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. 

In the wake of financial regulation moving its way through Congress, both the Washington Post and Politico have stories out on Wall Street's backlash against the Democrats.  The Post's lead: 

A revolt among big donors on Wall Street is hurting fundraising for the Democrats' two congressional campaign committees, with contributions from the world's financial capital down 65 percent from two years ago.

The drop in support comes from many of the same bankers, hedge fund executives and financial services chief executives who are most upset about the financial regulatory reform bill that House Democrats passed last week with almost no Republican support. The Senate expects to take up the measure this month.

This fundraising free fall from the New York area has left Democrats with diminished resources to defend their House and Senate majorities in November's midterm elections. Although the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee have seen just a 16 percent drop in overall donations compared with this stage of the 2008 campaign, party leaders are concerned about the loss of big-dollar donors.

And now Politico: 

With the financial reform bill likely to hit President Barack Obama’s desk in coming weeks, Wall Street's top political players are warning Democrats to brace themselves for the next phase of the fight: the fundraising blowback.

Democrats who backed the bill  are finding big banks far less eager to host fundraisers and provide campaign cash heading into the tightly contested midterm elections this fall, insiders say.

Some banks, in fact, have discussed not attending or hosting fundraisers at all for the next few months. Goldman Sachs is already staying away from all fundraisers, according to two sources. The company would not comment.

“I think at least in the short term there is going to be a great deal of frustration with people who were beating the hell out of us — then turning around and asking for money,” said a senior executive of a Wall Street bank.

Based on these stories, when if the Democrats get hammered come November, expect a lot of pixels and ink spilled on the awesome power of the financial sector to get what it wants in Washington.  And don't believe a word of it. 

This is the lobbying equivalent of a good but struggling baseball club calling a team meeting right before they play the worst ballclub in the league.  That is to say, sports managers often save their rousing speeches before a game they're pretty likely to win, so they can claim that their motivation was what led their team to victory. 

As Charlie Cook notes, the Democrats are heading into a Category 5 political disaster come November.  This has nothing to do with FinReg, and everything to do with a struggling economy, an ecological disaster in the Gulf, fired-up conservatives, and disaffected liberals.  Wall Street antipathy is really the least of their problems. 

I'm laying this marker down now -- unless we see some shocking upsets among the New York delegation (the real target of Wall Street's ire), analysts who proclaim the awesome political power of financial sector will be doing so with sloppy facts and sloppy argumentation. 

In recent years, I've seen some very... let's say exaggerated arguments about the power of political lobbies in Washington.  They do possess political influence, but much of that influence rests on the perception that they can make or break electoral fortunes.  In Wall Street's case, however, they're pushing on a door that was already wide open. 

Which is not surprising.  Powerful interests tend to apportion their money to candidates they think will win.  Indeed, to use a term of art, Wall Street's political preferences appear to be -- dare I say it -- pro-cyclical. 

Ten days ago I took David Axelrod to task for speaking publicly on foreign affairs when that's not really his job description. 

I bring this up because I'm wondering if the reverse critricism applies -- should foreign policy leaders stick their beaks into domestic policymaking bailiwicks? 

Last week there was this nugget buried within Mark Landler and Helene Cooper's story on the Obama-Clinton relationship on foreign policy:  "Mrs. Clinton has also taken on duties that go beyond her job description. At the request of the White House, she made calls to wavering lawmakers to enlist their support for health care legislation late last year." 

Now The Hill's Molly K. Hopper reports that the Secretary of State was actively involved in health care lobbying over the weekend: 

Hillary Rodham Clinton attempted to persuade on-the-fence Democrats to vote for the healthcare reform bill that narrowly passed the House on Sunday.

Lawmakers told The Hill that Clinton, who failed to convince the Democratic-controlled Congress to pass healthcare reform in 1994, was active in whipping votes for the White House and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

TMPDC's Rachel Slajda provides some context: 

The White House kept her in the bullpen, she told CNN in February, taking the mound only when needed.

"When I am asked, I am very happy to respond. I mean, it's not anything I have direct responsibility for, but I have had a number of conversations and both in the White House and on the Hill and with others who are playing a constructive role," she said.

This is a bit unusual, to say the least.  In recent history, Secretaries of State have refrained from active lobbying ands/or participation on matters of domestic policy.    

What I'm not sure about is whether this is a violation of an unspoken norm or just an unusual situation.  Hillary Clinton is not your ordinary Secretary of State.  Unlike Axelrod and foreign policy, I'm not about to claim that the Secretary of State lacks sufficient policy expertise on the issue at hand.  And let's face it, Hillary has a wee bit more political capital than, say, Warren Christopher did back in the day. 

So, question to readers:  is this a big deal?   

Commentary's Jennifer Rubin is reacting way out of proportion to David Axelrod's tour of the Sunday morning talk shows.  That said, she's got a germ of a good point:

David Axelrod — a political operative who now seems at the center of foreign-policy formulation (more on this later) — went on the Fox, ABC, and NBC Sunday talk shows to repeat how insulted the Obami were over Israeli building in Jerusalem and what an affront this was to them....

[I]t might have something to do with the fact that Axelrod and the Chicago pols are running foreign policy. It’s attack, attack, attack — just as they do any domestic critic.

Quibble away with Rubin's characterization of "Chicago pols," but she does raise a decent question:  why on God's green earth is the Obama equivalent of Karl Rove talking about foreign policy in public? 

Since the VP trip from Hell, it's clear that the Obama administration has ratcheted up the rhetoric in private, in public, in press leaks and through multilateral channels to their Israeli counterparts.  Given what transpired, it's entirely appropriate that the Obama administration make its displeasure felt publicly. 

Why Axelrod, however?  Sure, the Sunday morning talk shows wanted to talk health care as well.  And it's true that Axelrod, thought of as pro-Israel, could send a tough signal.  Still, couldn't the administration have sent Hillary Clinton to one of the Sunday morning talk shows instead?  Wouldn't she have been the more appropriate spokesman. 

I've spent enought time inside the Beltway to be leery of the gossipy tidbits I collect when I'm down there.  That said, there was one persistent drumbeat I heard during my last sojourn -- that Axelrod and the political advisors were acting as Obama's foreign policy gatekeepers.  

Now, I am shocked, shocked, that politicians are thinking about foreign policy in a political manner.  That said, there is a balance to be struck between political and policy advisors.  Even David Frum admitted that this balance got out of whack during the Bush administration.  I'd like to see things return to to the pre-21st century equilibrium.  It would be disturbing if the new equilibrium is that someone like David Axelrod becomes the foreign policy czar.

UPDATE:  You know what's particularly galling about this?  When the political operatives fail to do their job and point out politically useful things to do in order to augment American foreign policy:   

As an unusual public showdown between the Israeli and American administrations plays out, Hill sources say leading Congressional Democrats would be with the administration on this but would really like to get a phone call from Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell, currently en route back to the Middle East to try to salvage Israeli-Palestinian proximity talks.

As former Senate Majority Leader, Mitchell has credibility with the Senators, one staffer said. It would be really helpful if he makes some phone calls from the plane, to say we really need you to stay with the administration, we are trying to push the peace process forward, and if he would articulate some sort of vision, of where this next sort of piece of tactical fight is going.

This is not the first time one has heard this from Hill Democrats that they are feeling a bit in the dark, but at such a tense moment, it is hard not to be astonished that the administration was not working the phones to the Hill all weekend. 

"Same exact mistake of the first two Clinton years with majorities in both Houses," one Washington Democratic foreign policy hand said. "You'd think they would have learned the lesson of 'never take your allies for granted' at least after this year." 

In a post over the weekend about John Heilemann and Mark Halperin's new book Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime, The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder makes a very odd closing point:

Political scientists aren't going to like this book, because it portrays politics as it is actually lived by the candidates, their staff and the press, which is to say -- a messy, sweaty, ugly, arduous competition between flawed human beings -- a universe away from numbers and probabilities and theories.

I know a lot of political scientists, and let me take this opportunity to assure Marc that most political scientists love good, dishy books full of political gossip -- the uglier, the better.  I love Bob Woodward books and all the Making of the **** Campaign tomes as much as the rest of America seems to love John Grisham novels.  Many political scientists have similar feelings on this -- before people become political scientists, they're usually political junkies.  And anyone who studies this stuff for a living can't only be aware that politicians are flawed beings -- they have to love them just a little for their flaws.  As Seth Masket points out, "If we only cared about numbers and probabilities and theories, we'd have become mathematicians."

I suspect that the difference between my profession and Ambinder's is that while I love these canmpaign narratives,  I don't always buy their explanations for why things play out the way they do.  Structural factors like the economy matter a hell of a lot as well.  The chapter in Game Change on the Edwardses, for example, is really gripping stuff -- but it's gripping because of the tawdriness, not because it affected the campaign in any way whatsoever.  Even if theirs had been a fairy-tale marriage, John Edwards still wasn't going to be the president.  

Ambinder's passive-aggresive attitude towards my profession is not unique to him -- it flares up every once in a while among political journalists.  In some ways, this dust-up mirrors the occasional testiness that emerges between traditional baseball writers and sabermetricians.  Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy's recently complained about "the stat geeks, those get-a-lifers who are sucking all the joy out of our national pastime."  Yeah, because the last thing the sport would want is for informed people to be arguing passionately about it. 

Shaughnessy's assertion flabbergasted most sabermetricians, who clearly love baseball and all of its facets.  They just find it silly not to consider the utility of smart statistics when analyzing the support.  But a lot of sabermetricians tend to watch baseball with the television on mute so they don't have to hear broadcasters emphasize points that, to them, are superfluous -- just as many political scientists I know rarely watch the cable news shows. 

A good narrative, however?  We'll snap that up like popcorn. 

It turns out that Zhao Ziyang, China's Communist Party chief during the Tianamenn massacre (and who was outsted for opposing a violent crackdown), secretly recorded a memoir of his time in power.

This is very exciting -- as the New York Times' Erik Eckholm observes, "In a sharp break with Chinese Communist tradition, even for dismissed officials, Mr. Zhao provides personal details of tense party sessions."  In other words, there's some good dirt here for China scholars. 

One little thing nags me about Eckholm's story, however: 

One striking claim in the memoir, scholars who have seen it said, is that Mr. Zhao presses the case that he pioneered the opening of China’s economy to the world and the initial introduction of market forces in agriculture and industry — steps he says were fiercely opposed by hard-liners and not always fully supported by Mr. Deng, the paramount leader, who is often credited with championing market-oriented policies....

Roderick MacFarquhar, a China expert at Harvard who wrote an introduction to the new book, said it had given him a new appreciation of Mr. Zhao’s central role in devising economic strategies, including some, like promoting foreign trade in coastal provinces, that he had urged on Mr. Deng, rather than the other way around.

“Deng Xiaoping was the godfather, but on a day-to-day basis Zhao was the actual architect of the reforms,” Mr. MacFarquhar said in an interview.

I'm not a China expert, but I am a seasoned reader of political memoirs.  And, in my experience, memoirists do tend to paint a picture of their deeds that magnifies their accomplishments at the expense of others.  I see no reason why Chinese political memoirs should be any different from American political memoirs on this score.  So I'm going to take Zhao's claims on this point with juuuust a small grain of salt.

[Hmmm.... note to future version of you -- compile top ten list of best political memoirs--ed.  So noted.]   

Let's label this Drezner's Political Analogy of 2009: 

AIG bonuses are to the left side of the political spectrum as congressional earmarks are to the right side of the spectrum.

Why?  Well, these two things have a surprising amount in common. 

• Neither of them poll terribly well;
• Both of them reflect waste, inattention, and borderline corruption in handling the government's money;
• Both issues force the other party to say something to indicate that they don't support these things;
• Earmarks represent a very small percentage of the omnibus spending bill; bonuses represent a very small percentage of the AIG bailout;
• So, given the current economic situation, both of them are huge honking distractons and do not matter a whole hell of a lot. 

Consider this from today's Times write-up: 

New York’s efforts against A.I.G. have overshadowed those of the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, the official who is responsible for the financial bailout, along with the Federal Reserve. The White House and Treasury have been besieged by questions about why Mr. Geithner did not know sooner about the bonus payments due this month, and whether he could have done more to stop them, prompting White House officials to assert President Obama's continued confidence in Mr. Geithner.

If I was Mr. Geithner's press spokesman, here is what I would say in response to more media inquiries about this:

Mr. Geithner profusely apologizes for not devoting more attention to this matter.  He clearly devoted too much time to the G-20 summit, implementing the stimulus package, preparing the 2009 budget, and other piddling matters like that.  Clearly, instead, Mr. Geithner feels he should have devoted more attention to this issue, which does absolutely nothing to put the financial sector on a sounder financial footing.  I mean, it's not like he's the only guy in the building or anything.

Mr Geithner thanks the media and Congress for focusing so much on this dumb-ass issue.   

As you can see, there is very good reason why I'm not Tim Geithner's press spokesman. 

Let's be clear -- I'd like AIG officers not to get these bonuses, just as I'd like to see earmarks removed from the budget.  I just think the opportunity costs on focusing on these issues is pretty damn big.