A Big Disappointmitt

Did Mitt Romney allow bigots to drive a gay aide out of his campaign post? My buddy Steve Clemons, founding director of the Nixon Center, says the answer's yes.

Biden His Time In Beijing

My former Nixon Center buddy Steve Clemons reports that the VP is taking over the China portfolio.

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...

He Cheers For Washington

Kathy's and my buddy Steve Clemons, the founding executive director of the Nixon Center (shown here with the ambassador of Singapore at the last Center dinner we attended, in early 2009), is one of Washington's most influential foreign policy bloggers and commentators. He's interviewed in the Dec. 30 Washington Blade, which asked him why he lives and works in Washington:

Because Washington is the sun around which politicos here and around the world orbit. D.C. is a free trade zone for pursuing any cause — and to get a better world, whether through ending LGBT discrimination or improving America’s foreign policy course, one has to compete effectively in the game here.

Obama And Israel And The Palestinians

Steve Clemons:

A senior administration official told me yesterday that those who think that President Obama is simply going to give up on Palestine-Israel peace don't understand him.

She's Still Waiting

Steve Clemons, my former Nixon Center colleague, says Barack Obama should press reset on the Middle East and grasp for a comprehensive settlement and greatness:

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, and other very wise foreign policy practitioners from America's higher stakes Cold War past recommended to President Obama that he lay out his own parameters and vision for what the outlines of a final deal should look like. They strongly encouraged him to "make his own weather" and to provide this outline of his views before the February 2009 Israeli elections.

Barack Obama failed to heed their advice. Big mistake. And ever since, Obama has been responding to the weather that Bibi Netanyahu has created.

Obama Is The New Washington

My former Nixon Center colleague Steve Clemons on 1:

I know it sounds really corny, but this Thanksgiving, I'm grateful that George Washington was our first President -- and that Barack Obama who like GW can be austere and seemingly distant from common folks but yet is smart and chameleon-like in his ability to forge compromises can still get a great deal right in his presidency.

Key to McCain Family Peace: DADT

According to my former Nixon colleague Steve Clemons, John and Cindy McCain differ on gays in the military.

The Arkansas Shuttler?

When the campaign's over, my former colleague at the Nixon Center, Steve Clemons, thinks the Obama administration should redeploy Bubba:

"Bill Clinton is the only guy I can think of who is trusted and liked by all sides," Clemons told POLITICO. "He is the only guy I know who successfully wrestled and pushed Netanyahu to do what he wants to do. And Clinton has spectacular popularity in Israel and Obama doesn't."

The former president "has granular understanding of every deal and piece of the deal - behind the scenes stuff that has been distorted and reframed," Clemons continued. "No one has a better grasp, ... sees the opportunity and has the global stature to both cajole, seduce and embarrass" the parties towards an agreement.

And under that scenario, which Clemons concedes is a float though one influenced by some kibitzing on the peace process with Bill Clinton at an event last week, how would Obama control the force that is Bill Clinton?

"Why would you want to control him," Clemons responded. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict "has become a global fault line in the eyes of the world, and a manifestation of America's weakness today. It has far greater significance" strategically "than northern Ireland. My bet is this is one of several defining issues" for the U.S. and the Obama administration, Clemons continued.

Maybe It's So, Joe

The founding executive director of the Nixon Center in Washington is making big waves with a report that second-guesses the Bush-Obama policy in Afghanistan. The "Economist":

An impressively succinct report published this week by a bipartisan group convened by Steve Clemons, a hyper-networked denizen of the New America Foundation, says simply that the president's counter-insurgency strategy is not working, cannot work, and is based on a flawed understanding of America's interests in the country. In effect, it resurrects the Joe Biden idea that nation-building in Afghanistan is a fool's errand, and that America can take care of its strategic interests in the country at far less risk and cost by stripping down its ambitions there.

It Depends On What The Meaning Of "Faith" Is

Anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist -- quoted by my former Nixon Center colleague Steve Clemons -- on why conservatives are making a mistake on the mosque:

Norquist argues that Republicans fought hard to win enhanced legal rights for faith-based organizations when engaged in disputes with local and regional government authorities. And now, he argues, they are undermining one of their most notable accomplishments.

Blooming Statesmanship

As President Obama finally comes out in favor of the mosque and cultural center near the World Trade Center, my former colleague Steve Clemons, founding executive director of the Nixon Center, gets prominent play in a New York Times article when he says that Obama's talking points came from city hall:

Once [New York mayor Michael] Bloomberg spoke out, the president’s course seemed clear, said Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation, a public policy institution here.

“Bloomberg’s speech was, I think, the pivotal one, and set the standard for leadership on this issue,” Mr. Clemons said.

Typical Inside-The-Beltway Good Sense

My friend and former colleague Steve Clemons, founding executive director of the Nixon Center, writes that he's thankful for the Obama administration's openness to debate. Must be nice. Too bad debate is being anathematized on the right, which targets Republican candidates for failing to conform to a conservative covenant which in some of its key elements, such as ceding war policy-making to the military, has nothing to do with conservatism.

The GOP's leading light, Sarah Palin, is as far as I've seen unable or unwilling to make a nuanced comment on any policy or political issue or personality. We'll see if a political movement can be built on the pillars of her anger and sense of entitlement. In the meantime, Steve, better see if you can bottle up some of that inside-the-Beltway good sense and sell it on Amazon!

The Founding ED Of The Nixon Center...

...may have Barbra Streisand's shades.

Obama's War

Via Nixon Center founding executive director Steve Clemons, Katherine Tiedemann's case for a land war in Asia:

[T]he dangers of leaving Afghanistan altogether are great. With Pakistan pushing militants across the border into Afghanistan, security conditions in Afghanistan declining dramatically, and predictions for rising violence in 2009, it is naive to think simply because there are competing priorities on the world's stage that the United States can turn its attention and resources from this strategically critical region.

President Obama has seemingly embraced the Af-Pak struggle as "his" war, much like the Iraq War was President Bush's main foreign policy focus. Now is no time to turn our heads from the conflict, just as the United States appears poised to devote the resources to the country that the Bush administration should have.

And so while it is important...to insist on cost estimates and a strategic rationale, we cannot risk allowing the Taliban and al Qaeda safe haven to return to Afghanistan and Pakistan's wild border regions.

Cuba Policy "At Odds With National Interest"

Steve Clemons, founding executive director of the Nixon Center, provides an early glimpse at a Senate report honchoed by Nixonian realist and GOP Sen. Richard Lugar, who says the 47-year U.S. economic embargo of Cuba hasn't worked:

I call it the "slippery slope strategy" in which Lugar is shining a big spotlight on the inadequacy and failure of US-Cuba policy that for too long has been held in place by domestic constituencies who were working at odds with the American national interest. Lugar is pushing buttons and nudging Obama's team into put itself forward constructively -- and with these steps, it becomes easier to see the broader embargo as a serious anachronism and a mistake that needs remedy.

President Nixon would be pleased.

Obama Should Read Up On Nixon

Steve Clemons on The Nixon Center's dinner in honor of Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs:

Admiral Mullen stated:

President Nixon, in his memoirs, recalled that same kind of surprise during a discussion on national security in 1951, when then General Eisenhower emphasized the political and economic facets of foreign policy rather than the military.

"This impressed me," wrote Nixon, "because then, as now, it was unusual to hear a military man emphasize the importance of non-military strength."

This is one of many passages in which American presidents have struggled with the efficacy of American military power and have tried to think through the best strategies to achieve America's national security and global objectives.

Admiral Mullen wafted into his Nixon-Eisenhower comment through the portal of late 18th century British statesman Edmund Burke and added his own name to that of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and others who have asserted that America's most significant security threats can't be met by even the most richly endowed military machine. Other parts of the diplomatic and civil society establishment must be key parts of the American action plan....

Today, America's power in the world is wielded both by the size of the Pentagon and by the size of its national debt. This is not a healthy posture for the country and not sustainable.

Obama would be wise to read up on Eisenhower, on Nixon, on Edmund Burke and others -- and realize that for him to be a truly great leader, he must get out of today's intertia-drive decisions that lean too much towards military answers to problems -- and that are leading the US to greater calamity, global irrelevance, and impotence.

A Monday In An Expectant Washington

They say five million people are coming to Washington to see Barack Obama inaugurated next Tuesday, but this week, it felt empty and expectant. On Monday morning, the bookstores and sidewalk vendors had plenty of Obama merchandise ready, but shoppers were few. The chairs were in place for the VIPs on the west side of the Capitol. To accommodate the rest of the audience, Porta Sans are arrayed along the Mall all the way back to the Lincoln Memorial.

My Nixon Foundation colleagues Kris Elftmann and Kathy O'Connor and I felt as if we had the town to ourselves as we walked from our hotel in Georgetown to the Capitol -- until we saw a smiling friend standing next to us at a stoplight on Pennsylvania Avenue. Even though Tim Mead, legendary communications VP for our home town Angels, was on the way to the White House for a meeting with the President, he graciously paused to let Kris experience the heft of a World Series ring.

Our destination was the lavish new Captiol Visitor Center, the $621 million installation you access from an underground entrance halfway to the Supreme Court in order to protect Sen. Harry Reid from smelly tourists. Again, we expected to be battling crowds, but it was pretty much we and the statue of Po'pay from New Mexico. Perhaps 20 others were along for a breathtaking new film about the Congress and a guided tour of the Capitol.

Naturally, I looked for Christian highlights among the artworks in our greatest secular temple. In John Gadsby Chapman's 1840 painting "The Baptism of Pocahontas," on display in the rotunda, that's her brother turned away in protest as one of my fellow Anglicans, the Rev. John Whiteaker, does the deed, evidently a prerequisite for her marriage to John Rolfe. (Our gracious young guide said the protester was her father, but the Architect of the Capitol sets him straight.)

Wandering around the Obama-fixated capital, I remembered Garrison Keillor's rueful "We're all Republicans now" from the early years of the Bush Administration. These days the rue is on the other foot. As I walked up 12th Street, I passed the headquarters of the Republican Committee of the District of Columbia, where the party's pervasive dysfunction was appropriately expressed by a word-processed sign announcing that the doorbell was out of order.

Republicans associated with The Nixon Center, the Nixon Foundation's nonpartisan foreign policy think tank, were feeling somewhat more au courant Monday evening at the Four Seasons in Georgetown. After all, we were honoring the exceedingly relevant Admiral Mike Mullen, who as chairman of the Joint Chiefs will be President Obama's chief military adviser at least until late 2009. The smart money says he'll be reappointed for a second two-year term. Besides, The Center's foreign policy realism, halfway between isolationism and neoconservatism, corresponds neatly with the Obamian Zeitgeist. Recall that realist prophet Brent Scowcroft remained pointedly neutral during the fall campaign while staying in touch with Obama.

During the reception, I spotted the peripatetic Steve Clemons, whose influential "Washington Note" blog is also known for its humane, realistic perspective on international affairs. I asked him to pose with Singapore's ambassador to the U.S., scholar Chan Heng Chee, a loyal friend of The Center for many years. Steve graciously stooped to be photographed, since he's 6'5", and Ambassador Chan is not. Later Steve was seen giving my wife and colleague Kathy a foot rub at her table, which is a long story.

After paying tribute to President Nixon's foreign policy vision, Admiral Mullen called on the U.S. to make better use of its diplomatic and economic clout in addition to its military power. Good intelligence also plays a vital role in the war on terror, which meant that Orange County's Julia Argyros, wife of Nixon Center founding chairman George Argyros, was in a unique position to get up to date during her dinner conversation with Michael V. Hayden, director of Central Intelligence.

Meanwhile, Kathy (left) was getting caught up with Sharon Fawcett, deputy archivist of the U.S. in charge of all the Presidential libraries. We've been working with Sharon for many years on Nixon records matters in general and, most recently, the complex process of adding the Nixon Library to the Federal system, which culminated last year in the handover of the library and museum to the National Archives.

Sharon was having a little breather before returning to the gargantuan task of preparing President Bush's records for the long ride down to Texas and the soon-to-be-built Bush Library at SMU. She and her Archives colleagues face unprecedented technological challenges. She told us, for instance, that all the electronic records created by previous Presidents equal 2% of W.'s e-records. Among Sharon's most vital responsibilities: Making sure scholars can still read all those e-mails and attachments in 50 or 100 years without making hard copies of everything. Try getting an old file from a five and a quarter-inch floppy, for instance.

By the time all that's done, there'll be an Obama Library to plan -- in four or eight years, depending on whom you ask. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Godspeed on Tuesday, 44!

No BlackBerry Whine Served Here

Founding Nixon Center executive director Steve Clemons disses the iPhone:

I recently met a high-ranking AT&T executive who confided to me that he/she keeps a Verizon phone around at all times because AT&T's phone signal is undependable.

Despite hearing that advice, I allowed my staff colleagues at the New America Foundation to push me away from my old, always dependable LG Verizon phone to a new Apple made 3G I-Phone. I've had it for about four months, and I've been practically miserable ever since, at least in a phone sense. I never know whether I will be able to connect with people who call. I really can't do cell phone interviews on radio any longer -- and after I landed on the once aborted United flight to JFK on New Year's eve -- I needed to place a call to a transport company, and my call was dropped seven times despite all the bars being at "full" on the phone.

I have a very expensive piece of junk as far as I'm concerned -- and am on the verge of going back to Verizon. So while this may sound like personal bitching -- I can't believe that I can barely connect in this so-called broadband world we are supposed to be living in.

Would Two Kennedys In London Make A Right?

Steve Clemons, distinguished founding executive director of The Nixon Center, has written to friends promoting his intriguing idea that the PE should end the awkwardness created by Caroline Kennedy's senatorial ambitions by appointing her as ambassador to the Court of St. James's.

One potential problem is that her grandfather Joseph served in the same post, from which he notoriously resisted Winston Churchill's warnings about Nazi aggression, supported appeasement, tried to meet with Adolph Hitler without President Roosevelt's permission, and opposed wartime aid to Great Britain.

Londoners of a certain age may still wish to give an Ambassador Kennedy a piece of their minds.