The Cold War continues to rage in one last place in the world -- and that is between the United States and Cuba. It makes no sense for a democratic American government to unconstitutionally inhibit the travel of its own citizens to Cuba -- when it has embraced China and Vietnam and is on the way to normalizing relations with North Korea.

One of the protectors of the status quo and a failed American embargo of Cuba is Lincoln Diaz-Balart, one of two Diaz-Balart brothers currently serving as members of the Florida Congressional delegation.

Lincoln and his brother are nephews by former marriage of Fidel Castro -- and any scant investigation of the battle lines in the US-Cuba standoff will show the situation to be something of a nasty, Kentucky-style family spat.

But things are changing. Some of the elders who served on the board or as senior staff of the hawkish Cuban American National Foundation have defected from the pro-embargo Miami cartel against Cuba. Younger generation Cuban-Americans have also departed from the strident position of some of their elders.

And now there is news that Lincoln Diaz-Balart is underperforming in his fundraising and that the popular former Hialeah Mayor Raul Martinez is gaining some ground in unseating Lincoln, who has too frequently harmed American national interests by not using his influence and networks to change the course of US-Cuba relations rather than promoting a feud that serves only the interests of a small group.

I'm glad to see Raul Martinez putting pressure on him -- and this blog plans to watch this race closely as it may be the first time in a long time that a popular Democrat with more enlightened views on where to take US-Cuba relations might unseat one of the most recalcitrant embargo promoters in Congress.

-- Steve Clemons

My friend Dave Meyer -- one of DC's best political researchers and a co-conspirator on a number of projects with me -- browsed through the scorecard that the National Journal used to produce the result that Senator Barack Obama was the most liberal member of the Senate in 2007.

Just for the record, I do think that Barack Obama is more liberal than Hillary Clinton -- but that said, I don't think that should be considered a negative.

However, Meyer discovered only two scored votes where Obama took the 'liberal position' and Clinton took the 'conservative'.

As Meyer wrote to me:

The first was Joe Lieberman's S.Amdt. 30 to S.Amdt. 3 to S.1 The Amendment was "To establish a Senate Office of Public Integrity." Here's the roll call of the 27-71 vote.

Joining Obama on the 'liberal' side -- meaning the side in support of Joe Lieberman's amendment -- were Republicans Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe Chuck Grassley, and John McCain.

The second was Jeff Bingaman's S.Amdt. 1267 to S.Amdt.1150 to S.1348, the Immigration Reform bill. The Amendment was "To remove the requirement that Y-1 nonimmigrant visa holders leave the United States before they are able to renew their visa." Here's the roll call of the 41-57 vote (60 votes needed to pass, so it failed by 19).

Joining Obama on the 'liberal' side were Richard Shelby, Chuck Hagel, and Tom Coburn.

What is interesting and not highlighted by Dave Meyer is that Hillary Clinton had a vote on the Bingaman amendment that would have put her at odds with the Hispanic vote -- and Obama in line with the generally pro-immigrant Hispanic voters. That's a bit of a switch.

-- Steve Clemons

At least thus far, the coalition partner's in Ehud Olmert's current government seemed poised to remain where it is, even after the release of the Winograd Report -- which criticizes the government for its actions and decision-making in the Lebanon War.

I strongly support President Bush's efforts to get some kind of deal track set between Abbas and Olmert on a negotiated two-state solution between Israel and Palestine. In the current climate, Olmert is probably the best leader Israel has, perhaps other than Foreign Minister Livni, who might be able to deliver politically on a peace arrangement.

There are a lot of obstacles that have to be overcome in the next 11 months, but at least the Winograd Report is in the past now.

-- Steve Clemons

Members of the global steel cartel used to set steel prices at the Duquesne Club where I enjoyed an interesting evening tonight with board members and donors of the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh. My task was to outline some of the fault lines in foreign policy and how this fits into the various campaigns.

I had a great evening with an informed crowd -- but it is a challenge to discuss all of this without getting overly complex, and mired in detail that many who are not foreign policy junkies don't follow. Still, it was great to participate in an exchange and hear the serious questions posed by people not into this 24/7 but who take the challenges now seriously.

Tomorrow I'm meeting students and then doing a World Affairs Council lunch in Pittsburgh before returning to Washington.

Then the day after (Friday) between 11:00 am and 11:30 am EST, I will be chatting with Denver's national public radio station, KGNU, about the various economic proposals of the campaigns which are still standing. The station has live streaming over its site and shows can be downloaded for later listening.

-- Steve Clemons

I'm not sure of this, but my hunch is that Zalmay Khalilzad is probably the highest level Muslim in the Bush administration, and he's brought a skill set of diplomatic dexterity to the Ambassadorial position at the United Nations vacated by John Bolton.

Various UN watchers, international diplomats, and even other colleagues of his inside the White House see that Khalilzad has bolstered America's position and credentials at the United Nations.

But now someone in the White House (and I have a short list of who it might have been) is sniping at Ambassador Khalilzad in a manufactured controversy over Khalilzad sitting beside Iran's foreign minister at a World Economic Forum meeting captured in a YouTube clip.

America negotiated with Iran in stabilizing Afghanistan. America has negotiated with Iran in many different arenas. For one of John Bolton's White House pals to be pounding on Khalilzad for sitting next to Iran's Foreign Minister seems petty.

I have since learned from a source familiar with the Davos meeting that Khalilzad was originally not part of this Iran-focused World Economic Forum meeting and was added at the last moment by the session moderator. That may account for the lack of diplomatic management of panel seating.

Khalilzad's spokesman, Richard Grenell, is quick to point out that Khalilzad and Iran Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki didn't shake hands or meet separately. Grenell told Helene Cooper of the New York Times that Khalilzad was engaged in "just a multilateral conversation with the moderator."

Whatever the truth here, it does seem to me that Khalilzad is positioning himself as an engagement guy, though some close to him assure me that he is not working to undermine America's current "no high level diplomatic contact" posture toward Iran (though I wish he was).

One of the other oddities here is that Condoleezza Rice has not swatted Khalilzad for this seating arrangement/faux pas -- as she did Jay Lefkowitz recently for his comments about North Korea's nuclear program at an AEI event.

The engagers seem to be nudging forward as the pugnacious nationalists in the administration snipe -- but seriously, to go to the New York Times with a seating complaint is quite petty.

One wonders how long the Ambassador will stay in this administration. He seems to be better appreciated by the Davos crowd actually than his colleagues in the White House.

-- Steve Clemons

The Afghanistan Study Group -- co-chaired by General Jim Jones and former Ambassador Thomas Pickering will release its report today in an unusual event in the Senate Dirksen Building.

The Pickering/Jones Afghanistan Study Group report will be issued along with two other Afghanistan reports also to be released today by the Strategic Advisors Group of the Atlantic Council and the National Defense University. The Afghanistan Study Group was launched by the Center for the Study of the Presidency after the completion of the Iraq Study Group report which it also helped sponsor.

Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Norm Coleman (R-MN) will host the meeting at 2 pm today in Room 419 of the Senate Dirksen Building.

Speakers at the meeting will include Center for the Study of the Presidency CEO David Abshire, General James L. Jones, Atlantic Council President Frederick Kempe, Ambassador Thomas Pickering, and CSIS Senior Advisor Harlan Ullman.

According to the press release, the reports. . .

. . .concur that without prompt actions by the U.S. and its allies, the mission in Afghanistan may fail -- causing severe consequences to U.S. strategic interests worldwide, including the war on terrorism and the future of NATO. The U.S. cannot afford to let Afghanistan continue to be the neglected, or forgotten, war.

I won't be able to attend this today as I'm heading to a forum in Pittsburgh -- but wanted to highlight for others.

-- Steve Clemons

First of all, the Democrats as a party scored big in Florida. Turnout was huge among Democrats -- just truly impressive in a state that knew that it was being neglected by Democratic campaigners for moving the date of its primary ahead of February 5th.

Second, Hillary Clinton -- despite those who say it didn't matter -- scored a win that matters. To some degree, Florida neutralizes the momentum Obama achieved in South Carolina and gets both back to a position where they both have tail winds going into February 5th.

Third, John McCain has now won New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida. Giuliani is out and giving his loyalty oath to McCain tomorrow morning. Romney is still in -- but he's going to be struggling going into Super Tuesday.

Still much farther to go to know who the finalists will be.

-- Steve Clemons

This is just a great clip on what it's all about. To paraphrase Russ Feingold, it's about the end of liberty. . .

Thanks to Matt Stoller for sending.

-- Steve Clemons

When John McCain lost in 2000 to President Bush, his followers were left to wander in the wilderness during President Bush's first term. They had chosen the wrong horse and Bush's loyalty-obsessed handlers wanted to make the McCain team pay. By the time the second term came around, there was some loosening but not much.

There are stories percolating now that some Dem campaigns are telling others -- "you are with us or you are against us;" "if you help X, then you are dead to us. . .you are nothing;" "you will get no job -- no breaks whatsoever if you help X."

On the Republican side, I've been told by some helping one of the two governors that McCain's team has offered threats that are staggering and at one level, hard to believe -- but I know in at least one case, it happened.

This is bad news folks. If confronted about these kinds of behaviors, I'm sure that all of the candidates would individually disavow them. People could even be fired if they were recorded or reported in any manner that was beyond dispute.

But frankly, the country needs to have the kind of election it is having -- with no heir apparents, no slam dunks, and lots of debate and discussion.

The final four look to me to be Romney, McCain, Clinton and Obama. All sides need to be respectful -- and each needs to understand that very decent people with different frames of reference are trying ot make an important choice about who the next president should be. Let them do it -- and respect differences in a civil way.

No one should be threatened or penalized or brow-beaten or harassed to support one candidate over another. Those are tactics deployed by thug regimes -- not America, or at least not the America I want to live in.

-- Steve Clemons

Seven minutes and seven seconds. . .

For those interested, here is a shorter version -- about three and a half minutes long:

-- Steve Clemons

I just had an interesting meeting with a prominent and thoughtful national security expert in Washington. I can't go into any of the details of the meeting, but I am intrigued with the calculation that at least one serious, non-ideological pragmatist in foreign policy is making.

This person's sense is that John McCain and Hillary Clinton would both be the wrong choices for the country. McCain, he/she said, does not have the temperament for the presidency -- and doesn't listen to others and thinks he has most of the answers.

Hillary Clinton too, this person said, brings a group of retainers and pols who think they've done it all before -- and don't understand that tomorrow's challenges are more serious and more complex than any of us have perhaps seen in our lifetimes. According to this policy intellectual, Hillary Clinton's experience led her to affirm the Kyl/Lieberman IRGC amendment, which could have very well been a loophole for another war.

This commentator -- who would not go on the record -- believes that both McCain and Clinton are almost looking for a fight, a contest of wills internationally, to establish their bona fides as strong national security presidents.

But he/she said what was impressive about Obama and Romney is that they both seem to listen, to survey the landscape of perspectives, and judiciously work through the problems. This person has been as put off as I have been by the gut and mystique campaign that some of Obama's followers have been offering in support of him -- though I think it undermines Obama's credibility.

In fairness, I think that both McCain and Clinton have advisers to whom they listen and that they are well qualified and experienced. But the very real challenge for both is that they seem not to have a national security plan or foreign policy vision that would be different than that of President Bush's team.

Continuity of our current foreign policy direction will be highly destructive to America's already faltering global position.

But while I feel it necessary to expose faults and weaknesses in all of the candidates -- particularly in both the Obama and Clinton profiles -- I think it is interesting that a hard-edged, unsentimental national security expert I highly respect sees the strength of open-mindedness in Obama and Mitt Romney.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

Someone forwarded me an email to take this American Public Media quiz that would select my preferred candidate based on my policy preferences. It's a very appealing approach to abstract away personalities and nuance and purport to objectively measure candidates simply on the issues. And it appears to be quite popular with 11570 responses last I checked.

But like all empirical research, there's the inevitable mediation of data that injects a set of assumptions, personal interpretations, and delimitation of options, all of which can problematize such a test. And I happened upon a fairly significant one in this test when it came to the candidate's positions on Iran.

The prompt stated:

If you were the commander in chief, would you declare that you will not allow Iran to become a nuclear power and would use any means -- specifically military action, if diplomacy is not successful -- to stop it?

Being the decline-ist, defeatist, apologist I am (my friends attest that I always manage to rationalize the fly in my soup), I prefer not to open up a third front by way of war with Iran.

According to the test, the candidates who appeared to agree with me were Clinton, Edwards, Huckabee, and Paul. But I was surprised to find that Obama was not on that list and instead grouped with McCain, Romney, and Giuliani (all of whom have considered the option of a tactical nuclear first-strike).

It's particularly intriguing as Clinton is generally regarded as more hawkish on Iran, especially after her Kyl-Lieberman IRGC vote, and has cast Obama's statements about negotiations with allies as signs of naivete. Obama, on the other hand, is surrounded by and has been praised by a set of foreign policy realists (including Zbigniew Brzezinski and Sen. Chuck Hagel) who were pushing back against the Iran hawks even before the declassified NIE.

Moreover, Obama's statements, featured on page one of the New York Times in November of 2007, suggest he's gone to greater lengths than Clinton to detail his diplomatic strategy with Iran -- particularly dropping conditions as a precursor to negotiations as well as shedding the counterproductive regime change language (and policy), both of which inhibit an eventual strategic rapprochement.

Curious about this seeming mischaracterization, I decided to probe further. The test not only shows you how each candidate scores with you on each issue, but also goes offers a tab explaining why they are coded a certain way along with a hyperlink to the hard evidence, in the case of Clinton and Obama's Iran positions, a debate transcript.

For Obama, it states:

ANSWER OPTION: Yes

CANDIDATE'S POSITION: At a debate on 9/26/07, Obama said, "I make an absolute commitment that we will do everything we need to do to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. One of the things we have to try, though, is to talk directly to Iran, something that we have not been doing. And, you know, one of the disagreements that we have on this stage is the degree to which the next president is going to have to engage in the sort of personal diplomacy that can bring about a new era in the region. And, you know, that means talking to everybody. We've got to talk to our enemies and not just our friends."

For Clinton, it simply reads:

ANSWER OPTION: No

CANDIDATE'S POSITION: Asked by Tim Russert at a debate on 9/26/07 whether Israel would be justified in a nuclear strike against Iran, Mrs. Clinton said, "Well, Tim, I'm not going to answer that..."

Somehow, not answering is interpreted as being against military action on Iran. But more importantly, that answer was given when Russert asked whether Israel would be justified to take military action against Iran (there was no suggestion of a "nuclear strike"). And this was in the context where Clinton was justifying and supporting Israel's pre-emptive strike on a Syrian facility.

APM or Minnesota Public Radio ought to have another look at this to square it with the seemingly contradictory statements.

I suspect the Obama campaign will not be happy with the mischaracterization of his position on Iran when that is what he touts as one of his significant departures. And I'll bet the Clinton campaign -- trying to sell their candidate as the seasoned veteran with years of foreign policy experience -- would also be unhappy with the impression this leaves that she made the politically naive mistake of taking military options off the table.

-- Sameer Lalwani

Tomorrow (Wednesday) at 2:30 pm, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson will be speaking to the Real Estate Roundtable's State of the Industry Meeting. According to a press release, he will discuss the state of the U.S. economy and the fiscal growth package.

I highly recommend that people watch the first five minutes (and more if you can handle the sound problems -- as the entire panel was stunningly good) of the New America Foundation event video above. During his comments, economist David Hale said that during the early stages of the subprime loan crisis, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke called Hank Paulson 85 times (at 4:05 in the video). Hale said that Bernanke was calling to understand the crisis unfolding because Paulson had helped create the crisis.

Hale's other commentary about the Fed being late to action, not seeing this coming, of sending mixed signals about whether it would raise or lower rates -- is also fascinating to be reminded of. This event took place on November 30, 2007 -- and the fact that Hale, James K. Galbraith, and Zachary Karabell got so much right then in their criticism of the Fed and the Bush administration's policies deserves note.

BUT TOMORROW, someone at the event really should ask Paulson what some of the bullet points were that he shared with Bernanke in those 85 phone calls.

-- Steve Clemons

. . .if not in politics (he says facetiously).

The Washington Post has just launched a new website, The Root, which will attempt to provide a portal for all things cultural and political related to the African-American community. Here is a video intro.

From the Washington Post's announcement:

Conceived by Donald Graham, Chairman of The Washington Post Company and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard and Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, The Root will feature penetrating, lively commentary on political, social and cultural issues, and will showcase the breadth and depth of viewpoints currently shaping black culture. The site will also feature multimedia including slideshows and videos interviews.

"This is an historic endeavor. The Root is one of the world's first web-based magazines dedicated to reporting and commenting upon the interests, concerns and achievements of African Americans and people of African descent throughout the world," said Gates, Editor in Chief of The Root. "Since 1827, black journalists have dreamed of creating a national black newspaper and since W.E.B. Du Bois created The Crisis Magazine in 1910 and John H. Johnson created Ebony in 1945, black people have demonstrated a profound devotion to magazines targeted to their aspirations, dreams and challenges. The Root fulfills both of these goals and through the power of the Internet creates a truly interactive community."

In addition to Gates, Lynette Clemetson joins The Root as Managing Editor from The New York Times. Previously an award-winning national and foreign correspondent for Newsweek magazine, Clemetson has covered race, ethnicity and shifting demographics both in the United States and abroad. Terence Samuel, a top political reporter formerly of U.S. News & World Report and AOL Black Voices, will serve as Deputy Editor of The Root. Associate Editor for the site will be Natalie Hopkinson, former Assignment Editor for The Washington Post's Outlook section.

"The Root resists the notion that there is -- or ever was -- such a thing as a monolithic black community. The Web site will be a forum for true conversation, celebrating the rich mix of voices, issues and points of view that bring nuance and complexity to the black experience. And while the site is committed to topics of special interest to blacks, it is a destination for anyone interested in the dynamic link between history and our collective future," says Clemetson.

Should be interesting to watch how this develops.

-- Steve Clemons

I have friends now addicted to clicking this over and over and over again.

-- Steve Clemons

I just did a video log of my reactions to President Bush's speech last night and will post in a bit -- but my quick bullet point response to the evening included these items:

1. This was Bush's least memorable speech because it may have been his least stridently partisan.

2. On issues of climate change, education, and supporting our military forces with the tools and equipment they need -- Bush has clearly adopted much of the rhetoric of the Democrats. He urged argent action on climate change, even though he popped in some uncomfortable zingers -- like a push on nuclear (which he did with a grin) and a critique of developing nations by saying "no free rides" if we are all going to do our part in cutting greenhouse gases.

3. While his speech didn't have much sizzle, he did profile highly two accomplishments that I think will be remembered by historians as his legacy. Tax cuts and faith-based initiatives. Blurring the lines between religion and government is something I don't support -- but both parties are engaged in this, and Bush will get credit over time for institutionalizing a faith-obsessed trend that probably began with Jimmy Carter and was given a big push by Bill Clinton -- but which George W. Bush made an Olympics sport,

4. The full chamber support that Dems and Republicans gave Bush on Iraq shows to some degree what a seductive guy Bush can be at times. He has convinced Congress that America's goals in Iraq are being met because of the decline in violence and the seeming success of the surge. First of all, I don't buy the outlines of this success if we are achieving results by empowering some Sunni tribal, mafioso-like thugs who detest democracy as well as their fellow-Shiite brethren. But secondly, the surge was supposed to be a tool to reach a political outcome -- not an end in itself, justified within its own context. Bush and Congress were applauding a tactic last night -- not commenting on our strategic success or failures.

5. On Israel/Palestine, which Bush called recklessly the Holy Land, I was pleased to see Bush emphasize the importance of a deal in his speech. He didn't outline how we were going to get to success -- and the absence of some key players in the negotiations process practically assures future convulsions and preempts success -- but still, I'm glad Bush touched on the subject.

Interestingly, when the White House sent out its "State of the Union Highlights" which I posted yesterday evening, Israel/Palestine peace was not on the list.

6. The President mentioned his concerns about genocide and Sudan -- at which point Nancy Pelosi jumped out of her seat clapping strongly and loudly. In contrast, Cheney sat for a bit -- unsure if he should stand or not -- which he finally did.

7. There are many other critiques I could offer -- particularly the absence of a comprehensive global vision of any kind. His cliched and tired comments about "supporting freedom in countries from Cuba and Zimbabwe to Belarus and Burma" was just odd and seemed like a check-off strategy for nations that needed to be mentioned. In the case of Cuba, opening up travel -- a Constitutional right of Americans that their government has robbed from them -- would do more to promote awareness and new possibilities of freedom than the administration's failed approach to US-Cuban relations.

8. The oddest thing I saw last night occurred before the speech when Hillary Clinton walked into the chamber and began shaking hands with various Members of Congress sitting around Ted Kennedy and Barack Obama, who themselves were seated together. Kennedy graciously shook Hillary Clinton's hand as did everyone else there -- with the exception of Barack Obama, who just turned away.

I haven't decided whether this slight prickliness that Obama continues to exhibit -- of turning away from her, of pursing his lips as if furious, of reluctantly saying as he did one night in a debate about Clinton "you're likable enough" -- is something I like or not. I want to see some of the more savage and tough-minded qualities of Obama that the Clintons seem to be so good at.

But still the Clintons will shake hands with political rivals like Kennedy.

And Obama -- who says that he is willing to talk to dictators and thugs around the world (something I support) -- seems unwilling, at least last night, to engage Hillary Clinton unless compelled.

-- Steve Clemons

I haven't seen President Bush's speech yet -- just highlights -- though about to watch it tonight. Wolf Blitzer, though, just said that Bush revisits the theme of the "axis of evil" tonight.

Mistake.

Mike Huckabee, responding to Blitzer, just said that we should be pursuing an "Axis of Opportunity" -- not obsessing about an "Axis of Evil." And Huckabee said that the real state of the union is "troubled."

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

According to Andrew Malcolm, Rudy Giuliani dropped a hint that he might drop out of the race -- and then bounced back to say he'd win Florida.

Dems will miss Guiliani I think. He was the best hope that they had of a relatively easy win in November. All of the other candidates -- from Huckabee (who won't win) to McCain and Romney -- are far tougher for either Clinton or Obama.

-- Steve Clemons

This evening, in about 20 minutes, I'll be chatting with Terrence McNally on KPFK Pacifica Radio's Free Forum with Terrence McNally. I'll be up between 8:20 and 8:30 PM EST. Sorry for the late notice.

Just before me, Tom Hayden -- who endorsed Obama today -- will be talking about the elections. After my segment, Mark Weisbrot will be talking about the economy.

-- Steve Clemons

The State of the Union address is a stuffy affair to watch -- unless one is lucky enough to be sitting in the gallery (which I did one year when Bill Clinton was President).

The President often tries to make a point by pointing up at the gallery at some hero, or foreign leader, or wife of some fallen person, or a businessman that deserves recognition for selflessness.

I've already commented on one person on the President's guest roster tonight, but here is the entire list of Presidential guests -- most all of them there to underscore a point in the President's priorities:

Continue reading this article

-- Steve Clemons

State of the Union Excerpts -- 28 January 2008

President George W. Bush -- The White House

As Prepared for Delivery

"The actions of the 110th Congress will affect the security and prosperity of our Nation long after this session has ended. In this election year, let us show our fellow Americans that we recognize our responsibilities and are determined to meet them. And let us show them that Republicans and Democrats can compete for votes and cooperate for results at the same time."

On trusting and empowering the American people:

"From expanding opportunity to protecting our country, we have made good progress. Yet we have unfinished business before us, and the American people expect us to get it done. In the work ahead, we must be guided by the philosophy that made our Nation great. As Americans, we believe in the power of individuals to determine their destiny and shape the course of history. . .So in all we do, we must trust in the ability of free people to make wise decisions, and empower them to improve their lives and their futures."

On the economy:

"To build a prosperous future, we must trust people with their own money and empower them to grow our economy. As we meet tonight, our economy is undergoing a period of uncertainty. . .And at kitchen tables across our country, there is concern about our economic future. In the long run, Americans can be confident about our economic growth."

On earmarks:

"The people's trust in their Government is undermined by congressional earmarks. . ."

On housing:

". . .We must trust Americans with the responsibility of homeownership and empower them to weather turbulent times in the housing market."

On strengthening No Child Left Behind:

"On education, we must trust students to learn if given the chance and empower parents to demand results from our schools. In neighborhoods across our country, there are boys and girls with dreams -- and a decent education is their only hope of achieving them. Six years ago, we came together to pass the No Child Left Behind Act, and today no one can deny its results. . . Now we must work together to increase accountability, add flexibility for States and districts, reduce the number of high school dropouts, and provide extra help for struggling schools. Members of Congress: The No Child Left Behind Act is a bipartisan achievement. It is succeeding. And we owe it to America's children, their parents, and their teachers to strengthen this good law."

On the importance of trade:

"On trade, we must trust American workers to compete with anyone in the world and empower them by opening up new markets overseas. Today, our economic growth increasingly depends on our ability to sell American goods, crops, and services all over the world. . . These agreements will level the playing field. They will give us better access to nearly 100 million customers. And they will support good jobs for the finest workers in the world: those whose products say 'Made in the USA.'"

"If we fail to pass this [Colombia free trade] agreement, we will embolden the purveyors of false populism in our hemisphere. So we must come together, pass this agreement, and show our neighbors in the region that democracy leads to a better life."

On improving our energy security:

"To build a future of energy security, we must trust in the creative genius of American researchers and entrepreneurs and empower them to pioneer a new generation of clean energy technology. Our security, our prosperity, and our environment all require reducing our dependence on oil."

On combating climate change:

"Let us create a new international clean technology fund, which will help developing nations like India and China make greater use of clean energy sources. And let us complete an international agreement that has the potential to slow, stop, and eventually reverse the growth of greenhouse gases. This agreement will be effective only if it includes commitments by every major economy and gives none a free ride."

On entitlement reform and immigration:

"There are two other pressing challenges that I have raised repeatedly before this body, and that this body has failed to address: entitlement spending and immigration. Every Member in this chamber knows that spending on entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid is growing faster than we can afford. . .Now I ask Members of Congress to offer your proposals and come up with a bipartisan solution to save these vital programs for our children and grandchildren."

On the freedom agenda:

"Illegal immigration is complicated, but it can be resolved. And it must be resolved in a way that upholds both our laws and our highest ideals."

On the surge in Iraq:

"Our foreign policy is based on a clear premise: We trust that people, when given the chance, will choose a future of freedom and peace. In the last 7 years, we have witnessed stirring moments in the history of liberty. . .And these images of liberty have inspired us. In the past 7 years, we have also seen images that have sobered us. . .[and] serve as a grim reminder: The advance of liberty is opposed by terrorists and extremists -- evil men who despise freedom, despise America, and aim to subject millions to their violent rule."

"The Iraqi people quickly realized that something dramatic had happened. Those who had worried that America was preparing to abandon them instead saw. . .our forces moving into neighborhoods, clearing out the terrorists, and staying behind to ensure the enemy did not return. . .While the enemy is still dangerous and more work remains, the American and Iraqi surges have achieved results few of us could have imagined just 1 year ago. . ."

". . .Some may deny the surge is working, but among the terrorists there is no doubt. Al Qaida is on the run in Iraq, and this enemy will be defeated."

On our 2008 objectives in Iraq:

"Our enemies in Iraq have been hit hard. They are not yet defeated, and we can still expect tough fighting ahead. Our objective in the coming year is to sustain and build on the gains we made in 2007, while transitioning to the next phase of our strategy. American troops are shifting from leading operations, to partnering with Iraqi forces, and, eventually, to a protective overwatch mission."

On this generation rising to the moment in the war on terror:

"We must do the difficult work today, so that years from now people will look back and say that this generation rose to the moment, prevailed in a tough fight, and left behind a more hopeful region and a safer America."

On Iran:

"Our message to the people of Iran is clear: We have no quarrel with you, we respect your traditions and your history, and we look forward to the day when you have your freedom. Our message to the leaders of Iran is also clear: Verifiably suspend your nuclear enrichment, so negotiations can begin. And to rejoin the community of nations, come clean about your nuclear intentions and past actions, stop your oppression at home, and cease your support for terror abroad. But above all, know this: America will confront those who threaten our troops, we will stand by our allies, and we will defend our vital interests in the Persian Gulf."

On the American people:

"The secret of our strength, the miracle of America, is that our greatness lies not in our Government, but in the spirit and determination of our people."

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

I went off of my computer for just a day and a half while up in Montreal -- and tons of stuff breaks, including Ted Kennedy's endorsement of Barack Obama. This is quite significant but for reasons that may not seem as obvious as the press is promoting.

First of all, Caroline Kennedy's endorsement of Obama was inspirational to many clearly -- but it did not move me. I wrote the other day that I thought that the qualities she was celebrating in her iconic and impressive father left some significant pieces of his global perspective out of the picture. But her endorsement is hers to give, and I respect that. Of all the comments that impressed me after my post -- James K. Galbraith's caught my eye the most and made me think.

Galbraith, of course, is the son of famed Kennedy adviser and teacher, John Kenneth Galbraith. Jamie Galbraith, as friends call him, is one of the nation's sharpest economic minds, a progressive, and an adviser to John Edwards. He suggests that Kennedy, had he lived, might have taken steps to end the Vietnam conflict and to take America's direction in global affairs an alternative route. Arthur Schlesinger has suggested the same in his writings -- but while I acknowledge the possibility, much more of Kennedy's actual written commentary and his policy decisions seem to be consistent with him being a Cold War hawk. He was not as far over as Nixon or a John Foster Dulles -- but he was a hard-edged warrior when it came to the perceived battle going on globally between communism and democracy.

But back to the Kennedy clan.

Ted Kennedy has the largest machine in the Democratic Party. When I used to work in the Senate, I marveled at the Kennedy franchise -- at the number of people who had started with Kennedy, who then went on to different positions in government and the private sector, and then came back for his annual "friends only" Holiday Party at which he and his wife always showed up in some extremely cool but outrageous attire (I was there for Beauty and the Kennedy Beast). There were thousands upon thousands at this close friends' party.

The Clintons have a franchise of course. So does Joe Biden and Daschle and John Breaux. But the Kennedy empire is enormous -- and when Tom DeLay tried to stop the hiring of Democrats by K Street, it was Ted Kennedy's machine and his acolytes that he was really trying to hurt.

So this endorsement by Kennedy does have magnitude -- and bolsters Obama's position. The Clinton machine remains formidable and nationally deployed -- and may still have an edge. But there is no doubt that Kennedy's endorsement is not about Massachusetts nor about an aging white liberal -- it is about the thousands and thousands of followers who owe their careers to Ted Kennedy.

This is also about machine politics -- and Kennedy wants his machine to continue to thrive and to have major impact on the course of American policy and politics (and also wants his people to get jobs).

The Clinton franchise could never really be true to the Kennedy machine -- Bill and Hillary have their own many thousands of followers beholden to them.

Obama is fresh enough and new enough that he doesn't have such a machine; now Kennedy has gifted Obama an enormous vehicle which Kennedy hopes Obama will take as his own and keep intact.

On the State of the Union, I'll be watching. I've already been directed to one piece of pandering that I'm not thrilled with regarding the mother of a prisoner in Cuba. This is meant to remind the more fanatical Cuban-Americans in Miami who their patron in Washington is.

The reference (with all due respect to Mrs. Gonzalez referenced below who in my view is being exploited by Bush and other politicians) is to one of President Bush's guests tonight at the State of the Union. This from the White House press release:

-- Blanca Gonzalez, who lives in Miami, Fla. She is the mother of Normando Hernandez Gonzalez, a Cuban political prisoner arrested in He has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for reporting on the conditions of Cuba's state-run services and for criticizing the government's management

These kinds of emotional push-buttons are designed to keep the entire United States of America from doing what is in its national interests, and its a disturbing trend in politics -- complete pandering.

In other news, Lou Ann Linehan -- the very capable Chief of Staff to Senator Chuck Hagel and former high-powered liaison between the State Department and Congress -- is stepping down from her position to survey the political landscape. I happen to know that Hagel supports her and wanted her to stay. But Mike Buttry, Communications Director for Hagel, will now become Chief of Staff -- and Rexon Ryu, formerly one of many on a long roster of victims of John Bolton's harassment at the State Department Intelligence & Research Division, is the new Deputy Chief of Staff and Senior Foreign Policy Adviser.

The last thing I'll add is that DC has yet another political rag to work through -- and this one looks interesting. It's called The Washington Independent.

I know nothing about it yet -- other than it is allegedly progressive and already features the work of Holly Yeager, a great writer who previously worked with the Financial Times and whose husband is the well known political oracle Mark Schmitt.

Mark Goldberg and I had a chat about the Law of the Sea Convention and treaty politics in general over at Bloggingheads. There are lots of moving parts right now regarding the Law of the Sea, some of which I hope to report on later.

-- Scott Paul

photo illustration by Kevin Van Aelst; reprinted with permission from the New York Times

My New America Foundation colleague Parag Khanna has a vital article out today in the New York Times Magazine titled "Waving Goodbye to Hegemony."

While scenarios of the world's geostrategic and geopolitical future are proliferating today not only i Khanna's essay but in other provocative articles like "After Iraq" by Jeffrey Goldberg, Khanna's comprehensive approach to the question of America's future makes a great deal of sense to me.

What I like most is that he articulates what I've been sensing for some time in the global marketplace of power. Other nations aren't going to count on America's guarantees quite as much as before. They are filling the void of America's perceived decline with their own plans and pretensions and gambling that tomorrow's future will be far more fluid than yesterday's -- and that some of America's allies and foes will be able to surf this lack of global equilibrium into a better position.

Khanna perceptively writes:

At best, America's unipolar moment lasted through the 1990s, but that was also a decade adrift. The post-cold-war "peace dividend" was never converted into a global liberal order under American leadership.

So now, rather than bestriding the globe, we are competing -- and losing -- in a geopolitical marketplace alongside the world's other superpowers: the European Union and China. This is geopolitics in the 21st century: the new Big Three. Not Russia, an increasingly depopulated expanse run by Gazprom.gov; not an incoherent Islam embroiled in internal wars; and not India, lagging decades behind China in both development and strategic appetite. The Big Three make the rules -- their own rules -- without any one of them dominating. And the others are left to choose their suitors in this post-American world.

The more we appreciate the differences among the American, European and Chinese worldviews, the more we will see the planetary stakes of the new global game. Previous eras of balance of power have been among European powers sharing a common culture. The cold war, too, was not truly an "East-West" struggle; it remained essentially a contest over Europe. What we have today, for the first time in history, is a global, multicivilizational, multipolar battle.

I particularly liked Khanna's treatment of trends in Asia:

Without firing a shot, China is doing on its southern and western peripheries what Europe is achieving to its east and south. Aided by a 35 million-strong ethnic Chinese diaspora well placed around East Asia's rising economies, a Greater Chinese Co-Prosperity Sphere has emerged.

Like Europeans, Asians are insulating themselves from America's economic uncertainties. Under Japanese sponsorship, they plan to launch their own regional monetary fund, while China has slashed tariffs and increased loans to its Southeast Asian neighbors. Trade within the India-Japan-Australia triangle -- of which China sits at the center -- has surpassed trade across the Pacific.

At the same time, a set of Asian security and diplomatic institutions is being built from the inside out, resulting in America's grip on the Pacific Rim being loosened one finger at a time. From Thailand to Indonesia to Korea, no country -- friend of America's or not -- wants political tension to upset economic growth. To the Western eye, it is a bizarre phenomenon: small Asian nation-states should be balancing against the rising China, but increasingly they rally toward it out of Asian cultural pride and an understanding of the historical-cultural reality of Chinese dominance.

And in the former Soviet Central Asian countries -- the so-called Stans -- China is the new heavyweight player, its manifest destiny pushing its Han pioneers westward while pulling defunct microstates like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, as well as oil-rich Kazakhstan, into its orbit. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization gathers these Central Asian strongmen together with China and Russia and may eventually become the "NATO of the East."

Khanna's depiction of what is coming next is essential reading and gives one an informed snapshot of the mess that America will have in tomorrow's world.

Much of what Khanna describes would have happened over time regardless of the failure of both President Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to put America on a more enlightened and constructive track at the end of the Cold War. But as Charles Kupchan, author of The End of the American Era: US Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics of the Twenty-First Century, has told me many times -- "President Bush sped up history and made what would have taken a couple of decades happen in just a few years."

For those who want more, I highly recommend Parag Khann's book which will be out in March, The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order

-- Steve Clemons

The only thing I can tell definitively after the South Carolina Democratic primary is that John Edwards is out, but I thought that before. But not winning in the state of his birth pretty much seals the deal that Edwards will not live in the White House, at least not next year.

Barack Obama had a big win in South Carolina. For those who support him -- this victory was huge. Some are saying he took and handled everything the Clinton machine threw at him and prevailed. Maybe so. When I see that 80% of the African-American vote went to Obama, I can't help but think that this may be a negative in attracting Hispanic votes -- and it is the Hispanic voter that is increasing in weight in the country. Some suggest that a candidate who draws heavily from the African-American vote will lose the Hispanic vote, and vice versa.

We'll see. And the Hillary Clinton people say that they knew this was going to happen in South Carolina and thus sent her off to prepare for February 5th.

I think that the battle is looking very close -- and that Denver should be fun. I'm going to get my accommodations lined up now.

One last note on something that makes me feel very uncomfortable. Caroline Kennedy endorses Barack Obama today in an op-ed titled "A President Like My Father" and promulgates more of the ethereal mysticism about Obama being the new JFK. I won't challenge Kennedy's own preferences or her own assessment of her dad's contributions to national life.

But I will say that JFK, as significant a leader as he was, was a hard core Cold War hawk. He approved the invasion of other nations and approved of regime change as a tool of American foreign policy. While in the end, his intellect and the assembled high quality intellectuals he had around him kept the world from falling into a nuclear catastrophe with the Soviet Union, it was Kennedy's youthfulness and his combination of hawkishness and Wilsonian rhetoric that helped precipitate a number of crises.

Messing with the memory of any icon like JFK has its dangers -- but while Caroline Kennedy may not want to feature these parts of her father's legacy in her endorsement of Obama, I feel I must note them. Obama is a compelling candidate who must know that gravity operates even in the White House.

Mysticism and gut will not assure our allies, deter our foes, restore confidence among our citizens, or make America regain its unique national and international character again.

-- Steve Clemons

My friend and New America Foundation colleague Peter Bergen will always be remembered as the guy who found Osama bin Laden and arranged a famous CNN interview of him when the CIA couldn't find him. Bergen has written two important books about bin Laden and al Qaeda titled Holy War, Inc: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden and The Osama Bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda's Leader.

While Peter was born in Minneapolis, he has a British accent more distinctive than many Brits and comes off as some kind of grunge-era 007 with very hip musical tastes. Most of the world knows Bergen as CNN's terrorism analyst, particularly when anything bin Laden-esque surfaces.

That's why I found it amusing that today in the New York Times Book Review, Chris Suellentrop notes that Patrick Buchanan refers twice to Bergen in his new book as Peter Burger.

This is not to say, however, that the book is awful. Buchanan can write, and he knows how to provoke. His foreign policy prescriptions -- withdraw from NATO, abandon our commitments to Taiwan and South Korea and pretty much everywhere else in the world -- are not likely to be adopted by the nominee of either major party in 2008, but he presents them forcefully and often persuasively.

They deserve a wider hearing in American politics than they are currently given, if only to challenge the adherents of the prevailing orthodoxy to question their assumptions (although it doesn't bolster Buchanan's bona fides as a terrorism expert when he twice refers to Peter Bergen, the author of "Holy War Inc." and "The Osama bin Laden I Know," as Peter "Burger").

The name is Bergen. . .Peter Bergen.

-- Steve Clemons

I'm off to Montreal today to check in with McGill University's big Model UN exercise for students from around the United States and Canada.

Will comment on South Carolina later.

-- Steve Clemons

One of the more amusing twists in the Obama-Clinton battle at the moment is how they are both trying to campaign in Florida without technically doing so.

While watching the Democratic debates the other night in South Carolina from Washington, DC, I saw my first Obama TV ads. Apparently, he had made a "national ad buy" that had his commercials running on major networks around the nation -- including in Florida. All of the Democratic candidates had sworn not to campaign in that state because of the Florida's Democratic Party bucking the decision of the Democratic National Committee that its primary could not move ahead of February 5th. Florida moved ahead anyway.

Hillary's team got miffed at Obama ads running on Florida TV sets, but now I just received this creative approach from the Clinton campaign to not campaigning in Florida:

Statement by Senator Hillary Clinton on the Seating of Delegates at the Democratic National Convention

"I hear all the time from people in Florida and Michigan that they want their voices heard in selecting the Democratic nominee.

"I believe our nominee will need the enthusiastic support of Democrats in these states to win the general election, and so I will ask my Democratic convention delegates to support seating the delegations from Florida and Michigan. I know not all of my delegates will do so and I fully respect that decision. But I hope to be President of all 50 states and U.S. territories, and that we have all 50 states represented and counted at the Democratic convention.

"I hope my fellow potential nominees will join me in this.

"I will of course be following the no-campaigning pledge that I signed, and expect others will as well."

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

There's a story that would be less disturbing if not true that George H.W. Bush asked a number of close advisers to send him their lists of who should be on his ticket as VP. Dan Quayle -- for whom Bill Kristol was chief of staff -- was No. 2 on most of these lists.

If Romney or McCain or Giuliani were to win the GOP nomination, the name that would come in first on most of those lists is Mike Huckabee. Some in the Republican camp are pushing Chuck Hagel as a partner for Romney if he wins the nod -- and I actually think that would be an excellent pairing, but most odds makers would favor Huckabee.

And as Krauthammer writes today:

Mike Huckabee is not going to be president. The loss in South Carolina, one of the most highly evangelical states in the union, made that plain. With a ceiling of 14 percent among nonevangelical Republicans, Huckabee's base is simply too narrow.

But his was not a rise and then a fall. He came from nowhere to establish himself as the voice of an important national constituency. Huckabee will continue to matter, and might even carry enough remaining Southern states to wield considerable influence at a fractured Republican convention.

Huckabee as a pre-9/11, pre-Cheney VP would not be that worrisome to me, but the nature and powers of the Vice Presidency have changed and thus the decision about who holds that power matters more than it ever did before in American history.

There is much about Huckabee that makes me feel uncomfortable. I'm not into faith-based politics.

That said, there's a pragmatic current running in him that few -- including me -- have paid much attention to, and perhaps that needs to be revisited.

Huckabee is getting counsel from people like JIm Pinkerton and Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations. But Frank Gaffney, one of the co-governors of American neoconservatism, is also an adviser.

I should point out that while Huckabee has stated that he consults with Richard Haass -- I have not heard Richard Haass, who is a friend, publicly state that he endorses Huckabee. Haass is President of the Council on Foreign Relations, a non-partisan non-profit organization, and could easily be offering his expertise to any or all of the candidates on an egalitarian basis much like my New America Foundation colleagues and I try and do. But still, I hope that people like Haass have some real impact on Governor Huckabee. I have also not heard from Frank Gaffney that he has endorsed Huckabee. (Update: Just saw this -- so Frank Gaffney, like John Bolton may be off the list.)

The challenge this creates for people who care about smart national security and foreign policy decision-making is whether to simply rail at those who have features in their profile we don't like -- or alternatively, to see the candidates as franchises, or as schizophrenic enterprises, with some personalities around the candidate in the dominant position and others subordinate.

George W. Bush has always had realists around him, but they were subordinate and buried beneath the dominance of neoconservatives and pugnacious nationalists for much of his tenure.

If Huckabee increasingly looks like he has a lock on the Vice Presidency -- which is the way things are looking to me at this early stage -- then many will have to work to fix the realists in a dominant position around him and to curb the influence of international messianic crusaders who will also be part of the Huckabee mix.

-- Steve Clemons

Bushlandia, carnival centerpiece in Torres Verdes, Portugal; photo credit: Skip Kaltenheuser

Washington, DC is a town that takes itself way too seriously. It depends on Jon Stewart for an injection of levity.

Skip Kaltenheuser, a chronicler of carnivals around the world, has just written up his proposal to bring Carnival to Washington. And given New York Times diplomatic correspondent Helene Cooper's efforts to "hip up" Washington, I think a political extravaganza on floats with a bit of wildness would be just the thing to get over the bad hangover after the George W. Bush administration.

Bill Clinton and Jealous Mistress, carnival float in Cologne, Germany; photo credit: Skip Kaltenheuser

Maybe Jon Stewart -- or Colbert -- could be Carnival King. . .and Maureen Dowd or Arianna Huffington, queen?

-- Steve Clemons

This note below was sent by a field worker for the Edwards campaign in Nevada. It was sent to close friends (not to me) and seems like an honest take by this individual -- rather than something affected by spin other than a slight bias perhaps that one must expect towards his own candidate.

We are used to hearing complaints by now from Obama's camp about Hillary Clinton's campaign tactics and Hillary's camp about Barack Obama's -- but this is someone noting mischief from both the Clinton and Obama operations:

I'm still recovering from one of the most brutal weeks of my life. . .

The caucus system was an abomination of mismanagement by the Nevada Democratic Party, amid statewide cheating by the leading two candidates.

It turns out that since this wasn't a 'federal election' but a state run caucus, the usual voter registration requirements evidently don't apply. So you could bus in loads of college kids from Iowa or New Hampshire in the last two weeks, who were not required to show ID, and who caucused like Nevadans.

Also lots of members of the Culinary Union in Vegas aren't American citizens, but it seems that many people thought they were entitled to participate anyway. So we got screwed.

Nobody knows how widespread this was, but anecdotally it was huge. Busing in out-of-staters may even not have been illegal. Both Clinton and Obama had people actively interfering with the orderly process all over the state -- shouting down and intimidating appointed caucus chairs -- many of whom were pressured into an unwelcome job with insufficient training and no backup.

I heard of tugs of war where people physically attempted to seize papers from the appointed caucus chairs, they improperly demonstrated en masse where only one person with a sign was allowed, and of precincts where the numbers were called in, but the packets of ballot records were never turned in, etc.

That's how we went from polling around 30% to pulling just 4% of the delegates. In precinct after precinct they had enough outsiders show up to keep us from being viable and obtaining any delegates. If we needed 12, we only had 11, and got nothing on final count. That's how it went.

This was the dirtiest type of hardball I've ever seen, but nobody really wants to examine this process very closely.

But I can't lay all the blame on the other campaigns. Our campaign made plenty of mistakes too.

The only thing I can feel good about is that. . .my counties were almost all in double digits -- well ahead of the statewide average. Still I've never felt so beat up and emotionally drained.

Maybe this kind of note will help rank-and-file Democrats feel better that if either Obama or Clinton win the Democratic nomination, each would be a far tougher, hold the line operation in any replay of the debacles in Florida in 2000 or Ohio in 2004.

-- Steve Clemons

I don't know what you are up to today, but if you'd like to have lunch with us at New America, I've asked for one of the nation's leading iconic civil rights figures, Leonard Weinglass, to talk to us about his experiences and perspective representing the "Cuban Five" -- five Cuban nationals who were caught and indicted for spying on American private groups that were allegedly involved in planning terrorist attacks on Cuba.

I've been interested in this case because of the seeming imbalance between very harsh penalties imposed on these individuals -- and the absence of accountability for Luis Posada Carilles, a known Cuban-American militant who allegedly helped blow up a civilian aircraft in the 1970s.

Weinglass is a fascinating personality and internationally famed civil rights attorney -- and the contours of this case are interesting and relevant to the future of US-Cuba relations.

If you are free today and can join us between 12:15 and 1:45 pm at 1630 Connecticut Ave. (7th floor), please let me know. We'll have sandwiches.

-- Steve Clemons

A government that spies on its citizens, on Americans, without oversight is not democracy; it is tyranny. And yet this is what the Bush administration continues to try and do.

In yet another installment of high-fear politicking, Vice President Richard Cheney, lobbying for the passage of new FISA legislation, spoke at the Heritage Foundation today -- obviously speaking to a room filled with folks who mostly agree with him rather than venturing forth to talk to those who don't.

From Cheney's speech:

Under President Bush's leadership, after September 11th, the government made some difficult choices.

One of these was to stop treating terrorist attacks as criminal matters -- where you find out what happened, arrest the bad guys, put them in jail, and move on. The world changed when a coordinated attack ended the lives of 3,000 Americans and turned 16 acres of New York City to ashes. As the President has made clear many times, we are dealing with a strategic threat to the United States. We are at war with an enemy that wants to cause mass death inside the United States. And we must act systematically and decisively until this enemy is destroyed.

The terrorists waging war against this country don't fight according to the rules of warfare, or international law, or moral standards, or basic humanity. And we have to be clear-eyed about the character and objective of these adversaries. They have a strategic goal to recreate the old seventh-century caliphate -- an empire stretching from Europe through the Middle East, all the way around to Southeast Asia. They want to arm themselves with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons -- and they would not hesitate to use such weapons.

Their tactics, of course, are familiar to all the world: hijackings like those of 9/11, suicide attacks, car bombs, beheadings, messages of violence and hatred on the Internet. Their method is plain; is to plan in secret, and to proceed by stealth, so that we won't know what they're up to until a moment of sudden, catastrophic violence.

To wage this fight we have to marshal our resources to go after the terrorists, to shut down their training camps, to take down their networks, deny them sanctuary, disrupt their funding sources, and bring them to justice. We've taken necessary steps, as well, to go after the sponsors of terror, and to confront those who might provide these killers with more deadly capabilities. And because some of the early battlefields of the war have been right here in the United States, we have taken vital actions to defend the homeland against future attacks.

Among the most effective weapons against terrorism is good intelligence -- information that helps us figure out the movements of the enemy, the extent of their operation, the location of their cells, the plans that they're making, the methods they use, and the targets that they want to strike. Information of this kind is also the very hardest to obtain. But it's worth the effort in terms of the plots that are averted and the lives that are saved.

The best source of that information is, of course, the terrorists themselves. So our government has taken careful but urgent steps to monitor the communications of enemies at large, and to get information out of the ones that we've captured. The military has interrogated terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay. In addition, a small number of terrorists, high-value targets held overseas, have gone through a tougher interrogation program run by the CIA. These include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11.

The Soviet Union used the threat of internal sedition to justify all kinds of horrendous big brother strategies for spying on its people and justifying abusive government power. Cheney is doing the same and calling it patriotism.

As my Japanese politics professor, Hans Baerwald, taught me long ago -- the norms of a political system can't really be assessed without observing that system under shock, or under stress. And America has been under stress -- not only from 9/11 but from the purposeful manipulation of the country in a high-fear politics used to justify anything the Executive Branch wants.

And overall, America is not doing well on the issue of showing that democratic norms and America's system of justice, liberty, and checks and balance can weather shocks and stress.

Cheney wryly notes in his speech that Benjamin Franklin "believed that the vice presidency was entirely unnecessary" and that "[Franklin] said that if the office were to be created, anyone who served as Vice President should be addressed as 'Your Superfluous Excellency.'"

Dick Cheney has made the Vice President's office structurally powerful -- and the next holder of that position will be endowed with legal powers and tools that Cheney's predecessors did not have -- and thus Franklin's assessment of the office has been over taken by events and the challenges of American government today.

However, it is also important to note that Benjamin Franklin, after leaving Philadelphia's Independence Hall after signing the Constitution, was asked by a citizen:

"Dr. Franklin, what kind of government did you give us? A monarchy or a republic?" Franklin's response was: "A republic, if you can keep it!"

I wonder what Cheney would say leaving the Heritage Foundation today, if he were to give an honest assessment. . ."Vice President Cheney -- what have you wrought? A monarchy or a republic?"

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

This is a bit of an experiment, but the New America Foundation is trying a live web feed for some of our events -- including this big economic forum tomorrow.

We'll be starting promptly at 8 am EST and ending at 9:30 am. CNN and MSNBC are filming -- but C-Span is not making this round. We'll have our own digital copy up after the event.

Thanks to the many who watched on line today. The sound is great but the video distance is lousy. Our people will try to fix in future meetings. But I am embedding the YouTube capture of today's conference for your edification.

-- Steve Clemons

The Fed just dropped the fed funds rate by 75 basis points -- the largest such Fed move since 1982 and the market barely noticed.

No matter what the issues were yesterday, it is clear that the economy -- domestic and global -- is now the biggest political issue today and tomorrow. . .at least for a while.

So, tomorrow morning -- from 8 am til 9:30 am -- the New America Foundation/Economic Growth Program will host a forum with economic policy advisers to the various political campaigns.

Thus far, the campaigns included are Obama, McCain, Clinton, Huckabee and Edwards. The Romney campaign has been working very hard to send someone but after back and forth, the campaign was not able to produce someone for the meeting but hopes to work with us in the future. Senator Fred Thompson's campaign and Rudy Giuliani's team are also still trying to find someone at this point.

RSVP directly to me if you can make it at clemons@newamerica.net. If you have media questions, please call Erin Drankoski at 202-986-4901.

This event will be digitally recorded -- and we'll have the file on the web immediately after the event tomorrow -- but also are happy to send the link direcly to anyone who requests it, particularly those outside of Washington or abroad.

As the Economy Screams:
Perspectives and Proposals from the Presidential Campaigns

Wednesday, January 23, 2008
8:00 a.m. - 9:30 a.m.

Continue reading this article

-- Steve Clemons

When the Fed drops the fed funds rate by 75 basis points and the market doesn't react. . .well, that's really, really scary.

I've talked with a number of economists this morning who are stunned by the lack of market reaction to the interest rate drop. This may take us back to debating what quick and real stimulus package makes sense because monetary tools may be very limited at this point.

-- Steve Clemons

I'm not going to run through every detail of this extremely interesting debate, and I wish I had heard none of the political commentators afterward because listening to Mark Halperin (a virtual friend of mine) after, I was very irritated. He said he gave Obama an A- tonight and then a B+ each to Hillary Clinton and to Edwards.

I have to go with my own filters, not those of others -- and to me, regardless of who one supported tonight, it's clear that each scored points but that Hillary Clinton performed with an authority, presence in that huge hall, and mastery of detail that was just second to none. She hammered Bush on the semi-secret deal he's trying to rig with the Iraqi government to commit American troops and bases indefinitely -- something the others did not mention. She had numbers and details flowing forth as if they were as natural as could be.

One thing that was weird for me in this debate is that Hillary Clinton is clearly not mimicking her husband in any way. John Edwards is. Bill Clinton is the master of anecdotes and "let me tell you all a story" moments. Hillary is dense with facts, details, experiences -- but it's not warm and fuzzy.

I watched Ed Rendell one night at a 4,000 person DNC dinner in the final year of Bill Clinton's tenure introduce Al Gore in a kind of passing the torch evening from Bill Clinton to Gore. Both Gore and Clinton walked on to the stage at the same time -- and Clinton sat meekly behind Gore while the then hoping-to-be 43rd President literally "lost the crowd" which began speaking at an embarrassing volume over his rambling speech.

Clinton walked up after Gore who introduced him warmly (though the two were not speaking to each other in real life) and started his talk with "let me tell you all a story. . .", and the room went completely quiet.

John Edwards tries that in these debates, and has heartwarming moments -- particularly when he spoke about his mill working father tonight -- but overall, neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama really do Br'er Rabbit stuff. . .and I think I like that.

Here are some other quick reactions just off the top of my head.

First, I was miffed at Obama and Edwards for their ignorance or purposeful duplicity about the subprime home mortgage crisis. They both said that African-Americans were perniciously targeted by lenders. That's about as untrue as one can imagine. The subprime crisis is an outrage -- but it was a systemic problem -- and everyone who wanted credit got it. Had everyone else other than the African-American community received loans that were subprime and based on substandard collateral then there would be a case of discrimination, but to argue that Blacks were targeted to give bad loans to -- below prime rate levels -- was grossly wrong.

Hillary Clinton, alternatively, did not say that. She argues for a "work out" plan that freezes rates for five years (a bit long for my taste and probably hugely economically disruptive) and stops foreclosures for a period of time. The neoliberal Chicago school economist won't like this approach because it lengthens the period which capital is ineffeciently distributed. But the government -- mostly because of a combination of financial innovations in the market it doesn't understand, leading to poor regulation -- actually helped create the housing bubble and the crisis. To extend the bubble to work out the worst elements so that the shock harms fewer people is sensible.

I was surprised to hear Obama and Edwards not embrace this plan. Obama didn't want to reward speculators. This isn't a simple game of good guys and bad guys. There are hundreds of billions of dollars of bad loans hiding out there in financial portfolios that are not yet disclosed -- and much of the financial network will not finance each other in fear of subsidizing a corrupted portfolio. So, the problem is not only with homeowners but with the entire financial network.

Hillary Clinton got this in a way that really surprised me.

Barack Obama's answer on US foreign policy was impressive, particularly the part about engaging foreign leaders, the good ones and the bad ones. He gets the general vision of needing something new and different right, but I always find myself wanting more detail.

I thought that Obama was not given a fair shake for his hundred plus "present" votes in the Illinois legislature. That is the way that they do it there. He answered honestly and forthrightly -- and Edwards seemed off base to chase it further as it's mostly an artificial issue overall in my view.

I also liked the fact that while Edwards and Hillary both spoke about green-related job creation, Obama was the only one who said "broadband" and mentioned the need for robust levels of public infrastructure investment across the board. That is the kind of financial stimulus the nation needs now.

I'm glad that Obama got hit by both Hillary Clinton and Edwards for his health plan. He needs to change it and just come up with a plan that covers all Americans. Edwards' best moment was on health care policy I think, although he was wrong to say that none of their plans cover illegal aliens. I believe that Clinton's plan does in fact have a sub-tier package of health care for illegals as it's important to the core mechanism of her plan to cover everyone. When Edwards said that none of them covered illegal aliens, she shook her head no -- but then never commented about it.

And while I didn't like Hillary raising the slum lord issue with Obama, I was surprised to hear him refer to Rezko as "that indivdual." That individual is someone Barack Obama has known for 17 years and someone who has raised more than $14 million for him and who was on his Senate campaign finance organization. Now Hillary Clinton had Norman Hsu -- but while I didn't expect Obama to embrace Rezko, he might have just said that he was surrounded (as they all are) by people who are not always what they seem to be. At that moment, Barack Obama using "that individual" sounded a lot like -- well -- you know who. . .

Hillary Clinton was right to blast President Bush's financial rebate plan in his stimulus package. That kind of spending should be directed at generating America's next platform for innovation and for rebuilding the core infrastructure of the country. Clinton got some of this right in my view, but Obama was a bit more defined and thorough.

OK, enough now I guess. I'm not sure that these debates matter though I wish they would. I sat tonight watching the debates with a couple of Obama supporters who were groaning about his performance. But Mark Halperin still ranked him first.

They did not -- but they still support him. I'm frustrated as I think that Dems need a hybrid Obama-Clinton candidate, and I don't hear either candidate pushing all of the right buttons, or even enough of the serious, most important ones.

But in my view, Hillary Clinton turned in the best performance tonight. Then came Barack Obama, and close after though not enough came John Edwards.

But just one aside, I "hated" the question Wolf Blitzer posed of "If Martin Luther King was alive today, why would he endorse you?" Waste of our time -- and demeaning to King's legacy and the importance of this debate.

-- Steve Clemons

I'll be watching the debates tonight closely. Hope all of you will be too.

House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) has encouraged Bill Clinton to tone it down but did not say that the former President had crossed the line in his rough-handedness with Barack Obama and his campaign. Clyburn, an immensely impressive guy on Wolf Blitzer's show today, also chastised Obama for not seeming to understand that the transformation that Ronald Reagan wrought set back the African-American community in America and all of those who were needing help.

While much has been made about Bill Clinton's role in Hillary's campaign and whether or not his conduct is unbecoming for a former President, I can't help but think that there is some deep strategy at play here.

There is a possibility that Bill Clinton is beating up on Obama and engineering the environment for the Nevada caucus lawsuit so as to build confidence and attract votes that in another Gore-Bush-like standoff in Florida, Ohio or elsewhere that Clinton will be James Baker's equivalent -- that he'll oversee a tenacious, tough as nails, hard-scraping fight to win and not give away the show as Gore did in Florida and as Kerry might have done in Ohio.

I'm not sure -- but much of the howling at Bill's tough tactics and their appropriateness could be a net positive in the build up to February 5th.

And on another front -- today global financial markets crashed worse than any other day since 9/11/2001 itself. Whatever Bill Clinton may or may not be doing will be over when people look at American markets hemorrhage tomorrow.

I am helping to organize a forum Wednesday morning at the New America Foundation with economic advisers from most of the campaigns to talk about this crisis and the economy and what their candidates propose.

More on that later.

-- Steve Clemons

Facebook is no longer a college kid rolodex. It's becoming part of emerging new media in the country -- a distribution network for causes as well as news and opinion.

I'm about to recruit my 900th friend on Facebook. Now this is nothing compared to General Wesley Clark who has 4,299 friends -- or NPR's Carl Kassell with 3, 471 friends.

Although I am good friends with Wes Clark in real life, I'm still waiting for him (or the person minding his shop) to accept my languishing "friend request."

Kassell and I are friends on Facebook and have met a couple of times over the years -- and I'm friends in a Facebook sense with former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) who has been leading a battle partly through Facebook to advocate that Arizona Congressman Jeff Flake (R-AZ) get a seat on the House Appropriations Committee.

I joined the Flake effort as a group in Facebook in part because I think that the charismatic Republican Congressman really understands modern foreign policy and has a vision of US-Cuba relations that is tough-minded and would move us beyond the idiocy of the Cold-War rut we are in with Havana at the moment. And unlike many of our presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle, Jeff Flake realizes that Cuba is just a proving ground on which to demonstrate a more enlightened and sensible foreign policy with the world at large.

I also did what may be one of the first Facebook interviews over Facebook with writer and political correspondent for Spain's El Mundo, Pablo Pardo. I'll post the piece here (pdf with graphic) -- but it's in Spanish.

And as Noam Cohen writes in the New York Times today, microjournalism through Facebook is emerging as a significant new trend:

"NASHUA: Just saw Bill O'reily misbehaving at Obama rallly. Shoving Obama staffer."

With these sloppily spelled words, sent Jan. 5 by text message by John Dickerson, chief political correspondent for the online magazine Slate, did microjournalism come of age.

The encounter between Mr. O'Reilly, the Fox News host, and the campaign aide did become actual news, kind of, for a day (a brief item ran in The New York Times, for example). But it first emerged from a high school gym in New Hampshire via Mr. Dickerson's BlackBerry.

He uses Twitter -- one of a number of so-called microblogging services -- to distribute his text-message reporting to his Facebook friends, as well as his readers at Slate, which reprints recent Twitter items alongside his longer-form writing.

Microjournalism is the latest step in the evolution of Mr. Dickerson, who worked for years at Time magazine, and has moved from print to online articles to blog entries to text messages no longer than 140 characters, or about two sentences. "One of the things we are supposed to do as journalists is take people where they can't go," he said in an interview. "It is much more authentic, because it really is from inside the room."

Although I cleaned up John Dickerson's grammatical slips, The Washington Note (I think) was the first to grab Dickerson's Facebook twitter and throw it up (with Dickerson's permission) for broader consumption on the web. A bit later, Lynn Sweet got a piece out on Bill O'Reilly's shove -- and John Dickerson himself did as well.

I'm still figuring out Facebook, which while easy to navigate is very full of folks trying to have fun as well as to digest indirectly what their "virtual friends" are up to. I have signed on to some of the less serious applications because I was afraid of irritating some real friends who want me to be part of their video game fetishes. . .but I'm on Facebook for serious stuff mostly -- reading John Dickerson's twitters, including one about him enjoying throwing apple slices into the fire after Christmas with his kids.

OK -- it's not all serious. But it is part of the emerging new media.

-- Steve Clemons

Update: After this post, Wesley Clark just added me as a friend on Facebook -- and surged from 4,299 friends to 5,000 friends in the last hour. Wow, -- Steve Clemons

This is a video clip of Barack Obama's speech yesterday in Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church -- Martin Luther King's church. I reflected on it here -- and despite Obama's surprising and refreshing critique of intolerance in the African-American community, I still don't like politicking from churches.

In tribute to Martin Luther King, AP's Deepti Hajela reminds us that King was reviled by many in his time -- even by some who were trying to support his cause of racial equality. He was the person running against the grain and it was hard for some of the more risk averse to support him.

Today, Martin Luther King is an icon, and his cause has become sacrosanct -- so sacrosanct sometimes that people have stopped thinking about the emerging tectonics of racial politics.

The best guide I know of to discuss race in a post-post-MLK era is journalist and author Debra Dickerson, a former fellow of the New America Foundation and Washington Post editorial writer who needs to get back to blogging. She now teaches journalism at SUNY Albany and has written The End of Blackness: Returning the Souls of Black Folks to Their Rightful Owners and An American Story. This profile captures a bit of Dickerson's story in brief.

It's important I think to remember Martin Luther King and to realize that race is still an issue in the country -- but I can also easily imagine Debra Dickerson writing a provocative essay saying "enough already. . . we need to get beyond Martin Luther King." (just to be clear -- Dickerson has not said this but I bet the thought has crossed her mind)

And actually, getting beyond MLK is probably truer to the vision he wanted the country to achieve in the first place.

-- Steve Clemons

OK -- I don't like politicians speaking in churches. I'm behind (or way ahead of) the times.

It's not my kind of thing, and the beginning of Barack Obama's speech today at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta is the kind of verbage that doesn't click with me. When Bill Clinton endorsed Gray Davis from a church pulpit in California seemed just as bad as Karl Rove orchestrating offensive RNC mailers to church parish rosters.

But all that said, Obama's lines here are impressive, and brave -- basically tough love for members of the African-American community:

And yet, if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that none of our hands are entirely clean. If we're honest with ourselves, we'll acknowledge that our own community has not always been true to King's vision of a beloved community.

We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them. The scourge of anti-Semitism has, at times, revealed itself in our community. For too long, some of us have seen immigrants as competitors for jobs instead of companions in the fight for opportunity.

Every day, our politics fuels and exploits this kind of division across all races and regions; across gender and party. It is played out on television. It is sensationalized by the media. And last week, it even crept into the campaign for President, with charges and counter-charges that served to obscure the issues instead of illuminating the critical choices we face as a nation.

So let us say that on this day of all days, each of us carries with us the task of changing our hearts and minds. The division, the stereotypes, the scape-goating, the ease with which we blame our plight on others -- all of this distracts us from the common challenges we face -- war and poverty; injustice and inequality.

We can no longer afford to build ourselves up by tearing someone else down. We can no longer afford to traffic in lies or fear or hate. It is the poison that we must purge from our politics; the wall that we must tear down before the hour grows too late.

Because if Dr. King could love his jailor; if he could call on the faithful who once sat where you do to forgive those who set dogs and fire hoses upon them, then surely we can look past what divides us in our time, and bind up our wounds, and erase the empathy deficit that exists in our hearts.

If I heard more commentary like that from pols -- that took risks at the pulpit and did less pandering -- I might revise a bit of my objection to this sort of politicking.

But kudos to Barack Obama for surprising a devout secularist today.

-- Steve Clemons

One of the few things that would depress me more than Bill Kristol getting a regular column in the New York Times would be Nicholas Kristof or Paul Krugman giving up theirs. Luckily, I don't think that will happen.

That's a friendly preamble to a point I want to pick with Kristof about an otherwise good column today, "Hillary, Barack, Experience." He writes:

Alternatively, look at the five presidents since 1900 with perhaps the most political experience when taking office: William McKinley, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush. They had great technical skills -- but not one was among our very greatest presidents.

Assessing the greatest and worst presidents is a process fraught with problems and subjective bias, but still. . .I'm not sure that some on this list aren't some of America's greatest presidents considering the challenges of their times.

Since 1900, FDR gets the most applause for stewarding the nation -- and frankly, much of the world -- through an extraordinary period of crisis. But he was monarchial in Bush/Cheney ways as well -- and it was because of FDR that national security leaders like James Forrestal and others worked to craft and pass the National Security Act of 1947 -- in order to prevent the total usurpation of power by other presidents who may not be as generally benign or as intelligent as FDR was. FDR accumulated so much power that some of America's post-WWII national security "founders" worried about what would happen if a powerful but dumb president came into office. Their nightmare may finally have been realized in the presidency of George W. Bush.

But was FDR among the greatest presidents? Probably -- but there were problems. Truman oversaw a dramatic era of global institution building and laid the contours of containment policy -- and for that he was great. But he also dropped the atomic bomb -- which both blurs and secures his legacy. Eisenhower knocked back the crazies in his own party who wanted to engage in a set of nuclear conflicts and embraced containment of Soviet ambitions over war. I think Eisenhower deserves more credit for his leadership and steady hand than he is often given credit for.

But to Kristof's list, I won't debate McKinley as I'm not a studied authority on his presidency. But I think Nixon must rank among one of the greatest foreign policy leaders in American history, his presidency blurred of course and denigrated by Watergate and his ethical darkness in American politics. But on one level, Nixon's experience was extraordinarily important in the judgment calls he made on China and the Soviet Union. I think we need someone like Nixon (in the foreign policy sense) back in the White House today.

Likewise, while Gerald Ford was not a sizzler -- his contacts with Congress, his understanding of the office of the president, and his humble approach to the job were exactly what was needed in the post-Watergate crisis of the nation in which Nixon's missteps (and crimes) had harmed the presidency.

And frankly, I think that George H.W. Bush's good sense managing the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, overseeing German reunification, and applying a limited deployment of power in the Middle East against Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait without a full invasion of that country get him positive points. His son, our current President, fails on nearly ever score of comparison with the administration of the elder Bush. For more on why George H.W. Bush ranks so highly on national security decision-making when compared to both Bush 43 and to Bill Clinton, read Zbigniew Brzezinski's excellent Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower.

I won't get into the LBJ debate deeply here as there has been enough out in public recently about LBJ and Martin Luther King after the spat between Obama and Hillary Clinton camps on who did more to usher in civil rights legislation. But clearly LBJ's dramatic political personality and experience helped usher in substantial Great Society legislation and programs -- including landmark civil rights legislation in collaboration with the organic and compelling surge orchestrated by Martin Luther King. LBJ moved the nation and I can't believe that his experience was a non-issue.

In any case, George W. Bush does rank in my view as one of the worst presidents not only of the century -- but in American history -- but I wouldn't make the same case that the presidents highlighted by Nick Kristoff didn't achieve some impressive results in their time -- that would have been less imaginable without the relationships and experience that they had previously amassed.

-- Steve Clemons

The next President of the United States -- whether it's Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Mike Huckabee, or Mitt Romney -- is going to have the crap kicked out of him or her by friends and foes around the world.

The problem is that America's mystique as a superpower was shorn off by Iraq. The US showed its limits -- militarily and I would argue economically.

Mystique is ethereal -- and comes with decades of collective assessment, and to some degree awe, by other nations that a hyper-power like the United States once "seemed to have no limits." Mystique can't be re-established by the success of "the surge" in Iraq or some military conquest or victory. Mystique, and frankly, real global power, comes from decades of being the world's constructive, deciding vote -- from being the Sandra Day O'Connor of judicious engagement in one big problem after another.

Contrary to the views of my friend and Foreign Policy editor-in-chief Moises Naim, I don't believe America's place in the world can simply bounce back to where it was before the Bush administration's turn at the wheel. Major allies and collaborators like Japan, Germany, Israel, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and others are already placing different global bets and thinking through scenarios for the future that count on America being an important voice at the table -- but not the pivotal nation it has been for decades. And foes are moving their agendas now because they sense that America is not doing well at securing its global objectives.

The real problem in the international system today is that a global equilibrium of interests has been wrecked by America's invasion of Iraq, its failure to secure a normalization deal with Iran in 2003, its disregard for a status-hungry Russia in the Cold War period, and its inattention to China's rise globally as America remains distracted by its problems in the Middle East.

Duke University Professor Bruce Jentleson and UC Berkeley's Steve Weber make the good point that the next President will not only NOT start out where President Bush did in world affairs -- but from a position damaged by this administration's decisions and a place far back from even:

But the next president will not be starting from an international position similar to the one Bush inherited no matter how successful the administration is in undoing the damage of its failed policies. A once internationally weak and democratizing Russia has become an autocratic and provocative petro-state. China's economy is more than twice the size of what it was in 2000, and its global influence has correspondingly risen. And a new generation of jihadists, no less committed to violence, is eager to continue the anti-America campaign.

The GOP candidates who would build on Bush's old approach to foreign policy clearly don't get how the world has changed. But neither do Democrats who stress reversing what Bush has done. No one should feel vindicated by the Bush administration's reversals, because defining the future of U.S. foreign policy in terms of the past would be as big a mistake for the next president as it was for Bush.

When you are a great power, a lost decade does not simply leave you back where you started. It leaves you far behind. Our presidential candidates had better plan to do more than simply reboot the system and start over, as though the clock had stopped in January 2001.

Re-establishing an equilibrium that is stable is going to be very difficult and may very well involve a spate of conflicts and wars -- small and large -- that we haven't seen the outlines of yet.

But because of America's unique role and legacy over the last century and the lofty rhetoric that always flows from American political leaders who still see America as the center of all things -- the world will test the next president to get the sense of when power will be depoyed and when it won't -- and how far America will go and what it will gamble to achieve its goals.

All other key nations will want to know what the realities of American power and rhetoric are.

The next president will be tested by friends and foes alike. Imagine the first meetings of Kennedy and Khrushchev in which the Soviet leader deftly bounced Kennedy around during the beginning of JFK's tenure. But imagine it ten times, hundred times, a thousand times worse -- on a scale and complexity of actors and issues that far exceeds the realities of 1961.

It's going to be a rough ride for the next president. And it would be a cataclysmic mistake for any president not to anticipate these challenges -- and to choose any one of the certain-to-come conflicts ahead as a way to define his or her presidency.

-- Steve Clemons

Shortly after I wrote this post yesterday, I received a note from Gary Trauner, whose campaign for Wyoming's at-large seat in Congress fell 500 votes short in 2006. Gary is a regular TWN reader and offered to take a few turns with me down the mountain.

TWN readers will probably be interested in Gary's policy outlook. There are obvious limits on how deep political conversations can become on freezing cold chairlifts, but a few things became immediately clear. Gary is strongly committed to accountability in government and he takes a non-ideological approach to policy decisions. He is refreshingly in touch with happenings around Wyoming and equally interested in how America's role in the world has changed.

These talks took up very little of our day today -- and I hope there will be time for more such conversations in the future. Today was about skiing, so I should pass along sincere thanks to Gary and his friends Ruby and Andrew -- fantastic skiers all -- for showing this Yankee around Wyoming's biggest, baddest mountain on a fantastic powder day.

Gary's 2008 run for the House is going to heat up relatively soon. Should he win, he would not only bring a rational and down-to-earth perspective to Washington, he would almost certainly be the best skier in the House of Representatives (Mark Udall, running for the Senate this year, would apparently offer the stiffest competition).

-- Scott Paul

Hillary Clinton supporters Warren Lowman and Russell Totten caucus for Hillary Clinton in Carson City, Nevada and sent this picture into The Washington Note

Hillary Clinton wins the popular vote in Nevada's Democratic caucus, but Obama's team may be suggesting that he won because he may have pulled one more delegate than she did.

While Romney and Paul placed first and second in Nevada, the real race tonight for Republicans is in South Carolina.

John McCain -- at the time of this writing -- leads by what looks to me a sizable margin, but none of the networks will call Huckabee the 2nd place finisher. Romney is far back and trails Fred Thompson by a bit with 54% of precincts reporting.

A quick back of the envelope analysis leads one to think that there is a chance that neither Obama nor Clinton will break away from one another and that they'll be at near parity (what in Japanese is called hakuchu) for quite a long time. Some strategists are wondering whether this gives John Edwards a king-maker role at the convention if neither Obama nor Clinton secure enough delegates to win the nomination outright.

And on the Republican side, McCain clearly has the sizzle -- and Huckabee just got gut-punched, as things look at this moment anyhow. With the first state in the South possibly going to McCain -- and with him also taking New Hampshire -- McCain is showing that he has regional legs that none of the other candidates have.

-- Steve Clemons

I'm taking a long weekend away from the Law of the Sea Convention and other related issues here in Jackson Hole, WY. My view from the Jackson Hole Gondola was a bit less clear this morning than in this picture, but it was wonderful nonetheless.

I've learned since arriving that it is common knowledge that this is Dick Cheney's "undisclosed location." Apparently, occasional visits by Air Force 2 accopanied by Black Hawk helicopters and a convoy of military vehicles did not go unnoticed in Teton Valley.

Another interesting story: after the 2000 election, cell phone service drastically improved throughout the valley. The rumor among locals is that the White House, knowing that Cheney planned to retreat here regularly, paid to vastly upgrade service. I don't know if it's true, but it seems utterly believable. Either way, the seemingly boundless availability of White House discretionary funds boggles the mind.

Back next week with more.

-- Scott Paul

Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs R. Nicholas Burns speaking at New America Foundation/American Strategy Program Salon Dinner, 2 July 2007 (photo credit: Samuel Sherraden)

R. Nicholas "Nick" Burns is a stunningly effective diplomat. There is Dean Acheson DNA in the kind of work he does -- but also a little John Foster Dulles. He is part Kennan and Scowcroft and also has the moral integrity of a Cyrus Vance. Henry Kissinger and Paul Nitze would be comfortable with Burns' methods of achieving the country's national security objectives. He is both realist and idealist, a hybrid -- and he is one of the few who may have saved this country from another self-destructive war in the Middle East.

I happened to be on the US Airways shuttle flying back from New York to DC a while back -- and Nick Burns was on the plane. He had literally just finished the negotiations with the UN Permanent-5 on what the requirements would be for a third round of toughened economic sanctions against Iran. He had succeeded in securing an agreement on an Iran track with China and Russia -- but at a substantial price. They insisted that the IAEA and European efforts then underway, and seeming to have new vigor, with Iran play out before a new sanctions drafting effort. Beneath his affable facade, I could see he was exhausted. But what he fixed with a P-5 was a win for him -- and he intimated to me -- that this "gives us more time."

I am not exactly sure what he meant about wanting "more time" -- but my best hunch is that what Nick Burns meant is that it gave Condi Rice, John Negroponte, Mike McConnell, Bob Gates, Mike Hayden and him more time to maneuver the environment around Iran to compel it to suspend enrichment and negotiate in good faith -- before Cheney's wing of the national security establishment succeeded in convincing Bush to launch a strike.

I had just written a somewhat high profile Salon article outlining why Bush would not strike Iran, and I told Burns my throw away line in the piece was that Ahmadinejad was Iran's Dick Cheney. Nick Burns stiffened up -- and in a friendly way -- admonished me for saying such a think. He said "Cheney is no Ahmadinejad. No. No way."

Burns is respectful and serious -- and he was right on Cheney, and I was a bit too full of myself. But this is a small peek into the world in which Burns worked. Vice President Cheney's team did all it could to undermine Secretary of State Rice and her effective globe-trotting Under Secretary for Political Affairs in the diplomatic efforts to prevent yet another war from breaking out in the Middle East, while simultaneously addressing Chinese and Russian ambitions in the world, trying to maneuver North Korea into a more collaborative place, trying to strike a historic new partnership with India, dealing with tensions inside NATO regarding Afghanistan deployments and objectives, and helping out in the effort to move Israeli-Palestinian peace forward.

Continue reading this article

-- Steve Clemons

Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs R. Nicholas Burns is stepping down from his position in March and retiring in May after 26 years in the foreign service and three in his current position.

US Ambassador to Russia William Burns will be leaving Moscow and has been nominated to take Nick Burns' position.

This has enormous implications for various fragile deals in the works -- with India, with Iran, and also impacts US-Russia relations.

Developing.

-- Steve Clemons

A loyal TWN reader sent me this short clip of Ambassador John Bolton's appearance on the Jon Stewart Show Tuesday night -- and it's well worth watching.

At about 4:45 in the 5 minute and 23 second clip, Bolton agrees with Jon Stewart that President Bush should stop with oversimplified black/white pandering of "freedom is good" narratives vs. "people who hate liberty are trying to kill us" rhetoric.

While I would debate John Bolton's underlying current of anti-internationalism, he was very reasonable in this interview and poked at "the idealists." Who are the idealists Bolton is referring to?

Well, of the idealists that matter in US foreign policy circles today, liberal interventionists and neoconservatives stand out -- and it seems to me that the idealism of the Bush administration has been driven more by the neocon crowd, many of who are John Bolton's colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute.

I wish John Bolton had been at a dinner the New America Foundation/Middle East Policy Initiative hosted last night for former Israel Shin Bet Chief Ami Ayalon -- a leading star in Israel's Labor Party in the Knesset who narrowly lost a race recently against Ehud Barak to head the party.

Ayalon revealed that in discussions he had with former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz before the March 2003 Iraq invasion, Wolfowitz and he were discussing how "democracy" could be achieved in the Middle East. Ayalon reported that Wolfowitz said that "when tyranny and tyrants are removed, democracy will just burst out."

I think Bolton would have concurred with Ayalon's skepticism of Paul Wolfowitz's alleged view. To be fair to Wolfowitz, I happen to know that his views on nation building are substantially more complex -- but in the heady times in the Bush administration between the 9/11 attacks and the decision to invade Iraq, it's easy to imagine Wolfowitz and other Bush administration idealists/neoconservatives making such statements.

Bolton's reasonableness may in fact be spreading to other quarters inside AEI. Jacob Heilbrunn, author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons is speaking at an AEI lunch on Friday.

I have already heard of internal angst inside AEI over Heilbrunn being invited -- but I commend those at AEI who did pull this lunch together and think that it's a testament to any institution that it can entertain speakers and ideas that may run at odds with the general milieu of an organization. I might even go.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

Romney and Hillary Clinton win in Michigan. . .

However, the efforts by all -- on both sides of the political aisle -- to achieve political definitiveness are being firmly rejected by Americans. Republicans and Democrats are not sure what they want in their leader -- and this is going to be a fascinating, stressful, long term process.

I'm watching the Democrats debate issues in Nevada tonight, and I have to admit that I'm impressed by the format. I sort of like how cordial everyone is -- in fact, it was practically a love fest at the beginning. But it's a thoughtful way to have a serious discussion with candidates. One thing though -- I was disappointed in all of them on the economic issues, including John Edwards -- which surprises me, given how sharp his economic team is.

Tomorrow, I'll be MC'ing an evening for Jacob Heilbrunn who just wrote a book that must be read by those who want to understand the history and impact of neoconservative thinking on America's national security policy. Adam Bellow, son of Saul Bellow who is featured as well in the Heilbrunn book, will be representing Doubleday at this evening gathering.

And then after that, I'll be helping to moderate a salon discussion with former Shin Bet Chief Ami Ayalon -- who is a dynamic member of Israel's Labor Party -- and a Minister of State in the Israeli government with responsibilities for security.

It's going to be a busy day tomorrow -- but thought I'd share what's up.

Thanks to all for emailing. Can't answer it all -- though I try. Just a hint. Shorter emails are helpful -- because I get hundreds each day. And thanks to those of you clicking PayPal. I owe many a serous debt of gratitude -- and after I get done with some Iran incident digging, you'll hear from me.

For those friending on FaceBook, I love it -- very cool template for exchanging stuff.

On the campaigns, it's going to be a marathon -- not a sprint. On the Dem side, I see Hillary and Obama fighting for a long time ahead, even after February 5th -- unless a surprise or scandal emerges. I'll be writing on this more soon -- but I'm not sure that the Democratic Party can compete well in the general election without a fusion of effort and interests of them both. That may be bad news for Wes Clark, Ted Strickland, Bill Richardson, Joe Biden, and others. . .more on that later.

And yes, Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius will be one of two offering responses after President Bush's State of the Union address.

More tomorrow.

-- Steve Clemons

Despite rising concern in "the West" over CO2 emissions and climate change, the booming consumer demand for cars has emerged as a central and visible feature of India's rising economic growth. The New York Times describes how accelerating demand has outpaced regulation to produce comical dilemmas like this one:

Delhi issued more than 300,000 drivers' licenses last year, which could be seen as either a feat of bureaucratic efficiency or Indian ingenuity. At one city licensing office this week, the test consisted of turning on the ignition and driving in a wide circle that took about a minute. Ramfali, a professional chauffeur, said he scored a license even though he cannot read. Mr. Sharma paid about $40, or five times the official fee, to an independent broker who fetched him a license in half an hour.

After reading this wildly entertaining article, I realized driving in India is remarkably akin to certain views of international relations -- regardless of (inter)national norms, drivers (think states) will do whatever they can maximize their power and get what they want by exploiting every open crevice and fragility.

Most of the vehicles could be considered states but you can extend the metaphor to the competing actors for the road: fast-peddling cyclists, nimble but low-tech pedestrians, and the occasional lumbering elephant (think transnational actors like multi-nationals, terrorist networks, and the lumbering international organizations and bureaucracies, ever-trying to keep pace).

The above video of an Indian thoroughfare provides visual corroboration of my thesis: out of a sea of anarchy emerges a strange but fluid order. And particularly adept at exploiting this order is an actor with few scruples or inhibitions about exercising power when it can. Watch closely for the white car (shall we name it the Vladimir?) at the top center of the youtube screen emerging at 1:20 that flouts the norms of the existing order and likely heads off to make mincemeat of Herbie the love bug.

-- Sameer Lalwani

Via ElectoPundit, I just watched this -- and I'm stunned that more of us didn't see what these creative commentators foresaw and posted back in May 2007.

-- Steve Clemons

(Click on picture to watch the Ad)

A number of Citgo commercials lauding the Venezuelan government for supporting poor Americans with discounted heating oil have been appearing on prime time television, some even featuring former Congressman Joseph Kennedy. Though Kennedy has been accused of a Faustian pact for appearing in the ads, this story sidesteps the bigger picture.

I happened to catch one of the latest Citgo ads -- disarmingly humanizing and compassionate -- while watching the New York Giants stick it to the Dallas Cowboys last night (confession: I grew up in 49er country where Dallas was reviled with the ascendance of Bill Walsh's west coast offense, the significance of which I could not comprehend until reading Michael Lewis's The Blind Side).

The ads seem to capitalize on some of the crucial weaknesses in America today: economic uncertainties for Americans in the bottom two income quartiles magnified by rising heating bills and the geopolitical missteps that have given rise to the "New Axis of Oil" which Flynt Leverett described in the Summer of 2006. Leverett's latest piece in The National Interest continues to probe the limits of American power with a fragile and declining dollar against rising major oil and manufacturing states.

Part of the problem is also how we deal with the leadership of these rising powers. We try to simultaneously demonize and marginalize leaders like Putin, Chavez, and Ahmadinejad while pursuing soft regime-change efforts when they retain control of pivotal nodes of power, the energy faucets. Thus far this has proved ineffective and counterproductive as Leverett's article contends.

Chavez is not a megalomaniacal dictator like Kim Jong Il as some would like to paint him. He's motivated by a triad of interests -- augmenting Venezuelan geopolitical power, bridging domestic disparities with his ambitious social agenda, and maintaining his own regime. Sometimes the publicity of his social/populist efforts may actually cut into actual delivery of services. Journalist inquiry, like Tina Rosenberg's "The Perils of Petrocracy" in the New York Times Magazine a few months ago, has exposed the conflicts of interest and ineptitude that riddle his gospel of oil agenda.

The Citgo ads reveal a more complex opponent in Chavez than the one typically portrayed in the Wall Street Journal editorial page. We'll need to craft more sophisticated devices, such as an enlightened policy that weans Cuba away from Chavez if we want to create voices of geopolitical pluralism. If Israel-Palestine is the trope that animates the forces that move against us in the Middle East, our bungled Cuba policy plays a similar role for Latin America.

Chavez cannot be easily dismissed out of hand for the populist politics and global posturing that appeal across Latin America even amongst moderate allies in Brazil and Argentina. Now he's taking his case to a broad swathe of the American people -- I won't be surprised to see a Citgo ad on Super Bowl Sunday with over 90 million viewers -- and I guarantee people will be listening.

--Sameer Lalwani

Luis Posada Carriles

Being a political blogger during an election of the sort we are having today is a weird experience. There is no heir apparent in either party and there is a true scramble by all parties to win any way he or she can. And thus, the campaigns are reaching out to folks like me constantly with this angle or that. Usually, they want to give us their pre-packaged angles rather than the information we actually request.

But writing about the candidates during this time is like being a Hollywood actor during the voting period for the Academy Awards. I know a number of "stars" and one simply wouldn't believe the marketing gimmickry that film distributors use when sending out "screeners" to pump up support for their Oscar-hungry films. Political bloggers get a similar kind of deluge -- usually phone calls and opportunities here and there for "special moments" with candidates or their key advisors.

And it's a rush. In fact, it's more than just that -- it's a gusher of stuff. So much that it's hard to stay focused on other issues.

One of these is the fact that America is coddling wanted terrorists in the United States -- perhaps the most outrageous of which is Luis Posada Carriles who is walking around freely in Miami. Posada's case serves as as an example of the seeming arbitrariness of America's system of rule of law to Cuban nationals who witness this outrage and may appropriately wonder if our system of democracy is one more of rhetoric and veneer than substance.

There are others, like Center for Democracy in the Americas Director Sarah Stephens and National Security Archives Latin America expert Peter Kornbluh, who have written powerfully on the Posada case -- and I recommend a look at their thoughts.

Cuban nationals actually get a double whammy as they are subjected to a daily feed from their government on the abuse of justice in the US with regard to the so-called "Cuban Five" -- who clearly have received judgments against them that are unbelievably disproportionate to anything they might have done. Former State Department Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson gets into this here.

Now today, Salon has a definitive article by Tristram Korten and Kirk Nielsen on the coddled terrorists in Miami -- and here is a short bit by a local TV station in Miami reporting on some Code Pink organizers being chased and nearly attacked by Posada supporters.

Knowing any of the political candidates and what they might or might not do cannot come from asking them about the comfortable issues of the day -- it comes from seeing them under stress and when challenged to confront issues such as this Posada case.

Will John McCain, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama admit that our justice system in Florida that protects these thugs like Posada is broken?

Or will they hug the guy in a photo op in order to curry favor with the elder, anti-Castro fanatics -- who perhaps unknowingly have helped reinforce the status quo in Cuba and have helped distort and corrupt America's democracy.

-- Steve Clemons

My friend and colleague Anatol Lieven has a thoughtful oped in the Financial Times today, "Balkan Unrest Remains a Recipe for Disaster."

I feel the need to respond to one bias in his framing, however.

He opens his excellent piece thus:

In their dealings over Kosovo's independence, the European Union and Russia need to take their points of departure from reality and common responsibility for the stability of the European continent, not from legalism or self-righteousness.

The Russians must recognise that, whether they and the Serbs like it or not, Kosovo will soon become independent and will be recognised as such by the US, the EU and many Muslim states. If this is not granted soon, the Kosovo Albanians will revolt.

By vetoing United Nations recognition and giving moral support to Serbian intransigence, Russia can help keep Kosovo unstable and spread in­stability across the region. In the worst case, it could help produce a war that would destabilise not just the Balkans but Europe and deal a terrible blow to Russia's relations with the west; but Moscow needs to ask itself how it can be in Russia's interest to do this and take actions that will drive western Europe closer to the hardline anti-Russian positions in the US.

Lieven is correct to note that there are anti-Putin, anti-Russian hardliners in Washington who want yet more reasons to ignite global conflict and tension -- which reinforces the high-fear politics they have become vested in.

But beyond some folks in DC demonizing Putin and a resurgent Russia, there is little evidence that Russia is a priority today on Washington's foreign policy roster of concerns. As one former senior G.W. Bush administration official said at a Nixon Center gathering, "I can see no evidence that this administration has a strategy towards Russia of any kind."

And thus I would suggest to Anatol Lieven that Russia thinks it can push its agenda now with little fear of blowback because it senses no serious strategic plan of the United States towards it.

This is one of the reasons I believe that the next President of the United States is going to get the crap kicked out of him or her -- far worse than when Khrushchev famously manhandled John F. Kennedy in their early encounters.

Our allies as well as our real and potential foes just don't know what our genuine priorities are, and what the reality of American power is and isn't. There is a sense that America is less and less able to secure the objectives it sets for itself internationally.

We are moving into an era of a thousand pin-prick tests of our resolve and global position.

I also find it a bit ironic that the leading, front-page foreign policy issue for the U.S. on September 10, 2001 was Macedonia. Despite the boiling reaction among Arab Muslims to the long term bases then deployed in Saudia Arabia, we were largely nationally ignorant of the dangerous ferment building in the Middle East.

And now while we are focused on the Middle East, we are largely blind to the consequences of a new collision with Russia, and the challenges involved in recognizing an independent Kosovo.

-- Steve Clemons

Here is a clip of Ghaith al-Omari, my colleague at the New America Foundation and also a Senior Fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine, commenting on the state of things in the Annapolis Peace process on the Charlie Rose Show.

-- Steve Clemons

People from all walks of American life pay respects to the unassuming civil rights leader Rosa Parks in the US Capitol rotunda.

I'm not well positioned or exceedingly informed on the subject to comment much on the strange battle brewing between the Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama camps on race. In his comments on George Stephanopoulos' This Week this morning, Senator John Kerry in his broad endorsement of Barack Obama slipped in a line that seemed incongruent with other parts of his statement.

Kerry said something along the lines that when President Lyndon Johnson signed the civil rights act, he handed the pen he used to Martin Luther King. This had to be a clear reference to Hillary Clinton's comment the other day that "Martin Luther King's dream was realized when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act."

Stephanopoulos pressed Kerry on this wondering whether Obama's team was playing a race card against Hillary Clinton.

I think it's absurd for anyone to be engineering drama over the clear collaboration of effort and objectives that required both Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson -- but politics needs battles. One wishes that they were over real issues and not nuanced language.

But what I find really interesting IF indeed Senator Obama's team is trying to hammer Hillary Clinton for some subterranean racism is that Barack Obama in Iowa was trying to be the candidate who had finally transcended race in this nation -- not an aspirant to the White House who was highlighting the divisions between a white president who signed legislation into law and a black minister who helped inspire the need for that law and change.

Christopher Ames -- Provost and Dean of Washington College, a liberal arts college on Maryland's eastern shore founded in 1782, as well as a media expert -- wrote this note to me on Senator Obama's subtle sleight of hand in his Iowa victory speech that seemed to transcend race but still flirted with the concept without mentioning the word:

Steve,

I enjoyed listening to your dialogue with Mark Schmitt on over-analyzing the primaries. I then took a few minutes to listen to the Obama Iowa victory speech.

It's quite something. Here's my over-analysis, informed a bit by our conversation at your house in D.C. about the very question of whether Obama can win with the degree of racism still alive in this country.

Here's what fascinated me about Obama's stirring speech: the unnamed referent. "They said this day would never come." "You [voters in Iowa] have done what the cynics said we couldn't." Now I think it is pretty clear to everyone what Obama means by "what" and "this day." I'd paraphrase it like this: Cynics said a black man couldn't draw enough white votes to succeed in a national election, but now, by winning the primary in very white Iowa, we've demonstrated that the country is no longer so racially divided for that to be true. Indeed, people voted for the candidate whom they believed could best turn around (or "change") the disastrous policies of the Bush administration regarding foreign policy, torture, health care, the environment, and corruption.

Now this is a powerful message and a smart one because it pats his supporters on the back for rising above vestigial racism with their votes for him. And it underscores, perhaps rightly, his electability.

In all, I think it is a fine message and a legitimate talking point after the Iowa victory.

What fascinates me is that Obama communicates this in a fifteen-minute speech that never mentions race, even though the electability of a black candidate is the unnamed and perfectly clear referent. Race is thus always present and always unnamed. Thus the appeal of Obama as the post-racial candidate, somehow so different from a candidate like Jesse Jackson, who espouses similar political positions. Thus Obama's appeal to whites who are "tired" of race, who complain of "the race card," who see racial politics as "special interests."

To me, it's a remarkable rhetorical move, almost a sleight of hand. And it just might make the difference.

By the way, I recall your friend recently returned from Russia responding that if I was right about Obama not being electable, he'd like to return to being an ex-pat. Fair enough. I share his frustration and disappointment with the lasting power of racial division. But I wonder what countries one would consider moving to if the criterion was a country that has proven its ability to elect a member of a racial minority to national office. Certainly not Europe?

But that is a genuine question.

All the best,

Christopher Ames

Provost and Dean of the College, Washington College

Ames' comments intrigue me, but perhaps that is because I'm just not as tuned in as others on race policy questions.

One of my first colleagues formerly at the New America Foundation and a person I admire greatly is Debra Dickerson who in the early part of this decade was exploring the politics of race in a post-racial environment. She was watching the collapse of affirmative action and the disaggregation of racial blocs and often spoke about what a post-affirmative action racial agenda might look like.

Given that she was making these comments in the late 1990s and early part of this decade, it seems clear to me that at least in the political benchmarks pols are using -- political machines aren't ready for candidates who are truly racially transcendent.

And one more quip before I close. I found it unbelievable that Senator John Kerry said on Stephanopoulos's show that Obama as a black president could speak differently to African leaders than Hillary Clinton could as a white woman (I'm paraphrasing).

Whoever is in that White House is going to have to talk to all sorts of global leaders, and Kerry's comment seemed racist to me, perhaps not intended by him, but still. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have both invested heavily in relationships with various African leaders -- and Kerry's comments slight them not on substance but for the color of their skin.

My hope if Barack Obama is elected is that he'll get his people and advocates to transcend this kind of positioning.

-- Steve Clemons

Ambassador Joe Wilson and author Valerie Plame Wilson sent in this shot from their window in Santa Fe.

-- Steve Clemons

I am not surprised by this major New York Times expose on returning military veterans from America's operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The writers -- Deborah Sontag and Lizette Alvarez -- have found that returning vets have killed (or have been charged with killing) 121 persons in the U.S.

This reminds me of a discussion I had with a very senior Saudi defense attache in a European country. I asked him what he most feared regarding America's engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. He told me that he feared things stabilizing and general peace being achieved because then Saudi Mujahideen would return home.

-- Steve Clemons

This was strange exchange between a "senior administration official" traveling with President Bush in the Middle East and a journalist today in the United Arab Emirates at the Emirates Palace Hotel.

I'm not completely sure, but the exchange seems to be asking the press "not to put something out" that involves the details of a new arms package that President Bush will announce tomorrow in Saudi Arabia. Or it may be that the "senior administration official" (who I assume is someone like Stephen Hadley) does not want something out in the media before the White House formally notifies the Congress. But the cryptic short-hand makes the true meaning murky.

But then there is a giggling exchange between the official and the press about the start time for the official meeting between Bush and Saudi King Abdullah.

Again, I'm not sure -- but the exchange and comments from the "senior official" seem to undiplomatically poke fun at the Saudi King's late night habits.

Maybe this is just nothing, but if I were the Saudi King's chief-of-staff, I'd really want to know what the "senior administration official" was trying to telegraph with this exchange on the eve of an important meeting between President Bush and King Abdullah.

Here is the clip:

Q I checked the -- I was confused about the Saudi arms sales, what's expected. What I saw that the administration originally proposed was only about $620 million for AWACS and targeting -- sniper targeting pods, and no question of the JDAMs and things like that. Can you talk about how the sale is going to be modified and when you're going to announce it?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: It's a big package that we have offered to the Saudis. It actually gets sort of negotiated between us and the Saudis in pieces, and those pieces then get notified to the Congress. But it is overall a pretty substantial package -- we can get you the details on that -- but it is being rolled out in pieces as we get definitization, as I say, between us and the Saudis and are ready at that point to notify to the Congress.

Q Isn't there something being announced tomorrow in conjunction with his arrival?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: There's some discussions. We'll probably -- if we have an announcement tomorrow, we will make it. But I think there will be a --

Q When should we expect it, early or late?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Probably pretty early. There will be a notification in the Hill going up.

Should we put this out? No? No, I'm told not to put it out.

Q This is separate from the stuff I just referred to?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: This is one of the elements of the overall package that will be notified tomorrow.

Q The President is kind of an early-to-bed guy -- (laughter) -- and the King likes to stay up late, and the meeting tomorrow starts at 9:00 a.m. What do you think, how long is it going to go?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Well, we'll see.

Q We have a wager, hence the giggling. (Laughter.)

Q We have a wager. (Laughter.)

Q You think it could go pretty late, though, right? I mean -- (laughter.)

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: You know, this is a matter of great sensitivity and I don't really want to be wading in -- (laughter) -- very significant. But if someone wants to offer me 10 percent on the side, I could see what I could do. (Laughter.)

Q Well, the meeting is supposed to be, like, at 9:00 a.m. -- we were thinking 9:10 a.m. (Laughter.)

Q All right, enough.

-- Steve Clemons

Al Jazeera anchor and senior correspondent Yosri Fouda -- who interviewed al Qaeda leaders Ramzi bin al Shibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- sent me this clip this morning on stereotypes of Arabs in American films.

It's called "Reel Bad Arabs", five minutes long and worth learning from.

-- Steve Clemons

Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giametti clowning it up as Ben Franklin and John Adams in new HBO miniseries. Rare scene since Adams was not known for communal fun.

January 11th was Alexander Hamilton's 250th birthday -- but he doesn't have a movie or mini-series yet.

But John Adams -- 2nd President of the United States -- and a thorn in the sides of Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, and Jefferson but nonetheless a vital part of America's successful transition from concept to nation is about to have his own HBO series.

I just looked at the trailer that is available here -- and the line-up with Paul Giamatti, Laura Linney, Thomas Wilkinson, David Morse and others looks intriguing.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda play early morning catch at the Diaoyutai State Guest House in Beijing on 29 December 2007

Andrew Oros of Washington College has an interesting piece on Brookings Northeast Asia Commentary site on what impact 2008 elections both in the U.S. and Japan might have on the bilateral relationship.

I particularly enjoyed this part reflecting on how things have changed since former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's and Bush's memorable Camp David baseball toss:

Casual observers might have been jarred to see Prime Minister Fukuda, during his late December visit to China, tossing a baseball with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao.

These visuals naturally invoke earlier images of President Bush and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's similar play during Koizumi's visit to the United States in 2006. But does this mean Japan is now playing with China, not the United States? After all, no one reported President Bush and Prime Minister Fukuda playing ball during Fukuda's November visit to the United States.

During the four-day trip, Fukuda's first to China since he became prime minister, the two countries signed agreements to cooperate to fight climate change and to increase youth and professional exchanges, and concluded arrangements for China's president Hu Jintao to travel to Japan in April 2008 (which will be the first such trip by a Chinese head of state in a decade).

Rather than seeing this as a zero-sum competition, the United States should be pleased to see its game (baseball) and its principal ally (Japan) embraced in China. Difficult Japan-China ties serve no one's interests.

The most interesting part of Oros' essay is the bit which comments on Prime Minister Fukuda dialing back the strident hyper-nationalism of his predecessor, Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe:

Just as Republican presidential contenders in the United States have signaled a shift away from President Bush's foreign policy approaches, the rise to power of Prime Minister Fukuda also has signaled a political shift in Japan, though from within the same ruling LDP.

Although also clearly a strong supporter of the U.S.-Japan alliance, as noted in his November visit to the United States (the first foreign country he visited), Fukuda's public speeches regarding the alliance and in particular Japan's military role lack the stridency of Prime Minister Abe.

Fukuda also shows a greater closeness to Asia, for better and for worse. In his 2008 new year's speech (delivered in English via YouTube, a first for a Japanese Prime Minister), Fukuda does assert the "essential" nature of the alliance, not only to the security of Japan but also to the region, but then continues by expanding the definition of security to include health and sanitation, development, and environmental concerns -- rhetoric that harkens back to the "comprehensive security" approaches pursued by Japan in previous decades.

The concluding words of Fukuda's speech -- "The larger the problem the more we wish for cooperation among all in the world. Now is the time for the global community to unify to fight on the same side to live together." -- could not sound more different from the current chief executive in the United States.

Fukuda's broader and more cooperative approach to security suggests that his administration may be less keen to focus on expanding the military aspects of U.S.-Japan alliance.

Japan and how it decides to assert itself and its interests in Asia and globally are very important. Japan has significant military capacity -- but more importantly, it sits on a giant chunk of global capital reserves that will help drive the contours of future economic growth and development.

But as Oros illustrates in the essay, Japan is in the arena of nations being neglected right now because there don't seem to be any screaming problems there at the moment.

This again should remind us of how 'reactive' rather than 'proactive' our national security and foreign policy directions are. What's clear to me is that China and Russia -- and I'd add Japan and a number of other key nations -- are testing their abilities at proactively pursuing their objectives.

-- Steve Clemons

One of the Bush administration's toughest critics from the right has been Jim Pinkerton. Pinkerton is a friend, a New America Foundation colleague, a prolific opinion journalist, a Fox News commentator, and one of the most intelligent thinkers in Washington -- but he's just thrown me a bit of a curve ball.

Jim Pinkerton, in a note sent collectively to a head of a conservative DC think tank as well as to a former senior DoD official and me -- he disclosed that he was now officially "Senior Adviser" to the campaign of Mike Huckabee and that he hoped he could continue to work with us.

I will always work with Pinkerton. He may be the only top tier rationalist in Huckabee's firmament -- and I'll work with anyone to try and get the country on a better policy course. Pinkerton is not shy about the decision and believes in Huckabee -- though I sensed just a tiny bit of "don't be shocked that I am doing this. . ." in his note.

But Pinkerton's news reinforces my view that the debate about candidates ought not to be about ethereal characterizations of gut and identity -- but we should be debating proposals, debating the views and intentions of advisers, and debating past behavior and experience -- because these candidates are not individuals but rather "franchises" of often competing and internally discordant interests.

And in Pinkerton's case, he has just broadened the franchise of Mike Huckabee, and Huckabee hopefully knows the value of who he has just brought on board as Pinkerton enhances the policy heft of Huckabee's outfit perhaps more than one would have thought possible until this news.

-- Steve Clemons

Daniel Drezner just posted the following on his Facebook Profile and it's also at his blog:

Your dumb-ass quote of the day

From John Kerry's endorsement of Barack Obama:

"Experience is not defined by years spent in Washington but by instinct and judgment and wisdom," Mr Kerry told a crowd of about 2,000 at a college in Charleston, South Carolina.

I can sort of see judgment and wisdom emanating from experience. . .but instinct? Isn't that pretty much the opposite of experience?

Doesn't that almost sound like Stephen Colbert said it? I was wondering what his writers were doing during the strike.

UPDATE: Marc Ambinder has more.

And I do/did too. . .

I'd really like to just have Obama's and Clinton's supporters talk substance and drop the metaphysical stuff. They both have many substantive strengths and weaknesses. Let's get back to real points of comparison.

-- Steve Clemons

Oops!

Sudan acknowledged Thursday that its troops shot at a United Nations convoy in Darfur, reversing an initial denial, but it in part blamed the peacekeepers saying they should have notified Khartoum of their movements.

I'll paraphrase: if you guys hadn't gotten in the way of our bullets, we wouldn't have had to shoot at you.

On a serious note, let's hope this is not a harbinger of what's to come in Darfur. I have to wonder out loud if this was an "oops" at all or rather a premeditated attack intended to suggest that Khartoum's ridiculous conditions for UNAMID -- that it not move at night and communicate about all other movements in advance -- are reasonable given the confusing conditions on the ground. In either case, an already difficult peace operation is becoming even more complicated.

-- Scott Paul

An American journalist, Nicholas Schmidle, who authored the article "Next Gen Taliban" that appeared in Sunday's New York Times Magazine has been deported from Pakistan. He was forced to leave today -- Friday, 11 January.

Schmidle will be returning to Washington, DC on Saturday and will be joining a panel I am moderating Monday afternoon titled "Pakistan in Peril" featuring veteran journalists and Pakistan-watchers Steve Coll and Peter Bergen as well as former Bush administration National Security Council senior official Flynt Leverett. Nicholas Schmidle will now be part of this panel.

Schmidle was informed that the Ministry of Interior was deporting him for unspecified reasons, but his speculation is that he was expelled because of his article which The Washington Note highlighted on Wednesday, 2 January -- before it came out on Sunday.

These are the latest dispatches that Schmidle has published in Slate.

Other journalists I have spoken to today tell me that there is a pattern of intimidation of journalists clearly emerging in Pakistan. While this may be the first deportation of an American journalist that most can recall, there have been other troubling incidents.

New America Foundation fellow and journalist Eliza Griswold was apparently held in custody by Pakistan authorities on one occasion. CNN Terrorism Analyst and New America Foundation senior fellow Peter Bergen was denied a visa on one occasion in 2006 with no explanation given. Nir Rosen -- also a New America Foundation fellow who has reported extensively on Middle East affairs -- was threatened in Quetta, Pakistan by what some believe to be government "goons" and was told that he needed to leave immediately or he would be "the next Danny Pearl." New York Times correspondent Carlotta Gall was beaten by thugs who identified themselves as Pakistani police.

Some believe that Schmidle's article antogonized Pakistani government officials because he conducted interviews in Quetta where the Taliban are operating in full public. These sources suggest that Pakistan government authorities want to limit exposure to the fact that they have done nothing to shut down the Taliban in Quetta and/or are turning a blind eye to the Taliban's operations theres.

For those in the Washington, DC area -- the event I will be moderating with Schmidle, Coll, Bergen, and Leverett will be from 2:30 pm til 4:00 pm on Monday, 14 January at the offices of the New America Foundation. A video clip will be posted later to the New America Foundation website.

-- Steve Clemons

This week's events on the Israel-Palestinian front with President Bush's visit still leave the prospects for peace open to questioning. Mixed signals from the White House on settlements, a myopic focus on Iran, the endorsement of refugee compensation, and Blair's plans to join JPMorgan Chase create a muddled backdrop to assess the progress of Bush's visit. What was really needed to build on last year's Annapolis conference was a decisive punctuation point to signal the seriousness and resolve of the US, primarily to the Palestinians and Arab world, and I don't think that has yet happened.

The call upon Israel for settlement freeze made last Friday by the White House was positive news -- it demonstrated some rhetorical resolve that they were committed to the process restarted at Annapolis. But statements made this week by President Bush in Israel left him vulnerable to the charge that such resolve would not rise above rhetoric. When pressed on a question by AP's Anne Gearan, the President seemed to neglect his previous success with the bully pulpit and indicated that all the US could do was provide nudges from the sidelines. The transcript is as follows:

Q Mr. President, are you disappointed that the Israelis and the Palestinians haven't made more specific progress since Annapolis, and is it maybe time for you to apply some of that direct pressure you referred to earlier?

Continue reading this article

-- Sameer Lalwani

The human side of John Edwards' life has been clear for a while in the obvious stress of campaigning while his wife Elizabeth deals with her cancer. Hillary Clinton's humanity manifested itself in an usual moment of stress punctuated by a tear. John McCain's personal and political resilience after his experiences as a torture victim are always in my mind when I listen to him.

But on the Obama front -- I want to commend Senator Obama for taking time from a grueling campaign to call and speak to a young man who is receiving cancer treatments. I won't post the name of the person or mention his father other than the dad is a senior member of the Obama camp. Senator John Kerry also called the youth in the hospital. This is not the kind of thing that Obama's campaign or Kerry would want out -- and that makes it all the more impressive to me.

These folks are people -- real stuff is going in in the lives of everyone involved on all of the campaigns. And sometimes that is forgotten. But The Washington Note wants to wish the young man now receiving his first treatments a full and speedy recovery -- and wants to wish all others who have serious issues to manage in their private lives the best in doing so despite the demands of public life and the demanding electoral campaigns ahead.

-- Steve Clemons

I just ran across this May 2007 article by Bob Shrum about the Vice Presidential selection process that John Kerry went through in choosing John Edwards as his running mate.

I had never read this before -- but it really deserves another look because it gives some insight into how most candidates probably run through their VP choices -- well except for George W. Bush perhaps. In the case of Bush, Dick Cheney headed his VP selection team and didn't produce anyone who seemed quite as good as himself for the job. In the end, Bush's father and Brent Scowcroft suggested Cheney, and I think both feel very guility for it today.

Shrum's tell-all is remarkably personal, and gives a sense of how insider-ish many major political decisions are. It's interesting to note that Chuck Hagel was on Kerry's possibility list in 2004 -- and that Kerry was very uncomfortable with Edwards.

But given what I wrote about my disdain for gut thinking in making key decisions, particularly foreign policy which John Kerry referenced yesterday in his endorsement of Obama:

Kerry told me that the Edwardses simply stopped returning calls or talking to him and Teresa. Within months, Edwards started preparing for a bid in 2008. Kerry said that he wished he'd never picked Edwards, that he should have gone with his gut.

Maybe the mistake John Kerry thinks he made with John Edwards is why he cares so much about gut thinking, but Americans deserve something more serious.

-- Steve Clemons

Not only is today the 6th Anniversary of the start of the travesties at Guantanamo, it is the 250th birthday of the person I feel was the greatest and most historically neglected founding father, Alexander Hamilton.

For those who want to read one of the finest treatments ever of Hamilton's life and contributions, read Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton. I'm pleased to remind that the book won the George Washington Book Prize, the largest cash award for a book on America's founding era from the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College.

I also recommend my colleague Michael Lind's Hamilton's Republic: Readings in the American Democratic Nationalist Tradition.

One of the filters through which I think about modern politics is the missive: "Washington reigned, Hamilton ruled, and Jefferson complained. . ."

And come to think of it, Alexander Hamilton would have been one hell of a blogger had he lived today.

-- Steve Clemons

Tomorrow is the Six Year Anniversary of the first arrival of combat detainees at Guantanamo.

Early in December, I recommended that "The Guantanamo Detainee" be considered as TIME's person of the year because eventually the distortion of America's system of checks and balances and rule of law -- and our violation of international law will divide this nation, divide America from many in the world for generations, and have even divided many inside the Bush administration.

I wanted to note the anniversary and recommend that people familiarize themselves with the ACLU work and website dedicated to giving voice to those who are not receiving justice.

General Colin Powell and many others across the political spectrum have called for Guantanamo to be closed. It's time that progress was benchmarked and the public informed as to why it's not happening.

In fact, in Afghanistan at Bagram, the problem is worsening.

-- Steve Clemons

Barack Obama had been impressing me a while back with some calibrated, sensible approaches to recasting US-Cuba relations in this next era. I think that he was on to something big -- and had a general vision of how engagement works with parts of the world, particularly nations, that are not convergent or in lockstep with our own.

I remain hopeful that Obama if elected President of the United States will be as calculating with other nations and regions that require a very different course.

But to make these changes, or leaps, into alternative bilateral, multilateral, and global arrangements requires shrewdness and diplomatic skill, not sentimentalism, leaps of faith, or gut instinct. I think experience matters -- but experience can also be requisitioned. Judgment matters also -- and some approaches to problem-solving can be stymied by living too much in the weeds of a problem rather than seeing some of the big opportunities.

But national security and foreign policy making is both art and science; there are many moving pieces -- and America's national security portfolio is in possibly worse shape than at the end of the Vietnam War.

Hope and gut instinct are not enough. Today, John Kerry endorsed Barack Obama -- and he has every right to do so. Gary Hart did as well this week -- and I should disclose that I work closely with former Senator Hart.

But I have to say that I find myself repulsed by this line from Kerry:

Like him, I also lived abroad as a young man, and I share with him a healthy respect for the advantage of knowing other cultures and countries, not from a book or a briefing, but by personal experience, by gut, by instinct.

There are many things to admire in Senator Obama. His political instincts may be impressive -- but solving America's global problems will require methodic, hard work that struggles to keep some semblance of a proactive 21st century foreign policy agenda active while many problems we need to react to will be trying to squash it.

There are legitimate differences between people and candidates on how to approach foreign policy -- and I think that Obama get some of this right, as does Hillary Clinton.

But gut instinct is how George W. Bush did it -- and we can't suffer through more years of shoot from the hip approaches.

I very much hope that Barack Obama's campaign will begin to ask his various endorsers to DROP the gut instinct line. It is not a compliment to Obama and plants more doubts than it does secure confidence.

-- Steve Clemons

On the night of the New Hampshire primaries, I was attending the 2007 Distinguished Service Award Dinner of the Nixon Center at the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown. At the dinner, I heard (and recorded) a highly unusual, yet revealing roast of Henry Kissinger by billionaire Peter Peterson -- who was himself the night's honoree.

Pete Peterson, after whom the Institute for International Economics renamed itself the Peterson Institute, was Commerce Secretary during the Nixon administration and went on to help build and lead the Blackstone Group of which he is now Senior Chairman.

I like these dinners -- and regret that while I got a pretty low-quality tape and audio recording of Peter Peterson's fun pokes at Kissinger, I was not yet adept enough with the little flip video I have to get the important and mesmerizing attack that Nixon Center President Dimitri Simes made on neoconservatives and liberal interventionists.

Political commentator Jim Pinkerton and I both agreed that Simes was the news-maker that night and articulated an important call for serious thinking about America's damaged national security position that demanded setting credible priorities.

Before I post the roughly 10 minute video clip, I thought I would highlight that I was sitting next to former Nixon enemies list member and veteran NPR political correspondent Daniel Schorr. Schorr told me that he and Nixon became friends in the latter years and developed mutual respect. He was there with his wife, Lisbeth Bamberger Schorr, a specialist in social health.

On my right was David Keene of the National Rifle Association and American Conservative Union, and his wife. Also at the table were Brookings' Helmut Sonnenfeldt and his wife; Bob Merry, President and Editor-in-Chief of Congressional Quarterly; and They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons author Jacob Heilbrunn.

Merry and Grover Norquist had a ten-minute political exchange on stage before the major speeches about the early developments in the Republican and Democratic primaries, moderated by Jeffrey Bewkes, the new President and CEO of Time Warner.

Unfortunately (or fortuntately?), while Bob Merry and Grover Norquist were haggling, I was trying to get in cell phone range (the Four Seasons ballroom is in a cement dungeon and might just as well be considered a bunker) to get the New Hampshire primary results so I could join a roster of radio political commentators on "The Young Turks" show.

My colleagues were texting me the surprising results, and at 8:30 pm with 21% of the precincts reporting, Hillary Clinton had a four point lead over Barack Obama -- and CNN had already called the race for McCain over Romney and the rest of the Republican field. I jotted down all of the numbers on a page I ripped out of a stray copy of the Nixon Center's magazine National Interest, and showed it to a few folks who began passing the scribbled details all around the 250 person dinner. It went twirling in circles just about everywhere in the room.

My former colleague Peter Rodman -- now at Brookings and formerly at the Pentagon, the Nixon Center, and CSIS -- and who doesn't particularly agree with my take on neoconservatism nonetheless with a grin and in a friendly manner asked me "Can I trust these numbers?"

But clearly, most of the room was in shock -- some happy, some not.

But, this is all a lot of foreplay before the entertainment sizzle of the night. Peter Peterson, who I first met in January 1994 out at an event with Richard Nixon, Walter Annenberg, and others in Yorba Linda, California for the launch of the Nixon Center -- spent his time not campaigning for his most known personal cause -- fiscal hawkishness in dealing with America's future entitlements crunch -- but roasting Nixon national security adviser Henry Kissinger.

The sound and video quality are not the best, but there are not many moments like this when such revealing, often hilarious comments -- that still give one a sense of the constant drama in the White House more than 35 years ago -- are made before several hundred people.

I told a friend of mine at the Nixon Center that I got the whole thing recorded, and he grimaced a bit. But true to the standards he believes in, Nixon Center President Dimitri Simes told me it was all on the record.

So I share with you a bit of a DC evening. . .with many of the stars of the Washington national security scene in attendance. . . (note that it is ten minutes long).

Although both Henry Kissinger and James Schlesinger spoke at the dinner, Susan Eisenhower (who was just out in Oklahoma as part of the Sam Nunn/David Boren bipartisan confab there) and General Brent Scowcroft made the presentation to Pete Peterson at the end of the video above.

-- Steve Clemons

(Bill Richardson, accompanied by foreign policy advisor Calvin Humphrey to his left, negotiating a hostage release with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.)

With Bill Richardson's anticipated departure from the democratic Presidential primaries, it will be interesting to see towards whom his policy aides and ideas gravitate and which candidate, if any, incorporates his foreign policy language of a "New Realism". Aside from his oft touted credentials as hostage negotiator/high-level thug handler, Richardson has done a pretty good job, given the limits of a presidential race, in articulating what such a foreign policy agenda should look like beyond sanctimonious moral visions, crude posturing on global jihadism, and the ever indefatigable sermons on democracy promotion (which usually amounts to what Steve Clemons has termed "ballotocracies" rather than true, deep democracies).

No doubt there have been some gaffes on Richardon's part -- I think his reactions on Pakistan were under-thought and quite an overreach when he suggested the US withhold all support unless Mushrraf stepped down after Bhutto's assassination (probably a political opportunity grab rather than sober policy judgment) and I'm not convinced he is truly fluent in the nuts and bolts of the ideas and proposals he's espoused. But nevertheless, I think he's drawn from some excellent policy thinkers -- among them, longtime foreign policy aide Calvin Humphrey and UNH Professor Michael Contarino (right) -- to articulate and well-reasoned template that others might adopt. Continue reading this article

-- Sameer Lalwani