Eyes on the road, please: Is Washington at risk of succumbing to distracted driver syndrome?

So, let’s take a look at the papers and see how all that foreign policy is going for us, shall we?

• "As U.S. assesses mission, Karzai is a question mark" — here on the front page of the Washington Post is a devastating appraisal of the state of the U.S. relationship with our man in Kabul, Hamid Karzai. It features Karzai fulminating to Gen. David Petraeus and Amb. Karl Eikenberry that in his view he’s got three principal "enemies," and that if forced to choose among them he would take the Taliban over the U.S. and our international allies.
• "More Christians are Fleeing Iraq in New Violence" — in this, the lead story in the New York Times this morning, we learn that, as the opening paragraph puts it: "A new wave of Iraqi Christians has fled to northern Iraq or abroad amid a campaign of violence against them and growing fear that the country’s security forces are unable or, more ominously, unwilling to protect them."
• In the Financial Times, Dec. 12’s pages two and three featured the following headlines: "Swedes call for calm after bombs," "Racists battle riot police in Moscow streets," and "Debt refinancing sparks fears of deeper euro crisis."
• The Wall Street Journal features a profile of Umberto Bossi, the Italian political power broker and ally of besieged Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who calls immigrants "bingo bongos" and who flipped his country the bird during the Italian national anthem. The punch line is that this clown is representative of a resurgence of a European loony right wing that is giving the United States’ anti-immigration nut-jobs a run for their money in the ‘let’s blame it on the brown people’ sweepstakes. Or as the Daily Mail puts it in their own story on their own right wing hate brigade, The English Defence League, "they make the Tea Party look like a bunch of left wing liberals."
• The Journal also features an op-ed by one of their own fringe characters, Mary Anastasia O’Grady, the Americas columnist who still thinks she’s in the jungles of Central America battling commies most of the time. But this time she puts her finger on yet another place where a vaunted foreign policy initiative is going awry, Haiti, in a piece entitled "Haiti’s Preval Tries to Steal an Election."
• Speaking of borderline personality disorder, over at The Drudge Report, if you skimmed the headlines you were treated to choice entries like: "NKorea threatens SKorea with nuclear war" and "Iran conducts large military exercise near Iraq border." Of course they are joined with usual Drudge international fare which all seems to be oriented how strange and downright un-American the rest of the world is like: "China’s ‘City Jade Men’ Indulge in Mud Masks and L’OREAL Creams" and a story about an Iranian man being blinded with acid in an "eye for an eye" punishment for blinding his lover’s husband.
• The Guardian features more on WikiLeaks, the journalistic holiday gift that keeps on giving, allegations of election fraud in Kosovo and a YouTube video of a Sudanese public flogging of a woman.
• Over at The Independent you get "Quick Fix Aid Projects Fail to Help Afghans" with an explanatory dek saying, "The most extraordinary failure of the US-led coalition is that the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars has had so little impact.

And of course, in all of these, you get reports of deadly suicide bombings in Afghanistan and Iraq, the mediocre result at the Cancun climate talks, further turmoil in Mexico, $91 per barrel oil and a lot of other headlines that should, especially given the nasty, cold weather gripping much of the United States, have had readers inclined to pull the covers over their heads and actively considering the merits of hibernation.

But, despite all this and despite recent polls that show that if the 2012 elections were held today Mitt Romney might eke out a victory over President Obama, the reality is that over in the White House, none of these issues fill them with existential anxiety. Similarly, despite the fact that Afghanistan, Iraq, the Koreas, Iran, and Haiti are all a mess, you are not likely to see any of them emerge as principle issues for administration critics on the Hill or elsewhere.

Why? Well, you do the math. Which of these cases if it spins further out of control is likely to have a political impact in the United States big enough to distract American voters attention away from their own jobs, wallets and home prices?

My guess is that of all of them, the most potential dangerous for the political prospects of the president (which is not to say the most dangerous for say, the rest of the world) is the potential for a euro meltdown that knocks the world into the feared double dip. (When has an ice cream metaphor ever been so frightening to so many? Perhaps not since the last time the words Lorena Bobbitt and "banana split" were used in the same sentence.) Similarly, if Middle East upheaval or something other calamity produced a further spike in the price of gas the summer before the election, that might do the trick.

But that’s about it. Otherwise, on the dashboard of the United States, for the next two years all eyes are going to be on the jobs gauge and secondarily on the economic growth gauge. This is not news, of course, but with the world scene looking as it does, we should remember that when we learned how to drive one of the first things we were taught is that our eyes really belong out on the wide road ahead and that when you spend too much time looking down at your instruments you are likely to run into something unexpected.