SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 2010 DAVIDIGNATIUS
The Mideast’s generational shift
tion of generally pro-American leaders is givingway to a group whose attitudes and loyalties are less certain. This transition comes at a time when U.S. power in the region is per- ceived to be weakening. Theprocess ofchangecanbe
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seen, in different forms, in Sau- di Arabia, Egypt and Iraq — traditionally the three most powerful nations in the Arab world. All three are vexed by the machinations of a revolu- tionary Iran and by al-Qaeda militants, both of which en- courage opposition to the rul- ing elites. The first transition has al-
ready begun in Saudi Arabia, the wealthiest and historically the most pro-American of the Arab regimes. The headlines last week were about King Ab- dullah’s visit to the United States for treatment of a slipped disc, and the return to Saudi Arabia of Crown Prince Sultan, the defense minister. It was a sign of change that the travels of these aging royals were announced in the nor-
political succession is beginning in the Middle East in which a genera-
over which way the kingdom should lean, in regional and global conflicts. The succession in Egypt
turns on the age and health of PresidentHosniMubarak,who has led the country since the assassination of Anwar Sadat in
1981.Mubarak has proved to be a solid bulwark against Muslim fundamentalists — at the cost of Egypt’s stillborn democratic reforms. The tran- sition paradigm in this region is exemplified by the expecta- tion that Mubarak will be suc- ceeded by his son Gamal. With tight controls on the opposi- tion, the Mubaraks’ National Democratic Party is expected to win easily in the parliamen- tary elections starting Sunday. This father-to-son process
was also evident in Syria, where President Bashar al-As- sad succeeded his father, Hafez. It took the young presi- dent several years to consoli- date control, but he has done so cleverly and ruthlessly, and he is now one of the stronger Arab leaders of his generation — someone who regularly thumbs his nose at the United States and gets away with it. A less fortunate son is
AMR ABDALLAH DALSH
GamalMubarak, son of Egyptian PresidentHosniMubarak, as depicted on an electoral banner last week.
mally secretive kingdom. But the real Saudi news was
that Abdullah’s son Miteb has been appointed head of the National Guard, one of the country’s top military posi- tions. That marked a transfer of power to what’s known as the “third generation,” the grandsons of the founding King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud. An earlier hint was the appoint- ment of Prince Mansour bin Miteb, the son of the minister of municipalities, to succeed his father. Saudi analysts say these
changes appear to be establish- ing a pattern for succession: that sons will succeed fathers in the Cabinet positions as- signed in a long-ago power- sharing deal. A likely instance would be the appointment of Mohammed bin Nayef, the highly regarded Saudi chief of counterterrorism, to succeed his father, Prince Nayef, as minister of the interior when Nayef moves up to become the next crown prince. This succession scheme pro-
vides a measure of order, but it masks the tensions that are present within the royal family
KATHLEENPARKER
Who will lead the centrists? I
n a political culture where modera- tion is the newheresy, centrism is fast becoming the newblack.
Political outliers—not quite Republi-
can, not quite Democrat — are forming new alliances in a communal search for “Home.” Exhausted by extremism and aching for real change, more and more Americans are moving away from dema- goguery and toward pragmatism. Soon they may have options. A new
political group, No Labels (
www.nola-
bels.org), is hoping to mobilize and sup- port a centrist political movement. Led by Republican strategist Mark McKin- non and Democratic fundraiser Nancy Jacobson, the organization has raised more than $1 million so far — and the formal launch isn’t until next month. Backers include Andrew Tisch, co-chair of Loews Corp.; Ron Shaich, founder of Panera Bread; and DaveMorin, a former Facebook executive. The group hopes to attract politicians
who feel that they’ve lost elections for being too moderate and voters who feel homeless. There are plenty of each. Congress’s historically low approval
ratings, the anti-incumbency spirit of the midterm elections and the influx of Tea Party-backed candidates — not to men- tion Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart’s well-attended “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” — are all testament to dissatisfaction with Washington’s sys- temic failings.
Alas, there is little reason to hope that
things will change or improve when the new Congress convenes in January. Re- publicans seem determined to continue their “hell no” strategy. New Tea Party legislators seem determined to fight es- tablishment Republicans, thus diluting Republican power. Democrats aim to dig in their heels. Witness recent reaction to the prelimi-
nary bipartisan fiscal reforms recom- mended by Erskine Bowles (Democrat) and Alan Simpson (Republican), both
Anew group,NoLabels, hopes to attract politicians who feel that they’ve lost elections for being too moderate and voters who feel homeless.
respected for their nonpartisan ap- proach to problem-solving. Neither par- ty was enthusiastic, with House Speaker NancyPelosi objecting most strenuously. “Hell no” isn’t just for Republicans any- more. All of which points to more gridlock. When the porridge is either too hot or
too cold, the moment for something in between is ripe. More Americans now self-identify as independent rather than Republican or Democrat, even though
Lebanon’s Prime Minister Saad Hariri, whose father, Rafiq, was assassinated shortly after leaving that job in 2005. The coming month — when a U.N. in- vestigative tribunal is ex- pected to indict members of the powerful Syrian- backed Hezbollah militia for Rafiq’s murder — will test whether a son’s need for vengeance can sur- mount regional realpoli- tik. In this Shakespearean drama, don’t bet on Ham- let. Iraq is also in the midst
of a political transition, and that’s the hardest to predict. In this case, the ailing parent who’s about to depart the scene is not a
person but a nation — the United States. Since invading Iraq in 2003 and shattering its oldpowerstructure,U.S. forces there have been in loco par- entis. But that’s ending, with the formation of a coalition government headed by Prime MinisterNouri al-Maliki. Vice President Biden ex-
plained to a small group of journalists last week at the White House how he helped midwife the new government. But though it includes all the major political factions, it’s as fragile as Iraqi politics itself. And Biden said explicitly, in answer to a question, that if this weak center doesn’t hold and the country slips back into civilwar, theUnited States isn’t coming to the rescue. What’s ahead? As the coali-
tion deal was being reached, Iranian operatives are said by an Arab intelligence source to have circulated an order to kill former prime minister Ayad Allawi and other members of his Iraqiya Party. But don’t expect Uncle Sam to solve the problem. You’re on your own, kids.
davidignatius@washpost.com
KLMNO
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A21 GEORGEF.WILL Our
is “merely that of fixing the outside border of reasonable legislative action,” this still gives courts “a great and stately jurisdic- tion.” While patrolling that jurisdiction today, Supreme Court justices may be playing the video game “Postal 2,” whose richmenuof simulatedmayhemprovoked California’s legislature to pass a problem- atic law. During the oral argument aboutwheth-
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er the law restricting children’s access to violent video games violates First Amend- ment guarantees of free expression, the lawyer representing game manufacturers urged the court to remember America’s history of moral panics, which he said included one in the early 1950s about comic books. Really? Yes, and the episode remains instructive. An estimated 90 percent of children 8
MANDEL NGAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
President Obama speaks after touring a transmissions plant inKokomo, Ind., last week.
DAVIDS.BRODER
How to test Obama on bipartisanship
says that neitherpartybyitselfcanrealistical- ly hope to solve the challenges facing the United States? Suppose he means it when he says that
S
after the shellacking he and his fellow Demo- crats received in the midterm elections,heis ready and willing to hear the Republicans’ ideas for dealing with jobs, taxes, energy and even nuclear weapons control. I know that is supposing a lot — so much
that it seems impossible. It’s more like the script for a Broadway musical than a plausi- ble plotline forWashington. But nonetheless, suppose that he is serious when he says, over and over, as he did on Thanksgiving Day, that if we want to “accelerate this recovery” and attack the backlog of lost jobs, “we won’t do it as any one political party.We’ve got to do it as one people.” Should Republicans in their expanded
ranks in Congress believe this? Perhaps one or two may remember that back in 2004, when Obama was free to speak his mind as the newly nominated Democratic candidate for senator from Illinois, he told the Demo- cratic National Convention exactly the same thing. In the normally partisan keynote address
that launched him on the path to the White House, the young state legislator chose to address himself not to his fellow Democrats but to his fellow Americans. And to challenge to them to seek and find what they have in common, not simply what divides them. Suppose there is a chance that he is serious
— that after two years of trying to govern through one party, a party that held com- manding majorities in theHouse and Senate but now has lost them, two years with land- mark accomplishments but ultimate frustra- tion of his hopes to change Washington, he has reverted to his original philosophy of governing. What would Republicans do if they thoughttherewasachanceof thatbeingtrue?
uppose he is serious. What if Barack Obama is telling the truth about his own beliefs when he
They would do what Ronald Reagan always recommended in dealing with the Russians: Trust but verify. They would test him. As they should. When the leaders of the congressional Repub-
licans meet this week with Obama at the White House bipartisan summit that the president proposed immediately after Election Day and that they asked to postpone, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell should be prepared with a set of challenges to Obama’s seriousness. They might start with an area that traditional-
ly has been beyond politics: national security. The president has said it is a high priority forhim to see theNewSTART treaty with Russia ratified during this lame-duck session of Congress. JonKyl, theRepublicanNo.2in the Senateand
its lead voice on nuclear policy, has raised a number of issues he says must be resolved before such approval is
given.Kyl andObamahave been negotiating through intermediaries and have satisfied each other on most but not all points. The Republicans could ask Obama to sit down
directly with Kyl and see if they can compromise on the rest. That would be a fair first test of Obama’s sincerity. Another involves the soon-to-expire Bush tax
cuts. Almost everyone agrees they should be renewed for the 98 percent of American families earning below $250,000 a year. The president opposes but Republicans support extending them also for the top 2 percent. That is another issue on which Boehner and
McConnell would be justified in challenging Obama and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to negotiate with them and the top Republicans on the HouseWays andMeans and Senate Finance committees. And they could ask that the newly confirmed administration budget chief, Jacob Lew, fresh from his experience as deputy secretary of state, be added to the mix, with hopes that his diplo- matic skills can help find a way to close the gap. Those would be two ways of testing whether
Obamais serious, as I believe the evidence shows that he is. Trust but verify. A good Republican approach.
davidbroder@washpost.com
to 13 then read 10-cent comic books, of which scores of millions were sold weekly. The worrydujourwasjuvenile delinquen- cy. By 1957, delinquency—how quaint the term sounds — would be romanticized in “Romeo and Juliet” recast as “West Side Story.” But by 1953, delinquency was con- sidered an epidemic symptomatic of na- tional decline, so the U.S. Senate estab- lished a juvenile delinquency subcommit- tee. It included Estes Kefauver, the spot- light-seeking Tennessean whose 1950-51 hearings on organized crime — the first congressional hearings to have a mass television audience — made him a presi- dential candidate and, in 1956, the Demo- crats’ vice presidential nominee. In 1954, Fredric Wertham brought sci-
ence — very loosely defined — to the subject of juvenile crime. Formerly chief resident in psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, he was politically progressive: When he opened a clinic inHarlem, he named it for PaulLafargue, KarlMarx’s son-in-lawwho
This month the Supreme Court was urged to remember America’s history of moral panics.
translated portions of “Das Kapital” into French, thereby facilitating the derange- ment of Parisian intellectuals. Without ever interviewing the convict-
ed spy Ethel Rosenberg, Wertham testi- fied on her behalf concerning what he called her “prison psychoses.” Since 1948, he had been campaigning against comic books, and his 1954 book, “Seduction of the Innocent,” which was praised by the progressive sociologist C. Wright Mills, became a bestseller by postulating a caus- al connection between comic books and the desensitization of young criminals: “Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry.” Wertham was especially alarmed about
the one-third of comic books that were horror comics, but his disapproval was capacious: Superman, who gave short shrift to due process in his crime-fighting, was a crypto-fascist. As for Batman and Robin, the “homoerotic tendencies” were patent. Even beforeWertham’s book appeared,
a committee of New York’s legislature considered government licensing of com- ic-book publishers. More than a dozen states passed laws restricting sales of comic books—laws similar to the Califor- nia one pertaining to video games. Some civic groups staged comic-book bonfires. Comic-book publishers fended off such pressures by adopting a severe code of conduct. Soon even Betty and Veronica, those less-than-wanton femme fatales of the “Archie” comics, had their supposedly provocative protuberances made less so by donning looser-fitting blouses. In 1956, fear of comic books was sud-
they may be forced by a lack of alterna- tives to vote in traditional ways. But what if there were an alternative?
There’s little appealing about either par- ty dominated by a base that bears little resemblance towhoweare as a nation or the way most of us live our lives. Yet moderate Democrats and moder-
ate Republicans alike have been ban- ished. Purged, really. Some of them have landed in theNo Labels camp. Jun Choi, a Democratic former mayor
of Edison, N.J., told the Wall Street Journal he lost because he wasn’t ex- treme enough. Maggie Hassan, a New Hampshire state senator, thinks she lost for being too moderate. In South Carolina, Republican Rep.
Bob Inglis lost because he wouldn’t demonize Barack Obama. In a recent interview, he told me that he refused to say that Obama is a Muslim, or that he wasn’t born in the United States, or that the president is a socialist. Inglis was warned by a Republican operative that conceding Obama’s legitimacy would cause him problems. Indeed, Inglis lost to a Tea Party candidate. Inglis is otherwise one of the rational
conservatives who dare to suggest that, yes, we have to make painful cuts in entitlements. And, heresy of all, he ac- knowledges that climate change is real and that a carbon tax, offset by tax cuts elsewhere, is a plausible approach to regulation.
Inglis’s measured, thoughtful tone corresponds to a different school of political thought than what has domi- nated this past political season. Rational and calm, he resisted the finger-pointing andhyperbole that tend to capture atten- tion and votes. Can an Inglis ever survive in such a
culture? If not, what are we left with? Theanswermaybepartially evident in
the write-in election victory of Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. The first success- ful write-in candidate in a U.S. Senate race since Strom Thurmond was elected in 1954, Murkowski won the third way. Defeated in the Republican primary by Sarah Palin’s pick, JoeMiller,Murkowski refused to fade into history’s index of has-beens. She kept her seat by promoting ideas
and solutions and by rebuking partisan- ship.
Alaskans are by nature independent
and reliably rogue, as the nation has
witnessed.Thus itmay be too convenient to draw conclusions about a broader movement, but centrism has a place at the table by virtue of the sheer numbers of middle Americans, the depth of their disgust and the magnitude of our prob- lems. All that’s missing from a centrist movement that could be formidable is a leader. Anyone?
kathleenparker@washpost.com
denly eclipsed by fear of Elvis Presley, whosepelvis would not be the last cause of moral panic. Pre-Presley panics had con- cerned ragtime music, “penny dreadful” novels, jazz, “penny theatres,” radio and movies. By 1926, seven states and at least 100 municipalities had censors who pre- screened movies. In 1940, NBC radio banned more than 140 songs that were thought to encourage, among other evils, “disrespect for virginity.” NBC would broadcast only the instrumental version of Cole Porter’s “Love for Sale.” Post-Pres- ley panics about threats to children have concerned television (broadcast, then ca- ble), rap music and the Internet. Concern for children’s sensibilities is admirable. The coarsening of the culture is a fact with many causes, but its conse- quences are
unclear.Andit can bring out a Puritan streak in progressivism. The lawyer for the video-game industry
warned the Supreme Court that “the land is awash” with contemporary versions of Anthony Comstock (1844-1915), the cru- sader for censorship of indecency, as he spaciously defined it. “Today’s crusaders,” the lawyer said, “come less from the pulpit than from university social science de- partments, but their goals and tactics remain the same.” Progressivism is a faith-based program.
The progressives’ agenda for improving everyone else varies but invariably in- volves the cult of expertise — an unflag- ging faith in the application of science to social reform. Progressivism’s itch to per- fect people by perfecting the social envi- ronment can produce an interesting phe- nomenon—the Pecksniffian progressive.
georgewill@washpost.com
puritanical progressives
n eminent Harvard law professor, James Thayer (1831-1902), argued that although the judicial function
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