TWO, THREE, MANY IRAQS? While yesterday's Weekly Standard website was laying the groundwork for war against Iran, today I see that last week's print magazine has us fighting North Korea. Nicholas Eberstadt's article is worth a read if only for its well-chosen (and conveniently timed for after the election) invective against Bush's record over the past four years:

Long on attitude ("axis of evil") but short on strategy, the administration on North Korea was at times akin to a rudderless boat on an open sea.

Without rehearsing every detail, we might say that we have seen the Bush North Korea policy in "shocked by events" mode; we have seen it in "reactive" mode; we have seen it in "passive-aggressive" mode; and we have seen it in "paralyzed by infighting" mode. But we have yet to see it in "making bigger problems into smaller ones" mode.

Quite so. But what to do about it? First off, we need to deal with our pesky so-called "allies" in the South Korean government who, for some reason or another, are loath to embrace brinksmanship that threatens to destroy Seoul and are somewhat reluctant to see North Korea collapse and its desperately poor population become their responsibility.

Aggressive public diplomacy, Eberstadt implies, could bring a more congenial administration into office. Regime change accomplished in South Korea, Eberstadt then proposes the deliciously Orwellian step of "Readying the nondiplomatic instruments for North Korea threat reduction." He hopes, of course, for a diplomatic resolution, but thinks we ought to be "preparing for the deliberate use of nonconsensual, non-diplomatic options with North Korea." Given the success of nonconsensual, non-diplomatic threat-reduction instruments in Iraq, it's natural enough that Korea hawks are a bit reluctant to speak plain English, but this is a bit ridiculous. If forced to choose, though, would the Standard rather see a war with Iran or North Korea?

--Matthew Yglesias

WHO'S AFRAID OF THE BIG, BAD, BIN LADEN? Kevin Drum rounds up some recent commentary arguing that al-Qaeda isn't nearly as big a deal -- either in terms of the number of people involved or its practical capacity to execute attacks -- as the press has made it out to be. This is certainly the view of an increasingly large number of analysts. But it's also the case that this fact isn't nearly as relevant as it sounds at first glance. The Century Foundation's recent book, Defeating the Jihadists by Richard Clarke and others puts the point well:

When thinking of the growth and evolution of jihadist threat, it may be helpful to think of the relationship among distinct groups as four concentric circles. In the inner circle are the terrorists of the al-Qaeda organization, whose population is probably in the hundreds. The second circle contains active members of other jihadist groups, many of whom are willing to commit terrorist acts personally and die in the process as suicide bombers; it probably contains several tens of thousands of people. The third circle consists of those who identify with the jihadist cause or aspects of its ideology, and who might, if called upon, facilitate logistical or financial activity. This circle, which tends to support more "Islamist" governments, may contain tens of millions or perhaps as many as a few hundred million depending on the criteria. The outer circle is that of the Islamic world, the followers of the Prophet Muhammad both in majority Islamic countries and scattered throughout the world. They number over one billion people, most of them non-Arab.

The debate, in other words, has a somewhat semantic cast to it. The tens of thousands of committed activists of media legend do exist, but many experts think we should draw a distinction between this second circle and the relatively small al-Qaeda core. It's not a meaningless distinction -- there are thousands of people willing to fight in a jihadist vein in Iraq but there's no reason to think all those people are prepared to come over here and kill Americans. The vast majority of these people are involved in essentially local causes and only linked loosely to people with similar ideologies elsewhere.

This changes the way we think about the so-called "war on terrorism" (notably that the name is rather inapt and the struggle will not be fought mostly by means of terrorist attacks against the American homeland), but it doesn't change the fact that the problem deserves to be taken seriously. One should also keep in mind that whatever one makes of al-Qaeda, the September 11 attacks certainly did happen. If the hijackers didn't have much in the way of a support network, that indicates that small numbers of people can do a lot of killing, not that al-Qaeda is incapable of harming us.

--Matthew Yglesias

ONE LAST SHOT. Jack Shafer offers up a fitting coda to William Safire's career as an op-ed columnist:

William Safire asserted in his Nov. 1 New York Times column that journalists have a special name for stories they deliberately withhold from publication until they can do the most political damage. They're called "keepers," he wrote, and he more than implied that CBS News intended to zap the Bush/Cheney ticket in the last hours of the campaign with a keeper of its own about the missing munitions at Al-Qaqaa. . . .

With this piece, Safire aims to convince his readers—sans proof—that 1) modern media organizations corruptly spike (or hold) stories to protect (or damage) candidates and 2) that this skullduggery is so common that today's journalists refer to the stories as "keepers."

Yet in all my research, I've located only two journalists who believe in keepers, one who is about to turn 75 [that would be Safire] and one who died 30 years ago.

Sadly typical. I suspect, however, that in many ways liberals will find themselves missing Safire in years to come. His brand of gamesmanship is useful for creating echo-chamber effects and so forth, but is pretty useless when stacked up against the temperamentally hostile audience of The New York Times op-ed page. The other names being tossed around as possible replacements have (with the partial exception of David Frum, who used to do excellent work but seems to have been driven a bit mad by September 11), like David Brooks, all learned that you catch more flies with honey in this context and will likely do a better job of persuading liberals to come over to their side on a few issues.

--Matthew Yglesias

MORE BILL BADNESS. I have a feeling there will be virtually no end to the crap reporters discover wedged into -- or good things removed from -- the monstrous omnibus appropriations bill past recently. The latest bit, courtesy of The New York Times:

Congress has cut the budget for the National Science Foundation, an engine for research in science and technology, just two years after endorsing a plan to double the amount given to the agency.

Supporters of scientific research, in government and at universities, noted that the cut came as lawmakers earmarked more money for local projects like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and the Punxsutawney Weather Museum in Pennsylvania.

David M. Stonner, director of Congressional affairs at the science foundation, said on Monday that the reduction might be just the beginning of a period of austerity. Congress, Mr. Stonner said, told the agency to expect "a series of flat or slightly declining budgets for the next several years."

In renewing the legal authority for science programs in late 2002, Congress voted to double the budget of the science foundation by 2007. The agency finances the work and training of many mathematicians, physicists, chemists, engineers, computer scientists, biologists and environmental experts.

The $388 billion spending bill for the current fiscal year, approved by both houses of Congress on Nov. 20, provides $5.473 billion for the National Science Foundation, which is $105 million less than it got last year and $272 million less than President Bush requested.

Representative Vernon J. Ehlers, Republican of Michigan, said the cut was "extremely short-sighted" and showed "dangerous disregard for our nation's future."

"I am astonished that we would make this decision at a time when other nations continue to surpass our students in math and science and consistently increase their funding of basic research," said Mr. Ehlers, a former physics professor who is chairman of a technology subcommittee. "The National Science Foundation supports technological innovation that is crucial to the sustained economic prosperity that America has enjoyed for several decades."

It's not clear whether this was simply a case where congressional leaders had to make room for pork by cutting budgets here and there, or an expression of the modern GOP's distaste for science and its adherents. But provided Democrats get their act together as an opposition party, this bill is really proving to be the gift that keeps on giving -- a mix of outrageous abuses of power, illustrations of the majority's inability to run Congress decently, and awful policy choices at the expense of the national interest.

--Nick Confessore

IS THE HASTERT RULE BAD FOR BUSH? The Los Angeles Times' Ronald Brownstein has a good column today looking ahead at what Dennis Hastert's "majority of his majority" dictum bodes for George W. Bush's agenda:

To a point, Hastert's reluctance to advance legislation that divides House Republicans is understandable. Any legislative leader who routinely pushes bills opposed by many of his members probably won't be a legislative leader for long. The question Hastert should face is whether there is no room for exception within that general rule — no legislation where the national interest demands that he accept some fraternal tension.

The same question applies even more pointedly to Bush. No president relishes legislative fights within his own party. But for any president, one of the clearest tests of leadership is the willingness to stare down his own supporters to protect the national interest.

Bill Clinton promoted and signed the North American Free Trade Agreement even though 60% of House Democrats voted against it in 1993. He promoted and signed welfare reform, even though exactly half of House Democrats (and nearly half of Senate Democrats) voted against it in 1996. Even the 1997 legislation Clinton signed that balanced the federal budget drew opposition from a quarter of House Democrats — including Minority Leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri.

Bush, in his first term, signed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law and legislation requiring annual tests for students in reading and math despite opposition from many congressional Republicans. Mostly, though, he has advanced ideas only with broad Republican support. That explains why his first instinct in the intelligence standoff has been to pursue a compromise aimed at soothing House Republicans while holding enough Senate support to avoid a lethal filibuster.

But such a deal is unlikely. And that means Bush could face a stark choice: Pressure the House Republicans to allow a vote on the existing compromise, or permit the failure of security reforms that passed the Senate on a 96-2 vote and have been endorsed by the Sept. 11 commission, by the Republican chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence committees, and, officially at least, by the president himself.

As Brownstein well knows, the president doesn't necessarily really support the 9-11 Commission's recommendations. Heck, he didn't support the 9-11 Commission! So it's entirely possible that this is simply the GOP's way of letting the whole bill die, although it's not clear why Hastert would want the House Republicans, who are up for re-election in two years, to take the fall. But it does seem that real intelligence reform is not a priority of this administration or of the GOP's congressional wing.

--Nick Confessore

RIGHT TIMES. This New York piece about possible replacements for retiring New York Times columnist William Safire bandies about some of the expected names, including David Frum, Charles Krauthammer, Christopher Caldwell, Richard Brookhiser, Fred Barnes, and Robert Kagan, plus frontrunner John Tierney, currently a reporter in the Times' Washington bureau who's long been rumored to be up for an op-ed slot. Prospect contributor Chris Mooney did a good profile on Tierney a few years ago, and you can read it here. Media Matters has written up a dossier of Tierney, Krauthammer, and Barnes, which you can read here.

--Nick Confessore

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: OF MOSUL AND MEN. We can stop arguing about whether U.S. forces are all that stands between Iraq and civil war -- the civil war is already underway. That's the sad fact made obvious in Mosul, says Matthew Yglesias, and it will take more than quick and credible elections to hold it in check.

--Jeffrey Dubner

IRAQIFICATION SO FAR. The strategy, such as it is, in Iraq is to try and train increasingly large numbers of Iraqi soldiers, police, and other security forces to replace American troops. How's it going? Poorly, reports today's Los Angeles Times. Very poorly, according to The New York Times. Iraqi troops are undertrained, underequipped, ill-motivated, intimidated by the insurgency, and generally ineffective in battle.

According to the latest Iraqi Crisis Report from the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, however, the Iraq National Guard is "facing allegations of misconduct and ill-discipline," beating, abusing, and stealing from members of the public and behaving in a generally rude manner. "Even Saddam's henchmen didn't talk like that to normal people," said Jacob al-Mosawi, a member of the municipal council in Baghdad's al-Rashid neighborhood. According to an Interior Ministry official quoted by The New York Times, "any major withdrawal of American troops for at least a decade would invite chaos" due to the problems with the Iraqi security forces. But of course it's hardly guaranteed that 10 more years of the sort of thing we've seen over the past 12 months will substantial change the situation for the better.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE LEDEEN DOCTRINE. Michael Ledeen's views are superficially similar to the arguments presented by those arguing for military action, at least in his analysis of the current situation. As he lays it out in today's NRO column and elsewhere, the mullahs in Tehran are an intolerable threat to American security, the European diplomatic initiative is useless "appeasement," and the Israelis can't handle the issue on their own. But Ledeen's policy solution is rather different:

[R]egime change is the best way to deal with the nuclear threat and the best way to advance our cause in the war against the terror masters. We have a real chance to remove the terror regime in Tehran without any military action, but rather through political means, by supporting the Iranian democratic opposition. According to the regime itself, upwards of 70 percent of Iranians oppose the regime, want freedom, and look to us for political support. I believe they, like the Yugoslavs who opposed Milosevic and like the Ukrainians now demonstrating for freedom, are entitled to the support of the free world.

Ledeen, in other words, after all the bluster, doesn't want us to do very much. Instead, he thinks that through increased levels of rhetorical (and perhaps financial) support for the opposition we can provoke a crisis that topples the regime. According to this way of thinking a limited airstrike at Iranian nuclear facilities would be unnecessary and probably counterproductive. Most mainstream analysts think this is a bit of a pipe dream; Iranians are unhappy with their government in a sullen sort of way, not a revolutionary sort of way. My take is that these things are unpredictable, and it would be foolish to count out the possibility of a revolutionary situation materializing in the near-term -- but even more foolish to count on one arising. American efforts to intervene in Iranian domestic affairs have an unfortunate tendency to backfire, especially because the United States doesn't enjoy the positive image in the region that we have in, say, western Ukraine and the rest of Catholic Eastern Europe.

One thing to watch for is that the counterproliferation view and the regime-change view could be reconciled through an approach that no one is quite willing to advocate at this point: forcible regime change, either through a full-scale invasion or else through a Bay of Pigs-type operation led by armed exile groups like the Mujahedin-e Khalq and supported by American funds and arms. Assuming that stays off the table, the important thing to note is that Ledeen's strategy not only assumes that diplomacy can't work, but ensures that it won't. The harder the United States pushes on the regime-change lever, the more committed Tehran will become to acquiring a nuclear deterrent, and no one is going to make a deal with a country avowedly committed to overthrowing its government. If diplomacy is doomed to fail anyway, this is a price worth paying (indeed, not a price at all) but things look different if you think otherwise.

--Matthew Yglesias

INTERNSHIPS AT THE AMERICAN PROSPECT. The Prospect is now taking applications for spring-semester internships at our Washington, D.C., office. Two options are currently available: editorial internships working on our monthly print edition and online internships working on the TAP Web site.

These internships are great opportunities for anyone interested in political journalism. In addition to being involved in the production of one of America's leading liberal magazines, you'll have the opportunity to work with TAP authors and meet leading writers and activists at our brown-bag lunches. All the info you need is available here.

--Jeffrey Dubner

THE EMERGING REPUBLICAN MAJORITY. A couple of articles over the long weekend looked at the question of just how solid -- and long-lasting -- the current era of Republican dominance is likely to be. The New York Times' Todd S. Purdum took the long view and concluded that maintaining single-party rule is a pretty tough act:

From the rapacious capitalism of the Gilded Age to the cronyism of Teapot Dome, from the corruption of Tammany Hall to the cultural and fiscal excesses of the Great Society, American history is replete with examples of the price of one-party rule. At the moment, Democrats on Capitol Hill lack even the power to call a committee meeting, issue a subpoena or do anything much more active than complain.

But history also suggests a perilous twist on an adage as old as Athens: Whom the Gods would destroy they first give control of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. With responsibility for all of government comes accountability for all of government, and the picture is not always pretty.

Meanwhile, John Harris talked to the academic community and various Republican operatives for The Washington Post in an even-handed piece that found most academics unwilling to call George W. Bush's re-election a fundamental realignment but nonetheless see the Dems facing a world of pain:

The realignment debate underway since Nov. 2 is more than an academic parlor game. If Republicans have indeed seized the upper hand in national politics in a fundamental way, the implication for Democrats is that radical changes in their electoral strategies, and even issue positions, are needed to become competitive again. But if the 2004 election was essentially a coin toss that happened to go Bush's way, the opposition party can simply try a little harder and hope for better luck next time.

"Something fundamental and significant happened in this election that creates an opportunity for" the Republicans to remake national politics over the long term, said Ken Mehlman, who managed Bush's reelection campaign and was tapped by the president after the election to be the next chairman of the Republican National Committee. "The Republican Party is in a stronger position today than at any time since the Great Depression."

Liberal political analyst Ruy Teixeira is among many analysts not buying it. Two years ago, he co-wrote a book predicting an emerging Democratic dominance of national politics. That certainly has not happened yet -- but neither has the opposite, he believes. The electorate this year "tilted, but it didn't tilt very much," Teixeira said.

"If the war on terror is such a realigning issue, how come Bush only got 51 percent of the vote?" he asked....

But some Democrats said it would be complacent for their party to simply wait for better candidates or better luck. "Republicans are going to do everything they can to maximize their current position of ascendancy, and they have a lot of levers with which to do that," said Howard Wolfson, a former head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee....

Mark Gersh, a leading elections analyst with the Democratic-supporting National Committee for an Effective Congress, said he does not believe a realignment has occurred, but he does fear that the results highlight serious structural problems for Democrats. In addition to the higher number of Republican-leaning states -- a major GOP advantage in the Senate -- the Democrats are getting trounced in the outer suburbs of metropolitan regions. While these areas still produce relatively few votes, they are the fastest-growing areas of the country. A Los Angeles Times analysis found that Bush won 97 of the 100 fastest-growing counties.

"If the Democrats don't do well" in places and with groups "that are growing faster than others," said Gersh, "they are going to be in trouble."

My take: Hard as it may be to believe, the Democratic Party has not yet hit rock bottom. Everything I have heard since the election loss has led me to conclude that there is an entrenched layer of Democratic operatives, politicians, interest groups, and donors that desperately wants to regain power but whose members are too stuck in particular mindsets to lead the party in the kind of new direction that might make it possible for them to actually do so. Even Gersh's carefully couched warning suggests the rampant avoidance of reality I'm hearing. The Dems are "going to be in trouble"? As opposed to what, not controlling any branch of government? As long as there is any question about what happened in 2004 there will be no consensus on how to proceed in the future -- or even that change is necessary. Consequently, I fully expect the Democrats to lose seats again in 2006. Only at that point will a fresh leadership be able -- nay, be forced -- to emerge and reconnect the party with the world as it is today.

This pessimistic take is augmented by the fact that the GOP already looks to have the upper hand heading into the 2006 mid-term elections, according to The Washington Times:

Democratic senators in the states that President Bush won will face a tough road to re-election in 2006, Republicans say, with their sights set most eagerly on two Democrats named Nelson — Sens. Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Bill Nelson of Florida.

"They have something to worry about, and they need look no farther than Tom Daschle," said Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican, referring to this month's defeat of the Senate minority leader from the red state of South Dakota, which Mr. Bush won by 22 percentage points.

"Any Democratic senator running for re-election in a state where the president did extremely well has got to know they are an endangered species," he said....

"For Democrats who were hoping the worst was over in 2004, there isn't a lot of good news," said Nathan Gonzales, political editor of the Rothenberg Political Report.

Indeed.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

A HAUNTING LEGACY. Like a zombie, Washington state’s George Nethercutt continues to haunt the legislative process weeks after Sen. Patty Murray delivered him his political death blow in a heated Senate race.

I first wrote about Nethercutt’s disastrous amendment to the foreign operations appropriations bill last September when the issue was headed for conference -- and before rumors of an omnibus became real. The so-called “Nethercutt Amendment” would impose unnecessary punitive sanctions for some of America’s staunchest allies for the sole, and rather insignificant, fact that they are parties to the International Criminal Court.

As the Washington Post highlighted in an A2 article on Friday:

A provision inserted into a $338 billion government spending bill for 2005 would bar the transfer of assistance money from the $2.52 billon economic support fund to a government "that is a party" to the criminal court but "has not entered into an agreement with the United States" to bar legal proceedings against U.S. personnel. The House and Senate are to vote on the budget Dec. 8.

Many of America's NATO and major non-NATO allies, including Jordan, and a host of South American and Caribbean countries may lose important U.S. assistance because of this amendment. For various reasons relating to national law and domestic political considerations, many of these countries are unwilling or unable to enter into a bilateral immunity agreement with the United States.

According to Citizens for Global Solutions, a D.C.–based NGO that has been monitoring this issue for many months, the list of programs that would be threatened by the Nethercutt Amendment include:

• Jordan ($250 million for economic growth and governance reform)
• Ireland ($12 million for reconciliation programs to further the northern Ireland peace process)
• Cyprus ($13.5 million to further the peace process)
• Peru ($8 million to combat coca production and promote democracy)
• South Africa ($1 million to enhance counter-terrorism abilities and promote human rights)

Since I first reported on the amendment, the State Department has inserted a provision in the bill that would grant the president the authority to waive the Nethercutt restriction on a case-by-case basis. Thus, when King Abdullah IIvisits Bush next week, we can reasonably expect the king to press Bush on this issue.

Nevertheless, dangling the threat of suspending economic aid to some of our more important regional allies when American interests are at stake is a fundamentally flawed way to form foreign policy. Unfortunately, this is well on the way to becomming institutionalized.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

UNDESIRABLE, NOT INTOLERABLE. Before the election, those of us who warned that a second Bush term might bring new wars tended to get dismissed as cranks. Christian Lowe's article on Iran for The Weekly Standard, however, shows us the gears of a new adventure in full swing. After a sensible first page, the second part of Lowe's article starts laying the groundwork. He doesn't call for military action, but he does say that diplomacy is unlikely to succeed. More to the point, he defines a nuclear Iran as intolerable, thus indicating that concerns about the high cost of military options ought to be set aside:

A nuclear Iran, however, cannot be tolerated. Iran is well known for its sponsorship of terrorist organizations and has conducted a foreign policy of violence by proxy. The risk that Iran will transfer its nuclear technology to groups such as Hezbollah, whom Iran supports with an estimated yearly stipend of more than $100 million, is great.

A nuclear Iran would certainly be undesirable in a variety of ways -- it would undermine the non-proliferation treaty, encourage more countries to go nuclear, and weaken America's hand in the Middle East -- but Lowe's account is absurd. No state has ever handed weapons of mass destruction over to terrorist groups; Iran has repeatedly proven itself amenable to credible American deterrence threats (and a threat of a massive response to a nuclear attack would be very credible); Iran has never sponsored a terrorist attack on the American homeland; Hezbollah has grown less involved in terrorism in recent years; and as Lowe himself (quoting Richard Russell) says, Iran has other reasons for wanting a bomb as "a means to fill the void in military and deterrent capabilities."

Perhaps most important of all, there's no conceivable motive for an Iranian transfer of nuclear technology to Hezbollah; and for a country allegedly planning to deliver its weapons through terrorist groups, Iran's been spending an awful lot of time trying to improve its ballistic missile capacities. It's awkward in the current political context to be cast as a defender of or an apologist for Iran and/or Hezbollah, and that's not my intention, but it's absolutely crucial for people to speak up on this issue so that the country can have a realistic approach to Iran policy. If the public gets it in its head that Iran is likely to use its bomb to attack an American city then naturally enough the public will support costly and extreme measures to forestall that eventuality. But the actual damage to American interests that would be posed by a nuclear Iran is significantly smaller than the damage that would be done by an ill-advised military venture.

--Matthew Yglesias

"THE MAJORITY OF HIS MAJORITY." Dennis Hastert's operating policy that no legislation is to pass the House unless a majority of the GOP conference supports it -- even if the legislation is backed, like the intelligence bill was, by both the leadership and the president, and could easily pass if put to a floor vote -- really is quite remarkable. I'm compelled to return to a passage that I've excerpted before from Jan Reid and Lou Dubose's book on Tom DeLay, The Hammer, to try and account for Hastert's thinking:

DeLay prefers a polarized House in which the adversarial relationship between Republicans and Democrats is institutionalized. “A number of times the Republican majority could pass a bill by 300 votes,” said a veteran House staffer who has worked for the Democratic leadership. “A bill that has that type of potential. Then they yank it to the conservative side so it passes 220-210 . . . There’s a mentality in the Republican leadership that if a significant number of Democrats support a bill somehow it’s tainted.

“Part of it goes back to the K Street thing, where they want to be able to say to their funders that the only people who can deliver anything for you are Republicans.” If House Republicans can make their Democratic counterparts irrelevant to the process of passing the nation’s laws, they can make them irrelevant to big political contributors.

I doubt that this is the entire explanation for Hastert's rule, but the Washington Post piece doesn't quite seem to fully account for it either. Partisanship is an abstract good under the current GOP leadership -- the preeminent, all-encompassing principle that shapes the process in the House. Seeing as Hastert laid out his approach in explicit terms a year ago ("The job of speaker is not to expedite legislation that runs counter to the wishes of the majority of his majority") I suppose it should come as no surprise to see it put into practice now.

--Sam Rosenfeld

REGRESSION TO THE MEAN? Writing in yesterday's New York Times, Edward Luttwak, something of a neoconservative godfather back in the day but now a leading conservative skeptic of their agenda, predicted that George W. Bush would offer a more moderate foreign policy in his second term. Luttwak asks us to consider the last two second terms:

For the second Reagan administration, dovish pundits predicted an even tougher stance against the Soviet "evil empire," as well as a further acceleration of the arms race, led by the so-called Star Wars system against ballistic missiles. After all, in Reagan I, all the ceremonies of détente had been stopped, and a huge budget deficit had been accepted to build up the armed forces as quickly as possible. Some feared that Reagan II might escalate confrontation to outright war.

For Clinton II, the Cassandras warned of an even more passive foreign policy than Clinton I, during which the administration had refused to interrupt the Rwanda genocide, delayed intervention in Bosnia, and left Middle East diplomacy to the most tentative secretary of state anyone can remember, Warren Christopher. The president had shown enthusiasm for every aspect of domestic policy and an indifference to foreign affairs that not even live television coverage of preventable massacres could overcome.

As Luttwak points out, such predictions were proven wrong in both cases. But I think the leap from this pattern to some kind of iron law of foreign-policy moderation is too quick. Reagan didn't change his approach to the USSR because he changed his mind, he changed his approach because Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and changed Soviet policy. The case of Bill Clinton is less clear, but his second term saw ideologically congenial third-way governments come to power in Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Israel, making it much easier to reconcile his interventionist instincts with his multilateralist ones. Clinton, moreover, found himself faced with a hostile Congress and, therefore, the best shot to leave his mark on history was more active engagement with world affairs.

Something along these lines might happen with Bush. In particular, you could envision a reverse Clinton effect where expanded congressional majorities make him more inclined to invest himself in advancing his domestic agenda creating a commensurate desire to keep foreign crises on a low boil. But there's little sign that either hostile states or friendly ones are becoming more inclined to move policy in America's direction. That eliminates much of the impetus that might exist for Bush to moderate his approach in hopes of meeting others halfway.

--Matthew Yglesias

A QUESTIONABLE DEFENSE. The New York Times offered a strikingly unconvincing editorial in defense of the filibuster yesterday. The claim that the filibuster was "one of the checks and balances that the founders . . . built into our system of government" strikes me as a bit dicey -- this is not an institution that was actually incorporated into the Constitution nor one that seemed to be high on the minds of those we usually consider to be "the founders" -- but perhaps readers with better historical expertise can set me straight on this.

What is simply factually wrong is the editorial's claim that even during the "dark days" when southern senators used the maneuver to block civil rights legislation, "the Senate considered the right to filibuster sacrosanct." In fact, filibuster reform was one of the great causes of liberal Democrats in the Senate in the 1950s and 1960s. It was one of the pillars, along with the taming of committee chairs, of the reformist agenda liberals sought to enact as a means of passing activist, progressive legislation on everything from civil rights to labor policy to education. Senator Paul Douglas wrote about "The Fight Against the Filibuster" in The New Republic in 1953. Year in and year out the reform coalition in the Senate proposed measures to allow a simple majority to end a filibuster; in 1957 the proposal was only defeated by a vote of 55 to 38. After a bitter struggle, in 1975 the Senate changed the requirements for reaching a cloture from two-thirds of the body to three-fifths. How "sacrosanct" is that?

Like Tim Noah, I'm inclined to think that there is no really compelling, principled, abstract justification for the filibuster. That in no way means that I advocate that the Democrats roll over on the issue; retaining whatever possible levers of influence the party has at this precarious moment is a matter of such practical, not to say existential, importance that the need overrides any principled considerations at all. (And, to be sure, principle has nothing to do with the Senate Republicans' new longing for an efficiently majoritarian legislative process.) Moreover, one can certainly argue that given current circumstances the filibuster is justified on the grounds that the Democratic minority in the Senate actually represents a majority of the American electorate. These considerations don't preclude a bit of intellectual honesty and historical accuracy in discussing the issue, however. It's my feeling that liberals were right on the merits in their original opposition to the filibuster last century, even if such a position would be foolhardy to advocate at the moment. If anyone thinks they can offer a principled defense of the filibuster, I'm all ears.

But it'll have to be more convincing than the Times'. Frankly, the paper's editorial today attempting to advocate for federalism on the liberal-friendly matter of marijuana legalization while defending the power of the federal government to override states' rights on other matters doesn't do a great deal to assuage one's suspicion that there's a wee bit of hackery at work.

--Sam Rosenfeld

TRAINING DAY. There's something inspiring about the LA Times's account of basic training for soldiers headed to Iraq, but lurking beneath the surface it's rather disturbing. Thanks to the increasing levels of violence directed at non-infantry support units in Iraq it was deemed necessary to up the level of combat training every soldier receives, but the most obvious way to do this -- extend the training period -- was rejected because the Army can't afford to delay the deployment of new troops to the front. Similarly, the urgent need for high-tech equipment in Iraq means that body armor, night-vision goggles, and other elements of the modern military aren't available for use at training.

These are the sorts of things that happen in wartime, but normally they happen to countries whose resources base is genuinely depleted by a military crisis. Today's United States is an extremely wealthy country in which defense spending as a share of the economy is still relatively low by the standards of the second half of the twentieth century. The military is placed in these exigencies not because additional resources couldn't be made available, but because the administration is dedicated to a policy of rabid tax-cutting at home and its foreign-policy team has chosen to get us involved in a war with marginal popular support where the national interest at stake seems out of proportion to the scale of the conflict.

Disturbing on another level is that the Army's new training regime is so exclusively focused on combat and force-protection. What we've seen in Iraq certainly does demonstrate a need for that. But it's also demonstrated that our military -- though very well-trained to do the things it's trained to do -- isn't really trained to undertake the sort of post-conflict stabilization (i.e., "nation-building") mission in which it's engaged. Getting support personnel better prepared to defend themselves is good, but there's little point to it at the end of the day if the military remains incapable of accomplishing the goals the political leadership has set for it. Staying alive is naturally a top priority for anyone in a hostile situation, but if that's all our troops can really focus on then there's not much reason to put them in the hostile situation in the first place.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHEN IS DEBT NOT DEBT? When it would be inconvenient for the Republican Party to call it "debt," according to an important Jonathan Weisman article that you, like me, may have missed last week due to Thanksgiving travel. The lede really says it all:

Republican budget writers say they may have found a way to cut the federal deficit even if they borrow hundreds of billions more to overhaul the Social Security system: Don't count all that new borrowing.

You can go to the article for all the gory details, or check out Noam Scheiber's pessimistic predictions about the administration's plans for Social Security reform and then note that this is even worse then he thought it would be. At this point, however, we're reaching the stage of the game where America's burgeoning debt is not only a political football, but a cause of concern in international currency markets and among the foreign central bankers who've been fueling much of the Bush borrowing binge. These are the sort of people who have good reason to pay close attention to these issues and are unlikely to be appeased by the kind of con the administration is looking at.

--Matthew Yglesias

WEEKEND UPDATE. Mmm ... turkey. Here's what you missed:

The Columnists

• Nicholas Kristof. The real problem in Iraq is unnamed liberals who have no power.
• David Brooks. Globalization is good!
• George Will. Shockingly, most academics are liberals.
• Michael Kinsley. Can we start condescending now?
• David Broder. Cities are getting screwed.
• Jim Hoagland. What's an unjustified killing or two between friends?
• Maureen Dowd. I hate my family.
• Thomas Freidman. Maybe the people who've messed everything up so far will suddenly turn out to be brilliant.

The Op-Ed You Actually Need To Read

• Farouz Farzami on the Iranian reform movement.

--Matthew Yglesias

SIGNING OFF. TAPPED is shutting down for the holiday; regular posting will resume Monday. Happy Thanksgiving!

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE GIFT OF GOLD. The dollar is cratering, and the plunge in value ultimately threatens the living standards of ordinary Americans. With that in mind, Robert Reich has a gift suggestion for this holiday buying season.

--Sam Rosenfeld

POST ELECTION DISSECTION Since the election, experts have released numerous reports, commentary and analysis. Moving Ideas has compiled them all into one place! The analysis includes the gender gap, electronic machine errors, and voter suppression. We've also got a look back at 2004 campaign strategies and what’s next for the progressive movement. Instead of surfing around for all the info you need to know, visit Moving Ideas, a project of The American Prospect, for one-stop shopping for all the latest post election analysis.

--Diane Greenhalgh, MovingIdeas.Org

IRAQI SPECIAL TRIBUNAL WOES On the pages of the New York Times today, an Army Judge Advocate General, Michael Newton, calls to task those of us who have criticized the Iraqi Special Tribunal established to try former members of the Ba’athist regime for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Early in his Op-Ed he compares the structure of the Iraqi Special Tribunal to the successful “Hybrid model” used to try war crimes in Sierra Leone. This is an absolute farce. The Sierra Leone Tribunal is a hybrid model precisely because it mixes local judges and prosecutors with UN appointed, international law expert, counterparts. Three judges preside over each trial: one appointed by the Government of Sierra Leone, and two appointed by the Secretary General. Further, the Chief Prosecutor is appointed by the UN while his deputy is appointed by Sierra Leone. As it happens, the Chief Prosecutor for Sierra Leone, one David Crane, is an American and former Inspector General of the DOD.

The Iraqi Special Tribunal was created in Washington and signed into law by fiat of the Coalition Provisional Authority in December 2003. Not, surprisingly for the Bush Administration, the Tribunal’s statute included no role for the United Nations and shut out any possibility that the UN could have some formal role in training the judges, or even provide the kind of on-the-job training that occurs in the Sierra Leone tribunal. The “hybrid” relationship that exists is precisely this: Iraqis lead trials while Americans gather evidence and offer advise on prosecution strategy.

Because the US did not employ the Sierra Leone model, Iraqi judges will not be joined on the bench by any international counterparts -- and this is proving to be a huge problem. As one might expect, Iraqi judges are not particularly experienced in the kind of international humanitarian law under which the defendants -- including Saddam Hussein -- will be tried. Newton concedes as much in his op-ed:

Last month I spent a week in London working with the group of judges and prosecutors who form the core of the special tribunal. They are a distinguished group of patriots who know more than any outsider how critical the rule of law will be for the future of their country. Yes, just like other inexperienced judges on previous tribunals elsewhere in the developing world, they have much to learn about conducting complex trials in accordance with the most modern nuances of international law. But they are dedicated to doing so. As one Iraqi told me, "My job is to judge, not to murder."

These judges may be dedicated -- and knowledgeable of Iraqi national law, but a New York Times report (archived) from this famed London meeting (which actually happened in secret because of security concerns) relays just how inexperienced in international humanitarian law these judges are:

After one session, Joanna Korner from Britain, a former senior prosecutor at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, said she was pleased because ''I actually managed to get my judges to understand there is more than one crime against humanity.'' She was describing the crimes that involve systematic and widespread attacks against a civilian population, which include murder, persecution, mass rape, torture and deportation.

This does not bode well for the eventual trial of Saddam Hussein, who we can be sure will exploit these judges’ inexperience to his own end.

One point where Newton is right on the money, however, is the shameful reluctance of Yugoslav Tribunal Chief Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte and Kofi Annan to lend their offices’ expertise and help to train Iraqi judges. The Special Tribunal may be flawed -- some would say irredeemably so -- but spreading the gospel of International Humanitarian Law to new judges who live in a war-torn country can never be a bad thing.

Fundamentally, though, the kind of reactive finger pointing from a JAG on the pages of the New York Times is unhelpful unless he is willing to take a hard look at the how we got to this point in the first place. The American leading the war crimes investigations, Greg Kehoe, is a veteran of the Yugoslav Tribunal and a good man on a noble mission. Sadly, unless there is some fundamental shift in how the Tribunal is structured (not to mention an improved security situation), his cause may be a failure.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE NEXT PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY. As the battle over Supreme Court nominations kicks into high gear, we'll all be hearing more and more from Kay Daly. She's the latest GOP operative to carve media celebrity out of heading a faux "grassroots" conservative outfit. Like the savviest of right-wing warriors before her, Daly and her Coalition for a Fair Judiciary have garnered power by cultivating the perception of power. Greg Sargent has the details.

--Sam Rosenfeld

MORE LUMPS OF COAL BURIED IN THE OMNIBUS. Not content with trying to pass a provision to snoop into people's tax returns, the Congressional Republicans also inserted, at the request of the president, a provision in the giant Omnibus spending bill cutting student aid by $300 million. Nancy Pelosi's office estimates that the provision will cause 90,000 students to be denied Pell Grants, pitiful as they are these days, and another 1.2 million students to see cuts in their grant or loan levels.

UPDATE. Pell grant funding actually was increased by $458 million to about $12.4 billion, but, reports the AP, "Like other boosts to the Pell program in recent years, this one will be devoured entirely by increased demand. And the maximum grant will be frozen at $4,050, despite sharp increases in college costs." The objectionable part is this, which will really hit kids from lower-middle class families hard:

Congress declined last weekend to block the Education Department from updating tax deduction tables used to calculate aid eligibility -- a move that angered Democrats and some higher education advocates.

If the Education Department updates the tables, it would cause about 1 million prospective Pell Grant recipients to have their eligibility reduced by an average of $300, according to Brian Fitzgerald, staff director of the Advisory Committee on Financial Assistance, which advises Congress. The update would save the Pell program about $300 million annually.

The impact would be felt largely by students from families earning between $35,000 and $40,000, Fitzgerald said. Poorer families don't generally benefit from the deductions, and more wealthy ones don't typically qualify for Pells.

About 84,000 students eligible for some award under the previous guidelines would get nothing, Fitzgerald said.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

SECURE AND SAFE IN THE BLUE STATES. A couple of weeks ago, bloggers and journalists suddenly discovered that, despite red state bellyaching about the dissipated morals of those who reside in more liberal climes, it was actually the red states that had higher rates of divorce. The home turf of the much-maligned Massachusetts liberals -- Massachusetts -- meanwhile had the lowest divorce rate in the country.

Now comes word that city-living in the blue state is also less likely to get you killed, raped, robbed, or otherwise molested or beat up. According to the annual report of Morgan Quitno, of the top 25 safest cities in America, 20 are located in blue states. Meanwhile, if it's city crime you want, the states that voted for Bush are the place to be. More than half -- 15 -- of the top 25 most crime-ridden cities in America were located in Bush country last year. Chardonnay sipping -- and merlot growing -- Simi Valley, Ca., was among the safest, while beer-drinking, BBQ-eating Memphis, Tenn., was among the most dangerous. This was a pattern that pretty much held at each of the different levels of city size they studied, though it was more apparent among the smaller cities.

Half of the top 10 safest cities with more than 500,000 residents were in blue states, while six of the top 10 most crime-ridden large cities were in the red states. All 10 of the 10 safest cities with populations between 100,000 and 499,000 were in blue states, while eight out of 10 of the most dangerous cities with populations that size were in red states. Nine out of 10 of the safest cities with between 75,000 and 99,000 residents were in blue states, while six out of 10 of the most dangerous of these smaller cities were in red states.

Now, things get really interesting when you figure that a lot of these dangerous red state cities are a) among the most concentrated bases of Democratic support in the red states where they're located and b) have substantial minority populations. Part of this is simply an artifact of the fact that most cities, regardless of location, are strongholds for Democrats, from super-safe Austin, TX, to super-dangerous Cleveland, Ohio, and also of the fact that, in the industrial mid-west at least, minorities tend to be more likely to live in cities than in the 'burbs.

But it also raises some interesting questions about cause and effect. For example, does it fuel the growth of new (Republican-leaning) suburbs and exurbs when neighboring cities are perceived as too dangerous to live in? In Ohio, where Cleveland, Dayton, Cincinnati, Columbus, and Youngstown all made the most dangerous lists this year, most of the big cities lost residents between 1990 and 2000, according to Census figures released in 2001, while the Republican counties grew very rapidly. Similarly, what are the complex racial issues at play in some of these states (in, for example, Mississippi, where Jackson ranks in the top 25 most dangerous) -- and how do these impact changing demographic distributions between cities and suburbs? And what is the relationship between the desire for order of those in the red-state 'burbs and the problems and limitations of the red-state cities?

As we know, the relationship between virtue and vice is often one of reaction. There's a great line in Tom Waits' "Heartattack and Vine" that goes "Don't you know there ain't no devil, there's just God when he's drunk." I often recall this lyric when exploring the more blighted areas of D.C., this year No. 6 on the most dangerous cities list and wedged between a Southern red state and a Northern blue one. The more run-down neighborhoods here tend to have a very high concentration of both churches and liquor stores (God and God when he's drunk), while the more prosperous neighborhoods have cafes and shops and other amenities that allow for the flourishing of a dynamic secular civil society and commerce. What that means is that, in the less economically developed sectors of the city, the lure of destruction and the promise of salvation fight it out on territory that's more barren, making the contrast between the saved and the damned more vivid, and the options between the two fewer.

I wonder if this dynamic is not also at work in the red states. A lot of folks on the left (and center-left) have enjoyed pointing out the hypocrisy of high-divorce-rate communities voting on conservative values issues, but it actually makes a lot of sense. If you live in a community with a low divorce rate, marriage is not likely to seem like an institution you need to worry about. But if you live somewhere where it seems hard for people to stay together and there's a higher divorce rate, it can feel like the whole society is melting, especially if you've been raised to believe that there is a natural, God-given social order that should involve stable marriages. In such an environment, people can end up desperately craving some kind of outside force to reimpose social structures that once were held up by people's beliefs. Similarly, a single porn store in Manhattan's Greenwich Village isn't going to have a huge community impact -- though it is likely to be opposed by local community groups there with as much vigor as in Oklahoma -- but if located in a suburb or exburb that lacks the Village's dynamic secular civil society and plethora of other commercial activities, it's likely to stand out like a sore thumb.

All of which is just to say that the relationship between fundamentalism and perceived social disorder is a symbiotic one, and that the new crime statistics add another important data point to the picture.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

WHAT MANDATE? This New York Times poll reflects what's been obvious ever since the election, which is that far from having "the will of the people" at his back, President Bush does not enjoy majority support for almost any aspect of his once sotto voce, now fully-unveiled domestic policy agenda.

Mandate? Mandate? As Inigo Montoya once remarked, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

It's worth pointing out, however, one finding of the Times poll which the Democrats should pay attention to:

The poll also found pervasive concern about what Americans view as the corrosive effect Hollywood and popular culture have on the nation's values and moral standards. Seventy percent said they were very or somewhat concerned that television, movies and popular music were lowering moral standards in this country. While this sentiment was voiced by supporters of Mr. Bush and of Mr. Kerry, it appears that the concern about a decline in values is becoming another point of polarization in American politics. Mr. Bush's supporters were more likely to cite it than were Mr. Kerry's voters, and it was an issue that had particular resonance in the South and among weekly churchgoers, rural voters and women.

This doesn't strike me as a polarization problem. This strikes me as a real problem that lots of Americans are concerned about, and for good reason. Some liberals (and some libertarian types) like to mock people who get riled up about Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson's weird boob flash/mock assault routine at this year's Super Bowl. They're the same people who mocked Bill Clinton's v-chip proposal and Joe Leiberman's complaints about Hollywood violence. But I think Clinton and Leiberman understood something their critics do not -- and more Democrats ought to, if they want to be a majority party again.

--Nick Confessore

EARLE RESPONDS. Various cronies and colleagues of Rep. Tom DeLay have had a merry old time slinging mud in the direction of Ronnie Earle, the well-regarded Texas prosecutor who may or may not bring an indictment against DeLay, thus behooving the congressman's friends to paint Earle as some kind of partisan nutjob. What's been especially hilarious about this campaign is the up-is-down quality of it all, wherein Earle, not DeLay, is guilty of abusing his power, and the DeLay Rule is a tightening of accountability rather than a loosening of it.

The Democrats have been rather slow to defend Earle, not that he should need defending. But at any rate, here's a pretty good op-ed by the guy, in today's New York Times. The key bit:

The thinly veiled personal attacks on me by Mr. DeLay's supporters in this case are no different from those in the cases of any of the 15 elected officials this office has prosecuted in my 27-year tenure. Most of these officials -- 12 Democrats and three Republicans -- have accused me of having political motives. What else are they going to say?

For most of my tenure the Democrats held the power in state government. Now Republicans do. Most crimes by elected officials involve the abuse of power; you have to have power before you can abuse it.

There is no limit to what you can do if you have the power to change the rules. Congress may make its own rules, but the public makes the rule of law, and depends for its peace on the enforcement of the law. Hypocrisy at the highest levels of government is toxic to the moral fiber that holds our communities together.

The open contempt for moral values by our elected officials has a corrosive effect. It is a sad day for law enforcement when Congress offers such poor leadership on moral values and ethical behavior. We are a moral people, and the first lesson of democracy is not to hold the public in contempt.

Well said. Is it a lesson the congressional GOP is going to learn?

--Nick Confessore

THE NEW DOVES. Yesterday's Boston Globe reported on the new trend in Iraq hawkery toward arguing that we need to start cutting our force levels in Iraq. In part, this is a simple concession toward reality. Whatever the Platonic ideal of the right level of troops is, it's pretty clearly not what we have. Advocates of the "more troops" position think we ought to put significantly more forces in place than actually exist, so despite its prominence in the discourse, this meme has pretty limited applicability. That leaves you with trying to declare victory and go home -- presumably after the January elections.

On another level, though, as Jim Henley says this is "a dark lining wrapped in a silver cloud." The main task facing people who would like to see regime change in Teheran (or Damascus or wherever) at this point is that the problems in Iraq have created a lot of (perfectly warranted) skepticism about the feasibility and desirability of further ventures. Re-writing the history of the Iraq campaign so that the problem turns out to be that we went in with too many troops (rather than that, say, the war was sold with a non-factual rationale and the postwar planning conducted according to ideological rather than empirical criteria) lays the groundwork for the idea that the next war will be quick and easy, rather than "another Iraq."

--Matthew Yglesias

BIG MANDATE. In case there are any bewildered Democrats still left out there laboring under the impression that presidential campaigns are about issues, the latest New York Times national opinion poll should, finally, nail the coffin shut on that adorabe notion. I’m having massive technical trouble trying to access the full results, but in the meantime here are some highlights and analysis by Adam Nagourney:

While Democrats, not surprisingly, were the staunchest opponents of many elements of Mr. Bush's second-term agenda, the concerns extended across party lines in some cases. Nearly two-thirds of all respondents - including 51 percent of Republicans - said it was more important to reduce deficits than to cut taxes, a central element of Mr. Bush's economic agenda.

…

The poll reflected the electoral feat of the Bush campaign this year. He won despite the fact that Americans disapproved of his handling of the economy, foreign affairs and the war in Iraq. There has been a slight increase in the number of Americans who believe the nation should never have gone into Iraq. A majority of Americans continue to believe the country is going in the wrong direction, traditionally a warning sign for an incumbent.

…

The public appears ambivalent about the two proposals that Mr. Bush has identified as his major domestic initiatives for a second term: rewriting the Social Security system and reshaping the tax code, including more tax cuts.

On the tax code, administration officials are discussing plans that would, among other things, lower the tax rate on higher-income Americans and eliminate some deductions. In the poll, more than 6 in 10 of the respondents said people with higher incomes should pay a greater proportion of their income in taxes; 3 in 10 said all income groups should pay the same proportion.

About one-third of the respondents said the tax cuts passed in Mr. Bush's first term had been good for the economy; but nearly a fifth said they had done more harm, and just under half said the tax cuts had made little difference.

The discerning public is split 45-49 in supporting some kind of Social Security privatization scheme, though there’s no word yet on whether the latest news that the administration openly touts magic as the financing plan of choice will increase or decrease the public’s approval of the idea.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: OBJECTION OVERRULED. For the last three years, Alberto Gonzales has served as one of the leading proponents in George Bush’s inner circle of a radical interpretation of presidential powers in times of war. It’s an approach that has met with sound rejection in the court of law and the court of public opinion. Before Gonzales becomes the next attorney general, Deborah Pearlstein argues, it’s up to the Senate to determine if he still harbors such a vision.

--Sam Rosenfeld

“THE JEWISH JOHN EDWARDS.” Think the Dems won’t have many players coming off the bench in a few years? Well think again, says Ben McGrath, whose amusing Talk of Town piece in this week’s New Yorker identifies, of all places, the New York City Council as a likely breeding ground for future Democratic leaders. Some of the more ambitious council members, it would seem, are using their precincts as laboratories for inventive social policy experiments.

One emerging star, Councilman David Yassky of Brooklyn, was already cited by the DLC as someone to monitor. Writes McGrath:

David Yassky, whom the D.L.C. recently named “New Dem of the Week,” is rumored to be preparing a run for District Attorney. But in the near term Yassky, a sort of Jewish John Edwards, with glasses, has a few policy plans to audition locally…

The New Yorker piece skimps on the details of Yassky’s policy plans, but in the DLC's "New Dem of the Week” profile of Yassky, we are offered a glimpse into his innovative solution to overcoming an under-appreciated language barrier faced by immigrant parents and their American educated children.

Last month…Yassky announced the introduction of The Educational Equity Act. The legislation would require all Department of Education (DOE) Schools to provide timely interpretation services for parents or guardians with limited English proficiency at parent-teacher conferences, PTA gatherings, and other meetings between DOE employees and parents. It would also require the translation of all notices and report cards sent to parents. The program would translate those documents and events into the nine most commonly spoken languages among parents with limited English skills.

Translating school work so that non-English speaking parents may monitor their child’s progress seems right on the money. Incidentally, if you click on the DLC’s link, you will find a photo of Yassky, who appears to be separated at birth from John Edwards. The similarities are actually pretty startling.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

THE PROVERBIAL SHOT ACROSS THE BOW At the end of last week, the Republican majority made its first move, tucking an anti-abortion measure into a "must-pass" omnibus spending bill. From the Times piece:

The abortion language would bar federal, state and local agencies from withholding taxpayer money from health care providers that refuse to provide or pay for abortions or refuse to offer abortion counseling or referrals. Current federal law, aimed at protecting Roman Catholic doctors, provides such "conscience protection'' to doctors who do not want to undergo abortion training. The new language would expand that protection to all health care providers, including hospitals, doctors, clinics and insurers.

The bill is, disingenously, titled the "Abortion Non-Discrimination Act." Which sounds nice. But actually it means that poor women will likely be discriminated against as, according to Planned Parenthood, "this bill is not limited to the performance of abortion. It allows heath care entities to refuse to provide information about abortion to pregnant women." (emphasis mine.) Despite complaints from Democrats like Dianne Feinstein and eight other (female, naturally) Senators, and despite the total lack of debate on the issue, this bill is likely to pass. Holding it up would cause a partial government shut-down.

--Sarah Wildman

THE REJECTORS Don’t miss Fareed Zakaria's op-ed today on the State Department's misguided visa policy. Zakaria fears that embassy workers' knee-jerk response to visa applicants may do more harm than good.

I understand the need for greater scrutiny after Sept. 11. But it has given already cautious bureaucracies a new rule: "When in doubt, deny the application." Every visa officer today lives in fear that he will let in the next Mohamed Atta. As a result, he is probably keeping out the next Bill Gates.

A little while back, Steve Clemons weighed in on Visa policy in an intriguing, and well researched Op-Ed that appeared in the New York Times in March.

Even if their applications are rejected, citizens of developing nations must pay $100 for a non-immigrant visa to the United States. Not only is this policy unfair and counterproductive, but it is also unpatriotic.

The unfairness is obvious: people should not be charged for something -- in this case, a visa to the United States -- that they do not receive. And $100 is a huge sum in nations like India, with an annual per capita income estimated at $2,600 in 2002, or even Poland, where it is $9,700.

The State Department says these higher fees -- increased from $65 in November 2002 -- help pay for the cost of running America's consular service around the world. It's true that heightened security measures adopted in the wake of 9/11 cost more money. But rejected visa applicants should not have to pay for them. It's also true that the higher fees have produced more revenue. But they have discouraged visitors.

As it turns out, these fees actualy help to defray quite a significant portion of the costs of the State Department's Consular operations. As Clemons pointed out at the time, this is rather akin to a small town police department dependent on speeding traps to fund itself. Not exactly the best way to improve America's image abroad.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THAT NEW-TIME RELIGION. Prospect columnist Tony Hendra got his hands on a top secret DNC memo from Terry McAuliffe assessing the political landscape and suggesting where the Dems should go from here. His answer: Make piece with “Evangelico-Baptist premillenialist fundamentalism” and start coining some winning slogans. Maybe “moderate intolerance” or “progressive prejudice” would do the trick?

--Sam Rosenfeld

ANOTHER CRACK AT BUILDING A SPOILS SYSTEM. Close analyses of the omnibus budget bill will no doubt be coming out all week (here’s an early one solely devoted to the shortfall in the measure’s coverage of low-income home heating bills, while here’s a handy list of the top twenty pork projects that made it onto this “lean and clean” bill), but two provisions stripped out of the package are worth mentioning.

First, there was the umpteenth congressional measure overturning the anti-labor components of the president’s new overtime regulations. The stripped provision marked, I believe, the sixth time that such legislation has passed in a floor vote in either the House or the Senate, only to be killed in conference. Preserving the overtime rules has been the great cause of Senator Tom Harkin in the last few years; his struggle has been Sisyphean. Here’s his statement on the latest (and final?) setback.

Meanwhile, a more obscure measure was taken out of the final omnibus bill that could prove to be pretty significant -- an amendment authored by Rep. Chris Van Hollen that would have prevented government agencies from using the White House’s 2003 revision of the so-called “A-76 circular,” which contains the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidelines for opening government services up for competitive bidding.

The A-76 revision is the central pillar of the White House’s “competitive sourcing” initiative, which is meant to accelerate the pace and expand the reach of privatization efforts in the civil service. You may recall this got some attention two years ago when Mitch Daniels announced plans to open up 850,000 civil service jobs to competitive bidding and commentators like Paul Krugman wrote of the new spoils system in government.

Since that announcement, there has been a fierce struggle over the initiative carried out entirely under the press radar between the civil service unions and their allies in congress (not only Democrats) and the administration. Thus far the unions and allies have in fact had real success in slowing the entire process down -- but with a slightly strengthened conservative hand in Congress and an emboldened White House, the next term might be a different story. (This election-eve Washington Post piece gives a nice synopsis of the battle as it’s played out thus far.)

The stakes here are pretty clear. Obviously Bush’s initiative, if carried through without obstruction, promises to accomplish three things at once: produce a windfall for the GOP-contributing private firms bidding for the work, open up new opportunities for tainting data collection and analysis in various government agencies by outsourcing those duties to politically-aligned private companies, and, most importantly, cripple the loyally Democratic civil service unions.

Civil service reform isn’t the sexiest story in the world, but it’s important -- and this is a fight that will be unfolding over the next few years.

--Sam Rosenfeld

FIGHTING COUNTERFEITING. This story from Medil News Services about laser color printing companies working with law enforcement to combat counterfeiting provides an interesting insight into the ways in which private companies cooperate with federal law enforcement to combat organized crime.

The article explains that color laser printers actually encode each printers’ serial number on each printed document. The encoding is invisible to the naked eye and can only be viewed under a certain light and with a powerful magnifying glass. For the Secret Service (the federal agency charged with combating counterfeiting) the ability to read a printers’ serial number on seized counterfeit currency is crucial to tracking down the source of the counterfeits. With the serial number, law enforcement can trace the machine from its manufacture to the individual store in which it was sold, and sometimes even to the individual who bought the machine.

A little while back I interned for the International Criminal Police Organization – Interpol -- and a federal agent second to its General Secretariat told me an interesting story about how in fact, the US government effectively strong armed major laser printer manufacturers into encoding each printers’ serial number into each document. According to the agent, some laser printer manufacturers were at first reluctant to include the encoded serial numbers. Faced with feet dragging by some of these companies, the government threatened to award massive government contracts to competitors who would agree to install the encoding devices on all of their equipment. Naturally, faced with loosing multi-million dollar contracts the major companies acquiesced and now, virtually every document printed on a color laser printer is encoded.

Though some privacy rights groups might be wary of such encoding, I tend to believe that law enforcement needs trump privacy concerns in this case and the law enforcement-laser printer manufacturer alliance is actually fairly good example of an industry living up to its social (in this case crime-fighting) responsibilities.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: WILL OF THE PEOPLE? The old complaint used to be that liberals advanced policies through the courts because the policies weren't popular enough to pass through the legislative system. But who needs courts, Michael Tomasky asks, when Republicans can ram patently unpopular measures through the legislative process itself?

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: MORALS OF THE ELECTION. Leading up to November 2, many said that this was the most important election of their lives -- and they were right. The consolidation of Republican political control is likely to be more far-reaching than many realize at the moment, Paul Starr argues. To begin the task of rebuilding a real majority, Democrats must now face squarely some difficult choices about which issues are worth standing on principle for, and which aren't.

--Sam Rosenfeld

OMNIBUSTIN'. Today Josh Marshall excerpts a passage on the conference process from the Boston Globe’s invaluable series on the GOP’s legislative dictatorship; it's an appropriate day to do so. Year-round, the conference process has become a primary tool by which the Republican leadership can slip in measures and legislation that were neither voted on nor discussed on the House or Senate floors (or even sometimes within the relevant committees), but it never serves as a more powerful anti-deliberation, dissent-crushing weapon than during the drafting of the gigantic end-of-the-year omnibus appropriations packages.

Omnibus spending measures combine all thirteen appropriations bills and cannot be filibustered. They’re massive, phone-book-like packages drafted behind closed doors by the congressional leadership and appropriations committee chairs, and dumped on the desks of rank-and-file legislators mere hours before being put to a vote. Ronald Reagan pioneered the modern use of the omnibus bill to get his first tax cut and other measures through congress, and Bill Clinton perfected the use of the omnibus in the 1990s. The Republicans know a good thing when they see it. This is the third straight year in a row they’ve passed their budgets through an omnibus bill. (My boss Mike Tomasky explores some of the darker crevasses in this year's omnibus monster here.)

This weekend, when legislators were asked to comment on the Orwellian tax record provision Ernest Istook snuck into the bill, legislators tried to emphasize the perils of the omnibus process itself -- which is the broader story and the crucial context for understanding how Istook's measure popped up. Kent Conrad put it simply:

Conrad said the measure's presence in the spending bill was symptomatic of a broader problem: Congress writing legislation hundreds of pages long and then giving lawmakers only a few hours to review it before having to vote on it.

The frenzied manner by which these things are cobbled together in the last minute makes one wonder about the legislative system an advanced state like the U.S. employs. As Congressional Quarterly (subscription only) reports:

There was also plenty of evidence of the haste in which the omnibus was assembled, including handwritten cross-outs, numbers and notes. Language sought by Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., to establish a veterans’ memorial in Mt. Soledad Natural Park in San Diego bore the name and fax number of Jim Dyer, House Appropriations Committee staff director, while language to establish the Oil Region National Heritage Area in northwestern Pennsylvania was obviously downloaded from the Internet, printed and inserted into the bill.

Ah, the majesty of the American Congress.

--Sam Rosenfeld

MORE ON MOSUL II. The wires are reporting that the former police chief of Mosul, one Brig. Gen. Mohammed Kheiri Barhawi, was arrested by Kurdish militia when he fled the city in the wake of last weeks uprising. According to press reports, Barhawi was arrested after allegations that Sunni insurgents had him on their payroll.

Interestingly, Peter Galbraith gathered as much when he visited the city last month. On the pages of this month’s Prospect Galbraith mentions as an aside:

The police and, according to some Iraqis, the U.S.-appointed police chief [of Mosul] cooperate with insurgents. They help set up kidnappings and roadside bombings by alerting insurgents when a kidnapping target, or a U.S. convoy, rolls by a police checkpoint. And they look the other way when armed insurgents pass through the checkpoints.

As Matt suggested earlier, there is an emerging chicken-and-egg scenario in deciding whether or not this kind of sectarian violence in Mosul (that is, a Sunni police chief aiding Sunni insurgent attacks against the Kurdish-American alliance, while the Kurds with their superior firepower expand their control throughout the Ninevah province) signals a precipitating civil war, or is evidence of a civil war already in progress.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

REFORM PARTY. I should add that in addition to passing legislation allowing Congress to look at anyone's tax return, revoking a rule that kept Republican members indicted for a criminal offense from having to relenquish a leadership post, buying President Bush a boat, killing intelligence reform (these examples courtesy of Kevin Drum), increasing the amount of pork in appropriations bills by two orders of magnitude, and cracking down on the OECD for cracking down on tax cheats, (courtesy of my colleague Matt Yglesias), Republicans in Congress are also trying to outlaw TiVo.

Yes -- you read that correctly.

If the Democrats can't figure out that their best hope of reassuming leadership in Washington is to position themselves -- substantively, politically, and rhetorically -- as the party of reform, they deserve to be in the minority.

UPDATE: Reader M.B. notes:

Your blog entry on TiVo only scratches the surface of this invidiousness. What good is a law preventing you from fast-forwarding through commercials, unless there's a way to check whether you're doing it? I mean, it's not like cops are going to peek through your windows to see if you're fast-forwarding. So the real dangerous part of this slippery slope is that it has to be followed by another law giving either law enforcement or -- worse -- industry executives access to information about what you watch. What's next? Laws that make it illegal to skip pages in a book? To read a newspaper without looking at the ads? To block pop-ups on the Internet?

I thought conservatives were the ones who wanted to keep government OUT of our lives.

Good point.

--Nick Confessore

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: AN UNCERTAIN TRUMPET. Don't believe the "mandate" hype: this election did not amount to a determined rejection of liberalism by the American people. But the Democrats' problems -- particularly their inability to articulate a forceful defense of their own principles -- are very real, and demand attention. Robert Kuttner explains.

--Sam Rosenfeld

HOW LOGICAL! Shorter David Brooks: The fact that House Republicans changed their party rule on indictments in order to protect Tom DeLay is obviously evidence that DeLay is losing power. Had Brooks read this Newsweek article reporting that DeLay’s fellow House Republicans have contributed more than $200,000 to The Hammer’s legal defense fund, he could have included it in his column as Exhibit C: “When the caucus had managed collectively to transfer enough campaign contributions into DeLay’s legal fund to pass the 200 grand mark, one got the sense that some imperceptible shift in the Republicans’ psyche had just taken place. They happily threw gobs of money at their leader so he could pay off his mounting legal bills, but somewhere deep inside they were troubled about it. It is now clear that DeLay’s days are numbered.”

Brooks puts a lot of stake in House Republicans remembering their “core values” and reviving the “reformist ideal,” and thinks that the leadership that has emerged around DeLay -- Speaker Dennis Hastert, the whip, Roy Blunt, and his deputy, Eric Cantor -- is both effective and honorable, and will outlive DeLay. Brooks touts Cantor as a “rising star,” which is true, though exactly how Cantor represents the “reformist ideal” that Brooks waxes poetic about, he doesn’t say. It should be recalled that nobody has been more outspoken, or outrageous, in their statements defending the DeLay rule change than Cantor. If, deep inside, the Virginia congressman harbors the "core values" of the anti-corruption, reformist GOP of yesteryear, he’s doing a bang-up job hiding them, and Brooks is even more of an omniscient diviner of hidden truths than I thought he was.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WOULD THEY EVEN REGISTER IF THEY COULD? Voter registration is underway for Iraq's January 30th election. To be expected, violence has stalled the registration drive throughout Iraq, and in the Sunni heartland, there is nary an election office to be found.

About 90 of more than 540 registration centers have been shut down because of violence or threats, said Carlos Valenzuela, the head of the United Nations electoral advisory team. The shuttered centers include all of those in Anbar Province, which includes the hostile cities of Falluja and Ramadi, and those in Ninevah Province, whose capital is Mosul, the country's third largest city and a strong base for the insurgency.

The two provinces are dominated by Sunni Arabs. American and Iraqi officials say a high Sunni voter turnout that leads to Sunni acceptance of the new government is the best hope for quelling the insurgency.

Remember, a stated reason to raid Falluja was to “break the back of the resistance” in order to prepare the region for January’s forthcoming elections. Assuming (and this is a very big assumption) that election offices eventually open in Falluja, Ramadi, and Mosul, signs are not all that encouraging that a critical number of Sunni’s will even want to register and participate in the elections. The elections are fast approaching, and unless the US can coax some sort of sea-change in popular Sunni attitudes towards the merits of resistance versus political participation, the costly operations in Falluja, and potential future operations in Mosul and elsewhere would have been a sad, sad waste.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

GET THE LINE RIGHT. Um, who can see what's wrong with the stated reaction of Democrat (and ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee) Jane Harman to the Republicans' scuttling of the intelligence reform bill? This one's easy:

"If there is another major terrorist attack on our soil -- and sadly, there will likely be one -- we will have only ourselves to blame. Congress had a chance to protect America, and Congress failed."

No, "we" are not to blame. "Congress" -- in the sense of the Democrats and Republicans that comprise the U.S. House of Representatives -- isn't to blame, either. House Republicans are to blame for this. If Harman wants to raise the stakes and invoke responsibility for future terrorist attacks, she might as well do it honestly, and effectively. The Democrats are shut out of effective power in the House -- it's not their institution anymore, and the actions of the House majority need to be identified as the actions of the House majority, and not bemoaned in a spirit of collective contrition, or some old-fashioned sense of shared institutional failure.

Nancy Pelosi gets it. Check out her statement on the intelligence reform breakdown:

House Republicans single-handedly doomed that compromise by insisting on weak and unrelated provisions. When the 9/11 Commission issued its recommendations, it did so with urgency. But that urgency was never matched by House Republicans, who did not want the 9/11 Commission in the first place, and who never truly wanted to pass a meaningful reform bill.

Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the White House, and the blame for this failure is theirs alone.

Here’s hoping she gets everyone else on the same page.

--Sam Rosenfeld

FAUX DISAPPOINTMENT. When assessing blame for House Republicans’ scuttling of the intelligence bill, it’s important not to get suckered into thinking that this all comes down to the intransigence of two powerful committee chairmen, Duncan Hunter and James Sensenbrenner. The president’s expressed "disappointment" needs to be considered in the context of his original foot-dragging on the matter of intelligence reform legislation (not to say his initial opposition to the 9/11 commission that inspired the reform bill) and of the lackadaisical quality of his recent intervention into the conference negotiation process.

One phone call to a congressman does not exactly amount to a robust demonstration of the power of the presidency. And it pales in comparison to the lobbying that Bush and co. routinely engage in when they’re really determined to pass something -- one recalls Tommy Thompson stalking the House floor last year, breaking longstanding protocol regarding cabinet-level officials lobbying in congressional chambers, in an effort to cajole reluctant congressmen into voting for the Medicare bill. As Sheryl Gay Stolberg puts it in the Times today, “[m]embers of both parties, and independent analysts, said Sunday that they had no doubt Congress would have passed the measure had President Bush flexed his muscle.” But with at least one of his top administration officials -- Donald Rumsfeld -- openly opposing the legislation and likely more officials quietly advising Bush on the matter, the president wasn’t about to flex his muscle. All he needed to do was let the bill die, then furrow his brow in concern.

Stolberg’s piece seems to indicate that the House GOP leadership's hearts weren't in this legislation, either. Even if Dennis Hastert and Tom DeLay had been strong personal supporters of the bill, however, their aversion to reaching out for Democratic support would apparently have trumped all other considerations. After all, the official reason offered by Hastert's spokesman for the Speaker's decision not to bring the bill to a vote is rather bracing in its open admission that the Democrats simply don't count to the GOP leadership, even when their votes would ensure the passage of a bill the leadership insists it supports:

In the House, the leadership probably could have cobbled together a coalition of Democrats and Republicans to muster the 218 votes necessary for passage.

"I am convinced that had the speaker brought the bill to the floor, it would have passed," Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and chief author of the measure, said in an interview on Sunday. "That's what's so frustrating. Here we have a bill that's been endorsed by the White House, by the 9/11 commission, by the 9/11 family groups, by the speaker of the House, and we can't get a vote."

But Mr. Hastert did not want to split his caucus and did not want the bill to pass with less than ''a majority of the majority," said his spokesman, John Feehery. "What good is it to pass something," Mr. Feehery said, "where most of our members don't like it?" [emphasis added]

Now that’s some bipartisanship for ya!

--Sam Rosenfeld

MORE ON MOSUL. Eric Umansky emails to point out that there is at least one western reporter in Mosul -- Thanassis Cambanis of The Boston Globe. His coverage is well worth a look and reveals that the Iraqi government, for all intents and purposes, does not exist:

It is not the police or the governor appointed by Baghdad who really runs Mosul, but rather, a constellation of groups -- insurgents and Arab nationalists on the west bank of the Tigris River, Kurdish political parties and militia on the east bank, and Turkomen in pockets throughout the city.

Never fear, though: Marine commanders promise that we've "broken the back of the insurgency" so everything will be okay.

--Matthew Yglesias

ABOLISH THE NEA? Jon Chait suggests that one way Democrats could appease cultural conservatives without taking positions that are wrong on the merits would be by taking up the old conservative cause of abolishing the National Endowment for the Arts. Kevin Drum's all for NEA abolition, but doesn't see any possibility for a political wedge -- Republicans would just agree and that would be that. I'm not so sure. Bush has given the NEA a boost in funding and caught grief from social conservatives for his trouble. There could be a real -- if smallish -- political opening here.

How about the substance? I just so happen to have a pet scheme on this topic: Abolish the NEA and eliminate the tax deductibility of charitable contributions to cultural institutions. Use the recouped funds to provide "culture vouchers" to all citizens on an equal basis that they can contribute to an institution of their choice. That would promote the arts, get the government out of the art criticism business, help democratize American culture, and -- by shifting the tax incentives -- divert a certain amount of charitable money away from elite institutions and toward charities that spend their money on helping poor people and other pressing concerns.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHEN YOU CAN'T CUT, CHEAT. Thanks to burgeoning deficits, it looks like the tax cuts a-go-go spirit of the past few years has come to an end. Nowadays, if you want to cut taxes on the rich, you need offsetting tax hikes on the middle class. But some Republican senators have found a better way: Just make it easier to cheat.

Senator Judd Gregg, incoming chairman of the Senate budget committee, has added language to the spending bill that would halt OECD funding unless the organisation stops pressing tax-haven countries in the Caribbean and elsewhere to share information on companies that may be attempting to evade taxes.

Ah, the party of patriotism. The party of law and order. How do we miss thee.

--Matthew Yglesias

CIVIL WAR IN MOSUL. In the wake of the attack on Fallujah, violence has spread to Iraq's third largest city, Mosul, a majority Sunni Arab northern city with a substantial Kurdish minority. The Associated Press reports on that front that "The U.S. military and Iraqi security forces have been stepping up their fight against the resistance in the northern Iraqi city." I've been told, however, that the "Iraqi security forces" in question are, in fact, Kurdish peshmerga units relabeled as Iraqi government troops. I can't find any word on that issue in the Western press, but it seems to be confirmed by KurdishMedia.com's reporting on the subject.

Meanwhile, the AP reports that the local constabulary -- largely Sunni Arab in composition -- has essentially vanished. "[F]our-fifths of the 4,000-strong police force have quit their posts" and "it is thought that insurgent sympathizers have infiltrated the police force and have been passing along sensitive information." Other reporting has stated more forthrightly that members of the Mosul police force simply went over to the insurgency during the initial attack; certainly none of Mosul's police stations offered any sort of effective resistance to the insurgency. The upshot is that civil war in Iraq is not just a possibility, but -- in Mosul at least -- a reality. You have an ethnically mixed city in which Sunnis Arabs are fighting against a combined Kurdish/American force. The distinction between "government" and "insurgent" is less relevant than the simple ethnic divide.

What's particularly interesting about this is that though the turn of events in Mosul seems to have gone entirely unpredicted by U.S. authorities it was, in fact, predictable. I have in my hands a hot-off-the-presses copy of the December Prospect featuring a Peter Galbraith article about Iraq that was written before fighting broke out in Mosul. (Check back on Monday for the full text.) Without the benefit of hindsight that the situation would collapse, this is what he had to say:

During an October visit to northern Iraq, I gained some insight into the situation in Mosul. Iraq's third largest city, Mosul is fast becoming a bigger version of Fallujah. Kidnappings, car bombings, beheadings, and assassinations are increasingly common, with the targets being the U.S. occupation forces, the representatives of the Iraqi interim government, and ethnic Kurds who inhabit the east side of the city. The insurgents include Arab nationalists, ex-army officers, and Sunni fundamentalists. The insurgents have created a de facto administration in Arab west Mosul, collecting "taxes" and imposing a rough justice. With the death penalty meted out for even relatively minor offenses (prostitution, a doctor ignoring a warning to lower his fees), there are shades of the Taliban.

The police and, according to some Iraqis, the U.S.-appointed police chief cooperate with insurgents. They help set up kidnappings and roadside bombings by alerting insurgents when a kidnapping target, or a U.S. convoy, rolls by a police checkpoint. And they look the other way when armed insurgents pass through the checkpoints.

If a single well-informed individual could visit the city and gain these insights into the looming problems -- most notably, with the police force -- then why can't the U.S. government? Whether our lack of preparation stemmed from genuine ignorance or a simple disinclination to listen to pessimistic reports, it doesn't bode well for our efforts there that the policymakers in Washington seem to have such a dim grasp of what's taking place on the ground. Galbraith just happened to mention Mosul in an article that's really on a rather different subject. Who knows what other unknown trouble spots are lurking out there?

--Matthew Yglesias

THE IRRATIONAL VOTER. If you haven't read it already and are still up for reading election post-mortems, I'd highly recommend reading Christopher Hayes' TNR Online piece "Decision Makers" posted earlier in the week. Hayes, a freelance writer from Chicago, spent seven weeks trying to sway undecided voters for Kerry in Wisconsin and came up with some startling -- and insightful -- conclusions about the electorate based on his experience. I can't do justice to his observations in a summary so I'll just urge you, again, to read the whole thing. There's been a lot of discussion in Democratic circles about the need to build an intellectual and opinion-promoting infrastructure to rival the conservative one. Hayes' piece makes me think that what the left and the Democrats really need, though, is less punditry and more sociology. For a group of people who claim to be reality-based, I often find the Dems startlingly out-of-touch with the way real people think about issues and too willing to rely on shop-worn formulations promoted by various interest groups that are inadequately descriptive of present realities.

This issue of abortion, in particular, is one where Democratic rhetoric often loses touch with the complexity of reality. My colleague Sarah Blustain has written a gutsy and sympathetic piece on this issue for the December issue of the Prospect. It's not online yet but will be soon, and I hope very much that there will be more pieces like hers and Hayes' to come in many publications. People vote on things as they are, not only on the simple formulations developed for lobbying puposes or legal campaigns (though, of course, these help frame how people look at things as they are). And polling provides only the shallowest form of knowledge in terms of what people value.

This is not to argue that Democratic rhetoric ought to be more complex -- far from it -- only that the leadership of the out-of-power 49 percent could fruitfully spend a few years trying to figure out how people actually talk and think about issues, and not just how they'll rank them on polls.

I've heard it asked before why the left has not produced a David Brooks-like figure, a popular sociologist of contemporary America with a light-handed, ideological flair. It's a question worth asking again.

--Garance Franke-Ruta