That’s the argument Ben Friedman and I made in our “Think Again” piece for Foreign Policy magazine. Our point there was that someone reading newspapers and watching television would think that Secretary Gates was some sort of transformational figure who took hold of a boneheaded grand strategy, two failing wars, and one broken bureaucracy and made them into successes. We argued that this description, which one finds almost everywhere one finds the secretary’s name, is wrong. (For responses to some of the critiques of our piece, Ben has a post up at The Skeptics.)

Dana Milbank, Defense Analyst

Over the weekend Dana Milbank authored a column demonstrating the tendency to represent Gates as something of a messiah. He does so by juxtaposing…Sarah Palin’s and Robert Gates’s current tours, which show a stark contrast in “hubris and humility,” respectively:

The week’s dueling tours of Gates and Palin show the best and worst in American public life. Both call themselves Republicans, but he comes from the best tradition of service while she is a study in selfishness. He’s self-effacing; she’s self-aggrandizing. He harmonized American foreign policy; she put bull’s-eyes on Democratic congressional districts and then howled about “blood libel.”

Milbank then offers the usual laundry list of Gates’s accomplishments. He

set a new standard for honesty when, at his confirmation hearing in 2006, he admitted that the United States was not winning in Iraq. At the Pentagon, he brought new openness: He ended the gag order banning coverage of flag-draped caskets at Dover Air Force Base. He hired a journalist, Geoff Morrell, to repair press relations. He penned personal notes to families of fallen soldiers and attended funerals.

Gates brought new accountability, firing top officials over the outrages at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the mishandling of nuclear weapons. He fought with Congress and the military bureaucracy to redirect funds toward troop protection. His championing of mine-resistant vehicles saved countless lives, and his push for better Medevac in Afghanistan cut the average time-to-hospital for wounded soldiers to 40 minutes from 100.

His unusual frankness continued right into his farewell tour. During his trip, he affirmed that “everything is on the table” for defense spending cuts, spoke in detail about disputes with China, discussed shortcomings in Afghanistan and acknowledged his disagreement with Obama’s decision to attack Libya.

Ben and I examine almost every one of those plaudits in our article, and even granting that many of them were indeed successes, we argue that Gates’s legacy far outstrips his actual accomplishments.

For our take on Gates’ tenure as secretary of defense, go here. Also, Chris Preble had an op-ed in today’s Defense News on Gates’s record, available here.

Robert Gates Is Overrated is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Libertarians often debate whether conservatives or liberals are more friendly to liberty. We often fall back on the idea that conservatives tend to support economic liberties but not civil liberties, while liberals support civil liberties but not economic liberties — though this old bromide hardly accounts for the economic policies of President Bush or the war-on-drugs-and-terror-and-Iraq policies of President Obama.

Score one for the conservatives in the surging outrage over the Transportation Security Administration’s new policy of body scanners and intimate pat-downs. You gotta figure you’ve gone too far in the violation of civil liberties when you’ve lost Rick Santorum, George Will, Kathleen Parker, and Charles Krauthammer. (Gene Healy points out that conservatives are reaping what they sowed.)

Meanwhile, where are the liberals outraged at this government intrusiveness? Where is Paul Krugman? Where is Arianna? Where is Frank Rich? Where is the New Republic? Oh sure, civil libertarians like Glenn Greenwald have criticized TSA excesses. But mainstream liberals have rallied around the Department of Homeland Security and its naked pictures: Dana Milbank channels John (“phantoms of lost liberty”) Ashcroft: “Republicans are providing the comfort [to our enemies]. They are objecting loudly to new airport security measures.” Ruth Marcus: “Don’t touch my junk? Grow up, America.” Eugene Robinson: “Be patient with the TSA.” Amitai Etzioni in the New Republic: “In defense of the ‘virtual strip-search.’” And finally, the editors of the New York Times: ”attacks are purely partisan and ideological.”

Could this just be a matter of viewing everything through a partisan lens? Liberals rally around the DHS of President Obama and Secretary Napolitano, while conservatives criticize it? Maybe. And although Slate refers to the opponents of body-scanning as “paranoid zealots,” that term would certainly seem to apply to apply to Mark Ames and Yasha Levine of the Nation, who stomp their feet, get red in the face, and declare every privacy advocate from John Tyner (“don’t touch my junk”) on to be “astroturf” tools of “Washington Lobbyists and Koch-Funded Libertarians.” (Glenn Greenwald took the article apart line by line.)

Most Americans want to be protected from terrorism and also to avoid unnecessary intrusions on liberty, privacy, and commerce. Security issues can be complex. A case can be made for the TSA’s new procedures. But it’s striking to see how many conservatives think the TSA has gone too far, and how dismissive — even contemptuous — liberals are of rising concerns about liberty and privacy.

Conservatives, Liberals, and the TSA is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post complains that Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell “held a news conference in the hallway outside the Senate and all but called Obama a socialist.” And what exactly did McConnell say? Milbank goes on:

“They’re running banks, insurance companies, car companies, taking over the student loan business, taking over health care, now, apparently doing to the financial services industry what they did to the health-care industry, doubling the national debt in five years, tripling it in 10,” he railed. “They’ve got people over at the FCC trying to take over the Internet. This is a massive government overreach.”

So McConnell didn’t call anybody a socialist. He just listed President Obama’s policies — accurately, it seems to me. And Milbank listened to that list and said “hey, you’re calling him a socialist!”

We’ve been cautious here at Cato about calling anybody a socialist. But if Milbank thinks a description of Obama’s policies amounts to “all but calling him a socialist,” I’ll just let his analysis stand.

Who’s Crying Socialist? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In today’s Washington Post, Dana Milbank does a typically brilliant job deconstructing the activities of Congress. He looks at how members of the various defense committees put their energies into fighting for home-state hand-outs rather than focusing on broader defense issues from a national perspective.

The dominance of parochial interests over the general public interest is, of course, a long-standing problem in Congress. Members from cotton-growing states gravitate to the farm committees in order to defend cotton interests, while members from inner cities gravitate to committees overseeing urban affairs to defend programs that subsidize their constituents.

The result is that Congress spends a lot of money on items that don’t have broad public support, and it spends little time actually considering policies from a national perspective.

A partial solution to the problem would be mandatory committee rotations every two years in the House and Senate. All committee assignments would be made by random selection at the beginning of each Congress.

People will say: “You can’t do that because members on particular committees are often experts in their field.” That would be a good argument if members used their expertise to serve the general interest of the public. Rep. Jack Murtha is an expert on defense issues, and in theory he could be spending his and his staff’s time probing Pentagon operations, reviewing administration defense strategies, overseeing procurement programs to reduce waste, and other public-spirited activities.

But that is apparently not what Murtha and most other members of Congress spend their time doing. Anyone who watches congressional committee action on C-SPAN can see the pattern that Milbank describes–members use their brief time with important witnesses to get in on-the-record statements in support of favored special interests. And their staffs spend most of their time figuring out how to maximize the home-state grab from the budget, not examining big-picture policy issues.

We have a $3 trillion government because members of Congress love to spend money, as a sort of general proclivity. But they are particularly addicted to spending money on their home states. Random committee assignment would help to disrupt that addiction, and it would allow members to adopt a more neutral and critical eye on matters in front of the committees that they were assigned.

Rotating Congress is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Dana Milbank has the evidence:

For the past few years, liberal activists have gathered in Washington each spring for the Take Back America conference….

But now that Obama has actually taken back America, the activists at this year’s gathering feel a bit like the dog that finally caught up with the car. Organizers changed the name from Take Back America to America’s Future Now, but that didn’t prevent a sharp decline in participation. …

Hickey estimates attendance dropped from 2,500 last year to 1,500 this year, and even that may overstate things. At yesterday morning’s four concurrent “issue briefings,” 585 chairs were set out. Only 213 of them were occupied, including just 15 for the session on global warming.

Americans Want Global Warming Action Now is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

As President Obama institutionalizes the permanent campaign, Democrats are using his mailing list and his organization to generate support for his massive spending hikes. Yesterday they announced to the media that they were delivering 642,000 pledges of support for the Obama budget to Capitol Hill. But Washington Post writer Dana Milbank asked a couple of questions and got some interesting answers:

At Democratic National Committee headquarters yesterday morning, party workers were loading minivans with Xerox boxes, each addressed to a different congressional office. It was a classic campaign canvassing operation — except that the next election is 19 months away. “Supporters of President Obama’s Budget to Hand Deliver 642,000 Pledges Gathered from Around the Country to Capitol Hill,” announced the Democrats’ news release.

CNN and the Huffington Post dutifully reported the DNC’s claim of 642,000 pledges. Network cameras and the BBC showed up to film the operation. “We had one of the big printers downstairs smoking last night,” party spokesman Brad Woodhouse said.

In fact, the canvassing of Obama’s vaunted e-mail list of 13 million people resulted in just 114,000 pledges — a response rate of less than 1 percent. Workers gathered 100,000 more from street canvassing. The DNC got to 642,000 by making three photocopies of each pledge so that each signer’s senators and representative could get one.

So they asked 13 million Obama supporters to support Obama’s budget, and got 114,000 responses — which might suggest that even Obama supporters aren’t excited about trillion-dollar deficits farther than the eye can see. And then they counted each one they did get three times to get a good number for the press release, which some of the media bit on. I wonder — if I count each tax dollar three times, can I send in $3,000 and have them count it as $9,000? After all, my two senators and my congressman will all get to spend it.

Democratic Math is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog