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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2011 > May > 22
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Editorial: Obama doing what any president would on Mideast
President Barack Obama, in his speech on the Mideast on Thursday, May 19, did pretty much what any American president would do right now.
The time had come to take stock and lay out some sort of plan.
Events of recent months included the long-sought demise of Osama bin Laden — the most important human symbol of terrorism — as well as the outbreak of Arab Spring, in which people across the Mideast are rising up against harsh regimes (not against Israel or the U.S.).
And the president was just about to set off on a trip around Europe, after two years without having much impact on the Israeli-Palestinian issue.
Having, like everybody else, been caught off guard by the Arab Spring, the White House has sent mixed signals. So the president had to make clear that the United States stands foursquare with those who seek democracy and liberalization, that it will pressure besieged regimes to ease off their brutal responses, that it will foster economic aid and more trade, but that it sees its military role as decidedly limited.
All of this will sound merely commonsensical to most Americans. But it’s a new direction after decades of close relations with all manner of authoritarian regimes, about the only kind to be found in the Mideast until now.
The direction changes on Barack Obama’s watch — though relations with the Saudi Arabian regime look pretty stable — not because he’s a different kind of president, but because he’s president in 2011.
On the Israeli-Palestinian issue, too, the president mainly played the assigned role of an American president. He tried to put pressure on both sides to move toward an accommodation based on a Palestinian state and the survival for Israel in peace.
Most newsworthy, he said a peace settlement would have to be based on Israel’s 1967 borders with “mutually agreed swaps” of land. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately said those borders are “indefensible.” And Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney denounced the president for throwing Israel “under the bus.”
In fact, though, except for that line in the speech, there’s almost nothing to discomfit Israel (though the president left out some things that the Israeli government would have liked in).
Meanwhile, the president rejected the plan of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to go to the United Nations in pursuit of a declaration of a Palestinian state, as well as his new alliance with Hamas, which rejects the very existence of Israel.
So the American president found the kind of balance that will help him be seen as a constructive force by Europeans and others seeking peace, and will even earn a grudging respect from the two sides.
At any rate, his position on border is not a great departure from previous American presidents, previous Israeli prime ministers, the course of negotiations over the years or the views of many strong friends of Israeli. Indeed, the speech is not necessarily a major turning point in the history of the Palestinian issue. The American role is important but limited. Events drive much, including, apparently, the recent departure of former Sen. George Mitchell as the president’s special pursuer of a negotiated settlement. He saw things going nowhere, what with Israel and other forces caught up in watching events in the Arab world with uncertainty.
The larger importance of the Obama speech may be the part about the Arab world. The uprisings of 2011 are unleashing long dormant forces. The call for democracy is certainly not the only force at play. Poverty, religious differences, old grudges and more will complicate the task of moving in a direction the region has little experience with.
The president’s promise to be on the side of democracy and human rights will be harder to carry out than to articulate. But, along with its risks, it holds the possibility of a new connection between Arabs and Americans.
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Martin Gottlieb: Elections law particularly bad place for partisanship
It’s a perfect symbol of the state of politics today: The Ohio House of Representatives has passed a sweeping elections bill on a party-line vote.
Wouldn’t you think that if there were one subject on which the politicians would want to achieve some bipartisan agreement, it would be on how to run elections?
To divide cleanly on that is to invite public skepticism about the outcome of close elections, to deliver the message that the deck is stacked for one party, and that the politicians in that party don’t care who knows it.
The charge that the majority House Republicans had no interest in compromise should be withheld if the Democrats were simply hopeless, if they were just not going to agree to anything. But the House bill doesn’t test that view of the Democrats. A Senate bill that is pending might.
The bills are sweeping, not in that they change things profoundly, but in that they cover a wide range of issues and change things significantly.
Two of the biggest House ideas are particularly tough sells, not just to Democrats, but most likely to non-partisans. One would prohibit counties from mailing applications for absentee ballots to voters.
The urban counties, including Montgomery, have taken to doing this as a way to relieve Election Day crowding in presidential elections, to spur voting, to justify reducing the number of polling places and just as a simple service.
The service is pretty cheap, because the applications are included in notices being sent to voters anyway. And the counties aren’t asking for state money to do it.
Secretary of State Jon Husted says the counties should all have the same practices. He says smaller counties can’t afford to do it, and that people complain about a double standard.
But allowing the counties to decide for themselves would be fair.
The decisions are made by elections boards that have equal numbers of Rs and Ds and are sometimes unanimous. And urban counties have legitimate concerns that rural counties don’t have.
To prevent a county from providing a service it has the money to provide might look good to Republican politicians when the county is an urban one with a lot of Democratic votes. But what about preventing affluent suburban counties from providing a service that poor cities can’t afford? What about keeping affluent school districts from providing facilities that urban districts can’t?
The second measure that’s particularly troublesome: The House Republicans want to reduce the early-voting period to, really, five-and-a-half days: the weekdays in the week before the election, and half of the Saturday before that week.
Since 2008, many people have said the 35 days in effect then was too long, because it overlapped with the registration period. And some said it was too long because it didn’t allow for much of the campaign to happen.
But a week? Nobody ever said that was all that was needed. It doesn’t promise to relieve Election Day crowding as effectively, even though absentee mail-in voting would go on for three weeks.
Apparently the House Republicans are worried about the Barack Obama phenomenon of 2008 repeating itself, that is, of people who usually don’t vote voting.
Keep in mind that the House earlier passed another completely Republican initiative: a rule specifying that only certain kinds of photo identification can be used at the polling place. This addressed the problem under current law of people impersonating somebody else at the polling place, a problem that seems to be nonexistent.
Husted hadn’t proposed that, and the Senate hasn’t advanced it. As for the pending Senate bill, it has a longer early voting period, which Husted supports. And the Senate bill allows online registration, a Husted initiative, but the House bill only allows address changes online, not original registration.
Although Husted prefers the Senate bill, he hailed House passage for keeping the process moving. Expect him to support whatever comes out of House-Senate negotiations.
The parties are missing an opportunity. They should be agreeing on online registration, on modest adjustments in early voting, on a range of semi-technical adjustments proposed by local elections officials, and maybe more.
Recent Ohio elections have been characterized by incessant partisan squabbling about processes, by habitual litigation, and by the attempt of both parties to convince people that the other side is cheating, a charge that ultimately has to undermine confidence in election outcomes.
New secretaries of state always want to be the person under whom that goes away. Things are not looking good for the Husted years.
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