The George W. Bush presidential library is having its coming-out party this week. Five years after the end of the Bush administration, it's about time for a push to recalibrate our historical understanding of George W. Bush's legacy. In the Washington Post, Stephen Knott argues that the professional historians have it in for W., and that time will may vindicate his legacy:

In their hasty, partisan-tinged assessments of Bush, far too many scholars breached their professional obligations, engaging in a form of scholarly malpractice, by failing to do what historians are trained to do before pronouncing judgment on a presidency: conduct tedious archival research, undertake oral history interviews, plow through memoirs, interview foreign leaders and wait for the release of classified information.

There is a difference between punditry and scholarship. The latter requires biding one’s time and offering perspective as the evidence emerges and the passions of the day cool. An assessment of Harry Truman’s presidency looks quite different today than it did immediately after he left the White House in 1953. And no historian, especially Schlesinger, would have predicted in 1961 that 21st-century scholars would rank Dwight Eisenhower among the nation’s greatest presidents.

George W. Bush’s low standing among academics reflects, in part, the rise of partisan scholarship: the use of history as ideology and as a political weapon, which means the corruption of history as history. Bush may not have been a great president; he may even be considered an average or below-average president, but he and — more important — the nation deserve better than this partisan rush to judgment.

Meanwhile, over at the National Journal, Tom DeFrank details how the Bush library, and Bush himself, will push back against this historical bias:

This week’s two days of festivities on the campus of Southern Methodist University, Laura Bush’s alma mater, mark his somewhat reluctant re-emergence into the national spotlight since leaving Washington in 2009. President Obama and the three living Presidents will join 15,000 guests to celebrate the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Center.

The center comprises a Presidential library housing 43,000 artifacts and millions of documents from the eight years of 43’s tenure. The adjoining think tank, informally known as the “freedom institute,” will preach the gospel of Bush’s conservative vision to future generations.

The institute is also designed by Bush as the vehicle to rehab and burnish his legacy with future historians and posterity....

While time is known to heal some wounds and Presidential legacies, money doesn't hurt, either. The institute is bulging with cash, allowing its board to hire like-minded academics and pay some executives more than $650,000 a year....

“As time goes by Bush will benefit from the comparison with Obama,” Victor Davis Hanson of Stanford’s Hoover Institution predicted. “If Obama had been a Bill Clinton-like figure he would have made Bush look like the caricature his opponents have suggested. But Obama has been a great gift for Bush - he’s as polarizing a figure as Bush was.”

OK, so, a few things:

1) The moment you trot out someone as partisan as Victor Davis Hanson to claim that Bush's legacy will outshine Obama's, you've abandoned the argument that Bush is merely the victim of partisan historians.   

2) It's good to know that those shameful historians who abandoned dispassionate analysis in favor of a partisan agenda will overwhelmed by the forces for good -- namely, a $500 million wad of cash. And I, for one, look forward to future Knott op-eds praising the nobility of historians who suckled on this teat as paragons of unbiased scholarship. 

3) That Truman analogy that Knott uses? Yeah, as Amy Zegart discussed back in 2008, that dog won't hunt.

4) Five years later, is there any dimension of George W. Bush's legacy that will improve with time? Actually, I think the answer is yes on a few fronts. 

First, he's been a great ex-president. For such a polarizing political figure, it's remarkable at how successfully Bush has receded into private life. Lest you think that this was his only option, let me introduce you to Dick Cheney's post-vice-presidential path. 

Second, ironically, Bush's legacy will be a bit more buoyant because the quality of post-Bush GOP thinking on foreign policy has been so piss-poor that Bush really does look good by comparison. It is worth remembering that, for all of the criticisms of Bush's foreign policy rhetoric, he kept anti-Muslim hysteria somewhat in check. He boosted foreign aid through PEPFAR, which might be his most significant foreign policy legacy. And the Bush foreign policy of 2008 looked dramatically different from the Bush foreign policy of 2003, which suggests some degree of adaptation and learning. 

Third, the performance of Bush's economic team in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis probably deserves more credit than it gets. Despite being a wildly unpopular lame-duck president, Bush still was able to implement a series of international moves (convening the G-20 rather than the G-8) and domestic moves (TARP, the auto bailout) that prevented the crisis from metastasizing into another Great Depression. 

All that said, however, there are some cold hard facts that cannot be erased. George W. Bush helmed a war of choice that proved, in the end, to impose powerful constraints (though perhaps not system-changing) for American foreign policy. He pursued his foreign policy aims in such a way as to dramatically lower U.S. standing abroad. He was at the helm when all of the pressures that triggered the 2008 financial crisis were building up and did next to nothing to stop them. And five years later, the GOP is still wrestling with the negative aspects of his political legacy. 

At best, George W. Bush was a well-meaning man who gave the occasional nice speech and was thoroughly overmatched by events. At worst, he was the most disastrous foreign policy president of the post-1945 era. 

Am I missing anything?

Since moving to Foreign Policy, this blog has primarily been devoted to world politics, global political economy, and American foreign policy.  I don't know if I've ever blogged about gun control and gun violence (though I confess I've been enjoying my Twitter exchanges with Second Amendment absolutists immensely). 

Now if that peroration seems like a windup for a big "we must do something about guns" post, you're going to be disappointed.  Sure, from what I read, there's a clear correlation between gun ownership and crime, but it's far from clear that most of the policies on the table will do a whole hell of a lot to put a dent into that correlation. 

However, with the Obama administration gearing up for an ambitious set of policy proposals, and with the gun lobby gearing up to fight those proposals, I do have one useful policy suggestion.  If the White House is smart, they will take, verbatim, Kevin Drum's suggested policy proposals for eliminating lead from our nation's homes and topsoil. 

Now, if you think that sentence was a massive non sequitur, I'd encourage you to read Drum's outstanding Mother Jones essay on the surprisingly robust connection between lead poisoning and violent crime, as well as his follow-up blog posts.  Despite understandable and initial skepticism, even skeptics seem persuaded by the causal link.  [Where's the international relations hook?--ed.  This hypothesis holds when using cross-national evidence as well.] If the goal is to reduce violent, horrific crimes, then reducing lead exposure is a crucial part of the solution. 

The brilliant thing about adding this to the menu of policy proposals is that I suspect it would actually amass broad-based support.  Environmentalists will like it for obvious reasons, as will advocates of urban politics.  Parents will love it because they know lead is bad for you.  Policy wonks will love it because, well, the social science seems pretty rock-solid.  The best part, however, is that groups like the NRA would likely support it as well -- because it makes them seem reasonable.  In the wake of Sandy Hook, an awful lot of commentators have been saying things like "it's not just about guns," with a reference to meantal health or violence in the culture.  The causal evidence linking lead poisoning to gun violence and violent crime would appear to be far stronger than the stuff on popular culture.  So it would be smart politics for the NRA to endorse those measures. 

It's pretty rare nowadays to come up with a policy solution that doesn't run into some partisan divide -- but this lead poisoning issue would seem to be the exception.  I hope both the Obama administration and Congress exploit the opportunity. 

Your humble blogger has not been shy in stating that he now votes in presidential elections based largely on foreign policy considerations.  Nor has he been shy in expressing his... er... exasperation with various foreign policy kerfuffles during the campaign.  So as Election Day approaches, you might wonder -- what will Daniel Drezner do?  [Oh, give me a f**ing break, just get on with it!!--ed.]

With Barack Obama, there's an actual record to judge.... and I think it would be best to call it mixed.  The Economist, in its Obama endorsement, noted the following:

[On] foreign policy... he was also left with a daunting inheritance. Mr Obama has refocused George Bush’s “war on terror” more squarely on terrorists, killing Osama bin Laden, stepping up drone strikes (perhaps too liberally, see article) and retreating from Iraq and Afghanistan (in both cases too quickly for our taste). After a shaky start with China, American diplomacy has made a necessary “pivot” towards Asia. By contrast, with both the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and his “reset” with Russia, he overreached and underdelivered. Iran has continued its worrying crawl towards nuclear weapons.

All these problems could have been anticipated. The Arab spring could not. Here Mr Obama can point to the ousting of tyrants in Egypt and Libya, but he has followed events rather than shaping them, nowhere more so than with the current carnage in Syria. Compared with, say, George Bush senior, who handled the end of the cold war, this aloof, disengaged man is no master diplomat; set beside the younger Bush, however, Mr Obama has been a safe pair of hands.

I think that's a decent assessment, although it overlooks what is, to me, the most troubling element of Barack Obama's first-term foreign policy legacy -- his management of the foreign policy process.  As my Foreign Policy colleague Rosa Brooks has written about in agonizing detail, the dysfunction that was talked about in Obama's first year in office hasn't disappeared along with Osama bin Laden. 

Indeed, the aftermath of Benghazi puts this on full display.  To be blunt, for all the GOP efforts to make the lack of pre-attack planning an indictment of the White House, consulate security in Benghazi is not the kind of decision that rises to the White House level.  The aftermath of the attack is another story, however.  In the past 24 hours alone, report after report after report after report shows Obama's foreign policy agencies defending their own turf, leaking to reporters in ways that heighten bureaucratic dysfunction, and revealing the White House's national security team to be vindictive and petty. 

Benghazi also highlights a deeper problem with this administration -- the lack of policy follow-through.  Whether one looks at the Iraq withdrawal or the rebalancing to Asia or the Afghanistan build-up or their embrace of the G-20, the story is the same.  Even if the administration had demonstrated good first instincts, it has failed to follow up those instincts with either next steps or contingency planning. 

So, the biggest indictment of the Obama administraion's foreign policy has been poor management.  Which, as it turns out, is Mitt Romney's genuine strength, as Ezra Klein points out in his excellent Bloomberg column this AM: 

Romney’s apparent disinterest in an animating ideology has made him hard to pin down -- for the Journal editorial board, for journalists, for Democrats and Republicans, for campaign consultants, even for Romney’s closest confidantes. It has led to the common knock on Romney that he lacks a core. He’s an opportunist. He picks whatever position is expedient. He is a guy with brains, but no guts.

But after spending the last year talking to Romney advisers and former colleagues, as well as listening to him on the campaign trail, I’ve come to see this description as insufficient. It’s not so much that Romney lacks a core as that his core can’t readily be mapped by traditional political instruments. As a result, he is free to be opportunistic about the kinds of commitments that people with strong political cores tend to value most.

What Romney values most is something most of us don’t think much about: management. A lifetime of data has proven to him that he’s extraordinarily, even uniquely, good at managing and leading organizations, projects and people. It’s those skills, rather than specific policy ideas, that he sees as his unique contribution. That has been the case everywhere else he has worked, and he assumes it will be the case in the White House, too. 

This jibes with all the chatter I hear about Romney as well.  Which should lead you to think that Romney might be exactly what ails American foreign policy. 

The thing is, Romney's own foreign policy rhetoric makes it clear that managing foreign policy isn't enough.  As he's said, the president has to be a foreign policy leader.  A president has much greater leeway on these issues than on other policy dimensions.  A good foreign policy president needs to be genunely interested in the subject, possess good foreign policy insincts, and rely on a core set of ideas that allows him or her to make tough decisions in a world of uncertainty.  As I wrote last year: 

[A] philosophy of "I won't say anything until I know all the facts" is bogus because, in foreign policy, the facts are never all in. Very often intelligence is partial, biased, or simply flat-out wrong. It's those moments, when a president has to be a foreign policy decider for a 51-49 decision, that a combination of background knowledge and genuine interest in the topic might be useful.

When I use these criteria to think about Mitt Romney, he doesn't do very well.  Every conversation with every Romney advisor confirms the same thing:  this is not a guy who has engaged deeply in international affairs.  He was perfectly happy to go all neocon-y in the primary season to appeal to his base, and then tack back to the center in the general election to appeal to war-weary independents.  He's not doing this because he's dishonest; he's doing this because he doesn't care.  His choice of foreign policy neophyte Paul Ryan as his VP pick confirms this as well:  Romney/Ryan has the least foreign policy experience of any GOP ticket in at least sixty years.  

Furthermore, in the moments during this campaign when Romney has been required to display his foreign policy instincts, he's foundered badly.  He stuck his beak into the Chen Guangcheng case when silence was the better option.  He did the same thing in the aftermath of the attacks in Cairo and Benghazi, going so far as to accuse Obama of "sympathizing" with terrorists.  As for his overseas trip, well, the less said, the better.  All of these episodes show a guy who's out of his depth on matters of foreign affairs.  And when he's been criticized in taking these stances, Romney has responded by doubling down on a bad position.  His political instincts have led him to some bad foreign policy choices. 

I'm not nearly as enthusiastic about as Obama as, say, Jonathan Chait, but his endorsement of the president makes an interesting point:

It is noteworthy that... the best decisions that Obama made during his presidency ran against the advice of much of his own administration.... Many of his own advisers, both economists steeped in free-market models and advisers anxious about a bailout-weary public, argued against his decision to extend credit to, and restructure, the auto industry. On Libya, Obama’s staff presented him with options either to posture ineffectually or do nothing; he alone forced them to draw up an option that would prevent a massacre. And Obama overruled some cautious advisers and decided to kill Osama bin Laden.

On foreign policy, Barack Obama might be an indifferent manager, but by making his first decision the right one, he has saved himself numerous embarrassments and reversals. 

This was a closer call than I expected, and I honestly hope (and think there's a good chance) that if Mitt Romney is elected, he'd grow into his foreign policy role with time.  For this analyst, however, Barack Obama is the imperfect, but superior, alternative. 

And now the bitter political invective in the comments.... begin!! 

Your humble blogger is not naive in the ways of punditry.  He is keenly aware that the only way to move up the punditry food chain is to bemoan the crumbling state of America's infrastructure while pining for better high-speed rail, better schools, and ORDER, dammit!! 

In the interest of serving the greater good, your humble blogger has decided to do the crucial pundit fieldwork necessary to adopt this position.  I am therefore taking the Acela "hi speed" train from Washington, DC, to New York City, and shall chronicle every moment of import along the way in this blog post.  So buckle your seat bekts -- it's going to be a bumpy ride:

8:10 AM:  Part of the pundit code is getting into a local taxi and getting colorful quotes from them.  Alas, my cabbie was not the chatty type.  Also, despire the morning rush-hour time, there wasn't a lot of sitting around time.  Oh, and his cab was clean too.  Clearly, Washington DC is receiving favored treatment in its infrastructure. 

8:35 AM:  I get to Union Station to find much of it being renovated.  There are cranes and construction equipment everywhere!  What is his, Shanghai?!  Of course, in the Far East, they're just building new things, whereas here in the decaying United States, we're trying to preserve our crumbling monuments to modernity [Oh, that is Pulitzer GOLD, baby!!--ed.]

8:40 AM:  I want to get coffee from Starbucks, but the Acela line has already started forming.  I bypass the coffee to make sure I get a good seat.  Anger at stupid American regulations... rising!!

9:00 AM:  On the train, I hold my breath as I try to access Acela's wifi.  Many an expeletive has been tweeted in anger at this unreliable system.  In my case, however, it opens with no difficulty.  There is a warning page informing me that, for myriad reasons, the wifi might cut in and out and it can't access certain pages.  Still, Amtrak's web service has jumped up a notch since the last time I took the Acela... or, again, the NYC-DC corridor gets preferential treatment compared with the Boston trains.  Note to self:  hire eager-beaver grad student to unearth Amtrak perfidy. 

9:10 AM:  I can't access YouTube.  That's it, this is the worst f***ing WiFi service I've ever encountered.  There's no WAY this would happen in China!!!

9:20 AM:  Well, the Acela reveals itself to be erratic, as it starts to slow down from its pathetically low "hi speed" -- oh, it's stopoing st the BWI station.  Never mind. 

9:33 AM:  Sure, I could have opted for the quiet car, but I wanted to mix with "the people," get a sense of what they're talking about amongst themselves.  So far, they're talking about... PowerPoint presentations.  There's a column in here somewhere...

10:00 AM:  So far, the train has been on time, the WiFi has worked, and even the non-quiet car has been pretty sedate.  Friedman's Rage is not building.  [Bye-bye Pulitzer!!--ed.] No, wait, the train ride is kinda bumpy.  Very bumpy at times.  Kind of like... like... the American body politic!!  [Atta boy!  You're back in the game!--ed.] 

10:20 AM:  The WiFi cut out for, like 10 minutes south of Wilmington.   How sad and pathetic for America.  Why, if this had happened in, say, Chongqing, at least one train bureaucrat would have been executed and one British hedge-fund manager would have been poisoned to set an example for other trains.  

10:39 AM: The WiFi is becoming erratic again, causing additional mutterings from other passengers in my car. One of them says "This would never happen in Michael Bloomberg's America!!" #notreally.

11:35 AM: The train has arrived in Newark. I look around. God, I miss China.

11:45 AM:   Your pundit's long morning nightmare has come to an end on a gorgeous day in Manhattan.  I learned a lot about America on this trip, but even more importantly... I learned a lot about myself.   [Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Aaron Sorkin!!--ed.]

I think it's safe to say that your humble blogger has been mildly critical at times of the House GOP's negotiating tactics, as well as some of the foreign policy musings of House majority leader Eric Cantor.  Matt Bai's forthcoming budget story, for example, places a lot of the blame on last year's debt deal fiasco on House Speaker John Boehner's inability to compromise because of the ideological rigidity of his caucus.  Not surprisimngly, House Republicans can claim the lion's share of the credit for Congress' current levels of historic unpopularity.

Every once in a while, however, a story comes along in the mainstream media that provides just a smidgen of sympathy for what the House GOP is trying to accomplish.  In that sense, Jonathan Weisman's New York Times story about the relationship between business supporters and House Republicans accomplishes the seeimg impossible:  it paints a positive picture of Cantor and the House GOP:

Big business groups like the Chamber of Commerce spent millions of dollars in 2010 to elect Republican candidates running for the House. The return on investment has not always met expectations....

House conservatives are pressing to allow the U.S. Export-Import Bank, which has financed  exports since the Depression, to run out of lending authority within weeks. The bank faces the possibility of shutting its doors completely by the end of May, when its legal authorization expires.

And a host of routine business tax breaks — from wind energy subsidies to research and development tax credits — cannot be passed because of Republican insistence that they be paid for with spending cuts.

Business groups that worked hard to install a Republican majority in the House equated Republican control with a business-friendly environment. But the majority is first and foremost a conservative political force, and on key issues, its ideology is not always aligned with commercial interests that helped finance election victories.

“Free market is not always the same as pro-business,” said Barney Keller, spokesman for the conservative political action committee Club for Growth....

To conservative groups, fresh eyes on issues have produced fresh, small-government thinking. The Export-Import Bank, for instance, wanted a new, long-term authorization with an expanded loan limit and broader authority. Instead, Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia is drafting a 13-month reauthorization that would demand the Obama administration begin international talks to phase out export-lending subsidies globally, force the bank to be more transparent in its lending practices and rein in its loan portfolio.  (emphasis added)

Props to Cantor:  his policy rider makes some sense.  National export credit agencies are throwing around hundreds of billions of dollars to facilitate trade.  At least one World Bank study suggests that export-lending subsidies misallocate credit -- they tend to provide financing for firms that would have exported anyway.  There are instances when such subsidies might be useful, and, it should be oted, the OECD does some of the things that Cantor wants to see at the global level.  That said,  Cantor's suggestion for broader international collaboration and transparency make sense.  Indeed, Cantor now has common cause with some unlikely NGO allies.   

In all seriousness, if the House GOP could communicate that bolded message better to the American people, it might have a better approval rating.  Of course, there is nothing in that message that is inconsistent with the House doing its job on matters like passing budgets and so forth.  So I expect we'll have to wait until 2013 before another positive mention of Cantor appears in the paper of record. 

A few months ago I blogged about how the Putin-Medvedev two-step caused some grumbling among Russian elites.  Russian parliamentary elections were held over the weekend, and as it turns out there was some grumbling among the public as well: 

Russians voting in parliamentary elections apparently turned against the ruling United Russia party in large numbers Sunday, exit polls and early results suggested, to the great benefit of the Communist Party.

In what only months ago would have been a nearly unimaginable scenario, the party dominated by Vladimir Putin was predicted to get less than 50 percent of the vote, while polling organizations put the Communists at about 20 percent, nearly double their count in the last election.

Not long ago, anything under the 64.3 percent that United Russia won in 2007 would have been seen as unacceptable failure for the party and Putin, who has relied on its control of government and bureaucrats across the country to deliver ever more votes and entrench his authority.

But now its aura of invincibility is badly dented, and opponents may begin to sense an opportunity. If United Russia falls short of 50 percent of the seats in the lower house of parliament, it will turn to the nationalist Liberal Democrats, or even the Communists, for support. Those parties have been pliable up to now — Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democrats never vote against the government — but could start testing the limits of their power, given a chance.

Well.... that's the odd thing about how this plays out in Russia.  On the one hand, elections like these do matter, because they dent the veneer of an effective authoritarian being in control.  Despite rigging the game, it appears that Putin and his loyalists couldn't secure the desired result.  Any time an authoritarian aparatus demonstrates fallibility is not a good day for the authoritarian apparatus. 

On the other hand.... Putin and his cronies have two to three serious advantages going into the presidential elections.  First, they can use this election as a wake-up call.  By turning up the public spending taps (which high oil prices will allow them to do) they can probably buy some more loyalty.  Second, they can be more ruthless in rigging the electoral game to ensure Putin's victory.  In trading off the international legitimacy of elections vs. winning, I suspect Putin will opt for winning. 

Third, and most important, Russia is not like the Middle East, in which a grass-roots organization has been waiting in the wings to challenge the corrupt authoritarian state.  I suspect that what will save Putin is the existing alternatives to Putin -- namely, the communists and nationalists.  Russians might not like the status quo, but it's not like the opposition has covered itself in glory either.  The Liberal Democrats have done no real governing, and the Communists have done way too much governing in its past.  These are not really desirable alternatives. 

Unless a genuine grass-roots democracy movement sprouts up in the Russian tundra, I suspect Putin and his allies will muddle through the presidential elections.  What's more interesting is whether this event triggers some longer-term planning on the part of Putin or his opposition. 

What do you think? 

Tonight's CBS/National Journal debate was the first to be on broadcast television, and was devoted to national security and foreign policy.  Out of a sense of duty to you, dear readers, your humble blogger downed a lot of vodka watched the whole thing, and is ready to offer my grades. 

Before talking about the individual candidates, I'll say this -- I've been rather harsh on the GOP 2012 field, and, to be honest, most of them did better than I expected in this debate.   I didn't expect much, but still:  kudos to the campaign staffers, because everyone seemed better briefed on foreign policy than in past debates (On the other hand, I note that none of the candidates said a single good thing about Barack Obama's foreign policy.  I wasn't expecting hosannahs or anything, but the man is polling at 60% approval on this front). 

A big fail to CBS and National Journal for having a 90-minute debate that was only aired for 60 minutes on television.  The webcasts were bad, with lots of glitches on both sites.  As for Major Garrett and Scott Pelley, they did OK, but John Harwood and Maria Bartiromo outclassed them this week. 

In alphabetical order: 

Michelle Bachmann:  She kept her crazy pretty contained for much of the night, but it escaped for two big whoppers.  The first was when she said, "The table is being set for a worldwide nuclear war with Israel."  The second was when she expressed a desire for the United States to adopt China's welfare system (or lack thereof).  Grade:  D. 

Herman Cain:  The worst debate performance of the night.  Slow, rambling, evasive, and contradictory.  His answer on torture contradicted itself inside of 30 seconds; his Pakistan response was a total dodge.  His solution on Iran -- energy independence! -- would be like suggesting that the appropriate response to a rising China would be to move all Americans to Mars.  Both activities will take the same length of time.  Grade:  F. 

Newt Gingrich:  He had a pretty good answer on Pakistan, and was consistent -- albeit disturbing -- on the assassination of Americans working for Al Qaeda.  That said, Gingrich's "I'm smarter than everyone else" schtick wears thin fast.  I say this as someone who encounters academics on a daily basis.  Gingrich gives off the same insufferable mien of academics who think they're much smarter and more knowledgable than they actually are.  Grade:  B. 

Jon Hunstman:  Not surprisingly, the former ambassador gave the clearest and most coherent answers of the evening.  He pushed back the others on staying in Afghanistan, and correctly pushed back Romney on taking China to the WTO.  If foreign policy was really important to the GOP, he'd be the frontrunner, and it wouldn't be close.  Grade:  A. 

Ron Paul:  The contrast between Paul and the rest of the field was magnified during this debate.  As someone who thinks that Paul is too dovish at times, I thought he did a very good job, and got quite passionate on questions of torture.  Also -- and I think this is a first -- he got through the entire debate without mentioning the Federal Reserve.  Grade:  A-. 

Rick Perry:  Compared to his other debate performances, it was OK.  Compared to what I'm expecting a commander-in-chief to demonstrate, it was again way below the bar.  Perry proposed zero-based budgeting for foreign aid and a lot of other areas of the government; I wonder if he knows that the first president to embrace that idea was Jimmy Carter.  Then there were odd word choices.  China has to "change their virtues"?  He invented the word "forewithal."  And he was lucky that the end of the telecast cut off his attempt at an answerr on the euro,  because it was not going to go well.  Grade:  C. 

Mitt Romney:  Romney has perfected the art of sounding firm and resolute in his first sentence of any response on foreign policy, and then, with the next sentence, inserting enough hedges and qualifications to give himself tremendous wiggle room.  He demonstrated decent knowledge for the most part, and had another strong debate.  Grade:  B+. 

Rick Santorum:  I can recall quite clearly that Santorum have a decent answer on Pakistan at some point.  Beyond that, all I can remember was his whinging about not getting asked enough questions.  Grade:  C+ 

Offer your own grades/assessments in the comments. 

Over at CFR, James Lindsay pushes back on my previous GOP debate post on the general worlthlessness of foreign policy campaign promises:

Dan’s argument would be more persuasive if his example [of Bush not honoring his campaign promise of a humble foreign policy] proved his point. It doesn’t. Candidate Bush said he didn’t like nation building, and President Bush tried to avoid doing it in both Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s one of the reasons both occupations went badly. Beyond that, Bush carried through on much of what he said during the 2000 campaign. He didn’t like the ABM treaty, so he withdrew the United States from it. He thought that the Clinton missile defense program was inadequate, so he ordered the construction of a more robust one. He expressed skepticism of treaties and international insititutions, said he intended to provide firm American leadership, and vowed that the U.S. military’s true mission was “to fight and win war.” Sound familiar? September 11 changed Bush’s foreign policy agenda, but it didn’t change the core of his worldview.

None of this is to say that campaign speeches and debates tell you everything you might like to know about a candidate’s foreign policy views. No debate question or stump speech can ever anticipate all the situations a president will face. Dan is certainly right that presidential candidates sometimes say things about foreign policy that they have no intention of doing, as looks to have been the case with Obama’s 2008 pledge to renegotiate NAFTA. And Dan is equally right that presidents sometimes repudiate the foreign policy promises they make on the campaign trail, as Bill Clinton famously did with his opposition to favored-nation-trading status for China and Barack Obama did on Guantánamo Bay. (Though both presidents reversed themselves only after they tried and failed to implement their campaign pledges.)

But campaign speeches and debates do provide insight into how candidates think about issues.

Lindsay's point is well taken: candidates do say things that they wind up doing as president. My original point was intended to be narrower than that -- presidents do not get politically damaged by reneging on foreign policy campaign promises the same way they do if they renege on domestic policy promises. But as a rough guideline to a candidates' assumptions and style of foreign policy thinking, campaign speeches, essays, and yes, even debate responses can be useful.

Which is why, if I could ask one question at tonight's debate, I'd like to ask each of the candidates exactly how their religious devotion guides their foreign policy thinking. Oh, hell, let's be more specific -- I'd like to ask Rick Perry exactly how, as president, his statement that, "as a Christian [I] have a clear directive to support Israel" will affect his direction of the nondenominational blood and treasure of the U.S. government in the Middle East.

This is important.  Walter Russell Mead recently blogged that "the Christianists haven't got a prayer" in reasserting their former prominence in American society, and he's by and large he's correct in that assumption.  In terms of foreign policy, however, Perry's language was something new in the post-9/11 world.   Slate's William Saletan explains why: 

Whoa. That's something George W. Bush never did. Bush never said he had a Christian duty to stand with Israel, because to say such a thing would have been stupid and dangerous. By framing U.S. foreign policy in terms of a religious alliance between Christians and Jews, Perry is validating the propaganda of Islamic extremists. He's jeopardizing peace, Israel, and the United States.

Bush understood that the terrorists who struck us on 9/11 wanted a religious war. The key to defeating them wasn't to wage that war, but to refuse it. That's why Bush constantly praised Islam, emphasized American freedom of religion, and dismissed Osama Bin Laden as a renegade killer of Muslims....

Go back and look at Bush's comments about Israel. In eight years, he never mentioned his Christianity as a basis for his policies there. He defended Israel as a democracy and an ally. When he mentioned Judaism and Christianity in this context, he always included Islam. "The Middle East is the birthplace of three great religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam," Bush said in a speech to the American Jewish Committee a few months before 9/11. "Lasting peace in the region must respect the rights of believers in all these faiths." In 2007, Bush told Al Arabiya: "I believe that all the world, whether they be Muslim, Christian, or any other religion, prays to the same God. … I believe that Islam is a great religion that preaches peace." Again and again, Bush affirmed: "If you're a Jew or a Christian or a Muslim, you're equally American."

Perry has trashed this legacy. By declaring that "as a Christian, I am going to stand with Israel," he has vindicated Bin Laden's narrative. 

If the next president's religious vision is going to be his primary source of guidance for conducting foreign policy in the Middle East, yeah, that's something I'd like to know sooner rather than later. 

My favorite campaign novel remains Anonymous' Joe Klein's Primary Colors, and one of my favorite exchanges in that book takes place in the early part, when a campaign flack is trying to get a New York Times political reporter to cover a policy speech that would ostensibly contain a shot at a rival candidate:

[The reporter says,] "Do you think this election is going to be about welfare reform?"

"Well, that's part of it," I said. "The folks seem interested. What do you think it's going to be about?"

"What it's always about," he said. "Sex and violence."

And he was right: this was about violence.

I bring this up because Jonathan Martin's story about Jon Huntsman's dysfunctional presidential campaign in Politico is all about the violence -- in this case, the internecine warfare between Huntsman's longtime friends and his campaign manager John Weaver.

Now, Huntsman's chances of winning the nomination were pretty slim to begin with, so you might be wondering why your humble blogger is writing about this particular story [STOP PRE-EMPTING ME!!!!--ed.] I think there are three reasons.

First, I'd expect decent odds that Huntsman would be the secretary of state in any incoming GOP administration (quick, name me an alternate candidate with sufficient gravitas). Even if he's a sideshow to the current GOP nomination, he wouldn't be if a Republican won in 2012. A story like this, on the other hand, might not help his chances to land a cabinet post.

This leads to the second interesting question, however, which is whether we can jettison the implicit correlation between assembling a well-run campaign and a well-run government. By all accounts, Hillary Clinton's campaign was even more dysfunctional in 2008, and at least one veteran of that campaign admitted to flashbacks after reading Martin's story. That said, there hasn't been that much criticism of Clinton's management of the foreign-policy machine. Maybe managing a campaign is just a wee bit different from managing a political bureaucracy, or negotiating with other actors in world politics.

The final note is, oddly, reassuring. From Martin's story:

Huntsman’s early staffing was so bare-bones that the campaign didn’t even have a policy director, or standard white papers. It left Huntsman himself relying on papers prepared by the American Enterprise Institute to bone up on the issues....

[T]he campaign has suffered early organizational challenges -- and not just with departing personnel.

With no policy director initially, Huntsman was relying on position papers from the American Enterprise Institute to serve as his briefings.

On June 25, four days after the former governor’s announcement, but well after he had put together his basic campaign infrastructure, [disgruntled former campaign aide David] Fischer sent the candidate a blunt note.

“I am concerned about the slow pace of assembling your policy team,” Fischer wrote. [Finance consultant] Jim McCray called me today and he mentioned that donors often ask for a specific policy white paper. We don’t have them.”

Huntsman has since added a policy director to the campaign. (emphasis added)

It's very easy to become cynical about presidential campaigns and conclude that it's all about the dirty tactics opposition research. Discovering that early backers and donors actually care about, you know, policy substance, is kind of encouraging.

Unfortunately, Martin's story itself will likely make it that much harder for Huntsman to assemble a decent policy shop. Policy advisors want to glom onto campaigns that are ideologically palatable but also have a decent chance of winning. Any undecided policy wonks who were Huntsman-curious will read this story and run to Mitt Romney's campaign.

As FP's indefatigable Josh Rogin reported yesterday, GOP presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty will " deliver a major address on foreign policy on Tuesday in what his top aides are billing as a rebuttal to what they see as President Barack Obama's flawed May 19 speech.

Your humble blogger will be listening in -- live!!-- and will provide real-time updates on the blog and on Twitter.

I'll be looking for two things from this speech. First, how does Pawlenty straddle between his more neocon-friendly foreign policy approach with the stronger streak of retrenchment rhetoric that permeates the current GOP primary voter? Will he at least sound isolationism-curious, or will he conclude that the Tea Party's influence is waning? As I said before, my money is that he'll cozy up to this wing by sounding protectionist trade themes. The foreign policy pickings of Pawlenty's website are pretty slim.

Second, will Pawlenty score any Trumpie nominations? He came veeeeery close during the New Hampshire debate with his casual assertion that the United States could grow at 5% a year for a decade because China and Brazil had done it -- ignoring the vast differences in economic development between the United States and those two BRIC economies.

The speech will begin at 9:30 AM, so tune in so my life has meaning so you can learn what a GOP candidate thinks about the world!

[UPDATE] Live-tweets below, summary analysis at the bottom:

9:33 AM: Pawlenty starts by praising CFR #itsbeensoooooolongsinceIheardarepublicandothat

9:34 AM: T-Paw on U.S. in Middle East: "now is not the time to retreat from freedom's rise."

9:36 AM: T-Paw ain't coddling Tea Partiers -- bashes members of GOP for "out-isolating" Democrats.

9:37 AM: T-Paw: "History teaches us there is no such thing as stable oppression."#haveyouheardofthedarkages

9:38 AM: T-Paw blasts Obama for being silent during Iran's 2009 Green Movement, cutting democracy aid to Egypt during same year.

9:42 AM: T-Paw has four categories of ME countries. Category 1: emerging democracies in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Iraq. US must support democracy.

9:43 AM: T-Paw makes shrewd point that revolution in Egypt has caused a populist rejection of economic reforms that Mubarak instituted in past decade

9:44 AM: On Libya, T-Paw rejects "leading from behind" (GASP!!) recognizing TNC, and using full weight of U.S. force to ensure regime change.

9:45 AM: T-Paw's second category -- the monarchies. Claims Jordan, Morocco are engaging in "real reforms" Paging @blakehounshell

9:46 AM: T-Paw observes that U.S.-Saudi relaions are a a new low, but NOT because of Arab Spring. Apparently due to Obama cozying up to Iran. Hmm...

9:48 AM: T-Paw's Category 3: anti-US states of Iran, Syria. Blasts Obama for staying too close to Bashir Assad for too long. #fairpoint

9:49 AM: T-Paw's Category 3: anti-US states of Iran, Syria. Blasts Obama for staying too close to Bashir Assad for too long. #fairpoint

9:50 AM: T-Paw argues for "more forceful sanctions" to push business elites in Syria away from Assad regime #yeahthatwilldoit

9:52 AM: On Iran, T-Paw also calls for new, tougher sanctions as a policy solution. #sanctionsarenomagicbullet

9:52 AM: T-Paw's Category 4 is.... Israel!!! "Nowhere is Obama's lack of judgment clearer"

9:53 AM: T-Paw: Obama's Israel-Palestinan obsession is absurd - Arab Spring shows that conflict is NOT at the heart of the Middle East

9:54 AM: T-Paw: Peace will only come to Israel/Palestine when everyone in the region recognizes the US totally has Israel's back

9:57 AM: T-Paw: "America is exceptional, and we have the moral clarity to lead the world."

9:58 AM: T-Paw says that everyone should listen to David Petraeus the most on Afghanistan

9:59 AM: T-Paw goes off on Republican isolationists, arguing that one party focusing on decline & retrenchment is enough.

10:00 AM: Jon Meacham is moderating the Q&A. His first response to T-Paw: "Withdrawal? Decline? Retrenchment? Really?"

10:05 AM: Pawlenty acknowledges that autocracies can't be converted into democracies overnight, "takes generations."

10:08 AM: T-Paw: War on Terror will require a long, "episodic" commitment

10:10 AM: Asked about worse possibilities after Assad, T-Paw responds, "No one ever asked who would follow Hitler."

10:11 AM: BREAKING: Pawlenty pledges US will not invade every Middle Eastern country. #phew

10:15 AM: BREAKING: Pawlenty really does not like "cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all" foreign policy strategies #anticookieist

10:19 AM: Pawlenty: U.S. should "not necessarily" use military force in Syria.

10:21 AM: Pawlenty thinks Obama "dithered for a month" at the moment when U.S. force could have pushed Khaddafy out.

10:27 AM: James Traub from @FP_Magazine asks what to do about elections leading to anti-Israeli leaders in ME. T-Paw: start early, think long-term

My final assessment: Pawlenty successfully skirted a Trumpie nomination -- he exaggerated Obama's cozying up to Iran, but that's pretty much GOP boilerplate at this point. Pawlenty was also quite outspoken in attacking "isolationists' within the GOP as well.

The occasionally overheated piece of rhetoric aside, this was a reasonably coherent speech that placed way too much faith in the ability of more sanctions to force out regimes in Iran and Syria.

What do you think?

The most painful time for a book author is that interregnum between handing in the completed book manuscript, knowing that the text is locked down for good, and the book's arrival on the bookshelves.  That's because stuff happens during these months that would be awesome to put into the book, but alas, it's too late. 

Fortunately, there are blogs to write. 

With the success of AMC's The Walking Dead (don't worry, that show got into the introduction; oh, hey, did I mention that you can now preview the introduction online?  And that the endorsements are glowing?), pundits are now falling all over each other to try to use zombies as a political metaphor.  Late last month, Jeremy Grantham entitled his third quarter investment letter "Night of the Living Fed," with a pretty amusing cover graphic: 

Grantham's effort, however, pales besides New York Times columnist Gail Collins, however.  Her op-ed today posits that the revived popularity of the zombie genre is a bad omen for politics:

Zombies are in. This cannot possibly be a good sign....

What’s the attraction of zombies? They don’t really do anything but stagger around and eat raw flesh. The plot possibilities seem limited. Zombies come. Humans shoot them. More zombies come. Humans hit them over the head with shovels. Nobody ever runs into a particularly sensitive zombie who wants to make peace with the nonflesh-devouring public. (“On behalf of the United Nations Security Council today, I would like to welcome the zombie delegation to the ... aaauuurrgghchompchompchomp.”)

Maybe that’s the whole point. Our horror movies are mirroring the world around us. The increasingly passé vampire story is about a society full of normal people threatened by a few bloodsuckers, some of whom are maybe just like you and me, except way older. It was fine for the age of Obama. But we’ve entered the era of zombie politics: a small cadre of uninfected humans have to band together and do whatever it takes to protect themselves against the irrational undead....

I have three responses to this. 

First, I wish her minions Ms. Collins had taken a deeper bite out of the zombie canon in researching her op-ed, because, as I discuss in Theories of International Politics and Zombies, there is the possibility that the undead would follow the George Romero narrative arc and learn over time.  From p. 42-3 of the text:

Even in Night of the Living Dead, Romero's ghouls demonstrated the capacity for using tools. In each of his subsequent films, the undead grew more cognitively complex. The zombie characters of Bub in Day of the Dead and Big Daddy in Land of the Dead were painted with a more sympathetic brush than most of the human characters. Both Bub and Big Daddy learned how to use firearms. Bub was able to speak, perform simple tasks, and engage in impulse  control-that is, to refrain from eating a human he liked. Big Daddy and his undead cohort developed a hierarchical authority structure with the ability to engage in tactical and strategic learning. In doing so they overran a well-fortified human redoubt and killed its most powerful leader. It would take only the mildest of cognitive leaps to envision a zombie-articulated defense of these actions at the United Nations (emphasis added). 

If you buy the book, you'll see some sweet artwork depicting this very possibility. 

Second, Collins repeats a point that others have made in the past -- that the persistence of the zonbie genre seems aesthetically puzzling because the zombies themselves are such uninteresting characters.  That misses the point, however -- what makes the zombie genre interesting has less to do with the ghouls themselves than with how humans respond to them.  The zombies in Night of the Living Dead and Shaun of the Dead are exactly the same -- it's the human responses that evoke such different responses to those films.  Sure, it's quick and easy to label one's political opponents as brain-dead zombies -- what's intriguing is how one responds to that possibility. 

Third, it is noteworthy that both conservatives and liberals are using the zombie metaphor to advance their aims.  They both think the other side is brainless.  This doesn't sound good for political discourse -- but it might just lead to a cultural consensus. 

Ten days ago,The Hollywood Reporter's James Hibbard pointed out the ideological split in TV-watching.  Both sides like a lot of quality TV shows, but different ones:  Democrats lean towards Mad Men, 30 Rock and The Good Wife; Republicans go for Modern Family, The Big Bang Theory, and The Amazing Race.  I'm willing to bet, however, that The Walking Dead appeals to both sides of the partisan fence, precisely because they imagine the other side as the zombies.

This leads to an interesting prediction.  Politicians, pundits and professors like to use pop culture references to explain a concept to the widest possible audience.  If zombie TV is one of the few remaining places where an ideologically diverse group, however, then we're going to see a lot more uses of the zombie metaphor in politics over the next few years. 

I know that the good editors of this magazine have a series of U.S. election articles offering advice and analysis on the midterm elections and their effect on foreign policy.

I also know that even if this turns out to be a big "wave" election, things aren't really going to change all that much on the foreign policy front. This is for the following two reasons:

1) Congress doesn't have too much sway over foreign policy. Sure, things like foreign aid and treaty ratification rely on the legislature, and the election results will affect those dimensions of foreign policy. But think back to 1994 and 2006, in which both houses of Congress turned over to the opposition party. Was there any real change in U.S. foreign and security policy? The Clinton administration was still able to send troops to Bosnia, and the Bush administration was able to launch its "surge" strategy.

Foreign economic policy might be an exception. After both of those elections, the president found it harder to get trade deals through Congress. Given that this president hasn't been all that keen about trade anyway, I don't think the midterms will matter all that much -- though the South Korea-United States Free Trade Agreement (KORUS) might finally be put to a vote with the hope of securing GOP support.

2) In a sour economy, presidents don't get much of a bump for foreign policy successes. The best foreign-policy president of the past four decades was George H.W. Bush. How many terms did he serve? [Hey, this sounds familiar! -- Ed. Click here to see why. The only things that have changed since that post simply reinforce my thesis.] See Aaron David Miller's FP essay for more on this point.

Enjoy watching the returns, poll-watchers -- I'll be going to bed early, secure in the knowledge that U.S. foreign policy will persist in its current form.

Tom Brokaw has acquired sufficient gravitas such that, when he clears his throat in a meaningful way, he gets his own New York Times op-ed essay.

This morning, Brokaw cleared his throat about why the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan in Iraq aren't being talked about during this election campaign season. 

[W]hy aren’t the wars and their human and economic consequences front and center in this campaign, right up there with jobs and taxes?

The answer is very likely that the vast majority of Americans wake up every day worrying, with good reason, about their economic security, but they can opt out of the call to arms. Unless they are enlisted in the armed services -- or have a family member who has stepped forward -- nothing much is asked of them in the war effort.

The all-volunteer uniformed services now represent less than 1 percent of the American population, but they’re carrying 100 percent of the battle…

No decision is more important than committing a nation to war. It is, as politicians like to say, about our blood and treasure. Surely blood and treasure are worthy of more attention than they’ve been getting in this campaign.

It's true that Iraq was a much bigger issue during the 2002 and 2006 midterms. Is Brokaw right that the lack of a draft is deflecting the issue? Sort of. 

Brokaw has half a point in saying that the all-volunteer force blunts the incentive to have a public debate on this Very Important Topic. There's a better reason to explain the silence, however: There's not much daylight between the two parties on this issue. 

In 2008, the Bush administration began the drawdown phase in Iraq. In 2009, the Obama administration anted up for 30,000 more troops in Afghanistan. Neither war is popular with the U.S. electorate. 

Given these political facts, why would either party bring up these conflicts? Democrats can't rail against wars being prosecuted by a Democratic president. Not even nutjob ultra-conservative hacks can credibly claim that Obama has been a "Kenyan anti-colonialist" on the military front. Democrats can't really run on a "see, we told you that Obama isn't a war wimp!" message either. The GOP has little incentive to call for doubling down in these conflicts and can't really pivot towards a "pro-peace" position either. [I suspect the Islamophobia issue is cropping up on the GOP campaign trail because it's a stalking horse for "getting tough" with the United States' enemies. Even here, however, it's not like Democrats have created all that much daylight between them and the party of opposition.] 

If neither party has an incentive to bring up these wars during the campaign, the only way it becomes an issue is if a powerful interest group and/or social movement raises it. Here's here the all-volunteer force comes into play. Perhaps some returning veterans want to bring up the war as an issue for policy debate -- but the returning veterans do not appear to be alienated en masse. There is also no U.S. equivalent of the Union of the Committees of Soldiers' Mothers of Russia -- not that the Russian version was all that effective. All one finds on this terrain are the Cindy Sheehans of the world, and her credibility has been eroding as of late. 

Brokaw is right that matters of blood and treasure should be debated. But a debate requires politicians to have divergent views to debate about -- and right now, that doesn't exist between the major parties. 

Political scientists have a ton of explanations for why good policy might be bad politics, and vice versa. There are limits to that perverse correlation, however. A common-sense narrative is that is a policy actually yields concerete and positive results, then it should be perceived in a more favorable light. I mean, that's pretty straightforward, right? 

Politico's Ben Smith has an excellent article pointing out one whopper of an exception to this general rule: the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP: 

The Troubled Asset Relief Program is widely viewed as the original sin of the Obama administration -- though it was put together under President George W. Bush and succeeded far beyond expectations. It’s widely seen as the tipping point for disgust with elites and insiders of all kinds -- though it could also be seen as those insiders' finest moment, a successful attempt to at least partially fix their own mistakes....

"It's become demonized on the left and the right by screamers -- Glenn Beck and Rachel Maddow -- who have no interest in the facts; they’re just interested in hyperbolizing and generating attention," lamented New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg, a key player in guiding the measure through the upper chamber and one of the few Republicans willing to talk about TARP in positive terms.

Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that Gregg is retiring from the Senate at the end of the year -- or that hardly anyone from either party is joining him in praising TARP....

The consensus of economists and policymakers at the time of the original TARP was that the U.S. government couldn’t afford to experiment with an economic collapse. That view in mainstream economic circles has, if anything, only hardened with the program’s success in recouping the federal spending.

A study this summer by former Fed Vice Chairman Alan Blinder and Moody's chief economist Mark Zandi was representative of that consensus. They projected that without federal action -- TARP and the stimulus -- America’s gross domestic product would have fallen more than 7 percent in 2009 and almost 4 percent in 2010, compared with the actual combined decline of about 4 percent.

"It would not be surprising if the underemployment rate approached one-fourth of the labor force," they wrote of their scenario. "With outright deflation in prices and wages in 2009-11, this dark scenario constitutes a 1930s-like depression."

Despite this policy success, public attitudes towards TARP are pretty hostile.  Of course, part of that is due to some ignorance over the content of TARP itself: 

Polls suggest the public has only the haziest view of what TARP was. It's often conflated -- not least by politicians who voted for it and now seek to muddy the waters -- with the stimulus, a piece of policy whose supporters and foes have fallen into a much more familiar debate about the role of government and public spending....

Even Nevada GOP Senate nominee Sharron Angle at one point referred to TARP as "the stimulus." And few Americans seem to know that the banks at the center of TARP have paid the money back -- with interest.

Pollster Ann Selzer asked voters this summer, "Do you think the Troubled Asset Relief Program, known as TARP, was necessary to prevent the financial industry from failing and drastically hurting the U.S. economy, or was it an unneeded bailout?"

Fifty-eight percent of Americans said TARP was unneeded. Only 28 percent called it "necessary." 

Smith is correct to point out the myriad ways in which TARP has been lumped in with the other bailouts and stimulus programs that got enacted in 2008 and 2009. No doubt the mass public would not necessarily be able to pick, choose and evaluate each individual bailout/stimulus program.

Still, it's very troubling to see a manifest policy success get almost no love whatsoever from its creators. Over the long run, good policy should translate into good politics. The failure of that to occur in this case could lead to some very perverse policy outcomes after the midterms.