Cable news shows call it “commentating.” Direct from the peanut gallery, here are four interesting bits of analysis, with my own two cents thrown in, free of charge. To start us off, the best editorial cartoon from the past week:
But if Romney wins, we’re headed for 1984
Journalists can find historical parallels for the 2012 election in almost every presidential race of the last hundred years. Nate Silver of the Times breaks down the precedents by statistics and margins of victory, but Ed Kilgore, the “Political Animal” blogger at Washington Monthly, is particularly insightful. Each party has its own version of history to impose on 2012, though neither makes a very compelling argument.
Most of the arguments we’ll hear from the two campaigns about historical precedents for this election will continue to more or less involve Democrats talking about 1964 and Republicans talking about 1980, even if it winds up looking more like 2004.
The left would like us to see Romney as Barry Goldwater, a Republican out of step with the electorate whose “severe” brand of conservatism handed President Johnson his first victory at the top of the ticket, while the right hopes the media latches onto the the narrative of another Carter vs. Reagan match-up, “an incumbent Democratic president with a poor economy who tried to make the election something other than a straight referendum on his record.” In reality, however, Obama may be neither Johnson nor Carter — health care reform was no Civil Rights Act, but taking out Osama bin Laden was not a bungled hostage situation in Iran. Ironically, Kilgore suggests, Obama most closely resembles the man he replaced, a sitting president whose strength on foreign policy brought him a narrow victory over a lackluster and flip-flopping challenger.
Negotiating with China
William Pesek, a Bloomberg News columnist, makes an interesting point about the crisis in China over the fate of human rights activist Chen Guangcheng. Pesek is not a right-winger attempting to paint Obama as weak on foreign policy or naive in his handling of authoritarian regimes; though he believes that the administration should have taken a harder line in negotiations, what he finds most important is that the administration could have taken a harder line. The pressure to wrap up the talks over Chen before Hillary Clinton’s arrival was self-imposed and unnecessary, because the summit itself was largely for for show. Like many China watchers, Pesek believes that Beijing is playing to the home crowd. Party leadership cares far more about the domestic implications of its actions than any international repercussions; in fact, it is so preoccupied with its own internal struggles that substantial progress on U.S. relations is unlikely.
So let’s not pretend any one U.S.-China summit, this one included, matters all that much. China is undergoing a major leadership change this year with Xi Jinping expected to replace President Hu Jintao. It is taking place amid the biggest scandal to face the Communist Party in decades. Against that backdrop, the U.S. could have sacrificed this week’s Beijing summit with China’s departing leaders and little would have been lost.
While Hillary Clinton’s team may have felt the summit was important, the Chinese government, convinced that “Mr. Chen should be punished, not coddled by the Americans,” was ready to let the talks founder. The Times writes that “China’s negotiators suggested that they would cancel the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, which was scheduled to begin four days later with the arrival of Mrs. Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner.”
Pesek’s analysis is also borne out by reports detailing the Chinese media’s coverage of the Chen incident. The harsh line taken initially by the nationalist Global Times — “The West and its supporters in China always need a tool to work against China’s current political system” — seems intended more for domestic consumption than as an actual rebuke to the U.S. Projecting strength to its own restless population, especially given the uncertainty surrounding this year’s political transition, takes priority over persuading the U.S. to back off its talking points on currency devaluation or trade issues. The Times reports that intra-party divisions among China’s elite were as much an issue as the split between China and the U.S.: “Mr. Chen’s case highlighted what the Americans view as an intensifying struggle within the Chinese leadership between hard-liners and reformers.”
College is a two-story colonial in the suburbs
Daniel Indiviglio’s latest Reuters Breakingviews column compares student loans to the subprime mortgages pushed on low-income consumers in the pre-crash years.
A decade ago, government subsidies and guarantees helped expand the “dream” of homeownership to many Americans who would have been better off renting. Today, it’s college education being made more accessible with cheap funding provided by Uncle Sam . . . .
Like homeownership, college education has been exploited as a moral good. Anyone aspiring to earn decent wages needs a degree these days. Even jobs that haven’t traditionally required such academic training, like police work, now do.
Beyond the most superficial similarities — massive debt, a possible bubble — between the two industries, student loans and hard-sell mortgages don’t actually have that much in common. Both education and homeownership may be marketed as “moral goods,” but while the former is truly necessary to snag a well-paid job in today’s economy, the latter was never a required rung on the ladder to success. No one had to buy a home to get ahead in the world; as appealing as that McMansion may have been, it was a want, not aneed. Without a home, a couple could still save for retirement and maintain a satisfying lifestyle — in fact, millions of people in urban rental markets like New York City did just that.
By contrast, without a college education, a young person’s future is extremely limited. There is much less choice involved in attending college. As difficult as it may be to pay off student loans, their holders did not typically load up on debt out of greed or ignorance of the terms. Students, unlike homeowners who didn’t understand how quickly the payments on their adjustable-rate mortgage would balloon, typically know how hard it is to pay off loans. They just don’t feel they have any other option.
George Washington: the last president not to tell a lie
CNN political analyst Gloria Burger buries the lede in her piece about Mitt Romney’s more conservative rivals falling into line behind the presumptive nominee:
But after this combative primary season, watching Mitt Romney’s former GOP rivals struggle with ways to endorse their onetime nemesis is painful. It’s like they’re trying to find ways to snuggle with Darth Vader. At the very least, the contortions are a tad awkward and unseemly. And in the real world (as opposed to the political world), the result is completely unbelievable.
It’s also a perfect example of why voters don’t trust politicians.
Consider this: Newt Gingrich finally announced his support of Mitt Romney this week. Yet in his obvious struggle to find the right words to embrace a man he once called a liar, Gingrich came up with this tortured equation: “I am asked sometimes is Mitt Romney conservative enough? And my answer is simple — compared to Barack Obama? This is not a choice between Mitt Romney and Ronald Reagan. This is a choice between Mitt Romney and the most radical leftist president in American history.”
Well, Gingrich is the historian, so he would know.
Really, though, Burger makes a good point. We’re used to seeing elected officials do backflips on supposedly deeply-held positions (Mitt Romney on abortion, Newt Gingrich on global warming, the entire Republican party on the individual mandate), but it’s even more jarring to see a politician doing a 180 on something as basic as liking or not liking an enemy. Plenty of regular Americans tell fibs at work all the time — “That’s a great idea, sir!” — but they feel differently when a friend double-crosses them or a supposed pal cozies up with an ex-husband. Gingrich’s approval of Romney, albeit granted through gritted teeth, is just this sort of interpersonal hypocrisy that makes voters shake their heads. No one likes to remember the year in high school that her best friend fell in with the popular crowd and started gossiping behind her back.
It’s just one more thing sure to increase the trust deficit between Washington and middle America.
. . . So Well Read. . . 