Three Growth Spurts Urgently Needed

I've got just one question for Messrs. Obama and Romney. Five or six percent annual GDP growth would put people back to work, eliminate the federal deficit (as consistently strong growth did in the 1990s), and reduce both debt and cultural and social anxiety. Without a vibrant economy, we can't lead, we can't inspire, we won't be just and fair to one another, and our whole civic life becomes impoverished. How do you folks plan to address this crisis, nationally and globally?

Instead, according to Ben Smith via the "Dish," we get this:

President Obama himself invoked an old story about Romney strapping a dog to the roof of his car. The Chairman of the Republican National Committee shot back with a jibe about Obama having eaten dog as a schoolboy in Indonesia. Biden suggested that Republicans want to put voters back "in chains." Romney demanded Obama takes his campaign of "division and anger and hate back to Chicago." Obama's spokesman called him "unhinged." The atmosphere bristled with conflict, Twitter spilled over with gleeful vitriol, and the campaign reached the sort of fevered political moment when it feels like anything can happen.

Such as me sitting home in November unless somebody grows up.

The GOP And The Muslim Myth

Former Bush aide Peter Wehner on the persistence of the myth that Barack Obama isn't a Christian and Republicans elites' responsibility to say otherwise:

We live in a political culture that is so polarized that for some people, the worst thing that is said about one’s political opponent is assumed to be true. Being a Muslim shouldn’t automatically disqualify a person from being a president, of course; but for many people who (absurdly) assume that being a person of the Muslim faith and being a jihadist are interchangeable, it is.

Like the birth certificate issue, the claim that Obama is a Muslim [read: terrorist sympathizer] is a pernicious effort by some to discredit and disqualify him. It focuses on make-believe charges at the expense of real policy disagreements. But in some respects it’s even worse than the birth certificate issue, because it attempts to divide us on explicitly religious grounds, something that America at its best has always avoided.

I served a president who was at the center of crazy left-wing conspiracies. Ben Smith, then of Politico, reported: “More than half of Democrats, according to a neutral survey, said they believed Bush was complicit in the 9/11 terror attacks.” They asserted this not because there was a shred of evidence to support it but because they wanted to believe the worst they could about a president they had come to hate.

Those on the right shouldn’t replicate a similar tactic when it comes to President Obama. The GOP presidential candidates, if and when they’re asked about it, should do everything they reasonably can to discredit this belief which is, in some places at least, widespread. There are right ways and wrong ways to win elections – and Obama should not lose this election, or even a single vote, based on the false claim that he’s a Muslim.

Mad And M.A.D. In Yorba Linda

Rereading my April 19 post about the war against the Nixon Center by the White House and Bob Haldeman operatives controlling Nixon's foundation in Yorba Linda, I've come to regret suggesting that what is now the un-Nixon center (thanks to angry Watergate revanchists who forked over $2 million of a non-profit organization's assets to diss center president Dimitri Simes) had violated the parties' non-disparagement agreement.

On Monday, the center's journal, "The National Interest," published a post by veteran journalist Marvin Kalb, titled "Diminishing Nixon," about the Nixon-Haldeman foundation's embarrassing, impotent campaign to block the federal government's new Watergate exhibit.

That indeed looked at first like a first strike. But then I reread Ben Smith's analysis at Politico of the foundation's war on Simes, the U.S.-Russia relations expert Richard Nixon chose as center president. Smith names Simes foes such as Tricia Cox (wife of New York GOP chairman Ed Cox) and longtime Cox water carriers Rob Odle (a former CREEP official) and the Nixon White House's Ken Khachigian. All three are foundation board members.

Some of the hits on Simes aren't attributed. If he got wind of the smears as the article was being prepared and concluded that they were coming from persons associated with the foundation, he would naturally have surmised that they considered the agreement they had signed to be (as Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler might have said) inoperative. Whether or not Simes would have been correct in such assumptions, Kalb's blog post would then have been (in the increasingly apropos mutually-assured-destruction language of the Cold War) a Simes counterstrike.

Certifiable Birthers

Andrew Sullivan, godfather of the Palin birthers, misremembers:

Ben Smith argues against [Sarah] Palin's release of a birth certificate because he knows in advance that this would not stop the conspiracy theorists.

For the record, I have simply asked for some medical records establishing maternity since the day I found out about the weirdnesses of the story. If provided, I would regard the question as closed as the Obama birther certificate question. I tried to clear this up privately with the McCain campaign, but they had no clue either. The difference between the two cases, as Ben acknowledges, is that one public figure has provided easily available definitive evidence to end the debate; the other says she has - but hasn't.

Wrong. Sullivan published first, on Aug. 31, 2008, and asked questions later. He should admit that he was wrong to give mainstream credibility to a fabricated story without checking the facts. I'd bet at this point that Palin's refusing just to spite him. Besides, Ben Smith is probably right. Conspiracy theorists eat facts for breakfast.

It's Incredible! It's Disgusting! It's Trump!

Maggie Haberman and Ben Smith wrap up a "what's really up with Trump?" thumbsucker with the following testimony:

“I don’t see Donald Trump trudging around in the snows of Iowa wearing ear flaps and trudging around the country fair,” said a top official at the Southern Baptist Convention, Richard Land. “But look, we live in the celebrity age. He is a celebrity. He's got the name recognition. He’s got the money. He certainly appears to have the moxie. So maybe Americans are ready for a brash New Yorker.”

I'd speculated that Trump's longtime friend and adviser, former Nixon-Reagan operative Roger Stone, was the one who'd nudged him into the swamp of birtherism, where many a 2012 GOP prospect risks getting irretrievably mired. But Haberman and Smith report that Stone denies any direct involvement with Trump's current political activities. That could be because it's true. It also could be because the always controversial Stone doesn't want to end up as a stumbling block for the sufficiently controversial Trump.

Reordering The Universe

Ben Smith profiles my former colleague Steve Clemons, founding executive director of the Nixon Center (I took this photo of Steve with the ambassador of Singapore, Chan Heng Chee, at the last Center dinner I attended in 2009; with typical graciousness, he was squatting):

The 6-foot-5, same-sex-married son of an Air Force master sergeant is the quintessential Washington figure for the new age: a self-made, uncredentialed blogger and social butterfly, intellectual entrepreneur, name-dropper and media networker. He’s both a very new kind of Washington figure — his Washington Note cracked the foreign policy establishment open for the blogosphere back in 2004 — and a very old one, the spiritual descendant of great Washington hostesses like Pamela Harriman and the nearest thing to an inheritor of the largely dead, civil, bipartisan salon of the old foreign policy elite.

“Steve is a really important part of the foreign policy universe, and he deserves a huge amount of credit for reordering that universe,” said David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official...

She Still Needs A Future

There's a reason Presidents don't risk getting involved in the Middle East, with its ancient hatreds and treacherous politics, until relatively late in their terms, if at all. President Obama showed courage, perhaps born of naive self-confidence, by naming a Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, even before he was inaugurated.

In the months since, Mitchell has pressed Israel hard on the West Bank settlements. The Palestinians responded by spurning such incremental measures while refusing to budge on Israel's demand that they acknowledge that it is an inherently Jewish state. Now Israel has announced new settlement construction, prompting howls from Ramallah and a stern rebuke from the White House.

Michael Crowley speculates that Mitchell secretly green-lighted the new construction to help reset the Obama-Netanyahu relationship, presumably by making the PM appear less beholden to Washington in the eyes of Israeli voters. Crowley refers to reporting along these lines by Ben Smith at "Politico," but the link doesn't work, and I couldn't find anything from Smith except a blog item about the White House statement. If there's a chess game underway, I'd prefer to think that Mitchell and Netanyahu were collaborating on a message to the Palestinians that they need to bring something to the table, too. Otherwise, Crowley writes:

Obama has now essentially been flipped off by both the Israelis and the Arabs, no?

Which is precisely why Presidents usually stay away from Jerusalem until they've got almost nothing to lose. Israelis and Palestinians who really want peace might remember that an attentive White House will be nearly indispensable and begin to act accordingly.