In Thursday’s Congress Daily, Bruce Stokes and Andrew Kohut published a piece in which they labeled “voters’ avowed desire for bipartisanship in dealing with pressing national problems” a “self-delusional” myth:

Americans tell pollsters and journalists that they are sick of the partisan divide in Washington and want a candidate who can reach across the aisle to get things done…But surveys show such aspirations are likely to be frustrated by voters’ stark differences over priorities. For, while the American public fancies itself bipartisan, it remains deeply partisan.

Derek Shearer lauded their argument, and expanded it to bash foreign policy bipartisanship, in yesterday’s Huffington Post. Now I’ll tell you why these fine commentators, and the polls they cite, don’t tell the whole story.

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Paddy Ashdown’s decision to withdraw his candidacy for the position of U.N. special representative to Afghanistan will come as a body blow to those working to combat the rise of the Taliban in that shattered country. For a brief period of time it seemed as if Ashdown, who played a critically important UN-EU leadership role in Bosnia from 2002-2005, was going to lend his talents to the most critical security challenge facing NATO today. Unfortunately Ashdown decided to withdraw his candidacy on Sunday, apparently because he was not given the assurances necessary from President Karzi of Afghanistan.

Karzi had, briefly, supported the idea of Mr. Ashdown moving to Afghanistan in order to lead the critical aid and reconstruction mission. However, it seems that the Afghan President became fearful that Ashdown would have too much power and decided to kill the appointment.

There have been suggestions that Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. did not support Ashdown sufficiently (although Khalilzad denies this) but whether that is true or not, it strikes me as disappointing that the U.S. Administration did not push at the highest levels to secure this appointment. If an individual like Secretary of Defense Gates believes that Ashdown is the man for the job, he must work to get him to Kabul.

I’d like to see this issue get more attention – it is shocking that the international effort in Afghanistan, which needs more assistance than at any point since the winter of 2001, has lost a key asset such as Ashdown before he has even had a chance to start working. Ashdown is the type of individual the U.S. should be championing at the U.N. – he understands the U.N., E.U. and the U.S. and is, put simply, a man of action – something the international effort in Afghanistan desperately needs.

I am sorry to be late with this post. I just returned after being away for a funeral for a close and beloved relative; my uncle, who was a WWII veteran.

Speaking of death the Administration has just released its Fiscal Year 2009 budget request. That, of course, brings us to the Department of Defense (DOD) , or what we used to call in a more candid century, the War Department, budget.

At his news briefing yesterday at the Pentagon Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, “The investment in defense spending being presented today is $515.4 billion, or about 3.4 percent of our gross domestic product.” 

Hmm, “investment in defense spending.” So that’s what we’re calling it these days. 

Gates noted that the budget request is a 7.5 percent increase, or $35.9 billion, over last year’s enacted level. When accounting for inflation, this translates into a real increase of about 5-1/2 percent. The request includes a $70 billion emergency bridge fund that would cover war costs into the next calendar year. A more detailed request will be submitted this spring when the department has a better picture of what level of funding will be required.    

If passed by Congress, that would be the largest military budget — adjusted for inflation — since World War II. I guess that means Osama bin Laden must be the most dangerous menace since Adolph Hitler.

With Congress having already approved $691 billion in war spending since 2001, the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined could rise to just under $900 billion by next spring and could near the $1 trillion mark by the end of 2009. (more…)

I have written a lot on this blog about why I am concerned that the American economy is becoming increasingly insecure and that we are losing our competitive edge in the world. I think this week’s actions by our government underscore our insecurity. The Fed cut interest rates another 50 basis points this week, after a 75 point cut the week prior. And Congress is rushing through a measure to stimulate the economy by providing tax rebates at a time when we are already running an enormous deficit. These actions will provide a much-needed short-term jump-start to our economy but they will not fundamentally change the problems at the heart of our economy. Unfortunately, at the same time as policymakers offered short-term initiatives to calm our economy, they did not talk about the longer-term strategy to heal our economy.

In the long-term, we need three fundamental changes in our economy to improve our financial security. First, we need far greater financial transparency. We are living in a world where not even those on Wall Street understand what they are trading. This has become clear during the sub-prime debacle as financial analysts have been clueless as to how much and what kind of debt banks actually own. The lack of transparency puts the market in a roller coaster mode because one small, unexpected release of bad numbers leads analysts to worry that all the apples in the basket might be rotten.

Second, we need regulation. One problem over the Bush administration years especially has been that credit was given out with no background checks and often with teaser rates that confused the consumer. The problem was not that interest rates were too high, but that credit was too confusing and so many borrowers got in over their heads without even knowing it. Despite this, we’ve had only minimal changes in regulation since the subprime debacle.

Third, we need to balance our budgets. This is one of the reasons for our economic stability in the 1990s and our debt is one of the reasons that our dollar is declining so rapidly today because investors worldwide are losing faith in our country and our currency as our debt extends beyond our grandchildren’s ability to repay.

All of these policy issues should be part of the discussion as we figure out how to get our economy out of the current mess. I agree that at the moment we need a short-term stimulus but we also need to be repairing our economic house so we are more secure in the future.