Category: Editorial

There is a price to pay when a president appears disengaged, and President Obama obviously learned how much his diffidence cost him in the first debate this month. On Tuesday night, in the second debate, he regained full command of his vision and his legacy, leaving Mitt Romney sputtering with half-answers, deceptions and one memorable error.

Instead of windy and lethargic answers, the president was crisp in reciting his accomplishments and persuasive in explaining how he has restarted economic growth. Instead of letting Mr. Romney get away with a parade of falsehoods and unworkable promises, he regularly and forcefully called his opponent wrong. Having left many supporters wondering after the first debate whether he really wanted another four years, he finally seemed like a man who was ready to fight for another term.

What he did not do was describe how a second term would be more successful than his first has been, and, in particular, show how he would cut through the thicket of Republican opposition if re-elected. He missed opportunities to call for a more forceful opposition to assault weapons in another term, and to put forward a clear immigration policy.

But the contrast with the weak and failed ideas that Mr. Romney proposed could not have been clearer. The president noted that he had signed legislation that increased pay equity for women; Mr. Romney not only refused to say whether he would have done so, but condescendingly said he had hired many women when he was the governor of Massachusetts and had given them flexible schedules.

Mr. Obama pointed out that Mr. Romney’s tax numbers did not add up, and called the plan a “sketchy deal”; Mr. Romney responded in a huff. “Of course they add up,” he said. “I was someone who ran businesses for 25 years and balanced the budget.” Apparently he thinks it should be self-evident that a private equity mogul knows how to cut taxes drastically and still balance the budget, but it is not evident to any of the independent experts who have looked at his plan, as Mr. Obama icily pointed out.

The president reminded listeners that Mr. Romney’s immigration adviser was the author of Arizona’s radical, unconstitutional immigration law. And Mr. Romney himself repeated his cruel prescription to have undocumented immigrants “self-deport” by making it impossible for them to find work and aggressively demanding their identification papers. Mr. Obama offered the better, broader view on fixing immigration, though his own administration has also deported tens of thousands of noncriminals through a crackdown similar to Arizona’s law.

The president even got off a few good lines, pointing out that his pension was considerably smaller than Mr. Romney’s, and that his opponent was far more extreme than President George W. Bush in proposing to turn Medicare into a voucher system and to eliminate financing for Planned Parenthood. He finally took the opportunity to bring up Mr. Romney’s dismissal of 47 percent of the country as people who consider themselves victims and do not take personal responsibility for their lives.

But the most devastating moment for Mr. Romney was self-inflicted. Continuing his irresponsible campaign to politicize the death of the American ambassador to Libya, he said it took two weeks for the president to acknowledge that it was the result of an act of terror. As the moderator, Candy Crowley of CNN, quickly pointed out, the president referred to it as an act of terror the next day, in the Rose Garden. “Can you say that a little louder, Candy?” asked Mr. Obama, having fully regained his stride and confidence.

Voters who watched the first debate might have been left with an impression that Mr. Romney was the candidate of ideas and that Mr. Obama’s reserves of energy and seriousness had been tapped out. On Tuesday night, those roles were reversed.

– New York Times

Thursday night’s vice-presidential debate was one of the best and meatiest political conversations in many years, showing that real differences on public policy can be discussed with fervor, anger, laughter and real substance. In contrast to the dismal meeting last week between President Obama and Mitt Romney, this debate gave voters a chance to evaluate the positions of the two tickets, in part because Representative Paul Ryan’s nonanswers were accurate reflections of his campaign.

Vice President Joseph Biden Jr. would not sit still for a parade of misleading and often blatantly untruthful descriptions of the state of the economy and the Republican prescriptions for it. Though his grins and head-shakes were often distracting, he did not hesitate to interrupt and demand an end to “malarkey.” The result, expertly controlled by the moderator, Martha Raddatz of ABC News, was both entertaining and enlightening.

Mr. Ryan, as always, refused to acknowledge the improvement in the economy, at one point throwing out a canned talking point about the increase in unemployment in the depressed industrial city of Scranton, Pa., Mr. Biden’s hometown. “That’s how it’s going all around America,” he said, ignoring the steady reduction in the national jobless rate, which dipped to 7.8 percent last month.

“You don’t read the statistics,” Mr. Biden said, jumping in. “That’s not how it’s going. It’s going down.” He repeatedly pointed out that Mr. Romney had firmly opposed the federal bailout of the auto industry, which turned out to be the single biggest act of job creation in the last four years. Mr. Ryan responded weakly that Mr. Romney was a “car guy,” but offered little in the way of economic proposals beyond cutting taxes and ridiculing the Obama administration’s stimulus program.

The vice president, who was in charge of that program, actually defended it, breaking with his campaign’s usual reticence to discuss an enormously successful effort that, he pointed out, kept the economy from going over a cliff. And he showed Mr. Ryan’s hypocrisy on the subject by pointing out that the congressman had asked for stimulus money for his state of Wisconsin, just as other Republicans did even as they vilified the program.

Mr. Ryan’s performance on foreign affairs and military issues was at best disingenuous and at worst bumbling. He said he and Mr. Romney agreed with the administration’s planned 2014 pullout from Afghanistan but still thought it was a bad idea, a bizarre nonresponse that did little but confuse voters.

He never said what more a Romney administration would do about Syria than is already being done. And on Iran, he simply repeated Republican talking points about Mr. Obama’s “weakness” but did not say what Mr. Romney would do differently that would actually affect Iran’s nuclear program, apart from starting a war. He had no answer when the moderator asked how effective he thought military action be.

Mr. Biden refused to ignore the condescending remarks that Mr. Ryan and Mr. Romney have made toward the least fortunate, regularly described by the Republican ticket as “takers” who are irresponsibly dependent on government. That attitude, he noted, is reflected in the Republican tax plan that favors the rich. In one of his most effective summaries, he said that if Republicans would just “get out of the way,” there might be real action on middle-class tax cuts, jobs bills and mortgage relief.

“Stop talking about how you care about people,” he said. “Show me something.” Mr. Ryan’s predictable response: You said the stimulus would fix the entire economy and it didn’t. But he had no responsible answer for increasing growth.

Both candidates, however, demonstrated real engagement on issues that matter. It was a real change for voters starved for substance.

– New York Times

PETROLEUM Minister Diezani Alison-Madueke, last week, let Nigerians into the Jonathan administration’s response to the cycle of shortages of refined petroleum products, the latest of which has crippled commercial activities in most parts of the country.

Appearing before the Magnus Abe-led Senate Committee on Petroleum (Downstream) Sector on Tuesday, the minister told the committee of government’s plan to spend N251.2 billion ($1.6bn) on Turn Around Maintenance (TAM) and upgrade of three refineries. According to her, the exercise, due for completion in 2014, would shore up the capacities of the three refineries to 90 percent.

Any measure to cut down on the present regime of unbridled importation of fuel would certainly seem well taken. After all, that OPEC’s sixth largest producer of crude is unable to refine enough for its domestic needs is itself inexcusable.

However, we worry that the latest measure is no different from previous measures which neither turned the fortunes of the refineries around nor improved the nation’s refining capacity – they only boosted the bank balances of middlemen contractors.

To be sure, nothing of our experience with previous TAMs lend to any optimism that things would be any different even now. Nigerians are by now well familiar with interminable TAMs to put their faith in government’s latest plan. For instance, we saw how under the Sani Abacha administration, maintenance of the refineries became an avenue to fleece the treasury. Even the Obasanjo administration which attempted to redeem the situation was more of the same. In both exercises, the billions of naira spent on the TAM went down the drain.

Where is the evidence that anything has changed? We find none. Indeed, the on-going oil subsidy fund administration saga, under which the treasury has been fleeced of nearly a trillion naira, would seem enough pointer to how the virus of corruption has metastasised.

Throwing $1.6 billion at the ailing refineries is not a good way to use public funds. Not at this time. The claim that the refineries would attain 90 percent performance post-TAM is even more suspect. We have certainly heard such claims before. If we may dare to make the point again, the earlier arguments in favour of turning the treasury taps on – for the sake of keeping them running even if they are guaranteed to relapse later – are clearly as unhelpful, unrealistic as they are wasteful; they belong in the past.

The third reason is that the costs of keeping the ailing refineries have grown in years. Whereas, in the twilight of the Obasanjo administration, it was able to realise $700 million from the sale of two of the refineries to Bluestar Consortium, it seems highly unlikely that the same refineries would fetch anything near that figure– despite the billions sunk into them since their forced reacquisition by government.

For these reasons, we consider the option of sale as compelling and urgent. Apart from saving the treasury the annual outlay of keeping the non-functional entities, we have no doubt that the private sector will better deliver value for every dime invested for the prospective investors. It may well kick-start the process of true liberalisation– which the Federal Government – for reasons best known to it, has been too timid to push beyond its laissez faire fuel import liberalisation.

Having said that, the greatest threats to the nation’s quest for self-sufficiency in domestic refining remain the virus of corruption, bad faith and government’s astounding myopia. The interplay of the factors explains the befuddled thinking behind government’s policies and the paralysis which the sector has found itself. They are the reasons why the government would announce plans to build new refineries when it clearly lacks the nerves to turn the sod at project sites. They are the reasons why the refineries cannot work – and unfortunately – the same reasons why it does not make sense to throw in public money for TAM.