A couple of days and one judicious Spencer Ackerman intervention later, it occurs to me that a clearly and less inflammatory way of making the point I was getting at here would be to simply reference the recent Pew survey comparing mass public opinion to the views of the foreign policy elite, defined as members of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Not too surprisingly, there are a lot of differences. Notably, the mass public is less enthusiastic about trade agreements and less enthusiastic about U.S. “global leadership” on geopolitical issues. The mass public is simultaneously more unilateralist as a matter of principle and also more interested in burden-sharing with other countries. Personally, I sympathize with the elite consensus about a lot of things (trade, a relatively benign view of China, a belief that climate change is an important issue) but I tend to be closer to the masses on the merits of an activist foreign policy.

Now you could ask yourself, do members of elite foreign policy institutions hold the views they hold because they’re somehow corrupt or on the take? I think that would be silly. What I think is true, however, is that one thing that makes those institutions elite is the fact that they have a relatively large amount of money behind them and formal and informal ties to U.S. government agencies. And it’s the very eliteness of elite views that makes them influential out of proportion to the actual number of people who hold them.

The House of Representatives has already given us a good climate bill and a good universal health care bill. They seem poised to vote out a financial regulatory package quite soon. In the senate, none of those things have happened. They’re closest on health care, but instead of voting on a bill on Monday morning they’ll be doing . . . additional procedural antics more suitable to an elementary school student council goofing off than a crucial public institution of what’s still the world’s leading power.

Steven Hill has a nice op-ed in the FT on how ridiculous the whole thing is:

For a start, this “representative” body hardly looks or thinks like the rest of the nation. Only 17 senators are women, while the US as a whole has more women than men. Only five senators are Hispanic, black, or Asian-American, whereas one-third of Americans now belong to ethnic minorities.

A senator’s average age is an elderly 63 and most are wealthy millionaires. A famous 19th-century aphorism said: “It is harder for a poor man to enter the United States Senate than for a rich man to enter heaven,” and things are hardly different today. The senescent senators already have great healthcare benefits themselves, even while tens of millions of Americans do not. This powerful legislative body debating healthcare for the entire country is a patrician gerontocracy more closely resembling the ancient Roman Senate than a New England town meeting.

He also observes that not only is it ridiculous that 41 senators can block action, but the GOP 40 only represents about a third of the population!

At any rate, it’s hard not to sympathize with the Democrats as they struggle with Judd Gregg’s obstruction manual. But on an important level, you really shouldn’t. They’re all a part of the same absurd farce and until they come to recognize that’s what the senate is—not the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” but a bizarre anachronism—nothing will be done about it. When wild-eyed right-wingers wanted to deploy the “nuclear option” in 2005 the stage was set to at least attempt a broad structural reform and a return to majority rules. But instead the Democrats were so eager to preserve the right to filibuster that they agreed to surrender on the actual substantive point at issue—Bush’s crappy judicial nominees. And with the partial exception of Bernie Sanders, I never hear any of them talking about reform. Whining about obstruction, maybe. And, fine, whine away. But the question is what path will be taken to do something about it.

(cc photo by Wili Hybrid)

Peter Suderman highlights a disappointing moment from the president’s generally excellent Allentown Q&A:

Prompted by a rather bizarre question from a Sophomore at Lehigh Carbon Community College who wanted to know – based on his criminology course studies – if the President has considered legalizing prostitution, some drugs, and releasing non-violent offenders to stimulate the economy, the President answered with an unequivocal no.

“I appreciate the boldness of your question,” Mr. Obama said during his Allentown, PA jobs town hall, “That will not be my job strategy.”

Obama delivered the line well and got a good laugh out of everyone. But this is a serious proposal—more serious, I dare say, than Evan Bayh’s threat to default on the national debt unless he gets a pointless commission appointed—that deserves a somewhat serious answer. I think it’s obvious you can’t end the recession by legalizing prostitution and drugs. But at the same time, it should also be obvious that there are real economic costs associated with the prohibition of these activities and politicians ought to actually justify asking people to bare those costs. This is particularly pressing because the laws in question are so selectively enforced. Elliot Spitzer had his political career derailed by prostitution, but he’s not in jail. Does Obama think the world would be a better place if Spitzer were serving hard time? What about Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana? For that matter, does Obama think the world would be a better place if he’d been caught using drugs back in the day and sent to jail?

Presumably not. But to have laws on the books that the national elite fully intends never to apply to themselves or their families is ridiculous. I don’t want to see hookers and blow available for sale at the corner store, but there’s enormous scope for the reform of our policy in this area.

The administration’s Afghanistan surge strategy strikes me as a questionable allocation of national resources. But the strategy-qua-strategy has sounded perfectly reasonable to me, and I think there’s reason to believe that an adequately resourced population-centric strategy can be made to work. And given that the decision has been made to allocate vast resources to this endeavor, I’m certainly hoping it works even though if it were up to me we wouldn’t be going down this road.

But the new operation currently underway—dubbed “Cobra’s Anger”—an offensive in Helmand Province seems to have a somewhat problematic relationship to the overall strategic concept. We’re attacking a sparsely-populated area (NYT: “an effort to finally secure what was once a bustling village but what years of fighting have turned into a ghost town”) where public opinion is more hostile to us than is the case in most parts of the country. The strategic objective sounds enemy-centric (to re-occupy “Helmand, a Taliban stronghold whose huge opium crop provides a large portion of the insurgency’s financing”) as do the tactics (“assault Taliban sanctuaries in Helmand”). And as Mike Crowley wrote yesterday a wide range of people, from COIN guru John Nagl to Senator Carl Levin, are on record as thinking this Helmand focus is misplaced.

One assumes that part of the background here is simply that there was an unsuccessful campaign in Helmand earlier this year. If a renewed assault can be made to work, that will help vindicate the earlier effort, whereas if Helmand is abandoned in favor of some more promising area that might be seen by some as conveying the idea that those who lost their lives earlier this year died in vain. I don’t think that’s the right way to think about the situation, but you can see how it would exert a powerful pull over people in the field.

Strategically, the risk is that by focusing on places where the Taliban is well-entrenched rather than places where its gains are recent and tenuous, you ultimately undermine the objective of producing a short-term change in momentum that alters the political calculus.