is attempting to distinguish Mr. Obama’s view of America’s role in the world from her own. Conservatives, however, are questioning how much Mr. Obama’s former top diplomat can truly distance herself from the administration. …

“If she wants to achieve separation, she will have to answer some tough questions in the period ahead, such as: how hard did she really fight for arming and training the Free Syrian Army?” [Washington Post columnist Marc] Thiessen wrote. “Did she threaten to resign? What specifically did she advocate doing to help the opposition? Did she advocate air strikes against ISIS? And – most importantly – did she oppose Obama’s complete withdrawal from Iraq, which also ‘left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled’?”

Jennifer Rubin, a conservative columnist for the Washington Post, called Clinton’s remarks “the worst sort of political opportunism for which she is infamous.”

“For a year and a half after leaving the administration, she has not spoken out against the president on Syria or much of anything else,” Rubin wrote. “She did not have the nerve to resign out of principle on Syria, as did former ambassador Robert Ford. Only now, when the entire region has gone to seed she decides the Obama critics were right on some key aspects of foreign policy.”

If Hillary isn’t convincing conservatives, she has to be impressing liberals, right? Not really, writes Katie Glueck at Politico:

Hillary Clinton is giving some liberals flashbacks to 2008, and not in a good way.

Progressives are wincing over Clinton’s foreign policy comments in a blockbuster interview with The Atlantic, saying her statements are excessively hawkish and reminiscent of her past support for the war in Iraq. Some foreign policy experts, meanwhile, are criticizing her views as too simplistic; one analyst called them downright disloyal to President Barack Obama.

In the interview with prominent foreign affairs writer Jeffrey Goldberg, Clinton called Obama’s decision not to back Syrian rebels early on a “failure;” stood staunchly with Israel in its fight against Hamas; took a tough tone on Iran; and said that the West Wing’s foreign policy mantra — “Don’t do stupid stuff”— is “not an organizing principle.”

Clinton has always been more of a hawk than Obama, whom she served under as secretary of state during his first term. But for many liberals, whose enthusiasm will be important if she runs again for president in 2016, her comments simply felt like code for Bush-era interventionism.

Ironically, in attempting to distance herself from Obama’s foreign policy, Hillary Clinton has just modeled it for us. Contrary to her implicit claim in her interview with The Atlantic, Hillary has no “organizing principle” for herself either except that which gets her elected. Both she and Obama are entirely reactive; they have no policy except that which derives the best short-term benefits. Obama’s foreign policy was popular during his first term even while setting the stage for the predictable disasters that would follow, so she was more than happy to be along for the ride.

Now that Obama’s foreign policy has produced disasters and crises, she’s suddenly venting her Inner Hawk and attempting to rewrite history — with a little help from her friends, Joe Concha argues:

[I]n a crystal ball moment on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Andrea Mitchell and Joe Scarborough sounded more like campaign operatives than objective analysts in an attempt to separate likely-candidate Clinton from Secretary of State Clinton.

“It’s almost like Hillary understands, like most foreign policy experts we have talked to over the past month understand, that ISIS is the beginning of a great unraveling of the Middle East,” Scarborough said.

“She understands it, she understood it then,” Mitchell agreed, adding later, “What Hillary Clinton is trying to do here is show the distinction,” Mitchell continued, “that she had the vision, if you will, to see that Syria was the heart of it.”

So the takeaway from this exchange is: A) The former Secretary of State understands what ISIS could do to destabilize the Middle East if it takes Baghdad and beyond (all despite a lack of evidence of said former Secretary of State attempting to do and say anything about ISIS while she had the power to do so); and B) She apparently had the vision to see the mess in Syria would spill over into vulnerable neighboring countries like Iraq, but not many speeches or interviews can be found indicating such. Except, of course, when she admitted this back in June:

““I never thought it (ISIS) was just a Syrian problem. I thought it was a regional problem. I could not have predicted, however, the extent to which ISIS could be effective in seizing cities in Iraq and trying to erase boundaries to create an Islamic state. That’s why it’s a wicked problem.”

Yup, she sure understood ISIS then, as Mitchell contended. And by the way, where was Mrs. Clinton’s leadership and initiative on this before throwing an unpopular president under the bus? Mr. Obama is the Commander-in-Chief and has the final say on these matters, yes. And to ask her to call out her boss in public isn’t rooted in reality, of course. But part of her job was to earn the respect and trust of the president she serves. If she felt we should have approached the Syrian conflict differently (via arming “moderate” rebels to squash radical armies like ISIS), then why wasn’t she able to make a more effective argument internally?

That’s the question Hillary has to answer. More importantly, she has to convince voters that she has her own “organizing principle,” or principles of any sort other than the need to live in the White House again. Otherwise, Hillary Clinton will have the astonishing accomplishment of making Barack Obama look deliberative and strategic in comparison.

Update: Here’s a good question for Clintonistas to answer, too:

@ron_fournier How authentic was the book she just published highlighting achievements as Secretary of State, with no mention of rift with O?

— CPB (@dugan84) August 12, 2014

Yes, this distancing seems both recent and very convenient, no?

Update: Trimmed down two of the excerpts.

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MaristpollshowsObamadrivingmidtermvoteto

Marist poll shows Obama driving midterm vote to GOP

posted at 12:01 pm on August 12, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

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Midterm elections usually end up as referendums on the current President, and sixth-year midterms especially so. Will that be the case in November with Barack Obama? According to a new poll from Marist and McClatchy, yes — and Democrats will not like the outcome. By a ten-point spread, Obama incentivizes voters to go Republican more than Democratic:

President Barack Obama is dragging down his party and hurting the prospects of fellow Democrats as they head into midterm elections that will determine who controls Congress, according to a new McClatchy-Marist poll.

Obama is beset by problems at home and abroad. Just 40 percent of voters approve of the way he’s doing his job, tying his worst mark in three years and the second worst of his presidency.

Just 39 percent approve of the way he’s dealing with the economy and only 33 percent approve of how he’s dealing with foreign policy, the worst of his years in office.

By 42-32 percent, voters say their opinions of Obama make them more likely to vote this fall for a Republican than for a Democrat.

That’s actually twice the gap in the generic Congressional ballot, which stacks up 43/38 for Republicans — a very bad figure for Democrats. The GOP has gained 11 points in the gap since April, when Democrats led 48/42, which strongly suggests that the momentum has shifted in a big way as the general-election campaign season approaches. What’s more, it’s also pretty clear that no matter how poorly the GOP polls (only 22% approve of Republicans in Congress, as opposed to 32% for Democrats), the need to rebuke Barack Obama takes precedence for voters. Among independents, the GOP has a 14-point lead in the generic Congressional ballot, 40/26, and Obama makes independents likelier to vote for Republicans than Democrats by an almost 2:1 margin, 41/22.

So yes, this midterm will be all about Barack Obama, and not about income inequality or free contraception. Having an overall job approval rating of 40/52 is bad enough (worst since September 2011), but on issues that matter to voters, Obama may be doing worse than that topline figure suggests. His 39/58 on the economy is his worst showing since July 2013, and his 33/61 on foreign policy is Obama’s worst ever in the Marist series. He gets only a 30/55 on the Gaza war, and 32/51 on Ukraine. Even his personal favorability has plummeted; it’s now at 43/51, his worst showing in this series as well.

It’s a disaster for Democrats, and it doesn’t appear that it will get better any time soon. Obama might have mitigated the damage with a renewed sense of mission and engagement in the face of multiple crises, but instead he opted to go on vacation. Normally I’d push back against those who gripe about presidential vacations, but as I argue in my column today at The Week, this time critics have a point:

Three years ago, he proudly declared that he had kept his promise to get all troops out of the country, and two years ago campaigned on the fact that Mitt Romney would have kept U.S. troops there had he been president. In January of this year, Obama infamously dismissed ISIS as “a jayvee team” to al Qaeda, and shrugged them off as “jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes.”

Meanwhile, two weeks ago, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency told an audience that the U.S. is less safe than it was “several years ago,” and that rather than being on the run, the al Qaeda ideology “sadly feels like it’s exponentially grown” during that time.

On Saturday, with Marine One in the background, standing by to whisk him away to Martha’s Vineyard, Obama announced that he had ordered the U.S. military to conduct airstrikes on ISIS to prevent a potential genocide. He then proceeded to claim that removing all troops from Iraq wasn’t his decision, but was a situation forced on him by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Needless to say, the dramatic cognitive disconnects in Obama’s narrative don’t do much to maintain even the current low confidence in his leadership, let alone repair the damage. While Obama can certainly run the American response from his vacation retreat to the genocide unfolding in real time, his insistence on doing so reinforces the conclusion that the president isn’t taking the ISIS threat seriously.

Most Americans would expect that the sudden epiphany about the genocidal threat posed by ISIS would have a president working overtime. This time, at least, the need to boost confidence in the president’s leadership should have outweighed his legitimate need for some downtime outside the Beltway bubble.

Americans are less and less impressed with Obama, and going absent in August isn’t likely to make them feel any better about him as Commander in Chief, either.

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Video: Obama’s the “Underestimator in Chief”

Video:Obama’sthe“UnderestimatorinChief” posted

Obamaapprovalfallsto40/54inNBC/WSJpoll

Obama approval falls to 40/54 in NBC/WSJ poll

posted at 10:01 am on August 6, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

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How low can he go? Senate Democrats won’t be fans of this new version of “Limbo Rock,” because it’s Barack Obama’s plummeting approval numbers that have them in limbo, wondering whether they will end up on the wrong end of another electoral wave in November. The new NBC/WSJ poll puts the President’s approval number at 40%, its lowest in the series, and the shift is coming from Democrats themselves:

As for the politicians measured in the NBC/WSJ poll, President Obama’s overall job rating stands at an all-time low of 40 percent, a one-point drop from June.

That decline comes from slightly lower support from Democrats and African-American respondents. …

And Obama’s favorable/unfavorable rating remains upside down at 40 percent positive, 47 percent negative.

The takeaway there is that Americans are no longer separating Obama from his job performance. That may be because his attacks on his opposition have become increasingly personal and whiny, complaining about “hatin’ on” him, and so on. Or it may just be a realization after nearly six years that Obama just can’t be separated from his office in the same way that Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and even George W. Bush could be. That sharp decline in personal favorability no longer buffers Obama from the failures of his administration.

How bad is that personal favorability? Even the overall number doesn’t really do justice to the collapse. Very negative now exceeds very positive by eleven points, 22/33, the worst since December in the middle of the ObamaCare crisis, when the overall was 42/46. In April, it was 24/28 and 44/41 overall. Even during the midterm elections four years ago when the Republican wave was forming, the worst Obama got was a 26/27 on the passionate ends of the spectrum in August with a 46/41 overall.

The full job rating for Obama is 40/54, both of which are new records for Obama in this series. The 54% disapproval ties Obama’s ratings in March and December, during the ObamaCare rollout debacle. Disapproval has now been a majority since late October, after only flirting with it twice before then during his second term.

On the economy, Obama gets an almost-identical 42/53, which actually has been an improvement of late; it had been 39/58 in December and 41/56 in March. Foreign policy, though, has been a disaster, as Obama fell again to a new low of 36/60. In December 2012, Obama got a 52/40, and last December it was 44/48. He’s been cratering ever since. And on the crises that have erupted on the foreign-policy front, Obama flunks across the board:

• MH17 shootdown: 26/37 satisfaction with US actions
• Ukraine/Russia conflict: 23/43
• Syria: 18/37
• Gaza war: 17/45
• Rise of ISIS: 14/42
• Immigration crisis: 11/64

Obama had better think twice about making the midterms about immigration. That’s about as complete of a vote of no confidence in an American head of state as it gets.

By the way, while Democrats attempt to rebrand the “war on women” for the midterms, this is what NBC found that people actually care about:

Even though the recession ended years ago and even though the U.S. economy has created 200,000-plus jobs over the past six months, a plurality of Americans – 49 percent – believe the economy is still in a recession. (However, that percentage is the lowest it’s been since the Great Recession began, and 50 percent of respondents believe the economy is improving.)

What’s more, a combined 71 percent say the recession personally impacted them “a lot” or “just some,” and 64 percent say it’s still having an effect on them.

Then there are these numbers in the poll:

• 40 percent say someone in their household lost a job in the past five years;
• 27 percent say they have more than $5,000 in student-loan debt for either themselves or their children;
• 20 percent have more than $2,000 in credit card debt they are unable to pay off month to month;
• and 17 percent say they have a parent or a child over 21 years old living with them for financial or health reasons.

“People are continuing to tell us what ways [the Great Recession] is still impacting them today,” said GOP pollster Bill McInturff. “Those stories are pretty grim.”

Oddly, it’s also what Democrats don’t want to discuss, too … except for the occasional pivot to distract from the latest Obama administration failure.

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Obama hits 40% approval in AP poll, loses ground on foreign policy

Obamahits40%approvalinAPpoll,loses

Quotesoftheday postedat10:41

Quotes of the day

posted at 10:41 pm on July 23, 2014 by Allahpundit

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This weekend, Sen. Rand Paul will headline a “conservatarian” conference in San Francisco. So, just what is a conservatarian? Hard to say…

[David] Boaz—the leader of the premiere libertarian think tank in the country—had never heard of the term “conservatarian,” and threw some cold water on the idea that this type of libertarianism is a novel idea for Californians.

Which brings us back to the original question—is “conservatarianism” a new, tech-minded branch of libertarianism, or is it the same old philosophy with a shiny new buzzword?

***

Potential GOP presidential contender Rand Paul said Wednesday that no one should question Israel’s actions in a time of war.

“I wouldn’t question what they need to do to defend themselves,” the Kentucky Republican told conservative radio host Glenn Beck on “The Blaze.” “These are difficult decisions people make in war when someone attacks you. It’s not our job to second guess.”…

“The first thing I do is say absolutely no money goes to Hamas, no foreign aid gets in the hands of Hamas,” Paul responded. He added that he’d make sure Israel’s defense was well-supplied and funded — and even proposed an Iron Dome equivalent for the United States.

***

Paul has donned a yarmulke and danced to Hebrew songs. He has prayed at the Western Wall and visited a prominent New Jersey yeshiva (a religious school where a major GOP contributor served as his tour guide). He’s dialed into one of the country’s most popular Jewish radio programs and held off-the-record conference calls with Jewish leaders across more than 30 states. He has introduced pro-Israel legislation (title: the “Stand With Israel Act”), speechified about it in the Senate, and, relentlessly, sought a private audience with the wealthiest and most influential Jewish Republicans in the nation…

The charm offensive has two goals at its core. The first is to try to establish Paul in the foreign policy mainstream of Republicanism, particularly on the signal issue of Israel, which is of key importance to both Jewish voters and evangelical Christians. The second is to win over, or at the least neutralize, the moneyed class of hawkish Israel defenders—free-spending billionaires Sheldon Adelson and Paul Singer chief among them—who Paul’s advisers know represent among the most significant impediments to his becoming the party’s next standard-bearer…

“I’m not buying it,” said Elliott Abrams, who served as a top national security adviser to President George W. Bush and is now a senior fellow for the Council on Foreign Relations. Paul and Abrams had a private sit-down on Capitol Hill last fall. “You can’t be an isolationist and credibly pro-Israel. The idea that you’re isolationist for every other country and every other issue in the world except Israel just is not persuasive.” (Paul, for his part, vigorously rejects the “isolationist” label.)…

As former Sen. Norm Coleman, an RJC board member and influential Jewish political figure who has been courted by Paul, said, “He’s doing a very good job clearing up the perception that he’s not his dad.”

***

Perhaps more interesting than this hawks-versus-libertarians dispute, which is an old argument, is who Paul’s antagonists have been. Both Perry and Cruz are politicians who’ve long been associated with the Tea Party, as Paul has. Perry, in his ill-fated 2012 campaign, warned of “military adventurism,” called for withdrawal from Afghanistan, and advocated cutting off aid to Pakistan. Cruz was lumped in with Paul in the category McCain derided as “wacko birds” after Paul’s 2013 drone filibuster. Yet both Perry and Cruz are anxious to differentiate themselves from Paul by turning him into a peacenik caricature. (As Dave Weigel points out, there is personal animosity behind the Perry-Paul spat.) Paul and his allies, for their part, tend to see a neoconservative conspiracy in the way he’s so often used as a punching bag. In an interview last year, Paul described his antagonists to me as “the perpetual war caucus,” and added, “I think much of their chagrin is they see that we’re winning. They’re on the losing side of history.”

Rand Paul is performing an admirable service for the Republican Party: forcing it to have an uncomfortable family conversation—airing an internal dispute that otherwise might get papered over. A confident and opportunistic politician, Paul is eager to take on his critics; by doing so, he believes he can rid the GOP of the stain of Bush’s policies and expand its appeal among voters alienated by Iraq.

***

[I]t’s fallen to Rand Paul to revive his party’s standing with black Americans. After the splashy performances that sealed his reputation (a filibuster here, a standing ovation at Berkeley there), Paul has settled into something of a grind as the rest of the GOP’s presumptive presidential contenders take turns trying to cement themselves as the party’s antithesis to all things Paul…

Rand Paul seems to understand what all of America’s would-be Anti-Rands do not: The GOP cannot content itself with picking up “spare” minority votes here and there, mostly from Latinos, and celebrating the relative handful of black figures who stubbornly insist on being Republican.

As a Floridian Anti-Rand like Marco Rubio can attest, the Republican Party doesn’t really have a generic race problem. Lots of minority voters are simply for what the Democratic Party offers, not against the GOP because it strikes them as racist. Black Americans, however, have a different, distinct experience with the GOP. One minute, they were the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower. The next, they were the party opposed to the Civil Rights Act. No amount of theorizing or intellectualization can get around the impact of that change…

If the GOP’s contending candidates won’t at least accommodate his politics of race, the Anti-Rand who rises to the top faces the discouraging prospect of appearing to oppose them. In that case, defeating Paul will come at the cost of losing to the ghost of Goldwater.

***

In a brief speech before a panel moderated by Nicole Austin-Hillery of the liberal Brennan Center for Justice, the Kentucky senator and libertarian icon called the criminal justice system the “largest impediment to voting and employment in this country.” The U.S legal system, he said, has trapped many nonviolent felons in a place where they “can’t vote and can’t work.”…

Traditionally, the politics of enfranchising felons has fallen along partisan lines. Democrats want to expand the electorate, and Republicans want to restrict it. But Paul’s advocacy for allowing felons to vote seems to be based mostly on conscience. After all, there can’t be much political gain in appealing to a class of citizens who aren’t yet able to vote…

Instead, the voting rights advocacy puts Paul in a unique position moving forward. Increasingly, the Kentucky Republican seems to be pushing a libertarian brand of compassionate conservatism—without the big-government trappings of the Bush era. His emphasis on issues such as felon voting and the plight of Christians in the Middle East is designed to resonate with evangelicals without alienating moderates. It’s not entirely clear what the ideology of a Rand Paul Republican would look like in 2016, but as Tuesday’s event shows, it certainly won’t look quite like the platform of any other politician.

***

Early polls of the 2016 contest have shown Paul leading about half the time in New Hampshire and generally running toward the front of the pack in Iowa as well. Christie and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) both led these two states early on but have since seen their support fall off (thanks toe Christie’s bridge scandal and Rubio’s dabbling with comprehensive immigration reform), and nobody else is as consistently toward the top in both states.

It’s very rare that a presidential candidate excels in both of the two early states, given Iowa is dominated by evangelical Christians and New Hampshire has a more moderate bent. And it’s generally assumed that any candidate who wins both of would likely end the race right then and there — as was (essentially) the case on the Democratic side in 2004 with John Kerry.

Paul’s unusual profile appears to have appeal to these disparate constituencies. He has spent considerable time appealing to the kind of Christians you’d see in Iowa, but his libertarian streak fits nicely with New Hampshire as well. He talks to both tea party crowds and to non-traditional Republican groups, including historically black colleges…

Paul isn’t the only one who could seems capable of pulling off an unprecedented two-state sweep, but for now, he seems to have the best chance.

***

***

Via Reason TV.

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Hillary’spollyannaforeignpolicy postedat9:21

Hillary’s pollyanna foreign policy

posted at 9:21 am on July 18, 2014 by Jazz Shaw

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Each new crisis around the world, including the scab scraping problems in Ukraine following this week’s plane downing, seem to demonstrate that foreign policy will be a much bigger factor in the next presidential election than I’d once imagined. Americans will still focus on a host of domestic issues, but it’s impossible to ignore the deteriorating state of affairs around the globe and America’s place on that larger stage. This made it all the more curious to examine Hillary Clinton’s statements about American foreign policy given on, of all places, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Setting jokes aside for a moment, Stewart asked Hillary, what is our foreign policy anymore? Her answer was remarkable for its lack of depth.

What I found when I became secretary of state is that so many people in the world—especially young people—they had no memory of the United States liberating Europe and Asia, beating the Nazis, fighting the Cold War and winning, that was just ancient history. They didn’t know the sacrifices that we had made and the values that motivated us to do it. We have not been telling our story very well. We do have a great story. We are not perfect by any means, but we have a great story about human freedom, human rights, human opportunity, and let’s get back to telling it, to ourselves first and foremost, and believing it about ourselves and then taking that around the world. That’s what we should be standing for.

Peter Beinart at The Atlantic first brought this to my attention, and he found the former Secretary of State’s response lacking, though for different reasons than I did.

As a vision for America’s relations with the world, this isn’t just unconvincing. It’s downright disturbing. It’s true that young people overseas don’t remember the Cold War. But even if they did, they still wouldn’t be inspired by America’s “great story about [promoting] human freedom, human rights, human opportunity.” That’s because in the developing world—where most of humanity lives—barely anyone believes that American foreign policy during the Cold War actually promoted those things. What they mostly remember is that in anticommunism’s name, from Pakistan to Guatemala to Iran to Congo, America funded dictators and fueled civil wars.

I’m not going to debate Beinart as to how people in various parts of the world view the United States and our history of foreign involvement. There are as many answers to that question as there are nations. But this pollyannaish view that our major shortcoming is our failure to tell our story well enough just smacks of the Obama Doctrine. Everybody will like us if we just sufficiently explain why we’re so darned likeable!

The world is what it is, and there are, sadly, as many evil actors out there as there are noble people deserving of our help. If you want to lead this nation, what I believe we are looking for is someone who can articulate precisely what our goals are, where are resources can best be put to use and where we need to keep a hands off position. A real leader should be able to articulate how we are defining who our friends are and who we must be ready to move against, as well as the circumstances under which such action would be undertaken. And most importantly – in terms of communications – they will need to able to let the rest of world, friend and foe alike, know what they can expect from us both as ally and enemy, and be ready to deliver on those expectations.

Hillary Clinton’s answer was a clear demonstration of the opposite. This is not an advertising campaign to be managed by a smooth spokesperson. We’re talking about the responsibilities of the sole remaining superpower on the planet and how those challenges will be met. Home team cheerleading is not any sort of basis for foreign policy.

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Tags: foreign policy, Hillary Clinton, Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

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USmayallywithregimewewantedto

US may ally with regime we wanted to bomb 11 months ago to fight ISIS

posted at 11:51 am on July 3, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

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2013′s old and busted was Bashar al-Assad being a “reformer,” and the new hotness that August was that Assad was a monster that the US needed to bomb after using WMD on his own people. Skip forward eleven months and the field may reverse itself. Josh Rogin reports for The Daily Beast that the Obama administration may ally with Assad as a way to slow down or stop ISIS. That would be a remarkable shift for a White House that has spent the last three years looking for ways to bolster the rebellion fighting the Assad regime:

There’s a battle raging inside the Obama administration about whether the United States ought to push away from its goal of toppling Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and into a de facto alliance with the Damascus regime to fight ISIS and other Sunni extremists in the region.

As President Obama slowly but surely increases the U.S. military presence on the ground in Iraq, his administration is grappling with the immediate need to stop the ISIS advance and push for a political solution in Baghdad. The 3 1/2-year grinding civil war is Syria has been put on a back burner for now. Some officials inside the administration are proposing that the drive to remove Assad from power, which Obama announced as U.S. policy in 2012, be set aside, too. The focus, these officials argue, should instead be on the region’s security and stability. Governments fighting for survival against extremists should be shored up, not undermined.

“Anyone calling for regime change in Syria is frankly blind to the past decade; and the collapse of eastern Syria, and growth of Jihadistan, leading to 30 to 50 suicide attacks a month in Iraq,” one senior Obama administration official who works on Iraq policy told The Daily Beast.

If nothing else demonstrates the checkers mentality of American foreign policy over the last few years, this does. Barack Obama bombed the Moammar Qaddafi regime out of existence on the basis of “responsibility to protect,” creating a failed state in which al-Qaeda and other jihadist networks could flourish. Even while Assad was actively targeting his own people in the way the Obama administration claimed Qaddafi planned, the White House and especially Hillary Clinton insisted that Assad was a “reformer” with whom the US could work to democratize Syria.

When that clearly wasn’t working, the Obama administration switched to a reluctant opponent of Assad’s, boosting the rebels by non-lethal means publicly, and covertly sending small arms — even though we had difficulty in determining who were the “moderates” and who were the extremists. That reached a fever pitch last summer when Assad crossed the ill-advised “red line” drawn by Obama on the use of chemical weapons, at which point Obama at first moved without Congressional involvement to conduct military action against Assad’s regime. When public reaction quickly turned negative on that idea, Obama requested approval from Congress and didn’t get it.

Eleven months later, Obama now wants to work with Assad to defeat the rebellion … or at least the part of the rebellion that the US doesn’t like. The conceptual view of this partnership is a fairy tale that must be read to be believed:

Some administration officials are also suggesting that Iran could be a partner in a post-war Syria, helping to ensure security there during a transition period, after which Assad would negotiate his own departure.

Er, what? Neither Iran nor Assad want Assad to depart at all. Only someone with a rich fantasy life would believe that aligning with Iran and Assad would hasten Assad’s departure, let alone incentivize Assad to arrange for it. All that does is strengthen Assad, and Iran for that matter. It also will infuriate our Sunni partners in the region, who are aligning against Assad and especially Iran. If anything, it will accelerate the sectarian nature of the fight rather than isolate ISIS in the field.

This is what comes from having no foreign policy strategy, other than to get out of Iraq. Obama does not want to return there even to fight ISIS, which is an offshoot of al-Qaeda, even where we have a straight-up fight militarily — and there are good reasons for that, because we probably can’t arrive in time with enough forces to do the job, thanks to the total withdrawal of 2011. He won’t commit air power to it without forcing the Iraqis to dump Maliki either, which again is not altogether unjustified. However, it leaves us with no strategic or tactical way to stop ISIS, no strategic partner in Baghdad, and no other strategic partners from NATO willing to step in and help. Assad is nothing more than a life preserver tossed into an ocean of bad circumstances, and the rationalizations already arising make it look like an even more ridiculous choice.

If we want to fight ISIS, we’d be better off fighting ISIS ourselves. Propping up Assad through Iran is a complete reversal of American foreign policy of the last 35 years, in service to nothing except desperation.

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Tags: Barack Obama, Bashar al-Assad, foreign policy, Iran, Iraq, ISIS, Nouri al-Maliki, Syria

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FormerSecStatewithpresidentialambitionscan’ttellthe

Former SecState with presidential ambitions can’t tell the players in UK?

posted at 12:41 pm on July 3, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

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When I first saw this clip earlier today, I was inclined to dismiss it. After all, plenty of people make the mistake Hillary Clinton does in this interview with BBC Radio today. The interviewer asks the former Secretary of State to gauge the strength of the “special relationship” between the US and the UK, and offers a rather insipid answer that applies to nearly all of our allies in the West. But it’s the apparent ignorance of the UK’s political parties from a woman who served for four years as America’s chief diplomat that got the buzz (via TWS and NRO):

BBC: So how special is the special relationship?

CLINTON: It is so special to me, personally, and I think it is very special between our countries. There’s just a — not just a common language — but a common set of values that we can fall back on. It doesn’t matter in our country whether it’s a Republican or Democrat, or frankly in your country whether it’s a Conservative or a Tory. There is a level of trust and understanding. It doesn’t mean we always agree because of course we don’t.

In case you don’t get the joke, the Tories are the Conservatives in the UK. Their other major political parties are Labour and Liberal Democrats, which means this is another way in which the comparison is a bit inapt. That confusion shouldn’t surprise anyone who recalls this gem from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shortly after assuming that position in March 2009:

“I have never understood multiparty democracy.

“It is hard enough with two parties to come to any resolution, and I say this very respectfully, because I feel the same way about our own democracy, which has been around a lot longer than European democracy.”

Let’s not forget that most Western democracies use parliamentary systems with three or more major parties, including our two closest allies, the UK and Canada. So does the system we set up in Iraq. They’re not terribly exotic or difficult to understand at all, at least not functionally, although they may take slightly more work to study than the US two-party system. At the very least, they’re easy to recognize.

On the whole, though, I figured that fumbling on Conservatives vs Tories was a momentary and extemporaneous brain fade more than a display of actual ignorance. The answer itself is strange even apart from that. The BBC didn’t ask why the relationship was special to Hillary Clinton, but what the status of the relationship was between the US and UK. Clinton begins with a weird celebration of the special relationship as being super-special to herself, and then describes it in terms that are about as generic as one can possibly imagine. “Common set of values … level of trust and understanding,” as if that doesn’t describe nearly every close alliance in history between nations. It all but declares that the US-UK alliance isn’t special at all; I doubt that answer gives any confidence to most of the BBC’s listeners.

National Journal’s Alex Seitz-Wald thought the comment should have drawn more attention than it did, especially in the British press:

Surprised British press seems uninterested in Hillary's "Tory" gaffe. Seems notable for someone running on int'l chops.

— Alex Seitz-Wald (@aseitzwald) July 3, 2014

Maybe they’re just used to the fact that Hillary Clinton doesn’t understand multiparty democracy, or apparently recalls that the UK has such a system.

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Tags: 2016 election, foreign policy, gaffe, Hillary Clinton, incompetence, multiparty democracy, UK

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Openthread:NewObamastatementonIraq

Open thread: New Obama statement on Iraq at 12:30 ET; Update: Moved to 1:15

posted at 12:01 pm on June 19, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

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What might this mean? Six days ago, as ISIS marched on Baghdad, Barack Obama insisted that he would weigh the options for response to this crisis — and then promptly took off for some fundraisers and a round of golf. Yesterday, he briefed Capitol Hill honchos on his thinking, complete with a photo spray, and also told them that he didn’t see the need to get authorization for action, to which the top Congressional leadership concurred. Now Obama wants time in front of the cameras at 12:30 ET this afternoon [Update, 12:50 - moved to 1:15].

If he doesn’t come prepared with a plan, it will be … par for the course, no?

JUST IN: CBS News will broadcast President Obama's statement on Iraq as a special report on @CBS and online http://t.co/tVsUyujG2U

— CBS News (@CBSNews) June 19, 2014

When Obama met with Eric Shinseki the first time, he blew the opportunity to look decisive and presidential, and ended up waiting a week to finally do what everyone knew would have to happen anyway. In a sense, that’s what is dogging Obama here, too. He conducted a presser in the shadow of Marine One to say nothing much at all when the crisis had been unfolding for days already. The only action that Obama took by the end of the weekend was to send 275 Marines for embassy protection and transfers of personnel to Basra and Dubai. The lack of urgency in dealing with ISIS has to have captured the attention of the Iraqis, our allies, and especially our enemies.

According to the AP, the only change will be adding another 100 Green Berets as advisers to the Iraqi armed forces:

Obama now meeting with his national security team pic.twitter.com/Uv4kN837KQ

— Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) June 19, 2014

AP reporting: Obama is expected to announce Thursday that he is deploying about 100 Green Berets to Iraq to help train & advise Iraqi forces

— Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) June 19, 2014

That wouldn’t really require a presidential press briefing, would it? The Iraqis have publicly requested American intervention by air, and this might end up being an implicit rejection — a pocket veto, in a way, by just ignoring it.

In a spot of good news (if confirmed), the Iraqis have won the battle for their biggest oil refinery:

Iraqi forces regained full control Thursday of the country’s biggest oil refinery after heavy fighting with Sunni militants attempting to seize it, Agence France-Presse reported officials as saying.

“The security forces are in full control of the Baiji refinery,” Lieutenant General Qassem Atta, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s security spokesman, said in televised remarks.

The announcement came after Iraqi government forces battled Sunni militants for control of the country’s biggest refinery on Thursday as Maliki waited for a U.S. response to an appeal for air strikes to beat back the threat to Baghdad.

The sprawling Baiji refinery, 200 km (130 miles) north of the capital near Tikrit, was a battlefield as troops loyal to the Shiite-led government held off insurgents from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and its allies who had stormed the perimeter a day earlier, threatening national energy supplies.

Live video of Obama’s statement will be here, but don’t expect it to start exactly on time:

Update: Thank you, Captains Obvious:

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and his German counterpart discussed Iraq during a meeting Thursday in which both parties agreed Iraq is “primarily” responsible for dealing with Sunni Islamist insurgents.

“First of all, yes, the movement of [Islamic State in Iraq and Syria] is a real and concrete threat for all of us,” said German Minister of Defense Ursula von der Leyen.

“And we are aware of the fact that of course it’s primarily the Iraq government that is on duty to take care for the security of the country.”

And tsunamis are generally wet, too.

Update: Yep, looks like Iraq’s request for air strikes has either been denied or will wait for a while longer:

President will NOT ask Maliki to step down, will deploy advisors, increase counterterror $ & intell sharing, dispatch Kerry to the region

— Justin Fishel (@JustinFishelFNC) June 19, 2014

Again, not sure why this couldn’t have gone out in a Defense or State briefing.

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Tags: Barack Obama, foreign policy, Iraq, ISIS

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