John Cassidy's Blog, page 67

Good News on Syria: Bombs Aren’t Dropping and the Neocons Are Mad at Obama Again

At the end of a dizzying week that began with President Obama facing the likelihood of defeat in Congress on a resolution to authorize the use of force in Syria and John Kerry shuttling around in a largely futile effort to drum up international support, what can be said?

For one thing, the sight of Obama and Bashar al-Assad clambering aboard the life raft that Vladimir Putin floated out to rescue them isn’t the worst possible outcome. That would have been the Pentagon reluctantly unleashing a military attack on Syria, with hardly any public or political support, to preserve the credibility of a President whose loose talk about “red lines” and “game changers” had gotten him into a pickle.

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The Saliency Bias and 9/11: Is America Recovering?

I doubt I was the only one who switched off the television coverage of the memorial ceremony at Ground Zero on Wednesday morning. I didn’t do it because I don’t care about the victims or the remembrance of what happened—I care too much. Just before the south tower collapsed, I was standing on the corner of Greenwich and Warren Streets, watching tiny figures leap from the top floors of the burning buildings. It was the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen, and if I think about it, which I inevitably do when I watch the families reading the names of the victims, I can’t think about anything else, not clearly, anyway, because I get too upset.

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Why I Voted For Bill de Blasio

This morning, I went around the corner and voted for Bill de Blasio in the Democratic mayoral primary. At the last moment, I almost changed my mind and switched to Bill Thompson, an experienced and likable fellow who doesn’t get nearly enough credit for running Mike Bloomberg close in 2009, and who, along with Christine Quinn, is trying to keep de Blasio, the frontrunner, below forty per cent, forcing a runoff. But in the end I stuck with de Blasio, and here is why. My reasoning will initially seem a bit far removed from what’s happening in New York, but bear with me.

Years ago, when Tony Blair was fresh in Downing Street, I asked one of New Labour’s top economic advisers why the Blair government, which took over in 1997, was so intent on establishing a reputation as fiscally responsible and socially moderate. “Ruling from the left is not an option,” he said, or words to that effect. “You have to establish credibility with the markets and with the public. Then, but only then, you can do some progressive things.” Some years later, I interviewed a well-known Democrat who served under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and during a discussion of the Obama Administration’s response to the 2008 financial crisis he said something strikingly similar to what I had heard in London. “You cannot rule from the left. Look what happened to Mitterand and Schröder.” (Elected to the Élysée in 1981, the French Socialist introduced a sweeping package of economic reforms, only to reverse course two years later. Chancellor Schröder’s U-turn wasn’t as stark, but during the second half of his term, which ran from 1998 to 2005, he swung to the right, trimming welfare benefits and relaxing Germany’s tight labor laws.)

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Will Kerry’s Loose Lips Save Obama?

John Kerry is in trouble again. At a press conference in London on Monday, Kerry said that if the Obama Administration went ahead with air strikes designed to degrade the Syrian military and prevent it from using chemical weapons in the future, it would be an “unbelievably small, limited kind of effort”—inadvertently undermining the rationale for any action at all. On this side of the Atlantic, supporters of military action, most of whom want the attack to be big enough to give Bashar al-Assad pause, reacted with dismay. “I don’t understand what he means by that,” Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican who heads the House Intelligence Committee, said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “This is part of the problem. That’s a very confusing message.”

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The “Real” Unemployment Rate Is 9.7 Per Cent

The official jobs figures for August have focussed attention on an issue that labor-market experts have been puzzling over for years: the decline in the proportion of Americans who are working or actively looking for work. Last month, the labor force participation rate dropped to 63.2 per cent, its lowest level in thirty-five years. That’s pretty remarkable, especially for an economy that is supposedly in its fifth year of recovery. (According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Great Recession, ended in the spring of 2009.)

In the usual scheme of things, many people drop out of the labor force during recessions because jobs are scarce and they lose hope of finding employment. But once the economy picks up, they start sending out résumés, and the participation rate gradually picks up. (For the Labor Department to count someone as being in the labor force, he or she has to have been working or actively looking for work during the month prior to the date of the government’s monthly employment survey.) This recovery is different. In August, 2008, just before Lehman Brothers blew up, the participation rate was 66.1 per cent. Five years later, it’s still almost three percentage points lower than it was then.

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Has Christine Quinn Missed New York’s Liberal Moment?

Toward the end of the Democratic mayoral debate the other night, the last one before next week’s primary, New Yorkers got a glimpse of the real Christine Quinn. For much of the summer, Quinn, the City Council leader, has campaigned as if she were trying out for Meryl Streep’s role in “The Iron Lady,” the movie about Margaret Thatcher. Her clothes are conservatively cut. Her red hair is so carefully lacquered it looks like a helmet. Her native Long Island accent is held in check, the long “aws” carefully trimmed to “o”s. But finally she let her guard down, and her Irish out.

The question was about her reputation as a hothead who shouts so loudly at staff members and other officials that she was prevailed upon to have her office soundproofed. Quinn smiled broadly, something she hasn’t done much lately. “Look, I’m tough,” she began. “And when I see a solution that could help New Yorkers and it doesn’t materialize, I sometimes get angry.” Rather than apologizing for her belligerence, she as much as promised that if she becomes mayor she will continue to yell and scream. “You can’t take no for an answer,” she said. “You’ve gotta push to get things done … You don’t want a mayor who is a pushover. You don’t want a mayor who is indecisive.”

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Onward Into Syria, Blindly

Four days on and President Obama’s gambit of going to Congress for approval of military action in Syria is working out pretty well for him. Senator John McCain, his opponent in the 2008 campaign, is standing shoulder to shoulder with him. Secretary of State John Kerry is busy making allusions to Munich, and the skeptics in the Pentagon are keeping their doubts to themselves. The pro-bombing side is clearly on top. Ranged against it, an unlikely alliance of Tea Party Republicans, liberal Democrats, and war-weary moderates is making little progress.

But while the war party may have the votes, the skeptics still have the stronger arguments. A President who for years has been adumbrating the dangers of getting involved in a messy civil war in Syria is now leading the United States precisely in that direction. With precious little support from the American public—and without a justification rooted in international law—the Administration is about to launch a military strike on yet another Middle Eastern country with no clear goals or end game in sight. All we know for sure is that once the bombs start exploding in Syria, the United States will be inextricably tied to what happens there. That’s why McCain and other interventionists are supporting the President: they have been trying to drag him into this fight since the beginning.

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Onward into Syria, Blindly

Four days on and President Obama’s gambit of going to Congress for approval of military action in Syria is working out pretty well for him. Senator John McCain, his opponent in the 2008 campaign, is standing shoulder to shoulder with him. Secretary of State John Kerry is busy making allusions to Munich, and the skeptics in the Pentagon are keeping their doubts to themselves. The pro-bombing side is clearly on top. Ranged against it, an unlikely alliance of Tea Party Republicans, liberal Democrats, and war-weary moderates is making little progress.

But while the war party may have the votes, the skeptics still have the stronger arguments. A President who for years has been adumbrating the dangers of getting involved in a messy civil war in Syria is now leading the United States precisely in that direction. With precious little support from the American public—and without a justification rooted in international law—the Administration is about to launch a military strike on yet another Middle Eastern country with no clear goals or end game in sight. All we know for sure is that once the bombs start exploding in Syria, the United States will be inextricably tied to what happens there. That’s why McCain and other interventionists are supporting the President: they have been trying to drag him into this fight since the beginning.

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Ronald Coase and the Misuse of Economics

This is a story about the history of economics, mischief-making, and, ultimately, political power. It concerns the economist Ronald Coase, who died on Monday at the grand old age of a hundred and two.

During his lifetime, Coase, who was born in London’s Willesden neighborhood and educated in England before moving to America in 1951, was transformed into an icon of the political right. His famous “Coase theorem” was used to justify a hands-off approach to big business on the part of politicians, regulatory agencies, and judges, leaving pollution and other economic problems to the corrective powers of the free market. During the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties, when the Chicago School of economics was sweeping everything before it in Washington and in the nation’s courts, Coase’s work proved immensely influential. In 1991, the Swedes awarded him a Nobel Prize in Economics, just one of many honors he received.

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Has Obama Forgotten General Dempsey’s Warnings?

Summoning up all the enthusiasm of a middle-aged man approaching his annual prostate examination, President Obama has signalled that he is preparing to order the Pentagon to bomb Syria. If the President is indeed as wary of the upcoming military operation as he looks, it would hardly be surprising. His top military adviser, General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also harbors serious doubts about the wisdom of engaging U.S. forces in Syria.

Last month, Senator Carl Levin, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, asked Dempsey, a sixty-one-year-old Army man who commanded U.S. forces in Baghdad in 2003 and 2004, to provide him with an unclassified list of options for the potential use of U.S. military force in Syria. Dempsey responded with a letter, which, he said, contained “my independent judgment with as much openness as this classification allows.”

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