Shrinking Superpower

Michael Barone surveys the Obama foreign policy record.

Obama's "Thuggery"

Tough talk from the mild-mannered Michael Barone, who says President Obama has brought to his administration's media relations the brawling moves he learned from Chicago politics:

The same treatment is being given to Fox News, which according to White House spokesmen, "is not a news organization." "Other news organizations, like yours," Obama consigliere David Axelrod told ABC News, "ought not to treat them that way."

In other words, when Fox breaks the news that the White House green czar is a self-proclaimed "Communist" or that operatives of pro-Obama ACORN have been aiding and abetting child prostitution, other news outlets should spike the story. Or risk being demoted from great friend to bad apple.

Last February, Obama told Fox News (to which I am a contributor), "I don't always get my most favorable coverage on Fox, but I think that's part of how democracy is supposed to work. You know, we're not supposed to all be in lockstep here."

Now we are. Maybe Obama thought everyone in Washington would be his great friend. Having encountered un-Chicago-like dissent and disagreement, he has responded with classic Chicago brass knuckles. We'll see how far this kind of thuggery gets him.

Town Brawl

Michael Barone says what's helping make the nation's political atmosphere so noxious is the left's intolerance of dissent:

[I]t's interesting that the two most violent incidents at this summer's town hall meetings came when a union thug beat up a 65-year-old black conservative in Missouri and when a liberal protester bit off part of a man's finger in California.

The New Knitters

While it's always dangerous to speculate about motives, Michael Barone's assessment of why some people want Bush officials prosecuted rings true:

Whence cometh the fury of these people? I think it arises less from revulsion at interrogation techniques -- who thinks that captured al-Qaida leaders should be treated politely and will then tell the full truth? -- than it does from a desire to see George W. Bush and Bush administration officials publicly humiliated and repudiated. Just as Madame Defarge relished watching the condemned walk from the tumbrel to the guillotine, our contemporary Defarges want to see the people they hate condemned and destroyed.

Bush critics may well respond that their anger over torture isn't opportunistic. Instead, they'd say, the alleged abuses were the inevitable consequence of a mentality of lawlessness typifying the Bush administration from the beginning -- the original sin, of course, being the allegedly stolen 2000 election. In the same way, for many of Richard Nixon's most entrenched antagonists, the narrative that began with the Alger Hiss case was perfected in Watergate. It was in his nature, the argument goes. We should've known from the beginning. Why didn't they listen to us? As I've learned in a half-lifetime promoting the pro-Nixon nuances, it's almost impossible to dissuade those who have such fixed attitudes. Whether they should determine the structure and course of a sober national debate on torture is one of President Obama's many difficult tactical challenges.

Appalling Enemies List

Michael Barone reviews Rick Perlstein's Nixonland:

[M]y reading of this book left me more appalled by Nixon's enemies than by Nixon.

Can We Get That On GPS?

Michael Barone's map of roadblocks being erected to slow the President's bandwagon.

The 50% Danger

Michael Barone fears that if wealthy people's federal and state taxes reach the magic number of 50%, they'll do what they did when taxes were high in the 1970s -- hide their wealth instead of putting it to work:

[A]t that point, I fear, the animal spirits of high earners are going to be directed away from productive investment and toward tax avoidance and tax shelters. Away from creating new enterprises that can provide avenues upward for any and all, and toward gaming the system for the well-connected and shrewd insiders. Away from an economy that grows more than anyone imagined and toward an economy where system-gamers take shares of a static pie away from the rest of us. Is that where we really want to go?

In Search Of The Urban Outfitter Republican

Trying to direct the GOP uptown, Michael Barone comes uncomfortably close to suggesting that Gov. Palin is a trailer-park Republican:

The debate among Republicans is whether to go after downscale or upscale voters. Those who argue for going downscale usually have a 2012 candidate in mind: Sarah Palin. She has an undoubted appeal to such voters and revved up part of the Republican base -- cultural conservatives, and rural and small-town voters -- throughout the campaign. Despite the scorn the media heaped on her, she has excellent political instincts and seems capable of developing the knowledge base that would make her a credible presidential candidate in the future.

But my examination of the exit poll results and county-by-county election returns has led me to conclude tentatively that going upscale is the right move. As David Frum has pointed out, we're going to have more well-educated and millennial-generation voters in the future and fewer less-educated and Baby Boomers (among whom McCain ran even).