It was an '80s flashback in the New York Times Sunday book review. First, Veteran New York Times Moscow correspondent (and current editorial board member) Serge Schmemann attacked a new book about Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, "Winter is Coming," by Garry Kasparov, the chess grandmaster turned dissident. Schmemann seemed to take quite personally Kasparov's criticism of Barack Obama and his celebration of Ronald Reagan's staredown of the Soviet Empire to end the Cold War. Instead, Schmemann gave all the credit to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev: "...ultimately it was Gorbachev, more than any American or other Western leader, who played the greatest role in bringing down the Soviet system."
Schmemann laid out the roots of Putinism, and Kasparov's accusations against "the Democratic Party under President Obama...guilty of chronic appeasement and weakness in letting bad guys like Putin stay in power."
He was aggrieved at the notion.
There’s no pretense of nonpartisanship here, no subtlety. A fiery man known for his dynamic play in chess and for his self-assurance, Kasparov fully credits Ronald Reagan for the end of the Cold War and the fall of the “evil empire” -- “Lesser problems were left to lesser men” -- and he has no doubt that “the world would be a safer, more democratic place today had John McCain been elected” president, or at least Mitt Romney, who called Russia “without question our No. 1 geopolitical foe.” Barack Obama, by contrast, is relentlessly and repeatedly skewered: The president is “reluctant to confront the enemies of democracy to defend the values he touts so convincingly”; he is “busy retreating on every front”; and even when he does seem to be standing up to Putin, the most Kasparov can allow is, “I suppose that doing the right thing for the wrong reason is better than never doing it at all.”
The politicking becomes somewhat tedious, as do the “I told you so” moments scattered through the book: “It is cold comfort to be told, ‘You were right!’ ” Kasparov laments in his introduction. But much as one may disagree with Kasparov’s analyses, the main problem here is not so much with his accusations of Western or American perfidy. He has his right to his opinions, and even to the aggressive tone in which they are served up. That’s who he is.
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The real problem with “Winter Is Coming” is with its presumption that the United States is somehow responsible for what Russia has become, or for what it should become. Certainly Washington has an obligation to challenge Moscow and Putin when international norms or human rights are violated. Indeed, Obama and America’s democratic allies have done just that with the progressively tougher sanctions they have ordered against Russia. But even Reagan, the president Kasparov so adulates, never sought regime change in the “evil empire,” instead looking for areas of cooperation with Gorbachev. And ultimately it was Gorbachev, more than any American or other Western leader, who played the greatest role in bringing down the Soviet system.
Schmemann concluded with a petulant, Obama-protecting paragraph.
This is not the place to argue the merits or feasibility of arming Ukraine or cutting Russian gas imports. Nor is there a need to defend President Obama against Kasparov’s crude and baseless insults. The question to be posed is whether even the most aggressive Western stance toward Putin would make him less dictatorial or Russia more free. That change must come from within, and I would have much preferred to hear Kasparov’s take on what must change in Russia and how the Russians might do it. There are plenty of other people to trash Barack Obama.
Schmemann's reporting from Moscow after the revolutions of 1989 toppled the Berlin Wall and Communism in Eastern Europe betrayed a disturbing ambivalence toward the growing pains of freedom and democracy, as in this quote, courtesy of the Media Research Center archives from a story on beggars and ethnic strife in the Soviet Union dated March 13, 1991:
Lines might be long, freedoms might be few, but one thing the state guaranteed was security from the cradle to the grave...But with the novel forces of democratization, decentralization, and freer expression came the hard truths of poverty, dislocation, crime, ethnic hatred and the erosion of the state's omnipotence. Beggars and cripples emerged from the shadows, the injured and humiliated took to venting their grievances in the streets, and ever-worsening shortages pushed masses over the threshold of poverty.
Another Reagan-era flashback appeared a few pages down in the Times Book Review. The paper assigned liberal writer Timothy Noah to opine on a biography of the late Jack Kemp, Republican vice-presidential candidate and legendary tax-cut advocate.
Noah began his review of "Jack Kemp: The Bleeding-Heart Conservative Who Changed America," by veteran political analysts Fred Barnes and Morton Kondracke, with an attack on Kemp's beloved supply-side economics.
If space aliens were to land a flying saucer on the Capitol’s South Lawn, one question they might ask is: Wherever did you get the idea that cutting taxes would increase revenue?
That was the premise of supply-side economics as practiced by Jack Kemp, and it’s a certainty that if Kemp were still alive -- he died in 2009 at 73 -- he’d drop whatever he was doing and answer at such length that the little green men might be sorry they asked.
A relentlessly ebullient onetime quarterback for the Buffalo Bills, Kemp served 18 years in Congress as a representative for western New York, achieving political stardom by pushing through Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cut, of which Kemp and Senator William V. Roth Jr., Republican of Delaware, were the principal authors. “Jack Kemp,” a new biography by Morton Kondracke and Fred Barnes -- two right-of-center political journalists best known as co-hosts of “The Beltway Boys,” which ran for a decade on Fox News --gets off to a shaky start by stating that the Kemp-Roth bill helped “set off an economic boom that lasted into the 2000s.”
In fact, Kemp-Roth was a disaster. It inaugurated two decades of sky-high budget deficits, accelerated a nascent growth trend in income inequality and did (depending on who you ask) little or nothing to ease the brutal 16-month recession that began around the same time the bill was passed.
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Whether the law boosted tax receipts is a point on which Kondracke and Barnes remain politely agnostic, but the evidence couldn’t be clearer. The law reduced revenues by $111 billion over four years, according to the Treasury Department. That’s well over $200 billion in 2015 dollars. Reagan ended up having to increase taxes (over Kemp’s loud objections) one year later, and still was only partly successful in stanching the red ink. But the bill made Kemp a Republican star, because it knocked the top income tax rate lower than it had been since the 1930s. It was, Kondracke and Barnes observe, “Reagan’s most important domestic achievement.”
Tax revenues did in fact rise between 1981 and 1990, as this Cato Institute rebuttal to a Washington Post story shows.
Noah, who wrote previously for The New Republic and other liberal publications, gave Kemp backhanded praise as being a nice guy who "felt more at ease in the company of African-Americans than most Republicans," and as a big spender, "much more resistant than most Republicans to cutting government....Some of that resistance came from Kemp’s experience meeting with the dispossessed and developing an understanding of what their lives were like."
Noah took one last whack at tax cuts: "....despite its consistent record of failure under Reagan and President George W. Bush, supply-side economics remains the Republicans’ unquestioned faith.
In 2012 Noah praised "Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party: From Eisenhower to the Tea Party," in the Times Book Review, underlining the book's theme:
Then came Watergate, which alienated moderate donors in the '70s; direct-mail campaigns for the Republican Ripon Society, an influential liberal group, soon began losing money. At the same time, wealthy conservatives like Joseph Coors, John Olin and the Koch brothers were stepping up their contributions to conservative causes. With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the party lurched farther right, and modern Republicans became scarcer still. Today, nearly all political centrists are Democrats.
