Why is the Hillary camp talking up the possibility of her being Obama's vice president. The admirable and talented Liz Caputo touted the prospect on cable two nights ago; voluble Terry McAuliffe did the same on Larry King last night.

Perhaps the Clintons feel that if she were the Vice President, and Obama lost, then she'd be the presumptive nominee in four years, whereas if someone else were the vice presidential nominee he or she would be the presumptive nominee. But losing vice presidential nominees don't have that status. Indeed, the Clintons must know that if an Obama-Clinton ticket lost, both the top and the bottom of the ticket would more likely be regarded as akin to Dukakais, the man who lost an all too winnable election.

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We had an interesting discussion yesterday about the tendency we all have to choose information that validates our beliefs and reject the information that doesn't. The conversation focused mostly on the politics of the moment, both the conservative/liberal divide and the Obama/Clinton divide. Certainly, we can see in some of the discussions that devoted supporters of both sides have a tough time digesting bad info but love to trumpet good info. That's an important thing for us as a community to contemplate.

But it's also essential, I think, to broaden the focus from just our little world of debate to the whole world itself. In fact, I think Obama has pointed us in a direction that encourages us to break out of these mindsets even beyond our partisan politics.

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Jeremy Ben Ami, the founder of the J Street Project, has a piece in Sunday's Washington Post about what it means to be pro-Israel.

Not surprisingly, Jeremy -- who is an American but from a very prominent Zionist family in Israel -- believes that the cranks who are always calling people "anti-Israel" for supporting negotiations are not themselves pro-Israel at all.

I don't believe that various segments of the lobby have Israel's interests in mind. Nor America's. Their interest is in power, power for its own sake and for the sheer joy of making powerful politicians grovel. That is why Yitzhak Rabin told the lobby to take a hike when he became prime minister in 1992. He wanted Israel to deal with the US "government to government" without the lobby playing the role of intermediary. But that would have put the lobby out of business (no wonder they couldn't stand Rabin).

In any case, take a look at Jeremy's piece. I am delighted that it it is Sunday's Washington Post which means that all the lobby's Congressional bud's will see it.

I just posted some instructions over on the reader blog posting page. Check them out and let me know what you think, what I should change, if I've horribly misspelled any words, etc.

I've tangled with some bullies in my life, but Harvey Weinstein is surely at the top of my list. When I sold the film Shine to one of his rivals, he hunted me down at dinner in Sundance and put me up against the wall. He doesn't like to be on the losing team and his long time relationship with the Clintons has him staring defeat in the face. So what does he do? He threatens Nancy Pelosi to cut off the money to the DCCC unless she personally embraces his plan to privately finance a new primary for Florida and Michigan.

Since Harvey and Bill Clinton's other patron (who are they, Bill?) are going to finance this little oligopolistic fiasco, I assume they will also be in charge of counting the votes. General Pinochet would be proud.

Reader destor23 denounces Anne Marie Slaughter's vision of a "Concert of Democracies" supplanting the current UN framework.

ThurmanHart takes a look at "The Role of Judges in a Democracy."

Reader ItsNeverOver reports on L-3, the contractor "responsible for providing the much-maligned contractors to the Abu Graib prison."

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We've been reading your feedback closely and thinking a lot about how to adjust the discussion elements of the site to improve your experience. In that light, we've made two changes to how the reader posts are presented that we hope you'll like. Details after the break.

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My disagreement with Michael is an important one and he states it fairly. That said, I do not believe one has to follow Robert Kagan and say that the neo-conservatives are the sole heirs to the mainstream US foreign policy tradition in order to claim that the US is an expansionist imperial power rather than a status quo power. In fact, I don't share Michael's view that the prosecution of the Cold War was mainly responsive and defensive. I think Gar Alperowitz exaggerates the importance of warning of the Soviets in the decision to drop nuclear weapons on Japan, but surely this was at least part of the story. And was Vietnam a defensive war against Communist aggression? The Kennedy and Johnson administrations said as much, but it seems to a dubious claim, not to say an outright lie. But even were I to concede point, the American informal  empire far predated the Cold War and in Latin America at least was a fact of life from Monroe to Reagan.

Atrios:

It's important to remember that none of us are above the fray, that we all have hackish tendencies to suppress information which doesn't fit our worldview and privilege information that does. We're more likely to excuse behavior from people we like and exaggerate the ills of people we don't like. I try to fight hackish tendencies especially during this intra-Dem battle, but I don't claim to have superhuman Nonhack powers.

How do you push back your hackishness? I force myself to read thoughtful conservatives, to read stuff outside of the partisan political blogosphere, and to generally take a deep breath sometimes. You?

Many of the most senior members of the foreign policy Illuminati assembled in London last week, and neoconservative high priest Robert Kagan and neo-realist national security strategist Kurt Campbell had a collision that simply must be recorded for posterity.

The context was a dinner and then a conference featuring an intellectually and politically diverse crowd discussing the turbulent currents at play in the international system.

The dinner was held at the official residence of outgoing Ambassador of Germany to the UK Wolfgang Ischinger (he previously served in Washington as Ambassador) and featured special guests CENTCOM Commander-nominee David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker. The sponsor of the night was the new European Council on Foreign Relations whose executive director Mark Leonard is tying up European leaders in a new and important exercise in national security consciousness-raising.

I'm going to save what I learned about the Petraeus/Crocker exchange with people like Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School Dean Anne-Marie Slaughter, her colleague G. John Ikenberry (see his note below), UT Austin LBJ School Dean and former Clinton administration Deputy National Security Adviser James Steinberg and many others for another post. I was not in attendance (and thus am under no obligation to keep anything off the record, which I fastidiously adhere to when in such meetings) -- and have had to pull teeth and twist the arms of quite a few sources to piece together the content of the discussion.

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I have written before about the seemingly unstoppable proliferation of checkpoints and obstacles to movement in the West Bank, but I thought an update was in order. After all, Secretary Rice has just devoted another round of relatively fruitless Mid-East shuttling on primarily this issue. Here is the situation, how it has come to be, and why it makes America look Lilliputian....

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The problem I see with much of the discussion of Fareed's book -- and Michael Lind's response in particular-- is that it is so centered on relations and conflicts between nation-states and seems to leave little room for analyzing the conflicts between social and economic groups that exist within nations and extend across multiple nations.

Let me jump off from Matt's comment that those attacking China from the left seem to be "focused on finding ways to keep the Chinese population trapped in crushing poverty."  Actually, for most of those "bashing China", they are far more attacking the multinational companies-- American and Chinese -- that are getting rich at the expense of the average American and Chinese worker.   Since the main leftwing position on trade with China is not to shut down trade but to demand that workers have the right to demand higher wages and to end the confinement of labor union organizers to mental hospitals, this is hardly a demand to confine the population to poverty.

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I'm eager to read Fareed's next post. In the meantime, I'd like to indicate my agreement with Fareed and Josh, and respond briefly to the latest posts by Anne-Marie and David.

I stand by my observation that what Anne-Marie and John Ikenberry call the postwar liberal international order was in fact two distinct orders. Plan A--the UN, Bretton Woods, the Four (or Five) Policemen--was reluctantly set aside in favor of a hastily improvised but ultimately successful Plan B--NATO, the Marshall Plan, what became the EU--when the Soviet Union chose to act as a revisionist power instead of a status quo power after 1945.

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Taking up Fareed's invitation to respond to Michael's post, I would say that I see more continuity than discontinuity in US foreign policy up to an including the Bush administration. Robert Kagan's phrase 'dangerous nation' seems to me to describe the reality of America's self-appointed mission in the world better than the account that suggests that the post-World War II United States previously was committed to a benign, internationalist, multilateral order but has now fallen for siren songs of unilateralism and empire (of course, Kagan thinks it's a good thing that we're this 'dangerous nation,' whereas --- surprise, surprise --- I don't).

To accept Michael's argument, one really has to believe that the Cold War was fundamentally an act of self-defense, and I don't think that was the case. To say this is emphatically not to argue for some false equivalence between the Soviet Union and China on the one hand and the US and its allies on the other, or to deny that the American empire was infinitely superior in moral terms to its adversaries. There is no such moral equivalence; the US was morally superior. But it is to say that the United States was an empire and empires in my view are entities which one admires at one's moral and intellectual peril.

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Michael Lind argues that we have "a serious philosophical disagreement" between proponents of 1945 Postwar liberal internationalism, which envisioned an international order based on a "loose concert or concerts of nonaggressive, but not necessarily democratic, great powers," and the Cold War model of liberal internationalism, which is "an attempt to universalize the norms of NATO and the EU."

Let's start with the history. I take it that Lind's postwar model refers to the UN, with the provision for the P-5 members of the Security Council, three of which were democracies and two, Russia and China, were not. That was indeed Franklin Roosevelt's vision of the "four policemen (+ France); he was realist enough, rightly, to recognize that you could not have an international order unless all the great powers signed on. But that was only one plank of the postwar liberal order, as John Ikenberry and many others have argued. The others, were NATO, the Marshall Plan to get Europe back on its feet as a group of democracies rather than watch various European states turn community, and the EU to keep it as a strong economic and political entity. That was the US strategy throughout the Cold War - in keeping with the second half of Kennan's containment strategy, which was to strengthen the West until the Soviet Union collapsed from within. So I honestly don't know how Lind is distinguishing between a "postwar" and a "Cold War" model here.

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With the mortgage crisis smeared across the headlines every morning, you would think that the mortgage holders would keep their heads down. You would be wrong. The national banks are floating a new idea: they shouldn't have to obey state law when they foreclose on someone's home.

Pre-emption has been a gravy train for the national banks, insulating their credit card business from state consumer protection laws. Some banks now want another ride on the pre-emption train, claiming that they shouldn't have to follow local foreclosure laws when they take people's homes.

Tomorrow Congressmen Brad Miller (D, NC) and Steve LaTourette (R, OH) will introduce HR 5380 to make it clear that the banks have to follow the state law foreclosure laws that they have always followed. Here is the scary part: this is expected to be a close vote.

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There is a double entendre embedded in the phrase "public education" when it comes to how political leaders and the public learn from one another. Rarely has this process been so visible -- and vital -- as it has been this past week, when all three presidential candidates took positions and then questions on the federal gas tax holiday proposed for this summer.

Days after presumptive GOP presidential nominee Sen. John McCain came out with a proposal to lift the 18.4 cents-a-gallon federal gas tax during the upcoming summer months, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton did likewise, adding that she'd pay for the lost tax revenue with a windfall profits tax on oil producers. In short order, her rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Barack Obama, came out in fierce opposition to the proposal.

On the eve of the crucial North Carolina and Indiana primaries, Clinton and Obama found themselves finally having a policy debate on an issue where they are diametrically opposed.

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Let me follow Fareed's suggestion and respond to Mike Lind's arugment, with which I find myself very much in sympathy. I might quibble with some of Mike's history. But his prescription seems sound. Indeed, the persistent maximalism of American foreign policy thinking -- whether writ-medium sized in Iraq or large in the 'concert of democracies' idea -- seems wholly out of touch with the challenges facing the country today.

We have a number of factors playing out right now that bear an uncomfortably strong resemblance to other great and/or imperial powers at their moments of overstretch and decline. I'm talking about the rapidly eroding strength of the dollar (judged in exchange rates and reserve currency status), our mounting indebtedness to one of the autocratic powers we're now supposed to democratize and our increasing reliance on military power as the tool to resolve international disputes. A country's military power seldom long outlasts its economic foundations. And nations with ebbing economic power often find themselves relying increasingly on military power -- since it is the realm in which they remain unchallenged.

That sounds a lot like the position America finds itself in today.

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Okay, so Hillary Clinton is a fighter who won't quit, and all Americans love a fighter, whether it's in an Olympic sport, a firefight in Afghanistan, a new iteration of "Survivor," a sparring match with Bill O'Reilly, or gun-mongering in Indiana.

The media-circus' ring-masters have confirmed that Hillary is a fighter -- as tough as any man!. And who would know better than the ring-masters themselves after she showed them deftly but definitively last Sunday that George Stephanopoulos is an intelligent mouse, sitting or pretending to stand?

It's enough to make you forget what Hillary Clinton is fighting for. It's enough to make you forget that she has come close to retartding both racial and class justice by her attempted surge in Indiana and North Carolina.

But it's also enough to remind me, at least, that Obama, with one stone, could wound the two vultures of racial and class resentment that Clinton has roused and sent to feed on him. I mean a clarion call, as only he could make it, for class-based rather than race-based affirmative action.

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David Brooks writes this morning about the combative nature of the Clinton campaign. In watching Hillary try to intimidate her former employee Geoge Stephanopoulos, he marveled at her ability to spin her "sham gas-tax holiday."

This wasn't just shameless spin, it was shamelessness with a purpose. Clinton signaled that she wasn't going to concede even an inch to the vast elitist conspiracy. She wasn't going to feel guilty about ignoring the evidence. She was going to stomp on it, flay it and leave it a twisted mass of jelly quivering on the ground. She was going to perform the primordial duty of an alpha dog leader -- helping one's own.

I must say that my in-box in the last two weeks has been a small microcosm of that same intimidation policy.

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So now Hillary Rodham Clinton, educated at Wellesley and Yale Law, earner (with her husband) of $100 million in the last seven years, is talking about the "elitist" Barack Obama, formerly of the Harvard Law Review and possessor of a much smaller pot of money. Newsweek is out with a cover story on Obama's "Bubba Gap," and is mocked for eating "designer salads."

In the words of a former president, "There you go again." The fake elitist meme that travels like an infection through the body politic is now working its ill ways. Drinking liquids and taking aspirin won't cut it. What we need here is something to restore memories that have apparently been wiped out on a large scale, principally in the elitist media, but also with others in the political world.

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I think the discussion has moved in a very interesting direction, closing the first day's set of posts with Michael Lind. Rather than steer us onto new ground, I wonder if the other members of the panel would address Lind's interesting thesis.

Specifically: He argues that we waged the Cold War against two great powers -- Russia and China --because they refused to accept core rules of the road that would preserve international peace and stability. Now that they both do so (I would put in a few caveats about Russian behavior), we have pushed the bar higher, insisting that they sign onto a whole new set of core principles. For some people these two countries really have to do nothing less than reconfigure their domestic politics.

Well, regime change in the short term in unlikely in either country, Is this kind of maximalist US policy seems designed to produce great power tension and conflict. I have some elaborations of my own to make and responses to various points that Anne Marie and David made (and to praise Matt's perspicacity) but I don't want to sidetrack the conversation just yet.

Fareed is right that we're living in unusually peaceful times, by historic standards, notwithstanding jihadist terrorism, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and ethnic battles, many of them generations or centuries old. Here I suppose I am as "state-centric" as Fareed is, according to Anne Marie. Great power cooperation is essential to addressing most of the issues she raises, and great power struggle would make many of them worse.
That's why I agree with Fareed's warning about cheap talk of a new cold war with Russia, China and a supposed "axis" of authoritarian states. Such talk is blatantly hypocritical--what is America's ally Pakistan if not a rogue state, and what is Saudi Arabia if not a petroleum-fuelled autocracy? The "concert of democracies" alliance proposed by McCain and endorsed, in various forms, by most neoconservatives as well as many Democrats like Anne Marie, John Ikenberry, James Lindsay, and Ivo Daalder, would treat China and Russia as pariah states. By treating those countries as enemies, it risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The fact that the "concert of democracies" school wins the support of reputable thinkers of various political persuasions suggests that it cannot be dismissed as right-wing scare politics. What we have here is a serious philosophical disagreement about which version of liberal internationalism we want the U.S. to promote. Call these the 1945 Postwar version and the universalized Cold War model.

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I hope that Fareed Zakaria is right in his contention that we are living in, and, unless we completely blow it, will go on living in "scarily peaceful times." But I very much doubt that he is. The problem with his argument, I think, is that he reads too much into into two indisputable facts of the current moment --- that there are fewer major wars taking place than in living memory and that there is a greater level of global economic integration than at any time in history.

The principal reason, I think, that these facts are less significant than Zakaria believes they are (and that both he and I would like them to be) is that they are backward rather forward looking --- much in the way certain economic statistics better reflect the past state of the economy than serve as a useful basis for predicting its future. As I expect Zakaria would agree, there have been such periods in the recent past. Think of the 1990s, when after the fall of the Soviet Union, it seemed for those brief, happily self-deluded years that the liberal capitalist model had swept all before it, and that this capitalist tide was lifting all economic boats; that the wars that great powers, and above all the US, would likely be engaged in would henceforth be wars of choice, not necessity, and likely wars like Bosnia and Kosovo --- that is to say wars in which the national interest, from a realist perspective anyway, were less than self-evident; and that, grave as they remained, problems of want, above all disease and hunger, and threats to the environment were diminishing.

The picture in 2008 is very different from the one I have just described.

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I agree with Fareed that about the use of fear-mongering on the right and occasionally the left for domestic political purposes. And I agree that by a number of measures we are actually much better off than in many previous eras. But in his list of threats he betrays his realist roots, and thus misses some of the most important reasons for worrying about the current international environment. When Fareed lists usual suspects, he starts with terrorism, but the rest of the list - rogue states, Iran, North Korea, a revanchist Russia, an expansionist China - is completely state-centric. It's a Bismarckian tableau - who is up, who is down, who needs reassurance, who bears watching. He then throws in, slightly tongue in cheek, two economic threats - Indian outsourcing and Mexican immigration. But he completely ignores many of the threats I would put at the top of my list - nuclear proliferation, global epidemics, and climate change. In the case of both global epidemics and climate change, we face the direct threats of disease, flooding, drought, desertification, etc, but also the secondary security threats of profound domestic dislocations, causing government collapse, refugee flows, border wars, and conflict that appears to be ethnic in nature but that is in large part driven by resource scarcity (Darfur is a partial example).

The tertiary effects are even more worrisome.

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I'm really in overwhelming agreement with what Fareed Zakaria's written below, but I thought I might alienate the audience by noting that while China panic genuinely "is largely a product of the right" one shouldn't let the left off here too easily. Liberals' problem has less to do with security concerns posed by China than by economic ones. It seems to me that if I were a Chinese official sitting around in Beijing listening to how some Democrats talk about the national and global economy, I'd be hard-pressed to avoid the conclusion that their international economic agenda was focused on finding ways to keep the Chinese population trapped in crushing poverty. I don't think that's really what Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are trying to say as they race around the country denouncing trade deals left and right, but I'm pretty sure that is how they sound.

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I wrote this book for many reasons and it has many themes. But one of them - that I'd like to start with today - is about nature of the world out there. What is the international system in which the United States currently exists? How dangerous is it? Why? Those questions are in some ways fundamental to our understanding of American foreign policy. In my book, I take the unconventional view that we're living in a remarkably benign international environment.

We have done a great job of scaring the hell out of people, telling them that they are living in frightening times. You know the list: terrorism, rogue states, Iran, North Korea, a revanchist Russian, an expansionist China. Throw into this mix suspicions of Indian outsourcing and Mexican immigration and it seems as if the world is ganging up on the United States. In fact, the data overwhelmingly shows that we're living in more peaceful times than at any point since the early 1950s, and perhaps in several centuries. (Harvard's Steven Pinker says, "the most peaceful times in the species' existence.") Wars, civil wars, deaths are all down, down, down over the last twenty years. And economic growth is up across the globe.

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We're very excited that this week we'll be discussing Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World. Joining Zakaria is a great group: Michael Lind of the New America Foundation, Ann-Marie Slaughter of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, The Atlantic's Matt Yglesias, and prolific journalist David Rieff.

It's going to be fascinating, so finish up your reading.

Yesterday on one of the Sunday morning talk shows Clinton said: "When the federal government, through the Fed and Treasury, gave $30 billion in a bailout to Bear Stearns, I didn't hear anybody jump in and say, 'That's not going according to the market, that's rewarding irresponsible behavior.'"

I feel personally insulted and so should everyone connected with TPMCafe. As you all know, that is exactly what I have been screaming at the top of my lungs. In fact, I've said this so many times, that many of you are sick of hearing it.

And I didn't just say it at TPMCafe. I also said it at The American Prospect, Truthout, the Guardian, and Common Dreams. In fact, I've also said this in such prominent news outlets as the Lehrer News Hour and The New York Times.

Apparently Senator Clinton didn't hear me. She also didn't hear my solution, which is certainly not a silly cut in the gas tax which will primarily benefit the oil industry.

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No one questions the amazing personal courage of John McCain during the Vietnam War.

But when it comes to national security issues, and in particular strategic judgment, there is much to be quizzical about.

His views on putting ground troops into the Balkans during the Clinton Administration are worth examining.

His opinions about Somalia, Afghanistan, Iran, and for that matter Panama and the First Gulf War are all well worth scrutiny.

His views about domestic security are also rather noteworthy.

I have heard from Clinton campaign insiders that Hillary Clinton's gas tax rollback proposal is resonating with voters -- particularly the economically besieged in Indiana and North Carolina. She's offering a classic give away to lure voters -- and this is part of the retail politicking that the Clinton campaign is using to dismantle Obama's sizzle.

But my former boss Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), who chairs the Senate Energy Committee, endorsed Barack Obama last week -- and I think that Hillary's gas tax proposal was part of what put him over the edge. My hunch, knowing Bingaman and his views about nuclear language recklessness, is that Hillary Clinton's comments about "obliterating Iran" also cost her his superdelegate vote.

An effort is now underway among serious policy intellectuals from both sides of the political aisle to protest the Clinton gas tax rollback notion.

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