MoDo is off today. The Pasty Little Putz is just BUBBLING with wonderful ideas! He shares one with us this morning in “The Fight Republicans Need Now.” He squeals that the G.O.P. needs to flesh out its agenda, and a Rand Paul-Marco Rubio rivalry could be the best way to do that. Yeah. THAT’S what America needs — a Rand Paul agenda, seasoned with a bit of Marco Rubio. Just kill me now. The Moustache of Wisdom, in “Makers and Breakers,” says the other great geopolitical struggle in the world today is happening on the Internet. Mr. Kristof says “A Changed China Awaits Mr. Obama,” and that President Xi Jinping of China is tugging his country in a hard-line direction. He says President Obama should stand up to him. Mr. Bruni considers “Gray Hair and Silver Linings,” and tells us he’s starting to see the worst of aging, but he’s more struck by the best of it. ORLY? He was born in 1964, the year after I graduated from high school. He ain’t seen NOTHING of aging yet. Here’s The Putz:
For the second time in four years, the Republican Party has won a sweeping midterm victory without having a policy agenda to match. The party has a more-than-comfortable House majority, a solid Senate edge, and it faces a lame-duck president sealed in a bubble of sour self-regard. But if you look for consensus on the ends to which this new power should be turned, you’ll find … well … um … repeal of the medical-device tax?
The good news for Republicans is that they’re closer to having a positive agenda than they were in the backlash year of 2010. Now, unlike then, actual flesh-and-blood Republican politicians have proposed substantial policy ideas on issues as diverse as health care and transportation, higher education and taxes, the safety net and sentencing reform. The party as a whole hasn’t rallied around these proposals, but they’re there and waiting to be taken up.
The bad news for Republicans is that America’s permanent campaign is about to shift into a higher gear, because with the midterms over You Know What is coming next. This means that policy debates in Washington will soon be swallowed up by presidential insanity — and if the next Republican primary campaign is like the last one, the conservative conversation could soon become an idea-free zone.
But there is reason to hope that this time might be different, that the 2016 primaries might feature not only actual ideas but a transformative debate. And that hope seems most likely to be realized if the primary field is winnowed early, and we end up with a contest that gives special prominence to Marco Rubio and Rand Paul.
Rubio and Paul are not necessarily the most qualified of the Republican contenders — they are relatively young, they lack executive experience, and their legislative records are modest. But they are both deeply engaged with the challenges that would await a Republican president in a way that most of their potential rivals currently are not.
Those rivals have either been out of national politics for a while (Jeb Bush, Mike Huckabee), or they have been wrestling with state-level issues that don’t necessarily map onto national policy debates. There is, of course, plenty of time for Chris Christie or Scott Walker to raise his sights above pension fights and union battles. But Rubio and Paul are well ahead when it comes to thinking seriously about what a 21st-century conservatism should stand for and pursue.
Seriously, and differently. Rubio has gone further than any other likely 2016 contender in embracing what’s been dubbed “reform conservatism” — a vision of domestic policy that would overhaul the tax code and safety net to support work, family and upward mobility. For the Florida senator, the details of that vision include tax reform that would expand the child tax credit, more substantial wage subsidies for childless adults, a Social Security reform that would open the program’s Thrift Savings Plan for federal employees to more Americans — and a reform of Obamacare (still in the planning stages) that would try to cover similar numbers with less-comprehensive coverage.
Paul, meanwhile, embodies a more libertarian approach to conservative reform, in which the Republican Party would shed its “party of the rich” branding and reach out to new constituencies (minority voters and millennials, especially) by focusing on issues — criminal justice reform, civil liberties, corporate welfare — where a critique of big or heavy-handed government might be unexpectedly resonant.
There is overlap between his vision and Rubio’s, particularly on combating crony capitalism. But there is also a real philosophical difference between the two men on how much government should do to address social problems.
On foreign policy their contrast sharpens, because Paul casts himself as the heir to the realist tradition in Republican foreign policy, while Rubio’s record and statements are more in line with the neoconservatism of the Bush era. To use specific Obama-era examples, a Paul-led G.O.P. would presumably oppose Libya-style humanitarian interventions and eschew gambits like our effort to aid Syria’s rebels, while a Rubio-led G.O.P. might be willing to put American boots on the ground in both situations. These are not small differences, and they might be magnified in larger crises.
This is the point in the column when I would normally signal, subtly or clumsily, whose vision I find more attractive over all. But the reality is that I’m divided. I admire Paul’s outreach to minority voters, and I was very skeptical of the immigration bill Rubio shepherded through the Senate last year. But I have agreed with practically every domestic policy stance the Florida senator has taken since, and his reform agenda seems more sensible on substance and more plausible as politics than Paul’s more stringent libertarianism.
But then on foreign policy my sympathies reverse. Paul’s ties to his father’s more paranoid worldview are problematic, but the realism and restraint he’s championing seem wiser than the G.O.P.’s frequent interventionist tilt. To imagine Rubio as a successful foreign policy president, I have to imagine an administration in the mold of Ronald Reagan’s, where hawkish rhetoric coexists with deep caution about committing U.S. ground troops — and I think there’s reason to worry we’d get incaution and quagmire instead.
I suspect that the Republican electorate would also have mixed sympathies … and that is exactly why the party should want to see these men debate. Maybe that debate would end with one victorious and the other clearly vanquished; maybe it would encourage a kind of partial synthesis, perhaps offered by a savvy rival like Christie. But however the debate turned out, it would involve exactly the issues the Republicans need to work through before they’re given control of the White House once again.
One potential alternative to a Paul-Rubio tilt, meanwhile, is almost too grim to mention: a campaign in which neither man gets traction precisely because they’ve staked out too many positions, and instead the establishment money flows to a candidate (Jeb, Christie, even Romney redivivus) who plays it safe while Ted Cruz and Ben Carson and others have an empty scrum on the right to see who gets to finish second.
Such a campaign, in addition to being deeply tedious, would set the Republican Party’s intellectual clock back to 2012, with predictable results for the party in its inevitable collision with La Hillary.
Whereas to move forward, to win and govern, the G.O.P. needs to figure out exactly what kind of party it should be — and that may only happen if its brightest senatorial stars battle in the open, with a presidential nomination as the prize.
It’s interesting that there is no ability to comment on this thing. The Times was probably afraid their servers would crash… Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:
Flip through any newspaper and go from the foreign news to the business pages and what you’ll see is the “other” great geopolitical struggle in the world today. It’s not the traditional one between nation states on land. It’s the struggle between “makers” and “breakers” on the Internet.
This is a great time to be a maker, an innovator, a starter-upper. Thanks to the Internet, you can raise capital, sell goods or services and discover collaborators and customers globally more easily than ever. This is a great time to make things. But it is also a great time to break things, thanks to the Internet. If you want to break something or someone, or break into somewhere that is encrypted, and collaborate with other bad guys, you can recruit and operate today with less money, greater ease and greater reach than ever before. This is a great time to be a breaker. That’s why the balance of power between makers and breakers will shape our world every bit as much as the one between America, Russia and China.
Consider what Robert Hannigan, the director of GCHQ, Britain’s version of our National Security Agency, wrote last week in The Financial Times: The Islamic State, or ISIS, was “the first terrorist group whose members have grown up on the Internet.” As a result, “they are exploiting the power of the web to create a jihadi threat with near-global reach.” And, the simple fact is, he said, “messaging and social media services such as Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp … have become the command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists.” ISIS has used them to recruit, coordinate and inspire thousands of Islamists from around the world to join its fight to break Iraq and Syria.
Hannigan called for a “new deal” between intelligence agencies and the social networks so the companies don’t encrypt their data services in ways that make breakers like ISIS more powerful and difficult to track.
This will be an important debate, because this same free, open command and control system is enabling the makers to collaborate like never before, too. Here in Cleveland, I met two Israeli “makers” whose company relies heavily on Ukrainian software engineers. Their 11-year-old, 550-person company with employees in 20 countries, TOA Technologies, is a provider of cloud-based software that helps firms coordinate and manage mobile employees. It was just sold in a multimillion-dollar deal. Since I don’t know a lot of Israelis in Cleveland who employ code writers in Kharkiv, Ukraine, to service Brazil, I interviewed them.
Yuval Brisker, 55, was trained in Israel as an architect and first went to New York in the late-1980s to study at Pratt Institute. He later met Irad Carmi, now 51, an Israeli-trained flautist, who came to study at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Over the years, both drifted away from their chosen fields and discovered a love for, and taught themselves, programming. An Israeli friend of Brisker’s started a company in the 1990s dot-com boom, MaxBill, and eventually employed them both, but it went bust after 2001.
“We were both dot-com refugees,” said Brisker. “But one day Irad calls me up and says, ‘My father-in-law just came back from the doctor and asked: “Why is it that I have to wait for the doctor in his office when he knows he’s going to be late and running behind? There must be a technological solution.” The doctor knows he will be late and all his patients have cellphones. … Same with the cable guy. This was wasting millions of man hours.’ ”
In 2003, they started a company to solve that problem. But they had no money, and Carmi was working in Vienna. Carmi second-mortgaged his Cleveland home; Brisker took out loans. They communicated globally using email, Yahoo Messenger and an early Yahoo system that worked like a walkie-talkie. They wrote their business plan on free software without ever seeing each other face to face. Carmi in his travels to Spain discovered Alexey Turchyn, a Ukrainian programmer, who managed the creation of their first constantly updated cloud-based enterprise software. Eventually, they headquartered in Cleveland. Why not? As they say: “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog” — or in Cleveland or Mosul.
It still matters, though, being seen as an “American company,” said Brisker: “People know you represent that kind of entrepreneurialism and freedom of thought and creative expression and bold energy, and they want to be a part of it. They know it can transport them out of the malaise of their local world and enable them to build a new world in its place.”
Malaise? Why do some people respond to malaise with constructive, creative energies and use the Internet to scale them, and others with destructive creative energies and use the Internet to scale those? I don’t know. But more and more people will be superempowered by the Internet to make things and break things — and social networking companies and intelligence agencies working together or apart won’t save us. When every individual gets this superempowered to make or break things, every family and community matters — the values they impart and the aspirations they inspire. How we nurture our own in America and in other countries to produce more makers than breakers is now one of the great political — and geopolitical — challenges of this era.
And now we get to Mr. Kristof:
President Obama hasn’t even begun his state visit to China and he has already been mocked.
“U.S. public opinion has downgraded Obama,” a state-run Chinese newspaper, Global Times, editorialized about Tuesday’s election. “He has done an insipid job, offering nearly nothing to his supporters. U.S. society has grown tired of his banality.”
What a welcome! Global Times is often shrill, but that tone reflects the way President Xi Jinping is tugging his regime in a more nationalistic, assertive and hard-line direction.
The regime also gave a cold shoulder in September to former President Jimmy Carter, initially trying to block Chinese universities from hosting him. Xi and his No. 2 both declined to meet Carter — even though Carter is the one who established U.S.-Chinese diplomatic relations in 1979.
Then there’s something a bit more personal: China doesn’t seem to want to give me a visa.
I’ve been visiting China for more than 30 years and lived in Beijing for five. I speak Mandarin and have been alternately hailed by Chinese authorities and detained by them. But I’ve had cordial relations with the last few foreign ministers, and, until now, I’ve always received visas.
The Chinese leadership is blocking some visas for New York Times employees because it is upset by Times coverage of profiteering by families of senior officials. It was particularly irritated by Times articles showing that relatives of the former prime minister had amassed $2.7 billion.
Xi has been ruling China for two years now, and he has shown some inclination toward economic and legal reforms. Two years ago, I thought Xi might open things up a bit. Boy, was I wrong! Instead, it increasingly seems that Xi may deepen reforms in some areas but, over all, is a tough-minded nationalist who takes a hard line on multiple fronts so as to challenge nearly everything that Obama stands for:
•• In the East China and South China Seas, Xi has taken an aggressive approach to maritime disputes. There may be a thaw, but risk remains of military accidents, escalation and even war.
•• At home, he has overseen harsh repression of dissidents; activists who once were tolerated are now imprisoned. The brave lawyer Xu Zhiyong was this year sentenced to four years in prison, and China not only imprisons the Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo but also torments his wife, Liu Xia, with extrajudicial house arrest.
•• The government has tightened controls on the Internet, blocking not only nytimes.com but also Facebook and YouTube — and making it hard to use Gmail, Google Drive and Google Calendar.
Deng Xiaoping accepted technologies that brought political risks because they would help the economy, but Xi seems willing to sacrifice business convenience for more rigid political control.
Xi comes across as cocky and proud that China is now booming and strong, and he has been willing to poke his finger in the American eye. In 2009, he derided “well-fed foreigners who have nothing better to do than lecture us about our own affairs.”
All this creates a challenge for Obama. The United States doesn’t have many China experts in senior roles, and neither in Beijing nor Washington are many officials fighting for an improved relationship. Meanwhile, the two sides are battling behind the scenes over Chinese cyberwarfare against American targets.
When Obama first traveled to Beijing in 2009, his efforts at conciliation were perceived as signs of weakness, and China then overplayed its hand, Washington responded and relations suffered.
The world needs China to step up and play a constructive role (an excellent example is China’s plan to build an Ebola hospital in Liberia), especially on climate change. But Xi’s vision of the China-U.S. relationship is that America keeps mum about Chinese abuses and irresponsible behavior.
When Xi traveled to Tanzania last year, members of his delegation bought thousands of pounds of illegal, poached ivory from slaughtered elephants, according to a report this month by the Environmental Investigation Agency. These purchases were so huge that the price of ivory doubled on the black market, the group said. This stockpile of illegal ivory was then smuggled to Beijing by diplomatic pouch on the president’s official plane, the agency said.
Chinese officials vociferously denied the report, but the episode is a reminder how much China increasingly matters worldwide, for good or for ill. From the global economy to the survival of elephants to carbon emissions, China today affects almost everything everywhere.
So for those of us who love the Middle Kingdom, it’s sad to see it veer toward a nationalistic and repressive line under Xi. Obama won’t be able to change China, but he has too often signaled weakness in the Middle East and Ukraine. In China, he should stand firm.
And now we get to Mr. Bruni, again with no comments allowed…:
I turned 50 just the other day, but I got the gift that I most needed nearly two years earlier, from a couple of strangers whom I never saw again.
I was in a surgeon’s waiting room, about to have a crimson hillock carved from my back. This, I’ve learned, is one of the rites of aging: Your body starts generating superfluous things that you wish it wouldn’t — hairs, pounds, moles — and the removal of some is a matter of survival, not vanity. In this instance I had a baby cancer between my shoulder blades, and it threatened, if unattended, to go from relatively harmless to decidedly unfriendly.
Seated across from me were a man and a woman, neither of whom looked a day under 70. I could tell from their conversation that they’d just met, and that they’d both been in this place and through this drill many times before. When it came to carcinoma, they were frequent fliers.
“Too much tennis,” the woman said to the man as she pointed to a subtle divot on her neck, where the sun had done its cruel handiwork.
“Golf,” said the man, touching a similar dent on his brow. “Should have worn a hat.”
She gently pulled up the hem of her skirt to reveal a jagged, angry red line just below her knee. It gave her an excuse to show some leg.
Then she reached over to touch a patch on one of his forearms, which had also gone under the knife.
“Yard work,” he said, in what struck me as a deliberately virile, even boastful tone of voice. Her fingers lingered on the spot. He let them.
It reminded me of that scene in “Jaws” when the shark hunters compare scars, except that the battles that my fellow patients had waged weren’t with the deep’s monsters. They were with the body’s betrayals.
Cosmetically, these two had been diminished. But by other yardsticks?
As I watched them turn rogue cells into compatible memories, affliction into flirtation, I couldn’t help feeling that they’d actually been amplified, and that there’s a mercy and a kind of miracle in the way we’re constructed. We have tricks of the mind and tools of the spirit infinitely more potent than the ravages of time.
Its passage isn’t something I’m happy about. There’s a whole lot of downside, and I don’t mean just the odd growths, the weakening knees, the blurring vision and the crawling metabolism, none of which got the message that 50 is the new 40, at least not in my case.
I mean the lost ambitions. There’s a point at which you have to accept that certain hopes and dreams won’t be realized, and 50 sure feels like it.
I mean the lost margin for error. When you’re in your 20s and even your 30s, you can waste months, squander love, say yes to all the wrong things and no to all the right ones. And you can still recover, because there are many more months and loves and crossroads to come. The mistakes of youth are an education. The mistakes later on are just a shame.
And I mean the lost people most of all: the ones from whom you’re separated by unmovable circumstances; the ones who’ve died. By 50 you start to see the pace of these disappearances accelerating. It’s haunting, and even harrowing.
But there’s something else that you start to notice, something that muffles all of that, a muscle that grows stronger, not weaker. More than before, you’re able to find the good in the bad. You start to master perspective, realizing that with a shift in it — an adjustment of attitude, a reorientation of expectations — what’s bothersome can evaporate and what only seems to be urgent really isn’t.
I was talking about this recently with a close friend who’s only a bit younger than I am, and she said that with each year, she finds her friendships less volatile and easier, because she increasingly succeeds at looking past their flaws and disappointments and homing in on their pleasures and on what set them in motion to begin with. And she wonders why she didn’t do that sooner, why she gave in to so much fury and sorrow when she could have just let those emotions go.
You get older and you let things go. You say goodbye to the most isolating parts of your pride and, if you’re lucky, you slough off some of your pettiness.
You finally appreciate the wisdom of doing so, and you come to recognize that among multiple vantage points and an array of responses to a situation, you really can elect the most positive one.
There’s truth to those old saws about clouds and silver linings and lemonade from lemons. But it can take a good long while to wake up to that: to divine the lessons beneath the clichés and embrace them without feeling like a sap.
On the morning of my 50th birthday, I got a call with the results of a test that I’d actually forgotten was being done. A tiny dot that had recently appeared on my nose was indeed precancerous and had to be eliminated. There’d be some sort of freezing followed by some sort of chemotherapy cream and then, if that didn’t work, some sort of carving. Been there, done that, and will probably have to do it over and over again. Too much beach and too many tanning beds in my heedless past.
I thought, Oh, well. I’m blessed with insurance. I’m not a model with a career on the line. I’m not a looker being defaced.
And then I thought about the man and the woman in the surgeon’s waiting room, and how they’d stayed with me ever since, becoming more vivid in my mind as I closed in on 50. They’d underscored aging’s upside, helping me understand it more quickly and clearly. They’d embodied the possibility that you gain as much as you lose, and that there are slivers of opportunity and points of connection where you least expect them.
I have no idea how or if their conversation ended. I left before they did that day. Maybe they never exchanged another word.
Or maybe they swapped telephone numbers and, right now, they’re off together on vacation somewhere. They’re moving less nimbly than they once did. They’re wearing much more sunscreen. But they’re savoring the moment in a heightened way, and definitely not taking it for granted.
