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If we are to remain competitive in world commerce our port conditions s are very critical and those who live in Savannah know this very well. This analysis should be of help. (See 1 below.)
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Inevitable changes facing China. (See 2 below.)
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A review of Krauthammer's latest book. (See 3 below.)
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Further analysis of Kerry's commentary as America's 'honest broker." (See 4 below.)
Netanyahu responds. (See 4a below.)
Other views of America's fortunes and support for allies in the region! (See 4b, 4c and 4d below.)
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Hillary is coming and Republicans have several years to prepare for her coronation. Will they be able to measure up to the task? Much ink will be devoted to this because the news and media folks have to have something to write about and controversy is grist for their mill.
Hillary's association with McAuliffe, Virginia's recently elected governor, could prove discomforting because McAuliffe's questionable past could catch up with him but the Clintons know how to deflect mud having wallowed in it virtually their entire political careers.
Christie's appeal on a national scope will be examined and re-examined because he is the one who the Democrats most fear because he can take Hillary on without question. The problem with Christie, is that the more Conservative elements of the party find him not true red enough.
Rand Paul makes a lot of sense and is acceptable to Party Conservatives as is Cruz but neither have the same breadth of national appeal as Christie whose ability to capture the middle is critical.
Time will tell and it should prove an interesting three years.
Meanwhile Obama and Democrats up for election in 2014 have some heavy lifting of their own and must dodge the crushing weight of Obamacare so the next year should also prove interesting.
If they believe Obama is going to provide them help they misjudge his nature. Obama is looking to history and could care less about his brethren. He is self-absorbed. His goal of transforming America and putting America's return to what it resembled before he was elected out of political reach will drive him to do what he has to do!
World events , the inherent stupidity of Obamacare's implementation and its destructive impact may prevent him from accomplishing his goal so that too will make for a fascinating journey.
It is interesting to note Americans did not build Obamacare Obama did and now , perhaps, it will prove his unraveling. (See 5 below.)
Star is the SIRC speaker at the Feb 17, President's Day dinner. (See 5a below.)
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Dick
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1) United States: The Problem of Aging Infrastructure on Inland Waterways
Summary
The United States continues to face the problem of aging infrastructure on major water-based transport routes. A new waterways bill that is likely to be finalized soon -- the first such legislation since 2007 -- addresses some of the inefficiencies in the current system. However, the larger looming problem of insufficient funding remains. The U.S. inland waterways infrastructure is old, much-needed improvements have been delayed and the total cost of rehabilitation is expected to rise.
This is not a new or unknown problem, but measures to address the problem have been limited, and there is no immediate, rapid solution. Navigable rivers are one of the United States' inherent geographic benefits and have contributed to the nation's economic success. Failure to update and maintain the inland waterways could lead to disruptions in the supply chain and hurt U.S. competitiveness on the global export market.
Analysis
The United States' inland waterways system -- more than 19,000 kilometers (12,000 miles) of navigable routes maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers overlaid with expansive farmlands -- has contributed greatly to the country's success. Ongoing use of the waterway system requires the maintenance of infrastructure to meet usage demand, including dredging of ports and rivers, and the operation and maintenance of dams, levees and locks.
The Mississippi and Ohio rivers and the Illinois waterways, the busiest avenues for commercial traffic on inland waterways, all have expansive lock systems. The locks make navigating a river easier, sequestering vessels before raising or lowering the water level in a chamber in order to compensate for changes in the river's level. Most of these locks were constructed in the early 20th century, with an expected lifetime of 50 years. Seventy or 80 years later, many of these locks are still in operation. Unplanned delays due to mechanical breakdowns have been on the rise for more than a decade.
Funding for Inland Waterways and Ports
Under the current policy, the cost of maintaining this infrastructure falls to the federal government, but funding for major construction and rehabilitation projects on inland waterways is split equally between federally appropriated funds and money from a trust, the Inland Waterways Trust Fund, which currently secures revenue through a 20 cent tax on commercial barge operators' fuel. The tax rate has remained the same since the mid-1990s. The fund's assets began declining in 2002 and fell rapidly starting in 2005 as expenses continued to increase as the system aged, eventually exceeding the revenue generated by the fund. Moreover, some projects exceeded their expected budgets, further straining the trust fund. The decline of the Inland Waterways Trust Fund was halted in 2010 after the federal government suspended new contracts using money from the fund.
Port and harbor maintenance has a similar trust fund, the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund, which receives money from a tax on imports and domestically traded goods. Unlike the fund for inland waterways, the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund has a surplus. The funds are used for port maintenance, such as dredging to maintain port depths, and not for new construction, so many larger ships must still wait until high tide as full channel depths are not maintained at all times -- even in some of the nation's busiest ports. As vessels, especially container ships, become larger, an inability to maintain port depth could result in additional delays and an increase in related costs. With the expansion of the Panama Canal, many Gulf and East Coast ports want to expand to handle the larger vessels that will now be coming through the canal. Increased use of the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund (the government's budget for 2013 requested $848 million for maintenance programs -- roughly 50 percent of the revenues the fund generated in 2013) could allow ports to conduct more maintenance dredging to prevent unnecessary delays.
However, competition between ports could make the distribution of funds contentious. Because the trust fund is supplied from taxes on traded goods, ports that have higher traffic contribute more to the fund, but these ports are often not the ones that require the most dredging maintenance. For instance, Los Angeles/Long Beach spends less than 1 cent from the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund per ton of cargo moved, whereas Savannah, Ga., spends 42 cents per ton, and Grays Harbor, Wash., spends $6.16 per ton. The system is set up for a cooperative environment, but as more ports compete for the projected increases in traffic coming through the Panama Canal after 2015, this cooperative system has the potential to break down.
Addressing Inefficiencies
The U.S. government traditionally passes water resource legislation every two years, but the Water Resources Reform and Development Act, which the House of Representatives passed resoundingly with strong bipartisan support Oct. 23, was the first such legislation passed since 2007. The Senate passed a similar bill in May. The House and Senate versions will have to be reconciled, but both versions passed with bipartisan approval and are fairly similar, so it is reasonable to believe that some version will become law.
Part of the legislation is meant to limit projects that are unnecessary or stalled, freeing up funds for more necessary projects. A total of $8 billion in projects, including flood prevention and port expansion projects, would be approved under the new House bill, while $12 billion in projects would be eliminated. In addition, time limits on feasibility and environmental studies will be imposed. For the past several years, a large portion of the Inland Waterways Trust Fund has been tied up in a single lock improvement project, commonly known as the Olmsted project. Both versions of the bill increase federal funds for the project, freeing up money from the trust fund for other projects. Congress will consider the use of alternative methods to provide more revenue for the Inland Waterways Trust Fund, but no specific changes are outlined. Both versions of the bill also attempt to address the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund's current spending practices and increase total spending from the trust over the course of the next several years.
The Lingering Problem Inland
Regardless of the new legislation, the problem of underfunded and outdated infrastructure remains. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers estimates that it will cost $125 billion or more to revamp the entire inland waterway system. Some estimates show that just maintaining the status quo of unscheduled delays for the more than 200 locks on U.S. inland waterways would require an investment of roughly $13 billion dollars by 2020, averaging out to more than $1.5 billion annually. Operating and maintaining these are only part of the responsibilities held by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has a total appropriated non-emergency budget of roughly $5-6 billion annually. Because spending from the Inland Waterways Trust Fund is limited, a total of $170 million per year is currently available for major inland waterway construction projects. If operating under unconstrained conditions, the recommended construction budget for major rehabilitation or new construction would average $900 million per year over the next 20 years, with some years reaching $1.5 billion. Under the current budget, upgrading the system will be a long, drawn out process, and unintended delays are likely to continue increasing in the near term.
The drought in 2012 brought to the forefront how unplanned delays, or even the potential for unplanned delays, can affect both transport operators and commodity prices. Transportation by barge is well suited for bulk commodities that can benefit from the cost savings by exploiting economies of scale. The agricultural, coal, petroleum and fertilizer industries rely heavily on U.S. rivers to transport goods. Each year, more than 600 million metric tons of cargo, valued at roughly $180 billion, is handled along inland waterways managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
In addition, it is hard for older infrastructure to accommodate modern barges. This often causes longer passage times, which could contribute to increased transportation costs for goods. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, costs attributed to delays reached $33 billion in 2010 and are projected to rise to $49 billion by 2020. Road and rail provide alternative transportation modes, and the current increase in road and rail freight traffic is projected to continue. Since a single 15 barge tow is equivalent to roughly 1,000 trucks or more than 200 rail cars, shifting traffic from rivers to road or rail likely will increase congestion on these transportation routes. Moreover, waterways remain the least expensive mode of long-distance transport for freight, with operating costs of roughly 2 cents per ton per mile compared to under 4 cents per ton per mile for rail and slightly less than 18 cents per ton per mile for truck. This increased cost likely will be passed on to the consumer, and since a significant portion of the freight traveling on waterways is destined for export, this could affect global commodity prices, especially for staple agriculture products like corn and soybeans.
Increases in federal spending could make up the difference between the funds needed and the funds available. However, as U.S. government funding for infrastructure spending has dropped significantly in recent years, increases in user fees, tolls or private funding likely will be needed to fully pay for all current and future necessary improvements to the U.S. inland waterways. Until then, limited improvements to the aging infrastructure will likely continue to cause transport delays. Given the importance of waterways as a transport method for bulk goods, including agricultural exports, delays and the accompanying transport cost increases could affect both the U.S. economy and global food prices.
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2)
China's Inevitable Changes
By Rodger Baker and John Minnich
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China will convene its Third Plenum meeting Nov. 9. During the three-day session, President Xi Jinping's administration will outline core reforms to guide its policymaking for the next decade. The Chinese government would have the world believe that Xi's will be the most momentous Third Plenary Session since December 1978, when former supreme leader Deng Xiaoping first put China on the path of economic reform and opening.
Whether or not Xi's policies will be as decisive as Deng's -- or as disappointing as those of former President Hu Jintao -- the president has little choice but to implement them. China's current economic model, and by extension its political and social model, is reaching its limits just as it had prior to Deng's administration. The importance of the upcoming meeting is that it comes at an inflection point for China, one that its leaders can hardly afford to ignore.
A Fundamental Challenge
It is worth recalling just how extraordinary Deng's 1978 meeting was. Mao Zedong had died only two years earlier, taking with him what little remained of the old pillars of Communist Party legitimacy. China was a mess, ravaged by years of economic mismanagement and uncontrolled population growth and only beginning to recover from the trauma of the Cultural Revolution. Had the People's Republic fallen in 1978 or shortly thereafter, few would have been truly surprised. Of course, in those tense early post-Mao years hardly anyone could foresee just how rapid China's transformation would be. Nonetheless, battling enormous institutional constraints, Deng and his colleagues quickly set up new pillars of social, political and economic stability that guided China through the fall of the Soviet Union and into the 21st century.
Although Xi presides over China during a time of economic prosperity, not disrepair, perhaps not since Deng has a Chinese leader faced such formidable challenges at the outset of his tenure. Former Party general secretaries Jiang Zemin, and to a greater extent Hu, could largely follow the lead of their predecessors. Jiang, emerging as a post-Tiananmen Square leader, was faced with a situation where the Party was rapidly losing its legitimacy and where state-owned enterprises were encumbering China's economic opening and reform. But internationally, China's position was relatively secure at the beginning of Jiang's term in office, and by the time he took on the additional role of president in 1993, the decline of the Japanese economy and the boom in the United States and the rest of Asia left an opening for China's economy to resurge.
These conditions enabled Jiang's administration to enact sweeping bureaucratic and state sector reforms in the late 1990s, laying much of the groundwork of China's post-2000 economic boom. When Hu succeeded Jiang in 2002-2003, China's economic growth was seemingly unstoppable, perhaps even gaining steam from the Asian economic crisis. The United States, which had seemed ready to counter China's rise, was instead fully focused on Iraq and Afghanistan, and though the Communist Party of China was not exactly seen as the guiding moral compass of the state, the role of print and social media in raising criticism of Party officials had not yet exploded.
As Xi prepares his 10-year plan, China has reached the end of the economic supercycle set in motion by Deng. Public criticism of officials and thus of the Party is rampant, and China's military appears much more capable than it actually is, putting China is a potentially dangerous situation. Once again the United States is looking at China as a power perhaps to contain or at least constrain. China's neighbors seem eager for Washington's assistance to counterbalance Beijing's influence, and long-dormant Japan is awakening once again. Xi may not have to rebuild a fractured Party or state as Deng did, but in some ways he faces the same fundamental challenge: redirecting and redefining China.
China can no longer follow the path it has in previous decades. Deng emerged as China's paramount leader out of the struggles and chaos of the Gang of Four era and the Cultural Revolution. He redefined what China was and where China was going, not out of a desire to try something different or an infatuation with "Western" economic models but out of a fundamental need to change course. Whether Xi wants it to be or not, China is at another crossroads. He has little choice but to make consequential decisions, lest he leave China scrambling from one quick fix to another at the expense of long-term opportunities.
The Perils of Rapid Reform
Reform, with "Chinese characteristics," is not about Westernizing the Chinese model. Rather, it is about reshaping the relationship between the Party, the economy and the people in a way that will maintain the centrality of the Party. This may require improving the efficiency of the Party and governing structures, changing the organization and rules of business, and deferring to the rights and responsibilities of the citizenry. But while this will likely entail selectively scaling back the Party's power in certain areas, it does not mean the overall reduction of Party power.
Since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, the Party has been constitutionally at the center of Chinese leadership. Mao's authority stemmed from his role as chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, a position he held from 1945 until his death in 1976. Concerned by Mao's concentration of power, Deng never adopted the same titles, though he still managed China through the Party, drawing strength and authority through his careful balancing of retired and serving Party officials. In 1993, the Party general secretary took on the parallel role of the president. Jiang served in both roles, as did Hu and Xi.
The consolidation of Party and political leadership was made clear in the formula. It is matched by the general secretary and president also holding the dual roles of chairman on the two parallel Central Military Commissions, one under the Party and the other under the state. Under Mao, the Party and the state were united in the figure of Mao himself. In the 20-year transition from Mao to Jiang, the Party remained synonymous with the state, but the consolidation of power in a single individual was replaced as Deng sought to initiate a system of group leadership to avoid the rise of another strongman. Jiang's accession to the presidency formalized Party-government leadership, but consensus leadership constrained his power. Jiang may have technically held all the key posts of power, but other power brokers in the Politburo could counterbalance him. The system ensured that the paramount leader remained constrained.
This group dynamic allowed the Party to avoid the rapid and far-reaching policy swings of Mao, but it created stagnation in the bureaucracy and state sector. Ensuring the right web of connections often became more important than fulfilling the responsibilities of the Party or the state. Deng's machinations helped eliminate strongman politics and degraded political factions like the Gang of Four, but these were replaced by more complex and widespread bureaucratic and industrial patronage networks. The result was more a web than a set of individual strings. No longer could any one interest press entirely against another without risking the entire structure. The intertwining threads were just too complex. Rapid policy swings were impossible and factional battles that threatened the fabric of the state were effectively eliminated, but the cost was a decision-making process that was increasingly cumbersome and timid. Radical reform would never make it through the process of consensus building, and any policy deemed harmful was met with resistance.
This worked well during China's boom. Though China was corrupt, beset with a cumbersome regulatory environment and prone to violations of intellectual property rights, it was fairly predictable overall, unlike so many other developing economies. The consensus model was also more attuned to social stability, constantly making tiny adjustments to appease or contain the demands of public sentiment. In times of slowed economic growth, China's leaders would stimulate the economy. In times of apparent overheating, they could cut back on credit. If people were frustrated with local officials, the central government would alternately remove the accused leaders or crack down on the protesters. But when the foundation of China's economy began to shake after 2008, when China's very success drove up wages and prices as its biggest consumers faced serious economic problems of their own, China's consensus leadership proved unequal to the task.
During China's rise, Beijing needed only minor adjustments to maintain stability and growth. But now that the country is in a far different set of circumstances, Beijing needs a major course correction. The problem is that consensus rarely allows for the often radical but necessary response. And for good reason: The success of radical change is not guaranteed. In fact, history suggests otherwise, as it did notably with the case of Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet Union.
Adaptation
To overcome the limitations of consensus leadership, Xi apparently is trying to strengthen the role of president. He wants to redefine the presidency so that it is not merely the concomitant title for the Party leader but also a post with a real leadership role, similar to the presidencies of other major countries.
This is a way to compromise somewhere between consensus and strongman. The presidency should not exceed the Party, but as the head of state, Xi is hoping to use his position to have a greater say in how the Party is restructured. The first target is the bloated bureaucracy. Already there are signs that several of the reforms are about removing layers from China's bureaucratic structures. This should add efficiency to the system (its stated goal), but it may also confer greater central oversight and control by cutting through the webs of vested interests that have taken hold in many of China's most powerful institutions.
The reforms slated for the economic sector are similar. They will introduce more market and competitive mechanisms while giving Beijing greater control over the overall structure. Consolidation, efficiency, transparency, reform and restructuring are all words that possess dual meanings -- one regarding more efficient and more flexible systems, the other regarding systems that the center is better able to direct. At a time when China needs radical change, it first needs to change the mechanism through which policies are decided and enacted. The government hopes that by disengaging from constant, restrictive intervention into certain sectors, it will have greater capacity to intervene selectively, focusing on enforcement and compliance rather than dictating every move of state-owned enterprises. There is no guarantee that these reforms will work or that they can be implemented effectively or smoothly. China has seen three decades of economic growth, and in turn three decades of more tightly woven relationships and knitted interests. Unraveling any thread can rapidly degrade the entire structure, unless stronger central replacements are already in place.
China's leaders are facing the difficult task of adjusting once again to changing circumstances. Political legitimacy and control remain closely linked. It is Xi's position as head of the Party that ostensibly gives him legitimacy as head of the state. But to create a more nimble and adaptive government, Xi is seeking to harness the people in a slight reversal, using his role as president to rebuild the legitimacy of the Party, and in doing so take stronger control of the Party mechanisms. This is a difficult balance. But China is at a turning point, and without nimble leadership, a system as large and complex as China can move very rapidly down an unpredictable and uncontrollable path. The leadership can attempt to take control and hope for success, but the consensus system and entrenched and bloated bureaucracy are reaching the end of their effectiveness as China enters uncharted economic and social waters.
Editor's Note: Writing in George Friedman's stead this week are Rodger Baker, Vice President of Asia-Pacific Analysis, and Stratfor Asia-Pacific Analyst John Minnich.
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3)Book Review:
Things that matter: Three decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics
By Charles Krauthammer
If I ever have the misfortune to become the President of the
United States, the man beside me at critical moments will be Charles
Krauthammer. I will modify the Lincoln bedroom as necessary to provide the
accoutrements needed by an extremely smart and talented quadriplegic.
This book is simply a rendition of his choice of his best columns and op ed pieces over the last 30 years. Every one is worth reading, and every one is thought provoking.
In the introduction, he points out the importance of a seemingly unimportant area of our lives, politics:
“Politics, the crooked timber of our
communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything— high and
low and, most especially, high— lives or dies by politics. You can have the
most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however,
and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is
Germany 1933. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,— that is all / Ye know on earth,
and all ye need to know,” every schoolchild is fed. But even Keats— poet,
romantic, early 19th-century man oblivious to the horrors of the century to
come— kept quotational distance from such blissful innocence. Turns out we need
to know one more thing on earth: politics— because of its capacity, when
benign, to allow all around it to flourish, and its capacity, when malign, to
make all around it wither.”
Early in the book, he takes on the liberal versus conservative controversy:
“To understand the workings of
American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives
think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil. For the first
side of this equation, I need no sources. As a conservative, I can confidently
attest that whatever else my colleagues might disagree about— Bosnia, John
McCain, precisely how many orphans we’re prepared to throw into the snow so the
rich can have their tax cuts— we all agree that liberals are stupid. We mean
this, of course, in the nicest way. Liberals tend to be nice, and they believe—
here is where they go stupid— that most everybody else is nice too. Deep down,
that is. Sure, you’ve got your multiple felon and your occasional war criminal,
but they’re undoubtedly depraved ’cause they’re deprived. If only we could get
social conditions right— eliminate poverty, teach anger management, restore the
ozone, arrest John Ashcroft— everyone would be holding hands smiley-faced,
rocking back and forth to “We Shall Overcome.” Liberals believe that human
nature is fundamentally good. The fact that this is contradicted by, oh, 4,000
years of human history simply tells them how urgent is the need for their next
seven-point program for the social reform of everything. Liberals suffer
incurably from naïveté, the stupidity of the good heart. Who else but that
oracle of American liberalism, the New York Times, could run the puzzled
headline: “Crime Keeps On Falling, but Prisons Keep On Filling.” But? How about
this wild theory: If you lock up the criminals, crime declines. Accordingly,
the conservative attitude toward liberals is one of compassionate
condescension.”
He dissects the philosophy of our current leadership with the following statement:
“What divides liberals and
conservatives is not roads and bridges but Julia’s world, an Obama campaign
creation that may be the most self-revealing parody of liberalism ever
conceived. It’s a series of cartoon illustrations in which a fictional Julia is
swaddled and subsidized throughout her life by an all-giving government of
bottomless pockets and “Queen for a Day” magnanimity. At every stage, the state
is there to provide— preschool classes and cut-rate college loans, birth
control and maternity care, business loans and retirement. The only time she’s
on her own is at her grave site. Julia’s world is totally atomized. It contains
no friends, no community and, of course, no spouse. Who needs one? She’s
married to the provider state. Or to put it slightly differently, the “Life of
Julia” represents the paradigmatic Obama political philosophy: citizen as
orphan child. For the conservative, providing for every need is the duty that
government owes to actual orphan children. Not to supposedly autonomous adults.
Beyond infrastructure, the conservative sees the proper role of government as
providing not European-style universal entitlements but a firm safety net,
meaning Julia-like treatment for those who really cannot make it on their own—
those too young or too old, too mentally or physically impaired, to provide for
themselves.”
He clearly identifies the futility of political correctness and the current state of our news coverage:
“But, of course, if the shooter is
named Nidal Hasan, who National Public Radio reported had been trying to
proselytize doctors and patients, then something must be found. Presto!
Secondary post-traumatic stress disorder, a handy invention to allow one to
ignore the obvious. And the perfect moral finesse. Medicalizing mass murder not
only exonerates. It turns the murderer into a victim, indeed a sympathetic one.
After all, secondary PTSD, for those who believe in it (you won’t find it in
DSM-IV-TR, psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), is known as
“compassion fatigue.” The poor man— pushed over the edge by an excess of
sensitivity.”
“Nor was this the only incident. “The psychiatrist,” reported Zwerdling, “said that he was the kind of guy who the staff actually stood around in the hallway saying: Do you think he’s a terrorist, or is he just weird?” Was anything done about this potential danger? Of course not. Who wants to be accused of Islamophobia and prejudice against a colleague’s religion? One must not speak of such things. Not even now. Not even after we know that Hasan was in communication with a notorious Yemen-based jihad propagandist. As late as Tuesday, the New York Times was running a story on how returning soldiers at Fort Hood had a high level of violence. What does such violence have to do with Hasan? He was not a returning soldier. And the soldiers who returned home and shot their wives or fellow soldiers didn’t cry “Allahu Akbar” as they squeezed the trigger.”
“For some people, life begins at
conception. And not just life— if life is understood to mean a biologically
functioning organism, even a single cell is obviously alive— but personhood. If
the first zygotic cell is owed all the legal and moral respect due a person,
then there is nothing to talk about. Ensoulment starts with Day One and Cell
One, and the idea of taking that cell or its successor cells apart to serve
someone else’s needs is abhorrent. This is an argument of great moral force but
little intellectual interest. Not because it may not be right but because it is
unprovable. It rests on metaphysics. Either you believe it or you don’t. The
discussion ends there.”
As you can see from my examples, Dr. Krauthammer has an amazing command of the English language, and an amazing ability to drill to the center of a controversy, elucidate both sides of the issue, and lead the reader to a logical well-though-out conclusion. You may not always agree with him, I know I do not, but his reasoning and thoughts force me to think thoroughly about my position.
This book is well worth your time and effort to purchase; borrow from the library; borrow from a pal … whatever is necessary to get it in your hands. Read it! And enjoy it!
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4)
| Kerrys Antagonism Unmasked, by David M. Weinberg |
| Up until last Thursday night, most Israelis related to US Secretary of State John Kerry as a naive nice guy BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 218 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: John Kerry has abandoned America’s honest broker stance in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. His warnings about the coming isolation of Israel and of a third Intifada – unless Israel quickly allows the emergence of a “whole Palestine” and ends its “perpetual military occupation” of Judea and Samaria – effectively tell the Palestinians that they should make sure the talks fail, and then Israel’s “gonna get it.” Kerry laid out the consequences for Israel of disobeying America (no safety and no prosperity), but laid out no similar consequences for the Palestinians if they remain intransigent. Up until last Thursday night, most Israelis related to US Secretary of State John Kerry as a naive nice guy. His ardent enthusiasm for basically-impossible peace talks with the Palestinians was viewed as stop-gap diplomacy at best and a fool’s errand at worst. But in a November 7 joint interview to Israeli and Palestinian television, Israel discovered a different Kerry: nasty, threatening, one-sided, blind to the malfeasance and unreliability of Palestinian leaders, and dangerously oblique to the explosive situation he himself is creating. Channeling the Palestinian line, Kerry showed no appreciation whatsoever for Israel’s positions and concerns, aside from the usual, throw-away, vague protestations of concern for Israel’s security. His warnings about the coming isolation of Israel and of a third Intifada – unless Israel quickly allows the emergence of a “whole Palestine” and ends it “perpetual military occupation” of Judea and Samaria – amount to unfriendly pressure. Worse still, Kerry is trading treacherously in ugly self-fulfilling prophecy. There was always a high probability that the Palestinians would eventually use the predictable collapse of the talks as an excuse for more violence and renewal of their “lawfare” against Israel in international forums. Now they have John Kerry’s seal of approval for doing so. Kerry has basically laid out the Obama administration’s understanding of the campaign to delegitimize and isolate Israel – unless Israel succumbs to Palestinian and international dictates for almost complete Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Jerusalem. Kerry is effectively telling the Palestinians that they should make sure the talks fail, and then Israel’s “gonna get it.” So now the Palestinians know clearly what to do. They don’t really want a circumscribed, hemmed-in, mini-state of the like that Israel could agree too. They have never wanted the “sovereign cage” of a Palestinian state that Israel can contemplate (as Ahmad Khalidi and Saeb Erekat have categorized the generous Barak and Olmert proposals). What they have always wanted is “runaway” statehood and the total delegitimization of Israel, alongside an ongoing campaign to swamp Israel demographically and overwhelm Israel diplomatically. Strategically then, there is no good reason for Palestinian leader Abbas to agree to any negotiated accord with Israel. An accord will hem-in Palestinian ambitions. An accord will grant Israel the legitimacy that Kerry warns we are losing. An accord will grant Israel the legitimacy “to act in order to protect its security needs,” as Tzipi Livni keeps on plaiting. Obviously then, Abbas knows what to do. By stiffing Israel and holding to his maximalist demands, Abbas pushes Israel into Kerry’s punishment corner. He spurs on the isolation of Israel that Mr. Kerry is oh-so-worried-about. He creates ever-greater pressure on Israel to concede ever-more to Palestinian ambitions. In short, Kerry’s onslaught last night only encourages Palestinian stubbornness, and strips the peace process of any realism. Over the past thirty years, Israelis have shifted their views tremendously. They’ve gone from denying the existence of a Palestinian people to recognition of Palestinian peoplehood and national aspirations, and from insisting on exclusive Israeli sovereignty and control of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza to acceptance of a demilitarized Palestinian state in these areas. Israel has even withdrawn all-together from Gaza, and allowed a Palestinian government to assume authority over 95 percent of West Bank residents. Israel has made the Palestinian Authority three concrete offers for Palestinian statehood over more than 90 percent of West Bank territory plus Gaza. Palestinians have made no even-remotely-comparable moves towards Israel. What Kerry should be doing, therefore, is disabusing the Palestinians of the notion that they can fall back on bogus, maximalist demands as their uncompromising bottom line. He should be dialing-down Palestinian expectations and bringing Palestinians towards compromise no less than Israelis. He should be pressing them to close the “peace gap” by accepting the historic ties of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and the legitimacy of Israel’s existence in the Middle East as a Jewish state – which, in principle, includes Judea and Samaria. He should be calling on them to renounce the resettlement of Palestinian refugees in pre-1967 Israel, and to end their support for and glorification of Palestinian suicide-bombers and missile launchers against Israel’s civilian population, and to end the anti-Semitic and anti-Israel war-like propaganda that fills the Palestinian airwaves. Kerry should be making clear to the Palestinians that if they don’t compromise with Israel, the world will stand by Israel, will not isolate Israel, and will not tolerate Palestinian violence against Israel. Instead, Kerry chose to launch a full-bore attack on Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, and on all Israelis who – in Kerry’s words – pigheadedly “feel safe today” and “feel they’re doing pretty well economically.” He laid out the consequences for Israel of disobeying America – no safety and no prosperity. He laid out no similar consequences for the Palestinians if they remain intransigent. So much for the notion of an honest broker. ========================= David M. Weinberg is director of public affairs at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, and a diplomatic columnist for The Jerusalem Post and Israel Hayom newspapers. 4a) Israel moves to thwart 'dangerous' Iran deal Israel launched a diplomatic offensive Sunday to avert a "bad and dangerous" deal with Iran over its nuclear programme, including by pressuring the US Congress.
World powers failed to clinch a deal with Iran in three days of talks in Geneva, but top diplomats said they were closing in on an interim deal that would freeze or curb some of Iran's nuclear activities in exchange for the easing of some sanctions on Tehran.
But Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had told US, Russian, French, German and British leaders -- five of the six world powers negotiating with Iran -- "that according to the information reaching Israel, the looming agreement is bad and dangerous."
Netanyahu said the deal would remove sanctions on Iran while still enabling it to enrich uranium and advance work on a plutonium reactor -- a second possible route to an atomic bomb.
"I asked them what was the rush? I suggested they wait, and seriously consider things," Netanyahu said at the opening of Israel's weekly cabinet meeting.
"I hope they reach a good agreement, and we will do all we can to convince world powers to avoid a bad deal."
Economy Minister Naftali Bennett said Israel "will lobby dozens of members of theUS Congress, to whom I will personally explain during a visit beginning on Tuesday that Israel's security is in jeopardy."
Other senior Israeli officials had also warned against rushing to any agreement, arguing that the sanctions were succeeding in wearing down Tehran and should be given more time.
US Secretary of State John Kerry, who took part in the Geneva talks, insistedWashington was neither "blind" nor "stupid" when it comes to Iran's nuclear ambitions, and was fully committed to Israel's security.
"I think we have a pretty strong sense of how to measure whether or not we are acting in the interests of our country and of the globe, and particularly of our allies like Israel and Gulf states and others in the region," Kerry told NBC's "Meet the Press."
Senior US official Wendy Sherman meanwhile travelled to Jerusalem to discuss the Geneva talks and "continuing our close coordination with Israel about our ongoing efforts to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon," the State Department said.
'If we have no choice we will act'
Israel, the region's sole if undeclared nuclear power, views Iran's uranium enrichment programme as a guise for developing nuclear weapons and has not ruled out military action to halt it.
Netanyahu has sought to dampen the rising optimism about the talks following the election of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, a reputed moderate who the Israeli leader views as a "wolf in sheep's clothing."
Iran, which denies seeking nuclear weapons, has fired back, daring Israel to declare its own suspected arsenal and sign on to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
On Sunday Bennett said there were "differences" within US President Barack Obama's administration on reaching a deal with Iran and issued a dire warning if those favouring "concessions" won out.
"If in 10 years an atomic bomb hidden in a suitcase explodes in New York, or a nuclear missile hits Rome, one could say it is because of concessions that would have been made" to Iran, he said.
Bennett is likely to find support in the US Congress, whose approval would be required for the lifting of much of the sanctions, and where several lawmakers support maintaining and even strengthening the economic isolation of Iran.
Hawkish Republican Senator Lindsey Graham told CNN's "Face the Nation" Sunday that he feared "creating a North Korea-type situation in the Mideast, where we negotiate with Iran and one day you wake up... and you're going to have a nuclear Iran."
Israel's deputy defence minister, Danny Danon, meanwhile issued an unmistakable warning to on public radio, saying: "If we have no choice we will act -- that's why Israel has an air force."
4b) The Arab-Israeli Peace Process Is Over. Enter the Era of Chaos.By Lee SmithThis past weekend the White House clarified yet again what’s been apparent to everyone in the Middle East for quite a while now: The United States wants out, for real. “There’s a whole world out there,” National Security Adviser Susan Rice told the New York Times, “and we’ve got interests and opportunities in that whole world.”
To judge by the president’s decision making, Egypt and Syria apparently are no longer important parts of that world, nor is the shakeout from the Arab Spring, or preserving Washington’s special relationship with the Saudi oil kingdom, or other familiar features of American Middle East policy, like democracy promotion, which have been taken for granted by locals and the rest of the world alike. What matters seems to be getting out of the region faster, by making a snap deal with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani over Tehran’s nuclear program. But yeah, administration sources told the Times almost as an afterthought, we still care about the peace process. [Particularly ironic since President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize]
The problem is that a deal with Iran, when taken together with a U.S. withdrawal from the region, means the end of the peace process. As an Israeli official visiting Washington told me last week, one result of the administration’s minimalist regional profile is that the Arab allies of the United States—from Jordan and Egypt to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Cooperation Council states—will no longer enjoy the luxury of being able to count on the United States to pursue and protect their national interests, which means that they’ll have to do it themselves in a region where, as President Barack Obama said in his speech at the U.N. General Assembly meeting last month, the leaders “avoid addressing difficult problems themselves.”
What that means is that Washington’s Arab partners who are most concerned about Iran, like Saudi Arabia, now have a choice: They can defend themselves with all the weaponry the American defense industry has sold them over the years—or they can get someone else to do it. If most Arab regimes never really cared that much for the Palestinians in the first place, they clearly had even less use for the Israelis. But in the wake of a bad American deal with Rouhani, the Israelis may come in quite handy, as the only local power capable of standing up to a nuclear-armed Iran or stopping the Iranian nuclear program in its tracks.
There is plenty of evidence that the Gulf Cooperation Council states have already reached the conclusion that using the Israeli air force to fight their wars may be no more inherently loathsome—and a good deal cheaper—than relying on the unreliable Americans. Coordination between Israel and the Gulf Cooperation Council states is reportedly higher than it’s ever been before. And military and security relations between Jerusalem and Egypt’s ruling military junta are excellent, as both countries face mutual foes like Hamas in Gaza and local franchises of al-Qaida in Sinai.
What’s clear amidst all this traffic is that the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is presently the least important and least bloody conflict in the region, after the Syrian civil war, the Libyan civil war, Iraq’s violent partition, Egypt’s military crack-down, etc. From the point of view of national realpolitik, the only people who should be thinking long and hard about the end of the Arab-Israeli peace process are American policymakers.
Maybe it’s good news then that the lake of crocodile tears shed for 80 years over the Palestinian cause is about to evaporate into the thin desert air because the United States is leaving, and the Arab regimes obviously have more important things to worry about now—like their own security and survival. Yet from an American standpoint the end of the peace process is unfortunate—and not because it was ever likely to bring about peace between Arabs and Israelis, or usher in a reign of good feeling and peaceful relations across the Middle East.
* * *
Since Henry Kissinger first engineered the Arab-Israeli peace talks strategy in the wake of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, many American policymakers have forgotten, or perhaps never understood, that peace talks were primarily a device to advance American interests—a regional puppet show with Washington pulling the strings. With overwhelming political, diplomatic, and (most important) military support for Israel, Washington turned Jerusalem into a dependent client. It was also an invitation to the Arabs who, having despaired of any hope of defeating Israel in war, were forced to come to Washington on bended knee to secure concessions—like promises of withdrawals—from the Jewish state.
The point of the peace process, therefore, was to turn Israelis and Arabs alike into servants of Washington, which succeeded in ejecting the Soviets as the United States became the ruling hegemon of the Middle East—home to a very large percentage of the world’s supply of oil. In turn, its ability to guarantee the security and safe transit of the world’s oil supply made the United States not only the de facto ruler of the Middle East, but also the most important power on the planet, even in the eyes of its potential rivals, like the Chinese.
U.S. policymakers lost the thread of this effective decades-long regional strategy when the Cold War ended. In the absence of the familiar global Soviet threat, Americans were easily overwhelmed by cries for a final peace deal that was arguably never in the American interest—since the perpetuation of the conflict by kicking the can down the road forever was the key to keeping both the Arabs and the Israelis firmly in the American fold. American policymakers and analysts who believed in what I’ve called “hard linkage” argued that because the conflict really did motivate the policies of regional rulers, solving the crisis would make all the region’s other problems go away. Advocates of “soft linkage” meanwhile argued that progress on the peace process would make American partners in the Middle East more willing to cooperate on matters of greater U.S. national interest, like for instance, the Iranian nuclear issue.
For anyone who doubted that the Israeli-Palestinian crisis was simply a local problem that made for useful political theater and not an active threat to the peace and stability of the entire planet, the Arab Spring provided a helpful reminder of the region’s true underlying fault lines. Obama was in office for barely two years when the Tunisian revolution erupted in December 2010, and soon the established order was in jeopardy throughout the region. Obama stopped pushing Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas into negotiations because he eventually came to see that by forcing the issue he was getting nowhere and losing prestige in the process.
In retrospect, the Arab Spring was the first real assault on the peace process because it undermined the regional status quo that the United States had underwritten for four decades and kept in stasis with the peace process. Egypt and Jordan had treaties with Israel, and Syria was stalemated. The peace process was capable of checking states and their regional ambitions, but it had no power over the internal dynamics of Arab societies.
While the White House saw the upheavals in Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, and Syria as popular revolutions against a repressive order, they were actually, in each case, civil wars within Arab societies— pitting tribes, sects, Islamists, armies, and security services against each other. By avoiding all entreaties to support the Syrian rebels and topple Bashar al-Assad, Obama signaled that the United States had no dog in the fight, and no desire to work with key regional partners—especially Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Turkey—to solve a problem that affected them directly. Riyadh’s former ambassador to Washington and currently head of Saudi’s National Security Council, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, has gone on a very public media campaign against the White House to express Saudi Arabia’s displeasure over the Obama Administration’s policies regarding—in ascending order of importance—Egypt, Syria, and Iran.
It is possible that, in time, Obama will be seen to be a visionary who understood that American interests would be best served by putting as much distance as possible between us and a messy, violent part of the world. Few people think that now. According to administration officials, Obama seemed to them “impatient or disengaged” during meetings on Syria policy. And maybe he has a point. Why commit American prestige—and money, and troops—to help one side or another in Syria’s civil war? Similarly, if Arabs and Israelis really want peace, let them figure it out. And if the Israelis and the Arabs have a problem with Iran, let them work out it out themselves, while the United States moves on to more important issues, like health care, or China policy.
But the reason the American withdrawal from the Middle East is a problem is that we already know what the region looks like without the United States—it looks like Syria, with every regional actor, from Saudi Arabia and Iran, al-Qaida and Hezbollah, at war with each other. The upside of not having an Arab-Israeli peace process—with round after round of worthless negotiations that go nowhere—is no upside at all, since the process was never really meant to bring peace to the Israelis and Palestinians in the first place. Rather, it was a token of the Pax Americana, Washington’s assurance of stability in a strategically vital region. With the United States absent from the Middle East, there’s no peace process, and as a result there will likely be no peace for anyone in the region.
4c)
America will intervene with own peace plan by January if talks fail'
By Israel Hayom Staff and Shlomo Cesana
After meeting with senior Palestinian and American officials, Meretz Chairwoman MK Zehava Gal-On released a statement Monday saying that the Americans are “moving from a coordination phase between the two sides to an intervention phase.”
The new plan, expected to be presented in January 2014, will follow the “Clinton parameters,” according to Gal-On and her policy advisor Ilan Baruch. It will address all the core issues, and will be “based on the '67 lines with agreed land swaps.”
Also revealed in Gal-On's meetings with senior officials: U.S. President Barack Obama will continue to pressure Ramallah and Jerusalem to reach a breakthrough in negotiations by the second quarter of 2014.
Gal-On's statement further asserted that the Americans believe that both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas have the political credit necessary to forge an agreement. However, public skepticism on both sides has justified the American preparation to intervene if the talks reach a crisis.
Gal-On added that, in anticipation of a deadlock, the U.S. is expected to lay out a draft plan as early as January, complete with a schedule for talks and additionally addressing the points of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative.
Finally, these talks will not lead to another interim agreement, Gal-On's statement explained, as the Americans have accepted that Abbas will no longer be able to drum up public support for anything short of a permanent agreement.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu, in his Rome meeting with Secretary of State John Kerry last week, refused an American proposal to station American forces in the Jordan Valley or to allow other international troops to maintain the security along the eastern border.
During the seven-hour meeting, Kerry attempted to finish outlining the borders for the future Palestinian state.
The prime minister drew the outline first. In Netanyahu's map, the Palestinian state is farther away from the Jordan Valley, is surrounded on all sides by areas under Israeli sovereignty, is demilitarized, and preserves for Israel the greater Jerusalem area and the Jewish settlement blocs. The Palestinians, for their part, are thought to be unwilling to give up a state that does not stretch to the Jordan River, nor will they agree to not control the northern Dead Sea area.
4d) Stabbing Israel in the Back
If Barack Obama told me “I have your back”, I would spend a lot of time looking over my shoulder. His promises to Israel are dirt, worthless, and duplicitous in the extreme. Taken together, they have ensured that Israel will attack some of Iran’s facilities that are striving to make it a nuclear power with nuclear weapons.
An article in the October 31 edition of The Jerusalem Post, “White House official confirms Israeli attack on Syrian missile site” is just one example of the steps the Obama administration has taken to seriously undermine Israel’s security and hasten Iran’s ability to make good on its promise to “wipe it from the map.”
According to the article, an “anonymous US administration official” responded to a CNN inquiry that Israel had conducted air raids against a Syrian missile base near the port city of Latakia where “missiles and related equipment” were stored “out of concern that they would be transferred to Hezbollah.” Tellingly, the reporter noted that “It is unclear why the U.S. would leak such information as it could increase the pressure on Syria to retaliate against Israel.”
Monday, November 4th, marks the 34th anniversary of Iran’s seizure of U.S. diplomats in 1979. To this day Iran’s slogan has been “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.”
Little noted by most Americans, the Obama administration is feverishly trying to establish diplomatic relations with Iran despite the fact that it has technically been at war with us ever since our diplomats were seized from the U.S. embassy in Tehran, holding them for 444 days until their release the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated.
One of the best, most reliable sources of news from and about Israel is the Debka File and the same day the US blew the whistle on the Syrian attacks, they posted an article, “Braced for imminent nuclear accord with Iran, US pulls away from military option, IDF stays on the ready.”
The article bluntly stated that Israel “plans to keep in place advanced preparations for a unilateral military strike on Iran’s nuclear program in 2014.” On November 1st, Debka File reported on a “Mystery explosion at Iran’s Arak heavy water reactor” that has been under construction. It is the second time the facility has had an explosion.
The Obama administration has taken a very hard line against Israel’s warnings regarding the decades-long efforts of Iran to become a nuclear power. Flitting around the Middle East these days, Secretary of State, John Kerry, said “Some of suggested that somehow there’s something wrong with giving diplomacy a chance. We will not succumb to those fear tactics and forces that suggest otherwise.”
Kerry seems oblivious to the fact that the administration’s diplomatic efforts in the Middle East has managed to seriously harm U.S. relations with virtually all the nations in the region, not the least of which is Saudi Arabia that has as much to fear from a nuclear Iran as Israel. The Gulf States are all fearful of Iranian progress toward nuclear power.
Observers have concluded that Kerry’s efforts are aimed at “lifting decision-making on sanctions out of the hands of Congress and transferring it to this secret negotiation mechanism. By this means, President Obama hopes not only to thwart Congressional calls for tighter sanctions against Iran, but also to forestall Netanyahu’s efforts to this end.”
Indeed, all of Obama’s Middle East policies have come to a bad end at this point. The withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq has resulted in that nation becoming a bloodbath as al Qaeda, the Sunnis, and the Shiites wage a war of subversion against the present government there, in which the casualties are mounting weekly. The U.S. is also in the process of withdrawing from Afghanistan.
The tilt toward the Muslim Brotherhood that took over Egypt after an election, resulted in the then-president Muhammad Morsi’s efforts to impose harsh sharia law on the nation. Egyptians rallied against him and the military arrested him and has cracked down on the Brotherhood. There are reports that Egypt, a longtime U.S. ally, is now discussing the purchase of weapons from Russia. U.S. aid to Egypt has apparently ended.
One cannot overlook the disastrous decisions that followed the overthrow of Muamar Gaddafi, Libya’s former dictator that resulted in the December 11, 2012 attack in Benghazi that cost the life of the U.S. ambassador and three security personnel.
Israel knows that Obama is no friend and, therefore, the protection and support of every previous administration since the days of Truman are at an end until the current administration is replaced.
It will, as it has in the past, do what it must to defend itself against Iran and the threats posed by Hezbollah and Hamas. It has no other option.
Obama is increasing the threat of war and he knows it.
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5)
Something Clinton This Way ComesWill the GOP be ready?
The governorship of Virginia has been held by some of the most eminent men in American history: Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Randolph, Henry Lee, James Monroe. And now, Terry McAuliffe will sit in their chair. Depressing? Perhaps, but it is worth remembering that for about half a century, the political machine of Harry Byrd selected Virginia governors based upon their loyalty to “the Organization.” If Virginia has seen better leaders than the Democratic apparatchik who served as chief fundraiser during the scandal-plagued Bill Clinton years, it should come as some comfort to denizens of the Old Dominion that it has (probably) also seen worse.
THE FORMER PRESIDENT CAMPAIGNING WITH MCAULIFFE IN OCTOBER
AP / STEVE HELBER
What to make of the longer-term implications of the 2013 off-off-year elections, both in Virginia and in New Jersey, where Chris Christie cruised to an overwhelming victory? It is hard to judge what they mean for 2014 and beyond, although many pundits will try. These are but 2 states out of 50, and, moreover, the electorates that emerged last week will probably not be seen again. Such is the nature of low-turnout affairs a year before a midterm and three years before a presidential election. Still, there are some conclusions to draw about the broader national picture, especially looking at the two states together.
Let’s start with Virginia. Terry McAuliffe has all the sleaziness of Bill Clinton with none of the Southern charm or policy wonkery. Yet he managed to win a comfortable, if underwhelming, victory in a state that until recently had been solidly in the Republican column. The manner in which he accomplished this feat is what should interest conservatives, for he mimicked the old Clinton approach, which will surely be Hillary Clinton’s tack in 2016.
-McAuliffe did exactly what his master did in 1996. First, he started with a solid base of support from those in the lower socioeconomic strata of society, in particular poor African Americans. According to the exit polls, he won 65 percent of those who make less than $30,000 a year, and 90 percent of African Americans. To this substantial group—about half his total voting coalition—he added people at the high end of the socioeconomic strata. He won 57 percent of people with a postgraduate degree and 55 percent of people who make more than $200,000 a year. In Virginia, a state with a tight relationship to the federal government, these are people with great faith in the capacity of technocratic experts to manage society. Add their gentry liberalism (support for environmentalism, abortion rights, gay marriage, etc.), and they were easy McAuliffe targets.
But this is not enough in Virginia, especially the Virginia of 2013, a state whose electorate last week was not terribly disposed to the party in power. President Obama’s job approval in the exit polls was a weak 46 percent, identical to support for Obamacare. On top of that, the voters roughly split on who deserved blame for the government shutdown, with just a slight plurality pointing the finger at the Republicans. So how did McAuliffe get this indisposed electorate to back him?
That is where his comfort level with the upper echelon of society comes into play. McAuliffe followed a tired-but-true playbook: In his public appearances, he played the role of crusading populist, looking out for the people and not the powerful; behind the scenes, he massively outraised his opponent by currying favor with the powerful interests he publicly disclaimed. What to do with all that cash? With an electorate that is growing tired of big government, it is not enough for a Democrat as liberal as McAuliffe to paint a positive vision of the future. Instead, he had to scare the bejesus out of people, warning them in ad after ad that his Republican opponent, Ken Cuccinelli, is an extreme crypto-Puritan who would set the Old Dominion back a century or more.
It is in this way that McAuliffe pulled in just enough anti-Obama voters to win. While a majority of Virginia voters disapproved of the president, McAuliffe pulled in 11 percent of them. Of voters who opposed Obamacare, McAuliffe won 11 percent. This is not much by any stretch of the imagination, but elections are always fought at the margins—and, importantly, McAuliffe managed to win more Obama opponents than Cuccinelli won Obama supporters. In his quest, he was assisted enormously by a divided Republican party, including a donor class that never really gave Cuccinelli a second look. The state’s attorney general, of course, failed to help his own cause by running an inept campaign. Ditto the party activists who saddled Cuccinelli with a lieutenant governor candidate, E. W. Jackson, whose controversial comments put him too far outside the mainstream.
5a) Getting Real Why Cuccinelli Was Defeated
By Star Parker
) 
Politics is in the eye of the beholder.
Post-mortems now gushing forth about why Ken Cuccinelli, conservative Republican candidate for governor in Virginia, lost to Democrat Terry McAuliffe, a business-as-usual political retread from the Clinton crowd, tell us more about who produces this punditry than what reality actually might be.
We’re hearing that the Tea Party killed Cuccinelli (according to the Wall Street Journal editorial page they “stabbed him in the back”) with the government shutdown and that, once again, a socially conservative Republican candidate has shown he can’t win the votes of women.
What I see is very different. What I see is a Republican Party that still has not learned the necessary lessons to reverse setbacks of recent years.
It was not the Tea Party that stabbed Ken Cuccinelli in the back but the establishment of his own party. Once a real conservative candidate gets nominated, the party loses interest. And because they lose interest, they hold back funds, thus assuring their own prediction that this candidate can’t win.
Cuccinelli lagged in total funding by $14 million. In the early months of the campaign, because of lack of funding, he was brutally attacked in ads that went unanswered.
Regarding the shutdown – supposedly of disproportionate impact because so many Northern Virginians work for the federal government – Cuccinelli was well behind in the polls for months before the shutdown even occurred. Again, largely because of unanswered attack ads.
The Republican establishment can’t seem to grasp that they would have helped their cause by embracing the de-fund ObamaCare efforts of Tea Partiers Ted Cruz and Mike Lee.
Every day Americans see more clearly what a disaster ObamaCare – the Affordable Care Act – is. If Republican leadership would have unified clearly around the efforts of Cruz and Lee, and the American people got a clear picture of Republican unity and commitment to slay the ObamaCare monster, it would have helped the party and Cuccinelli.
It is also clear that Republicans still haven’t gotten the message about race and the changing demographics of the country.
When Barack Obama won the presidency in 2012 while winning just 38 percent of the white vote, Republicans supposedly learned something.
Those lessons appear to have been lost in Virginia.
Virginia has a large black population, 50 percent higher than the national average. Terry McAuliffe got 90% of the black vote, as did Creigh Deeds, the Democratic candidate for governor in Virginia in 2009.
The difference is that in this election blacks constituted 20 percent of the overall vote, up four points from 16 percent in 2009. So the impact of the black vote grew in 2013.
That increase of four points of the black vote as a percentage of the total vote could have made the difference alone, given that Cuccinelli lost by 2.5 points.
The Republican candidate for Lt. Governor was a no-nonsense black pastor, graduate of Harvard Law School, E.W. Jackson.
This would have been a classic opportunity for the Republican Party to aggressively visit black churches, talk about the conservative religious values that these black Americans care so dearly about, and explain the deep damage that welfare state policies and secular humanism embraced by Democrats has done in black communities. Where were they?
Then there is the claim that conservative candidates can’t attract women.
Not true. It’s not about gender but about marriage.
Cuccinelli captured the votes of both married men (50 percent) and married women (51 percent). It was the unmarried vote that McAuliffe captured (51 percent single men, 67 percent single women).
Republicans have not failed in recent years as result of being too bold or too conservative.
They have failed due to lack of clarity, conviction and courage.
The defeat of Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia is not an encouraging sign that Republicans have learned their lessons.
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