Breaking It Down

Fred Kaplan from Slate breaks down President Bush's "new" strategy on dealing foriegn threats:

To laud Bush now for "talking up multilateralism" is to ignore the real point—that he still refuses to engage North Korea in direct, one-on-one negotiations, though everyone involved has urged him to do so because, they all realize, that's the only way progress can be made. He refuses because he doesn't want progress to be made, or at least not that way. He still believes that it's better to defeat evil than to negotiate with it—and so it is, but he hasn't yet accepted that he has no alternative to negotiating with this particular evil. Again, there's been no seismic shift....

This is what's really going on. Bush and his team have slowly discovered that their prescriptions for changing the world—regime change, preventive war, and spreading democracy by force if necessary—aren't working and aren't going over with the world. But they don't know what to do about it; they don't know how to go about their business differently. Bush is drifting, not changing.

Harold Meyerson breaks down why Joe Lieberman is having problems:

No great mystery enshrouds the challenge to Lieberman, nor is the campaign of his challenger, Ned Lamont, a jihad of crazed nit-pickers. Lieberman has simply and rightly been caught up in the fundamental dynamics of Politics 2006, in which Democrats are doing their damnedest to unseat all the president's enablers in this year's elections. As well, Lieberman's broader politics are at odds with those of his fellow Northeastern Democrats. He is not being opposed because he doesn't reflect the views of his Democratic constituents 100 percent of the time. He is being opposed because he leads causes many of them find repugnant...

The issue here isn't that Lieberman is not 100 percent. It's that his positions -- not just on foreign policy but on trade, Social Security and other key issues -- are often out of sync with those of Democrats in his part of the country. To expect his region's voters to dump the area's moderate Republicans but back Lieberman is to expect that they will adopt a double standard in this year's elections.

Considering the midset of some of our politicians, I think more simple explanations of issues will be in order.