Jeffrey Laurenti: Fluff and Fact on Obama's 'Global Leadership'

Jeffrey Laurenti: Fluff and Fact on Obama's 'Global Leadership':
Barack Obama opened his State of the Union address this year by ticking off claims to four major accomplishments in the global arena. Three of them his political foes could not factually contest -- ending his predecessor's war in Iraq, eliminating Osama bin Laden, and starting the phase-out from Afghanistan. But they furiously challenge the overarching achievement he asserted: that his policies have "made the United States safer and more respected around the world."

"More respected"? Conservatives are furiously seeking to discredit his claim. Mitt Romney's top foreign policy advisors regularly pillory the president for being "comfortable with the decline of America in the world" (John Bolton) and prone to "naiveté and weakness" (Richard Williamson). America's global dominance is at risk because "this president does not want America to be the leader," says Richard Grenell, the Romney campaign's foreign policy spokesman until homophobic conservatives forced his ouster.

Something as intangible as the credibility of "leadership" seems hopelessly unprovable. But the Pew Research Group's release last week of hard data on public opinion across 21 countries, representing a majority of the world's population and power centers, provides some solid metrics to judge Obama's impact on America's global leadership.

"Global Opinion of Obama Slips," Pew headlined its report summary. And sure enough, Obama's numbers are down compared to the confidence expressed in his leadership in his first year in office. Country by country, Pew documents an inexorable fall in Obama's ratings, which have plunged an average -- are you ready -- six percentage points worldwide since 2009. People's attitudes toward the United States have also dipped concomitantly, by a median five percentage points.

But whatever the disappointment in Obama, the public in every country but embittered Pakistan is far more enthusiastic about Obama's global leadership than about George Bush's four years ago. In fact, world confidence in Obama averages, at 50 percent (and a stratospheric 82 percent among Europe's biggest powers), an astounding 32 percentage points above Bush's rating. (Pakistanis churlishly now rate Obama at the same 7 percent as they did Bush.)

Awkwardly, Governor Romney essentially vows to resuscitate Bush's foreign policy, which seems certain to resurrect the worldwide hostility to American purposes that so hobbled the United States in the last decade. As a country, favorable attitudes toward the United States are currently an average of eight percentage points higher than they were at the sunset of the Bush administration. Among our most crucial allies, the large West European countries that have been indispensable partners militarily, politically, and financially in such crisis situations as Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, and now Syria, support for the United States is now 20 points higher.

The policy issues on which world publics see Obama as a disappointment cannot offer much solace to his conservative critics at home. His biggest failure, it seems, has been in delivering action on climate change, on which he dropped an average 34 percentage points across countries surveyed (and 49 points in Western Europe).

The second biggest area of disillusionment has been on the expectation that he would deal "fairly" with both Israelis and Palestinians. On average only 18 percent of respondents now expect him to do so; the comparable level of expectation in his first year was 46 percent. (Fortunately for Obama, 60 percent of his voters at home still think his Mideast policies are fair to both sides.)

On both of these issues, Obama's conservative opponents have fought his initiatives tooth and nail, and are baying for confrontation with our allies.

They also vehemently insist on U.S. freedom of action to wield deadly military force without regard to the United Nations -- which turns out to be the third area of global disappointment in Obama: the deflated expectation (45 percent in 2009, 29 percent now) that he would rely on international approval for use of force. A foreign policy elite that sneers at U.N. Security Council regulation of armed force as "Mommy, may I?" is bent on renewing Bush-era antagonisms.

For all the disappointments, Obama still enjoys far higher international public support than do leaders of other major powers. He bests German chancellor Angela Merkel throughout Europe and in Germany itself (87 percent confidence in him versus 77 percent in her).

In Arab and Muslim countries, however, Obama has poorer ratings than the deceptively invisible U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon. In Egypt, where at a crucial moment Obama pressed 30-year president Hosni Mubarak to retire, his ratings stand at 29 percent positive, 69 percent negative; Ban is rated positively by 36 percent. In Jordan, confidence in Obama stands at 22 percent, and in Ban at 42.

Between Obama and Russia's Vladimir Putin, however, there's no contest. Putin is poorly rated virtually everywhere. Americans view him negatively by a 2-to-1 margin, Germans and Britons by a 3-to-1 margin, Italians and Poles by a 4-to-1 margin, and the French by an extraordinary 8-to-1 margin. Even in Arab and Muslim countries, Obama's positive rating is nearly twice Putin's.

Of course, the most important number for any politician is how he's viewed by his own voters, and 69 percent of Russians profess confidence in Putin's handling of international affairs -- a number that makes for interesting context when we talk about influencing Russian policy on Syria. Oh, did I mention that 61% of Americans in Pew's survey reported confidence in Obama's handling of international affairs?

That's a better rating than Americans give Obama for his overall job performance, which is the number that really counts for reelection. With the American public dispiritingly uninterested in foreign policy this year anyway, conservatives should stick to the economy, stupid.

Much as his partisan opponents might want to paint Obama as a star-crossed Jimmy Carter, that dog just won't hunt. It's Governor Romney's determination to reprise the foreign policy of George Bush that terrifies many Americans -- and most of the world.

Romney is an idiot

The Miseducation of Mitt Romney: Diane Ravitch

Mario Tama/Getty Images
Republican candidate Mitt Romney participating in a 6th grade class at Universal Bluford Charter School, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, May 24, 2012.

On May 23, the Romney campaign released its education policy white paper titled “A Chance for Every Child: Mitt Romney’s Plan for Restoring the Promise of American Education.” If you liked the George W. Bush administration’s education reforms, you will love the Romney plan. If you think that turning the schools over to the private sector will solve their problems, then his plan will thrill you.

The central themes of the Romney plan are a rehash of Republican education ideas from the past thirty years, namely, subsidizing parents who want to send their child to a private or religious school, encouraging the private sector to operate schools, putting commercial banks in charge of the federal student loan program, holding teachers and schools accountable for students’ test scores, and lowering entrance requirements for new teachers. These policies reflect the experience of his advisers, who include half a dozen senior officials from the Bush administration and several prominent conservative academics, among them former Secretary of Education Rod Paige and former Deputy Secretary of Education Bill Hansen, and school choice advocates John Chubb and Paul Peterson.

Unlike George W. Bush, who had to negotiate with a Democratic Congress to pass No Child Left Behind, Romney feels no need to compromise on anything. He needs to prove to the Republican Party’s base—especially evangelicals—that he really is conservative. And this plan is “mission accomplished.”

Romney offers full-throated support for using taxpayer money to pay for private-school vouchers, privately-managed charters, for-profit online schools, and almost every other alternative to public schools. Like Bob Dole in 1996, Romney showers his contempt on the teachers’ unions. He takes a strong stand against certification of teachers—the minimal state-level requirement that future teachers must pass either state or national tests to demonstrate their knowledge and/or skills–which he considers an unnecessary hurdle. He believes that class size does not matter (although he and his children went to elite private schools that have small classes). Romney claims that school choice is “the civil rights issue of our era,” a familiar theme among the current crop of education reformers, who now use it to advance their efforts to privatize public education.

When it comes to universities, Romney excoriates Obama for the rising cost of higher education. He claims that more federal aid leads to higher tuition, so he offers no new federal funding to help students burdened with debt. His plan does not mention the fact that tuition has increased in public universities (which enroll three-quarters of all students) because states have reduced their investments in higher education and shifted the burden from taxpayers to students. Romney will encourage private sector involvement in higher education, by having commercial banks again serve as the intermediary for federal student loans, an approach Obama had eliminated 2010 as too costly. (Until 2010, banks received guaranteed subsidies from the federal government to make student loans, while the government assumed nearly all the risk. When the program was overhauled by the Obama Administration, billions of dollars in bank profits were redirected to support Pell Grants for needy students.) To cut costs, Romney encourages the proliferation of for-profit online universities.


The Romney education plan says that no new money is needed because more spending on schools will not fix our problems. However, he proposes to dedicate more taxpayer money to the priorities that he favors, such as vouchers, charter schools, and online schools. He also wants more federal money to reward states for “eliminating or reforming teacher tenure and establishing systems that focus on effectiveness in advancing student achievement.” Translated, that means that Romney is willing to hand out money to states if they eliminate due process rights for teachers and if they pay more to teachers whose students get higher scores on standardized tests and get rid of teachers whose students do not.

In making the case for vouchers—which provide government funding to pay the tuition at any private or religious school that parents choose—Romney exaggerates the evidence; indeed, some of his claims are simply false. He points to the D.C. voucher program, which began in 2004, the first program to use federal tax dollars to subsidize private-school tuition—as “a model for the nation.” He asserts that “After three months, students [in the D.C. voucher program] could already read at levels 19 months ahead of their public-school peers.”


This is flatly wrong. A Congressionally-mandated evaluation of the D.C. program found that students with vouchers made no gains in either reading or math. As the report stated, “There is no conclusive evidence that the OSP [Opportunity Scholarship Program] affected student achievement.” Romney claims that 90 percent of voucher students graduated from high school, as compared to only 55 percent in the low performing public schools of D.C. But here he exaggerates. The federal evaluation of the program said that 82 percent of the students receiving vouchers graduated from high school as compared to 70 percent of the students who applied to the voucher program and were not accepted. This is a respectable gain, but nowhere near as large as the numbers Romney cited. Because students who enter a lottery tend to be more motivated than those who do not, reputable social scientists usually compare the outcomes of those who won the lottery and those who did not.

Paradoxically, Romney’s campaign takes credit for the fact that Massachusetts leads the nation in reading and mathematics on the federal tests known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress. But Romney was not responsible for the state’s academic success, which owes to reforms that are entirely different from the ones he is now proposing for the country. Signed into law a full decade before Romney began his tenure as governor in 2003, the Massachusetts Education Reform Act involved a commitment by the state to double state funding of public education from $1.3 billion in 1993 to $2.6 billion by 2000; to provide a minimum foundation budget for every district to meet its needs; to develop strong curricula for subjects such as science, history, the arts, foreign languages, mathematics, and English; to implement a testing program based on the curriculum (because of costs, the state tested only reading and math); to expand professional development for teachers; and to test would-be teachers. In the late 1990s, again before Romney assumed office, the state added new funds for early childhood education.

Romney’s plan, by contrast, is animated by a reverence for the private sector. While little is said about improving or spending more on public education, which is treated as a failed institution, a great deal of enthusiasm is lavished on the innovation and progress that is supposed to occur once parents can take their federal dollars to private institutions or enroll their child in a for-profit online school. Massachusetts attained success by raising standards for new teachers, not by lowering them. Nor did Massachusetts eliminate teacher tenure, that is, the right to a hearing for experienced teachers before they can be fired. Higher education, we are assured, will flourish when “innovation and skill attainment” matter more than “time in classroom.” Put in plain English, the last sentence is claiming that higher education will become more affordable when more students enroll in online universities, most of which are low-cost and for-profit. Of course, online universities are cheaper; they have no capital costs, no library, no facilities, and minimal staff. Some are under investigation for fraud because of their methods of recruiting students; they have fended off federal regulation by a heavy (and bipartisan) investment in lobbying.

The Obama administration’s first response to Romney’s proposals was to scoff and say that Obama’s K-12 policies had the enthusiastic support of prominent conservative Republican governors, such as Chris Christie of New Jersey and Susana Martinez of New Mexico. Unfortunately, this is true. Apart from vouchers and the slap at teacher certification, Obama’s Race to the Top program for schools promotes virtually everything Romney proposes—charters, competition, accountability, evaluating teachers by student test scores. If anything, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been as outspoken on behalf of charters and test-based accountability as Mitt Romney. And, like Romney, Duncan has disdained the issue of reducing the number of students per teacher.

Romney’s proposal for private-school vouchers is red-meat for the right wing base of the Republican party, especially evangelicals. Vouchers have been the third rail of education politics since Milton Friedman proposed them in 1955; they have been put before the voters in several state referenda and have been consistently rejected. As a general rule, the public does not want public money to support religious schools. And many religious schools are wary about accepting public money and the regulations that eventually are tied to it. But in the past few years, vouchers have been revived by state legislatures in Indiana, Wisconsin, and Louisiana without resorting to popular vote.

The results are already troubling. In Louisiana, where Governor Bobby Jindal’s education reform legislation was enacted in mid-April, the new law declares that students in low-performing schools are eligible to take their share of state funding to any accredited private or religious school. About 400,000 students (more than half the students in the state) are eligible, but only some 5,000 places are available in the state’s private and parochial schools. When the state posted the list of participating schools, the one that registered to accept the largest number of voucher students was the New Living Word School, which offered to enroll 315 of them. But its current enrollment is 122, and it has no facilities or teachers for the new students, though it promises to erect a new building in time for the beginning of the school year this fall. Most of its instruction is delivered on DVDs.

Another school, the Eternity Christian Academy, which currently has 14 students, has agreed to take in 135 voucher students. According to a recent Reuters article, students in this school

sit in cubicles for much of the day and move at their own pace through Christian workbooks, such as a beginning science text that explains “what God made” on each of the six days of creation. They are not exposed to the theory of evolution.

The pastor-turned-principal explained, “We try to stay away from all those things that might confuse our children.” Some of the other schools that have been approved to receive state-funded vouchers “use social studies texts warning that liberals threaten global prosperity; Bible-based math books that don’t cover modern concepts such as set theory; and biology texts built around refuting evolution.”

The Reuters reporter described the Louisiana law as “the nation’s boldest experiment in privatizing public education, with the state preparing to shift tens of millions in tax dollars out of the public schools to pay private industry, businesses owners and church pastors to educate children.” Next year, all students in Louisiana will qualify for a voucher to take courses from private vendors or corporations offering courses or training. Expect a boom in new education businesses in Louisiana.

What Governor Jindal is doing sounds like a template for the Romney plan. With no increase in funding, all the money for vouchers and private vendors and online charters will be deducted from the state’s public education budget. Governor Jindal and Mitt Romney should explain how American education will be improved if taxpayer dollars are used to send more students to sectarian schools and to take their courses from profit-making businesses and online schools.

In the vision presented by Mitt Romney, public dollars would flow to schools that teach creationism. Anyone could teach, without passing any test of their knowledge and skills and without any professional preparation. Teachers could be fired for any reason, without any protection of their freedom to teach. In some states and regions, teachers will be fearful of teaching evolution or global warming or any controversial issues. Nor will they dare to teach books considered offensive to anyone in their community, like Huckleberry Finn.

And candidate Romney should explain how privatizing the way we school our children will further his goal of “restoring the promise of American education.” “Restore” suggests a return to the past. When in American history did the for-profit sector run American schools? Which state ever permitted it until the advent in our own time of for-profit charter corporations and for-profit online corporations? Which founding fathers ever railed against public education? John Adams, that crusty conservative, said this:

The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.

Restoring the promise of American education should mean rejuvenating public schools, not destroying them.

Age of Ignorance

Age of Ignorance: Charles Simic

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Fairgoers cheer for Sarah Palin while she appears on the Sean Hannity Show at the Iowa State Fair, August 12, 2011

Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal. It’s no use pretending otherwise and telling us, as Thomas Friedman did in the Times a few days ago, that educated people are the nation’s most valuable resources. Sure, they are, but do we still want them? It doesn’t look to me as if we do. The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state, such as the one we now have, is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from bullshit.

An educated, well-informed population, the kind that a functioning democracy requires, would be difficult to lie to, and could not be led by the nose by the various vested interests running amok in this country. Most of our politicians and their political advisers and lobbyists would find themselves unemployed, and so would the gasbags who pass themselves off as our opinion makers. Luckily for them, nothing so catastrophic, even though perfectly well-deserved and widely-welcome, has a remote chance of occurring any time soon. For starters, there’s more money to be made from the ignorant than the enlightened, and deceiving Americans is one of the few growing home industries we still have in this country. A truly educated populace would be bad, both for politicians and for business.

It took years of indifference and stupidity to make us as ignorant as we are today. Anyone who has taught college over the last forty years, as I have, can tell you how much less students coming out of high school know every year. At first it was shocking, but it no longer surprises any college instructor that the nice and eager young people enrolled in your classes have no ability to grasp most of the material being taught. Teaching American literature, as I have been doing, has become harder and harder in recent years, since the students read little literature before coming to college and often lack the most basic historical information about the period in which the novel or the poem was written, including what important ideas and issues occupied thinking people at the time.

Even regional history has gotten a short shrift. Students who come from old New England mill towns, as I have discovered, have never been told about the famous strikes in their communities in which workers were shot in cold blood and the perpetrators got away scot-free. I wasn’t surprised that their high schools were wary of bringing up the subject, but it astonished me that their parents and grandparents, and whoever else they came in contact with while they were growing up, never mentioned these examples of gross injustice. Either their families never talked about the past, or their children were not paying attention when they did. Whatever it was, one is confronted with the problem of how to remedy their vast ignorance about things they should have already been familiar with as the generations of students before them were.

If this lack of knowledge is the result of the years of dumbing down of high school curriculum and of families that don’t talk to their children about the past, there’s another more pernicious kind of ignorance we confront today. It is the product of years of ideological and political polarization and the deliberate effort by the most fanatical and intolerant parties in that conflict to manufacture more ignorance by lying about many aspects of our history and even our recent past. I recall being stunned some years back when I read that a majority of Americans told pollsters that Saddam Hussein was behind September 11 terrorist attacks. It struck me as a propaganda feat unsurpassed by the worst authoritarian regimes of the past—many of which had to resort to labor camps and firing squads to force their people to believe some untruth, without comparable success.


No doubt, the Internet and cable television have allowed various political and corporate interests to spread disinformation on a scale that was not possible before, but to have it believed requires a badly educated population unaccustomed to verifying things they are being told. Where else on earth would a president who rescued big banks from bankruptcy with taxpayers’ money and allowed the rest of us to lose $12 trillion in investment, retirement, and home values be called a socialist?

In the past, if someone knew nothing and talked nonsense, no one paid any attention to him. No more. Now such people are courted and flattered by conservative politicians and ideologues as “Real Americans” defending their country against big government and educated liberal elites. The press interviews them and reports their opinions seriously without pointing out the imbecility of what they believe. The hucksters, who manipulate them for the powerful financial interests, know that they can be made to believe anything, because, to the ignorant and the bigoted, lies always sound better than truth:

Christians are persecuted in this country.

The government is coming to get your guns.

Obama is a Muslim.

Global Warming is a hoax.

The president is forcing open homosexuality on the military.

Schools push a left-wing agenda.

Social Security is an entitlement, no different from welfare.

Obama hates white people.

The life on earth is 10,000 years old and so is the universe.

The safety net contributes to poverty.

The government is taking money from you and giving it to sex-crazed college women to pay for their birth control.

One could easily list many more such commonplace delusions believed by Americans. They are kept in circulation by hundreds of right-wing political and religious media outlets whose function is to fabricate an alternate reality for their viewers and their listeners. “Stupidity is sometimes the greatest of historical forces,” Sidney Hook said once. No doubt. What we have in this country is the rebellion of dull minds against the intellect. That’s why they love politicians who rail against teachers indoctrinating children against their parents’ values and resent the ones who show ability to think seriously and independently. Despite their bravado, these fools can always be counted on to vote against their self-interest. And that, as far as I’m concerned, is why millions are being spent to keep my fellow citizens ignorant.

First Gray Wolf in 80 Years Enters California

First Gray Wolf in 80 Years Enters California:
Following years of dedication on the part of conservationists to reintroduce the animals to their native habitats, things are looking up as the first gray wolf to be seen in California in nearly eight decades is spotted.

Jared Bernstein: Pesky Brother-in-Law: Christmas Edition

Jared Bernstein: Pesky Brother-in-Law: Christmas Edition:

Hear those jingle bells in the distance? It's a sleigh coming up the drive, led by that chubby, jolly, old... conservative brother-in-law.

What with Christmas upon us and the family coming around, it's time for the next edition of what to do when that pesky brother-in-law, or aunt, or whomever, hits you with so many Fox canards that you can't even enjoy your new iPod.

[Earlier editions: here, here, and here.]

I like those flat tax plans from Perry, Gingrich, and the rest of them... those guys really get what wrong with our crazy tax system!

Response: Yeah, those plans do sound simpler than the current mess, that's for sure -- but I'm afraid they're not as simple as you might think. Or as fair. (Dramatic pause, as your audience looks up expectantly from their figgy pudding.)

First off, if we really want everyone to pay one tax rate and we set that rate so as not to lose a lot of revenue, a lot of people's taxes could go up. Remember old Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan... sounds pretty flat, right? Well, over 80% of taxpayers faced higher payments under his flat tax plan. And the ones with the biggest breaks on these flat plans are the richest taxpayers. Rick Perry's flat tax lowers tax payments for multi-millionaires by a cool $1.5 mil.

Now look, we all know every tax change is going to have winners and losers, but I don't think most people want to whack the middle class so the rich can do a lot better

What's that? You're willing to trade a little more on your tax bill for simplicity?

I hear you but here's the problem. Flat taxes can end up being more complicated than they sound. They often work like national sales taxes -- like in Europe, just a straight 20%, say, on what you buy. But in those cases, they usually exclude basic necessities so now you have to keep track of that, and fight over what get exempted.Next, to make sure you avoid the Cain problem of some people paying more, both Perry and Gingrich proposed that you could either pay the flat tax or stick with the current system. So, guess what? Now you get to figure out your tax bill both ways so that you can figure out which is cheaper. That sure doesn't sound simpler to me.Anyway, you know what makes the system we have complicated? It's not the different rates. If that's all it was you could just look your income up in a set of tax tables, find your liability, and be done with it in literally seconds. And that would be true whether we have one rate or a hundred rates.What complicates things are all the exemptions, credits, and special privileges for different types of income. For a lot of people, you pay a higher rate for money you earn teaching children, like Aunt Debbie does, than for money you make when you sell a stock. That's both unfair and too complicated.So I say let's add simplicity and fairness by just taxing every dollar as a dollar no matter who earned it on which day of the week. And keep the progressive rates in place, so everyone can pay their fair share.

You liberals love Social Security, but everyone knows it's a dinosaur program, about to go extinct. None of you kids are ever gonna see a dime from it, so you might as well drop it.

Response: That's a mistake a lot of people make, bro, but it's simply not true. In fact, the folks who keep the books on this point out that for about the next 25 years, Social Security can pay full benefits. After that, it will be able to pay 75% of scheduled benefits. And by the way, even with that reduction, those benefits will be higher than they are today (that's because they're scheduled to go up over time, so even with the reduction, they'll be higher than today's).

Still, you've got a point--there's not enough retirement security in America. The real dinosaur in the room, unfortunately, is the guaranteed pension. Fewer and fewer jobs provide that anymore -- it's all 401(k)'s, where you get to bet your future on the stock market-good luck with that these days (note heads nodding in affirmation). In fact, if you think about it, the only guaranteed pension you can depend on is... wait for it... (dramatic pause)... Social Security! And believe it or not, a lot of conservatives want to turn Social Security into a stock market plan-(shake head despondently, with pity for those who don't get what a bad idea this is...).

So we've got to mend it so that it can pay full benefits, not just 75% over the long-term horizon. One thing to keep in mind is that the funding shortfall of the program is just about equal to the high end part of the Bush tax cuts--the part that just goes to households about $250K and that's supposed to expire at the end of 2012. So fixing the program in perpetuity shouldn't be that hard a lift.

And there's other stuff we could do. Did folks know that the tax to fund the program only hits salaries up to $110,000? That means that if you make a million bucks, about 90% of your salary is tax free when it comes to the payroll tax that funds Soc Sec. That ain't right.

So rest assured, with some smart, fair tweaks, the program will be around for many Christmas's to come. The bigger concern is that Social Security on its own won't provide enough income to provide a comfortable retirement for a lot of folks. But it's still a solid foundation for folks to build upon, one that we should be sure to make more solid for generations to come.

This post originally appeared at Jared Bernstein's On The Economy blog.