Barack Obama: American Stoic

If the Founding Fathers had a chance to meet Barack Obama, they would of course be shocked. Even the most enlightened of them were not prepared to imagine an African-American President. And what they would think about his policies is anyone's guess: the Founders' political philosophies were shaped by their political environments, and they wouldn't fit easily into today's debates. But I'm pretty confident that they would be impressed with President Obama's personal bearing, which sometimes seems to have more in common with their ideas of deportment and decorum than with our generation's ideas. The Founders would never have expected Obama, but they would have understood him. It's not just that Washington, Jefferson, and Adams would have been able to smell what Obama is cooking. It's that Obama is cooking from the Founders' favorite menu.

Barack Obama behaves in many ways like a Stoic. By that, I don't just mean someone quiet and uncomplaining, the way we use the word "stoic" today. I mean that Obama acts very much like a follower of the Stoic philosophy followed by many classical Greeks and Romans. The Stoics taught that you should master your emotions through reason and self-discipline and focus on living a virtuous life. They also taught that virtue, reason, and discipline could free you, psychologically, from the impermanence and unpredictability of the world around us. The Stoic definition of virtue was both personal and civic, and the test of virtue was your actions, not your feelings. The point was not to feel righteous or spiritually exalted, but to live a good and just life day to day. By definition, that meant being a virtuous citizen of your community.

I have never seen or heard Obama using the specific language of Stoicism, but he certainly acts like one, and for the real Stoics that's the test. (Someone who "believes in" Stoicism but lives corruptly, or in thrall to intemperate emotions, is not a Stoic. Someone who has never heard of Stoicism but walks the walk meets the most important standard.) Obama's behavior since the election has been one very illuminating example: being Obama, he has put his personal feelings aside and focused doing what seemed best for the country, and at certain moments his behavior seems at odds with what he's presumably feeling. If "what seems best" has varied over the last few weeks, it has been because of new information or changing events, not because of Obama's mood. It is not about his mood; "No-Drama" Obama considers his own mood the lowest priority, and would see it as a serious moral failure if he let his mood interfere with his duty.

The Founders would recognize and applaud this immediately. It's almost exactly the way they conceived of virtue. The other Founders loved and admired Washington because they saw him as a man who had been born with strong natural passions (not least his naturally ferocious temper), who subordinated those passions under iron self-control. (When Washington's mastery of his temper did slip, as it sometimes did during the setbacks of the Revolutionary War, the results could be volcanic.) Washington exemplified the reason-over-emotion approach that his era held up as the ideal.

And Washington's favorite work of literature, bar none, was Joseph Addison's play Cato, a historical tragedy about a Roman statesman and his Stoic civic virtue. Washington actually put on a production of Cato at Valley Forge, because it was a good example of how to put moral virtue and duty over merely physical problems like hunger, cold, and fear. In fact, Cato was a huge favorite among many of the Founders; Washington and Franklin are always quoting it, although we no longer recognize those lines as quotes. Nathan Hale's famous line, "My only regret is that I have but one life to give for my country," is straight out of Cato.

It is not a surprise that someone like Obama, who reads widely in history, philosophy, and literature, would absorb some Stoic ideas. Those ideas have been steadily passed down. The Renaissance saw a huge revival of interest in Stoicism, and the 17th and18th centuries, with their love of reason and order, borrowed freely from Stoic thought. (Joseph Addison didn't write a play about Cato for no reason.) Stoic ideas have found their way into our wider tradition. And the Obama's Stoicism-without-the-name has clear antecedents in the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King Jr.'s approach to civil disobedience. That non-violent civil disobedience is, in practical terms, straight Stoicism: the protestors used their intellect and self-discipline to overcome danger, fear, and anger, so that violence, fear, and anger could not be used to control them. John Lewis sacrificing his body on the bridge at Selma, willingly allowing himself to be beaten rather submit to wrongful authority, is practical Stoicism of the highest order. Stoicism understands self-discipline as a synonym for freedom. If you can master yourself, you are free from other masters.

But Stoic self-control has so far out of fashion that we have trouble understanding it, trouble even calling it by its proper name. When most of us hear about someone subordinating their emotions to their reason, we tend to think of terms like "repressed" or "inhibited," terms that suggest that the person doesn't have full access to his or her feelings, or is too fearful to express them. We usually think that such a person needs to loosen up and become less inhibited, to express their emotions more. This started with the Romantic movement in the early 1800s, which prioritized emotional intensity above all, and was consolidated by psychoanalysis's attempts to free patients from genuine repression. At this point, a huge chunk of our popular culture is built around the proposition that everybody would be happier with less impulse control. We love stories about maverick-y cops and maverick-y fighter pilots and maverick-y scientists (all professions where mavericks can be genuinely dangerous). We watch reality TV, which deliberately showcases people who respond irrationally and hysterically to the most trivial challenges. We imagine a character like Mr. Spock, whose project superficially resembles the Stoics', as unable to feel, unable to name his feelings. When we have a Broadway hit about one of the Founders, we choose Hamilton, the one who was most volatile and out of control. (I love that show, but it only has a second act because Hamilton self-destructed.) And Key and Peele joke, hilariously, about President Obama's need for an "Anger Translator," who speaks the truths that Obama is imagined as unable to speak or to recognize.

All of this badly misunderstands Stoicism. Mastering your passions with reason and discipline does not mean being passionless. (George Washington did not need any Anger Translator. George spoke anger very fluently, and could release a poetic torrent of rage if he liked.) It does not mean lacking emotions, or lacking access to emotions. In fact, real self-control usually demands some serious self-knowledge. You cannot master your feelings if you do not know them. The difference between Stoicism and repression is that a repressed person cannot choose to express an emotion, even if they would like to, while an accomplished Stoic chooses whether and how to express something. From the Stoic perspective, a repressed man and a hysterical "maverick" are two sides of one debased coin: one cannot choose to express a feeling and the other who cannot keep himself from expressing it, but neither has any real control over their emotions. Obama's public performance over the last decade testifies both to his self-control and to his self-knowledge. He has more self-control than we are used to seeing in politicians, but also brings a sense of emotional authenticity, or genuineness, that few other politicians can match.

Obama's successor, of course, lacks anything like Obama's discipline. He seems to have given himself over entirely to uncontrolled passions. From a Stoic point of view, he is (as Hamlet puts it) "passion's slave." Because the President-Elect has no -- and apparently seeks no -- mastery of his own emotions, he is mastered by them, in the thrall of every momentary impulse or upheaval. On a profound level, he is not free. He is unable to govern his own emotional responses or his own behavior. He is the subject of a tyrant, and his response is to try to exert tyrannical control over those around him. But, tyrant that he may be, he is also exceptionally vulnerable to control and manipulation by others. Certainly, some of his advisers play on his emotional weaknesses. And although it is startling for the President-Elect of the world's most powerful nation to be under the thumb of a lesser foreign power's leader, this President-Elect's inability to govern his emotional life renders him, as the Stoics would expect, naturally servile.

The Founders, like the Roman Stoics before them, believed that only individual self-control, the ability of citizens to discipline their own passions and impulses, could make self-governing republics possible. Self-government is only possible through self-government, and when the citizens can no longer rule themselves through their reason and self-control, they will lose their collective ability to govern the republic or, worse, give that power away. It is the nature of the unmastered soul to seek a master elsewhere.  

This President-Elect is also a product of our wider culture, which has come to misunderstand "authenticity" as self-expression unfettered by decorum or reason. Only that fundamental misunderstanding allows the President-Elect to be misunderstood, by part of the public, as a person capable of leadership. The question for America, and for us as Americans, is whether we can regain the personal and civic discipline to keep our Republic free.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Political Advice from the Past

I'm at a rare books library this week, with politics happily tuned down to a lower volume. That's true even though the library is around the corner from the Capitol Building, and almost across the street from the Supreme Court. So I was in town for Mitch McConnell's continued resistance to the eminent Merrick Garland, but I am busy doing other things.]
What do I have to say about Obama's strategy, and the Republicans' obstruction? Not much today; maybe next week. But I did get a piece of odd political advice in one of the 17th-century books I was reading yesterday. The book wasn't as useful as I had hoped it would be, and would be even less entertaining to you, but at one point the author (Thomas Scot, about whom you heard so much in grade school), throws out two couplets about the importance of guile and strategy in high office. First, he writes:

Not simple truth alone can make us fit
To beare great place in State, without great wit.

Honesty is not enough for high office; maybe necessary but not sufficient. Good-hearted simplicity is not a qualification. How that might apply to Obama and his antagonists, I leave for you to think through on your own. But Scot finishes his little epigram with these lines:

For when the Serpent comes to circumvent us,
We must be Serpents too, or else repent us.

And there, in honor of St. Patrick the expeller of serpents, is where I will leave it for today.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Lame Duck Amok (or, Barack Obama in Winter)

So President Obama is having a couple of pretty good months for a lame-duck President. Obamacare upheld, same-sex marriage legalized nationwide, and the Confederacy-lovers suddenly on the ropes. Things can change fast in national politics, and this post might seem completely wrong in six weeks, but right now, today, Obama's opposition seems about as hapless as they've ever been: unable to cope with events, usually on the defensive and mostly on the wrong foot. And yes, some of this is the usual ups-and-downs of partisan politics. But it's still remarkable that halfway through his second term, when most presidents are largely irrelevant, Obama seems to have stronger mojo than he's had in years.

Maybe it's luck. But maybe Obama's opponents have done this themselves. They have forced him to govern like a lame duck for years now, unable to get almost anything through Congress, so that he had to rely on executive action and the bully pulpit. Most presidents get reduced to using those tools around this point in their second term, and it takes most of them a while to adjust. But Obama has been practicing using his lame-duck toolkit since the 2010 elections; he is right in the middle of his comfort zone at exactly the point when most presidents get thrown out of theirs. In fact, being a lame duck has liberated him to use the bully pulpit more, to be more energetic and direct in his rhetoric. There are no more mid-term elections to worry about, no more swing districts to lose. Obama can just be Obama.

And to some degree, what we're seeing is the overreach of conservative opposition to Obama. Obama has not gone on the offensive; he hasn't had the muscle to do that, and it seems not to be his nature. Instead, the conservative right has largely chosen their own battlegrounds on which to fight Obama, and they're losing to him badly on those chosen grounds. They decided to make repealing Obamacare into a hopeless crusade, long after the point of realism, and they've lost. They made gay marriage a core issue, and lost completely. If the last Supreme Court term has been largely liberal in its decisions, it's because conservative activists overreached, proposing cases that they hoped would produce huge 5-4 wins but that instead turned into 5-4 and 6-3 losses. The conservative Supreme Court Bar has kept swinging for the fences, striking out, and giving the ball to the other side.

Barack Obama could not have started the Black Lives Matter movement. The First Black President could never have done that. And remember, back in 2010 people were publicly scolding Obama for even suggesting that maybe Henry Louis Gates, Jr. shouldn't have been arrested on his own front porch because a cop was annoyed at him. But over the last few years conservative media have chosen to actively champion a series of white men who killed unarmed black men, beginning with Fox News's attempt to lionize George Zimmerman: not just to defend him, but to hold him up as an actual hero. That has meant that increasingly, over the past few years, national media has covered shootings that previously got nothing more than a brief story in local papers. Young black men being shot by cops is not a new phenomenon. What's new is that young men being shot by cops get national press attention, which starts to make it clear just how often this goes on. This has become a national conversation because the conservative media chose it as an area of focus, because they chose the inalienable right to shoot a teenager with Skittles as their preferred cultural battleground. It gets Fox News's viewers excited, but it turns out that repeatedly advocating for killing unarmed youths is not a winning mainstream position. And now Black Lives Matter has a life of its own.

And, to be fair, Obama's success (at least for the moment) in his lame-duck phase may ultimately come down to something much simpler: discipline. At this point in their second terms, most two-term presidents have been wrestling with a major scandal. In July of 1987, the Iran-Contra hearings were already on TV every day. In July of 1999, Bill Clinton had survived impeachment and we all knew much too much about blue dresses, cigars, and the President's favorite sex acts. In July of 1975, Richard Nixon had already been replaced by Gerald Ford. The second half of most second terms have involved a lot of self-inflicted bleeding. And while the last two years of George W. Bush's presidency might not have had a signature scandal per se, an iconic American city got all but completely destroyed on his watch and he seemed neither equipped nor strongly inclined to deal with that. The debacle of Hurricane Katrina clearly destroyed the public's confidence in Bush's leadership, and he never got it back.

For all the chatter, almost since he was inaugurated, about "Obama's Katrina," he simply hasn't had one. There has been no disaster of that size, compounded by negligence, on Obama's watch. And despite the endless harping on possible scandals (Ben-ghhhhaaaazzziiii!) by the Republican base, none of them has seemed like much of a scandal outside the Republican base. Obama is partly helped by the fact that things that could and arguably should be scandals -- wiretapping foreign leaders, aggressive drone strikes without oversight -- are things that his predecessor began doing and that his opposition wants to intensify, not to stop.

That said, we're at the point where most second-term White Houses are plagued by scandal, a muckraker's paradise, but journalists are hell-bent on digging up dirt on Hillary Clinton instead. The Candidate of Hope never quite turned into that guy, but No Drama Obama has pretty much delivered what he promised: a disciplined White House with no major scandals and little serious self-inflicted damage. You can beat Barack Obama; we've seen it done. But you can't get Barack Obama to beat himself. And he's been more than willing to let his opponents knock themselves out.

cross-posted from (and comments welcome at) Dagblog

Ted Cruz and the Quest for the GOP Obama

Ted Cruz's declaration that he's running for President doesn't make a lot of sense from the normal perspective. No one has ever given him any reason to suspect that he could become President. No poll has showed him with even ten percent support.  It only makes sense when you realize who Ted Cruz is modeling himself after: Barack Obama. Of course, he's not like Barack Obama in almost any way. But Ted Cruz doesn't know that. He doesn't see the real Barack Obama. He sees the conservative caricature of Barack Obama, and that's what he's trying to mimic.

Like Obama eight years ago, Ted Cruz is a first-term US Senator who hasn't achieved much in the Senate yet, but who is popular with some activists in his own party, and who is considered a rising star by some. That much is true. But that's pretty much where the resemblance ends. And that's apparently enough for Cruz to tell himself that he can follow Obama's route to the White House.

But in the real world, Ted Cruz is nowhere near the path Obama was on in 2007. Cruz doesn't have the base of donors he would need to run an actual campaign. He doesn't have the organization he would need, or the people to set up that organization; most of the talented GOP campaign-runners don't want anything to do with him. And he's got no support from other elected Republicans. Most Republicans hate Ted Cruz. Cruz announcing his candidacy for President is like someone saying that if you overlook his hitting, his fielding, his running, and his throwing, he's a lock for the Baseball Hall of Fame someday. Eight years ago, Candidate Obama was already building one of the most formidable national campaign organizations in decades. He had built relationships with major donors. He had major power brokers in his party, people like Ted Kennedy, urging him to run. If Cruz looked seriously at where he is right now and compared it to where Obama was at this point, he'd see how ridiculous he's being.

But that would mean seeing Barack Obama as he actually is. And the Republicans are committed to seeing Barack Obama as merely a media phenomenon, a guy who might be a talented orator but doesn't have any substance. They're committed to seeing him as an incompetent manager, in over his head. So they don't allow themselves to understand even bottom-line facts about him. They forget about the terrifyingly efficient ground organization he built. They forget that he outplayed and out-strategized Hillary Clinton, who wasn't any naive newcomer. They prefer to believe that Obama is just an unqualified guy who made a couple of nice speeches and got lucky. So Ted Cruz is trying to run as that version of Obama: the reality-free "Imagine" speech he used to kick off his campaign is his idea of an Obama speech. Cruz actually imagines that some vacuous lofty rhetoric might be all he needs.

Cruz is not only ignoring the practical differences between Obama and himself (like, you know, having a plan and not having a plan). But he also misunderstands the differences between himself and Obama as candidates. Cruz is abrasive where Obama is affable. Cruz is way out on his own party's right wing; Obama has always been comfortably middle-of-the-road for a Democrat, but gets called a crazed radical socialist by the right-wing echo chamber. Instead of comparing himself to the actual Obama and moving toward the middle, Cruz compares himself to the Republican fantasy of Obama and tells himself that if a far-left-winger could win, a far-right-winger can. Of course, a far-left candidate hasn't.

The Republicans have made this mistake before; their first attempt to run their own Obama wasn't Ted Cruz but Sarah Palin. That seems ridiculous now, but Palin in 2008 looked to the Republicans almost exactly like Obama looked to the Republicans: inexperienced, with no real substance, but charismatic and exciting on the stump. Of course, the weakness in Palin's preparation started to show disastrously early whereas, to some Republicans' mystified frustration, Obama's alleged lack of preparation never gives itself away. The obvious explanation for that is something Republicans don't want to consider.

And of course the search for a Republican Obama, and Ted Cruz's hopes to follow what he thinks of as Obama's strategy, overlooks a major factor in 2008. One of the reasons that a senator with a short track record in Washington was viable that year, when he wouldn't have been in a normal election cycle, was the Iraq War. The newcomer was viable because the establishment candidates had all voted for a war which, by 2008, voters had come to see as a terrible mistake. Obama was elected as a newcomer because the old guard had screwed everything up so badly. And Republicans don't want to think about that reality at all.

cross-posted from Dagblog

How Obama Talks About Terrorism and Racism

Let's keep this simple. The way Barack Obama talks about Islamic terrorism is exactly the way he talks about white racism. Exactly. The only difference lies not in what Obama actually says, but in how his critics respond.

When Obama talks about racism in America, which he has learned to do only when necessary, he takes pains to separate the terrible and toxic ideology, racism, from the larger white culture. This makes sense. If you tell white people that they are inherently racist and that there's nothing they can do about that, you are telling them not to do anything about that. In fact, you are pushing them to be more racist. If racism is part of who they are, after all, why not embrace it?

Obama has to work against the white racists who are actively claiming that it's all of white culture that's under attack whenever someone protests racism, that complaining about racist practices is an attack on whites themselves. The white racists of the world want nothing better than to erase any difference between being white and being a racist.

Now, when Obama talks about Islamic terrorism, which is also an inevitable part of his job, he takes pains to separate the terrible and toxic ideology, terrorism, from the larger Islamic culture. This makes sense, unless you are completely stupid. If you tell Muslims that being terrorists is an inherent part of their religion, and that only terrorists are real Muslims, you are telling them to actively support terrorism. In fact, you are pushing them to become terrorists. If they can't be a good Muslim any other way, why not embrace it?

Obama has to work against the Islamist terrorists who are actively claiming that it's Islam itself that's under attack whenever the United States fights against terrorism, that fighting terrorism is an attack on their religion itself. The Islamist terrorists of the world want nothing better than to erase any difference between being a Muslim and being a terrorist.

In both cases, Obama is making the sane and sensible rhetorical move. He carves out a way for white people to be against racism, and for Muslims to be against terrorism. Doing it the other way would be incredibly self-defeating.

Let me repeat that: Incredibly. Self. Defeating.

Here's the major difference: when Obama speaks about racism, his critics on the right pretend that he DID NOT distinguish between being racist and being white. They claim he's attacking all white people.

When Obama speaks about terrorism, his critics on the right attack him for distinguishing between being a Muslim and being a terrorist. They claim that he's soft on terrorism because he won't accuse Islam itself of being a terrorist religion.

That's really the whole story. When Obama talks about racism, he is falsely accused of doing something counterproductive that he's not stupid enough to do. When Obama talks about terrorism, he is angrily denounced for not doing something counterproductive that he would be stupid to do. I wish I could still be amazed.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Obama's Mission

Barack Obama was elected because the American people were tired of being bogged down in unwinnable foreign wars. He was elected because a majority of American voters had come to view the Iraq war as a mistake. This is a basic, bottom-line political fact. Therefore, it is not (and cannot be) Official Beltway Wisdom.

Obama also had a mandate to save the country after the economic crash. And he had some mandate to fix health care, which he had campaigned on doing, although this was not nearly as important as he thought. A lot of Obama's early political problems can be ascribed to the fact that he overestimated how much the country cared about health care and underestimated how much the country cared about financial reform and getting the troops home from Iraq. He would have been better served with bolder steps on the economy and a quicker timetable to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan. But even when he has misunderstood the voters' exact priorities at a particular moment, the voters' priorities have been real.

President Obama's address to the nation Wednesday night shows that he still remembers his mission. We're going into Syria to fight ISIS, but only with an air campaign and not with ground troops. Obama was immediately criticized by various talking heads and political opponents (in fact, was criticized even sooner than immediately, because the complaining started in advance of the speech) that Obama ought to commit ground troops, or not rule out committing ground troops, right away. They complained that Obama needs to be Serious, which means putting American soldiers and Marines in harm's way. But the American people made Barack Obama President specifically so he would not send troops to this kind of war. He is carrying out the mission we gave him.

There's been a lot of criticism in Washington about Obama's strategic maxim "Don't do stupid stuff." Hillary Clinton, who would be President if she had not voted to let George W. Bush do stupid stuff, has joined the criticism. But all this wise Washingtonians miss the basic fact. Obama was elected to keep the country from doing stupid stuff. And most of what passes for strategic wisdom in Washington these days is pretty stupid.

Committing ground troops into Syria is stupid. It is not even remotely a strategy. Sending our troops into a war zone with no plan for getting them out, or even a picture of what victory would look like, is not strategy but stupidity. And we've already lost too many American lives to stupidity like that.

People who want to invade Syria argue that supporting the moderate rebels is not enough, because the moderate Syrian rebels are not strong enough to win. Let me point out that if there is no existing force on the ground in Syria strong enough to beat ISIS even with our air support, then there is no force on the ground for us to hand Syria over to when our troops leave. It is the same problem as Iraq and Afghanistan. Going in with ground troops means going into a situation that will collapse again shortly after our ground troops leave. Staying in Syria until Syria is stabilized means occupying Syria forever.

If we don't have an ally that can win without our ground troops, then we don't have an exit strategy for our ground troops. Don't do stupid stuff.

More importantly, don't get American soldiers and Marines killed doing stupid stuff. That is our Commander in Chief's mission. Let him do it.

cross-posted at Dagblog

Fear Itself: Ukraine Edition

The single most important thing Barack Obama needs to do about Ukraine is not to panic. The single most important thing anyone else in the United States can do about Ukraine is not to panic Barack Obama. Developments in the Crimea are extremely dangerous, and that's exactly why everybody needs to calm down.

I have no idea whether or not Obama is handling this situation well or badly. Neither does anybody else who's not party to what he's telling other international leaders on private lines. How Obama is handling things is about what he's saying to people like Angela Merkel and about how those people responding. I don't think there will be any way to measure his success or failure for a while.

On the other hand, it's clear from the other side of the planet that Vladimir Putin has panicked and committed himself when he shouldn't have. There is virtually no endgame in which Russia doesn't lose more than this stupid adventure was worth. There are many endgames where things spiral out of control because Putin continues to panic or is too afraid of losing face to do what's in his own self-interest. He's dangerously unpredictable right now, and that is more than bad enough. What we really don't need right now is another nervous world leader scared to lose face. That's a recipe for a  spasm of pointless bloodshed that will leave scars on that region for a generation.

Of course, the American news media is essentially an industry of panic. So your TV is full of panicky or opportunistic people shouting loudly that Obama should panic right now. They're saying that Obama has to do something, by which they mean look like he's doing something. They complain that Obama is not tough enough, by which they mean that he does not act tough enough. Again, I have no idea how tough Obama is or isn't being behind closed doors. What I do know is that acting tough is seldom a sign of actually being tough. And acting tough because other people call you weak is absolutely a confession of weakness.

I don't know anything about the Ukraine situation. But some things are obvious:

1. There is not a military solution to this, and any military intervention will make things worse. The point is to keep the violence from expanding. And fighting a top-five military power on its own borders is not winnable; any "victory" would cost far more than it would be worth. It just can't be done.

Anyone demanding that Obama "get tough" by flexing military muscle needs to go to their quiet corner, get their binky, and soothe themselves for a while.

2. What's already happened cannot be reversed quickly.  Obviously, our preferred fantasy outcome is that the Russian troops just pack up and go back to Russia quietly, cleaning up their litter as they go. But that's just a fantasy. They may eventually leave peacefully. They will not immediately leave peacefully. Getting them out without bloodshed will take some time. Attempting to get them out by force won't be quick either, and there's no way to predict how it would go.

Anyone demanding, in essence, that Obama make this never have happened is simply freaking out, and should be disregarded.

3. No Russian leader is going to pull back an invasion force because the President of the United States tells him to. It doesn't matter who that President is. I mean, that's just crazy talk. This is not about us.

4. There is no workable solution to this that doesn't leave Russia access to its naval facilities in Crimea. Even if you, like me, know approximately zero about Russian history, you know that access to a warm-water port has been one of Russia's key strategic goals for centuries. That didn't change in the last six months, and it's not going to change in the next six months either. Putin's panicky invasion is at least partly a response to fear of losing key Black Sea bases, and that's a totally reasonable fear that he has acted on foolishly and unreasonably.

If this ends with the Russians backing out but keeping their naval bases, that is the best case scenario. Those bases are their only legitimate strategic goal. If you hear people complaining that Obama is "too soft" because this ends with the Russians keeping their main Crimean base, those people are out of their minds. If this ends with the Russians only in those naval bases, that would be the best outcome imaginable.

5. There is no military situation that panicking will not make worse.

Not panicking is not itself the solution. Obama can't turn this around simply through the force of his personal calm. But he can't do anything positive if he doesn't stay calm. This problem demands a cool head and a steady hand. Flipping out and getting emotional will only invite disaster.

cross-posted from Dagblog

A Plague on False Centrists

“A plague on both houses!” I've seen that line from Romeo and Juliet quoted repeatedly for the last two weeks,  as pundits and bloggers devoted to “balance” argue that the Democrats and Republicans share the blame for the current budget shutdown and the looming threat of default. The line itself is a cliche, but quoting Shakespeare makes you sound learned, and that is too often the major aim of both-sides-do-it journalism: making the journalist seem wise and above the inconvenient facts of the fray. Shakespeare was a poet, not a pundit, more interested in dramatic complexity than sound bites but if we’re going to mine his plays for lessons, we should remember what we’re quoting. Saying “a plague on both your houses” does not solve political conflict in Romeo and Juliet or in the real world. It accelerates a destructive feud, and it's meant to. Those who curse both houses are not trying to make peace. They are egging on a brawl.

    The line “a plague on both your houses” is of course spoken by Romeo’s friend Mercutio, mortally wounded in a street duel. Taken out of context, it sounds like an accusation that the Montague and Capulet families are both equally violent and equally blameworthy. But the audience can see for itself that this is not true. Romeo steadily refuses to fight. He and the other Montague on stage, his cousin Benvolio, work tirelessly to head off the duel, and when that fails Romeo physically throws himself between the fighters to stop them. Romeo and Juliet is a play about dangerous civil disorder, and the leaders of the Montague and Capulet houses do share the blame for disrupting the peace. The senior leaders who should rein in each house’s servants and young men, the clowns and hotheads, instead actually encourage aggression. But Mercutio pretends that there is no difference between the play’s most violent characters and its handful of peacemakers, no difference between starting a fight and trying to stop it. His pretense of neutrality is worse than an empty pose; it actively promotes violent conflict.

    Mercutio deliberately goads one of Juliet’s cousins to combat, and when Romeo refuses to be baited Mercutio jumps in to start the fray. He not only wants a fight; he insists. “A plague on both your houses” is the cry of a man killed with a sword in his hand. It is meant to spur Romeo to further bloodshed, accusing him of causing the death he tried to prevent, and it succeeds. Every death in Romeo and Juliet comes after the "plague on both houses" line. Blaming both sides equally undermines the peacemakers but empowers the hostile and unreasonable, freeing them from any public responsibility. If every time you kill a Montague (or a Capulet), people shake their heads and blame both the Montagues and Capulets, you might as will kill as many Montagues or Capulets as you can; your victims split the blame with you. And if you have to take half the blame every time you try to make peace and get attacked with a sword instead, you will never manage to make peace. Apportioning half the guilt for every crime to the criminal and half to the criminal’s sworn enemy is not an act of moderation. It promotes and rewards extremism.

    The American media has unerringly taken the side of confrontation and brinksmanship and discord, through years of mounting political disputes and manufactured crises. The press has done this while pretending neutrality with sad, wise shakes of the head, lamenting the unreasonableness of both sides. That head-shaking is not neutrality. It is active intervention on behalf of the unreasonable. Unprecedented acts of obstructionism are treated as routine tactics. Partisans abusing the legislative process to extract concessions are awarded the same stature and coverage given to national leaders seeking compromise. Worse, those who work for conciliation and those who work against it are portrayed as equally partisan, as if deal-making and deal-breaking were simply two sides of the same coin. Individual journalists may be liberal or conservative, but the political media itself is clearly biased toward confrontation: indifferent to policy results but hungry for drama, always looking for more juicy showdowns and shutdowns and crises. So the press has played Mercutio, standing in the street hoping to see a fight, scoring the “winners” and “losers” of every pointless showdown. The media pose as objective bystanders because they only forgive half of every crime and only slander half of every good deed. But absolving the cheats and brawlers is not objectivity. Cursing the peacemakers is not standing honest witness. The press has not been a bystander. It has acted, scene after pointless scene, to build more conflict. Our political journalists have helped to write the sorry drama our nation must now play out. They should take their bows.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Larry Summers Is Not the Main Problem

I'm as pleased as anyone that Larry Summers has withdrawn from consideration as the next Chair of the Fed. I thought he would do a terrible job. But Summers himself was never the real problem. His candidacy was only a symptom. The real problem is that we have a President who wanted to nominate Summers in the first place. Obama does not understand what's wrong with the American economy, and five years into his term, he persists in some basic misunderstandings.

There are two basic Democratic narratives to explain the 2008 financial meltdown, and they contradict each other. When Obama took office, he had to choose which story to believe. The first story is that the economy thrived under Clinton, and Bush's people screwed it up. I'll call that the Democrat vs. Republican story. It's partisan, but not ideological.

The other story is that Clinton's economic policies led to a short-term boom, but set us up for the long-term bust that started in 2008. The toxic securities that crashed the system in 2008 were deregulated under Clinton. Deregulation of banks started under Clinton. Clinton thought Alan Greenspan was a genius. The list goes on. The Bush people, at worst, only exaggerated what Clinton's people had already been doing. Their basic emphases (favoring investors over workers, worrying more about inflation than unemployment, etc.) were the same. Call this the Left-vs.-Right story. It's ideological, but not partisan.

You can't believe both of these stories if you're going to actually come up with a plan to improve the economy. You have to pick one. If the Democrat-vs.-Republican story is the right one, the best thing to do is to put Clinton's old academic advisers back in charge. But if the Left-vs.-Right story is true, then putting the old Clinton guys back in charge is the LAST thing you should do. Clinton's economic policies, devised by Robert Rubin and the so-called "Rubinites" associated with him, are either the way out of our country's economic mess or a way further into that mess. It can't be both.

Obama clearly chose the "Clinton knew how to run the economy" story at the outset of his first term. That makes sense. Obama had never had a strong personal vision for economic policy. (Read the economy chapter in The Audacity of Hope and you'll see what I mean.) He was immediately forced to take responsibility for a national economic crisis that had hit late in his election campaign, giving him almost no time to think our economic problems through or develop new policy ideas. And he had to stop the bleeding somehow. Going with the Democrat-vs.-Republican story gave Obama a ready-made team to put in charge and a set of basic policies to follow. (Larry Summers, Clinton's old Treasury Secretary, is one of the main Rubinites.) Going with the Left-vs.-Right narrative would have meant coming up with a completely new team and a completely new set of ideas. But who would he have picked? How would he distinguish good policy advice from bad? Accepting the Left-vs.-Right narrative meant moving into uncharted territory during a national emergency. Throwing out the old playbook and starting over is a much riskier move, and Obama hates unnecessary risks. Electing Hillary Clinton instead of Obama would not have avoided this problem. Hillary would have relied on Bill's old economic advisers, too.

While Obama's original choice might have been reasonable at the time, it has also turned out to be wrong. Five years later, growth is still sluggish, unemployment still high, and income inequality more rampant than ever. We've had five years of the Rich Man's Recovery, where the tiny fraction at the top have started growing even richer than they were in the Bush II years, but the rest of the country is still nowhere close to getting back to economic health. Not only is that not success, it's potentially a recipe for much bigger failure. The high levels of inequality make the whole system less stable and more prone to catastrophe.

Sure, we are almost certainly better off than we would have been if McCain, rather than Obama, had been calling the shots, and better off than we would be under President Romney. A move to the kind of Austrian economics that people like Rand Paul favor would have been a disaster. Obama understandably wants credit for keeping the economy from going off the rails completely and for whatever recovery has taken place over the last five years. He's committed on some level to defending his earlier decisions, and doesn't feel he has any room to maneuver on his left. He's right as far as that goes: his centrist policies are surely healthier than hard-right economic ideology would be. But "better than crazy" is not good enough. And while Obama's policies fit reality better than the right wing's do, the actual economic reality is still far to Obama's left.

Centrism is almost never the long-range solution to a fundamental crisis. A major crisis is usually a sign that a set of policies have major underlying problems. Sticking to the middle of the road makes sense in the good times, but disasters as big as 2008 are reality's way of telling you that you are on the wrong road. Proceeding cautiously down the wrong road and obeying a reasonable speed limit only changes how fast you get lost. To actually get out of trouble, you have to turn around and go in a different direction. That Obama wanted to put Larry Summers, the chief advocate of deregulating the exotic securities that caused the 2008 crisis, in charge of the Federal Reserve, shows that Obama still thinks that he can keep going down the Clinton/Bush economic road and it will all be okay if he just drives carefully enough. That he wanted to have Larry Summers riding shotgun with him is bad. But even if Summers isn't officially navigating, Obama is still following the wrong directions.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Boston and the End of the War on Terror

cross-posted from Dagblog

Five weeks after a terrorist attack on Boston, President Obama has declared that the War on Terror, "like all wars, must end."  If I had told you a year ago that he would make such a speech a month and a half after a high-profile terrorist attack on a major American city, neither you nor I would have believed me. But the lessons of Boston drive home the wisdom of the President's decision. It showed us that a terrorist attack is meant to be lived through and that Americans are ready to live through one. And it showed us an excellent civilian response to a terrorist attack paired with a decidedly mixed paramilitary response.

The key lesson of the Boston bombings is clear: the best way to prepare for a possible terrorist attack is to build six or eight world-class hospitals in your city. Start in the 19th century if you can.

I'm phrasing that as a joke, but much of Boston's resiliency and quick response was built on the city's superb medical infrastructure. Every victim who was alive when a first responder reached them got to a hospital. Every victim who got to a hospital lived. That is simply remarkable. The city's medical personnel held the death count to the absolute minimum. That does not diminish the senselessness of those three deaths, or the grievous wounds that many survivors suffered. But the city's doctors and nurses prevented a fourth or fifth or sixth senseless death, and I am grateful to them for that.

Some of Boston's success at coping with the attack comes from specific post-September-11 training. Boston's emergency responders had drilled for this scenario, and all of the hospital trauma centers had some doctors who had served in Iraq or Afghanistan and had experience treating the kinds of severely traumatic injuries that they saw on April 15. You can only give the police and EMTs special training after you've built organizations strong enough to carry out the training. First responders did a superb and intelligent job in triaging the wounded, spreading them out between the six nearby trauma centers. But that could only happen because the first responders had the luxury of six top-tier trauma centers within a three-mile radius. There aren't many spots on the planet with that luxury; the attack happened at the heart of a medical epicenter.

And you can't build a Tier One trauma center in any hospital. You need an institution and a staff that can support it. Boston could only dedicate such impressive resources to crisis medicine and emergency response because of the profound depth in the city's overall medical resources. Boston was ready to tend its wounded on that terrible day because Boston works on tending the wounded every day.

Boston's response to the Marathon bombings, its ability to absorb the body blow and respond effectively, was built on its peacetime strengths. It was a victory of the open society. On the other hand, the paramilitary response to the bombing suspects once they were identified, the manhunt and the city-wide lockdown, showed that we've already reached the point of diminishing returns. Getting tougher, giving the police heavier weapons or more military training, is not going to help; we're already at the point where those things are beginning to offset their own benefits.

I certainly can't fault the various police forces engaged in the manhunt for their caution; the bombers had already murdered a police officer, and they'd thrown IEDs at others. They had no choice but to assume that Dzokhar Tsarnaev had a gun and at least one more bomb. But the daylong lockdown, which paralyzed a major urban area and temporarily stopped its economy dead, was at least partly counterproductive. The lockdown itself helped hide Tsarnaev. He was found almost immediately after the lockdown ended, by one of the neighbors who'd been locked down. The militarized search took all the civilian eyes off the street. As soon as those eyes were back, the fugitive was easy to find.

After every attack, there are calls to get "tougher." But there's no tougher to get at this point without undermining ourselves. We're already at the point where the "toughness" is starting to hurt as much as it helps. Sending more cops with more body armor wasn't going to speed up that search. If they'd called in the National Guard, the bomber would probably still be hiding in that boat now.

And that's basically where we are as a country with the larger situation. Bringing more muscle than we've already brought to the War on Terror isn't going to get us better results. In fact, we've hit the point where more muscle and more security restrictions are going to bring us slightly worse results, while continuing to drain our resources.

There have also been calls to "toughen" immigration, because the bombers were immigrants, and there will be a new minor rule change designed to hassle foreign students between terms. That is not going to meaningfully cut back on terrorism, though it will play into the terrorists' argument that we're a country hostile to foreigners.

Of course, the people screaming about tougher immigration rules are ignoring the immigrants who played important positive roles during the Boston events. The terrorists were actually located because the hostage they took in a car-jacking, a Chinese national, was able to escape them and was quick-thinking enough to help the police track the terrorists with his cell phone. I don't see how keeping that guy out of the country would have made things better.

Nor can any reasonable person believe that those world-class hospitals that saved so many victims' lives on the day of the bombing are run by exclusively American-born doctors and medical staff. A world-class research hospital, by its nature, attracts talent from across the world. Some of the people saving lives in those six trauma units were immigrants. I'm pretty glad those people were here.

We're not going to be make our country safer by keeping foreign medical students out of the country. We can only make ourselves a little less safe by doing that, becoming a country with less young medical talent. We're not going to make ourselves safer by making it even more of a hassle to fly; we can only weaken ourselves a little by discouraging foreign talent and foreign business from coming. Closing our society down doesn't make it safer from terrorist attacks. It only weakens our power to weather those attacks.

Terrorism will never go away. It only takes a few disgruntled people willing to murder strangers. And we will always need to invest some resources in stopping terrorism and repairing the damage. But the question is how we allocate those investments. Some anti-terrorism spending goes toward things that have no other use in themselves, such as the x-ray machines in the airport, and that function as a drag on the overall economy, such as making airline travel more difficult and complicated. Frankly, most obvious military and security measures fall into these categories. On the other hand, spending money on things like hospitals improve the country's effective security while improving the general economy. Build excellent hospitals, with some extra money for things like trauma response, and you make the city better while also making it less likely that people in that city are killed by terrorists. Investments that protect us against terrorism and its effects while also strengthening our open society are apure gain. Spending on fortifying the country always involves some dead loss; spending on strengthening the public commons makes us safer while benefiting us in other ways. There will always have to be some straight-up security measures that will function as sheer cost; those costs are hedges against risk. But those measures can never diminish risk to zero, and at a certain point they start to cost far more than they save. On the other hand, money spent on building our country, rather than walling it in, is a secure investment in every sense.

Bain for Dummies

cross-posted from Dagblog

Over the past week much of our national media, especially the national pundit corps, was consumed with two questions: Was the attack about when Mitt Romney left Bain Capital fair? and Would Romney choose Condoleeza Rice as his running mate? These are both silly questions. The correct answers are, "Yup," and "Of course not." That part of the press corps took the second question seriously at all, even for one day, shows how disconnected they are from reality. Their chatter about the Bain question is just as clueless.

The question many pundits asked themselves was whether it was accurate to claim that Romney did not leave Bain Capital in 1999, just because he was listed in SEC filings as the company's  "CEO, Chairman, President and sole stockholder" for another three years? Pundits asked themselves this question because only pundits would not know the answer. Of course, they also asked a number of GOP sources, for balance's sake.

The "Is it fair?" question follows the earlier concern-troll version of the question, "Will attacks on Romney over Bain backfire?" (In fact, you still get some of that.) That question, too, defies and denies the obvious. Mitt Romney has run against a Democratic opponent in exactly two elections. The Democrat who hit him on Bain, hard and early, beat him comfortably. That isn't the whole story of either election. But what part of that record says going after the Romney's work at Bain is a bad strategy?

The argument for the "fairness" of the attacks is on a complete lack of perspective. It takes for granted that what is "fair" is what is considered normal within a tiny sliver of America: the wealthiest and most powerful sliver. Romney's Bain arrangements between 1999 and 2002 were within accepted business practices among high-flying financiers. They were vetted by lawyers, and involved legal fictions that have become standard in Romney's slice of the business and social worlds. And so to people who are accustomed to moving in those worlds questioning Romney's complicated but perfectly routine and legally-vetted relationship to Bain seems somewhere between impolite and outrageous.

But if you have reached the point where being "on leave," and CEO, and sole stockholder, and drawing a $100,000 salary, and having nothing to do with the operations of the business that pays you to be CEO, all seems normal to you, you are in the bubble. Part of the problem is that you have lost any sense of how most Americans would view these arrangements, and indeed any sense that the rest of the country does not share the perspective of private-equity managers or publishers of major newspapers. You have lost the basic understanding that your particular world view might not be shared by the whole universe.

Only someone in the bubble, for example, would think of Condi Rice as a great running mate. As hilarious as it would be to see Mitt Romney paired with someone stiffer and less natural on the campaign trail, it will never happen. There's a reason that Rice has always been appointed to office, and not elected. That reason is Condoleeza Rice. If you're used to seeing Rice on her home court, at Georgetown social events or government functions or press availabilities, you could lose sight of some basic things about her, like the stiffness. You might "realize", having spent more time around her, that she's not as stiff as she looks. But this "realization" is an illusion fostered by proximity, and only the tiny segment of the population that's spent a lot of time around Condoleeza Rice could fall prey to it. Seen from further away, Rice is revealed to be even stiffer than she initially looks, which is impressive. Also, seen from a greater distance, she looks uncannily like someone who downgraded the priority of fighting Al-Qaeda and then signed off on a disastrous and unpopular war, because that's who she is.  You can't send her to the Iowa State Fair and have her shake swing voters' hands. You also can't have her debate Joe Biden, who was in the War Room when bin Laden was killed. Either would be a disaster. If you can't see those things about her, the problem is that you're too close. You have lost perspective.

And once you lose touch with the fact that not everyone sees the world the way the people immediately around you do, you start to lose touch with basic reality. You can begin to accept absurd things as perfectly normal. You become unable to hear how silly, and how transparently dishonest, a phrase like "retired retroactively" sounds. Or, like Bob Woodward, you can go on Meet the Press and declare that "everyone knows that SEC filings are meaningless." That statement only makes any kind of sense at all if you have a very restricted sense of who "everyone" is. But the bigger problem is that if "everyone" knows SEC documents are just nonsense, then "everyone" has lost touch with basic moral realities. "Everyone" is corrupt and doesn't know it.

But once you get your head far enough outside the bubble to notice why saying "retroactively retired" insults other people's intelligence (if not your own), you might start to notice some other very strange things that are invisible inside the bubble.

For example, four years after crisis in the financial sector threw the country into this massive recession, the Republicans have nominated a guy from the financial sector for President. He claims that he can make everything okay again, by going back to the old policies from before 2008.

That may not sound odd to our investor class, or our politicians, or our mainstream journalists. But actually, it's really odd.

Not seeing why Bain is a problem is part of not seeing why nominating Romney was a problem in the first place. Not seeing why Romney is a problem is part of not seeing what's wrong with our financial class or our economy. And many influential people in our country are deeply committed to not seeing those things.

They are committed to not seeing why even modest new financial regulations are necessary. They are commttted to not seeing that the banking sector needs reform. They are committed to not understanding why Obama has been "so hard" on Wall Street, let alone seeing how soft Obama has actually been on Wall Street. They are committed, God help us, to not seeing why years of high unemployment would be bad for the economy. They are committed to not seeing even the most obvious solutions to America's economic problems, because they are passionately committed to not seeing the problems.

This election isn't just about America's future, and its economy, and basic questions of fairness and the American dream, although it's about all those things too. This election is about something even bigger than that: the reality principle. The next four months are going to be a bitter, dogged campaign to break down our ruling class's fundamental disconnection from real world. They aren't going to like it.  Not one bit. And that's why they're so upset over the Bain Capital attacks: because those attacks are true. And once this election begins to be about the truth, the truth is really, really going to start to hurt.

Getting to No: Obama and the Republicans

cross-posted from Dagblog

I am delighted by Obama's statement on gay marriage. I'm proud to be an American today.

A great deal of focus is rightly on Obama himself today, on his decision-making process and on how he got here. But I'd like to take a second to think about the anti-gay-marriage movement and how it got here. This week should have been a triumph for them. Tuesday night they won their hard-line constitutional amendment in North Carolina, banning not only gay marriage (which was already illegal), but civil unions and anything that resembled a civil union. Wednesday should have been a day to celebrate their victory.

Instead, they had a sitting President of the United States taking a public stand against them on national television, in an election year. And it was actually worse than that: a famously cautious and accommodating politician caught up in a very tough re-election fight threw the full weight of his office behind a position that polls at barely better than 50/50 and that just got solidly voted down in a swing state. And by doing that, he put hope and energy back into a movement that should have been feeling defeated and demoralized. How did the anti-gay movement get to the point where the President would do that in an election year? How did they get to the point where this President did that in an election year?

I think this is the fruit of the right wing's general strategy of obstructing Obama. This is a President bent on compromise, facing an opposition party that refuses to take yes for an answer. The President offers a health-care-reform bill based on Republican ideas, and gets denounced as a diabolical socialist.  And the Republicans in Washington have adopted a bizarre negotiation strategy that I can only call "getting to no." In a normal, rational negotiation you respond to concessions from the other side by making a concession of your own and moving toward a middle ground that both parties can live with. The Republican strategy, if I can call it strategy, has been to respond to every concession by making more extreme demands. Ask for something, get offered half, and respond by tripling your original demand. This strategy can only work if the other party is in such a hopeless position that you don't actually need to negotiate with them anyway, or it can work for a short time simply because it's so strange that it takes the other side by surprise and you take advantage of their confusion. But sooner or later, the other party figures it out, and stops negotiating.

North Carolina's constitutional amendment is a classic getting-to-no move. Gay marriage is illegal? Let's make it more illegal! And outlaw civil unions! And outlaw gay couples using other legal means, such as estate planning, to get any protections for their joint property! Ha ha!

Well, yesterday they got their no. I suspect they actually wanted it, and I hope they're pleased.

It isn't clear to me whether this decision will help or hurt Obama in the election. But it's very clear to me that he's safe from any tide of outrage against him. Everyone who'd be angry with him over this is already outraged with him. He gets outrage when he tries to make nice with them. And the outrage machine is already set to eleven. That means there's really nothing else they can do to him.

Rush Limbaugh is saying that Barack Obama is waging war on the American way of life. You know what that makes this? Thursday. Obama gets accused of scheming against American freedoms when he does bipartisan back-bends for a week. He has shown a lot of deference to the Right on their core issues. So they attack him over peripheral issues, or make up phantom issues and fight for them as if they're making their principled last stand. What that means, in the long run, is that Obama pays no price for opposing the Right, because the price of opposing them is already built in. And it means that he's free to oppose the Right on the issues they care about most of all, because they don't have anything left in reserve to fight him with.

If you don't make any distinction between your major policy goals and your minor ones, then in the end you won't be able to protect the major ones. And if you never compromise, no one compromises with you. It's only reason. Here's your no. There are more where that came from.

Barack Obama, Warlord of the 21st Century

cross-posted from Dagblog

You know who I really, really wouldn't run against on a national-security platform? A Nobel Peace Prize winner who killed Osama bin Laden.

But that's just me. Last week Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, in an extended and generally thoughtful interview with President Obama, asked the following question:

GOLDBERG: One of the aspects of this is the question of whether it's plausible that Barack Obama would ever use military power to stop Iran. The Republicans are trying to make this an issue -- and not only the Republicans -- saying that this man, by his disposition, by his character, by his party, by his center-left outlook, is not going to do that.

Three days after Goldberg published that interview, Obama's Attorney General gave a speech declaring that the Executive Branch could target American citizens for assassination whenever it liked, because (wait for it), the "due process" demanded in the Constitution is not the same as judicial process. By Holder's standard, as long as the President and his aides use a process when they're deciding who to kill, it's all good with the Founders. Which leads us to the question: how could someone with the disposition, the character, and the center-left outlook to order unreviewed drone strikes on American citizens ever bring himself to use military force?

Not seeing Obama as he really is has become one of our national pastimes, and both the Left and the Right play it at championship level. Some people on the Left cannot forgive Obama for not being the peacenik we (and I include myself in that "we") wanted to think we were electing. And I'm certainly not happy about the stands he's taken on targeted killings, or on executive detention. But to give Obama his due, he was absolutely up front with the voters about his military plans if elected. He wanted to get out of Iraq, but recommit to Afghanistan, and he's done that. He explicitly told the American voters, on TV, that he would hunt and kill Osama bin Laden. He didn't say capture or apprehend. He didn't even go with Bush's swaggering "dead or alive." Obama said "kill," full stop. And that's what he did. He also said, in both the primary and general-election debates, that we was willing to breach Pakistani sovereignty if that's what it took to get Bin Laden. Even if some of us don't have the President that we thought or hoped we were electing, on military questions we definitely have the President that the candidate told us he would be.

Right wing critics, on the other hand, fervently insist that Obama somehow is the peacenik that the Left thought he was, and that he's coddling America's military enemies. This coddling generally takes the form of relentless attacks with predator drones, and I suspect our enemies get tired of it pretty quickly. The idea of Obama as weakling is a strange but resilient fantasy, impossible to disprove because it's never been even remotely based on military reality.

So let's review what we, as voters, actually did in the 2008 general election:

We replaced George W. Bush with a better and more effective war leader.

This is not the story anybody tells. It is not what anybody believes happened. But it is what obviously did happen. Barack Obama has been a very effective war leader, given the mess he inherited. In fact, he's been much, much better at coping with the gigantic military mess that Bush II left behind than he has been at coping with the gigantic economic mess Bush left behind. (This only makes sense: Obama could start thinking about military strategies before he even started campaigning, but when the economic crisis hit we were already in the countdown to Election Day.) Obama succeeds because, unlike George W. Bush, he keeps his eye on the ball: achieving goals and taking out enemies while risking as few American troops as possible.

This is what we voted for, and when it comes down to it, what the average middle-of-the-road voter wants: more victories, fewer casualties. This country didn't turn away from George W. Bush and sour on the Iraq war because they had developed philosophical objections to warmongering or were worried about erosion of habeas corpus. They turned against Bush and his wars because those wars brought casualties instead of victories. Most American voters don't like Americans getting killed. And most voters like presidents who get things done. That's Barack Obama as Commander-in-Chief: soldiers come home and jobs get done.

So Obama gets behind the bombing campaign in Libya, and Qaddhafi gets toppled without American boots on the ground. Obama authorizes predator drone strikes and special forces raids and more predator drone strikes, targeted attacks with calculate risk against reward. He signs off on the Bin Laden raid deep inside Pakistan but insists on a backup helicopter. Which takes us back to Goldberg's question:

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Look, if people want to say about me that I have a profound preference for peace over war, that every time I order young men and women into a combat theater and then see the consequences on some of them, if they're lucky enough to come back, that this weighs on me -- I make no apologies for that. Because anybody who is sitting in my chair who isn't mindful of the costs of war shouldn't be here, because it's serious business. These aren't video games that we're playing here.

Now, having said that, I think it's fair to say that the last three years, I've shown myself pretty clearly willing, when I believe it is in the core national interest of the United States, to direct military actions, even when they entail enormous risks.

Since Barack Obama used most of his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech lecturing about Just-War Theory and when he felt justified launching military attacks, I'd think that's much more than fair to say. But here's the truth: that preference for peace over war, that refusal to risk people without a compelling reason, is part of why he is good at this. Weighing risk and reward is a virtue in almost any enterprise, but it's especially important as a military virtue. Good commanders don't take pointless risks. This is why George H. W. Bush, mocked on national television for using the word "prudent," won a war in Iraq and why his swaggering son did not. This is why John McCain, whose solution to seemingly every problem is to send more troops, never became an admiral like his father and grandfather, and why he did not become president.

The fantasy that Obama is weak on defense is deeply and dearly held by Republicans, and the three Republican presidential candidates who've managed to carry states have all begun, to various degrees, attacking that presumed weakness. But by "being stronger," the Obama-is-weak crowd mean "acting tougher, in a loud theatrical way." They mistake swagger for strength. They think George W. Bush was "strong" because he'd say dumb stuff like "Bring it on," and fearlessly send lots of other people into unnecessary danger. They think John McCain, who was angry at Obama for not sending American ground troops to Libya and who during the 2008 campaign urged a military intervention against Russia, is "strong," because he's an impetuous hothead who always wants more boys in harm's way. And this kind of tough-on-TV thing can pass for strength for a little while, because most of our country is so insulated from the sacrifices that our military make. But given time, and we've been at war for more than a decade, voters figure this out. In peace time, the guy who makes the biggest show of toughness in the bar gets treated as the tough guy. In war, people learn the difference and don't forget it. Sonny Corleone acts tougher than Michael Corleone, but that's no reason to get in the car with him.

The leading Republican candidates don't seem to have grasped this yet. And they (or their base) seem fixated on the idea that Obama's weakness as a war leader will make him vulnerable to attack. Attacking one of your opponent's strongest points because you've mistaken it for a weak one is pretty much the opposite of strategy. Ask Custer.

Let's remember what that naive peacenik state senator from Illinois said all those years ago when he opposed the second Iraq war:

I'm not against all wars. I'm against dumb wars.

If that's a platform you want to campaign against, good luck. You were never going to make a good commander-in-chief anyway.

Gingrich and "Protecting Barack Obama"

cross-posted from Dagblog

So, Newt Gingrich is getting all kinds of media love after blasting the media in Thursday's debate, and saying that he's "tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans," for example by reporting on things that Republicans running for President have actually said and done. I mean, the "elite media" hasn't fact-checked anything Barack Obama has said in a Presidential debate
since before he was elected! How can that be fair?

And the elite media has been attacking Mitt Romney, too, just as Gingrich said. For example, the media keep running those anti-Romney attack ads from Newt's SuperPAC. That's how far they're willing to go to protect Barack Obama.

But it isn't just the media protecting Barack Obama. Think of all the women who are protecting Obama from a damaging sex scandal right now by not having sex with him! Is it fair that Gingrich has to take heat for cheating on his first two wives, while Barack Obama doesn't have to take heat for cheating on his wife at all? He's obviously being protected by a conspiracy of radical feminists who have decided to tilt the so-called "character issue" in Obama's favor by not offering him sexual favors. Thuggery, plain and simple. Sure, you can try to make it look like Obama's somehow responsible, because he's more "faithful to his marriage" or something like that, but why should we presume that a man should be able to control his own sexual impulses around attractive women? Is that presumption fair to Herman Cain?  Obviously, Obama is being protected by an elitist cabal of non-mistresses.

Then think of all the people who've protected Barack Obama from embarrassment by not paying him hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobby on Capitol Hill. Newt Gingrich is unfairly handicapped by having to come up with awkward misleading explanations for all the lobbying money he's paid, like his claim he got paid $300,000 to be "a historian." Can Obama come up with a better cover story than that? We don't know; he keeps evading the questions by not having fat stacks of lobbyist money to explain. Dirty Chicago politics, plain and simple.

As if that isn't bad enough, think of the way Obama is being unfairly protected by his tax forms, which get ruthlessly disclosed every single year. Is it right that a Democrat doesn't get picked on about his tax forms because he annually releases them and lets everyone see how much he makes and how much he gives to charity and what tax rate he pays, while a Republican like Mitt Romney gets hammered for not revealing those things? Is it fair that Obama's dirty tax-form-release trick gets backed up by every single major Presidential candidate for the last forty years, all doing it so it looks like something you're "supposed to" do? That's an elitist conspiracy if I've ever heard of one. And even liberal Republicans like George Romney are in on it! What a low blow!

Then think of all the people who are protecting Barack Obama, who have been protecting him for decades now, by inviting him to come and make speeches where he doesn't say anything silly, racist, or flagrantly untrue. Why is it fair that Obama never has to explain talking about man-on-dog sex, or trafficking in crude racial stereotypes, or flat-out lying? Why should he get away with not making racist appeals or forgetting what Syria is? Who are these people who keep letting him make speeches without saying anything crass or shameful? I'll tell you who they are: a conspiracy.

And don't just blame the elites. Some of the blame goes to humble, ordinary multimillionaire office-holders like the current Republican candidates. They're clearly attempting to protect Obama. Every Republican debate is an obvious attempt to undermine the eventual Republican nominee's viability in the general election. And now that they're down to only one candidate, Mitt Romney, who stands a fighting chance against Obama, they're all doing their damnedest to protect Barack Obama by making Mitt Romney look bad. That includes Mitt Romney.

And worst of all, Newt Gingrich is trying to protect Barack Obama by nominating a Republican with only a 27% approval rating to run against him. Clearly, Gingrich is terrified by the prospect of Obama facing a serious and plausible Republican opponent, and he's bending heaven and earth to make sure that doesn't happen.

Stop protecting Barack Obama, Newt. And remember what the conservative movement is about: personal responsibility.

The California Preview

cross-posted from Dagblog

So, the Iowa Straw Poll went overwhelmingly to candidates who would have been considered fringe last time around, with Michelle Bachmann and Ron Paul combining for something like 55% of the vote. Some Democrats are taking this as consolation, on the theory that even if Obama is vulnerable the Republicans will nominate someone too extreme to beat him. Meanwhile, we have the usual "centrist" columnists indulging the the usual "centrist" fantasies about some miraculous "centrist" third-party candidate who will solve all of our intractable problems by being, um, "bold." (Because who loves bold solutions more than someone who considers both the mainstream party platforms too extreme?)

All I can say to that is: whatever. I've been here before, dude. Last time it was called "California," and it didn't go well. In fact, it's still not going well. And now we're repeating the California debacle on a grand scale.

In California, where one can have a long and very successful political career inside a single red red red or blue blue blue district, the Republican Party has long resisted nominating moderates for statewide office: only truly true conservatives are pure enough to get the nod for Senator or Governor. This, of course, is a great plan for losing, in a gigantic state with plenty of very blue districts in it. But compromise is for wimps.

This often tempted the Democrats into nominating dull and uninspired candidates who had paid up their party dues and who would not always set the world on fire, but could step back while the Republicans doused themselves with gasoline. About ten years back, a steady and reliable centrist Democratic Governor, the aptly named Gray Davis, was in real political trouble, with his popularity diving from the high fifties to the low forties. Privatizing the electrical grid had turned into a debacle with sky-high prices and occasional rolling blackouts, Davis was unable to fix the problems or to rally the voters to his side. Since he was so vulnerable, and the governor's mansion was in the Republicans' grasp, they nominated a good ideologically pure conservative to make sure they got full value after they won the election. And that's why they didn't win the election. The guy they put up couldn't even beat Gray Davis.

This is what set up the recall election that made Schwarzenegger governor. The Democrats were hoping to stagger through because the Republicans were even more unpopular than they were. And the Republicans were too ideologically rigid to do the sensible thing. It was only through the strange recall process, which sidestepped the Republican nominating process, that a moderate Republican (exactly the candidate the political situation most favored, and the kind of candidate the GOP should have put up to begin with) got on the gubernatorial ballot at all.

There's your Obama-will-get-through-this-because-they're crazy strategy, right there. And I'm not eager for a repeat with higher stakes. Sure, Obama might stagger to a 47%-42% victory, the way Davis did in his re-election campaign, but what's he going to do after that? It's a recipe for a mess.

And for the Friedmans of the world, longing for an independently wealthy centrist to arrive on a big white horse, Schwarzenegger's governorship should provide an illustration of how well that goes, which is not well at all. I despised Schwarzenegger's first campaign, but his attempt to govern was basically sensible and reasonable, and it got him absolutely nowhere. Difficult financial problems don't respond to personal charisma. And entrenched political difficulties don't magically fix themselves when you elect an "outsider." In fact, the problems were worse because Schwarzenegger was basically a governor without a party. His fellow Republicans in the legislature were too ideologically pure to listen to him, and the Democrats didn't owe a Republican governor anything. Neither party had really backed him, and neither had any stake in helping him. Arnold couldn't pass a budget. By the second term, he couldn't pass a slow U-Haul on I-5. Nothing makes legislative partisanship worse than taking the party leadership away. The rank and file legislators just revert to their base political instincts.

If our current Senators and Representatives won't reliably listen to Obama and Boehner, why on earth would they listen to someone with whom they have no political relationship or alliance? If Beltway columnists managed to make enough animal sacrifices to the gods and get, say, Michael Bloomberg elected, that would not be the end of Washington gridlock. That would initiate a new era of much deeper Washington gridlock, as the President of the United States would find himself with no one who would cast a vote, let alone a difficult vote, to help him out.

California is still a political basket case, and it's in real trouble. And lately I've been hearing the same allegedly clever ideas that made California's problems worse passed around as possible "solutions" for the whole country. It's a little like proposing that we put the whole country on the San Andreas fault. It worked badly before, and it will only be worse on a larger scale.

What Tools Does Obama Have Left?

cross-posted from Dagblog, with discussion thread here.

I've thrown away the woe-unto-ye-Barack-Obama post that I started after the debt ceiling debacle, because lots of other people have written it, and truth be told I've written it already myself. Let's take for granted that Obama needs to put up more of a fight against the Republicans, and that compromise and sweet reason aren't working. Here's the question: what to do now?

Let's skip "use the bully pulpit!" and "talk to the American people!" We've all heard those, and to be frank I don't see the weekly radio address turning this mess around. I'm interested in the question of what he can actually get done, rather than what message he should send. Let's also rule out "be tougher" and "don't compromise" as too vague; what would "being tough" actually entail? And let's save the argument about how he'll never do the right thing, because he doesn't want to for the next thousand and six discussions about that.

Let's imagine that the ghosts of Lincoln, Kennedy and FDR appear to Barack Obama tonight, tell him it's time to save the Republic, and put a ramrod up his spine. He wakes up tomorrow determined to stop those conservative maniacs and take the country back, just the way people with blogs are always saying he should. My question is this:

When he wakes up tomorrow, all fiery and determined, what specific steps are available to him? What can he do?

He's not going to be able to get anything through the Legislature, with an angry opposition party controlling the House and a bunch of "centrist" Democratic Senators focused on appeasement. No matter how much he wants to, he can't get laws passed, because it turns out that the executive branch is not in charge of legislating.

And he's still going to have the problem of his appointees being locked up in confirmation limbo, with a huge pile of judicial and sub-cabinet-level appointees stuck in the Senate after two and a half years. He can't make that problem go away just by wishing.

So what can the President of the United States do in this ugly position with the powers that the Constitution grants him: the power to make recess appointments, the oversight of the justice department, supervision of the federal bureaucracy (including all of the regulatory agencies), and the power to veto legislation? What can Obama do with the powers specifically invested in him as President, rather than in his unofficial Presidential roles as party leader and bully-pulpiteer?

What Pakistan Knows

cross-posted from Dagblog

Since Pakistan's recent double embarrassment in the Osama bin Laden affair, in which they proved unable to detect either bin Ladin living half a mile from their chief military academy or an American helicopter raid deep in the Pakistani interior (i.e. half a mile from their military academy), angry American legislators have been asking What Pakistan Knew about OBL's presence in their country.

Let me try to reframe that question with another one:

Does the President of Pakistan know who had his wife killed?

I'm a long way from being an expert on Pakistan. But I do remember some very basic things. The current President, Asif Ali Zardari, came to power as the widower of his far more charismatic wife, Benazir Bhutto. Zardari is a proxy President for Bhutto's voters, a tender of the slain hero's legacy. He is Mr. Bhutto, basically a corrupt male version of Coretta Scott King. (Zardari's love of graft helped drive Bhutto from power, and even into exile, at various points of her career. His actual nickname is not "Mr. Bhutto" but "Mister Ten Percent," for the kickbacks he demanded while his wife was in power.)

Benazir Bhutto is not President of Pakistan because she was murdered in public. And before she was murdered, she accused the regime at the time, including specific members of the regime, of scheming to have her assassinated. Then they pulled some of her security, and she was murdered while out on campaign. But in the end, the military regime had to accept elections and Bhutto's party, the PPP, which meant that her widower had to keep the flame alive as President.

Does Ali Asif Zardari know exactly which members of the regime colluded in his wife's murder? Does he know which conspirators are still part of Pakistan's security establishment? If he does, he can't do a thing about it.

The military regime had to give way to civilian leadership, but there was no clean-up of the Army or the ISI. The people who'd done Musharraf's dirty work didn't leave, let alone get punished. They're still there. And if the President of Pakistan wants to know who gave the orders that widowed him, he either can't find out or can't do anything about it. Think for a second what that means about how power is distributed in Pakistan, and how much control the official government has over the Army and the ISI.

Pakistan does not seem, from my distant layman's perspective, to be have a fully accountable chain of command. Clearly, there are groups in the military and intelligence apparatus who conspire and freelance and simply don't let the higher-ups into the loop, and those people are wired to enough factional influence that they cannot easily be brought to heel. Some people have sufficient resources to assist al-Qaeda or the Taliban, or to conspire in other ways, and they do. Those people don't let their superiors know, and their superiors either can't find out or are afraid of the consequences if they do. Imagine a situation where Iran-Contra happened and Reagan actually didn't know about it, where some lieutenant colonel felt free to put that together without letting the President or his people know. That's what we're talking about.

The people who hid bin Laden didn't tell Zardari, or anyone near Zardari, for the same reason they don't tell Zardari that they had his wife shot. They don't consider it his business.

Is this appalling? You bet. How do you deal with a country where the military and the spooks aren't accountable to the official leadership? I don't know. But not dealing with Pakistan isn't an option. And putting the hammer down on the official leadership, the people being kept out of the loop by the entrenched military conspirators, is not going to help. All that will do is weaken the civilians and give them even less control over their insubordinate military. The military and intelligence hierarchies have always planned to outwait and outlast their nominal masters in the civilian leadership. There's no reason to speed up We're stuck with the same crappy deal that Zardari is; he became President without having full control over his army, because that was better than having no control over them at all. And now we're in the same boat. We could refuse to deal with Zardari, or his successors, because they don't have the power to hold up their side of their bargains, but all we'd be doing is sacrificing whatever control of the Pakistani military that the civilians do have.

And before we start kicking Pakistan for being all Eastern and barbaric, remember that the West colludes in Pakistan's distribution of power. After the bin Laden raid, I saw one of the players that Bhutto accused of wanting her dead quoted in the New York Times: just another knowledgeable source.

Run, Donald, Run!

cross-posted from Dagblog

So, Barack Obama has given in to the birther lunatics -- or rather, to their enablers in the national press -- and released his long-form birth certificate. Which of course, won't stop the lunatic birthers. But it's not clear that Obama actually intends it to. This is in many ways a classic Obama move. Obama does seem justly and genuinely exasperated with the press corps, but he also likes to position himself as the reasonable alternative to unreasonable opponents.

More vexingly, at least on the surface, the timing of the release gives aid and comfort to Donal Trump, who is already taking credit for the release. That's very annoying, in that it feeds the national media's silly obsession with Trump and prolongs The Donald's free-media "campaign" for the presidency. It even makes it more likely that Trump will actually put his big money where is bigger mouth is, and attempt to get on primary ballots. He's riding high, and the media is stoking his already-formidable self-regard. If Trump's grandiosity is sufficiently cultivated, he may decide that the White House is his for the spending, and start staffing up.

That result, as I say, would very annoying. But that doesn't mean Obama would be displeased. If the White House just released a document that seems to validate Donald Trump's candidacy, we might consider that the Obama people want to validate Donald Trump's candidacy.

There's a saying that Obama's been extremely lucky in his opponents. And that's true. But it hasn't always been luck. He's shown a talent for attracting such opponents, and for subtly goading them into self-immolation. And he's certainly developed an appreciation for the pleasures of campaigning against a turbulent freakshow of an opponent.

Donald Trump is the media freakshow personified. He's been doing reality TV since before reality TV was invented. He's spent decades making himself ridiculous on camera, and his special gift as a media star is his utter inability to realize how silly he is. The joke is on Donald, and the funny part is that he isn't in on it. He is not a serious candidate. He's not a serious anything. And if someone decided to run negative ads on Trump, the sheer wealth of material boggles of mind. Only another narcissistic buffoon could believe, even for a second, that people would vote for someone like Trump. That any media figures floated the idea only shows that they are doing entertainment and not news.

Trump would be a dream opponent for Obama, a kind of white Alan Keyes. But more interestingly, he could be a monumental headache for Republican hopefuls in the primaries. If he actually took even a half-serious run in the primaries, he could make advertising in the earlier states crazy expensive. He's certainly capable of wasting a hundred million dollars, even if he doesn't actually have that much money to waste. And even if he doesn't run, he sucks up media oxygen that other candidates need, and he makes it even harder to placate the crazy part of the base by pandering to them so shamelessly. (Maybe you could say that The Donald is giving cover to the other Republicans by keeping them from press scrutiny. But the press doesn't do serious scrutiny any more. And if they do find a mini-scandal about a candidate not named Trump, the later it breaks the more it hurts.) Good luck trying to build name recognition when the TV is obsessing about Trump like he's a royal bride. And good luck trying to get past the crazy conspiracy theories in the primaries when Trump and the cable news hover over them like flies on a horse apple.

Obama's deepest political instinct is to pose as the reasonable centrist, so that the other side has to either make a deal with him or risk looking crazy. This can be frustrating because it leads him to make deals again, and again, in order to perform his "reasonableness," even when the question should be out of doubt. Releasing yet another form of his birth certificate is like his various compromises over health care and the budget: splitting a difference that he long ago split. But where this should pay dividends is when the other side refuses to take the deal. Barack Obama didn't release his long-form birth certificate to prove that he was born in Hawaii. He released it to prove that the doubters are too insane to care about proof.

What messes with this strategy is a press corps which is fundamentally unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality any more, a group that takes both reasonable and insane positions as equally valid, and presents them as equivalent. They can't tell a serious budget position from a cooked one. They can't bring themselves to cover national news instead of conspiracy theories. Almost nine percent of the country is out of work, at a minimum, and they want to talk about birth certificates. They have absolutely no idea how crazy they sound. Obama isn't just fighting the Republicans. He's fighting the press. What he needs to do is communicate past them to the American people, who actually care about actual things.

The question for the next two years is this. Will the real world pop the media bubble at last? Or will they manage to distort the debate so much that the voters lose touch with reality?

Ever Notice That The Birthers ...

never talk about Biden becoming President?

If you really didn't believe that Barack Obama was Consitutionally eligible for office, wouldn't that make Biden (who shared Obama's fat majority in the Electoral College) President? Yet that never comes up.

Even if you were magical thinker enough to believe that Biden, by running on an ineligible man's ticket were ALSO somehow disqualified from office, wouldn't that make the Speaker of the House President? I can see how that notion might be unpalatable to Republican activists when Pelosi was Speaker, but now that there's a Republican Speaker you hear exactly the same amount of nothing about it.

Where's the Birther movement demanding that Boehner be sworn in as President?

Even the Birthers aren't interested in their own theory as something that might be real. They're interested in it as a tool to reject reality completely.

Let me translate the demand to "see the birth certificate":

Obama shouldn't have been President, so none of this should happen! I will not eat my peas! No laws that I don't want can ever ever ever ever pass! And it is NOT bedtime, Mommy! Not not not!

Birtherism is not an attempt to follow a legal or Constitutional principle. It shows no interest in what the Constitutional ramification of an ineligible POTUS might be. It's simply a way of shutting out cognitive dissonance, and refusing to believe that more than half the country voted for Obama.

cross-posted from Dagblog