Post published for www.foreignpolicy.com, March/April 2012

In an American election focused on a lousy economy and high unemployment, conventional wisdom holds that foreign policy is one of Barack Obama’s few strong suits. But the president is strikingly vulnerable in this area. The Republican who leads the GOP ticket can attack him on what Obama mistakenly thinks is his major strength by translating the center-right critique of his foreign policy into campaign themes and action. Here’s how to beat him.

First, the Republican nominee should adopt a confident, nationalist tone emphasizing American exceptionalism, expressing pride in the United States as a force for good in the world, and advocating for an America that is once again respected (and, in some quarters, feared) as the preeminent global power. Obama acts as if he sees the United States as a flawed giant, a mistake that voters already perceive. After all, this is the president who said, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” Voters also sense he is content to manage America’s decline to a status where the United States is just one country among many. As he put it, his is “a U.S. leadership that recognizes our limits.”

The Republican nominee should use the president’s own words and actions to portray him as naive and weak on foreign affairs. Obama’s failed promises, missed opportunities, and erratic shifts suggest he is out of touch and in over his head. For example, before he was elected, he promised to meet with the leaders of Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Venezuela “without precondition.” Nothing came of that except a serious blow to the image of the United States as a reliable ally. During the 2008 campaign, he also argued that Iran was a “tiny” country that didn’t “pose a serious threat.” How foolish that now seems.

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Published for www.online.wsj.com, February 23, 2012

The volatile Republican presidential contest has provoked feverish talk in the media and the blogosphere about a brokered or contested convention in late August, when 2,286 Republican delegates gather in Tampa, Fla. Here’s how those scenarios would unfold.

A brokered convention would see a new candidate—someone other than Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum—enter the remaining primaries or parachute in during the convention (if no existing candidate has secured a majority of delegates). In backroom deals, either based partly on the strength of his late primary performances or only on the discretion of party leaders, he would become the nominee.

A contested convention, on the other hand, would see no dark horse enter but none of the existing candidates arrive in Tampa with a 1,144 majority of delegates. Lots of wheeling and dealing would ensue, and after several ballots a nominee would emerge from the four current candidates.

Is either scenario likely? Let’s put it this way: The odds are greater that there’s life on Pluto than that the GOP has a brokered convention. And while there’s a better chance of a contested convention, it’s still highly unlikely.

Consider the calendar and the math. After Super Tuesday on March 6, a new candidate could still file for the Nebraska beauty contest, the Minnesota caucuses, and the primaries in New Mexico, California, Utah, South Dakota, New Jersey and Texas. Those eight contests have 519 delegates at stake: 238 awarded winner-takes-all, 241 split proportionally and 40 unpledged.

If a new candidate gets all the winner-takes-all delegates (unlikely since 222 in California and New Jersey are awarded by congressional district, not statewide), plus half those awarded proportionally, he still would have just 378 delegates of the 1,144 needed for nomination. At least two current candidates are likely to have far more. Why would they step aside for a newcomer?

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Published for www.online.wsj.com, February 16, 2012

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once said that the problem with socialism is that eventually you “run out of other people’s money.” And it’s not just tax dollars she was talking about, as the Obama presidency has shown.

Take the decision to force Catholic institutions to provide health-insurance coverage for sterilization, contraception and abortion-inducing drugs. When this decision caused an outcry, Mr. Obama offered the following compromise: Insurance companies will be ordered to provide such coverage “free” to employees of Catholic churches and organizations.

But of course, this coverage won’t be free. Insurance companies will pass the cost on to policyholders, including those same Catholic institutions. In short, Other People’s Money will be used.

Another example: To appear empathetic about housing foreclosures, the Obama administration pressured five banks to cough up $25 billion—$3 billion to the federal and state governments, and nearly $22 billion for payments to people foreclosed upon and to reduce the principal of mortgages with balances greater than the home’s current value.

This will bail out no more than 10% of homeowners whose mortgages are underwater, according to an estimate by Chris Papagianis of the nonpartisan policy-research institute e21, who notes there is roughly $700 billion in residential negative equity across the country.

But the political optics are good—the banks can be tarred because of their paperwork foul-ups—and the $25 billion isn’t from the federal budget. This also constitutes a use of Other People’s Money, paid by all bank customers through bigger fees and higher interest rates.

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Published for www.online.wsj.com, February 8, 2012

Newt Gingrich’s remarks Saturday night after the Nevada caucuses and on NBC’s “Meet the Press” the next morning proved that presidential candidates should talk policy, not process.

Proclaiming “We want to get to Georgia, to Alabama, to Tennessee,” Mr. Gingrich said primaries in the South would produce “a series of victories” that by the April 4 Texas primary would make him “very, very competitive in the delegate count.”

Well, the Gingrich Southern strategy faces big obstacles, starting with Rick Santorum and Ron Paul. Demanding that these two candidates drop out so he becomes the only conservative alternative to Mitt Romney hasn’t worked.

Mr. Paul sees himself as the leader of an insurgency. He’s made it clear he’s in the race to stay. And while Mr. Santorum’s victories on Tuesday in the Minnesota and Colorado caucuses and Missouri’s beauty contest primary didn’t produce any national convention delegates (Missouri’s vote was nonbinding, and the caucuses were for precinct delegates), his wins also spell trouble for the former House speaker’s plans.

Mr. Santorum’s success came because while Mr. Romney and Mr. Gingrich battled in Florida and Nevada, he barnstormed Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri, making 22 stops in the three states to Mitt’s three and Newt’s two. He demonstrated that showing up matters and gained critical momentum toward becoming the not-Romney alternative.

Newt’s Southern strategy also faces a geographical obstacle. There are 25 contests in February and March, and 18 of them, with 579 delegates, are outside the South. The remaining seven in the South have 371 delegates at stake. Mr. Gingrich can compete for only 322 of them because neither he nor Mr. Santorum qualified for the Virginia ballot. (Messrs. Romney and Paul did.) Mr. Romney will, in all likelihood, grab the 33 delegates awarded winner-take-all at the congressional district level and most of the delegates allocated proportionally by Virginia’s statewide results.

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Published for http://online.wsj.com, January, 26,2012

In a rare moment of senior-presidential-adviser-to-senior-presidential-adviser telepathy, I overheard the private thoughts of David Axelrod as he prepared to appear on television Tuesday night, following President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address:

Well, this is about as pleasant as a dentist appointment. Sure hope we’re right that no matter what the question is, all I need to say is, “President Obama believes everyone should get a fair shot, everyone should do their fair share, and everyone should play by the same set of rules.” Say it loud, say it proud, say it again and again.

Speaking of which, I love that line about “asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary.” Sure, the top 10% pay 70% of federal income taxes, so billionaires already pay more taxes than their secretaries, and no one’s really for doubling capital gains taxes. But it sounds so good, and stokes so much anger toward the rich.

I did enjoy how Barack went after Congress. A couple of times it looked like he was going to turn around and slap Boehner for obstructing his agenda. Hope it helps voters forget we Democrats controlled both chambers for two years and got pretty much everything we wanted. Now we have to pretend it never happened.

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Published for www.online.wsj.com, January 19, 2012

Battered but standing, Mitt Romney emerged from Monday’s presidential debate still the front-runner. Newt Gingrich was at the top of his game, likely earning him at least the silver in South Carolina. Ron Paul probably pushed Rick Santorum into third and himself into fourth place by equating Osama bin Laden with a Chinese dissident. In the most volatile Republican primary season in history, Thursday night’s CNN debate still looms large.

If Mr. Romney survives the kerfuffle he created about the income taxes he pays and wins South Carolina after taking Iowa and New Hampshire, he will have gone 3 and 0. No Republican has done that in an open presidential race. Ever.

Still, that alone won’t make him the presumptive nominee. The gaps between the candidates matter. And here the numbers look good for the former Massachusetts governor. The RealClearPolitics average of recent South Carolina polls has Mr. Romney in front by 10.3 points (at 32.3%), followed by Mr. Gingrich who, in turn, leads Messrs. Paul and Santorum by 7.7 points. If this holds up, Mr. Romney would go into the Jan. 31 Florida primary with a hard-to-dislodge lead.

He’s already in great shape in Florida. While voter attention has been focused on the first three contests, Team Romney has been prepping the next battlefield. Since Dec. 12, the Romney Super PAC and campaign have run an astonishing $3 million of unanswered television ads in the Sunshine State.

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Published for The Wall Street Journal, January 12, 2012

In an open race for the GOP nomination, no Republican has won both Iowa and New Hampshire, as Mitt Romney has. No one has come in fourth or fifth in New Hampshire, as Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum did, and become the nominee. No one has entirely skipped Iowa, as Jon Huntsman did, and won elsewhere. No one has recovered after grabbing the 1% that Rick Perry received in the Granite State. And no one became the nominee after failing to win one of the first two contests, a position in which Ron Paul finds himself.

All this means history will be made this year, no matter what happens next.

The focus Tuesday was more on the winner’s margin than on the victory itself. Mr. Romney won the New Hampshire primary by an impressive 16.4 points. (The state’s last five contested GOP primaries have seen an average winning margin of 10.5 points.) True to its tradition, New Hampshire paid little attention to Iowa’s big story—Mr. Santorum’s impressive second-place finish. He finished fifth. The candidate who camped out in New Hampshire saw that pay off, as Mr. Huntsman did 17 times as well there as he’s doing in the Gallup national poll, where he’s at 1%.

All six candidates have enough resources to run hard in the next contest, in South Carolina on Jan. 21. Already, five campaigns have placed over $6 million on television in the state, with Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Romney accounting for over $4 million of it.

It’s important to understand that South Carolina is not quintessentially Southern in the way that, for example, Mississippi and Alabama are. Social conservatives in the upstate region (including Spartanburg) unfamiliar with Mr. Romney’s record might be more willing to support Messrs. Gingrich and Santorum than were their New Hampshire counterparts, who had observed Mr. Romney’s unwavering conservative positions on abortion and marriage when he was governor of neighboring Massachusetts.

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Published for The Wall Street Journal, January 5, 2012

Not long ago few thought Mitt Romney could win both the very conservative Iowa caucuses and then the quirky, slightly contrarian New Hampshire primary. If he did, most assumed he would have a lock on the Republican nomination. For understandable reasons: No other GOP presidential candidate in an open race has achieved back-to-back victories in these first two contests.

By this time next week, we’ll know if Mr. Romney is 2-0. If so, he becomes the prohibitive favorite.

The other big Iowa winner is former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum. Iowa does winnow the field (as it did with Wednesday’s departure of Congresswoman Michele Bachmann). But it also gives unheralded contenders like Mr. Santorum a chance to jump into the spotlight. And in spectacular fashion, he did. He essentially tied the GOP front-runner, leap-frogging the governor of the second-largest state (Rick Perry) and the former speaker of the House (Newt Gingrich).

Mr. Santorum shouldn’t kid himself; he faces huge obstacles. He’s spent a year making Iowa his second home. Now he’s in less friendly, less familiar terrain. He hasn’t had to endure withering scrutiny but will shortly. His chief opponent has tremendous organizational and financial advantages and has been through the rigors of a presidential primary race. Still, Mr. Santorum has a shot, and that’s all he could have hoped for.

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Published for The Wall Street Journal, December 29, 2011

As New Year’s approaches, here are a baker’s dozen predictions for 2012.

• Republicans will keep the U.S. House, albeit with their 25-seat majority slightly reduced. In the 10 presidential re-elections since 1936, the party in control of the White House has added House seats in seven contests and lost them in three. The average gain has been 12 seats. The largest pickup was 24 seats in 1944—but President Barack Obama is no FDR, despite what he said in his recent “60 Minutes” interview.

• Republicans will take the U.S. Senate. Of the 23 Democratic seats up in 2012, there are at least five vulnerable incumbents (Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Pennsylvania): The GOP takes two or three of these. With the announcement on Tuesday that Nebraska’s Ben Nelson will retire, there are now seven open Democratic seats (Connecticut, Hawaii, North Dakota, New Mexico, Virginia, Wisconsin): The GOP takes three or four. Even if Republicans lose one of the 10 seats they have up, they will have a net pickup of four to six seats, for a majority of 51 to 53.

• Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Harry Reid or both will leave the Democratic leadership by the end of 2012. Speaker John Boehner and Senator Mitch McConnell will continue directing the GOP in their respective chambers.

• This will be the fourth presidential election in a row in which turnout increases. This has happened just once since 1828, from 1928 through 1940.

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Published for The Wall Street Journal, December 22, 2011

This month, during a speech in Osawatomie, Kan., and in an interview on “60 Minutes,” President Barack Obama laid out the broad contours of his re-election strategy. Republicans would be wise to examine his words and prepare accordingly.

Mr. Obama will frame this election as a fight for the middle class. He told his Kansas audience that America was once a place where “hard work paid off, and responsibility was rewarded, and anyone could make it if they tried.” Now, as he informed “60 Minutes” correspondent Steve Kroft, “the rules are rigged” against “middle-class families.”

The president’s tack is, in part, a reaction to his precarious standing among voters with high-school education or less. In a Gallup poll of Dec. 18, for example, his job approval with these voters—usually described as blue-collar workers—was 40%, down 26 points from January 2009. He can’t win if his numbers in this group stay so low.

Mr. Obama will make “fairness” a major theme. He declared in Kansas that his goal was to “restore balance, restore fairness,” and he then told Mr. Kroft that a “balanced approach” to the nation’s deficit crisis required “everybody to do their fair share.”

But resentment is not an effective political appeal. Americans tolerate unequal outcomes if they believe people have equal opportunity. Crude class warfare like Mr. Obama’s has never been successful in presidential campaigns (consider candidates Mondale, Dukakis, Gore and Kerry). In fact, a Gallup poll of Nov. 28-Dec. 1 shows that fewer Americans (45%) now believe income inequality “represents a problem that needs to be fixed” than believed that in 1998 (52%).

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