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How To Read The Iran Debate

How To Read The Iran Debate

WASHINGTON — Deals involving limits on weapons, nukes, or otherwise, are intricate and technical. Only a limited number of people among arms-control connoisseurs fully grasp the meaning of every detail.

Yet in a democracy, these matters are and should be the subject of debate. Those engaged in the argument sometimes pretend to more knowledge than they have, tossing out a raft of numbers — readily available courtesy of your favorite newspaper — on centrifuges, enrichment, and the like. Others are somewhat more candid in acknowledging that their view is shaped by what they thought before a single fact was published, though they, too, will rattle off a few data points just to enhance their credibility.

And so it was with the framework of the agreement announced on Thursday designed to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons, or, at the least, kicking the prospect of a nuclear Iran down the road a decade or so. The fact that it’s a “framework” and that the final deal won’t be reached for a few months creates wiggle room for everyone. And the United States has been far more forthcoming than Iran in disclosing details, suggesting there are still fuzzy parts.

Just to be clear, I am not immune from my own critique. I welcome this deal, or pre-deal, because going in, I supported the idea of trying to get Iran to postpone getting a weapon. This is better than the alternatives, including war or an effort to keep sanctions going with allies who are not likely to support them, especially if the United States scuttles the talks.

I also see the possibility — not a probability, but a chance — that an agreement could open Iran up and strengthen those inside pushing for more freedom. Lest you think this is foolish, consider that both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher thought that betting on Mikhail Gorbachev could lead to change in the Soviet Union. (“I like Mr. Gorbachev,” Thatcher said. “We can do business together.”) Many of their traditional supporters thought they were dangerously wrong, possibly naive. But they were right.

Moreover, I don’t think that we should give Saudi Arabia or other Sunni states a veto over our foreign policy, and I do think that in the long run, Israel will be safer, not in greater danger, if we can contain Iran in this way. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu emphatically disagrees, but I suspect that if the U.S. gets the deal it wants, many American supporters of Israel will take issue with him.

But there is something else reassuring about this first round: The outline is tougher and more specific than many skeptics thought it would be. Yes, Secretary of State John Kerry and the Obama administration managed expectations well. But among open-minded skeptics, the tilt was toward pleasant surprise.

It’s true that the facts as we know them are being read differently, depending on the orientation of the reader. President Obama says the inspections envisioned will be “robust and intrusive.” His critics say they aren’t nearly intrusive enough. Supporters of the deal note that the number of centrifuges Iran will be operating to enrich uranium is being cut from 19,000 to 5,000. Critics say Iran will still be running 5,000 centrifuges and is not being asked to destroy the rest. And they worry that the sanctions on Iran will be removed too quickly and not in stages.

Nonetheless, even some who are far from sold on the framework acknowledge it contains some useful measures: limits on the enrichment of uranium, the conversion of the underground nuclear facility at Fordow into a “research center,” and keeping a reactor in Arak from being able to produce weapons grade plutonium. I offer this paragraph not to pretend to any expertise on these matters, but to suggest the utility of a kind of intellectual triangulation: If even those inclined to be skeptical of a deal think these are positive elements, they are almost certainly steps forward.

You’d like to think that on a matter this important, those involved in the debate would acknowledge ambiguities and uncertainties and that each side would admit it’s placing a bet — on hope or skepticism. I’m not holding my breath. Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) is normally a sensible sort. But referring to the State Department’s top negotiator, he told a radio interviewer that “Neville Chamberlain got a lot more out of Hitler than Wendy Sherman got out of Iran.” It’s not a promising way to start.

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

Photo: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry with Foreign Minister Javad Zarif of Iran in Vienna, Austria, on November 23, 2014, before the two begin a one-on-one meeting amid broader negotiations about the future of Iran’s nuclear program. (U.S. State Department photo/ Public Domain)

When Obamacare Was ‘Doomed’

When Obamacare Was ‘Doomed’

WASHINGTON — Is there any accountability in American politics for being completely wrong? Is there any cost to those who say things that turn out not to be true and then, when their fabrications or false predictions are exposed, calmly move on to concocting new claims as if they had never made the old ones?

The fact that the Affordable Care Act hit its original goal this week of signing up more than 7 million people through its insurance exchanges ought to be a moment of truth — literally as well as figuratively. It ought to give everyone, particularly members of the news media, pause over how reckless the opponents of change have been in making instant judgments and outlandish charges.

When the health care website went haywire last fall, conservatives were absolutely certain this technological failure meant that the entire reform effort was doomed. If you doubt this, try a Google search keyed to that period relating the word “doomed” to the health care law.

It should be said that the general public was much wiser. A CNN poll in November that Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent highlighted at the time found a majority (54 percent to 45 percent) saying that the problems facing the law “will eventually be solved.” Political moderates took this view by 55 percent to 43 percent, independents by 50 percent to 48 percent. Only Republicans — by a whopping 72 percent to 27 percent — and conservatives (by 66-33) thought the law could never be fixed.

Their representatives in Washington, moderate conservatives as well as the Tea Party’s loyalists, followed the base’s lead. In mid-November, for example, Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) told Fox News flatly that the law is “destined to fail,” “fundamentally flawed” and “not ready for prime time.” House Speaker John Boehner predicted dire outcomes before the website fiasco. He repeatedly insisted, as he did in July, that “even the Obama administration knows the train wreck will only get worse.”

This attitude affected more neutral observers. Forbes magazine posted a piece on Nov. 22, 2013, under the headline: “What to do if and when Obamacare collapses.” The op-ed modestly acknowledged that “it’s too soon to write an epitaph for Obamacare,” but then barged forward, since “its crises are piling up so fast that one has to begin looking ahead.”

At this point, the etiquette of commentary typically requires a “to be sure” paragraph, as in: To be sure, the law could still face other problems, blah, blah, blah. But such paragraphs are timid and often insincere hedges. After all, every successful program, even well-established ones such as Medicare, Social Security and food stamps, confronts ongoing challenges.

So let’s say it out loud: The ACA is doing exactly what its supporters said it would do. It is getting health insurance to millions (right now, it looks like around 10 million) who didn’t have it before. And it’s working especially well in places such as Kentucky, where state officials threw themselves fully and competently behind the cause of signing up the uninsured. Those who want to repeal the law will have to admit that they are willing to deprive these people, or some large percentage of them, of insurance.

Too many conservatives would prefer not to say upfront what they really believe: They don’t want the federal government to spend the significant sums of money needed to get everyone covered. Admitting this can sound cruel, so they insist that their objections are to the ACA’s alleged unworkability, or to “a Washington takeover of the health system” (which makes you wonder what they think of Medicare, a far more centralized program). Or they peddle isolated horror stories that the fact checkers usually discover are untrue or misleading.

Thus the moment of truth, about the facts and about our purposes.

From now on, will there be more healthy skepticism about conservative claims against the ACA? Given how many times the law’s enemies have said the sky was falling when it wasn’t, will there be tougher interrogation of their next round of apocalyptic predictions? Will their so-called alternatives be analyzed closely to see how many now-insured people would actually lose coverage under the “replacement” plans?

Perhaps more importantly, will we finally be honest about the real argument here: Do we or do we not want to put in the effort and money it takes to guarantee all Americans health insurance? If we do — and we should — let’s get on with doing it the best way we can.

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

AFP Photo/Nicholas Kamm

Who Cares About The Value Of Work?

Who Cares About The Value Of Work?

WASHINGTON — Finding a way out of our current political impasse requires some agreement on what problems we need to solve. If anything should unite left, center and right, it is the value of work and the idea, in Bill Clinton’s signature phrase, that those who “work hard and play by the rules” ought to be rewarded for their efforts.

This is why one of last week’s most important and least noted political events was the introduction of the 21st Century Worker Tax Cut Act by Senator Patty Murray (D-WA). Murray favors a minimum-wage increase to $10.10 an hour, but she also has other ideas that would help Americans at the bottom of the income structure to earn more.

Let’s start with principles, and then move to specifics.

There’s a new vogue among conservatives: to talk less about entrepreneurs and to stop talking altogether about “makers” and “takers.” Instead, many of the wisest heads on the right are urging a focus on work. The new emphasis reflects a realization that President Obama won in 2012 in large part because Mitt Romney and his party failed to convey empathy for those who live on wages and salaries.

An early champion of this view was Ramesh Ponnuru, a writer for National Review. “The Republican story about how societies prosper — not just the Romney story — dwelt on the heroic entrepreneur stifled by taxes and regulations,” he wrote shortly after the election. It is, Ponnuru added, “an important story with which most people do not identify.”

Writing earlier this year in National Affairs magazine, Henry Olsen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center was more biting. “Modern conservatives,” he argued, “have tended to discount the moral value of the average person, focusing instead on extolling the moral superiority of the great.”

Two other conservative thinkers, Reihan Salam and Rich Lowry, say the antidote is for Republicans to become “the party of work.” As they see it, work “stands for a constellation of values and, like education, is universally honored.” The GOP, they said, “should extol work and demand it.”

Yes, that last phrase — “demand it” — could lead to a darker kind of politics involving the demonization of those who simply can’t find jobs. Thus did Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) get into trouble for mourning “this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working.”

No matter what Ryan was trying to say, he seemed to be emphasizing the flaws of the unemployed themselves rather than the cost of economic injustice. My Washington Post colleague Eugene Robinson captured this well: “Blaming poverty on the mysterious influence of ‘culture’ is a convenient excuse for doing nothing to address the problem.”

Nonetheless, many conservatives really do realize that they need to embrace hardworking Americans. But the question stands: What are they willing to do about it?

This is where Murray comes in. Her bill would rid the tax code of certain disincentives to work. She notes that “the second earner in a household often pays a higher tax rate on his or her earnings than the first.” Her plan would right this by offering a 20 percent deduction on the second earner’s income up to roughly $60,000 a year. (The benefit is focused on lower-income families, so it phases out at $130,000 in joint annual income.) For a $25,000-a-year second earner in the 25 percent bracket, she says, this would mean $1,250 “back in their pocket for groceries, child care, or retirement savings.”

She’d also expand the Earned Income Tax Credit for workers without children and lower the eligibility age from 25 to 21. The changes would increase their maximum benefit from $487 to about $1,400 a year. It’s hardly nirvana. But for someone earning around $15,000 a year, it’s real money. The proposal would cover its roughly $15 billion annual cost by closing loopholes already identified as worthy of being scrapped by the GOP’s leading tax reformer, Rep. Dave Camp of Michigan.

You can, of course, look at what Murray is doing as a way of calling the conservatives’ bluff on the matter of work. But that will be true only if the right allows its bluff to be called.

In making their case, Salam and Lowry quoted Abraham Lincoln on the need “to advance the condition of the honest, struggling laboring man.” If conservatives are serious about this (and about the honest, laboring woman, too) they’ll join Murray in raising the minimum wage and in seeking a tax code more in harmony with the dignity of work.

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

AFP Photo/T.J. Kirkpatrick

The Politics Of Hopelessness

The Politics Of Hopelessness

WASHINGTON — Listlessness is bad politics. Defensiveness is poor strategy. And resignation is never inspiring.

You can feel elements of all three descending around President Obama as he fends off attack after attack from his conservative foes who vary the subject depending on the day, the circumstance and the opportunity.

Obama and his party are in danger of allowing the Republicans to set the terms of the 2014 elections, just as they did four years ago. The fog of nasty and depressing advertising threatens to reduce the electorate to a hard core of older, conservative voters eager to hand the president a blistering defeat.

American politics has been shaken by two recent events that hurt first the Republicans and then the Democrats. Republicans have recovered from their blow. Democrats have not.

Last fall’s government shutdown cratered the GOP’s standing with the public and confirmed everything Democrats had been saying about a House majority in thrall to a far right uninterested in governing. Then the Obama administration threw its adversaries a lifeline with the disasters that befell HealthCare.gov, empowering Republicans to remount their favorite hobbyhorse. House Speaker John Boehner used the foolishness of the shutdown to insist that there would be no more Tea Party adventures this year, no matter what Ted Cruz said.

And Republicans have broadened the assault whenever possible. Shamefully but effectively, many of them made Obama, not Vladimir Putin, the prime culprit in Putin’s invasion of Crimea, hanging the word “weak” around the president’s neck. Democrats thought the killing of Osama bin Laden would forever guard Obama from comparisons with Jimmy Carter. They did not reckon with the GOP’s determination to Carterize and McGovernize any Democrat who comes along.

Despite the large strides in the health care website’s performance and despite Obama’s efforts to regain the initiative with executive action, Republicans remain on offense. Executive actions — even helpful ones like last week’s aimed at keeping workers from losing overtime pay by being falsely reclassified as supervisory — cannot transform the political agenda or mobilize a movement.

The most telling fact about the Democrats’ defeat in Florida’s special House election last week was the party’s failure to get its voters to the polls. This owed to many factors, but one of them is disaffection in Democratic ranks.

The recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll pegged Obama’s approval rating at 41 percent, his disapproval at 54 percent. But the most disturbing finding to him ought to have been the 20 percent disapproval he registered among Democrats. Winning back three-quarters of those discontented Democrats would, all by itself, bump his overall approval rating up by more than 6 points. It’s where he needs to start.

With more than two and a half years left in his term, Obama has already begun to convey a sense of resignation that his largest achievements (except, perhaps, for immigration reform) are behind him. His cool composure disinclines him to expressions of anger over how conservatives are foiling progress on job creation, education, the minimum wage and infrastructure investment. And the difficulty of getting anything through the House and past Republican filibusters in the Senate is limiting the Democrats’ policy imagination.

Going on offense means, first, building on what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is undertaking in his campaign against the Koch brothers and other right-wing millionaires trying to buy themselves a Congress.

This is not just a tactical effort to turn tens of millions of dollars in negative advertising into a boomerang by encouraging voters to ask why the ads are appearing in the first place. It is also about drawing a sharp line between the interests and policy goals of those fronting that money and the rest of us. And by the way, Republicans denouncing Reid were perfectly happy back in the day to condemn George Soros for his spending on behalf of liberals.

It also means embracing the Affordable Care Act, promising to keep it and improve it, and laying out what repeal would actually mean: to seniors enjoying additional prescription drug benefits, to consumers protected from losing insurance because of pre-existing conditions, to adult children now on their parents’ health plans. It means counting the cost of what state-level Republicans are doing in blocking 4 million to 5 million needy people from the Medicaid expansion.

Above all, it means lifting the debate from the hopelessness and exhaustion that are turning millions of Americans away from political engagement. The hope and change guy needs to have one more act in him.

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

AFP Photo/Saul Loeb