The punditry opines

Sandy Levinson

Joan Vennuchi, who writes for the Boston Globe, has a truly stupid column in today's paper (no hyperlink available) in which she excoriates Ed Markey for voting "present" at the meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  "He wasn't exactly "Senator Courageous and that's putting it kindly."  It was also a "slap in the face to Secretary of State John Kerry," whose seat he now inhabits in the Senate (and on the committee that Kerry formerly chaired).  "Markey did not have Kerry's back."  Finally, she concludes, "In other words, man-up."  It apparently doesn't occur to her that Markey is being a model of a "republican representative," in the Madisonian sense, in his belief that he actually needs to learn more before casting a vote.  His "present" had absolutely no consequences, save for eliciting stupid responses like Vennuchi's or the usually perspicacious Washington Post reporter Chris Cillizza's, who gives Markey his coveted "Worst Week in Washington" award for the same vote.  It doesn't occur to Vennuchi, especially, that Markey's job is not "having Kerry's back" or demonstrating that he's a "man," but, rather, thinking through whether it makes sense to authorize yet another war that is so far remarkably ill-explained and defended.  Good for Markey!  I look forward to seeing how he ultimately casts his vote sometime in the next two weeks.  Even if he disappoints me and decides to authorize the attack, I'll have far more confidence in his judgment than in some of the other bloviators who seem eager to rush to decision based on either support for the President or merely listening to their anti-war constituents (even if I'm one of them).  This may well be the most important vote that Markey (or any of the other senators) will cast, and they should think long and hard.

Frank Bruni, on the other hand, offers a high-minded critique of those who are actually thinking of the consequences of their vote re the 2016 elections.  He apparently believes that everyone should be concentrating on the merits of the decision, independent of low political consequences.  There is surely something to be said for his position, but let me suggest that if one is fearful of the consequences of the Obama Administration's ill-considered and poorly-defended desire to intervene in Syria, that fear properly goes beyond the consequences for the Middle East, even if they justifiably take pride of place.  It is not, I think, unseemly to realize that this debate, caused by Obama's altogether proper, I would argue even necessary, decision to look to Congress for authorization, is wrecking the hopes for important domestic legislation.  And I keep wondering about the economic opportunity costs, given the certainty that no Republican will vote to raise taxes to replace the Tomahawk missiles, etc. 

But, even beyond that, I don't think it's unseemly to suggest that the big winner from this episode is and will be Senator Rand Paul.  I fully expect him to repeat his one-man filibuster and spend many hours (perhaps joined by Sen. Bernie Sanders) explaining why the Obama-Kerry-Power policy is really terrible.  Furthermore, if Congress unwisely authorizes the intervention, then Obama will truly have no choice but to send in the missiles, etc.  Maybe everything will go perfectly, and he will get great credit for Kennedy-like "grace under pressure" (recall that Kennedy unilaterally risked World War III during the Cuban Missile Crisis).  But if it doesn't, then I expect Paul to get a huge boost in his own race for the presidency, as libertarian-isolationism will start making more and more sense to millions of Americans who see a National Security-Surveillance State complex increasingly out of control (and fully defended by Obama and most prominent Democrats).  Why shouldn't the risk of helping to elect Rand Paul be taken into account by Markey and others,  Paul, unlike, say, Michele Bachman or Sarah Palin, is not terminally stupid, and he can be depended upon to take full advantage of the gift the Administration is giving him.

Indeed, I am convinced that one reason why JFK risked World War III was the up-coming November elections in 1962, when he and other Democrats were being battered by hawks like Kenneth Keating for failing to stand up to Castro and Communism.  Robert McNamara stated in private that the missiles posed no real threat to the US, given a secure US second-strike capacity.  (We now know that he was wrong only because Soviet commanders on the ground in Cuba had apparently, and inexplicably, been given authority over the weapons, but no one knew that at the time.)  We went to the brink of nuclear annihilation to preserve US credibility (which led LBJ to believe he had no alternative to escalating Kennedy's war in Vietnam) and the Democrats' prospects in the November elections.  (And, of course, Kennedy in fact bargained with Khrushchev over US missiles in Turkey, but he lied through his teeth to the American people and denied it, another part of the Kennedy legacy that tends to be swept under the rug.)  It is an unfortunate truth, which Bruni seems to want to deny, that politicians are always thinking of consequences, including messy ones like the future of their own seats (I'll bet that the various presidential prospects are thinking of Hillary Clinton and John Kerry in 2002 and want desperately not to repeat their mistakes) or the broader future, as with the likelihood that Obama will turn out to be the best friend that Rand Paul could possibly dream of.
Posted 3:41 PM by Sandy Levinson [link]