John McCain is now leading or tied with Barack Obama in every national survey conducted after the Republican Convention:
Let’s presume that the 10 point lead in Gallup is a wild outlier unless and until we see anything like that result in other polls.
One presumes this bounce is primarily a reaction to the choice of Sarah Palin as the VP choice and her speech to the convention Wednesday. McCain’s performance was fine but it’s hard to imagine that it was responsible for a sizable movement.
The head-to-heads are interesting but the Electoral College maps are more useful. The usual suspects have yet to update theirs.
David Kay, former U. N. weapons inspector, has an op-ed in the Washington Post on the Iranian nuclear development program which I take as a veiled campaign advertisement for John McCain. In the op-ed Dr. Kay’s assessments are that, judging by the known knowns, Iran is likely to have a nuclear weapon in two to four years. Taking into account the known unknowns Iran may well have a nuclear weapon within a year or two. And the unknown unknowns? Who knows?
My humble best guess is that Iran is pushing toward a nuclear-weapons capability as rapidly as it can. But if Tehran were to believe that American — not Israeli — military action is imminent, it might slow work on the elements of its program that it thinks the world can observe. Yet such temporizing would only be tactical. Its strategic goal is to acquire nuclear weapons to counter what it views as a real U.S. threat. Iran appears to believe that the United States is not willing to accept the validity and survival of the Iranian revolutionary state.
So, what next? That’s what’s missing from the Iran debate and that forms the crux of Dr. Kay’s op-ed.
Two concerns seem to be most absent from discussion of Iran’s “nuclear future,” whatever it is: First, what policies would limit any advantage, political or military, that Iran might gain from such weapons? Second, how do we begin to craft, with all the states of the region — including Israel and Iran — political, economic and security arrangements that recognize their varied interests and concerns and their often very different perspectives on what these are? In the end, we need to decide how we can perform damage control and create arrangements that take into account states’ varied interests.
I seem to be one of the relative few who believe that neither the U. S. nor Israel is likely to attack Iran whether it has nuclear weapons or not in the near term and that it would be highly imprudent if they did. However, formulating a policy that prevents or discourages Iran from seeking or acquiring nuclear weapons that doesn’t include the use of military force certainly would seem to require a greater willingness to accept pain than we’ve exhibited lately.
UPDATE
Charles Ferguson, senior fellow for science and technology at the Council on Foreign Relations, writing in the Christian Science Monitor proposes a novel approach to breaking the logjam of negotiations with Iran:
A potential trust-building deal would bind the US and other nuclear energy states to Iran as clients under the condition that Iran accepts more rigorous safeguards on its nuclear program.
The clients would agree to buy Iranian enriched uranium and spent fuel containing plutonium for a competitive price. This would ensure that Iran would not amass a large stockpile of enriched uranium and plutonium but would continually ship this nuclear fuel material to clients.
Iranian leaders would show that their intentions are truly peaceful if they accepted this deal. And by accepting it Iran would gain international recognition for its enrichment program and could crow that they have the world’s superpower as a client. It would be a win-win situation.
He also re-states a point I’ve been making for years: Iran does not have enough indigenous uranium to achieve the self-sufficiency that’s the stated aim of their nuclear development program:
A country needs adequate supplies of natural uranium to begin the process. Also, it needs a fuel fabrication facility to turn the enriched uranium into fuel that can be placed inside the core of a nuclear reactor. Iran has neither of these major components. But the limited supplies of indigenous natural uranium and the pilot scale enrichment plant now in operation are enough to allow Iran to eventually make dozens of nuclear bombs.
That’s one of the many troubling things about Iran’s nuclear development program: either they’re nuts or they’re hiding something. Neither is particularly comforting.
After almost a year in the making, the new Atlantic Council site launched over the weekend. As usual with large Web projects, there are still a couple of bugs to work out — things that worked fine on the same server that broke when we repointed the domain — but we’ll get those fixed in the next day or two.
In the meantime, we’ve proud to announce two new blogs.
Atlantic Update is our breaking news blog, which will feature daily roundups of the most important news and op-eds in the transatlantic space.
New Atlanticist is our policy and analysis blog, which will provide expert analysis on the most pressing issues facing the transatlantic community from the Council’s staff, board, affiliated scholars, and friends. Today’s inaugural “issue” features three posts thus far:
NATO and the Near Abroad: Beyond Bucharest by Nick Gvosdev, until recently the editor of The National Interest and now a professor at the Naval War College. He calls for “a frank conversation on the Russian question” in light of the recent events in Georgia.
Alexander Motyl, a professsor at Rutgers-Newark, asks “Would NATO Defend Narva?“ He argues that NATO’s tepid response to the Georgia invasion calls into question the future of the Alliance in “Old Europe” and that we may see those states race to arm themselves with nuclear weapons.
Finally, yours truly asks whether we are “Focusing on the Wrong Georgia?“ It’s a response to Thomas Friedman’s column in yesterday’s NYT and rebuts that notion that we should invest the money we’re spending on overseas crises at home.
There’s been an interesting conversation going on, prompted by this guest post by Gregory Gause, professor of political science at University of Vermont and director of its Middle East Studies Program. In his post Dr. Gause notes that in recent months Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has taken a number of steps which, considered together, appear to be a concerted attempt to position himself as the new strongman of Iraqi politics. The moves include establishing his bona fides as a symbol of Iraqi nationalism by insisting on a date for the withdrawal of U. S. forces, eliminating opposition within Shi’ite politics with his campaign against the Sadrists, taking on the Awakening Councils demonstrating that Iraq will remain Shi’a-controlled, and consolidating his position within his own political coalition.
Marc Lynch (Abu Aardvark) replied to the post with a thoughtful commentary noting, among other things, the gap between PM al-Maliki’s intentions and his capabilities:
Maliki’s aggressiveness conceals his precarious political position. State institutions remain rickety, corrupt, and inefficient. His ruling coalition is shaky, despite the return of the IAF to his government, and even the core alliance with the Kurds has come under pressure over Kirkuk (i.e. Barzani’s denunciation of the authoritarianism in Baghdad).
Sam Parker (Iraqologist), posting at abu muqawama, responded with an intriguing post on the delicate political balance in Iraq, a struggle between those who are currently in power and those who would like to be in power, the “Powers That Be” and the “Powers That Aren’t” or the PTB and PTA for short.
It’s natural to conclude from this, as Gause appears to, that Maliki is making a bid to be a strongman. The big problem with this argument, as Abu Aardvark points out, is that 1) the PTA are down but not out and 2) Maliki is not strong enough yet to be a strongman. In other words, the PTB still need each other and Maliki still needs the PTB. The reason they need each other is that there is not yet a real “national” security force that is both strong enough and loyal enough to any one group or person for any one of them to emerge dominant. When it comes to beating down the PTA, the PTB and their armies are unified and all on the same side. But if the PTB try to go after each other, it would be a total bloodbath, especially with the rest of the country not pacified yet. Gause’s strongman theory and the implications he draws from it are correct, if instead of a single strongman you think of the PTB as an emerging authoritarian regime but one that, at least for now, depends on the alliance of the PTB.
I can’t contribute substantively to the commentary on the Iraqi political aspect of this conversation but I believe that from the American viewpoint if PM al-Maliki is trying to position himself as a new strongman in Iraq whether real or illusory it constitutes a problem for the United States. As the leader of the fledgling, highly imperfect democracy in Iraq, the al-Maliki government would be worthy of our support as part of our grand strategy in the War on Terror (remember the War on Terror?). As the strongman of Iraq al-Maliki would just be yet another strongman in a region in which strongman-type governments are the predominant form. We might support him nonetheless as the lesser evil but we’d be running the risk of taking the course that we’ve been criticized for in the past as earning us the enmity of people in the region—supporting repressive regimes. That’s the price of a return to the policy of realism for which some Americans seem to yearn.
The presidential race was essentially tied going into the party conventions. As expected, Barack Obama got a small bounce, somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 points, from the Democratic convention. As expected, McCain is getting a bounce from his convention. The wild card factor, the announcement of Sarah Palin as McCain’s running mate and her subsequent convention speech, seems thus far to have worked out swimmingly, reenergizing the campaign with the base.
The shake-out from all of this, though, is that we’re right where we started, with a race that’s essentially tied. Yesterday’s Zogby poll has McCain-Palin at 49.7 percent and Obama-Biden at 45.9 percent. Then again, Zogby, who uses a complicated party weighting and likely voter adjustment, had McCain up 47.1 to 44.6 going into his convention. Gallup’s daily tracking poll — which uses a ridiculously small sample and does not screen out those unlikely to show up to vote — had McCain up 4.2 points as of Friday. RealClearPolitics, which hasn’t updated since Friday and whose most recent polls therefore don’t fully account for the GOP bounce, has Obama up 2.4.
What’s interesting, though, is that despite the race having shown no real movement in the national head-to-head polls, Obama has made some gains in the more meaningful state-by-state race. Electoral-Vote.com has it Obama 301, McCain 224, Ties 13. On the eve of the conventions, they had it at Obama 269, McCain 256, Ties 13. The difference? The flipping of Ohio and several western states from “Barely GOP” to “Barely Dem.” Their methodology is overly reliant on single polls (RealClearPolitics still has it at 273-265) but the movement bears watching.
I’ll continue to believe, unless confronted with strong and sustained contrary evidence, that this is Obama’s race to lose. All the fundamentals point to a Democratic win this year and he’s a much more dynamic speaker than McCain. That it remains a statistical toss-up — that Obama isn’t running away with it — at this stage is interesting, indeed.
Sorry about the BtVS video (which is mildly spoilerish for the show, BTW). It’s not my intent to get into “Bangel” shipping, it’s just hard to find McLachlan videos that allow embedding. As this song was actually used in the show (over the scene that appears at about 2:11), a good many of the ones that can be embedded are Buffy tributes of some sort.
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In a study published Wednesday by Dublin-based EU think tank Eurofound, official and reported work hours were compared across the EU. Europe’s hardest workers, at least in terms of hours spent on the job? Full-time workers in Romania and Bulgaria, the EU’s newest members, put in 41.7 hours a week. Germany ranked 6th, with workers reporting 41.1 hours a week spent at work.
The report, which analyzed statistical data from all of the EU member countries, found that the 15 pre-2004 members of the EU spend an average of 39. 5 hours a week on the job, while people in the 12 new member states work 40.6 hours on average. Of the top 10 countries, seven — Bulgaria, Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia and Hungary — joined the EU after 2004.
[...]
Vacation time also varies dramatically from country to country. Swedes have a generous 33 days per year of paid vacation, while Estonians get just 20. Germans rank high here, too — third on Eurofound’s list, with 30 days per year.
This is mostly a function of affluence, of course, but also an indication of culture. It’s noteworthy, for example, that Estonians, who are at the bottom of the EU vacation scale, get twice the paid vacation time that Americans do.
It should be noted that the EU numbers aren’t just averages: They’re government mandated minimums! And, no, the figures above do not include public holidays. The U.S., of course, guarantees 0 days of paid vacation.
A new Rasmussen poll has Sarah Palin viewed favorably by 58 percent of likely voter respondents, compared with the 57 percent favorables that both John McCain and Barack Obama enjoy. Yes, that’s a statistical tie but it’s pretty impressive considering that 67 percent of the country had never heard of her a week ago.
Not surprisingly, there’s a strong partisan breakdown, with 89 percent of Republicans, 33 percent of Democrats, and 59 percent of unaffiliated respondents viewing her favorably.
More interesting — although partly explained by party — is that she’s much more popular with men (65 percent favorable) than with women (52 percent). A separate Rasmussen survey released Wednesday found that men prefer Palin to Hillary Clinton 49 percent to 45 while women prefer Clinton to Palin 57 percent to 35. Go figure. Maybe Will Wilkinson is on to something with his “Paglian chtonoic sexual power” analysis.
McCain has benefitted from a “Palin bounce,” getting a jump of 12 percent (from 42 to 53) amoung Republicans and 11 percent (54 to 65) among independents in the week since making the announcment.
