Jeffrey Goldberg has pointed to this Salon report from Tehran and highlighted this passage:

In an ever escalating competition of appropriation, Iranians are finding new and clever ways to turn the Revolution inside out. Most compelling of all is the exquisitely subversive “Death to Russia!” and its companion “Death to China!” “Marq bar Russi-e! Marq bar Chin!” For 30 years, ever since the Revolution, Iranians have been chanting “Death to America!” with the regime’s encouragement. It has long been a convenient outlet for any domestic discontent. Somehow the protesters have collectively decided that from now on, the U.S. will be left alone, all chants against that nation must cease. “Death to Russia” has become the new “Death to America.”

At first glance, this makes a lot of sense. After all, Russia and China are major patrons of the current regime, the protesters despise the current regime, and therefore they direct their contempt of their own government at its foreign backers as well. The protesters have been frustrated and stymied, so it is natural that they are venting their frustration in a variety of ways. This was more or less how the “Death to America” slogan started off before it turned into nothing more than an empty phrase to be dutifully repeated by regime loyalists to demonstrate their support. As every anti-Iranian voice in the West is so keen to remind us, this anti-American element became a major part of the revolutionary regime’s self-presentation. Almost as if the Iranian protesters want to confirm that their movement is like other “color” revolutions throughout Europe and Asia, they are now adopting anti-Russianism.

Internationally, these new slogans might win the protesters a little more sympathy in the West (if there is any more sympathy left for them to win). Nothing seems to bring out Western enthusiasm for foreign protesters like their expression of anti-Russian sentiment. That said, however understandable these outbursts are they seem extraordinarily ill-conceived. Russia and China obviously accept the status quo in Iran and so have no desire to aid the protesters, but until now they have not necessarily had any reason to fear that the success of the protesters threatened their interests in any way. The protests were the result of a domestic, internal dispute between the regime and dissidents, and foreign policy considerations were marginal at best–this was all to the advantage of the protesters. Now the protesters seem to be getting too “exquisitely subversive” for their own good. So long as they can wield the regime’s official rhetoric against it, appropriate the symbols and language of the revolution and Shi’ism for their own cause, and hold themselves up as the real defenders of the revolutionary legacy, the protesters have a better chance of getting at least some of what they want. Once they begin to dissociate themselves from that legacy, and then make a point of dropping the traditional anti-American rhetoric to replace it with a challenge to Iran’s current patrons, they are making themselves appear more like the front for an American agenda and are therefore reducing their chances of success.

Moscow especially loathes “color” revolutions because they have more often than not been explicitly anti-Russian in their focus, much as Washington finds populist movements in Latin America obnoxious because of their emphasis on opposition to U.S. influence in the region, but even in the “color” revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia Moscow’s acquiescence in the change of government was an important factor in resolving both crises. If the protesters make anti-Russian and anti-Chinese sentiment a significant part of their movement, they can be sure not only that these powers will do nothing to curb the regime in the event that it cracks down more severely but also that these powers will actively work to sabotage their movement any way they can.

John Schwenkler referred me to the open letter addressed to Obama by numerous central and eastern European politicians, and I was already going to say something about it, but John O’Sullivan’s very odd column on the same subject deserves some comment first. I call it odd because I would have thought O’Sullivan would be able to see by now that the “reset” is entirely one-sided and the fears of all these regional leaders are completely misplaced. At most, the “reset” now means that Washington will (probably) stop Cheney-like hectoring of the Kremlin about its internal affairs, and in return Washington expects the Russians to assist on any number of international problems while all of the old provocations with NATO expansion and missile defense proceed at a somewhat reduced pace. After a promising beginning earlier this year, conventional attitudes towards Russia are returning (I suppose they never really left), perhaps out of a mistaken belief that relatively greater Russian weakness will make Moscow more compliant and amenable to policies it regards as absolutely unacceptable. This ensures the same depressing dynamic of escalating hostility that has governed U.S.-Russian relations for at least the last fifteen years. Once again, the malign influence of Biden is there for all to see.

More remarkable than his misreading of current Russia policy is O’Sullivan’s unthinking repetition of the pro-Georgian line about last year’s war:

Such assurances would be more comforting to Central and Eastern Europe if Russia had not already violated such principles (and various international treaties) by invading Georgia and annexing two of its provinces – and done so with impunity and eventual Western acquiescence. What the restive Easterners want is closer integration with America so neither Russia nor other hostile powers will be tempted to future “revisionism.”

For one thing, the enclaves had already practically been annexed years before when the people in those enclaves began claiming Russian citizenship. Why did they do this? One reason was that the people in Abkhazia and South Ossetia don’t want to be Georgians. Tbilisi has wanted to reincorporate them into Georgia, which is what Saakashvili was attempting to do last year by force. Saakashvili’s attempt failed, and a consequence of this has been that the de facto separation of the enclaves has deepened and the desire not to live under Georgian rule has intensified. O’Sullivan portrays the war as if it were an unprovoked attack by Russia, when one investigation after another has placed the bulk of the blame for the war on Saakashvili. Perhaps the most irritating part of pro-Georgian arguments is this absurd charge of revisionism leveled against Moscow, when it is Tbilisi that has been trying to engage in revisionist policies to reclaim territories lost in the early ’90s. It is as if Belgrade had still been trying to take back control over Bosnia in 2008 and the EU were being accused of being a revisionist power by preventing this.

As for the letter itself, it is focused entirely on threats from Russia–there are no “other hostile powers” on the horizon for the signatories to the letter. One wonders what closer integration America could provide beyond NATO membership and strong existing bilateral trade and diplomatic ties that would put the minds of these leaders at ease. It also seems significant that all of the signatories are mostly former presidents, prime ministers and ministers. Far from necessarily being representative of their current governments or nations, the signatories to this letter could be displaying their pro-American or Atlanticist credentials for their own reasons. Perhaps this is unfair, but from the format and some of the individuals involved (e.g., Kwasniewski, Havel, etc.) I am unfortunately reminded of the so-called “letter of the eight” and the Vilnius letter from 2003, whence so many stupid ideas about “New Europe” derived.

It may be that an anti-Russian open letter is more representative of the views of the many nations of central and eastern Europe than were the pro-war letters of 2003, but we should be wary of taking this letter as the voice of the region. As far as the war was concerned, all of the governments that signed on to those letters were doing so against the wishes of vast majorities of their respective publics. It may be worth noting that the missile defense program proposed for Poland and the Czech Republic, which the signatories seem so intent on seeing completed, has not been terribly popular with actual Czechs and Poles. It is hardly a surprise to find European leaders embracing policies that do not command broad support from their voters, but we should keep this foremost in mind whenever we are discussing specific security and foreign policy questions concerning Europe.

As Biden’s visit to Kiev and his comments there make clear, the open letter was unnecessary, the “reset” is largely cosmetic, and it seems probable that Poland and Czech Republic are once again going to have a U.S. security policy imposed on them with the cooperation of their own political classes that are out of touch with broad swathes of both nations. In other words, it is business as usual.

P.S. It occurs to me that one of the reasons why so many Americans cultivate a distrust of Russia is this song-and-dance our government engages in at the start of every new administration in which Washington pretends to want to start afresh, changes nothing in its policies and then uses the Russians’ annoyed, negative reactions as proof that good relations are impossible. Because Bush patted Putin on the back and said stupid things about his soul, we are meant to believe that this was supposed to make Moscow forget Kosovo, NATO expansion and scrapping the ABM Treaty. Now that Obama and Biden have said pleasant things about a “reset” and complimented Medvedev a few times, things can continue on much as they did before, and the political class will later express its bewilderment when the Russians grow impatient with this completely one-sided arrangement.

My column for The Week on the administration’s India policy and Clinton’s visit is now online.

Rod quotes Gail Collins in a conversation with David Brooks:

The way you stop that is definitely not by declaring yourself an independent and leaving your party to the hard-core right [bold mine-DL] that brought it to its current disastrous state. It’s by working from within. A conservative independent is just a Republican who’s had his heart broken, David. I think they need you.

I’ve done more than my share of Brooks-bashing in my time, and for the most part it doesn’t interest me to do more of it, but all of this talk of Brooks’ “alienation” from the Republican Party and his poor, broken heart has to be qualified by the recognition that for the first five or six years of the Bush administration Brooks was not only a team player, but he was also a leading cheerleader of most of the disastrous moves that reduced the GOP to its current state. Brooks’ disillusionment with the party began around the same time that everything the administration had done, particularly as it related to Iraq, began going horribly wrong.

The culture of incompetence, ignorance, cronyism and bluster that had always prevailed in the administration may have finally become too much for Brooks to stomach, but on the substance of policy it is rather crucial to remember that it was not anything like a “hard-core right” Republican agenda that destroyed the party. Such labeling makes no sense, unless you insist on labeling the mainstream GOP “hard-core right” and prefer calling its right-wing critics moderates. The GOP was destroyed by its support for a war waged in the name of nonproliferation, democracy promotion, nation-building, and the enforcement of United Nations resolutions, none of which can really be called “hard-core right” priorities. This war was most loudly cheered on by those “progressive globalists,” as Brooks might call them, inside the Republican Party who see America as the superpower needed to ensure global governance. The most zealous and die-hard supporters of that war were those in the Republican Party whose policy views typically fall in the center or the left of the GOP, and this included Brooks. The “hard-core right” of the party did not by and large distinguish itself in any of this, either, but they are the ones left to take a disproportionate share of the blame as moderates such as Brooks take cover behind the label independent. The independent label can sometimes be accurate and necessary, but it is just as often a refuge for partisans who want to distance themselves from the consequences of the policies they favored back when they referred to themselves by a partisan label.

As DougJ noticed in Brooks’ latest column, the Iraq war figured nowhere in his story of Republican collapse and self-destruction, which is what we might expect from Brooks. Like most Republican war supporters, he refuses to acknowledge the war’s role in destroying the party and instead can’t stop talking about excessive spending. If Brooks’ heart has been broken by Republican failure, it is a self-inflicted wound.

Peter Lawler has written a strange, disjointed post at Postmodern Conservative in which he makes the following bizarre claims:

Thinking in terms of nations and wars and all that is part of getting over the postpolitical fantasy characteristic of contemporary elites, especially in Europe. A variant of that fantasy seems present in the resurgence of Midwestern isolationism on the “American conservative” right. Wars, that isolationist thought is, is [sic] caused by greedy capitalists, and so no more greedy capitalism, no more war [bold mine-DL]. There’s also the libertarian (Ron Paul) variant of that theory: War is caused by people who want to be more than greedy capitalists by intervening politically in the affairs of others. As long as we don’t bother them, they won’t bother us. But we postmodern conservatives who think politically–although not only politically–believe that it’s always prudent to be ready for war.

As a representative of what I suppose must be called Midwestern isolationism, I have to say that I have no idea what Lawler is talking about. The idea that the central complaint among non-interventionists on the right is that U.S. wars are driven by anything so rational as pursuit of new markets is just hilariously wrong. Many non-interventionists may also be critical of corporate power and influence, but perhaps aside from a very few firms the only ones profiting or gaining from war are governments, and they typically start or enter into wars to pursue state interests. As for Ron Paul, he can speak for himself, but my guess is that he thinks that wars are caused by governments that start wars to increase the power of the state, control more territory and resources or project power over and against rivals.

Some “postmodern conservatives” (I suppose we can all use scare quotes) may not be interested in opposing aggressive warfare and empire, but they could at least make some minimal effort to understand the positions of those who do. If they bothered to make that effort, they would understand that non-interventionists are quite interested in being prepared for wars that provide for the common defense of this country, which will normally mean not preparing to fight wars in territories on the other side of the planet where no American interests are at stake. In other words, we think that the military should be concerned primarily with American defense, which will likely never have anything to do with going to war against China.

As I made clearbefore vacation, I have also beenbaffled by the U.S. government’s reaction to the deposition of Zelaya last month. Bunch cites Chris Caldwell’s latest on the Honduran constitutional crisis, and in the article Caldwell reiterates things that critics of the administration were quite rightly saying in the first few days after Zelaya’s removal from office. The more time that has passed, the clearer it becomes that Zelaya was in the wrong and deserved to be removed. The curfew and restrictions that the transitional government put in place in their initial panic and overreaction are now gone. That has not stopped the efforts by the OAS to try to re-install Zelaya, but these efforts seem sure to fail. It is time for Washington to accept the fait accompli, recognize the new government and push for an end to the attempted international isolation of Honduras.

The one thing that has bothered me about most of the other criticisms of Obama’s response is how obsessed with Hugo Chavez they always seems to be. Caldwell’s article also has this flaw. The Honduran crisis interests many of these critics not for any of the lessons about the dangers of executive usurpation and the importance of constitutional rules to the functioning of democratic government that it might offer, but because they choose to see it primarily as a battle between Chavismo and its enemies. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Chavez is irrelevant to what has happened in Honduras, but Chavez is certainly not centrally important, either, yet so much of the criticism of Obama from the right has fixated on Obama siding with Chavez and his allies. This invests Chavez with far more importance in all of this than he deserves.

One might call Zelaya’s removal a “setback” for Chavez, as Caldwell does, except that the “success” of Chavez’s influence on Zelaya was partly responsible for generating the tremendous opposition to Zelaya. What this means is that Chavez ultimately loses influence even in those places where he seems to be winning. The Kirchners in Argentina have been very cozy with Chavez as well, and they are already experiencing popular repudiation in recent congressional elections. The rest of the region tolerates, but does not follow, him. All over Latin America the backlash against neoliberalism that aided Chavez’s influence has not translated into sustainable support for Chavez or his proteges. Hawks in this country are so interested in building Chavez up as a regional menace that they cannot see how weak and unimportant he really is.

What is telling about the background to the crisis is how weak Chavez’s preferred politician had become and how unpopular the import of anything resembling Chavismo or “participatory democracy” seems to have been. If Zelaya was so spectacularly unsuccessful in promoting such an agenda in one of the poorest of Central American nations, and if he formed such a broad consensus of political, military and religious institutions against him in the process, Chavez’s influence outside Venezuela is perhaps even more limited and strategically insignificant than I had thought. Perhaps Honduras’ elite feared that Zelaya might somehow succeeed in imitating Chavez, but the important thing to remember about this is that Zelaya made his legal removal possible simply by taking the first steps in that direction whether or not he had any chance of succeeding. To put it another way, it never mattered legally whether Caesar intended to become a dictator after he crossed the Rubicon, but simply whether he had entered Italy under arms. Even if Zelaya was certain to fail in changing the constitution, he was not permitted to make the attempt. Surely Zelaya’s defenders, so deeply concerned with proper procedure as they are, can see now why his removal was required.

Reaching out to the Muslim world may help in creating an environment for peace in the Middle East, but we must insist as Americans that our policies be firmly grounded in the beliefs of the Judeo-Christian tradition upon which this country was founded. ~Eric Cantor

Via Steve Benen

So Cantor means that he will offer support to opposition Maronites in Lebanon and work to realign U.S. policies in the Near East to favor Armenia, right? No, I guess that wasn’t quite it. When he says that policy should be “grounded in the beliefs of the Judeo-Christian tradition,” maybe he means that we should repudiate aggressive warfare, collective punishment and indiscriminate bombing, especially when those methods also adversely affect local Christian populations. Oh, that’s not it, either? Of course, it means exactly what you would think that it does, which is that we must support Israel to the hilt with support defined as the embrace of the most hawkish, counterproductive policies possible.

What I don’t understand is why Benen and others are finding this statement to be so far “out there.” Don’t get me wrong–it’s a fairly ridiculous statement. It is also quite common, and not just on the right. After all, it isn’t just conservative pundits and activists who are constantly burdening Israel as the front-line state of “civilization” and “Enlightenment,” which is the polite, secular way of saying “they are like us.” Making explicit references to religious heritage as a basis for supporting another state may be embarrassing to secular supporters, but these are the effective political allies they have chosen to tolerate and embrace to one degree or another.

Politicians annually line up to praise a lot more than Israel’s “democratic character and desire to live in peace,” and Cantor’s Christian Zionist audience wouldn’t give a fig for a small eastern Mediterranean country were it not for the religious heritage of its majority, the religious significance of the land in which they live and their conviction that their support is authorized and required by Scripture. Normally politicians prefer to use more vague language, such as “common heritage” or “common values,” but most of them are referring at least in part to cultural and religious identity. By the standards of Christian Zionist discourse, what Cantor said was unexceptional and actually rather mild. Supporters of Israel routinely rely on the support of people who fervently believe what Cantor said, but then profess shock and dismay when confronted with what they believe.

What he needs to do is empower a “red team” that will start at zero and challenge every foreign policy assumption. There is very little in US foreign and security policy that makes sense any more but there are huge and well-paid constituencies that exist to support the status quo – they must be challenged. Obama has been conceding the ground to all of those groups without any debate and with seemingly little resistance. ~Philip Giraldi

Mr. Giraldi’s recommendation is a good one, and his frustration with the administration’s continued cheerleading of insane NATO expansion is something I share, but this is tempered by the recognition that Obama and Biden have always favored this foolishness and Obama always concedes grounds to entrenched interests. Obama’s backing of hegemony and interventionism is something I have talked about quite a lot, and Prof. Bacevich has repeatedly pointed out Obama’s acceptance of what he has called national security ideology, so who really expected anything different at this point? Biden flew to Tbilisi to embrace the reckless demagogue Saakashvili in the immediate wake of the latter’s escalation with Russia–why would he not now embrace a slightly less reckless Ukrainian leadership that has not started a war? I agree that pushing for Ukrainian membership in NATO is crazy, but almost everything Washington has done in connection with NATO for the last two decades has been crazy.

Even if Obama were inclined to do any of the things Giraldi and I would like to see (and I don’t think he is remotely interested in most of them), he would probably destroy his Presidency inside of a year by doing just a few of them. It’s all very well to say that he should challenge the entrenched interests who are invested in perpetuating current policies, but could any President survive doing this? If not, what self-interested politician is going to take the risk? Who would reward him, and what votes are in it for him? The answers to these questions are no, no one, nobody and zero.

Obama is already routinely accused of trying to destroy Israel because he has reiterated the (meaningless) formal U.S. position on (illegal) settlements; he has never ruled out launching a war against Iran over a nuclear program that poses no threat to America, but whatever minimal caution he does show is portrayed by domestic critics as weakness and capitulation. As we can all see, despite some early constructive moves, he remains wedded to the bipartisan consensus in favor of provoking and insulting Russia for no good reason, but simply by contemplating anything other than reflexive hostility he already received much contempt here at home. More to the point, he is someone who wants to belong to the consensus view in whatever setting he is in, so of all the people who could try to break from establishment assumptions on foreign policy he is one of the most unlikely.

Reading David Brooks this morning, I had the odd feeling that I had read numerous, virtually identical op-eds for the last six months, except that their subject was Obama’s alleged weakness in the face of foreign “challenges.” For example, take this paragraph:

Machiavelli said a leader should be feared as well as loved. Obama is loved by the Democratic chairmen, but he is not feared. On health care, Obama has emphasized cost control. The chairmen flouted his priorities because they don’t fear him. On cap and trade, Obama campaigned against giving away pollution offsets. The chairmen wrote their bill to do precisely that because they don’t fear him. On taxes, Obama promised that top tax rates would not go above Clinton-era levels. The chairmen flouted that promise because they don’t fear him.

We have heard much the same litany from domestic critics of Obama regarding his efforts at improving relations with Iran and Russia (“he is emboldening them! he is projecting weakness!”), and even most of the criticism from the right on his handling of the deposition of Zelaya has been framed as part of Obama’s supposed servility to Chavez. The constant in all of these arguments is the claim that Obama is too conciliatory, yields too much, and invites challenges. In other words, we are supposed to believe that the rest of the world does not fear him. This has been a completely unpersuasive argument, in no small part because there is no evidence to support it. Brooks is applying the kind of critique hawks normally use to indict the administration’s foreign policy agenda, as if he took Jonathan Chait’s unified Obama theory and turned it on its head. Chait defined “the Obama method” this way:

Obama’s method begins with attempts to find common ground, expressions of respect for the adversary’s core beliefs, and profuse hope for cooperation. In his iconic 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention, Obama famously announced that Democrats, too, “worship an awesome God.” In his Cairo speech, Obama pointed to the contributions and freedoms of American Muslims. In both speeches, Obama signaled cultural respect by adapting the other side’s own rhetorical formulations–invoking “a belief in things not seen” (2004) or calling the Middle East the region where Islam “was first revealed” (Cairo).

This rhetoric removes the locus of debate from the realm of tribal conflict– red state versus blue state, Islam versus America–and puts it onto specific questions–Is the American health care system fair? Is terrorism justified?– where Obama believes he can win support from soft adherents of the opposing camp.

Naturally, Obama’s pacific expressions tend to alarm the more hawkish elements of his own camp, who interpret his idealistic rhetoric as naivete or weakness.

The method Chait described is one that I recognized a bit earlier when I wrote:

The approach that conservatives find infuriating when directed at them is the same one he was using on Thursday in Cairo: define the limits of the debate, establish one’s own views as the balanced, reasonable center of the debate, invite people from either side to join the ostensibly reasonable center, and thereby marginalize those who continue to ignore or oppose you.

At this point someone might object that the method Chait identifies would not apply to adversaries within his own party, but there seems to be no reason to think that he copes with intra-party opposition any differently than he does with opposition from other quarters. It could be that Obama is drawing out his opponents among the chairmen in Congress in order to triangulate against them and present himself to the public as the “responsible” and “reasonable” check on liberal Democrats. I think he is banking on identifying the excesses of the domestic agenda with Congressional leaders and posing as the voice of restraint, because doing so serves him best. He can afford to do this, and one key reason why is the substance of the stimulus bill.

As most of its critics have emphasized, the stimulus was largely a giveaway to Democratic constituencies, which means that the administration has bought a lot of goodwill with activists already, and it did so while risking relatively little with the broader electorate. If Roubini is right and the recession ends by the close of the year, few will remember that the stimulus was wasteful, laden with giveaways to interest groups and costly. Most will remember that it passed, and then later that year the recession ended. More important, all that most voters will remember is simply that the recession began on Bush’s watch and ended under Obama. If the relationship of the Congressional majority and party activists with the White House in the last administration is any indication, that one giveaway earlier this year will satisfy enough people inside the party that Obama will be able to disappoint and resist Congressional leaders for years afterwards.

On the other hand, the lockstep support of the Congressional GOP for almost everything Bush tried to do burned them badly, so creating the impression that there are significant disagreements between a “radical” Congress and Obama might be quite useful for both Congressional Democrats and Obama: the members can tell the activists and voters back home that they are pursuing their agenda as intensely as possible, and Obama can use Congress as a foil and tell moderates and independents that he is the only one who can halt their excesses and eventually get them to craft “responsible” legislation. Of course, all of this takes for granted that the chairmen are actually Obama’s opponents and that Obama’s statements on all of these things in the past reflect the agenda that he really wants and cannot get, and that may not be true.

The difference between Brooks’ critique of the “suicide march” and the typical hawkish attack on Obama’s foreign policy is that Brooks seems to think that there are ways to pursue the agenda Obama has laid out on health care and cap-and-trade that would not lead to cost inflation and giving away pollution offsets. Obama also campaigned against mandates, and the health care legislation has those, too, but this is not an example of Congress’ defiance. It is instead a reminder that Obama was trying to have things both ways during the campaign, which in that case meant support for health care legislation with none of the drawbacks. Foreign policy critics start with the assumption that conciliatory moves and diplomatic outreach are wastes of time and dangerous signals of weakness, so for them Obama has already failed simply by making an attempt they already regard as doomed. The chairmen are not exactly defying Obama when they are crafting legislation that will more or less inevitably lead to these things by the very nature of the legislation. It’s as if someone had written in 2001 that the GOP Congress was “defying” Bush by passing tax cuts with no concern that this would increase the deficit. After all, Bush had promised fiscal responsibility! Perhaps someone somewhere believed that Bush’s “priority” in this matter was fiscal responsibility, but no one believed that for very long. We do not discern the priorities of politicians in what they say they want, but rather in how they act.

Whenever people have started praising Obama for his “pragmatism,” what they are referring to is his willingness to ditch positions that are no longer useful and to accommodate himself to new centers of power. Meanwhile, the only people who are likely to be surprised by the reckless progressivism of the domestic agenda are those who conned themselves and others into believing that Obama was something else all along. The only people who are likely to see a significant conflict between Obama and Congressional Democrats on these items are those who think that the government can do these things without the negative consequences Brooks mentions.

There have been several occasions over the last two and a half years when it became quite common to say that Obama wasn’t ruthless or tough or wily enough to defeat his opponents, but in every confrontation so far he has come out ahead. If the chairmen really are defying him because they don’t fear him, perhaps it is they who are overconfident and are heading for a fall. It is quite possible that liberals in Congress will drive the Democrats off an electoral cliff with their domestic agenda, and it seems clear that the proposed health care legislation will exacerbate the key problem it is supposed to be solving, but if this happens it will not be because Obama failed to instill fear in committee chairmen. It will happen because the substance of the legislation is flawed.

In the end, members of Congress in the President’s party who want an even more aggressive approach to a given policy usually also tend to be the most ideological and the most loyal partisans, which means that their dissent and defiance, to the extent that any exists, are the least dangerous to the President and his agenda.