U.S. Policy Debate about "Another Planet"

A column in the Australian by Paul Kelly nicely captured one of the essential points from the panel we held last week on "the rise of the rest" or "the return of the rest," as I put it. (You can watch our raw footage here.) As Kelly put it, policy nirvana is out of America's reach even under a McCain or Obama Administration. I think Flynt Leverett of the New America Foundation got the prize for the quote of the day. Here is how Kelly put it:

In his comments this week to the Carnegie Council workshop in New York, Leverett said that when US politicians talked about achieving energy independence, "either they don't understand how stupid that is or they do understand and say it anyway". He argued that the classic remedy to confront the US's declining currency was to raise interest rates and balance the budget, but there was no sign "that either McCain or Obama will do this". The US debate "was about some other planet from where we are now".

(Photo from NASA website.)