Archive for category National Politics
Maps
Posted by Joshua Sharf in 2012 Presidential Race, Media Bias, National Politics, PPC, War on Islamism on September 28th, 2012
Still catching up from the New England trip. Today was the Ceremonial Marking of the Maps. It’s something I enjoy doing tremendously, marking out the routes that we took. I usually end up doing it twice – once on the large US map, and once on the individual AAA maps. If you like driving, the roads you’ve driven are sort of an archive unto themselves. 2001: the Columbia River Gorge and the Oregon coast. 1997, and then 1999 again: The Loneliest Road in America across Nevada. 2011: A helluva lot of Nebraska. 2012: The Grand Tour of New England. You can’t really get to know a place by driving through it once, which it why great photographers often make a career out of one state. But you can get a little sense of the lay of the land, see what you missed, and plan the next trip.
As for the photographs, I’m still working on those. Posted a bunch of them to Facebook, but a two-week excursion into the Far Northeast deserves a section on The Site, not just a Facebook album. Of course, you could say the same thing about Nebraska.
In the meantime, maybe someone needs to get the working press a map to what happened in Benghazi, and then perhaps they can politely ask for their manhood back from whatever jar Jay Carney is keeping it in. I realize that what we used to affectionately call the MSM thinks that this time, they really show us who’s boss. They thought they had done that during Katrina, when they finally got their revenge for being thwarted in the 2004 election. (You remember 2004, don’t you? The year that the Tiffany Network teamed up with 42nd Street to foist a false-document hoax on the public to unseat a sitting President?) It must be tiring for them, having to do this over and over again.
I have a very old friend, a White House reporter for a newspaper you’ve probably heard of. He wrote a piece a few days after the September 11 attacks this year, parroting the administration line about the whole thing being, as Mark Steyn put it, film criticism that got out of hand. I wrote him a brief email, asking him how he could write this as fact, when it was clear, even then, that at a minimum, the attack in Libya didn’t have anything to do with the video, and that the video’s connection to the rest of what was going on was word-of-mouth and tenuous at best. He replied that “the intel guys didn’t have indications of premeditation.” Um, the intel guys were lying to you, my friend. Now that is a story in its own right. Count on it to be written sometime after January 21, 2017.
But just in case anyone in the briefing room wants to turn in their claim check on the family jewels, Bill Hobbs has helpfully put together a road map of the administration’s handling of this year’s September 11:
Fact: The Obama administration required our ambassador in Libya to be “protected” by “security” people who had no bullets in their guns.
Fact: The Obama administration was forewarned of the possibility of a terrorist attack against the U.S. in Libya days before 9/11/12. Fact: The Obama administration made zero changes to the security measures taken to protect our ambassador and defend our embassy and consulate.
Fact: the terrorist attack the Obama administration was warned was likely did in fact happen.
Fact: Our ambassador and three other Americans were killed.
Fact: For two weeks, the Obama administration continued to insist that the attack on the Benghazi consulate was a spontaneous riot of a mob angry about a YouTube video – when it KNEW that American intelligence services had determined within 24 hours that the attack was clearly a pre-planned, sophisticated terrorist attack.
Fact: Obama went to sleep the night of the attack while the ambassador was missing – and a four-hour terrorist assault was underway.
Fact: The morning after the worst terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11/01, attack, Obama went to Las Vegas to campaign.
Fact: There NEVER WAS an angry mob rioting outside the Benghazi consulate.
Fact: The Obama administration sent our UN Ambassador onto FIVE different news programs last Sunday to lie and claim the attack on the embassy was an out of control mob – when the administration already knew it was a terrorist attack.
Fact: While the Obama administration claims the attack is “under investigation,” 16 days after the attack, FBI agents have not even gone to Benghazi.
Fact: The most significant piece of information found at the scene of the attack – Ambassador Stevens’ diary – was found by a CNN news crew.
Fact: Entries in that diary strongly suggest that Stevens had been warned he was the target of an impending attack.
Fact: The Obama administration, confronted with the contents of Stevens’ diary, chose instead to talk about whether CNN violated journalistic ethics by reporting from the diary.
Fact: In his UN speech yesterday, Obama continued to pretend that outrage over a YouTube video is what caused the deaths of Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans at the Benghazi consulate
As much as I would like to have the luxury of this just being about media bias, there’s an election coming up, and the primary victims of journalistic malfeasance are going to be the voters, who will be confronted at some point with the fact that their government is taking them for fools, who probably already know that, but will never actually have that knowledge confirmed by so much as an editorial in their newspapers. Somewhere down the line, the official story will change from “riots over a video,” to “terrorist attack,” and by then it will already be old news, so the change will go unnoticed, and Oceania will always have been at war with East Asia. Which is what happens when an administration can conduct neither defense nor diplomacy.
It can’t do it because its thinking is a muddle, and its moral compass always seems to be operating near Iron Mountain.
As usual, it is left to Benjamin Netanyahu to provide both a conscience and clarity. That bomb chart with the red line was simply brilliant, mostly because it was brilliant in its simplicity. Naturally, the wags have been all over it, using the bomb’s blank interior as a canvas. Here’s my favorite:
Anything that simplifies can be mocked. But it will mostly be mocked in Israel, where an open society can always make fun of its leaders, and nobody actually can afford to take the threat lightly. Netanyahu’s a big boy with a thick skin, and can take such lampooning easily, knowing he reached his target audience with clarity, two things Obama seems incapable of.
When we were kids, we used to try to make up different planets, and then game out world conquest. But at one point, a friend of mine, I think the same one who’s the White House correspondent, said that they new maps were superfluous, because earth already had so many strategic choke points and such interesting terrain. Right now, we’re worried about Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz. But consider what happens when the Suez Canal is no longer a sure thing, and the Mediterranean coast of Africa starts bristling with anti-ship missiles with the names of our carriers on them.
These are deeply serious times, and we have a deeply unserious administration governing, and a deeply unserious press not covering them, but covering for them.
June 1998 Video of Obama on Political Coalitions and the Working Poor
Posted by Joshua Sharf in 2012 Presidential Race, National Politics, PPC, President 2012 on September 24th, 2012
The Daily Caller has posted the unedited audio of then-State Senator Barack Obama at a Loyola College forum, where he discusses the importance of uniting the working poor with welfare recipients as a political coalition.
Turns out this wasn’t a one-off, or a cool idea that occurred to him in the middle of the forum, but something he had been thinking about for a while. Here’s C-SPAN video of him at a Brookings Institute forum on the State of the Cities four months earlier, on June 14, 1998:
Why is this problematic? Traditionally, the working poor haven’t identified with welfare recipients, but with the middle class, just as the middle class tends to identify with the rich. They tend to see themselves as hopeful and upwardly-mobile. By getting the working poor to see themselves as having more in common with recent welfare recipients, Obama is hoping to get them to believe that they need/want/are entitled to government help that they might not have sought otherwise, and to form a voting bloc in favor of expanded government redistribution.
Forward! To The 1870s!
Posted by Joshua Sharf in 2012 Presidential Race, History, National Politics on September 23rd, 2012
A lot’s been made in the last few days about the new Obama campaign “flag,” which replaces the 50 stars with the Obama campaign symbol. (After all, who need 50 stars when you can get by with The One?) As a counterpoint, some on the left have taken to posting Lincoln campaign flags, and a few of my friends on the left haven’t been above calling conservatives names over their outrage. It turns out it wasn’t just Lincoln who did this – it was a fairly common, almost standard campaign motif from about 1840 to William McKinley. I’ve collected a slideshow (although those of you reading this in email will need to go to the site to see it):
Then, starting in the very late 1800s, around about the same time that we started to take our place on the world stage, our attitude about the flag started to change as well. In 1898, the poem, “Hats Off!” was published. It was still current as late as the 1960s, when it was being republished in a book I read as a kid. The Pledge of Allegiance was published in 1892, as well. (Ironically, Francis Bellamy was a Christian socialist, but nowadays it’s the “right-wingers” who open meetings with it. It was written in the days when American socialism was more nationalist, and less Internationale, I suppose. Good thing they dropped the salute, though.) And in 1924, the Code of Conduct for the Flag was finally enacted, about a generation after the flag’s started to become a more venerated symbol. By that time, of course, putting your picture on the flag had long gone out of fashion.
Does this mean that the Obama campaign flag is much ado about nothing? I don’t think so. I was never outraged by the appropriation of the flag, but I did consider it to be just another example of the creepy cult of personality that Obama seems way too comfortable with, and which is completely inappropriate for a sitting president of a democratic republic. Harsanyi missed this year’s DNC logo, a stylized Obama campaign “O.” I looked back at convention logos of both parties from 1980 onward, and didn’t see anything remotely like that for either party. He also didn’t mention the other weird stuff, like making an “O” with your hands in 2008, and the Obama Campaign Wedding Registry.
We’ve lionized presidents before, but usually after they’ve left office. Lincoln, FDR, Kennedy, and Reagan come to mind. Three of them died in office, three led us through decisive moments in major struggles. (JFK’s persists to this day. I was looking at a poster of presidential portraits in DAT this morning, and while almost all were the official presidential portrait, Kennedy’s was of his standing with his hand on his desk, head bowed, in a golden haze, which struck me as a little over-the-top. Fifty years on, that sort of thing isn’t doing anything to encourage serious appraisals of his time in office, is it?) But I can’t remember anything like this for a living President, and Obama’s the eighth one I’ve been conscious of.
Certainly the way that Obama did this is different from what came before. In some ways, the redesign does more violence to the flag than the portraits did. The Obama “O” is a paler shade of blue, cyan really. And the previous presidents and campaigns at least kept the stars there, rather than replacing them entirely. But I’m sure that if he had put his portrait, or a stylized, dark blue monochrome of the Sheperd Fairey poster there, and kept the stars, it would still have been weird. It’s not just about the design elements.
My friend State Senator Shawn Mitchell put his finger on it when he said that campaign symbols, indeed any political symbols, are created in a particular time and a particular environment. In the 1870s, people were used to seeing this sort of thing. Now they’re not.
The claim that this is just reviving an old tradition of flag redesign doesn’t ring true, not in today’s context. A lot’s changed since the late 19th Century, and how we think about the flag is only part of it. Maybe it was more acceptable when the Republic was younger. Maybe there was a recognition that the presidency was itself, in some way, a national symbol, and that in the days before the federal government has usurped so much of the states’ powers, there was less danger in any one individual who occupied the office.
So how about a deal. We’ll stop complaining about Obama “desecrating” the flag, if they’ll pare back the Federal Government to the scope it had in 1876.
Swing States & National Elections
Posted by Joshua Sharf in 2012 Presidential Race, National Politics, PPC on August 3rd, 2012
In my comment yesterday, I noted that in my experience, campaigns that find themselves behind in the national polls, but believe they can win by targeting only swing states, are generally losing campaigns. You might be able to pull that off if the difference is less than 1%, but nobody is going to win the Electoral College while losing the mythical national popular vote by 3%, as Rasmussen has consistently had Romney leading Obama by.
Comes this from Bill Kristol at the Weekly Standard, quoting an election-savvy friend of his:
“The national numbers aren’t changing much because Romney is actually gaining in the states that are not being bombarded with media. Yesterday’s Connecticut poll has Obama by only 8 for example. And red states seem to be getting even redder. This is happening because the daily news is about the economy, Washington problems, etc. and that is the main message getting through. So, polls in these states reflect how voters who only see national news and national advertising (to the degree there is any) respond.
…
“One can draw a lot of different conclusions here—but doesn’t it seem likely that the Obama attack on Romney is working where it is deployed in full measure? I think many analysts have erroneously concluded that because the national tracking has not moved, the Obama attack on Romney’s wealth, Bain, taxes, etc. is not effective. The results in these states suggest otherwise.”
Hidden in here is the reason that, barring something that shakes up the race, it’s a losing strategy for Obama. If the overall national trend is in favor of Romney, light blue states will tend to move to toss-up, while he consolidates his hold on the toss-up and lean-Romney states that Obama isn’t advertising in.
Faced with having raised less money, Obama is staying in the game only by virtue of outspending Romney in key states. This puts him in a position similar to that of McCain four years ago, who was practically invisible on the air towards the end of the campaign. Obama won’t be invisible, but he’ll be at a money disadvantage.
So Obama will find himself having to play defense in more and more states, with less and less money to do so. That’s why campaigns that go tactical this early in the process tend to lose.
It’s certainly possible that the national media will pick up on and repeat the Obama campaign message in the newscasts, but to be honest, I’m not sure how that really changes the nature of their coverage from where it is now.
Usual caveats apply, but it certainly looks as though this is a re-election campaign that knows it’s in trouble.
Capitals and Embassies
Posted by Joshua Sharf in 2012 Presidential Race, Israel, National Politics, PPC on August 2nd, 2012
This evening, the Romney campaign hosted a conference call for Jewish supporters, with the featured speaker being Dan Senor, author of “Startup Nation,” about Israel’s economy. Senor accompanied Gov. Romney on his recent foreign trip, and spoke about some of the highlights.
During the Q&A, I asked him specifically about his recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and moving the embassy there from Tel Aviv. A 1995 law provides for that, but also allows the President to waive that action for 6 months. Presidents Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama have all repeatedly put off moving the embassy to Jerusalem. President Obama recently took this equivocation to new heights, when his spokesman refused to identify Israel’s capital:
The followed the BBC’s failure to identify any city as Israel’s capital on its Olympics site, while readily identifying Jerusalem as the capital of the as-yet non-existent country of Palestine. While the Obama administration is hardly responsible for the BBC, its failure to support Israel generally – beyond the security cooperation – no doubt contributes to an atmosphere where the Beeb can perpetrate such insults.
While I don’t think anyone can reasonably question Romney’s affection for and support for Israel, Obama’s supporters have taken to pointing out that President Bush, while also identifying Israel’s capital as Jerusalem, repeated waived moving the embassy.
Senor, I think, aptly separated the two issues. Moving the embassy isn’t necessary to recognizing a country’s capital. Likewise, it should be a no-brainer to recognize that Israel’s national governmental institutions reside in a part of Jerusalem whose position as a part of Israel has never seriously been questioned. Doing that in no way pre-judges the final status negotiations, which may take place sometime in our lifetimes.
In other words, doing so should have no immediate practical implications vis-a-vis the Palestinians, except insofar as they and other Arabs choose to be rejectionist of even minimal Israeli demands. It would, however, be of significant symbolic importance, making it clear that the US supports Israel as a normal country within the nation state system.
That the Obama administration is incapable of even that tells you all you need to know about the difference between Romney and Obama on this matter.
About That Battleground States Poll
Posted by Joshua Sharf in 2012 Presidential Race, Media Bias, PPC, President 2012 on August 1st, 2012
The MSM is making much of this morning’s Quinnipiac/NY Times/CBS poll allegedly showing President Obama moving ahead in the battleground states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida. This poll should carry more weight, since it is a poll of likely voters, probably identified by whether or not they voted last time, and whether or not they voted in the primary. But as is often the case with MSM polls, the internals belie the conclusions.
The poll shows President Obama leading Governor Romney 50-44 in Ohio, 53-42 in Pennsylvania, and 51-45 in Florida.
Obama actually won these states 51-47, 54-44, and 51-48, respectively. That in itself should raise some suspicion. I don’t know of any other significant polls that show Obama running ahead of where he did in 2008. Nationally, he won by 7 points, and Rasmussen’s daily likely-voter poll has shown only occasional movement from a 47-44 Romney advantage. I suppose it’s possible that concentrated saturation-bombing could move polls in individual states, but I’ve seen such tactical strategies in the past, and they almost always come from losing campaigns.
The other odd number is how people claim to have voted in 2008. These are, respectively, 53-38, 54-40, and 53-40, or +11, +4, and +10 vs. how those states actually went. Even assuming people moved around, the numbers for Ohio and Florida are huge, and the number for Pennsylvania is still significant. While people are more likely to remember themselves as having voted either for a winner, or for their current preference, even if they voted the other way, it’s hard to believe these are representative of the people likely to vote in this election.
Lord knows, I’ve been wrong about polls before. Tomorrow morning at Denver’s First Thursday Breakfast, pollster Floyd Ciruli – a Democrat, but you’d never know his party affiliation from his commentaries – will be speaking. I’ll ask him about these conjectures then, and report what he has to say.
Romney’s New Ad Disappointing
Posted by Joshua Sharf in 2012 Presidential Race, National Politics, PPC on July 13th, 2012
One of the reasons I had – and still have – considerably more hope for the Romney campaign than I ever really did for the McCain campaign is that Romney has shown an ability to counter-punch, especially in the early, sparring rounds. But the Romney response to Obama’s discredited claims about outsourcing fall falt.
Let’s stipulate that a Democrat getting Four Pinnochios from the Washington Post on an ad is as close to metaphysical certainty that the ad is untrue as it’s possible to get in this lifetime. That still doesn’t make Romney’s response effective.
I’m unsure why featuring noted non-Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton doing the same thing that Mitt’s doing – telling Obama to cut it out – is supposed to help. To me, it just illustrates the tactic’s futility. It’s a little like Bob Dole futilely imploring George H.W. Bush to, “stop lying about my record.”
People expect their politicians to lie. People don’t expect their Presidents to lie, which is why Obama’s ad, explicitly saying that “What a President believes matters,” is so much more effective, even though the criticism would work better on him.
Adolescence Just Keeps Getting Longer
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Economics, Health Care, National Politics, PPC on July 11th, 2012
Two posts getting some attention today. First, this from Derek Thompson at the Atlantic:
And then this, from Taylor Cotter over at the Huffington Post:
I suppose that I’m grateful that I can make all my car payments and start saving for retirement while most of my friends are living at home and working part-time jobs — but I often find myself lamenting the fact that I’m not living at home and not working a part-time job. From my perspective, these are just some of the life-changing, character-building experiences that I may never have.
Now, it’s easy to laugh at Taylor, and Lord knows, I have. Oh, the struggles of not starving, not having to live at home. The horrors of being able to go out for drinks and read a book from time to time. The sheer insipidness of knowing that your rent is paid and there’s food on the table. Really, who wants to live like that?
But at a more serious level, the fact that she seriously thinks that she’s missing out on something by not spending mandatory time in her parents’ basement or her old room, shows that that may slowly be turning into the norm. It slows down adulthood, accumulation of both social and financial capital, and becomes harder and harder to reverse. Subsidizing the trend by putting 25-year-olds with masters degrees on their parents’ health insurance only aggravates the problem.
As young Taylor shows, it can become a desirable thing to start off your life that way. And when you think about it, why stop at 26? Or 30? Why not keep going all the way to early retirement. (Retirement from what? If you have to ask, man, you just don’t get it.) Well, the Greeks and the Spaniards show why.
Michael Barone likes to say that American has the worst 18-year-olds and the best 30-year-olds. That’s because the time immediately after college toughens kids up, and teaches them what the real world is like.
God help us when 40 becomes the new 30.
How Would You Sell The Tea Party?
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Business, Movies, National Politics, PPC on March 22nd, 2012
Reading Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw, I got to his essay, “True Colors: Hair Dye and the Hidden History of Postwar America.” He argues that the difference between Clairol’s “Does She or Doesn’t She?” and L’Oreal’s “Because I’m Worth It,” is the difference between 1950s and 1970s feminism. Moreover, even when the two product’s pitches had essentially merged (Gladwell was writing in 1999), their buyer’s different self-images lingered on. Smart ad men know they’re selling more than a product, they’re selling an experience, or an image. Sometimes, that image or dream ties into a larger social change or movement, and that that’s both a reflection and an agent of that change:
This notion of household products as psychological furniture is, when you think about it, a radical idea. When we give an account of how we got to where we are, we’re inclined to credit the philosophical over the physical, and the products of art over the products of commerce…
“Because I’m worth it,” and “Does she or doesn’t she?” were powerful, then, precisely because they were commercials, for commercials come with products attached, and products offer something that songs and poems and political movements and radical ideologies do not, which is an immediate and affordable means of transformation.
Far from trivializing a political, social, or economic movement, commercialization can help make it personal and accessible, and therefore less threatening and more familiar.
We’ve seen a couple of Tea Party movies, one explicitly so, (Atlas Shrugged), and one implicitly (Robin Hood). Thus far, I’m aware of only one commercial that implies a Tea Party presence, the Starbucks commercial with the angry old loner who yells at town halls, which would be a bit like L’Oreal selling “Because I’m worth it” using Nurse Ratchet or Gloria Steinem, who quickly became a caricature of herself.
It may be that we have to wait until the Tea Party sees more success, in winning hearts and minds if not yet national elections, before companies are willing to bet their products’ success on its messaging. But just as feminism succeeded in making the political personal (and more destructively, the personal political), and as environmentalism succeeded in making small actions and then products green, the Tea Party might get farther by doing something similar for its own themes.
It’s not wise to choose your political message based on the products it might sell, but certain themes will sell better than others. We can search forever in the tall grass of social history to discover how much of feminism’s public appeal was based on opportunity, and how much drew from raging against The Patriarchy, but there’s no question that positive sells. Ilon Specht may have been angry when she wrote, “Because I’m worth it,” but the slogan expresses liberation, not anger.
To be sure, it faces some hurdles in doing this. If the theme is fiscal responsibility, most families already need to spend less than they make. If it’s personal liberty, the government’s probably a tougher customer to disobeying rules, tougher than most companies. And to the extent that it dwells on what used to be, rather than what might be, its message is nostalgia, and the only products it will sell are baseball and Coca-Cola. You want to get people to invite your ideas into their homes, you need to be relevant to how they’re living their lives today, and want to be living them tomorrow.
So, what products do you see as being right for capturing the Tea Party ethos, and allowing people to internalize it? Which themes are best suited to commercialization? And what messages should go in their commercials? How would you write such a commercial?
Exactly Whom Is Our Secretary of State Representing?
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Israel, National Politics, PPC, War on Islamism on February 27th, 2012
From the Washington Examiner’s Joel Gehrke, a report on Attempted Public Diplomacy by our Secretary of State the other day in Tunisia:
QUESTION: My name is Ivan. After the electoral campaign starts in the United States – it started some time ago – we noticed here in Tunisia that most of the candidates from the both sides run towards the Zionist lobbies to get their support in the States. And afterwards, once they are elected, they come to show their support for countries like Tunisia and Egypt for a common Tunisian or a common Arab citizen. How would you reassure and gain his trust again once given the fact that you are supporting his enemy as well at the same time?
SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, first, let me say you will learn as your democracy develops that a lot of things are said in political campaigns that should not bear a lot of attention. There are comments made that certainly don’t reflect the United States, don’t reflect our foreign policy, don’t reflect who we are as a people. I mean, if you go to the United States, you see mosques everywhere, you see Muslim Americans everywhere. That’s the fact. So I would not pay attention to the rhetoric.
Secondly, I would say watch what President Obama says and does. He’s our President. He represents all of the United States, and he will be reelected President, so I think that that will be a very clear signal to the entire world as to what our values are and what our President believes. So I think it’s a fair question because I know that – I sometimes am a little surprised that people around the world pay more attention to what is said in our political campaigns than most Americans, say, are paying attention. So I think you have to shut out some of the rhetoric and just focus on what we’re doing and what we stand for, and particularly what our President represents.
The first problem, the one where she acts as a partisan advocate for the President, she’s already admitted was a mistake: “My enthusiasm for the President got a little out of hand.” I’ll say. I realize the days of politics stopping at the shoreline are long gone, and have been at least since Ted Kennedy tried to cut a deal with the Soviets to defeat Ronald Reagan in the Presidential elections, and Jimmy Carter circulated a letter begging UN Security Council members to vote against President George H.W. Bush’s efforts to liberate Kuwait. Nevertheless, I was operating under the quaint assumption that the Secretary of State represented the country, not her political party, when she traveled overseas.
The second problem is much more substantive. Tunisians might well understand a personal loyalty from the Secretary of State, they’re more likely to attach significance to foreign policy pronouncements. Her answer, roughly translated into English, is, “Don’t worry about what gets said in the campaign. There’s a lot of pandering to small, specific lobbies. We’re not really all that supportive of Israel.”
If she felt the need to be non-committal, there are about 100 ways she could have done that. But what about an answer that defends not only the interests of the United States, but the good sense of the American people, and the interests of our allies, as well? Something like:
Well, you have to understand that the American people as a whole, not just particular lobbies, feel a sympathy towards Israel, for its democracy, and its success in defending itself against enemies. Naturally, we hope that that era is coming to an end, and Israel and her neighbors can live in peace. but
Rather than defining your interests in opposition to Israel, perhaps you should look to them as a model in some ways. It, too, is a small country, whose primary resource is the creativity of its own diverse population. After all, your question implies an interest in our own democratic process for how we select leaders and how that affects policy, so it’s clear that Tunisians would like to develop a stable, lasting free system of their own. And I think the Arab Spring could learn a lot from a close neighbor who also wants close relations.
I realize it’s much more fun to engage in “Smart Diplomacy,” but how about mastering actual, basic diplomacy first. That starts with not accepting all the premises of a hostile question.
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