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? 

Bill Keller has moved on from the esteemed position of New York Times executive editor to the very vulnerable position of New York Times Op-ed Columnist Ripe for Mockery. 

Alas, it's hard to mock Keller's column today for two reasons.  First, Keller bothered to do some actual reporting, traveling to India to interview supporters of Anna Hazere to get their opinion on Occupy Wall Street.  Since the Times itself has suggested that overseas protest movements might inspire similar action in the advanced industrialized economies, this seems appropriate.  It certainly seems more appropriate than comparing the Occupy movements to the Arab Spring. 

The second reason is what Keller got from his interview with Anna Hazare associate Kiran Bedi: 

“When we started the movement, it was like Occupy,” Bedi told me. “But we went beyond Occupy.”

For starters, while Occupy Wall Street is consensus-oriented and resolutely leaderless, Hazare is very much the center of attention. There was an anticorruption movement before Hazare, but it was fractious and weak until he supplied a core of moral authority. When he announces his intention to starve himself, he parks himself on an elevated platform in a public place, thousands gather, scores of others announce solidarity hunger strikes, and TV cameras congregate, hanging on his every word. Hazare and his entourage can seem self-important and high-handed, but he is a reminder that leadership matters.

Second, the Occupiers are a composite of idealistic causes, many of them vague. “End the Fed,” some placards demand. “End War.” “Get the money out of politics.” Much of the Occupy movement resides at the dreamy level of John Lennon lyrics. “Imagine no possessions. ...”

Hazare, in contrast, is always very explicit about his objectives: fire this corrupt minister, repeal that law bought by a special interest, open public access to official records.

His current mission is the creation of a kind of national anticorruption czar, a powerful independent ombudsman. The measure is advancing, and Team Anna hovers over the Parliament at every step, paying close attention to detail, to make sure nobody pulls the teeth out of it. Instead of a placard, Bedi has a PowerPoint presentation.

Occupy Wall Street is scornful of both parties and generally disdainful of electoral politics. Team Anna (yes, they call themselves that) likewise avoids aligning itself with any party or candidate, but it uses Indian democracy shrewdly, to target obstructionists. Recently Hazare turned a special election for a vacant parliamentary seat into a referendum, urging followers to vote against any party that refused to endorse his anticorruption bill. Hazare has also called for an amendment to the election laws to require that voters always be offered the option of “None of the Above.” When it prevails, parties would have to come up with better candidates.

“What really changes them,” Bedi said of recalcitrant politicians, “is the threat of losing an election.”....

“Occupy has been, to my mind, an engaging movement, and it’s driving home the message, to the banks, to the Wall Street circles,” Bedi said. “That’s exactly the way Anna did it. But we had a destination. I’m not aware these people — what is their destination? It’s occupy for what?” (enmphasis added)

Damn, that sounds familiar. 

There's one other big difference that's buried in Keller's column, however.  He notes that, "One poll found 87 percent public support for Hazare’s 12-day August fast."  While the Occupy movement is certainly more popular than the Tea Party movement, I haven't seen a single U.S. poll demonstrating that breadth of public support. 

Am I missing anything? 

Centrist pollster Douglas Schoen has an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal that reports on some polling his firm did of the Occupy Wall Street protestors: 

The protesters have a distinct ideology and are bound by a deep commitment to radical left-wing policies. On Oct. 10 and 11, Arielle Alter Confino, a senior researcher at my polling firm, interviewed nearly 200 protesters in New York's Zuccotti Park. Our findings probably represent the first systematic random sample of Occupy Wall Street opinion.

Our research shows clearly that the movement doesn't represent unemployed America and is not ideologically diverse. Rather, it comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence. Half (52%) have participated in a political movement before, virtually all (98%) say they would support civil disobedience to achieve their goals, and nearly one-third (31%) would support violence to advance their agenda....

What binds a large majority of the protesters together—regardless of age, socioeconomic status or education—is a deep commitment to left-wing policies: opposition to free-market capitalism and support for radical redistribution of wealth, intense regulation of the private sector, and protectionist policies to keep American jobs from going overseas.

Sixty-five percent say that government has a moral responsibility to guarantee all citizens access to affordable health care, a college education, and a secure retirement—no matter the cost. By a large margin (77%-22%), they support raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans, but 58% oppose raising taxes for everybody, with only 36% in favor. And by a close margin, protesters are divided on whether the bank bailouts were necessary (49%) or unnecessary (51%).

Thus Occupy Wall Street is a group of engaged progressives who are disillusioned with the capitalist system and have a distinct activist orientation.

Now there are two ways to look at this data.  The first, as many sympathizers with the movement have done, is to impugn the pollster's politics, his methods, and the ways in which he's inferring broad political generalizatiions from the data. 

These points are worth considering, though looking at the precise questions asked compared to his inferences, I'm not seeing all that much conceptual stretching.  Plus, Schoen's results seem to jibe pretty strongly with a smaller New York poll of 100 protestors conducted earlier this month. 

The nascent movement known as Occupy Wall Street had its largest single day of protests on Saturday. And a funny thing happened: most of the action was far from Wall Street itself....

Over all, about 38,000 protesters — more than half of the documented total — turned out in the Western Census Bureau Region, which accounts for about 23 percent of the country’s population. On a per-capita basis, the West drew about two-and-a-half times more protesters than the Northeast, four times more than the Midwest, and five times more than the South. And it wasn’t necessarily in large cities — although places like Los Angeles and Seattle had large crowds, so did the wine-and-cheese town of Santa Rosa, Calif., and the college town of Eugene, Ore. among others.....

 

This could be due to a number of factors. Perhaps it has something to do with race, for instance. Cities where African-Americans make up a majority of the population, like Detroit, New Orleans and Cleveland, have tended to have underwhelming numbers of protesters and poorly organized Occupy groups. (There are plenty of those cities in the South, the Northeast and even the Midwest — but not really in the western United States).

Or maybe it has something to do with technology: Much of the organizational activity for the Occupy movement has taken place online, and the West Coast is particularly tech-savvy.

I suspect that more than anything, however, it reflects the politics of the protesters. Specifically, they tend to be more liberal than they are Democratic partisans. Take liberalism, subtract the Democratic Party, and the remainder might look something like Occupy Wall Street (emphasis added).

There needs to be more data, but Schoen's results don't seem out of line with the other data points. 

I was pretty dismissive of Standard & Poor's debt downgrade last month.  Re-reading that post, I stand by my political analysis of events going forward.  Furthermore, the recovery of U.S. equity markets, the sharp reduction of yields on U.S. debt, and the failure of the other ratings agencies to follow suit are further data points suggesting that the S&P decision was flawed. 

There's reality and perceptions of reality, however.  On that latter front, after a recent expedition to Washington, I've concluded that regardless of whether S&P was right, they've won the argument in terms of perception.  The summer debt debacle is, in many ways, the political equivalent of Hurricane Katrina.  Perceptions of the Bush administration never recovered from that event, even though one could plausibly argue that the policy outputs of Bush's second term were better than the first term.  Neverthelesss, Katrina was an inflection point that has caused a number of actors to reassess their perceptions about the political and policy competency of the White House and Congress. 

Something similar seems to have happened with the debt deal.  Politico's Ben White relays the dramatic effect on consumer confidence: 

The Conference Board this week reported the biggest monthly decline in consumer confidence since the height of the financial crisis in 2008, its consumer confidence index falling from a reading of 59.2 to 44.5, the lowest in two years....

“The debt ceiling negotiation is an extremely significant event that is profoundly and sharply reshaping views of the economy and the federal government,” Republican pollster Bill McInturff wrote in a presentation of survey work he has done recently that suggests the debt ceiling debate has led to a significant shift in public opinion.

The partisan struggle over raising the debt went on for weeks before Obama finally announced on the night of Aug. 1 that a deal had been reached that resolves the issue for now. But while Washington has moved on to its next drama — the deliberations of the so-called supercommittee agreed to in the deal — its psychological impact has resonated widely.

McInturff said the result has been “a scary erosion in confidence” in both the economy and the government “at a time when this steep drop in confidence can be least afforded. … The perception of how Washington handled the debt ceiling negotiation led to an immediate collapse of confidence in government and all the major players, including President Obama and Republicans in Congress.”

A recent Washington Post poll found that 33 percent of Americans have confidence in Obama to make good decisions on the economy and just 18 percent have confidence in Congressional Republicans to do so.

These are especially dangerous readings when Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has essentially said it is up to politicians to help boost the economy now that the Fed has fired nearly all its monetary policy bullets.

Speaking of Bernanke, he had this to say at Jackson Hole last week: 

[P]erhaps most challenging, the country would be well served by a better process for making fiscal decisions. The negotiations that took place over the summer disrupted financial markets and probably the economy as well, and similar events in the future could, over time, seriously jeopardize the willingness of investors around the world to hold U.S. financial assets or to make direct investments in job-creating U.S. businesses. Although details would have to be negotiated, fiscal policymakers could consider developing a more effective process that sets clear and transparent budget goals, together with budget mechanisms to establish the credibility of those goals.

Ten days before Bernanke's speech, FP's Josh Rogin reported that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had acknowledged the global ramifications of the debt fracas, telling a forum at National Defense University: 

I happened to be in Hong Kong a few weeks ago, and I said confidently that we were going to resolve this; we were not going to default; we would make some kind of political compromise.

But I have to tell you, it does cast a pall over our ability to project the kind of security interests that are in America’s interest. This is not about the Defense Department or the State Department or USAID. This is about the United States of America. And we need to have a responsible conversation about how we are going to prepare ourselves for the future

Clinton's statements were confirmed by officials I talked to while down in DC. 

So, can this perception be changed?  Here, I'm bearish in the short-term.  These kind of perceptions can be self-fulfilling.  Economic growth is a remarkable political palliative, but growth looks anemic for a good long while.  The Obama administration can try to change the narrative, but that's almost as difficult as Inception -- for the same reasons: 

As Reinhart and Rogoff have observed, the economic aftereffects of debt crises are long-lasting.  From here on out, the political effects of such crises will be on full display. 

As someone who studies global political economy, this is fascinating.  As a U.S. citizen, this is utterly depressing. 

American politicians are super-mad at Standard & Poor's for downgrading U.S. debt even after the debtopocalypse was averted earlier this week.  These same politicians seem torn between pointing out that S&P  sucks at math and blaming the other political party for the S&P screw-up. 

I really don't care about that as much as the debate over whether S&P got its political analysis  right.  Here's the key paragraphs of the actual Standard & Poor statement: 

[T]he downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges to a degree more than we envisioned when we assigned a negative outlook to the rating on April 18, 2011....

Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.

Felix Salmon, thinks that this analysis is spot on:   

[T]he US does not deserve a triple-A rating, and the reason has nothing whatsoever to do with its debt ratios. America’s ability to pay is neither here nor there: the problem is its willingness to pay. And there’s a serious constituency of powerful people in Congress who are perfectly willing and even eager to drive the US into default. The Tea Party is fully cognizant that it has been given a bazooka, and it’s just itching to pull the trigger. There’s no good reason to believe that won’t happen at some point.

David Weigel concludes that the S&P political analysis is fair:

This is not crazy.This what Republicans imply about the supercommittee -- they will not accept plans that increase taxes, and despite the fact that they've agreed to let the Bush tax cuts lapse on January 1, 2013, they are making noises about not accepting a return of the rates. The best possible scenario, if we assume that stance, is what I wrote about today -- tax reform plans that start in the supercommittee and win over a committed Congress.

Kevin Drum, however, thinks that S&P's political analysis is way off: 

S&P shouldn't be in the business of commenting on a country's political spats unless they've been going on so long that they're likely to have a real, concrete impact on the safety of a country's bonds. And that hasn't happened yet. There's no serious macroeconomic reason to think Americacan't service its debt and there's no serious political reason to think the Tea Party has anything close to the power to provoke a political meltdown in which wewon'tpay our debt....

[S&P]should care only about the safety of U.S. bonds, and for the moment anyway, there's no legitimate reason to think either that we can't pay or that we won't pay. The bond market, which has all the same information as S&P, continues to believe that U.S. debt is the safest in the world, and in this case the market is right. S&P should stop playing dumb political games and stick to its core business.

I side, mostly, with Drum.  It's totally fair for S&P to factor politics into their assessment of sovereign debt.  Indeed, a key trend in sovereign debt analysis over the past five years has been the recognition that political fundamentals can matter as much as economics.  That said, if ratings agencies are going to do this, then their political expectations can't just be retrospective -- they need to do some actual forecasting.  Instead, they looked at recent weeks and extrapolated into the future. 

There are three factors that should give S&P pause before assuming that political dysfunction could lead to no increae in tax revenue.  First, as Drum points out, despite all the displays of ideological inflexibility, in the end the debt ceiling vote secured a strong majority of the GOP House caucus.  Some Tea Party members were willing to risk a crisis, but not actually go and perpetuate one.  It was not a Great Moment in Democracy, but in the end a deal was done.  You can't dock for intransigence without noting the outcome. 

Second, unlike the debt ceiling, deadlock in late 2012 means that the Bush tax cuts expire.  Either a lame-duck Obama or a newly-re-elected Obama will be able to make that fiscal decision (no way any faction in Congress musters the 2/3 vote necessary to override).  As Jonathan Chait has repeatedly observed, that dynamic is the opposite of the debt ceiling episode, in which case paralysis led to bad fiscal outcomes.  If S&P thinks partisan gridlock will persist on Capitol Hill, then the conclusion to draw is that taxes will go up. 

Third -- and this is pretty important -- S&P has failed to observe the political aftereffects of the debt deal.  As I argued previously: 

[T]he thing about democracy is that it has multiple ways to constrain political stupidity and ideological overreach. The first line of defense is that politicians will have an electoral incentive to act in non-crazy ways in order to get re-elected. The second line of defense is that politicians or parties who violate the non-crazy rule fail to get re-elected. So, in some ways, the true test of the American system's ability to stave off failure will be the 2012 election.

The first line line of defense has been breached, but the second line of defense looks increasingly robust.  Public opinion poll after public opinion poll in the wake of the debt deal show the same thing -- everyone in Washington is unpopular, but Congress is really unpopular and GOP members of Congress are ridiculously unpopular.  At a minimum, S&P needs to calculate how the current members of Congress will react to rising anti-incumbent sentiment.  If they did that analysis and concluded that nothing would be done, I'd understand their thinking more.  I didn't see anything like that kind of political analysis in their statement, however.   

In the end, I suspect Moody's and Fitch won't follow S&P's move, so this could be a giant nothingburger.  Still, if these guys are going to be doing political risk analysis, it might help to actually have some political scientists on the payroll.  Based on their statement, S&P is simply extrapolating from the op-ed page, and that's a lousy way to make a political forecast. 

Am I missing anything? 

Here's an open secret -- most American foreign policy observers loathe domestic politics.  To those who seek to define and distill the national interest, the notion that factions or parties can get in the way of the common good is very, very frustrating.  This is why, whenever gridlock breaks out in Washington, there is a spasm of caterwauling from prominent foreign policy thinkers that Something.  Must.  Be  Done. 

This leads to some silly memes, like claims that a third party will break the logjam.  It won't -- a glance at Duverger's Law and you know that the first-past-the-post electoral system in this country means that a two-party system is the only stable long-term equilibrium.  A third party in the United States could only achieve electoral viability in one of two ways:  either supplanting one of the existing parties, or focusing on success in a particular region.  Since neither of these outcomes has occurred since the Civil War, I'm not holding my breath. 

Gridlock frustration also leads to proposals of Grand Diagnoses and Remedies for Fixing the System.  Fareed Zakaria goes down this road, offering a diagnosis of why partisanship has been rising in the United States and then links to Mickey Edwards' essay in The Atlantic of how to fix things.  Zakaria, riffing off of Edwards, lists four reasons why partisanship is so high: 

1)  Redistricting has created safe seats so that for most House members, their only concern is a challenge from the right for Republicans and the left for Democrats....

2) Party primaries have been taken over by small groups of activists who push even popular senators to extreme positions.

3) Changes in Congressional rules have also made it far more difficult to enact large, compromise legislation.

4) Political polarization has also been fueled by a new media, which is also narrowcast.

These sound compelling, except that A) none of them really explain increased polarization in the Senate; and B) only the fourth trend is in any way recent (the rest of these phenomenas can be traced back to the 1970's).   

The real problem with Congress is that any proposed institutional reform to correct the problems would require either a dilution of legislative power or a dilution of the minority's power to obstruct.  Neither minority nor majority parties in Congress will be interested in moves like that unless and until we're in a crisis that made 2008 look like a ripple in the pond. 

If you are looking to this humble blogger for ways out of this current problem... um... look elsewhere.  My training is in international relations, and I've found that people with that kind of training tend to prefer policy reforms that provide political leeway and insulation to the executive branch.  These measures are appealing because they tend to minimize the number of stupid interactions with galactically stupid members of Congress.  Over the long-term, however, even a stupid Congress still serves as a valuable check on executive branch authority. 

I'm as frustrated as the next foreign policy observer when it comes to the current policy paralysis.  I know my own kind, however, and we suffer from the flawed belief that there was a halcyon era of bipartisanship in the foreign policy days of yore.  Be very, very wary when a foreign policy pundit gives advice about how to reform the American system of government.  Most of the time they are relying on decades-old Introduction to American Government arguments that are either obsolecent or incentive incompatible. 

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Over the past week there's been a lot of foreign policy outputs coming from the gut, particularly with respect to the greater Middle East. Newly minted Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has been cursing like a PG-rated sailor as of late, saying about the Iraqis, "dammit, make a decision" with respect to a new defense minister. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has declared that Bashar Assad has "lost legitimacy," which is A) true; and B) not all that helpful a guide for future policy toward Syria. U.S. ambassador to that country Robert Ford took to Facebook to express his ire at the Syrian government. And now we're halting $800 million in military aid to Pakistan, which sounds great but is not necessarily going to make things better.

Do these gestures of frustration accomplish anything? That's hard to say. In terms of concrete outcomes, the likely answer is no -- part of the reason for the venting of frustrations on these issues is that the United States has so little leverage in most of these situations. On the other hand, just the acknowledgment of frustration can be politically useful, a venting of pressure that might otherwise lead to hopelessly misguided or absurdly risky policy options.

For exhibit A, see Reuel Marc Gerecht's latest on Syria in The Weekly Standard, which opens with, "The administration's policy toward Syria is shaping up to be the greatest missed opportunity of Barack Obama's presidency." The essay goes to great length to bash realists detail the myriad policy benefits that would come with regime change in Damascus. This is all well and good (though a bit exaggerated), until we get to what the Obama administration should be doing to foment change:

There are many things that the Obama administration should be doing that it isn’t: using the presidential bully pulpit against the Assad regime, deploying the American ambassador in Damascus as a shield and voice for the opposition (if Ford gets expelled, he gets expelled), organizing the Western diplomatic community in Damascus to do whatever it can to aid the opposition, offering substantial technical support to the Turks to extend a Wi-Fi-ed broadband as far over the Syrian border as possible, and working with Paris to implement energy sanctions that might severely impair the Assad regime. But the most important thing it could do now is encourage Turkey to stand firm against Syria.

Ideally, we should want to see the Turks establish a buffer zone or safe haven on the Syrian side of the border (Ankara sometimes did this in Iraq to counter nefarious Kurdish activity).

Let's be clear: The Obama administration could be doing everything on that list, and it wouldn't make an iota of difference. The only policy that would matter is if the Turks actually wanted to establish a buffer zone -- except in a later paragraph even Gerecht acknowledges that, "neither Erdogan nor Davutoglu would want to do this."

So, to sum up, Gerecht is really enthusiastic about Syrian regime change, and wants the U.S. to beat its breast a little more and ask "pretty pretty please" for the Turks to do something they view as against their self-interest. This will accomplish … nothing.

If you start seeing gut-level foreign policy, it's usually a sign that every other rational option has failed. And although we hope otherwise, frustration alone rarely leads to policy breakthroughs.

The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Reuters have stories about Germany's newly announced plan to denuclearize by 2022.  See if you can find the common pattern.  Here's the WSJ: 

Germany's move—marking a contrast with the U.S. and other countries that have largely stuck to plans to continue pursuing nuclear power—is a U-turn from a contentious plan that Ms. Merkel engineered just last fall that would have extended the lifetimes of some of Germany's reactors into the 2030s, more than a decade longer than previously scheduled. Ms. Merkel's latest move is effectively a return to an agreement to phase out nuclear power approved in 2002 by a center-left Social Democrat-Green coalition....

In few countries is nuclear energy the hot-button issue it is in Germany, where polls show some 70% of the populace opposes it, the legacy of a broad-based antinuclear movement that harks back to the 1986 Chernobyl accident. Since the Fukushima accident, antinuclear protests have taken place across the country.

Ms. Merkel's change in course, though, hasn't produced the desired political effect. Conservative allies have been frustrated by her turn away from a cherished policy victory, and nuclear opponents have seen the move as opportunistic. Those perceptions contributed to several stinging regional election losses for the Christian Democratic Union this spring, and have led to a surge in clout for the opposition Green Party.

And now the NYT:

For Mrs. Merkel, the embrace of clean energy represents a transformation based on the politics of the ballot box. Just last year, her center-right coalition forced through an unpopular plan to extend the life of nuclear power plants, with the last to close in 2036. That action inflamed public opinion but the Fukushima disaster politicized it. The nuclear crisis is widely believed to have caused Mrs. Merkel’s party to lose control of the German state of Baden-Württemberg for the first time in 58 years, in a March election that became a referendum on energy policy.

By Monday, Mrs. Merkel said the country must “not let go the chance” to end its dependence on nuclear power.

And, finally, Reuters: 

The German chancellor has, in nine months, gone from touting nuclear plants as a safe "bridge" to renewable energy and extending their lifespan to pushing a nuclear exit strategy that rivals the ambitions of the Social Democrats and Greens.

Merkel had her atomic epiphany after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in March, announcing a moratorium on nuclear power and launching an urgent overhaul of German energy policy, resulting in the exit strategy announced on Monday.

Her change of heart, however genuine as it may be, coincides with a string of disastrous election results for her Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Free Democrat (FDP) allies that have been partly blamed on her unpopular pro-nuclear policy so far.

With the FDP losing popularity almost as fast as the Greens gain it, and the Greens unseating the CDU in their heartland of Baden-Wuerttemberg in March as well as outpolling them for the first time in Germany in Bremen this month, Merkel has upgraded the nuclear moratorium to a rush for the exit.

Watching Merkel's performance during the myriad euro crises of the past two years, I'm beginning o detect a decision-making algorithm at work.  Let's call it The Merkel Algorithm.  It consists of the following steps:

1)  A problem festers;

2)  Dither and do nothing;

3)  Public opinion polls drop;

4)  Let things fester some more;

5)  Lose an electioon somewhere;

6)  Announce new policy that reverses prior position

7)  Lose even more political support. 

Merkel appears to have brilliantly executed this strategy on both the eurozone and nuclear power.  In all seriousness, what I don't understand is the long periods of dithering and festering.  I get that politicians will sometimes be wrong-footed on policy shocks.  Merkel, however, really does seem to wait until the worst, most cravenly political moment to do something.  Why? 

Your humble blogger hereby calls on all Germany-watchers to offer either an explanation or a more nuanced take on the Merkel Algorithm -- because your humble blogger is good and truly flummoxed. 

President Obama is scheduled to address the country this evening on Libya, and the odds are pretty good that Ben Rhodes will be writing the bulk of the speech.  I'm sure the speech will be interesting, full of false choices for the Obama administration to surmount and the like. 

Still, what I'd love to see is Rhodes' first draft -- you know, the one where he just spits out exactly what he thinks Obama is thinking on Libya, warts and all. 

Well, fortunately, due to your humble blogger's vast and imaginary network of sources inside the Beltway, I have secured a copy of that first draft of the speech, reprinted below for your edification:

FIRST NOTES/DRAFT OF POTUS LIBYA SPEECH

By Benjamin Rhodes

I'm addressing you, my fellow Americans, because my administration's message on our war limited humanitarian intervention kinetic military action in Libya has truly and totally sucked.  Seriously, I'm gobsmacked at how f***ing incoherent we've been in communicating our rationale to the foreign policy community and the American public.  The bickering within my administration and within the international coalition has not helped -- sweet Jesus, multilateralism can be a royal pain in the butt sometimes.  No wonder public support has been relatively anemic (although there's also the fact that I'm launching another war when all Americans care about right now is the domestic economy). 

How bad is it?  I'm getting hit by the neocons for moving without Congressional permission less than a week after I was getting hit by them for not moving quickly enough!!  Thank God for Newt Gingrich, or I'd look really bad.  Now I'm getting flak from the left on not being consistent with R2P when, in fact, anyone who knows anything about R2P knows that I'm doing the best I can.  Seriously, I'm supposed to intervene militarily in Bahrain and Syria too?  Sure, right after I send the 82nd Airborne to liberate Tibet.  At least I can ignore the criticism from those who went on junkets to Tripoli last year.  Hypocrisy sure is a bitch, huh? 

What kills me, what absolutely kills me, is that in just ten days, without any boots on the ground, we've accomplished one whole hell of a lot.  First off, if we hadn't intervened, the rebels would have been routed in Benghazi, and Khaddafy would be in control of the entire country again.  OK, so maybe the "100,000 dead" figure was a bit exaggerated, but surely the fall of Benghazi would have created hundreds of thousands of Libya refugees flowing into Egypt, which is exactly what that country doesn't need right now.   Anyone who doesn't realize that the situation in Libya and the situation in Egypt are connected is a f***ing moron (which, since we forgot to mention this fact for an awfully long time, apparently includes my messaging shop). 

Now, the situation on the ground looks pretty much like how things looked during the high tide of the Libyan rebellion.  So long as our air support continues, that's now the worst-case scenario -- and you know what, that's actually pretty tolerable.  It would mean that the rebels would control about 70% of Libya's oil reserves and that the regions of the country most hostile to Khaddafy would be free of his grip.  Over time, sanctions will start to hit Khaddafy's resources, the Libya Transitional Council can get its act together, and we can burden-share with NATO a hell of a lot more.  The Libyans don't want our boots on the ground any more than we want to have them there -- so further escalation is not in the cards. 

All the while -- and remember, this is the worst-case scenario -- the United States will have accomplished two direct deliverables and quite a few positive policy externalities.  Directly, we averted a humanitarian disaster and created a buffer in eastern Libya that eases any economic or humanitarian pressure on Egypt (which is where our strategic interest lies). 

In many ways, the policy externalities are even bigger.  The biggest bonus is that, for once, our hard power is actually augmenting our soft power.  Those images on Al Jazeera of Libyans saying thank you to the United States -- that's pure soft power gold.  When you compare how the U.S. government has handled the Arab Revolutions  to Al Qaeda or Iran, the contrast is pretty stark.  What's happened in Libya has helped to obscure our more realpolitik response in, say Bahrain.  Oh, and we managed to find a purpose for NATO.

Is this messy?  Duh, of course!  Could this intervention distract us from The Big Picture?  Maybe for the past week and this week, sure, but it's not like Iran or China is really exploiting what's going on in the Middle East -- they're too busy trying to pretend it's not happening domestically.  As for North Korea learning that it's a mistake to give up their nukes, I'm pretty sure they'd learned that lesson way back in 2003, thank you very much. 

Look, I'd have loved for the messaging to be clearer, and in retrospect it would have been good if we'd had asked Congress for authorization, but this is what happens when you make foreign policy on the fly in a region wracked by revolution.  It's not perfect, but if you think about the counterfactuals real hard, I'm fully confident that the benefits massively outweigh the costs of this intervention.  So there. 

Since I moved to Foreign Policy, the blog post that generated the most feedback was my impressionistic take on the Millennial generation's foreign policy perspectives.  I concluded that post on whether generaional cohorts would have distinct foreign policy attitudes with the following:

As I think about it, here are the Millennials' foundational foreign policy experiences: 

1)  An early childhood of peace and prosperity -- a.k.a., the Nineties;

2)  The September 11th attacks;

3)  Two Very Long Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq;

4)  One Financial Panic/Great Recession;

5)  The ascent of China under the shadow of U.S. hegemony. 

From these experiences, I would have to conclude that this generation should be anti-interventionist to the point of isolationism. 

There was a LOT of very thoughtful pushback in the comments and e-mails from Millennials themselves -- enough for me to wonder whether my jaded Gen-Xer eyes were growing too world-weary. 

Now, however, we actually have some data.  The Brookings Institution has released a new report, "D.C.'s New Guard: What Does the Next Generation of American Leaders Think?"  The survey results came from 1,057 respondents (with a average age of 16.4) who attended the National Student Leadership Conference, Americans for Informed Democracy young leaders programs, and other DC internships -- i.e., those young people already predisposed towards a political career.   

The results are veeeeery revealing.  The headline figure is that 73% of respondents think that "The U.S. is no longer globally respected" -- which actually suggests that the respondents haven't been looking at the data, but that's a side note.  No, the really interesting response is as follows:

[A]lmost 58% of the young leaders in this survey agreed with the statement that the U.S. is too involved in global affairs and should do more at home. Alternatively, 32.4% thought the U.S. had "struck the right balance" between issues at home and abroad," while only 10% thought that the United States should be more globally proactive.

This isolationist sentiment among the younger generation stands in stark comparison to the Chicago Council's recent 2010 polling of older Americans, which found that 67% wanted America to have an active role in the world and only 31% thought we should limit our involvement, a near exact reverse. The older generation survey concluded that there was "persisting support for an internationalist foreign policy at levels unchanged from the past," but this perceived persistence is certainly not there among the young leaders (emphasis added).

Now, to be fair, It is possible to reconcile beliefs that the United States is doing too much abroad now while still believing that the U.S. should exert global leadership, but on a more modest scale.  Still, I'm counting this as a clear win over the young people insisting that my impressionistic take on their generation was wrong.  Take that, Bieberheads!!!

[Hey, I just noticed this paragraph by P.W. Singer at the start of the report:

In 2011, a “silver tsunami” will hit the United States: the oldest Baby Boomers will reach the United States’ legal retirement age of 65. As the Boomers leave the scene, a new generation will begin to take over. But while the generation that directly follows the Boomers, Generation X, may be “of age”, there is a good chance that it will not actually shape public life and leadership as much the following generation, the Echo Boomers, also known as the “Millennials." (emphasis added)

Say, could that swipe at your generation explain your attitude in this post?--ed.] 

No!!  Really!!  It has nothing to do with that!  Now if you'll excuse me, I need to lock myself into a dark room and watch Reality Bites on an endless loop for the next 24 hours. 

As Ian Bremmer announced over at The Call, Eurasia Group recently released their top risks for 2011. Coming at no. 7 is the U.S. political system: "In 2011, headline risk will be driven by both parties loudly promoting priorities for which there is no path forward."

It's telling that political risk assessments need to be used for the United States, but not surprising. The U.S. political system does not always work terribly well.

The events of the past week would appear to expand that sentiment to U.S. political culture, however, which is several cognitive leaps too far. For example, Gideon Rachman compares the murder of a Punjabi governor in Pakistan to the attempted assassination of Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords:

Events in both Pakistan and America suggest what happens when you not only disagree with your political opponents - but when you demonise them as enemies of the faith or the nation. At that point, some may conclude that it is legitimate to end the argument with bullets.

Sigh… let's all take a few deep breaths, shall we?

Let's turn to Lexington's response to Rachman:

Well yes, America could become like Pakistan if people concluded that it was legitimate to settle arguments with bullets. But in America, where guns are plentiful and political and religious feelings intense, the telling thing is that almost no one at all considers political violence to be legitimate. The killings have been met with universal condemnation by ordinary Americans and the whole political class. The violent act of one probably deranged individual doesn't show that America is heading down the same road as Pakistan. And the response to it suggests that the political cultures of the two countries are fundamentally different.

Indeed, seen in historical context, Adam Serwer points out that the United States' political culture has trended away from violence:

Political violence in the United States has never been more illegitimate. There was a time when a member of Congress could walk into the Senate and beat a political rival senseless and walk away unmolested. The South was once a place of unrestrained terrorist violence conducted with the tacit approval of local authorities. Even when those authorities were brave or responsible enough to press charges, securing guilty verdicts would be difficult because of a local culture willing to accept crimes committed in service to white supremacy. We live in a time where no major political movement would be willing to openly justify such behavior.

This is why, in the aftermath of the incident, both the left and right began placing the blame on the other side.

Finally, we get to James Pethokoukis:

[P]olitical violence has been rare in the United States in recent years. That's despite the disputed 2000 presidential election, the unpopular Iraq war and the election of the first black president. Indeed, the World Bank ranks America above the UK when it comes to "political stability and absence of violence." And the U.S. rank has actually been on the rise in recent years.

There's going to be a rollicking debate about whether political vitriol contributes to political violence. Fine. But let's put things in perspective -- extremist rhetoric or not, this kind of thing is blessedly rare in the American polity.

There was something about the TSA body scans/patdowns mass elite backlash that I agreed with on the specifics but found vaguely disconcerting for some reason.

In this post, Tyler Cowen goes a long way towards explaining those reasons.  His glosing paragraphs:

The funny thing is this: when Americans insist on total liberty against external molestation, it motivates both good responses and bad ones.  It supports a libertarian desire for freedom against government abuse, but the same sentiments generate a lot of anti-liberal policies when it comes to immigration, foreign policy, torture, rendition, attitudes toward Muslims, executive power, and most generally treatment of "others."  An insistence on zero molestation, zero risk, isn't as pro-liberty as it appears in the isolated context of pat-downs.  It leads us to impose a lot of costs on others, usually without thinking much about their rights.

The issue reminds me of the taxation and spending debates; many Americans want low taxes and high government spending, forever.  For airline security, at times we want to treat it as a matter of mere law enforcement, to be handled by others, and one which should not inconvenience our daily lives or infringe on our rights.  At the same time, so many Americans view airline security as a vital matter of foreign policy and indeed as part of a war.  We own and promote this view and yet we are outraged when asked to behave as one might be expected to in a theater of war.  

The main danger to liberty here is not the TSA but rather a set of American attitudes which, at the same time, take our current "war" both far too seriously and also not nearly seriously enough.

Overall, I'd like to see less posturing in these debates and more Thucydides.

Amen.

Cards on the table:  having experienced one first-hand, I hate the new full body scanners being used at airports.  I hate that their existence allows TSA officials to bark additional orders at me like I'm a five-year old.  I hate having to hold my hands up in a surrender position to be scanned. I hate having to empty every f***ing piece of lint from my pockets before going through one.  I hate that they have lengthened and not shortened the time it takes to get through security.  I hate the fact that other countries with equally acute terrorist concerns are not nearly as physically invasive in their security screenings.   I hate the sneaking suspicion I have that the scanners are merely a massive exercise in kabuki security theater designed to alleviate the psychological fears of some travelers.  I hate that the official response to these complaints boils down to, "we face a determined enemy."  I hate the stupid reassurances that the "imaging technology that we use cannot store, export, print or transmit images," when, whoops, it turns out that this has already happened.  I hate the ways in which these scanners make it so easy to mock the United States. 

The thing is, right now I'm in the distinct minority of Americans. 

The above chart is the result of a CBS poll released yesterday (which also found a majority of Americans to oppose racial profiling) on the question of full-body scanners in airports.  The results speak for themselves. 

Or do they?  Here are a couple of different ways of interpreting these results. 

1)  Big friggin' surprise.  It's pretty easy to find U.S. public opinion polls demonstrating majority support for homeland security measures ranging from crackdowns on illegal immigration to  torture enhanced interrogration techniques.  As I've said in the past, when it comes to homeland security, the average American has few qualms about strengthening the national security state.  This latest poll is just one more data point supporting that argument. 

2)  Oh, you wait... you just wait.  Nate Silver ably rounds up the rages against these machines coming from angry unions, pissed-off bloggers, and generally cantankerous individuals surreptitiously taping their pat-downs. 

What do these vocal members of the minority have in common?  They've all had to fly recently.  Silver posits that as more Americans face the indignity of these scanners, the poll numbers will start to change.  Well see.

3)  New Elite, meet Real America.  Silver also points out that a minority of travelers comprise a majority of actual air travel:

A study by the market-research firm Arbitron found, for instance, that frequent fliers — those who take 4 or more round trips per year — account for the 57 percent majority of all air travel, even though they make up just 18 percent of air travelers and something like 7 percent of the overall American population.

At least one past survey has identified differences in perceptions about airport security procedures between frequent and occasional fliers. This was a 2007 Gallup poll, which found that while just 26 percent of occasional travels were dissatisfied with airport security, the level rose to 37 percent among those who fly more frequently.

What I think we need to know then, is how those who have actually traveled through an airport that uses the full-body scanners feel about them — particularly if they’re people who fly frequently and are therefore going to bear the burden of any inconvenience, embarrassment, invasion of privacy or health risk brought on by the new technology.

Well... maybe.  Silver wants to prioritize the preferences of frequent travelers over other Americans.  To be fair to the pro-scanner position, however, it's not just the people who board planes who are affected the consequences of homeland security failures.  I'm not convinced that the opinions of grounded Americans shouldn't apply. 

There's a deeper cultural question, however.  There's an awful lot of resentment welling up in the United States against "elites."  Defining just who is in the elite and who is in "Real America" is an inexact science.  I can't help but wonder, however, if frequent air travel is the perfect Sorting Hat that separates the elites (i.e., the frequent travelers) from the masses (i.e., everyone else).  [UPDATE:  Adam Serwer makes this point as well:  "The TSA's new passenger-screening measures just happen to fall on the political and economic elites who can make their complaints heard. It's not happening to those scary Arabs anymore. It's happening to 'us.'"  See also Seth Masket and Kevin Drum on this point.]

This isn't necessarily a partisan divide -- conservative elites appear to be just as frosted with the TSA as liberals.  Body scanners are an issue that only animates the hostility of elites, however.  Real America couldn't give a flying fig one way or the other -- except if National Op-out Day gets them mad when they're traveling because of even longer security lines.  But I think it's a better than 50/50 chance that they'll be angrier at the opt-outers than the TSA employees. 

Maybe the scanners will quickly disappear in the face of elite protests.  Or maybe it means that some clever populist will seize on this issue as a way to talk about out-of-touch elites again. 

Clearly, I hope it's #2, but I don't know.  With travel season upon us during the next six weeks, we'll see..... 

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.