As a descriptive matter it is in fact the case that many people yearn for politicians to respond to national security threats in a manner that fills certain psychological needs rather than in a way that represents a reasonable policy response to a problem. But normally when you hear this explicitly stated, it’s by someone like me accusing other people of implicitly wanting this. It’s rare that you see something like Maureen Dowd’s column explicitly making the point:

He’s so sure of himself and his actions that he fails to see that he misses the moment to be president — to be the strong father who protects the home from invaders, who reassures and instructs the public at traumatic moments.

He’s more like the aloof father who’s turned the Situation Room into a Seminar Room.

Sorry, no. The Situation Room is not a Seminar Room, but it’s also not the Reassuring Dad room. It’s a place where the President meets with key officials to decide what to do in response to emergencies. The “moment to be president” starts when you swear the oath of the office and it ends when your successor takes office. And the job is to make decisions that reflect a realistic assessment of the risks, of the available policy options, and of the costs and benefits involved in the different options. Reassuring children is a job for parents. Treating adults like they’re little children is, perhaps, a job for newspaper columnists.

Personally, I’m not happy with some of the things Obama has done in response to the failed pantsbomber—the new “profiling lite” policy in particular—but this sort of complaint from Dowd makes me feel a lot more sympathetic to the guy.

Via Brad DeLong, Noel Maurer looks at the People’s Bank of China’s balance sheet and concludes that maybe we can’t find much consumer price inflation in China because there really isn’t much inflation happening:

He points out that complaints about currency manipulation aside, the renminbi really did appreciate in 2007 and 2008. And when that process stopped the mysterious “other liabilities” category began to grow:

Well, look at the orange indicator. High-powered money isn’t growing. What is growing is the white block at the top, what the PBOC calls “other liabilities.” I have no idea what those are, but they represent currency mopped up by the central bank. In other words, the PBOC is keeping a lid on inflation by taking in liquid renminbi from somebody in exchange for an IOU of some sort.

At some point, the PBOC will no longer be able to keep up this balancing act. They might sink the economy by sucking up too much liquidity and depriving the private economy of credit. They might lose their ability to control inflation. Or they might let the renminbi rise. But there are reasons to believe — and I should mention that I have changed my opinion on this issue in the last year or so — that the Chinese government and PBOC may be able to keep up the balancing act for some time. In theory, I think, it should be sustainable as long as Chinese firms remain profitable enough to finance themselves via retained earnings despite the fact that a big chunk of those earnings wind up metaphorically sitting in the PBOC coffers.

I think that probably the most important part of this is the reminder about the renminbi appreciation that happened in the recent past. People sometimes discuss China’s stance on exchange rates as if it’s driven by an absolutely dogmatic refusal to allow appreciation. But the evidence from this chart suggests to me that when the only way to control consumer price inflation is to have China’s currency appreciate, then that’s what they do.

So to repeat myself, when talking about the currency issue I think it’s important to keep a distinction in mind. If the renminbi appreciates as a result of much tighter money in China, it’s not clear who that helps under circumstances where the global economy remains depressed. But if US undertakes additional monetary easing, that will likely press the Chinese to appreciate the renminbi to prevent major inflation. That would accomplish the narrow goals of US exporters and import-competers, in a way that accords with broader interests.

It appears that some anonymous person told Heliemann and/or Halperin that Ted Kennedy told him that Bill Clinton said to Kennedy, of Barack Obama, that “a few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.” In the interests of selling books, some of found it useful to read this as a comment about race—like that forty years ago Obama would be getting coffee for important politicians, not serving in the United States Senate.

That seems, however, like a bizarre reading of the situation. It’s quite literally true that in the relatively recent past—the year 1994, say—both Clinton and Kennedy were extremely important figures in American politics and Obama was a young and well-regarded politically active Chicago attorney, the sort of person who might be eligible for a staff job working for Clinton or Kennedy.

I think it requires a senselessly uncharitable view of not only Clinton’s views on race, but also his basic intelligence, to think that he would have thought the other line of argument would be a smart gambit to break out. I learned about this contretemps from Mark Kleiman’s sensible take.

Kleiman also has a persuasive defense of Harry Reid. To clarify what I said yesterday it’s the very lack of having really done anything wrong that makes Reid’s situation to sticky. It’s just jarring for those of us under a certain age to think of an old white guy walking around saying “negro” and wielding political influence. But Reid can’t really apologize for being the sort of old white guy who would say that because he is, in fact, just such an old white guy. On the merits, the observation that it’s a political asset for Obama that he doesn’t speak in a manner that’s racially coded as black is pretty much banal conventional wisdom.

Yemen has a lot of problems. It would be nice, for a variety of reasons, to see those problems ameliorated. The United States could, in principle, play a role in assisting the amelioration of many of those problems. The fiscal cost of providing assistance is not likely to be beyond the capacity of the world’s richest country. Which is to say that I’m in agreement with many of the analytic points the Washington Post makes in its editorial on Yemen. But the tone and overall attitude they bring to bear couldn’t be more wrong. The Post labels any doubts about the feasibility of the mission “defeatist.” They dismiss practical objections with a vague and plainly irrelevant reference to the success of the Marshall Plan. They wave off concerns about cost-benefit analysis with an irrelevant comparison to defense spending as a percent of GDP during the Cold War era. The issue of why a health care program must be deficit-neutral but a hazily defined counterinsurgency mission in Yemen mustn’t isn’t even raised.

But most of all, the characterization of the strategic issues at the end is a disaster:

There is much that the United States and its Arab and European allies could do in Yemen. Little has been done to prepare the country for a future in which its supplies of both oil and water may disappear. Outside mediation could ease the government’s war against Houthi rebels in the north and an increasingly violent conflict with political opponents in the south. Independent media and civil society groups seeking to broaden political freedoms could be supported and shielded. Government forces could be trained not just in counterterrorism operations but in the broader counterinsurgency mission, centered on protecting the population, that has become the model for Iraq and Afghanistan. All this could be costly and take time. But as in Afghanistan, the alternative is to pursue a policy that won’t defeat al-Qaeda.

There’s a lot of conditional claims there. And if the conditional “coulds” are taken in the right spirit, this is absolutely true. But it’s all undermined by the ponderous claim that anything less than an all-in approach to Yemen amounts to a surrender to al-Qaeda.

Consider: Outside mediation really could help ease Yemen’s civil conflicts. But for that to happen, political actors need to believe that we’ll stop helping them if they act in a totally unreasonable manner.

Similarly, Independent media and civil society groups seeking to broaden political freedoms really could be supported and shielded. But there’s a tension between trying to improve a state’s internal security forces and trying to create more space for independent media and civil society groups. It might be possible to navigate the tension, but then again it might not. And, again, it’s more likely to work if the government thinks we will stop helping them if they act in an inhumane and unreasonable manner.

One can go on down the list like this. Again, I hesitate to say too much about the specific situation in Yemen, since like all our country’s leading pundits my base of knowledge about Yemen, though growing, is tiny. But the general logic of the situation is one that recurs time and again with countries around the world. Undertaking missions of the type that the military terms Foreign Internal Defense is something that there’s a pretty broad range of possibilities for. But it inherently requires a certain cooperative spirit from the putative foreign ally. And there’s just no way to judge in advance whether or not something is going to work out. Under the circumstances the worst thing you can do is thunder in with a lot of chest-pounding and definitive declarations of absolute commitment. You need to try to do what you can, and pair that with a determination to re-evaluate and recalibrate going forward based on the evolving situation.