Syria Vote (2)

I have just spent almost two hours listening to highlight segments of the Sunday talk shows. The discussions have been animated, boisterous even, and with less predictable ideological commentary than usual. Here's what I take to be the summary right now:

• The President will win the vote in the Senate, but lose in the House. Liberal Democrats will link with libertarian and Tea Party Republicans to effect the defeat.
• This would be the first time a President has asked for authorization for the use of military force and been turned down by Congress.
• If the vote is defeated, Obama will be crippled domestically, and the US' credibility will be seriously damaged on the world stage, especially vis a vis Iran.
• A good many were baffled by why the President chose to go to Congress, when he could have struck without seeking authorization, and it was obvious he would lose the vote. No one suggested that he might have done this because he felt it was simply the right thing to do; passing the buck to Congress, to remove the decision from his shoulders, was the favored explanation. Almost everyone agreed that this course change represented the President "blinking", showing himself to be indecisive.

So what will happen? The President will put on a full court press this week, including a Tuesday evening speech. Israel, through its lobbying group, AIPAC, is going to flood Congress with 250 lobbyists to talk to every single member of Congress to let them know this is a crucial vote. Will it be enough? I don't really know, but here's what intuition is telling me: the President will get a conditional authorization to use force, subject to his spending a specified number of days trying to get Syria/Assad to stand down from using chemical weapons, to sign the Chemical Weapons Treaty, and possibly to destroy their current stockpile and/or turn it over to UN observers. Senators Manchin and Heitkamp are circulating such a resolution in the Senate right now. I think momentum will build for a compromise like this throughout the week.

My conclusion: the President will get a resolution he can support within 10-14 days. I'm not as confident as I was in my first post, but I think the political tide will turn by mid-week. Many, but certainly not all, will conclude that bringing the question to Congress is really a demonstration of strength, not weakness; that the President needs to forcefully make the point that chemical weapons use is unacceptable; that defeating the strike resolution would not just weaken the President, it would weaken the country; that we must send consistent messages to Iran; and that making a short-term diplomatic push (before striking) could make good sense.

An important week coming up.

China Rebalancing

From Michael Pettis

The above chart comes from Michael Pettis, who is probably the smartest China analyst I have encountered. For two years or more, Pettis has been predicting a slowdown in China's GDP growth. His arguments with other China analysts are famous. One of his highly publicized bets is with the Economist, that is predicting that China's GDP will eclipse ours in 2016. At this point, almost all the bettors are siding with Pettis.

In his blog, he says very clearly that he is not making direct predictions. He is saying:

Syria Vote

So far the President seems to be winning the positioning battle: the coming vote will not directly be a vote of confidence in Obama; it will be a vote on America's willingness to act decisively and, when needed, militarily, in defense of its direct interests or essential international norms.

It will also test whether America can act cohesively in the world arena, when it cannot do so in its domestic affairs. This last point is central to Obama's case, and a key part, I believe, in explaining why he sought a vote at all. It's not just because of the "red line" that we are now told he mistakenly declared, although that is part of it. The big question some in the world have, and quite likely among that group are adversaries like Iran, is whether the US, split as it is politically, can nonetheless act powerfully on the world stage. A positive vote will demonstrate this to be true.

Had the anti-strike vote been successful in making this a vote on whether we want Obama to take the lead in a strike on Syria, he might have lost. Most likely, he would have won the Senate and lost the House, which would have meant a loss. This happened to Clinton in 1999 in the Kosovo bombing campaign: the Senate said yes; the House tied 213-213, thus not saying yes; and Clinton continued the bombing (already begun) until a successful conclusion six weeks later.

Boehner and Cantor have joined Senators McCain and Graham in support. Don't know that we've heard from McConnell yet. My prediction right now: solid win in the Senate; close call, but a win in the House. And because this will not be viewed as primarily an anti-Obama vote, the large number of House GOP voting No will be viewed as the new isolationist voice emerging in the Republican Party, connecting with libertarians Rand Paul and Mike Lee in the Senate.

Of course, as always, I could be wrong.

Good News

The above is exceptionally good news: healthcare spending growth is slowing. Peter Orzag signaled this in a recent Bloomberg column. He referenced a CBO technical paper Why Has Growth in Spending for Fee For Service Medicare Slowed, from which the chart above is taken. The study's authors say they don't know the slowdown's causes for sure. Here's the Abstract:

The Coming Vote

From theobamadiary.com

Do you think he'll get the vote? I'm not confident - but I think he will. I hope so.

Realignment to Radicalization

Everyone in the GOP-controlling Tea Party can't be paranoid, even if the word paranoid is broadened from  its clinical definition to include paranoid politics, where we react to threats to the polity as if they were direct threats to us, thus eliminating the boundaries between the personal and the political. Every Tea Partier can't be a deep conspiracy nut, I said after finishing yesterday's piece. Something else must be going on to give broad credence to paranoid conspiracy theories.

And I think there is, and we find it in Kim Messick's second great Salon articleThe Conservative Crackup: How the GOP Lost Its Mind, where he tracks the GOP realignment since 1960, leading to polarization and finally to our current gridlock. Key elements:

Paranoid Politics

Have been reading and rereading two remarkable articles by Kim Messick in Salon: The Tea Party's Paranoid Aesthetic and The Conservative Crackup: How the Republican Party Lost Its Mind. Thoughtful, powerful and scary stuff. Here's the wrap-up to the first article:

The question the rest of us confront, then, is not how to tutor the Tea Party in the realities of democratic governance. It is what we should think when one of our two major political parties is captured by a faction that rejects the possibility of normal politics. In his essay, “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt — 1954,” Richard Hofstadter left us these strikingly prescient words:

[I]n a populistic culture like ours, which seems to lack a responsible elite with political and moral autonomy, and in which it is possible to exploit the wildest currents of public sentiment for private purposes, it is at least conceivable that a highly organized, vocal, active, and well-financed minority could create a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.

What our own time is in the process of proving, however glumly, is that such a political climate is much more than merely “conceivable.”

Again, this from Richard Hofstadter almost 60 years ago:

 it is at least conceivable that a highly organized, vocal, active, and well-financed minority could create a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.