The GOP Faces Years in the Wilderness After 2012 Election Losses

by Robert Shrum  The Daily Beast

 

 

Sensible Republicans seeking to renew the viability of a conservative party that seems out of touch after a stinging defeat at the polls are being denounced as ‘heretics.’ Robert Shrum on why the party might never find its way back.  

So here is the Republican Party reinventing itself. The GOP majority in the Ohio legislature rushes to defund Planned Parenthood in its post-election session. The orange-tinted speaker of the House proposes to undo Obamacare through "oversight" in the name of "solving our debt and restoring prosperity." Never mind that health-care reform doesn’t raise the deficit but reduces it. Or that "a new low," 33 percent of Americans, the anti-Obama bitter-enders, still favor repealing the law (PDF). And a rising star in the GOP future, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, offers a dim view out of the pre-Darwinian past that maybe the Earth was created in seven days—and that since "theologians" disagree, we should teach "multiple theories."

This doesn’t sound like rethinking, or thinking at all, but like the reflex and revanchism of a party that doesn’t comprehend or simply can’t respond to the dimensions of its 2012 defeat. There’s not just the delicious irony that maladroit Mitt Romney, the 47 percent man, will end up with 47 percent of the vote. Outside the South, President Obama defeated his opponent 55 to 45 percent, winning a landslide there as well as in the Electoral College. The bottom line: Romney got elected president of the old confederacy.

The aggrieved and deluded suggest secession—a question that was definitively settled four score and seven years ago. The fantasist who founded UnSkewedPolls.com conjures up a new website, BarackOFraudo.com, "proving" that the president stole Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Florida. Sensible Republicans—perhaps even Boehner, who has to fear the Tea Party and a coup from Eric Cantor, his House majority leader—know this is self-defeating nonsense. So do smart GOP strategists, who for speaking truth to the loss of power were promptly denounced by the grand inquisitor Rush Limbaugh as heretics who want "to get rid of conservatism."

That’s not what they’re saying, of course. They’re insisting that something must be done to renew the viability of a conservative party that seems out of touch, out of ideas, and without much hope for victory short of economic calamity under the Democrats. But beyond the ritual lashing of Romney, who fled the national stage with ugly recriminations about the "old playbook" of "gifts" that bribed voters, the reactions from Rubio to Rush point toward slapping a new façade on a fundamentally unchanged, increasingly self-marginalizing GOP.

One of Limbaugh’s targets, Steve Schmidt, a veteran of Bush 2004, who managed Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 2006 reelection and John McCain’s 2008 campaign, was at NYU’s post-election conference at Villa La Pietra in Florence. The Republicans and Democrats there, both analysts and leading actors in the Obama and Romney efforts, heard senior Romney adviser Kevin Madden, a convinced conservative, regret that his candidate had been pushed so far to the right during the primary season. Alex Castellanos, who worked for Romney four years ago, called for a "bottom up" conservatism relevant to middle-class voters, one that offered them clear and persuasive benefits. (He didn’t say "gifts." He was focused on opportunity.)

Schmidt was blunt. The GOP had to abandon the ceaseless pursuit of the last white guy in Mississippi at the expense of alienating the mainstream. He argued a case in point: Republicans should be "a pro-life party," but not "the anti-contraception" party, which is how Romney sometimes came across as he felt forced to match the über-purist Rick Santorum in the primaries. Castellanos mentioned that since Republicans believe in states’ rights, the answer on abortion might be to reverse Roe v. Wade but then leave the decision on the issue to each state.

That wouldn’t bring over those who care deeply about reproductive rights. And it would incite fierce resistance from those who believe life begins at fertilization. But at least such moves would provide the substance and not just the slogans of a party repositioning from the edge.

Obama pollster Joel Benenson responded that such shifts may require two or three more cycles of presidential loss. It took the Democrats that long in the wilderness in the 1970s and 1980s, when only one Democrat won the White House for only one term, and then only in reaction to the Watergate scandal. Democratic consultant Steve McMahon amplified the point: until Bill Clinton, Democrats kept hoping or clinging to the certainty that they were right and that all they had to do was find the right candidate.

That’s not where realistic Republican strategists want their party to be. But four overriding realities militate against a GOP return to the White House in 2016 and perhaps for several campaigns beyond.

First, the economy, the issue Romney ran on, the issue that in a time of distress can elect an otherwise unacceptably hard conservative candidate like Ronald Reagan, is now likely to turn decisively in the Democratic direction. At La Pietra, NYU professor Joshua Tucker cited models that show growth and jobs rising at a robust pace in the next four years. Tucker, a founder of The Monkey Cage blog, where political scientists grapple insightfully with politics, observed that 2012 was two presidential elections rolled into one. Whoever won this time, Romney or Obama, would get credit for the coming prosperity. A President Romney could have been all but unbeatable for reelection. Now the high cards on the economy will be held by Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, or whoever else is the Democratic nominee.

This scenario could be undermined or undone if the White House and Congress don’t come to an agreement on the fiscal cliff and the nation falls back into recession or, less damaging, experiences a period of declining or sluggish growth. But the standard rule may not apply that the president and his party are held primarily responsible for a downturn. A new Pew poll finds that by nearly 2-to-1, voters would blame congressional Republicans rather than Obama for a failure here.

Second, the nature of the Republican primary electorate hamstrings the party’s capacity to adapt. The religious right and the true believers who dominate the nominating process have their own explanations or rationalizations for 2012. Romney wasn’t conservative enough. Richard Viguerie, who invented GOP direct mail, announced: "Romney’s loss was the death rattle of the establishment GOP." Franklin Graham, a pale carbon copy of Billy, bore false witness to the electoral facts: "The vast majority of evangelicals did not go to the polls." But they did; they constituted the same proportion of the vote as in 2008, and more of them voted for Romney than McCain.

Is it really conceivable that Republicans in the presidential primaries would be willing to leave abortion rights to the states or to leave Planned Parenthood alone?

Schmidt recommended that Republicans dispense with the Iowa caucuses, where the litmus test is who’s most for Jesus, according to the narrow measures of right-wing fundamentalists. That change won’t happen, not yet; religious and movement forces on the far right won’t yield their hold on the primary process and their veto power over the nominee. In the last two elections, they sacrificed at least five Senate seats for the sake of ideological ultra-orthodoxy. So why won’t they demand their kind of presidential candidate—no doubts, no flip-flops, always there with them? And they believe the country will come around to them. Former Moral Majoritarian Ralph Reed smoothly explained how. Yes, there has to be change, to "combine core principles with outreach." But outreach to whom, if the core principles are reaction and intolerance?

That’s the potentially insuperable challenge for Republicans in the near and medium and maybe even the long term. As Biden adviser and Obama media-maker Mike Donilon said in Florence, the GOP is simply on the wrong side of the emerging majority in the country. In the exit polls, 59 percent of voters said abortion should be legal in all or most cases. By 49 to 46 percent, they supported gay marriage; the tide has swiftly turned on the question that carried George W. Bush to a narrow win in 2004 on a wave of evangelical turnout. And 65 percent in the exit polls favored immigration reform with a path to citizenship.

All this leaves Republicans out there on a demographic cliff with women, Hispanics, and young people. And for the most part, their own primary voters won’t let them retreat.

Post-election, Sean Hannity of Fox News did switch on immigration reform, presumably calculating that a conservative softening here will placate Hispanics. He was echoed by others in the Republican leadership and commentariat. This expedient is simplistic, desperate, and ahistorical.

Defining passages forge political identity. When they came to America, Jews were largely welcomed by the Democratic Party and disdained by the GOP. They have remained overwhelmingly Democratic as they have become more affluent, because they lived and believe in the party’s values of tolerance and diversity. African-Americans, hard as it now is to remember, used to vote Republican in substantial numbers. Dwight Eisenhower won 39 percent of them in 1956. Four years later, Martin Luther King Sr. was originally for Richard Nixon. He changed his mind after the Kennedy brothers spoke out when his son was in danger in a Georgia jail. Events from then until the Kennedy-Johnson civil rights legislation brought African-Americans to the Democratic fold, and they have never left. Indeed, disrespect for Obama and efforts this year at voter suppression have reinforced their partisan loyalty.

Hispanics have already heard their own share of disrespect from Republicans, the rank racism of anti-immigrant hardliners and the casual contempt of Romney, who told "illegals" to "self-deport." They will hear even more of this as nativists in the party resist a change on immigration—which, even from Rubio, will be a watered-down version of reform.

The GOP used to take comfort in the cliché that Hispanics were cultural conservatives, Catholics who agree with them on social issues. Wrong again. In the exit polls, they are more progressive than the electorate as a whole on questions of marriage equality and the role of government. For Hispanics, the passage here has probably already been made with the politics of insult driving them toward the Democrats. And to add injury to that insult, Asian-Americans also are voting Democratic by a wide margin; the likely reason is that they too see the GOP as the party of an indivisible prejudice that demeans them too, even if it doesn’t explicitly target them.

Young people may be another lost cause. As Professor Tucker said at La Pietra, party ID tends to be set by age 30, and those under and approaching 30 are decisively Democratic. So are unmarried women, a growing segment of the population, alienated from the GOP on concerns ranging from reproductive rights to equal pay. Is it really conceivable, soon if ever, that Republicans in the presidential primaries would be willing to leave abortion rights to the states or to leave Planned Parenthood alone? And it’s inconceivable that this would be enough to convince women that the party is on their side.

Economic conservatives and wealthy Republicans have formed an unholy alliance with a religious right whose views they don’t share but whose votes they covet. Now they’re saddled with a base that could leave them with increasingly unelectable nominees—for president, for the Senate, and for the House, which this year was largely saved for the GOP by partisan redistricting.

But the economic conservatives have their own weakness, which is the third reality that now imprints and imprisons the Republican brand. Especially after the fights of the past two years, and the argument the president successfully prosecuted during the campaign, Americans perceive the GOP as the party that favors those at the top and not the middle class. As he refused to let the election be cast as a mere referendum, Obama returned to Democratic ground with the first full-throated populist appeal in half a century or more. In 1992, President Clinton’s centrism had a populist tinge as he promised to "put people first." Al Gore has said he regrets the decision in 2000 to back off the dividing line of "the people, not the powerful." Obama never backed off as he constantly pushed a central choice: who stands for the many and not just the few?

The president has laid a predicate for a generation of Democratic campaigns and left Republicans in what could be a permanently vulnerable position. Castellanos obviously realizes this; thus his argument in Florence for a conservatism that is "relevant" to the middle class. But what exactly is that, in light of the debate that’s now front and center? The GOP will only deepen its difficulties if congressional Republicans hold tax cuts for most Americans hostage to tax cuts for the rich.

Republican compromise here would represent some measure of change. But that too wouldn’t be enough. The fourth reality is a technological gap in voter mobilization; more accurately the gap is a chasm. Karl Rove now talks of imitating Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy, which widened the electoral landscape on which the Democratic Party competed. A breakthrough in its time, that strategy is now far behind what the Obama forces did with social media to track contact and get people to the polls—and to buy television time for much less than the Romney campaign paid. What they did was a quantum leap beyond their own success in 2008. This year, their combat with Romney, from micro-targeting to monitoring turnout, was like the Starship Enterprise battling a B1 bomber.

Can the GOP catch up? It’s not just a matter of technology. There is a "pressing and alarming deficit in human capital." A sophisticated process doesn’t run itself. Thus the imperative of recruiting "a new generation" of Republican operatives; for example, from the "libertarian-minded minority in Silicon Valley." But why would libertarian geeks flock to a party that argues for big government interference in the most private aspects of people’s lives, and that discriminates against the gay or lesbian techie who sits nearby in the same open-plan space?

The day after the election, the deputy GOP leader in the Senate, John Cornyn, predicted a "period of reflection and recalibration ahead." But it’s hard to envision the party realigning itself to the new and real America.

Instead, in the throes of their self-proclaimed reexamination, many Republicans remind me of a scene in Theodore H. White’s classic The Making of the President 1960. JFK spoke in the Boston garden on the last night of the campaign, with politicians and ward heelers smoking cigars arranged in rows behind him. As the crowd cheered, White wrote, a look passed across their faces. You could see what the pols were thinking: Kennedy has a trick; if only I could figure it out, I could be president.

It was a false and easy conceit. And if what the GOP looks for now is a trick, what it will find is a way deeper into the wilderness.

The Senate’s Long Slide to Gridlock

By JONATHAN WEISMAN The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Senator Bob Dole had just assumed the mantle of Senate majority leader, after the Republican landslide of 1994, when he confronted a problem.

Piles of Republican legislation from Newt Gingrich’s self-styled “revolutionary” House were stacking up in a narrowly divided, more deliberate Senate, and Democrats were threatening to gum up the works with amendments that would stall the bills.

Mr. Dole turned to the Senate’s Democratic master of floor procedure, Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, who taught him a parliamentary trick known to Senate insiders as “filling the tree,” Mr. Dole recalled.

The convoluted procedure allows the majority leader to claim all opportunity for offering changes to a bill, effectively preventing any other senator from proposing an amendment intended to slow down legislation or force a politically embarrassing vote.

“I never knew what ‘filling the tree’ was until I tried it, but it turned out to be pretty good,” Mr. Dole said, ruefully accepting a share of the blame for the parliamentary arms race that has consumed the Senate in recent years. “I don’t think there’s any credit.”

The increased use of the tactic, which had previously been rare, is part of the procedural warfare that has reached a zenith over the past two years in the Senate. Republicans threaten to filibuster and propose politically charged amendments, Democrats fill the amendment tree, and Republicans filibuster in retaliation.

The tactic initially meant to speed bills has instead helped slow them down. The Senate — the legislative body that was designed as the saucer to cool the House’s tempestuous teacup — has become a deep freeze, where even once-routine matters have become hopelessly stuck and a supermajority is needed to pass almost anything.

As a result, the first fight of the next Senate, which convenes in January, is not likely to be over a fiscal crisis, immigration, taxes or any issue that animated the elections of 2012. It will instead probably be over how and whether to change a troubled Senate, members and aides say.

With his majority enhanced and a crop of frustrated young Democrats pushing him hard, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, says he will move on the first day of the 113th Congress to diminish the power of Republicans to obstruct legislation. “We need to change the way we do business in the Senate,” said Senator Tom Udall, Democrat of New Mexico. “Right now, we have gridlock. We have delay. We have obstruction, and we don’t have any accountability.”

The pressure leaves Mr. Reid with a weighty decision: whether to ram through a change in the rules with a simple majority that would significantly diminish Republicans’ power to slow or stop legislation.

The changes under consideration may sound arcane, but they would have such a profound impact that they are referred to as the “nuclear option.” In effect, they would remake a Senate that was long run on compromise and gentlemen’s agreements into something more like the House, where the majority rules almost absolutely.

Critics of the idea, who exist in both parties, say such a change would do great damage, causing Washington to career from one set of policies to another, depending on which party held power.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said he would aggressively fight any rule change and blamed the Democratic majority for the Senate’s dysfunction. “This notion that the Senate is dysfunctional is not because of the rules,” he said. “It’s because of behavior.”

Supporters of the idea, who also do not fit a neat ideological profile, argue that the collegial Senate of the past no longer exists and that American democracy is often paralyzed as a result. Today’s Senate, they say, has left crucial positions unfilled, like a confirmed head for the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and is preventing action on major issues like job creation proposals.

“There is a tendency to look to the past through rose-colored glasses, to some mythical golden era when everyone got along and cooperated. That’s not true. It’s always been tough, and it’s always been rough,” said George Mitchell, a former Democratic majority leader who would now back some changes. “But I do believe and accept the premise that it’s worse now.”

Doing almost anything in the Senate today requires 60 votes, because Republicans, who will have 45 seats in next year’s Senate, are blocking even procedural motions to begin debating bills or considering nominations. The act of doing so is commonly called a filibuster, although it no longer requires holding the Senate floor for hours.

Both parties bear some responsibility for the changes, experts say, though not in the same precise ways.

Before 1917, senators could delay final votes on legislation by holding the floor and talking. There was no mechanism to stop them, but such filibusters were rare until the debates surrounding entry into World War I. In 1917, the Senate adopted its first “cloture” rule: two-thirds of the Senate could cut off debate on a bill and force a final vote.

Between 1917 and 1971, no session of Congress had more than 10 such votes in its two years. Still, filibusters were common enough that in 1971, Mr. Byrd, a master of Senate procedure, shifted the rules to allow the Senate to take up other legislation during a filibuster.

That change began an escalation of tactics, in which both delays and attempts at circumventing delays have become more common, with one often leading to more of another. Moves by the minority to obstruct bills elicited responses from the majority worsening the environment.

In the 93rd Senate, which met in 1973 and 1974, the number of cloture motions filed — a rough measure of filibuster threats — jumped to 31, from an average of fewer than two per Congressional term between 1917 and 1970. Throughout much of the next two decades, cloture votes continued to rise, regardless of which party was in the minority, with many such motions filed in anticipation of filibusters.

“The notion that this started in 2010, I’m sorry, that’s so revisionist,” said Lauren C. Bell, a political scientist at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va.

But the current Republican minority has taken the practice to a new level. During the past three sessions of Congress, the majority leader has resorted to an average of 129 cloture motions, a near doubling from the level when Democrats were in the minority from 2003 to 2007.

The current Democratic majority has contributed to the parliamentary tit-for-tat, by filling the tree more than in any previous Congress. It has done so over 20 times in each of the last three sessions of Congress. The previous high had been 11, under Republican leadership in 2005 and 2006.

“None of this is new,” said Trent Lott, a former Republican Senate majority leader. But, he added, “I’m shocked at how much deterioration has occurred.”

Senators from both parties agree that one cause of the trends is the ease with which lawmakers can now bring the institution to a halt. Once the Senate found a way to move on to other business while a bill was being filibustered, senators faced little personal pressure against mounting one. And when the number of votes needed to break a filibuster dropped to 60 in 1975, from 67, the Senate minority could claim that this change allowed for reasonable bipartisan compromise.

But there have been major cultural shifts as well, past majority leaders and academics say. Lyndon B. Johnson once said the Senate was an ecosystem of whales and minnows. Get the few whales and the minnows follow.

The advent of C-Span 2, which put cameras in the Senate in the 1970s, helped turn all the minnows into whales in their own right, Ms. Bell said. The influx of House Republicans in the 1990s, steeped in the partisan fights of Mr. Gingrich, furthered the shift. Republicans and Democrats alike point to a moment in the 1990s when Rick Santorum, then a Republican senator from Pennsylvania and a former House warrior, refused to yield the floor to a colleague when asked, a refusal almost unheard of in the Senate.

The battles over procedure themselves helped corrode the environment. Talk of the “nuclear option” began almost a decade ago, in President George W. Bush’s first term. With Democrats thwarting Mr. Bush’s judicial nominees, Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican majority leader, considered overriding filibusters with a majority vote. Mr. Reid, then the minority leader for the Democrats, fought back. “We believe in following the rules, not breaking the rules,” he said. “It will change the Senate forever, and that is not good.”

Ultimately, the two parties averted a larger confrontation by a gentlemen’s agreement to filibuster judicial nominees under only the most egregious circumstances, as when a nominee is overly partisan or obviously unqualified. In Mr. Bush’s first term, the Senate approved 89 percent of his judicial nominees. The rate fell to 74.5 percent in his second term, and was 75.5 percent in Mr. Obama’s first term.

In October last year, Mr. Reid took the first step toward going nuclear, a step many of his predecessors have contemplated but never done. Unilaterally dismissing a Republican filibuster, he used a simple majority — 51 to 48 — to override the Senate parliamentarian. The parliamentarian had ruled that additional Republican amendments were in order on a China currency bill, even though they were unrelated to it.

Around 40 Democrats — led by Senators Udall, Tom Harkin of Iowa and Jeff Merkley of Oregon — have indicated their support for a set of broader rules changes. Two incoming senators, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Chris Murphy of Connecticut, have also pledged their support. The filibuster would be prohibited on motions to take up legislation or nominations and motions to take approved legislation to conference with House negotiators. A simple majority could approve these motions, which would reduce the amount of time the Senate spends on procedural matters.

Beyond that change, Democrats want to make filibusters harder to execute. Although filibusters would be allowed on final votes to pass legislation or confirm nominees, those conducting them would have to speak from the Senate floor. “It’s completely reasonable that senators choosing to argue there should be more debate should have to make their case in public,” Mr. Merkley said.

Democrats argue that the changes are modest and will not deny the minority party leverage to block bills and force concessions from the majority. Mr. Reid, who opposed the changes over the last two years, now says he strongly backs them. But he has not said if he will resort to the nuclear option after Republicans almost certainly block the Democrats’ initial efforts.

Mr. McConnell says that the power to filibuster a motion to proceed to legislation is the lever Republicans need to negotiate the conditions for debate; without it, the minority party will not have a fair chance to amend bills or to shape the discussion.

Neither side, however, denies that the Senate is dysfunctional.

“There’s so much difficulty with comity now,” lamented Tom Daschle, a former Democratic majority leader. “Both the majority and minority feel as if their backs are against the wall, and they have no choice but to fight. The majority wants to govern, the minority wants its rights, and those two are almost irreconcilable these days.”

For Israel, Gaza Conflict Is Test for an Iran Confrontation

By DAVID E. SANGER and THOM SHANKER NY TIMES

WASHINGTON — The conflict that ended, for now, in a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel seemed like the latest episode in a periodic showdown. But there was a second, strategic agenda unfolding, according to American and Israeli officials: The exchange was something of a practice run for any future armed confrontation with Iran, featuring improved rockets that can reach Jerusalem and new antimissile systems to counter them.

It is Iran, of course, that most preoccupies Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Obama. While disagreeing on tactics, both have made it clear that time is short, probably measured in months, to resolve the standoff over Iran’s nuclear program.

And one key to their war-gaming has been cutting off Iran’s ability to slip next-generation missiles into the Gaza Strip or Lebanon, where they could be launched by Iran’s surrogates, Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, during any crisis over sanctions or an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Michael B. Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the United States and a military historian, likened the insertion of Iranian missiles into Gaza to the Cuban missile crisis.

“In the Cuban missile crisis, the U.S. was not confronting Cuba, but rather the Soviet Union,” Mr. Oren said Wednesday, as the cease-fire was declared. “In Operation Pillar of Defense,” the name the Israel Defense Force gave the Gaza operation, “Israel was not confronting Gaza, but Iran.”

It is an imprecise analogy. What the Soviet Union was slipping into Cuba 50 years ago was a nuclear arsenal. In Gaza, the rockets and parts that came from Iran were conventional, and, as the Israelis learned, still have significant accuracy problems. But from one point of view, Israel was using the Gaza battle to learn the capabilities of Hamas and Islamic Jihad — the group that has the closest ties to Iran — as well as to disrupt those links.

Indeed, the first strike in the eight-day conflict between Hamas and Israel arguably took place nearly a month before the fighting began — in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, as another mysterious explosion in the shadow war with Iran.

A factory said to be producing light arms blew up in spectacular fashion on Oct. 22, and within two days the Sudanese charged that it had been hit by four Israeli warplanes that easily penetrated the country’s airspace. Israelis will not talk about it. But Israeli and American officials maintain that Sudan has long been a prime transit point for smuggling Iranian Fajr rockets, the kind that Hamas launched against Tel Aviv and Jerusalem over recent days.

The missile defense campaign that ensued over Israeli territory is being described as the most intense yet in real combat anywhere — and as having the potential to change warfare in the same way that novel applications of air power in the Spanish Civil War shaped combat in the skies ever since.

Of course, a conflict with Iran, if a last-ditch effort to restart negotiations fails, would look different than what has just occurred. Just weeks before the outbreak in Gaza, the United States and European and Persian Gulf Arab allies were practicing at sea, working on clearing mines that might be dropped in shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz.

But in the Israeli and American contingency planning, Israel would face three tiers of threat in a conflict with Iran: the short-range missiles that have been lobbed in this campaign, medium-range rockets fielded by Hezbollah in Lebanon and long-range missiles from Iran.

The last of those three could include the Shahab-3, the missile Israeli and American intelligence believe could someday be fitted with a nuclear weapon if Iran ever succeeded in developing one and — the harder task — shrinking it to fit a warhead.

A United States Army air defense officer said that the American and Israeli militaries were “absolutely learning a lot” from this campaign that may contribute to a more effective “integration of all those tiered systems into a layered approach.”

The goal, and the challenge, is to link short-, medium- and long-range missile defense radar systems and interceptors against the different types of threats that may emerge in the next conflict.

Even so, a historic battle of missile versus missile defense has played out in the skies over Israel, with Israeli officials saying their Iron Dome system shot down 350 incoming rockets — 88 percent of all targets assigned to the missile defense interceptors. Israeli officials declined to specify the number of interceptors on hand to reload their missile-defense batteries.

Before the conflict began, Hamas was estimated to have amassed an arsenal of 10,000 to 12,000 rockets. Israeli officials say their pre-emptive strikes on Hamas rocket depots severely reduced the arsenal of missiles, both those provided by Iran and some built in Gaza on a Syrian design.

But Israeli military officials emphasize that most of the approximately 1,500 rockets fired by Hamas in this conflict were on trajectories toward unpopulated areas. The radar tracking systems of Iron Dome are intended to quickly discriminate between those that are hurtling toward a populated area and strays not worth expending a costly interceptor to knock down.

“This discrimination is a very important part of all missile defense systems,” said the United States Army expert, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe current military assessments. “You want to ensure that you’re going to engage a target missile that is heading toward a defended footprint, like a populated area. This clearly has been a validation of the Iron Dome system’s capability.”

The officer and other experts said that Iran also was certain to be studying the apparent inability of the rockets it supplied to Hamas to effectively strike targets in Israel, and could be expected to re-examine the design of that weapon for improvements.

Israel currently fields five Iron Dome missile defense batteries, each costing about $50 million, and wants to more than double the number of batteries. In the past two fiscal years, the United States has given about $275 million in financial assistance to the Iron Dome program. Replacement interceptors cost tens of thousands of dollars each.

Just three weeks ago, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited an Iron Dome site as a guest of his Israeli counterpart during the largest American-Israeli joint military exercise ever. For the three-week exercise, called Austere Challenge, American military personnel operated Patriot land-based missile defense batteries on temporary deployment to Israel as well as Aegis missile defense ships, which carry tracking radars and interceptors.

Despite its performance during the current crisis, though, Iron Dome has its limits.

It is specifically designed to counter only short-range rockets, those capable of reaching targets at a distance of no more than 50 miles. Israel is developing a medium-range missile defense system, called David’s Sling, which was tested in computer simulations during the recent American-Israeli exercise, and has fielded a long-range system called Arrow. “Nobody has really had to manage this kind of a battle before,” said Jeffrey White, a defense fellow for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy “There are lots of rockets coming in all over half the country, and there are all different kinds of rockets being fired.”

Obama’s Political Intelligence

Posted by Adam Gopnik THE NEW YORKER

 

 

Tuesday night was a beautiful night for those who admire President Obama for his temperament, his intelligence, his calm, his decency, and his refusal, in the face of obviously intense daughterly pressure, to buy a second dog. (Let the word go forth from this day on: one dog is delightful —but one is enough.) It also sealed in place, by real but still smallish margins—and therefore as though it were a fated necessity rather than a contingent achievement— the Obama phenomenon. It is still one of the most singular stories in American history: how a slight black guy from Chicago with an odd African name and no resume except a single shining speech and a fine, introspective literary memoir became the dominant political figure of an American empire still at the height of its power. Nothing so improbable has happened in a big democracy, or semi-democracy, since Disraeli’s day. And, once again, one marvelled at the ability of Obama’s opponents to hate with such a passion a man so seemingly impossible even for his teen-age daughter to dislike—a man who never takes the bait of rage, who sometimes seeks conciliation to crazy fault, and has said scarcely an angry, mean-spirited, or intemperate thing in his public life.

But watching him come to the podium and hold it, some of the reasons for that hatred were discernible. Obama is, above all, calm, cool—not needy in any way, and that absence of neediness, that pervasive cool, which reads to even his admirers at times like a slight, ironic detachment from his own eloquence, must seem to his detractors like an infuriating arrogance and remoteness. John Kennedy, who had the same gift of detachment, was often accused, quite fairly, of the same type of self-absorption and indifference to others. He carried no cash in his coat. Still—hate him? How, exactly? Why, precisely? (Republicans, who once saw the impotence and indignity of Democrats hating Reagan, their own detached man, should know better.) But it’s inevitable. Everybody admires the guy who never breaks a sweat—except the guys running alongside him in the race, who would at least like to see him making an effort. A man who is not needy, a philosopher once said, does not always recognize the needs of others. (One imagines that Bill Clinton would have liked a shout-out in the President’s victory speech; he didn’t get one, though, more sensitive to such things, doubtless would have given one if the roles were reversed.)

The really weird thing is that the President returned, passionately and with evident sincerity, to the themes of that first fine 2004 speech: national unity; we are less divided than our policies suggest; no red states, no blue states. “No, no!” some of his admirers wanted to intervene. “Pay attention to what happened in the past four years, Mr. President! We are every bit as divided as our politics suggest. That is why they are our politics.”

This persistence with a credo in many ways refuted is part of Obama’s gift. While his Presidency had been a true success—health-care reform, sane economic policies, sane Supreme Court Justices, an end to torture, and all the rest—his specific political project has in many ways failed. He clearly thought, at the beginning of his first term, that his evident personal virtues, good will, intelligence, willingness to compromise—virtues evident to him, too, since modesty is not part of the cool man’s arsenal anymore than insecurity is—would bring rational right-wingers in his direction and push out the fringe on both sides. It didn’t happen. Not nearly. So it is easy to see why some of his supporters (cf Chris Matthews) were, despite their euphoria, a little exasperated—we’re not going to do this again, are we?

But the truth is that there are reasons why Obama is a phenomenon, and one of them is that his political intelligence is so keen that he knows when unreality best serves his ends. Political intelligence is as distinct and intuitive a gift as any of the other kinds of intelligence—the situational intelligence of the athlete or the analytic intelligence of the intellectual—and a large component of political intelligence lies in being faithful to your own fictions. The new Spielberg-Kushner-Lewis movie, “Lincoln,” reminds us (or will, once widely released) that Lincoln’s entire conduct in office during the war was based on the fiction that the secession had never happened—that the South was not a rebellious nation but, rather, a bunch of outlaws running around in gang regalia. What you could see had just happened—a bunch of states becoming an alien nation—had not. This fiction of continuity, of an indissoluble union in the face of its rather evident dissolution, was essential to Lincoln’s case and to his credo.

To this list of—what shall we call them?—higher liars (sounds harsh, though it conveys something of the idea) most other great politicians might be added. F.D.R., with his assertion that fear was all there was to fear when there was so much real stuff to be frightened of; and Reagan, for that matter, with his many repeated myths and mantras. By now Obama must know the virtues of fighting and the limits of the invocation of unity, but he knows, too, that a cool man who does not cherish his own warmest rhetoric becomes a mere hot-air artist. If that knowledge can make him seem at times naïve, or even willfully perverse—well, after all, he’s the one who’s the phenomenon, not you. And he’s the one who put his foot down about the second dog.

His Last Race, Win or Lose

By PETER BAKER NY TIMES

 

BRISTOW, Va. — President Obama looked out at the sea of shivering supporters at a chilly late-night rally here and soaked in the wave of blue campaign placards and the flashing of a thousand smartphone cameras.

It was 37 degrees, and he warmed his left hand in his pocket even as he jabbed at the air with his right. Midnight was approaching. It was the last rally of the last Saturday of his last campaign, and he drifted off script.

“I was backstage with David Plouffe,” Mr. Obama told the crowd, referring to his political guru, who looked surprised as he stood offstage. “And we were talking about how, as the campaign goes on, we’ve become less relevant. I’m sort of a prop in the campaign. He’s just bothering a bunch of folks, calling, asking what’s going on.”

Indeed, for Mr. Obama, the campaign is effectively over. Oh, there will be a final round of rallies on Monday, a final frenetic swing through swing states and plenty of Plouffe phone calls asking what is going on. But the machinery they have assiduously put in place over four years is now on remote control. The campaign is out of their hands, and so is the fate of the 44th president.

Win, and he has a chance to secure a legacy as a president who made a mark not simply by virtue of his original barrier-breaking election but also by transforming America in his image — for the better, he hopes; for the worse, his critics fear. Lose, and he becomes an avatar of hope and change who could not fulfill his own promise and whose programs might not survive his remarkable rise and fall.

It is in moments like these that nostalgia takes hold for a president on the precipice. With each passing day, aides said, Mr. Obama has taken note every time he passes a milestone.

“This is my last debate prep practice,” he said at Camp David.

“This is my last walk-through,” he said, touring a debate stage.

“This is my last debate,” he said after squaring off a third time with Mitt Romney.

The “lasts” piled up on a bone-weary final weekend as he raced from Ohio to Wisconsin, Iowa to Virginia, New Hampshire to Florida and back to Ohio, then Colorado and Wisconsin again. What he hopes most is that these are not the last days of his presidency.

“You can see the nostalgia, the wistfulness, setting in,” observed Dan Pfeiffer, one of his longest-serving advisers and now the White House communications director. “The focus here is winning and making the case, but the last campaign of a man’s life — you every once in a while pause and think about that.”

Other than a brief interlude for Hurricane Sandy, the White House has been relocated to Air Force One for months. Mr. Obama half-jogs off the plane and half-jogs onto the stage, his coat off, his sleeves rolled up, his tie usually gone. He has grown hoarse arguing his case. Between stops, he huddles in the plane’s conference room, nursing his throat with tea and scratching out his speech in longhand.

His daily routine has been upended, but he tries to keep up his workout regimen in hotel fitness centers. He eats whenever he can, usually whatever the Air Force stewards are serving aboard the plane or something brought in before a speech. Occasionally, when he stops to glad-hand at a pizza place or a doughnut shop, he may snack in the motorcade to the next campaign rally; at a Cleveland meat shop, he bought barbecue jerky.

He is happier whenever he gets time with Michelle Obama, but she has largely kept a separate schedule. Like any father on the road, he makes sure to call his wife and children every evening. To keep him company in recent weeks, friends like Marty Nesbitt and Mike Ramos have accompanied him aboard Air Force One. Between conference calls on storm recovery on Sunday, he checked out the Chicago Bears football game on the Air Force One television.

The other day, Mr. Obama landed in Chicago to vote and spotted his former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, now the city’s mayor, waiting on the tarmac. A huge grin appeared on the president’s face, and he pointed at Mr. Emanuel. The mayor grinned and pointed back. The two embraced like long-lost brothers and chatted happily before walking, arm in arm, to shake hands with bystanders.

“He’s got his goal in eyesight, and he’s driving to the basket,” Mr. Emanuel said later. “He’s a happy warrior, I’d say.”

Happier with the debates over. He considered preparations for the first one “a drag,” as he put it, and got walloped. It was an eye-opener for a president who has never lacked confidence, a moment when he “faced his own political mortality,” Mr. Pfeiffer said. “The first debate turned a switch for him. He came out of that very focused on ensuring that would never happen again.” By his own reckoning, Mr. Obama had failed to “communicate why he wants a second term,” said another adviser.

Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, who played Mr. Romney during debate rehearsals, said Mr. Obama recognized the peril. “He just decided in his mind that he needed to bear down and win, period,” Mr. Kerry said in an interview. “He’s a competitive guy. He’s very analytical. He knows exactly what he had not done and exactly what he wanted to do.”

After coming out stronger in the later debates, Mr. Obama could finally return to the trail, where the affirmation of the crowd beats the pounding of the pundits. The crowds are smaller — he drew 24,000 here in Bristow, compared with 60,000 and 80,000 in his final days in 2008 — but they are enthusiastic, and he draws energy from them.

“The president seemed relaxed,” said former Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio, who campaigned with him in that state. “You don’t see a lot of anxiety or frenetic behavior.”

Mr. Obama seems to enjoy his unannounced stops even more, allowing a tiny peek into his interior life. At the Common Man restaurant in Merrimack, N.H., he met a woman with two daughters. “You can’t beat daughters,” he said, reflecting on his own, who were, he added, still at a good age: “They still love you. They’re still cute. They don’t talk back too much.”

One of his favorite stops was the employee cafeteria at the Bellagio hotel and casino in Las Vegas, where he greeted kitchen workers and room cleaners. “For him, that was the people he’s fighting for,” Mr. Plouffe said later. “He loves stuff like that. That was a unique one.”

It made such an impression that Mr. Obama was still talking about it a day later. “That thing at the Bellagio yesterday was great,” he told reporters on Air Force One. Then, recalling that his press secretary’s van broke down, he joked, “I think every trip we’re going to find at least one occasion to ditch Jay Carney.”

Very rarely does Mr. Obama confront the nearly half of America that polls say do not support him, those who blame him for the economic troubles still afflicting the country. He seemed taken aback at Cleveland’s West Side Market when he asked a chicken vendor how business was going.

“Terrible since you got here,” the man said.

The vendor later told his local newspaper he had meant only that the president’s party had blocked his business that day. But he inadvertently voiced the frustrations of many Americans.

Nor has Mr. Obama faced many tough questions lately, like those about the response to the attack in Benghazi, Libya, since he generally does not take questions from the reporters who trail him everywhere.

Instead, he sticks to generally friendlier broadcast interviews, sometimes giving seven minutes to a local television station or calling in to drive-time radio disc jockeys with nicknames like Roadkill.

With Michael Yo, a Miami radio host, he revealed his first job — Baskin-Robbins, “paid minimum wage” — and addressed a feud between Mariah Carey and Nicki Minaj: “I’m all about bringing people together,” he said.

He relishes rare moments away from politics. He had dinner one night at a Washington restaurant with several swing-state Democrats who had won a contest to meet the president. He had done his homework; he knew their names and their children’s names. But as he tucked into a dinner of salmon, asparagus and potatoes — he left most of the potatoes — he was eager not to dwell on the campaign.

“We didn’t really talk about politics very much,” said Kimberley Cathey, 41, a speech language pathologist from North Carolina. “I don’t recall really in the hour and a half we talked anything major about the election,” said her husband, Ron, also 41. “It was pretty much a night away from that.”

The president did contemplate the possibility of defeat, but said he and his family “would be fine no matter what the outcome,” Ms. Cathey said. Mario Orosa, 44, a technical specialist at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Akron, Ohio, said he had asked Mr. Obama, “What was the last thing that made you really nervous?” The president replied, “I don’t remember.”

He is not a nervous man. But even his famous cool may be challenged on Tuesday night. For the “prop,” it is all over but the waiting, while Mr. Plouffe makes some calls and bothers some more folks.