Totally Liberal Campus - Where's Diveristy of Views?

Be my guest. Go argue with Mort Zuckerman. (See 1 below.)

Rangel authors the new 'sock it to me schtick' that used to be a humorous "Laugh In" skit! (See 2 below.)


Bret Stephens writes, Obama gets it right in his Ghana speech pointing out the President understands 20% government skimming. Perhaps living and working in The Windy City, where The Daley Family Machine has been skimming for years, taught our President something. (See 3 below.)

Republican Rep.Jack Kingston responds to a friend of mine. (See 4 below.)

University's all liberal professors are too much for this student. Where is the intellectual diversity? Not on this Oregon campus for sure.

In fact he was rebuked for asking the question of their political leanings. That should teach this young student not to probe in pursuit of diversified thinking. (See 5 below.)

Obama, keep the pressure on Israel and maybe they will bend. If not, you can always do like the Brits just did and put them in the penalty box for existing and defending themselves in a region surrounded by a heap of hate. (See 6 below.)

I have not been listening to The Sotomayor Hearings but I have caught a few editorial commentators. What I find interesting is that most nominations for the Supreme Court are ultimately approved after they have been severely grilled and often damaged by vicious attacks - mostly by liberal Edward Kennedy types. Think Allito, Bork, Thomas.

If the nominee survives the trial by fire and finally gets their appointment are we left with a damaged goods justice and, if so, is that healthy for the nation? The Supreme Court is both the weakest of the three branches of government yet, the most powerful as long as we intend to abide by their rulings. Weak because the court has no army, cannot raise their salaries and are basically dependent upon Congress. Strong because the members are appointed for life and serve isolated from political pressures if the justices have guts to resist, which most do. We owe this marvelous and delicate balance to our framers.

Now lets go change it all.


Dick

1)The Economy Is Even Worse Than You Think: The average length of unemployment is higher than it's been since government began tracking the data in 1948.
By MORTIMER ZUCKERMAN

The recent unemployment numbers have undermined confidence that we might be nearing the bottom of the recession. What we can see on the surface is disconcerting enough, but the inside numbers are just as bad.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics preliminary estimate for job losses for June is 467,000, which means 7.2 million people have lost their jobs since the start of the recession. The cumulative job losses over the last six months have been greater than for any other half year period since World War II, including the military demobilization after the war. The job losses are also now equal to the net job gains over the previous nine years, making this the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all job growth from the previous expansion.

Here are 10 reasons we are in even more trouble than the 9.5% unemployment rate indicates:


- June's total assumed 185,000 people at work who probably were not. The government could not identify them; it made an assumption about trends. But many of the mythical jobs are in industries that have absolutely no job creation, e.g., finance. When the official numbers are adjusted over the next several months, June will look worse.

- More companies are asking employees to take unpaid leave. These people don't count on the unemployment roll.

- No fewer than 1.4 million people wanted or were available for work in the last 12 months but were not counted. Why? Because they hadn't searched for work in the four weeks preceding the survey.

- The number of workers taking part-time jobs due to the slack economy, a kind of stealth underemployment, has doubled in this recession to about nine million, or 5.8% of the work force. Add those whose hours have been cut to those who cannot find a full-time job and the total unemployed rises to 16.5%, putting the number of involuntarily idle in the range of 25 million.

- The average work week for rank-and-file employees in the private sector, roughly 80% of the work force, slipped to 33 hours. That's 48 minutes a week less than before the recession began, the lowest level since the government began tracking such data 45 years ago. Full-time workers are being downgraded to part time as businesses slash labor costs to remain above water, and factories are operating at only 65% of capacity. If Americans were still clocking those extra 48 minutes a week now, the same aggregate amount of work would get done with 3.3 million fewer employees, which means that if it were not for the shorter work week the jobless rate would be 11.7%, not 9.5% (which far exceeds the 8% rate projected by the Obama administration).

- The average length of official unemployment increased to 24.5 weeks, the longest since government began tracking this data in 1948. The number of long-term unemployed (i.e., for 27 weeks or more) has now jumped to 4.4 million, an all-time high.

- The average worker saw no wage gains in June, with average compensation running flat at $18.53 an hour.

- The goods producing sector is losing the most jobs -- 223,000 in the last report alone.

- The prospects for job creation are equally distressing. The likelihood is that when economic activity picks up, employers will first choose to increase hours for existing workers and bring part-time workers back to full time. Many unemployed workers looking for jobs once the recovery begins will discover that jobs as good as the ones they lost are almost impossible to find because many layoffs have been permanent. Instead of shrinking operations, companies have shut down whole business units or made sweeping structural changes in the way they conduct business. General Motors and Chrysler, closed hundreds of dealerships and reduced brands. Citigroup and Bank of America cut tens of thousands of positions and exited many parts of the world of finance.

Job losses may last well into 2010 to hit an unemployment peak close to 11%. That unemployment rate may be sustained for an extended period.

Can we find comfort in the fact that employment has long been considered a lagging indicator? It is conventionally seen as having limited predictive power since employment reflects decisions taken earlier in the business cycle. But today is different. Unemployment has doubled to 9.5% from 4.8% in only 16 months, a rate so fast it may influence future economic behavior and outlook.

How could this happen when Washington has thrown trillions of dollars into the pot, including the famous $787 billion in stimulus spending that was supposed to yield $1.50 in growth for every dollar spent? For a start, too much of the money went to transfer payments such as Medicaid, jobless benefits and the like that do nothing for jobs and growth. The spending that creates new jobs is new spending, particularly on infrastructure. It amounts to less than 10% of the stimulus package today.

About 40% of U.S. workers believe the recession will continue for another full year, and their pessimism is justified. As paychecks shrink and disappear, consumers are more hesitant to spend and won't lead the economy out of the doldrums quickly enough.

It may have made him unpopular in parts of the Obama administration, but Vice President Joe Biden was right when he said a week ago that the administration misread how bad the economy was and how effective the stimulus would be. It was supposed to be about jobs but it wasn't. The Recovery Act was a single piece of legislation but it included thousands of funding schemes for tens of thousands of projects, and those programs are stuck in the bureaucracy as the government releases the funds with typical inefficiency.

Another $150 billion, which was allocated to state coffers to continue programs like Medicaid, did not add new jobs; hundreds of billions were set aside for tax cuts and for new benefits for the poor and the unemployed, and they did not add new jobs. Now state budgets are drowning in red ink as jobless claims and Medicaid bills climb.

Next year state budgets will have depleted their initial rescue dollars. Absent another rescue plan, they will have no choice but to slash spending, raise taxes, or both. State and local governments, representing about 15% of the economy, are beginning the worst contraction in postwar history amid a deficit of $166 billion for fiscal 2010, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and a gap of $350 billion in fiscal 2011.

Households overburdened with historic levels of debt will also be saving more. The savings rate has already jumped to almost 7% of after-tax income from 0% in 2007, and it is still going up. Every dollar of saving comes out of consumption. Since consumer spending is the economy's main driver, we are going to have a weak consumer sector and many businesses simply won't have the means or the need to hire employees. After the 1990-91 recessions, consumers went out and bought houses, cars and other expensive goods. This time, the combination of a weak job picture and a severe credit crunch means that people won't be able to get the financing for big expenditures, and those who can borrow will be reluctant to do so. The paycheck has returned as the primary source of spending.

This process is nowhere near complete and, until it is, the economy will barely grow if it does at all, and it may well oscillate between sluggish growth and modest decline for the next several years until the rebalancing of excessive debt has been completed. Until then, the economy will be deprived of adequate profits and cash flow, and businesses will not start to hire nor race to make capital expenditures when they have vast idle capacity.

No wonder poll after poll shows a steady erosion of confidence in the stimulus. So what kind of second-act stimulus should we look for? Something that might have a real multiplier effect, not a congressional wish list of pet programs. It is critical that the Obama administration not play politics with the issue. The time to get ready for a serious infrastructure program is now. It's a shame Washington didn't get it right the first time.

Mr. Zuckerman is chairman and editor in chief of U.S. News & World Report.

2)The Small Business Surtax: The Obama Democrats pick income redistribution over job creation and economic growth

Jason Furman owes an apology to Michael Boskin, the Stanford economist who wrote a year ago on these pages that Barack Obama would raise American income tax rates nearly to 60%. Mr. Furman, then in the Obama campaign and now at the White House, claimed this was wrong and that Democrats would merely raise taxes back to their Clinton-era level.

House Democrats are now proving that Mr. Boskin had it right, and before it's over even he may have underestimated how high taxes will go. In the middle of a recession and with rising unemployment, Democrats have been letting it leak that they want to raise U.S. tax rates higher than they've been in nearly 30 years in order to finance government health care.

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Every detail isn't known, but late last week Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel disclosed that his draft bill would impose a "surtax" on individuals with adjusted gross income of more than $280,000 a year. This would hit job creators especially hard because more than six of every 10 who earn that much are small business owners, operators or investors, according to a 2007 Treasury study. That study also found that almost half of the income taxed at this highest rate is small business income from the more than 500,000 sole proprietorships and subchapter S corporations whose owners pay the individual rate.

In addition, many more smaller business owners with lower profits would be hit by the Rangel plan's payroll tax surcharge. That surcharge would apply to all firms with 25 or more workers that don't offer health insurance to their employees, and it would amount to an astonishing eight percentage point fee above the current 15% payroll levy.

Here's the ugly income-tax math. First, Mr. Obama has promised to let the lower Bush tax rates expire after 2010. This would raise the top personal income tax rate to 39.6% from 35%, and the next rate to 36% from 33%. The Bush expiration would also phase out various tax deductions and exemptions, bringing the top marginal rate to as high as 41%.

Then add the Rangel Surtax of one percentage point, starting at $280,000 ($350,000 for couples), plus another percentage point at $400,000 ($500,000 for couples), rising to three points on more than $800,000 ($1 million) in 2011. But wait, there's more. The surcharge could rise by two more percentage points in 2013 if health-care costs are larger than advertised -- which is a near-certainty. Add all of this up and the top marginal tax rate would climb to 46%, which hasn't been seen in the U.S. since the Reagan tax reform of 1986 cut the top rate to 28% from 50%.

States have also been raising their income tax rates, so in California and New York City the top rate would be around 58%. The Tax Foundation reports that at least half of all states would have combined state-federal tax rates of more than 50%.

Mr. Rangel also wants to apply his surcharges to investment income like capital gains. So the combined effect of repealing the Bush tax cuts and the new surcharges would be to raise the tax on stock appreciation by at least 60% -- to as high as 24% from 15% today. President Obama has been worrying about a capital squeeze on small businesses, but raising the capital gains tax would only further starve them of funds.

Democrats claim these tax increases on the rich won't do any economic harm. They should read the work of Christina Romer before she became chief White House economist. Ms. Romer and her husband, David Romer, a Berkeley economist, have published multiple studies on the impact of tax policy changes over the past 100 years. One of their findings is that "tax increases appear to have a very large, sustained and highly significant negative impact on output." In other words, tax hikes are an antistimulus.

Another implication of the Rangel plan is that America's successful small businesses would pay higher tax rates than the Fortune 500, and for that matter than most companies around the world. The corporate federal-state tax rate applied to General Electric and Google is about 39% in the U.S., and the business tax rate is about 25% in the OECD countries. So the U.S. would have close to the most punitive taxes on small business income anywhere on the globe.

Mr. Rangel and House Democrats are also banking on the idea that raising tax rates by 20% will raise 20% more tax revenue, but that's like telling Wal-Mart it can raise prices by 20% and get 20% more profit. When taxes on the rich rise, their reported income tends to decline. The last time the top federal income tax rate was 50%, the richest 1% paid only about 25% of all income taxes. Today, at a 35% rate they pay nearly 40%.

A new study by the Kaufman Foundation finds that small business entrepreneurs have led America out of its last seven post-World War II recessions. They also generate about two of every three new jobs during a recovery. The more the Obama Democrats reveal of their policies, the more it's clear that they prize income redistribution above all else, including job creation and economic growth.

3) Obama Gets It Right on Africa: We'd be glad if the government only skimmed 20%.
By BRET STEPHENS

There's a striking passage in "Dreams From My Father," in which a young Barack Obama, on safari in Kenya, gets an unembellished picture of everyday African life from his driver, a man named Francis.

"[Francis] said he enjoyed his work with the travel agency but disliked being away from his family. 'If I could, I might prefer farming full-time,' he said, 'but the KCU makes it impossible.'

"'What's the KCU?' I asked.

"'The Kenyan Coffee Union. They are thieves. They regulate what we can plant and when we can plant it. I can only sell my coffee to them, and they sell it overseas. They say to us that prices are dropping, but I know they still get one hundred times what they pay to me. The rest goes where?' Francis shook his head with disgust. 'It's a terrible thing when the government steals from its own people.'"

Terrible indeed. And perhaps it was an echo of Francis's voice that shaped Mr. Obama's speech last Saturday in Ghana, by far the best of his presidency.

Here's some of what Mr. Obama said: "No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20% off the top." "The purpose of foreign assistance must be creating the conditions where it's no longer needed." "The West is not responsible for the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy over the last decade, or wars in which children are enlisted as combatants." "We must support strong and sustainable democratic governments." "America can also do more to promote trade and investment." "We have a responsibility to support those who act responsibly and to isolate those who don't, and that is exactly what America will do." "History shows that countries thrive when they . . . create space for small and medium-sized businesses that create jobs."

All this is not only true, it's groundbreaking. Since British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan gave his "Wind of Change" speech (also in Ghana) nearly 50 years ago, Western policy toward Africa has been a matter of throwing money at a guilty conscience (or a client of convenience), no questions asked. The result, as Mr. Obama pointed out, was that countries such as Kenya, which had a larger GDP than South Korea in 1961, "have been badly outpaced."

Maybe it took a president unburdened by that kind of guilt to junk the policy. Or maybe it simply took a conversation with some of the Francises of Africa -- the politically invisible middle classes held down by their own kleptocratic rulers. Whatever the case, Africa will be well served if Mr. Obama can make good on his rhetoric.

Now if only Mr. Obama would apply those same principles to the rest of his agenda, foreign and domestic.

For instance, if trade and investment are good ideas for the U.S.-Africa relationship, why has the Obama administration dragged its feet on free-trade agreements with Colombia and South Korea? Or, if the U.S. owes Africa no apologies for its recent disasters, why has Mr. Obama gone to such lengths to apologize to Iran for the 1953 Mossadegh coup, and, in his Cairo speech, to the entire Muslim world for the politics of the Cold War? Or if Mr. Obama wants to "isolate" irresponsible actors, why does he continue to promise engagement with Iran, Syria, Russia and perhaps North Korea no matter how they behave?

Similarly, while U.S. government officials don't usually demand bribes (at least outside of Illinois), the U.S. corporate tax rate, at 39%, is the second highest in the industrialized world. That's about 10 percentage points higher than the OECD average, or nearly twice the 20% "bribe tax" that scandalizes Mr. Obama.

As for creating "space for small and medium-sized businesses," it's ironic that Mr. Obama would make this point on the same weekend that House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel is calling for a 3% surtax on the wealthy -- many of whom, as Scott Hodge of the Tax Foundation notes, happen to be business owners. These are the same people now facing the prospect of next year's expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the return to the 55% top rate on estate taxes, another scourge of small-business owners.

Finally, if the $2.3 trillion the West has given in foreign aid over the past five decades -- a "stimulus" package if ever there was one -- has done nothing to raise Africa out of poverty, why does Mr. Obama think that any amount of stimulus spending is going to revive America's economic fortunes? At least in Africa's case, the West could periodically forgive its debts. Who will forgive ours?

In his conversation with Francis, Mr. Obama records his lament that Kenya's "big men" fail to take responsibility for their country:

"'Attitudes aren't so different in America,' I told Francis."

"'You are probably right,' he said. 'But you see, a rich country like America can perhaps afford to be stupid.'"

Somebody make this guy treasury secretary.


4) HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
WASHINGTON D.C. 20515

JACK KINGSTON
FIRST DISTRICT
GEORGIA


Dear Friend,

Over the years, healthcare spending in the U.S. has grown faster than the rate of inflation and now exceeds $2.4 trillion annually – nearly one-fifth (17%) of our nation’s economy.

We all agree that healthcare should be more affordable and accessible. Disagreement comes, however, on how to achieve that goal.
From a government-run “public option” to a vast expansion of the already insolvent Medicare and Medicaid to cover all Americans, some believe that growing the government is the answer to our troubles.

I disagree. Inserting bureaucrats between a doctor and his patient would only further drive up the cost of coverage and decrease quality. Our office spends countless hours refereeing Medicare coverage disputes and billing errors. It is very inefficient.

With respects to government run healthcare, the statistics are startling. Breast cancer mortality is 52% higher in Germany and 88% higher in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Prostate cancer mortality is 604% higher in Britain and 457% higher in Norway than it is in America. Just across our northern border, Canadians have a 9% higher mortality rate for breast cancer and 184% higher for colon cancer.

Worst of all, massive government intervention would end the creativity which has been the hallmark of the American healthcare system. Consider that during the years of socialized medicine in the Soviet Union, not a single new pharmaceutical or treatment method was developed.

While President Obama has set an August 1 deadline for Congress to act, I believe we must take time to fully examine all proposals. Rushing through legislation that will impact every American and which could lead to a government-takeover of one-fifth of our economy could prove dangerous.

Back in January, President Obama said we must, “act quickly and boldly on the economy,” to stop the economic downturn. At the time, unemployment was 8%; now it’s 9.5% with 1.5 million people out of work since the passage of his economic “stimulus” legislation.
Similarly, in September President Bush told the world that we must act on an “urgent timeline” to pass the Troubled Assets Relief Program. Since then, stock portfolios are down more than 40% and at least 45 banks have failed. Now the same “Washington-knows-best” wisdom is telling us to act quickly for healthcare reform. Isn’t it about time to stop turning to Washington?

Consider two of our existing government-run healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid. While these programs are known to be in danger, it takes an act of Congress to reform them. In the last session of Congress, though, some 452 bills were offered by members of Congress to push for much-needed reforms. Of those, only 12 became law – not a great track record in reforming government healthcare plans!

While I have grave concerns about a government takeover of our nation’s healthcare, a bipartisan solution to healthcare reform is achievable and must be a primary concern of this Congress. As we prepare for the debate, I need your input and hope you’ll take the time to complete my healthcare survey. To do so, click here.

To learn more about the healthcare debate, click here or direct your browser to http://kingston.house.gov/healthcare.

Thank you for your time – I hope to hear from you soon.

Sincerely,

Jack Kingston
Member of Congress


5) Nearly all my professors are Democrats. Isn't that a problem?


After I posed that question, two faculty railed against me. That's a sure sign that universities should address the lack of ideological diversity.
By Dan Lawton

When I began examining the political affiliation of faculty at the University of Oregon, the lone conservative professor I spoke with cautioned that I would "make a lot of people unhappy."

Though I mostly brushed off his warning – assuming that academia would be interested in such discourse – I was careful to frame my research for a column for the school newspaper diplomatically.

The University of Oregon (UO), where I study journalism, invested millions annually in a diversity program that explicitly included "political affiliation" as a component. Yet, out of the 111 registered Oregon voters in the departments of journalism, law, political science, economics, and sociology, there were only two registered Republicans.

A number of conservative students told me they felt Republican ideas were frequently caricatured and rarely presented fairly. Did the dearth of conservative professors on campus and apparent marginalization of ideas on the right belie the university's commitment to providing a marketplace of ideas?

In my column, published in the campus newspaper The Oregon Daily Emerald June 1, I suggested that such a disparity hurt UO. I argued that the lifeblood of higher education was subjecting students to diverse viewpoints and the university needed to work on attracting more conservative professors.

I also suggested that students working on right-leaning ideas may have difficulty finding faculty mentors. I couldn't imagine, for instance, that journalism that supported the Iraq war or gun rights would be met with much enthusiasm.

What I didn't realize is that journalism that examined the dominance of liberal ideas on campus would be addressed with hostility.

A professor who confronted me declared that he was "personally offended" by my column. He railed that his political viewpoints never affected his teaching and suggested that if I wanted a faculty with Republicans I should have attended a university in the South. "If you like conservatism you can certainly attend the University of Texas and you can walk past the statue of Jefferson Davis everyday on your way to class," he wrote in an e-mail.

I was shocked by such a comment, which seemed an attempt to link Republicans with racist orthodoxy. When I wrote back expressing my offense, he neither apologized nor clarified his remarks.

Instead, he reiterated them on the record. Was such a brazen expression of partisanship representative of the faculty as a whole? I decided to speak with him in person in the hope of finding common ground.

He was eager to chat, and after five minutes our dialogue bloomed into a lively discussion. As we hammered away at the issue, one of his colleagues with whom he shared an office grew visibly agitated. Then, while I was in mid-sentence, she exploded.

"You think you're so [expletive] cute with your little column," she told me. "I read your piece and all you want is attention. You're just like Bill O'Reilly. You just want to get up on your [expletive] soapbox and have people look at you."

From the disgust with which she attacked me, you would have thought I had advocated Nazism. She quickly grew so emotional that she had to leave the room. But before she departed, she stood over me and screamed.

"You understand that my column was basically a prophesy," I shot back. I had suggested right-leaning ideas weren't welcome on campus and in response the faculty had tied my viewpoints to racism and addressed me with profanity-laced insults.

What's so remarkable is that I hadn't actually advocated Republican ideas or conservative ideas. In fact, I'm not a conservative, nor a Republican. I simply believe in the concept of diversity – a primarily liberal idea – and think that we suffer when we don't include ideas we find unappealing.

After my article on political diversity was published, I received numerous e-mails from students at other schools who spoke of similar experiences. As a result of my research and personal experience, I can now say without reservation that the lack of ideological diversity on college campuses is a dangerous threat to free and open discourse in academia. Sadly, there are few perfect solutions.

One proposal considered by universities is endowing a chair of conservative thought to lure a high-profile conservative scholar to campus. However, this has the potential to exacerbate partisan tensions by sanctioning an explicitly ideological position.

A more draconian option is to enact a political litmus test and mandate that Republicans fill a certain number of positions, but doing so would exclude many qualified professors and be unfairly discriminatory.

The fact is that political diversity, like many diversity efforts, is something that cannot be created through edict, but only by a concerted effort on the behalf of those in power. While hiring on the basis of party affiliation isn't the answer to reducing political discrimination, denying that political beliefs influence pedagogy is simply naive.

Faculties in ideological departments should examine the body of work of a candidate to see if it fills a shortcoming. In a department of journalism or political science, a professor with a right-leaning perspective would not only provide a balance in curriculum, but a potential mentor to conservative students who feel isolated in their beliefs. At left-leaning universities, such professors should be aggressively pursued.

Above all, deans, provosts, and professors must not allow their aversion to conservative ideas to manifest so contemptuously.

Political disagreement is crucial to vibrant discourse, but not in the form of caricatures, slights, or mockery.

Students should never come under personal attack from faculty members for straying from the party line. The fact that they do shows how easily political partisanship can corrupt the elements of higher education that should be valued the most.

Dan Lawton is a freelance journalist

6) Despite Jewish Concerns, Obama Keeps Up Pressure on Israel
By Tony Karon

President Barack Obama has concluded that Israel and the Palestinians are unlikely to achieve peace unless they're under external pressure to make the requisite compromises. Believing that a two-state solution is in the best interests of both parties and that time is running out for such a solution, the President is stepping up the pressure on both sides. That was Obama's message at a White House meeting on July 13 with representatives of leading Jewish-American organizations, some of whom have lately complained that the President is unfairly pressuring Israel to make concessions on West Bank settlements, while going easy on the Palestinians.

According to various accounts of the White House meeting, Obama was gentle but firm in rejecting requests to refrain from publicly expressing his differences with Israel's leaders. When it was suggested by one participant in the meeting that the past eight years had demonstrated that the best chance for peace came when there was no daylight between the U.S. and Israeli positions, Obama pushed back, noting that the close ties between the Bush Administration and the governments of Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert had in fact produced no significant progress toward peace.

"He said, 'The United States and Israel were very, very close for eight years, and it produced very little,' " Anti-Defamation League president Abraham Foxman told the Los Angeles Times. In order to generate momentum toward a solution, Obama explained, the U.S. was pressuring Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab states to make concessions.

Foxman was reportedly not convinced, and some others at the meeting expressed reservations afterward. Some, however, were reportedly more inclined to give Obama's approach a chance to work, and the President's approach was enthusiastically backed by J-Street, a new Jewish-American lobby group that ties support for Israel to the pursuit of peace. The presence of J-Street's Jeremy Ben-Ami at the White House meeting was one more change to digest for such stalwarts of the Jewish-American establishment as Foxman and Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Following the President's Cairo outreach speech in June, Hoenlein had said publicly that "President Obama's strongest supporters among Jewish leaders are deeply troubled by his recent Middle East initiatives, and some are questioning what he really believes."

Whether or not Obama suffers any domestic political cost for putting pressure on Israel remains to be seen — he won three-quarters of the Jewish vote in last year's election, and he has good reason to believe he can retain most of that support even if he prods Israel on issues like settlements. After all, the settlements are not fundamental to Israel's security, to which Obama constantly reiterates his rock-solid commitment.

But Obama may be understating the extent of pressure that will be required to bring about a two-state solution to the conflict. The settlement freeze that he has demanded of Israel, for example, is simply a confidence-building mechanism aimed at securing new gestures from Israel's Arab neighbors and helping restart negotiations. But Israel's government has pushed back hard, rejecting the principle of a total settlement freeze and insisting on completing some 2,500 housing units currently under construction, excluding East Jerusalem from the freeze, and making it conditional. And Arab governments are reluctant to be seen to offer new "rewards" — such as allowing the opening of diplomatic facilities or overflight rights for commercial aircraft — in return for Israel's simply complying with its obligations under the 2003 "road map" for peace. Each side seems to doubt the seriousness of the other, and each will cite the other's reluctance to move forward as a reason to hold back themselves.

The intentions of Israel's leaders came under further question last week, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's father, the historian Ben-Zion Netanyahu, told an Israeli TV interviewer that he had been told by his son that he did not support the creation of a Palestinian state. Despite Benjamin Netanyahu's having accepted the goal in principle under pressure from Washington, his father said the Prime Minister had done so only on the basis of conditions that were impossible for the Palestinians to ever accept.

Then, in an interview published on July 10, Netanyahu's national security chief and key adviser, Uzi Arad, said the Palestinians, including Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, were not committed to living in peace with Israel. "Even the moderates among them do not really want a settlement," Arad said. "At most, they are striving toward a settlement in order to renew the confrontation from a better position." As a result of U.S. pressure, a Palestinian state of "stamps, parades, carnival [...] That could happen," Arad said. "A fragile structure, yes; an arrangement resting wholly on wobbly foundations."

Plainly, there are key voices in the Israeli leadership that are deeply skeptical of Obama's effort to move quickly to implement a two-state peace. And, of course, as the President himself constantly reminds, the window of opportunity for such an outcome is closing after two decades of fruitless negotiation.

In a little-noted speech in London on July 11, European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana — a key figure in the "Quartet" of the U.S., E.U., U.N. and Russia that is overseeing the peace process — said that if the parties were unable to bring the conflict to an end in the very near future, the international community would have to impose a solution. "The mediator has to set the timetable too," Solana said. "If the parties are not able to stick to it, then a solution backed by the international community should be put on the table."

Solana called for a U.N. Security Council resolution outlining in detail the parameters of a two-state solution, fixing borders, prescribing arrangements for sharing Jerusalem, security and the fate of refugees. Of course, Obama is saying nothing of the sort, still hoping to drag the two sides, however reluctantly, to the negotiating table to hash out an agreement. But Solana — who has been involved in trying to do just that for a decade longer than Obama has — may simply have recognized that the U.S. pressure that has been required to get both sides simply to make confidence-building gestures is nothing compared with what will be required to get them to accept a final peace agreement.