Where Obama's placation ended

In honor of the ACA's end-of-open season rush, a repost. 

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Garry Wills, summing up David Remnick's portrayal of Obama in The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, is close to right, and yet so very wrong, as he segues to his own judgment:

Obama’s strategy everywhere before entering the White House was one of omnidirectional placation. It had always worked. Why should he abandon, at this point, a method of such proved effectiveness? Yet success at winning acceptance may not be what is called for in a leader moving through a time of peril. To disarm fears of change (the first African-­American presidency is, in itself, a big jolt of change), Obama has stressed continuity. Though he first became known as a critic of the war in Iraq, he has kept aspects or offshoots of Bush’s war on terror — possible future “renditions” (kidnappings on foreign soil), trials of suspected terrorists in military tribunals, no investigations of torture, an expanded Afghan commitment, though he promised to avoid “a dumb war.” He appointed as his vice president and secretary of state people who voted for the Iraq war, and as secretary of defense and presiding generals people who conducted or defended that war.

In Spielberg's Lincoln, don't underestimate Thaddeus Stevens

There is a legitimate criticism to be made that Steven Spielberg's Lincoln underplays the role of African Americans in their own liberation. The charge holds, notwithstanding that the opening battle sequence prominently spotlights black soldiers in a battle tableau of intense horror, immediately followed by a powerful scene in which a young black soldier, present at that battle, challenges Lincoln with the nation's failure to live up to the lofty sentiments expressed in the Gettysburg address. Kate Masur makes a convincing case  that  "it’s disappointing that in a movie devoted to explaining the abolition of slavery in the United States, African-American characters do almost nothing but passively wait for white men to liberate them." Masur's complaint that the film renders passive two African American White House servants who were in fact effective activists seems to me inarguable.

Less legitimate, it seems to me, are complaints that the film glorifies political compromise (as opposed to inviting us to assent to ethically compromised political machinations, which it does do) - or that in valorizing Lincoln's pragmatic maneuvering, it correspondingly devalues the unalloyed abolitionism and racial egalitarianism of the radical Republicans, led by Thaddeus Stevens. So argues Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Obama's military triangulation

President Obama has not adequately explained why he decided to go to war in Libya. But this reported aspect of his decision-making process disturbs me:

In his meeting with Members of Congress today, sources tell ABC News, President Obama said he expected that the period that the US would be involved in heavy kinetic activity would be "days, not weeks," after which he said the US would then take more of a supporting role.

That recalls Obama's response to the conundrum of whether to ramp up or cut back U.S. engagement in Afghanistan.  Faced with the terrible choice of eschewing or undertaking military action (or reducing vs. escalating), Obama's signature decision seems to be "do it quickly" and "do it at minimal cost."  There's a kind of triangulation here that, while posing as an extreme realism (policy nuance based on the facts of the particular case) may actually reflect a form of escapism -- a bid to shape events to a degree that human activity can't attain. Perhaps that goes as well for the attempt the clothe the U.S.'s role as a supporting one -- though the latter does seem like good policy if you accept the premise that military action was required.

The decision-making pattern seems at least to rhyme with that portrayed in great detail by Bob Woodward in Obama's War.  As I've noted before, while Woodward does not explicitly pass judgment on Obama's chosen course, his narrative skews toward those in the administration's counsels who highlighted apparently insurmountable obstacles to standing up a self-sustaining government in Afghanistan: the total corruption of the Karzai regime, the complete failure to date of "handing off" responsibility to any unit of the Afghan army or police; the near-complete sanctuary enjoyed by the Taliban in Pakistan.  Rather than fully confronting the "mission impossible" implications, Obama imposed his own conditions on the military brass: do it with (somewhat) fewer troops, and do it on a shorter timeline.  That may have preserved his authority in some obscure sense, but seems unlikely to have increased the odds of a successful outcome.

Where Obama's "placation" ended

Garry Wills, summing up David Remnick's portrayal of Obama in The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, is close to right, and yet so very wrong, as he segues to his own judgment:

Obama’s strategy everywhere before entering the White House was one of omnidirectional placation. It had always worked. Why should he abandon, at this point, a method of such proved effectiveness? Yet success at winning acceptance may not be what is called for in a leader moving through a time of peril. To disarm fears of change (the first African-­American presidency is, in itself, a big jolt of change), Obama has stressed continuity. Though he first became known as a critic of the war in Iraq, he has kept aspects or offshoots of Bush’s war on terror — possible future “renditions” (kidnappings on foreign soil), trials of suspected terrorists in military tribunals, no investigations of torture, an expanded Afghan commitment, though he promised to avoid “a dumb war.” He appointed as his vice president and secretary of state people who voted for the Iraq war, and as secretary of defense and presiding generals people who conducted or defended that war.

To cope with the financial crisis, he turned to Messrs. Geithner, Summers and Bernanke, who were involved in fomenting the crisis. To launch reform of medical care, he huddled with the American Medical Association, big pharmaceutical companies and insurance firms, and announced that his effort had their backing (the best position to be in for stabbing purposes, which they did month after month). All these things speak to Obama’s concern with continuity and placation. But continuity easily turns into inertia, as we found when Obama wasted the first year of his term, the optimum time for getting things done. He may have drunk his own Kool-Aid — believing that his election could of itself usher in a post-racial, post-partisan, post-red-state and blue-state era. That is a change no one should ever have believed in. The price of winningness can be losing; and that, in this scary time, is enough to break the heart of hope. 

It is true that Obama sets tremendous stock in his ability to win buy-in from potential adversaries, to disarm them by acknowledging what he regards (or presents) as the legitimate points in their argument, to find common ground and therefore assent. Remnick captures this.  Recounting Obama's reaction to Robert Caro's portrayal of the old hard-core segregationist bull of the Senate Richard Russell, Reminick writes:

Much of Obama's self-confidence resided in his belief that he could walk into any room, with any sort of people, and forge a relationship and even persuade those people of the rightness of his positions. Jim Cauley, Obama's Senate campaign manager, said he thought Obama believed that he could win over a room of skinheads. "All of us are a mixture of noble and ignoble impulses, and I guess that's part of what I mean when I say I don't go into meetings with people presuming bad faith," Obama has said. Now he seemed to think that he would have had a fighting chance with Russell: "Had I been around at all in the early sixties and had the opportunity to meet with Richard Russell, it would have been fascinating to talk to somebody like that.  Even if you understood that this enormous talent would prevent me from ever being sworn in to the Senate"(426).

But placation is only weakness if it has no end point. Obama did persist too long in trying to win Republican cooperation. But his faith in his ability to win assent was not weakness but hubris.  According to George Packer, the title of whose long chronicle Obama's Lost Year gave Wills his keynote above:

Obama's quest for bipartisanship, in the face of exceedingly discouraging facts, has been so relentless that it suggests less a strategy than a core conviction: reasonable people can be civil, exchange ideas, and eventually find points of agreement.

Change you can believe in? By degrees...

Many who responded to Obama's promise of change, myself sometimes among them, are disturbed by his willingness to trim back major initiatives. A stimulus that's one third tax cuts, with aid to states and municipalities cut back. Health care reform without a public option. Financial regulatory reform that leaves "too big to fail" banks intact. An end to torture with a continued policy of preventive detention.

Against those frustrations, set Charles M. Blow's explanation for a marked uptick in conservative sentiment among the electorate:

The Obama administration’s response to the financial and automotive crises and its pursuit of a wide range of reforms is the epitome of new and untried. Major change has come much too quickly for far too many. The response: retreat to a cocoon of conservatism.

And recall Frederick Douglass's assessment of Lincoln:

Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.

Obama won by raising hopes that he would "bend the arc of history" and specifically reverse this country's hard swing to the right over the past forty years. But he's spoken of that arc (in effect) mathematically, envisioning fundamental change as moving a battleship a few degrees. Let's see how things look when we've moved a ways around the bend.

"Measuring him by the sentiment of his country..."

When I read those who lambast Obama for shrinking from investigation and prosecution of those who authorized torture, I essentially agree. The U.S. is bound by international and domestic law to prosecute torturers.

When I read those who take Obama and Geithner to task for coddling distressed or insolvent banks, I worry, though I'm really not qualified to judge.

Both charges, though, often bring to mind Frederick Douglass's assessment of Lincoln's gradual, calibrated, calculated move toward emancipation:

Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.

I also think of FDR, moving the U.S. at what from Churchill's desperate perspective was glacial speed toward engagement in world war.

As a political general, Obama is meticulous about covering his flank. Put another way, in political warfare he subscribes to Powell's doctrine of overwhelming force. He has sixteen high-ranking officers stand behind him when signing the executive orders ending torture and preparing to close Guantanamo. He has Robert Gates to do the heavy lifting on deep cuts and a new approach to military procurement (Gates pretty much laid out what he wanted to do while Bush was still in office; Obama's political skill was more in choosing him that shaping his policy on this front). And while Obama to a degree exposed himself to backlash within the CIA by releasing the torture memos, the memos themselves may ultimately provide cover for the next steps in national catharsis. When prosecution of Bush Administration officials comes on Obama's watch, his stance will be more in sorrow than in anger. If major banks are nationalized, it will be (as Roubini suggested it must) when no one has any doubt that they are insolvent.

Glenn Greenwald, as fierce a critic as any Obama has on the civil liberties front, understands this dynamic in his own way and is more than willing to play his role, analogous (I would think) from his point of view to that of the abolitionists pushing Lincoln:

Criticisms directed at Obama and Holder for advocating immunity for CIA officials who relied in "good faith" on DOJ memos (a mere subset of the government criminals) is absolutely warranted. But, it is not Obama's sole responsibility -- or even his decision -- to prosecute. As a strictly legal matter, that is a decision for the Attorney General, independently, to make; it is Eric Holder who has the obligation to enforce the law, independent of anything Obama wants or says and regardless of what public opinion demands.

But more crucially, it is also the responsibility of the citizenry to demand that this happen. What Obama did yesterday -- whether by design or not -- provided the most potent tools yet to create the political pressure for prosecutions. As Kevin Drum makes clear, no decent human being reading those memos would be anything other than repelled by what was in them. Polls already found that large percentages of Americans, majorities even, favor investigations and/or prosecutions for Bush crimes. The onus is on those who believe in the rule of law to find ways to force the government to criminally investigate whether they want to or not (this petition demanding that Holder appoint a Special Prosecutor is a very good place to begin, though it will require much more than just petitions).

Andrew Sullivan, more prepared than Greenwald to invest personal faith in a leader, sees Obama playing "a long game":

I share Greenwald's deepening concern about Obama's concessions to the national security state. But I am not convinced there is no method to his meandering.

Obama understands he is the president, which means that he understands, unlike his overwhelmed predecessor, that he is the president of all Americans.

He knows that indictment and prosecution of the war criminals at the heart of the last administration would appear to those cocooned from the reality of what happened as an assault on American unity and stability. That proper concern has to be balanced against the gravity of the crimes, the profound nature of the constitutional claims that underpinned them, and the necessity to uphold the rule of law. And so a process whereby the president hangs back a little, allows the evidence to slowly filter out, releases memos that help prove to Americans that what was done was unequivocally torture and indisputably illegal ... is not to be despised.

I think Obama knows what happened; and he knows that, in the end, America will have to face it. He will not defend it, but he will not be the prosecutor either. It's the long game he knows. And it's the long game that will bring these people to justice.

Then too, those of us who believe that investigation and prosecution for torture have to happen need to exercise some imagination to recognize what we are asking for. Cheney's shameful charge that Obama is exposing the nation to terrorist attack by banning torture is just a foretaste of the rage that will be unleashed from still-powerful political forces when hearings and trials take place. Imagine that those trials go forward. And then imagine a successful major terrorist attack in the U.S. The country's mood could change in an instant. An authoritarian thug like Giuliani or a demagogic buffoon like Palin could be elected, and really end American civil liberties. Perhaps -- after, say, a nuclear terrorist attack -- there could even be a coup, though it's hard for me to imagine the intervening chaos, and any coup would have to circumvent the current military leadership.

That's why Obama is positioning himself to be pushed. That's why Democrats in Congress won't start investigations without some Republican support. It's not cowardice. It's a matter of building the overwhelming political support needed for a process that will be traumatic in itself and could be destabilizing if coupled with a major external shock.

From Emancipation Proclamation to Achievement Gap

Reading Doris Kearns' Goodwin's Team of Rivals, I was struck by a stray moment of insight from a slaveholding unionist during the deliberations of Lincoln's cabinet over the likely fallout from the Emancipation Proclamation. Members recognized fully that they were likely unleashing, in Gideon Welles' words, "a revolution of the social, civil and industrial habits and condition of society in the slave states." Most did not want integration and equality; Lincoln himself still clung to the dream of colonizing freed slaves in another country.

Attorney General Edward Bates, a Missouri slaveholder, favored forced resettlement; he believed that "amalgamation" would bring "degradation and demoralization of the white race." There was an absurdist loop in his thinking: he thought that whites would be degraded by contact with blacks because they had degraded blacks. But he recognized the the full force of his society's assault on their slaves' humanity. There's a rather extraordinary sociological insight (or was it common amongst slaveholders?) at the core of his Catch-22:

Although he conceded that 'among our colored people who have been long free, there are many who are intelligent and well advanced in arts and knowledge,' he could not imagine former slaves, 'fresh from the plantations of the South, where they have been long degraded by the total abolition of the family relation, shrouded in artificial darkness, and studiously kept in ignorance,' living on an equal footing with whites (p. 466; my emphasis).

Exacerbated by 100 further years of brutal discrimination, that "total abolition of the family relation" still takes its toll. What Stanton and his ilk did not foresee was the remarkable extent to which African Americans would embrace core American ideals and repeatedly hold the country to its founding promises (Lincoln, a fact-driven leader if there ever was one, did later get some inkling through his encounters with Fredrick Douglas and other black leaders). To revel for a moment in the obvious, here's the thread of that black buy-in/black indictment from Frederick Douglass through Martin Luther King and Barack Obama:

Frederick Douglass, Rochester New York, July 4, 1852:

Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?....

I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me by asking me to speak today?

Martin Luther King, Lincoln Memorial, August 28, 1963:

In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now.

Barack Obama, Philadelphia, March 18, 2008:

"We the people, in order to form a more perfect union."

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America's improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution - a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part - through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

Lincoln, as Garry Wills shows in Lincoln at Gettysburg, was a leader in casting the Declaration of Independence's "We hold these truths..." credo as a blueprint for a work in progress, an ideal always to be aspired to and progressively fulfilled. He didn't invent this conception --indeed, it's there in Douglass' 1852 speech above -- but he framed it memorably, and repeatedly, and committed the nation to it in blood, and so recast the country's self-conception. And so the threads still run parallel: black leaders continue to hold us to that ideal, and black families struggle with the brutal sabotage of it acknowledged by Stanton.

A knowing tribute to Lincoln

Obama is understood to have a bit of a fascination with that prior state legislator from Illinois, Lincoln. Allusions and the occasional fleeting impersonation are peppered through Obama's speeches and stagings. Perhaps that's why, while reading through Obama's June 30 speech on patriotism, I was struck by a little cold-eyed, split-second qualification to a paragraph's paean to Lincoln. Here it is:

Abraham Lincoln did not simply win a war or hold the Union together. In his unwillingness to demonize those against whom he fought; in his refusal to succumb to either the hatred or self-righteousness that war can unleash; in his ultimate insistence that in the aftermath of war the nation would no longer remain half slave and half free; and his trust in the better angels of our nature - he displayed the wisdom and courage that sets a standard for patriotism (my emphasis).

Lincoln's ultimate insistence was long in coming. At the outset of his term, he insisted he was not out to take away anyone's slaves; he famously said that if he could preserve the union by preserving slavery, he would do it; he took the nation through two years of war before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. To me, that adjectival toss-in suggests that nuance is reflex to Obama.

In that nuance I hear Frederick Douglass, who took Lincoln's full measure, catalogued all his betrayals (from one point of view) of black people, and somehow, in his Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln , folded a clear-eyed and pained recitation of those betrayals into one of the most moving orations ever spoken in tribute to a fellow human being:

Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.

As a way to celebrate the 4th, no one could do better than read this speech of Douglass's, delivered at the unveiling of The Freedman's Monument in memory of Lincoln in Washington, D. C. in April 1876. His pain in acknowledging that Lincoln "was preeminently the white man's Pesident, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men" is palpable, but it's only prelude to his appreciation of the man's transcendence of his own prejudices and smaller concerns. Douglass eulogizes Lincoln in words as purged of anger as those of Lincoln himself, in his second inaugural address:

Though high in position, the humblest could approach him and feel at home in his presence. Though deep, he was transparent; though strong, he was gentle; though decided and pronounce in his convictions, he was tolerant towards those who differed from him, and patient under reproaches. Even those who only knew him through his public utterance obtained a tolerably clear idea of his character and personality. The image of the man went out with his words, and those who read them knew him.

To give way for a moment to Obama's own conceit: is it too much to hope that we can look back some day and say something similar about him?