I imagine the Obama administration may be wondering whether or not to release another edition of the National Security Strategy (NSS). They released Obama’s first (and so far only) one in May 2010. Although the law mandating the NSS calls for annual updates, at the time it looked like the administration might follow the George W. Bush precedent of releasing just one per term.

The one-per-term standard makes sense for a number of reasons. First, we shouldn’t expect the overall national security strategy of the country to change on an annual basis. Second, producing a quality document takes a surprising amount of work; better to invest those resources in monitoring the implementation of the old one than in finding ways to repackage old wine in new wine skins. Third, as an administration creeps closer to the silly season of campaigning, the temptation to turn the document into a brag-sheet rather than a serious articulation of the administration’s worldview becomes irresistible. Whether or not you agreed with the content of the arguments, Clinton’s first NSS and both of Bush’s were more substantial and thus more consequential documents than the later ones produced by the Clinton administration.

However, I would not be surprised to learn that a new version is under consideration. Doubtless the campaign temptation is pulling mightily on the Obama team. President Obama will be the first Democratic incumbent in decades — maybe since Roosevelt — to have reason to believe that his bragging rights on national security are stronger than they are on domestic policy and the economy. When the applause lines are louder on national security than they are on the economy, it is easy to predict that the candidate will proffer the former more often than the latter (insert late night comic riff about Giuliani mentioning 9/11 here). Whether or not they can produce a document at least as serious as their first one, let alone on par with earlier ones is tougher to predict. Campaign-induced distortions will be a big challenge.

Yet there is one good reason why they should release another version in the current term — perhaps good enough to overcome all of my other caveats. A few weeks ago, President Obama released a much-ballyhooed “new strategic guidance” and the administration went to considerable lengths to emphasize the boldness and novelty of what they were doing. The commentariat responded in kind — a Google search of “Obama strategic pivot” produces some 1,200,000 hits.

If it really is so new and so bold, it raises the obvious question: is it new and bold enough to require changes in the (now) old NSS, from which, in theory, such defense guidance is supposed to emanate?

On the other hand, if the new strategic guidance does not require a change in the NSS, how bold and new can it be?

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At his National Prayer Breakfast address yesterday, President Obama declared, “Now, we can earnestly seek to see these values lived out in our politics and our policies, and we can earnestly disagree on the best way to achieve these values. In the words of C.S. Lewis, ‘Christianity has not, and does not profess to have a detailed political program. It is meant for all men at all times, and the particular program which suited one place or time would not suit another.’ Our goal should not be to declare our policies as biblical.”

These are wise words. I only wish Mr. Obama believed them.

Because in the same speech in which he quoted Lewis, Mr. Obama also said this:

And when I talk about shared responsibility, it’s because I genuinely believe that in a time when many folks are struggling, at a time when we have enormous deficits, it’s hard for me to ask seniors on a fixed income, or young people with student loans, or middle-class families who can barely pay the bills to shoulder the burden alone. And I think to myself, if I’m willing to give something up as somebody who’s been extraordinarily blessed, and give up some of the tax breaks that I enjoy, I actually think that’s going to make economic sense. But for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus’s teaching that “for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.” It mirrors the Islamic belief that those who’ve been blessed have an obligation to use those blessings to help others, or the Jewish doctrine of moderation and consideration for others.

For Mr. Obama to move from the Biblical injunction that “for unto whom much is given, much shall be required” to higher marginal tax rates on those making $250,000 or more is laughable theology. Why draw the line at $250,000? Why not draw it at $125,000? Or $500,000? And why doesn’t Mr. Obama, in the name of Jesus, propose increasing the highest marginal tax rates to 90 percent? In fact, why doesn’t he endorse a plan for the government to take over people’s property and their life savings and distribute it to the poor under the banner of “for unto whom much is given, much shall be required”? Why doesn’t he propose a plan to take money from Americans making $25,000 a year in order to send it to people in Africa making a dollar a day? And why doesn’t St. Barack, in order to set an example for us all, commit that his net worth will never exceed $1 million? Or perhaps the argument being made by the president is that if we read the book of Acts carefully enough, we’ll find that God’s preferred tax rate just happens to be the one championed by Mr. Obama.

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I wanted to add a note of caution to John Steele Gordon’s post regarding today’s Bureau of Labor Statistics report on the unemployment rate.

It’s certainly true that there’s good news in the report. But if you examine the internal data, there are also grounds for concern.

To be specific: the labor-force participation number fell to 63.7 percent, the lowest (seasonably-adjusted) figure since May 1983. If the economy were stronger, an increase of 250,000 jobs would actually move the unemployment rate up a bit, since people who had given up looking for work would once again start (meaning they would be counted as part of the labor force again). But what appears to have happened in January is that the number of people being hired increased by less than a quarter-of-a-million while the number of people who dropped out of the labor force was around 1.2 million, a record figure. (For more, see here.)

Consider this: If the labor-force participation rate in January 2011 (64.2 percent) was the participation rate in January 2012 (63.7 percent), the unemployment rate would be 8.9 percent instead of 8.3 percent (see this piece by Matt McDonald for more). And if the same number of people were looking for work today as in 2007, unemployment would be right around 11 percent

In addition, as Tyler Durden points out [], in January, the number of part time workers rose by nearly 700,000 (from 27,040,000 to 27,739,000) while the number of full-time jobs increased by only 80,000 (from 113,765 to 113,845).

These are not good signs. And when you combine this jobs report with the new CBO report (which predicts unemployment will reach 8.8 percent in the fall), the news that last year we experienced the worst sales year on record for housing, and the news that real GDP in 2011 increased only 1.7 percent (down from 3.0 percent in 2010), I’m not terribly encouraged.

Gaining jobs is better than losing jobs, but our economy remains in a very weak condition.

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Earlier this week, President Obama did something unprecedented when he acknowledged the existence of the CIA’s drone campaign—the first time an American president has publicly declared that the United States is using unmanned drones to kill al Qaeda terrorists.

It is unclear whether the disclosure was inadvertent, or the result of a conscious decision by the administration to be more forthcoming about the drone program. But one of the consequences of the president’s remarks is that it exposes the program to greater risk of successful legal challenges by groups opposed to the drone campaign.

Before the president spoke, the government could argue in court that the very fact that the United States is conducting drone strikes in a given area and context was classified and thus within the scope of a “state secret” assertion. Indeed, the administration has successfully argued in previous legal cases that national security prohibits the discussion of the covert program.

Now, if a civil plaintiff were to claim harm from a drone strike in the general area and context implicitly acknowledged by Obama, the plaintiff might be allowed to proceed—even if the government could still assert state secrets privilege over specific details of an operation or the workings or techniques of the drone program. The president’s public acknowledgment of these operations has thus narrowed the ground for a “state secrets” assertion and made it at least marginally more difficult to get cases dismissed on national security grounds.

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Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal is a very good writer and a very smart man. But his claim that President Obama’s slimmed down version of his most recent State of the Union address – a speech Obama has taken on the road – is “soaring out in the country” is fairly wide of the mark.

We just learned, for example, that only 36 percent of likely voters grade the Obama administration’s handling of the economy at good or excellent, while a huge number — 62 percent — grade the president at fair to poor, with poor collecting the largest number: 45 percent. Now I recognize that people could like Obama’s speeches and disapprove of his policies. But in the end, they will (unlike 2008) cast their vote based on his deeds rather than his words. And Henninger’s claim that Obama is the “maestro” of the “inner melodies of life in America these days” isn’t something I detect when looking at polling data or, frankly, much else.

I’m glad Henninger is raising warning flags, because conservatives should assume the race against Obama won’t be easy. And there are reasons to guard against soaring confidence when it comes to the 2012 election. But my own sense of things is Obama long ago lost his claim to being America’s rhetorical maestro – and while his words may play well in a pre-selected crowd in Chandler, Arizona, they have fallen flat with most Americans.

If Barack Obama wins the presidency in November, it won’t be because he stirred the hearts of Americans. It will have very little to do with any inner melodies of life in America. It will be because he succeeded in utterly destroying the reputation of his opponent.

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This past summer, Edward I. Koch, a Democrat, made headlines by noisily endorsing Republican Bob Turner in a special election to fill the congressional seat of disgraced Tweeter Anthony Weiner. The former mayor explained that he’d decided to rally Jewish voters in Brooklyn and Queens to chastise President Obama for his Israel policy. Koch’s outsize role in Turner’s surprise victory made for big political news and led to speculation that Obama could be facing trouble in his reelection bid.

The episode was unusual, but unusual has always been de rigueur for Koch, a three-term mayor and a constant post-mayoral presence in New York City. For one thing, Koch has long described himself as a “liberal with sanity” in a city that consistently tilts left. Further, Koch’s personality and ego have always been larger than life, and long before the era of 24-hour news, the mayor found imaginative ways to keep himself in the spotlight. So while the role he played in the Turner election was eye-catching, it wasn’t surprising when you considered his eventful, iconoclastic career.

Ed Koch was born in the Bronx in 1924 to Polish Jewish immigrant parents. After completing his law degree at NYU and beginning his legal career, he moved into an apartment in Greenwich Village, where he became involved in local Democratic politics. In 1963, he ran for Greenwich Village district leader as a reform Democrat and won, beating the powerful machine pol Carmine De Sapio. Koch’s willingness to run against the local Democratic Party machine was an early sign of his independence: for this Democrat, party loyalty wasn’t the ultimate virtue.

In 1968, Koch ran for Congress and proved a tireless politicker. One month before the election, his opponent, Whitney North Seymour, Jr., saw him asking for votes outside a subway station, struck up a conversation, and asked how long he had been doing that kind of campaigning. “Oh, about a year,” Koch replied. The “look on Seymour’s face,” Koch wrote in his autobiography, Mayor, meant that Seymour knew that the man with two names was going to beat the man with four names.

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Penn: Newt Gingrich has been a great candidate in the way that the Titanic was a great ship. It has been very attractive to board, but we know where it’s headed. Of course Gingrich believes he is unsinkable, and, for that, Democrats must be very grateful.

So thank you Gingrich for running a negative ad campaign in Florida so that the Democrats don’t have to. You have literally saved the Obama campaign, Democratic National Convention and Democrats around the country millions of dollars. Moreover, you have all but done the work for the Obama opposition research team. From painting Mitt Romney as someone having a “profound character problem” to acting “totally dishonest,” you have torn apart his record at Bain Capital, made him release his tax returns and forced him to deplete his bank account.

Thank you Gingrich for further fragmenting the Republican Party. You have self-declared this GOP nomination a two-person race between yourself, the conservative leader, and Romney, the Massachusetts moderate. In doing so, you are working to depress conservative voter turnout in the general election.

Thank you Gingrich for bringing prolonged drama and grandiose schemes to this primary season. With 46 states to go, you have ample opportunity to remind us of the reasons why moon colonies and farmers in space should be a priority going forward as well as why employing poor children to serve as janitors to earn money is a good Republican idea.

As he did during the ’95-’96 federal government shutdowns, Gingrich is once again bringing his unique brand of brinksmanship to hector Romney and the Republican Party.

Hughes: That which does not kill you makes you stronger. That old adage came to mind as I watched Romney overcome the most serious threat to his campaign thus far with a decisive victory over Gingrich in the important and diverse state of Florida.

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The granting of Secret Service protection following Mitt Romney’s decisive Florida victory did not prevent him from immediately shooting himself in the foot. “I’m not concerned about the very poor,” he explained. “My campaign is focused on middle-income Americans.”

It is problematic for a politician to declare any group of citizens beneath his attention — either the bottom 1 percent or the top 1 percent. But those in the top 1 percent, at least, can fend for themselves.

There are few things more powerful in politics than the confirmation of a stereotype, which is Romney’s main political risk. A wealthy man can prove that he empathizes with average people — see the examples of aristocrats such as Teddy or Franklin Roosevelt. But Romney has yet to prove it. He could start by making the economic advancement of the very poor a central concern of his campaign.

Republicans are still getting accustomed to Romney as their nominee. For many, the failure of Newt Gingrich was like sidestepping a falling anvil. It has inspired more relief than jubilation. Now Republicans are left to ponder the Romney-Obama matchup.

Romney’s strengths: His political skills — his mastery of policy details and his ability to extemporaneously explain his views — are superior to those of recent nominees such as Bob Dole and John McCain. He is seldom stumped or flustered. He learns from his mistakes. His responses to attacks on his personal wealth, for example, were poor initially but quickly got better. He eventually proved himself capable of tough attacks on Gingrich — a distressing but important qualification in a presidential contender. Romney is a fairly moderate candidate who emerged from a conservative primary process, giving him the ability to appeal to independents in the general election. He can claim the role of economic fixer at a time when there is much to be fixed. Solid majorities of registered voters view Romney as possessing the leadership qualities to be president and as capable of managing the government effectively.

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Amidst the assorted personal attacks and lunar colonization strategies in last Thursday’s Florida debate, Rick Santorum made an actual substantive argument that had oddly been largely absent from the debates until then: That Mitt Romney would have trouble making the case against Obamacare because the Democrats will point to Obamacare’s resemblance in some important respects to the health-care reform Romney helped enact in Massachusetts while he was governor.

The repeal of Obamacare is among the most pressing domestic priorities for the next president (second only to reviving the economy), and is among the most potent political weapons for Republicans in the coming election. The Democrats will certainly try everything they can to neutralize the advantage, and they have already started making the case that Obamacare was just the same thing as Romneycare. Romney’s answer last week—which focused on the fact that Obamacare was a one-size-fits-all federal law—suggests he is not well prepared to deflect that argument and make a wholehearted case against Obamacare. In fact, more than anything his answer suggests that he has not internalized the real case against Obamacare, and for an actual reform of our system of health-care financing.

In the latest NR, Ramesh and I have a piece (which is now up online here) that tries to suggest what his answer should have been, and should be in the fall should he win the nomination. As we note, the very argument that Obamacare was based on a state solution (let alone the amazing fact that Obamacare’s own champions make that argument) is itself proof that Obamacare was not even intended (let alone well designed) to address the actual problems with our system—problems that are caused by a series of badly misguided federal policies (above all Medicare’s fee-for-service structure, Medicaid’s state-federal structure, and the distorting influence of the tax exemption for employer-provided coverage), and which the states must all live with. Romneycare was one (in our view ill-advised and unsuccessful) attempt to live with those problems. But whatever you think of it as a state solution, surely a federal solution would not simply live with our badly broken federal health-care architecture but would fix it instead.

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Jeffrey Anderson, writing in The Weekly Standard, makes an excellent point:

In President Obama’’s first budget, entitled (with no apparent sense of irony) “A New Era of Responsibility,”” he projected that the federal budget deficit in 2012 would be a rather hefty $581 billion. Fast-forwarding three years, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) now projects that it will instead be $1.079 trillion, meaning that, if the CBO is right, Obama was wrong by $498,000,000,000. To put that into perspective, that roughly half-trillion dollar margin of error is more than Obama allocated in this year’’s budget for Medicare. Medicare could magically have become free for 2012, and the deficit would still have exceeded Obama’’s earlier estimate.

It strikes me that President Obama isn’t simply vulnerable when it comes to the objective conditions of the country (though he is); it’s that he’s vulnerable based on what he promised versus what he has delivered as president. That’s true on a range of issues, including the unemployment rate (which we were told wouldn’t go above 8 percent if his stimulus package was passed; December was the 35th straight month with unemployment above 8 percent); health care costs (he promised to bend the health care cost curve down; it’s gone up); poverty going down (it’s gone up); cutting the deficit in half (it’s exploded); fixing the housing crisis (it’s gotten worse); improving America’s image in the world (we’re less popular in the Muslim world now than we were under Obama’s predecessor); and improving the political culture in Washington (the divisions have gotten deeper and Obama has set a record for polarization in each of his first three years in office).

Time and time again, Barack Obama has not only not done what he promised; his policies have moved things in the opposite direction.

He is a man who rode to office on his words and promises. In November, Obama might well be given a one-way ticket back to Chicago for the same reason.

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