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In That Old Volkswagen Bus With Bernie, Rolling Toward 1972

In That Old Volkswagen Bus With Bernie, Rolling Toward 1972

Unpack your old tie-dyed T-shirts, roll yourself a fat doobie, and warm up the ancient VW bus. We’re going to do Woodstock and the 1972 presidential election all over again. And this time, the hippies are going to win! Four years of peace, love, and single-payer health care.

But do take care to clear the path for Bernie Sanders. Because if he steps in something the dog left behind, he’s going to blame Wall Street and start yelling and waving his arms around.

And you know how much that upsets Republican congressmen who are otherwise so eager to oblige his plans to soak the rich and give everybody free college, free health care, free bubble-up and rainbow stew—as the old Merle Haggard song had it.

OK, so I’m being a smart-aleck. I was moved to satire by a couple of moments from last week’s Democratic and Republican presidential debates. First, Sen. Sanders, boasting about a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll that shows him beating Donald Trump by 15 points—54 to 39. Hillary Clinton tops Trump only 51-41.

Both would be huge landslides. In 1972, Richard Nixon defeated George McGovern 61-38. The Democrat won only Massachusetts.

The part Sanders left out and that Hillary was also wise enough to leave unmentioned is that the same poll shows her leading him59 to 34 percent in the Democratic primary contest nationally. Twenty-five points.

She’d have to be a fool to take that to the bank, although it does demonstrate why a lot of the horse-race commentary has the narrative upside down. See, unless Bernie manages to prevail in the Iowa caucuses, his campaign pretty much goes on life support. A New Englander nearly always wins in New Hampshire, and rarely goes anywhere after that.

Almost needless to say, all polls are individually suspect. Moreover, the national media give far more play to surveys depicting a close contest; they’re better for journalists’ careers.

That would be true even if you didn’t know that bringing Hillary Clinton down has been an obsessive quest in Washington and New York newsrooms for twenty-four years.

During most of which time it’s been “Bernie who?” That Vermont socialist who’s all the time yelling? That guy?

Yeah, him. The guy with the Brooklyn accent and the Wacky Prof look who says “billionaire” the way some people say “Ebola.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

The same guy Ohio Gov. John Kasich boldly predicted would lose all 50 states if Democrats were foolish enough to nominate him. Actually, I’m confident Sanders would carry Vermont and probably Massachusetts against any Republican nominee. But New Hampshire and Maine could be out of reach.

Even against Trump? Well theoretical matchups mean next to nothing this far out. And I suspect that Bernie’s big advantage–hard for politically active readers to believe—is that most voters know almost nothing about him except that he’s neither Hillary nor The Donald.

I also suspect that a Trump vs. Sanders matchup would bring a serious third-party challenge. Let the GOP attack machine get to work on Sanders and I’m guessing we’d soon learn that there’s no great yearning among the electorate for socialism—democratic or not.

Did you know, for example, that Sanders took a honeymoon trip to the Soviet Union in 1988? George Will does.

Does that make him disloyal? Of course not, merely a bit of a crank. As Sanders loyalists are quick to remind you, President Reagan went to Moscow to negotiate nuclear arms reductions with Gorbachev that same year.

As a personal matter, I got my fill of Marxist faculty lounge lizards back in that tie-dyed, VW bus era. Disagree with them, and you’re an immoral sellout. That gets old really fast.

Writing in The Washington Monthly, David Atkins does a brave job of trying to explain away a Gallup poll showing that while 38 percent of Americans say  they’d never vote for a Muslim president, and 40 percent wouldn’t support an atheist, fully 50 percent said no socialists need apply.

Can Bernie persuade them otherwise? I don’t see how. Most Americans don’t actually hate the rich, and his despairing portrait of contemporary American life doesn’t square with most people’s experience.

“Against these liabilities,” observes Jonathan Chait, “Sanders offers the left-wing version of a hoary political fantasy: that a more pure candidate can rally the People into a righteous uprising that would unsettle the conventional laws of politics.”

Meanwhile, not only has Sanders presented no realistic political scenario for enacting his vaunted reforms, serious observers also question their substance.

Writes liberal MVP Paul Krugman:

“To be harsh but accurate: the Sanders health plan looks a little bit like a standard Republican tax-cut plan, which relies on fantasies about huge supply-side effects to make the numbers supposedly add up.”

During the last Democratic debate, Bernie accused Hillary of failing to take his candidacy seriously. Fair enough. But has he?

Photo: Bernie Sanders telling you about democratic socialism. DonkeyHotey via Flickr

Obama: Reaganite On Iran

Obama: Reaganite On Iran

WASHINGTON — When President Ronald Reagan met Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva in November 1985, he whispered to the Soviet leader: “I bet the hard-liners in both our countries are bleeding when we shake hands.”

Reagan had a point. His inclination to negotiate with the Evil Empire left many of his conservative friends aghast. In an otherwise touchingly affectionate assessment of the 40th president’s tenure, my Washington Post colleague George Will said that Reagan had “accelerated the moral disarmament of the West … by elevating wishful thinking to the status of political philosophy.”

Further right, the conservative activist Howard Phillips accused Reagan of being “a very weak man with a very strong wife and a strong staff” who had become “a useful idiot for Kremlin propaganda.” Wow!

Few metaphors are perfect; Iran is not the Soviet Union. But the Reagan legacy is worth pondering to understand why, barely hours after the nuclear deal with Iran was announced, so many of President Obama’s critics leapt to conclude that the accord, as House Speaker John Boehner said, would “only embolden Iran — the world’s largest sponsor of terror.” Many of the president’s supporters were just as fast off the mark in backing him.

No doubt the instant responses can be explained partly by partisanship and by whether the responder has faith in Obama. But these reactions also had much to do with attitudes toward the proper approach to an adversary.

Are negotiated deals ever to be trusted? Should the United States be influenced by its allies’ wishes? Are imperfect compromises ever acceptable? Is hope that a hostile regime might gradually transform itself always wishful thinking? Is avoiding war a legitimate goal, or is every negotiation a repetition of Munich and every promise of “peace in our time” shortsighted?

Those of us inclined to support what Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have achieved answer these questions with a combination of Reaganite practicality and Reaganite hopefulness — and may conservatives forgive someone who voted against Reagan twice for invoking him.

Of course negotiations can work. John F. Kennedy, no softie, got the balance right when he declared: “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.”

It’s worth remembering that Reagan’s willingness to bargain with Gorbachev weakened the hard-liners in the Soviet Union, creating the opening for its collapse. And there are parallels between the two-step approaches that both Reagan and Obama took to a problematic foe. The Gipper was very tough at the outset of his presidency, and the Soviet Union realized it could not keep up with American defense spending. Gorbachev came to the table. Obama got our allies to impose much tougher sanctions, and Iran came to the table.

There is no way of knowing if this deal will lead to a dramatic transformation inside Iran, and there are some legitimate doubts that it will. But then, Reagan’s conservative skeptics were also insistent that the Soviet Union could never change, and surely never fall. They were wrong and Reagan’s bet paid off. Obama is now making a comparable wager.

Critics of this agreement fear that, at best, it will keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon for “only” 10 years. The administration says the timeline is longer, but what if it’s 10 years? Walking away from the table wouldn’t buy us more time. On the contrary. Former Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns noted in the Financial Times that, absent a deal, “the ayatollahs would have been just a month or two away from a weapon.”

If the administration had torpedoed these talks, our partners would have been hard pressed to maintain the current sanctions, let alone toughen them. The United States will now need to be vigilant in containing Iran. But, again, Reagan — like every president from 1945 forward — successfully contained the Soviet Union.

Three days after the Senate approved the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in May 1988 (Democrats sped it through even as some Republicans tried to drag out the process), Reagan was his classic optimistic self at Moscow University. “We may be allowed to hope,” he declared, “that the marvelous sound of a new openness will keep rising through, ringing through, leading to a new world of reconciliation, friendship and peace.”

Obama was a long way from being as ebullient about Iran at his news conference Wednesday. He was all about verify, not trust. But like Reagan, he’s willing to take a chance on the idea that reaching our goals through negotiation can be wiser than the alternatives.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.

Photo: President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev having their first meeting in the Oval Office at the White House, December 8, 1987. (Via Wikicommons)

Top Reads For News Junkies: ‘The New Cold War’

Top Reads For News Junkies: ‘The New Cold War’

The crisis in Ukraine has put our country’s fraught relationship with Russia into grim focus. The years after the collapse of the Soviet Union more and more resemble parentheses between two Cold Wars rather than a lasting peace. The New Cold War: Putin’s Russia and the Threat to the West was first published in 2008, and the most recent edition, released last summer, has been updated to cover Russia’s increasingly aggressive tactics and incautious conduct on the global stage.

You can purchase the book here.

Renewed Fighting Flares Between Armenia, Azerbaijan

Renewed Fighting Flares Between Armenia, Azerbaijan

By Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times

As the conflict between Ukraine and Russia flares into a sixth month, two other former Soviet republics are now engaged in renewed fighting over the remote, mountainous enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

A six-year war between Armenian and Azerbaijani troops had been dormant since a truce was brokered by Russia 20 years ago — until clashes resumed in the South Caucasus region last week.

On Monday, the governments in Yerevan and Baku reported the worst bloodshed over the disputed territory in two decades had taken the lives of 13 Azerbaijanis and six Armenians.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told the Itar-Tass news agency that he had asked the leaders of both countries to meet with Russian mediators in the Black Sea resort of Sochi on Friday to try to work out a plan to restore peace.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday expressed “deep concern” over the resurgence of fighting and urged the two countries to respect the long-agreed cease-fire conditions.

Russia, the United States, and France spearheaded peace efforts two decades ago, after more than 30,000 were killed in the bitter war for control of the territory that, like some of the disputed land in southeastern Ukraine, was carved up — irrespective of ethnic communities — by Soviet leaders decades before the 1991 collapse of the communist empire.

Nagorno-Karabakh, though largely populated by Armenians, was made part of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic under then-Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. But as anti-communist revolutions swept Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, Armenians in the enclave, backed by government forces from across the border, seized control, sending 700,000 Azerbaijanis fleeing for protection from Baku.

Although organized fighting ended with the 1994 cease-fire, a permanent settlement of the conflict has been elusive and hostilities have continued to simmer between the two neighbors.

Russia and Ukraine have been locked in conflict since Moscow-allied Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich was ousted by a pro-European revolt in February and Russian President Vladimir Putin seized Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, which is the base of Russia’s Black Sea naval fleet.

Lavrov’s diplomatic intervention suggested that Moscow intends to take the lead in trying to tamp down the latest flare-up between ex-Soviet neighbors. But Russia’s former alliance with France and the United States in the Caucasus region’s peace talks likely has been complicated by the United States and European Union sanctions imposed on Russia for its role in the deadly Ukraine fighting.

Photo via WikiCommons

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