The Post Office may close but you can still 'seal' this!
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If not the New York Times, I can generally rely upon The New Yorker to prove my point. Liberals enjoy a disconnect when it comes to "We The People. Why? Because they know we cannot understand the depths of what they can fathom. Conservatives are just too shallow for their exalted thinking and analysis. After all, they are convinced their progressive thinking has formed the basis of all our nation's advances and certainly none of its ills
Yes, it remains all GW's fault. But soon the GW Pinata will have Paul Ryan's face on it and GW can slink back into oblivion, un-reminded of the terror he brought to the world trying to free Iraqis from tyranny. Better they should have been left to the fate of Syrians aka Obama.
Three cheers for the U.N. and Obama's Nobel Peace Prize. Remain aloof and indifferent, leave others to their fate, bow and 'reset buttons,' let Iran have their nasty old nuclear bomb and you too can be awarded if not knighted! (See 1 below.)
One more observation about the rising drum beat attacks on Ryan which began immediately after his selection.
I submit they reflect Obama's approach toward governance. Obama believes government is the solution and the bigger government is, the more its takes over economic sectors the more productive we will be as a nation. Obama believes government knows best and should be the final arbiter in selecting allocation of resources and thus Solyndra's.
This is contradictory to every principle on which our nation was founded. Consequently, Obama has to be against personal choice and individual freedom and this is also why he does not recognize American exceptionalism and demeans personal success.
The attacks on Ryan are indicative of why Obama and his thuggish supporters must crush those with creative ideas, and helps explain why Ryan is such a threat. Ryan's message is one of reality. He states the obvious. If we continue on the current path America will falter and government will be unable to carry out its legitimate responsibility which is to protect its citizens and assure their opportunity to achieve and sustain prosperity.
Therefore, Romney /Ryan detractors have to go to extreme lengths to suggest R/R are extreme.
Thus, Obama and his misguided advisors have locked themselves into a negative, downer type campaign which is out of sync with what defines the American spirit and vision. But then Liberals and Progressives and their media and press protectors are frequently out of touch with "We The People." They neither get nor understand what motivates most Americans because they are elite in nature and, all too often, drink their own wine bath water. America is a beer nation of mostly fair minded, optimistic people! Consequently, they are unwilling to buy the charge radical and obnoxious ad message that Ryan is willing to push grandmother off the cliff and that is why Romney and Ryan win the election!
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R and R will undertake reform and one of the first places to start is tax reform. Can it happen? (See 2 below.)
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Is New York about to retrogress because of PC'ism? We just spent 5 or so days in New York and I noted earlier the city is enjoying a dynamic renaissance.
I forgot to mention "The Highline." Years ago meat was delivered over a CSX rail system above ground. Then trucks made incursions. Several years ago some wealth and public spirited citizens hired some city planners who, thinking outside the box, have now developed these tracks into a skyline walkway which has resulted in Chelsea undergoing a transformation that is exceptional.
You can now walk from 14th street to 32nd street above the traffic on a walkway with plantings, space for social interaction, food stands etc. Consequently, new buildings have replaced old ones and art galleries, restaurants etc. have begun to replace empty lots and broken down tenement housing etc. WOW is all we could say as we walked its entire length . (See 3 below.)
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Fouad Ajami see Hollow Hillary as I do. A disaster as Sec. of State! Read why. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)LOOKS LIKE RYAN: MITT’S PICK
If tonight’s reporting is correct, and if Mitt Romney really does announce at 9 A.M. Saturday that Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin is his running mate, Romney has made the most daring decision of his political career.
After spending weeks looking into Ryan’s history for The New Yorker, visiting his home town, and interviewing him twice, I am genuinely surprised that Romney chose him. First, let’s tally the risks of a Ryan pick.
For one thing, Ryan has no significant private-sector experience. Besides summer jobs working at McDonald’s or at his family’s construction company, or waiting tables as a young Washington staffer, Ryan has none of the business-world experience Romney frequently touts as essential for governing. In the run-up to his first campaign for Congress, in 1998, that gap was enough of a concern for Ryan that he briefly became a “marketing consultant” at the family business, an obvious bit of résumé puffing.
But Ryan’s Washington experience is also light, at least for a potential President—which, after all, is the main job description of a Vice-President. Ryan has worked as a think-tank staffer and Congressman, but he’s never been in charge of a large organization, and he has little experience with foreign policy. Given how Sarah Palin was criticized for her lack of such experience, I’m surprised that Romney would pick someone whose ability to immediately step into the top job is open to question.
And the experience that Ryan does have is not exactly what voters are clamoring for at the moment. The bulk of Ryan’s House career coincided with the Presidency of George W. Bush, during which he was a reliable vote for many Bush policies that have not aged well: Medicare Part D; the Iraq War; and the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Ryan told me that voting for all of that spending, which added trillions to the deficit, made him “miserable,” but he’ll need a better explanation in his October debate with Joe Biden.
Presumably, Romney’s main reason for picking Ryan is not his early deficit-busting record but his more recent rise to celebrity as a crusading policy wonk determined to tame the federal government. Romney, who has been extremely vague about what he would do if elected, will now own Paul Ryan’s ideas, which include privatizing Social Security, turning Medicare into a voucher program, bloc-granting and drastically cutting Medicaid, and reducing discretionary spending to levels that would affect every popular government program. This Ryan agenda will now fill the vacuum created by Romney’s unwillingness to lay out the specifics of his own plan. Even before this (apparent) announcement, Democrats were planning on tying Romney to Ryan’s policy platform. Now Romney has done it for them.
So what’s the potential upside? Romney seems to have realized that his spring and summer strategies have been a failure. Since winning the nomination, Romney’s plan has been to turn the election into a simple referendum on Barack Obama. With the ailing economy, Romney believed, he needed to do little more than stand around and wait for voters to sour on the incumbent. When they did, Romney would be there as the default alternative. In recent weeks, as Romney’s favorable ratings declined, some encouraging economic news dribbled out, and Obama’s poll numbers ticked up, a loud faction of Republicans began pointing out that Romney’s theory of the campaign was wrong. Their argument was that Romney needed to turn the race into more of an ideological debate. He needed, these Republicans said, to embrace a bold policy agenda that would dramatically contrast with Obama’s. Nobody made this case more loudly than Paul Ryan.
Presidential candidates shouldn’t “run on vague platitudes and generalities,” he told me in one interview. “I want a full-throated defense for an alternative agenda that fixes the country’s problems,” he said in another.
Romney’s choice of Ryan will undoubtedly be criticized as capitulation to the right, and this pick does seem to demonstrate that Romney is not able or willing to distance himself from the base of his party. But the good thing about the Ryan pick is that the Presidential campaign will instantly turn into a very clear choice between two distinct ideologies that genuinely reflect the core beliefs of the two parties. And in that sense, Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan is good news for voters.
For more on Paul Ryan and the announcement of his place on the Republican ticket, see Ryan Lizza’s full Profile of the Wisconsin Congressman, James Surowiecki on Ryan’s budget, John Cassidy on Romney’s “Let’s talk about Ryan, not me” strategy, Jane Mayer on Ryan’s affection for libertarian hero Ayn Rand, Alex Koppelman on why the pick had to be Ryan or someone like him, andAmy Davidson on the first speeches that Romney and Ryan gave as running mates. And bookmark The Political Scene, the hub for all of The New Yorker’s coverage of the 2012 campaign.
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2)Dave Camp: Is Tax Reform Politically Possible?
He may be the last optimist in Washington, but the House Ways and Means chairman says the need for faster economic growth and some cultivated bipartisanship can fix the tax code.
It is now a daily routine: President Obama issues another class-warfare call to arms, demanding that the rich pay higher tax rates starting next year. Along the way he also takes derisive shots at Republicans in Congress, as Mr. Obama insists that they triple income- and investment-tax rates for the affluent next year.
His primary adversary in accomplishing that goal if he wins re-election is likely to be one of those Republicans in Congress: Dave Camp, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Mr. Camp ridicules Obama's plans as a bullet aimed at "small businesses and investors, which will only further weaken the fragile economy."
His twin goals are, first, to back America away from the 2013 tax cliff "so that no one's taxes go up," and second to pass tax reform, creating what he calls "a fairer, flatter and simpler tax code that lowers rates, gets rid of lobbyist loopholes, and creates more growth and jobs." Those two goals are pretty much the polar opposite of what the president is seeking.
The surprise is that Mr. Camp remains upbeat about accomplishing both, including finally cracking the code on tax reform by the end of next year. It's a sure thing if Mitt Romney wins, he thinks, and even possible in a second Obama term. "The next president, no matter who that is, is going to have to lead on this issue," he insists.
This is certainly a minority opinion—so why the optimism? "We're facing a train wreck with the tax system in 2013. Pretty much the whole tax code expires next year—the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, the Alternative Minimum Tax hitting the middle class, the estate tax, and all the rest. Given the weakness of the economy, voters are going to demand that we get this done."
Zina Saunders
Most Americans have never heard of Mr. Camp, who is still boyish-looking at age 59 and is in his 11th term representing northern Michigan. Compared to the many flamboyant predecessors who swung the Ways and Means gavel—Charles Rangel, Bill Thomas, Dan Rostenkowski—Mr. Camp is soft-spoken, laid-back and collaborative. He was recently diagnosed with what he calls a "treatable" form of non-Hodgkins lymphoma. He pledges this illness won't sidetrack him from his congressional goals. And there's no doubt he knows the tax code inside and out.
Listening to him talk leaves little doubt that he wants tax reform to be his legacy: "It is my absolute highest priority." Thanks to term limits on committee chairmen, he has only two more years to get it done. "I want something that will be pro-growth and last for years if not decades, so we're not destabilizing the economy by putting the tax code up for grabs every two years," he says.
If Mr. Obama wins re-election, that's going to be a heavy lift.
So how to do it? The model Mr. Camp has in mind happened 26 years ago, the last time Congress had the fortitude to look under the hood of the tax code and clean the engine. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 was negotiated by the Reagan administration, Democratic Rep. Dan Rostenkowski and Republican Sen. Bob Packwood. It was one of the true bipartisan triumphs of modern times, passing with 97 Senate votes, including those of current Senate Democratic leaders Harry Reid and Charles Schumer.
The 1986 tax reform eliminated most special-interest deductions and loopholes, lowering the top income-tax rate to 28% from 50%. Harvard economist Dale Jorgenson says the gains to economic growth from the lower rates and the simplified code increased GDP by more than $1 trillion, and that a similar reform now could increase national wealth over the long term by $7 trillion in net present value.
Editorial board member Steve Moore on President Obama's claim that Mitt Romney's tax plan would raise taxes on middle and lower class earners.
But in the 1990s and 2000s Congress began tinkering again, a lot of the junk removed from the code "has been put right back in," and tax rates started rising. Mr. Camp's calculates that "we've made 5,000 changes to the tax code just in the last 10 years." He says the whole system is so complicated that even the corporate lobbyists who form long lines outside his office seeking tax favors "are now telling me, 'Please fix the code. Give us less paperwork and a 25% rate and we'll gladly give up our loopholes.'"
Although he likes the flat tax that Steve Forbes popularized 16 years ago, his draft plan calls for two rates—10% for most Americans and 25% on six-figure earners and above. To ensure that tax reform gets a fair hearing, he says Republicans plan to create a "fast-track" authority so that the compromise doesn't get bogged down in committees and is assured an up or down vote on the House floor.
"We're not competitive on taxes anymore, especially in terms of international tax," he says. "We've got the highest corporate rate in the world, and we're the only country left with a world-wide system of taxation. We need to be on the cutting edge of tax and economic policy in the world so that we're the center of innovation, effort, growth, jobs."
On the business side, he wants to bring the corporate rate down to 25%, paid for by eliminating certain deductions and green energy tax subsidies "so we're not constantly picking the energy flavor of the month," and perhaps eliminating the tax advantages of debt financing over equity. This would no longer allow businesses to deduct the interest on their borrowing.
He's also considering a low "deemed repatriation tax" that would require American companies to pay a tax of about 5% on profits stored overseas. "We think that will help raise money and bring back cash stored offshore," because the rate would be so much lower than what is charged today. Then he adds: "I'm much more interested in raising revenues for businesses than for the government."
The hard part of tax reform is bringing the special interests to heel while taking away popular deductions. Can we eliminate all such deductions? Here Mr. Camp bobs and weaves. On the mortgage-interest deduction: "You probably picked the toughest one, because most families have a mortgage. And that is the largest savings vehicle for most families."
I couldn't get him to specify what deductions he would put on the cutting board: "I think at this stage of the game, it is not good to legislate body parts," adding that "you don't have to reduce or hit all of the deductions." I take that as a roundabout admission that the GOP may flinch when it comes to deductions that are the biggest revenue losers.
Mr. Camp has sought advice from Mr. Packwood, who helped engineer the 1986 reform. The major lesson he took away is, "You've got to do it in a bipartisan way." But can bipartisanship happen if Democrats won't cut tax rates but want to raise them instead? Where are the Bill Bradleys, the Richard Gephardts, and other Democrats who once wanted lower rates and a broader base?
Mr. Camp still sees some hope, pointing to the 34 Democratic senators and 91 House Democrats who voted for the 2010 extension of the George W. Bush tax rates. The obvious Democrat to take the role of Bill Bradley would be Max Baucus, the Senate Finance chairman. Mr. Camp will only say that Mr. Baucus is "open-minded" on tax reform, hardly a hearty endorsement.
Mr. Camp adds that a crucial precondition to tax modernization is to "fix the revenue scoring system to take full account of the economic growth dividend from simplification and lower rates." Republicans have been saying that for years. Yet they have never made the Joint Tax Committee or the Congressional Budget Office change their rules to take account of how worker and investor behavior changes when tax rates change.
As in 1986, "we will use a revenue neutral model," Mr. Camp says, and "we're not trying to find ways to address the debt or deficit through tax reform." He sounds like Jack Kemp here insisting that "growth will bring more revenues and our target is to have a tax system that raises revenues of between 18 and 19% of GDP." That's up from about 16% today. Who says Republicans won't raise tax revenue?
Mr. Camp is also confident that after the election in November he can get a deal with Democrats to extend all the current tax rates, including for those who make more than $200,000. "I think we can get bipartisan support," he says, citing comments from former President Clinton and four Democrat senators who expressed support for extending current tax rates. Why would Democrats budge? "Because the economic cost of not getting it done is too high," he replies. I wish I shared his optimism.
Where Mr. Camp is less upbeat and visibly frustrated is on the prospect of fundamentally fixing entitlements. "There really is a wide divide on how that issue is looked at by the Republicans and Democrats. I'd hate to paint with a broad brush, but many Democrats don't feel that we have a crisis in entitlements and Republicans do."
Mr. Camp is contemptuous of the Democratic inclination to "demagogue every Republican proposal," such as last year's Democratic television ad showing a Republican tossing an elderly woman in a wheelchair off a cliff. He dismisses out of hand the standard Democratic fix of squeezing doctors and hospitals on reimbursement rates: "This only exacerbates the problems and makes it more difficult for seniors to find Medicare physicians who'll treat them."
With a $16 trillion debt and trillions more in unfunded liabilities embedded in these programs, does he think it is getting too late? "I'm an optimist, I think we are still at a point where if we act, we can address these problems before it's a situation like Europe. They may be past the tipping point."
The trick for Mr. Camp to realize his dream of creating a pro-growth, comprehensible, 21st-century tax code is not just to get Democrats to agree to lower tax rates, which will be hard enough. Even tougher may be to get Republicans to give up those popular deductions and carve-outs that many in the middle class and Chamber of Commerce have come to regard as rights.
"Every deduction was put in there for a reason and has powerful lobbies behind them," he admits. "I'm trying to work my way out of a job." If he does, everyone will know his name.
Mr. Moore is a member of the Journal's editorial board.
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3)How to Return New York City to the Street Gangs
The campaign against the police policy of 'stop-and-frisk' challenges two decades of successful city governance.
By HEATHER MAC DONALD
Crime in New York City has dropped 80% since the early 1990s, a decline unmatched anywhere in the country. The change has yielded an explosion of commerce in once forlorn neighborhoods, a boom in tourism, and a sharp rise in property values. Nowhere were the effects more dramatic than in the city's poorest areas.
When the bullets stopped flying, entrepreneurs snapped up the vacant lots that had served as breeding grounds of crime. Senior citizens were able to visit friends without fear of getting mugged. Children could sleep in their own beds rather than in bathtubs, no longer needing shelter from stray gunfire. Target, Home Depot and other national chains moved into thoroughfares long ruled by drug gangs, providing jobs for local workers and giving residents retail choices taken for granted in middle-class neighborhoods.
Most significant, more than 10,000 black and Hispanic males avoided the premature death that would have been their fate had New York's homicide rate remained at its early-1990s apex. Blacks and Hispanics have made up 79% of the decline in homicide victims since 1993.
New York's previously unimaginable status as America's safest big city is now in jeopardy thanks to a rising campaign against its proactive style of policing. In 1994 the New York Police Department, led then by Commissioner William Bratton, embraced the revolutionary concept that the police could actually prevent crime, not just respond to it after the fact.
The department began analyzing victim reports daily to target resources to where crime patterns were emerging. Top brass held commanders accountable for the safety of their precincts. And officers were expected to intervene when they observed someone acting suspiciously—maybe asking the person a few questions, perhaps frisking him if legally justified. In so doing, they sent the message in violence-plagued areas that law and order was still in effect.
Associated Press
Then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani (background) with Police Commissioner William Bratton, 1996
Such proactive stops (or "stop-and-frisks") have averted countless crimes. But a chorus of critics, led by the New York Times, charges that the NYPD's policy is racist because the majority of those stopped are black and Hispanic. Every declared Democratic candidate for mayor in 2013 has vowed to eliminate stop-and-frisks or significantly reduce them. A federal judge overseeing a class-action lawsuit against the NYPD has already announced her conviction that the department's stop practices are unconstitutional, the prelude to putting the department under judicial control.
Omitted from these critics' complaints is any recognition of the demographics of crime. Blacks were 62% of the city's murder victims in 2011, even though they are only 23% of the population. They also made up a disproportionate share of criminals, committing 80% of all shootings, nearly 70% of all robberies and 66% of all violent crime, according to crime reports filed with the NYPD by victims and witnesses, usually minorities themselves.
Whites, by contrast, committed a little over 1% of all shootings, less than 5% of all robberies, and 5% of all violent crime in 2011, even though they are 35% of New York City's population. Given where crime is happening, the police cannot target their resources where they're needed without producing racially disparate stops and arrests.
Critics also contend, among other charges, that the absolute number of stops—680,000—is too high and demonstrates illegality. But there were nearly 900,000 arrests and summons last year under the far more exacting standard of probable cause. It is not surprising that a police force of 35,000 witnessed 680,000 instances of reasonably suspicious behavior among New York's 8.5 million residents. If 25,000 officers in enforcement commands made just one stop a week, there would be over a million stops a year.
Violence continues to afflict minority communities. A rash of shootings during outdoor basketball games this summer should remind New Yorkers of what is at stake in the stop-and-frisk debate. The victims include a 4-year-old boy killed last month in the Bronx when two thugs started shooting at each other across a playground, and a 25-year-old member of the Harlem Youth Marines, an anti-gang group, killed during a shootout in June.
If the residents of the tony Upper East Side faced a similar risk of getting shot at recreational basketball games, the police would be out in force in that neighborhood, too, looking for the signs of gang activity and for individuals who appear to be carrying guns.
Attacks on police officers have also skyrocketed this year. On Wednesday night, a thug on a bicycle shot the plainclothes officer who had just stopped him for suspicious behavior. This is the 10th time a cop has been shot in 2012, which is more than in the previous four years combined, reports the New York Daily News. Gun violence on the year is up 8.3% through Aug. 5, as stop-and-frisks dropped 34% between the first and second quarters of 2012, according to the New York Post.
It is too soon to tell whether the rhetorical campaign against the allegedly racist police is behind the onslaught against officers, or if the drop in stops has led to the rise in shootings. Over the long term, however, there is no doubt that getting rid of proactive policing will return New York to the bad old days of youth wolf packs and the flight of businesses and residents from the city.
No policing strategy is as effective in reducing violence as New York-style law enforcement. The cities offered up as alternative models by the NYPD's critics—such as Boston, Chicago and High Point, N.C.—have much higher rates of crime than New York.
The department should do everything it can to minimize the friction caused by its stop policy—above all by making sure that officers courteously explain to subjects they stop why they were approached. Being stopped if you are innocent of wrongdoing, even if the officer has legal grounds for doing so, is without question humiliating and maddening. But being shot when you are innocent of any wrongdoing is far worse.
New York's triumph over the lawlessness that was wasting lives and leading it to economic ruin is the greatest urban policy success of the last quarter-century. It proved that society has the capacity to reassert norms of civilized behavior even when they appear to have permanently broken down. Putting that triumph at risk will take its greatest toll on the very individuals whom the NYPD's critics purport to speak for.
Ms. Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of "Are Cops Racist?" (Ivan R. Dee, 2002).
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------4)Hillary and the Hollowness of 'People-to-People' Diplomacy
Nearly a million miles in the air. And U.S. power is diminished.
By FOUAD AJAMI
The sight of Hillary Clinton cutting a rug on the dance floor this week in South Africa gives away the moral obtuseness of America's chief diplomat. That image will tell the people of the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo, under attack by a merciless regime, all they need to know about the heartlessness of U.S. foreign policy.
True authority over foreign affairs has been vested in the White House, and for that matter, in the Obama campaign apparatus. All the great decisions on foreign policy—Iraq and Afghanistan, the struggle raging in Syria, the challenge posed by the Iranian regime—have been subjugated to the needs of the campaign. All that is left for Mrs. Clinton is the pomp and ceremony and hectic travel schedule.
Much has been made of her time in the air. She is now officially the most traveled secretary of state in American history. She has logged, by one recent count, 843,458 miles and visited 102 countries. (This was before her recent African swing; doubtless her handlers will revise the figures.) In one dispatch, it was breakfast in Vietnam, lunch in Laos, dinner in Cambodia. Officially, she's always the life of the party.
This is foreign policy trivialized. If Harry Truman's secretary of state, Dean Acheson, was "present at the creation" of the post-World War II order of states, historians who bother with Mrs. Clinton will judge her as marking time, a witness to the erosion of U.S. authority in the international order.
After settling into her post in early 2009, she made it clear that the "freedom agenda" of the prior administration would be sacrificed. "Ideology is so yesterday," she bluntly proclaimed in April of that year. This is what her boss had intended all along. The herald of change in international affairs, the man who had hooked crowds in Paris and Berlin and Cairo, was, at heart, a trimmer, timid about America's possibilities beyond its shores.
AFP/Getty Images
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (right) dances with South African Foreign Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane in Pretoria, Aug. 7.
Presidents and secretaries of state working in tandem can bend historical outcomes. Think of Truman and Acheson accepting the call of history when the British could no longer assume their imperial role. Likewise, Ronald Reagan and George Shultz pushed Soviet communism into its grave and gave the American people confidence after the diplomatic setbacks of the 1970s and the humiliations handed to U.S. power under the presidency of Jimmy Carter.
Grant Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton their due—they have worked well together, presided over the retrenchment of American power, made a bet that the American people would not notice, or care about, the decline of U.S. authority abroad. This is no small feat.
Yet the passivity of this secretary of state is unprecedented. Mrs. Clinton left no mark on the decision to liquidate the American presence in Iraq—the president's principal adviser on Iraq was Vice President Joe Biden. We have heard little from her on Afghanistan, except last month to designate it a "major non-NATO ally." She opened the tumult of the Arab Spring with a monumental misreading of Egypt: Hosni Mubarak was a "friend of my family," she said, and his reign was stable. She will long be associated with the political abdication and sophistry that has marked this administration's approach to the Syrian rebellion.
Columnist Bret Stephens on why the Obama administration won't intervene militarily in Syria until after the election and what the U.S.'s lack of engagement could mean for a post-Assad Syria. Photos: Associated Press
With nothing save her words invested in Syria, she never tires of invoking the specter of jihadists finding their way into the fight: "Those who are attempting to exploit the situation by sending in terrorist fighters must realize they will not be tolerated, first and foremost by the Syrian people."
Aleppo, an ancient, prosperous city, the country's economic trading capital, shelled as though it is a foreign city, is subjected to barbarous treatment, and Mrs. Clinton has this to say: "We have to set very clear expectations about avoiding sectarian warfare."
Syria has now descended, as it was bound to, into a drawn-out conflict, into a full-scale sectarian civil war between the Sunni majority and the Alawi holders of power. But Mrs. Clinton could offer nothing better than this trite, hackneyed observation: "We must figure out ways to hasten the day when bloodshed ends and the political transition begins. We have to make sure that state institutions stay intact."
These are the words of someone running out the clock on the Syrians, playing for time on behalf of a president who gave her this post knowing there would be at Foggy Bottom a politician like himself instead of a diplomat given to a belief in American power and the American burden in the world.
One doesn't have to be unduly cynical to read the mind of the secretary of state and that of her closest political strategist, her spouse Bill Clinton. Defeated by Mr. Obama in 2008, the Clintons made the best of it. They rode with him without giving up on the dream of restoration. The passivity of Secretary Clinton, and the role assigned Bill Clinton in the Democratic convention as the one figure who might assure the centrists and independents that Barack Obama is within the political mainstream, are an investment in the future. The morning after the presidential election, the Clintons will be ready. They will wait out an Obama victory and begin to chip away at his authority.
And in the event of an Obama defeat, they will ride to the rescue of a traumatized party. Mrs. Clinton will claim that she has rounded out her résumé. She needn't repeat fanciful tales of landing in Bosnia under fire in 1996; she will have a record of all those miles she has flown. She will pass in silence over the early hopes she had invested in Syria's Bashar al-Assad as a reformer, and over the slaughter he unleashed on his people. Her devotees will claim that all was well at State and that Hillary mastered her brief with what she likes to call "people-to-people" diplomacy.
Mr. Ajami is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the author most recently of "The Syrian Rebellion," just out by Hoover Press.
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