We're still in the sequester's grip

George Packer zooms out from the latest fiscal skirmish to assess the state of budgetary warfare in the Obama era:

President Obama and the Democrats in Congress appear strong for refusing to give in to blackmail.

But in a larger sense the Republicans are winning, and have been for the past three years, if not the past thirty. They’re just too blinkered by fantasies of total victory to see it. The shutdown caused havoc for federal workers and the citizens they serve across the country. Parks and museums closed, new cancer patients were locked out of clinical trials, loans to small businesses and rural areas froze, time ran down on implementation of the Dodd-Frank financial-regulation law, trade talks had to be postponed. All this chaos only brings the government into greater disrepute, and, as Jenny Brown’s colleagues dig their way out of the backlog, they’ll be fielding calls from many more enraged taxpayers. It would be naïve to think that intransigent Republicans don’t regard these consequences of their actions with indifference, if not outright pleasure. Ever since Ronald Reagan, in his first inaugural, pronounced government to be the problem, elected Republicans have been doing everything possible to make it true.

In which Nicholas Kristof hurls a Hail Mary toward Assad

Unlike several New York Times columnists, Nicholas Kristof usually gets his facts straight.  And in his advocacy over decades for victims of war and rapine, he's developed a signature line of argument: Okay, it may be imprudent/ineffective for the U.S. to intervene militarily. But we can do x, y and z -- a carefully calibrated and coordinated range of diplomatic, economic and sub-military measures -- to pressure a brutal dictator or warlord to stop or reduce the killing. Such has been Kristof's m.o. in columns urging action in Darfur, South Sudan, and I think, a range of other conflict zones.

His advocacy today for a strike on Syria seems uncharacteristically sloppy, a mesh of unargued or thinly argued assumptions: When slaughter in civil war escalates, it's the U.S.'s responsibility to step in. Arming Syrian rebels earlier might have built a more viable or cohesive or moderate opposition and reduced the slaughter.  A punitive strike now may not only deter further chemical weapons deployment but also cause moderate rebels to spring out of Syrian soil like Spartoi.

It's not about him

George Packer's blog posts are relatively rare, and I always look forward to them.  He usually brings new information and a deeply informed perspective both to international affairs and to domestic politics. But I think he's simply off his rocker about Obama in his latest:

His campaign was based on the man more than any set of ideas or clear vision of the future. Everyone knew what Reaganism stood for. No one knows what Obamaism means, which has allowed his enemies to fill in the blank.

That is complete malarky.  No one ever campaigned on a set of policy proposals more coherently situated in a conceptual framework than Obama did. He laid that framework out in speech after speech after speech, not to say in The Audacity of Hope. When I get my hands on the book this evening, I will fill in an early manifesto here.

"Obamaism" is liberalism on a diet, with programs subject to outcomes assessment, undertaken with awareness that overtaxation kills the golden goose, and biased toward creating the right incentives, as in the Race to the Top education program. It's mainstream  liberalism chastised by Reaganism: government as part of the solution but aware of its limitations and the law of unintended consequences. It is a liberalism that, thus chastened, bids to move a commitment to shared prosperity back to center of American politics:

But through hard times and good, great challenge and great change, the promise of Janesville has been the promise of America - that our prosperity can and must be the tide that lifts every boat; that we rise or fall as one nation; that our economy is strongest when our middle-class grows and opportunity is spread as widely as possible. And when it's not - when opportunity is uneven or unequal - it is our responsibility to restore balance, and fairness, and keep that promise alive for the next generation. That is the responsibility we face right now, and that is the responsibility I intend to meet as President of the United States (Janesville, WI, Feb. 13, 2008). 

Obamaism focuses on long-range foundations of economic growth: improved education, renewable energy sources, a repaired safety net, control of healthcare costs, a rollback of the growing income inequality of the past 30 years. (Perhaps it's that long view that hurting him now. People know what he stands for; not enough yet trust that what he and the Democrats deliver will help them.) Here, for example, is Obama laying out his economic program in February 2009 (after outlining what went wrong in the runup to financial crisis):

We cannot rebuild this economy on the same pile of sand. We must build our house upon a rock. We must lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity – a foundation that will move us from an era of borrow and spend to one where we save and invest; where we consume less at home and send more exports abroad.

It's a foundation built upon five pillars that will grow our economy and make this new century another American century: new rules for Wall Street that will reward drive and innovation; new investments in education that will make our workforce more skilled and competitive; new investments in renewable energy and technology that will create new jobs and industries; new investments in health care that will cut costs for families and businesses; and new savings in our federal budget that will bring down the debt for future generations. That is the new foundation we must build. That must be our future – and my Administration's policies are designed to achieve that future.

While "New Foundation" has been largely written off as anodyne politispeak, the chosen metaphor is in sync with Obama's propensity toward thinking long-term and thinking big: changing the trajectory, moving the battleship by degrees. In the campaign, Obama stressed the results he would pursue.  As President, starting from the deep hole of a hellacious recession and pleading for patience, he has often stressed process:

Olympia Snowe, put up or shut up on healthcare reform's flaws

In George Packer's long dossier of Senate dysfunction, Olympia Snowe repeats for the umpteenth time that she voted against the healthcare reform bill because she was shut out of merging the Finance Committee bill, which she help forged and voted for, with the HELP Committee bill:

Snowe also voted for the Finance Committee’s health-care-reform bill last October, the only Republican to do so. But in December, at the pivotal moment, she voted against the version that went before the full Senate. “I wasn’t interested in expanding this program beyond the Finance Committee version—it grew by a thousand pages,” Snowe said. She wasn’t included in the negotiations with White House officials that took place in an elegant conference room across from Reid’s suite of offices, and said that the Democrats “did not accept any of my proposals. As I said to the President, it was all windup and no pitch.” 

Snowe here resorts to the Republican fallback position of ridiculing numbers of pages rather than specifying what she didn't like in substance.  The enacted health care reform law is similar in its essentials to the Finance Committee bill -- about which Snowe had this to say to Ezra Klein on October 16, 2009:

A Wrinkle in (Presidential) Time

A bit of free association below, keying off George Packer's musing about the disillusionment he's hearing on his book tour from young Obama supporters (h/t Andrew Sullivan). Packer:

The most disappointed people I meet are under thirty, the generation that made the Obama campaign a movement in its early primary months. They spent their entire adult lives under the worst President of our lifetime, they loved Obama because he was new and inspiring, and they felt that replacing the former with the latter would be a national deliverance. They weren’t wrong about that, but the ebbing of grassroots energy once the Obama campaign turned to governing suggests that some of his most enthusiastic backers saw the election as an end in itself. The Obama movement was unlike other social movements because it began and ended with a person, not an issue. And it was unlike ordinary political coalitions because it didn’t have the organizational muscle of voting blocs. The difficulty in sustaining its intensity through the inevitable ups and downs of governing shows the vulnerability in this model of twenty-first-century, Internet-based politics.

The triggered memory is of the disillusioned twelve-year heroine of the children's fantasy A Wrinkle in Time after she catches up in a far-off galaxy with her adored, longed-for, long absent father:

She had found her father and he had not made everything all right. Everything kept getting worse and worse. If the long search for her father was ended, and he wasn't able to overcome all their difficulties, there was nothing to guarantee that it would all come out right in the end. There was nothing left to hope for. She was frozen, and Charles Wallace was being devoured by IT, and her omnipotent father was doing nothing. (Ch. 10: Absolute Zero).

Holbrooke hearts Hoh in mid-resignation

The resignation of Matthew Hoh, a bright young U.S. administrative official (and former Marine captain) in Afghanistan, is sobering, because he details ways in which the U.S. presence stimulates insurgency. To veer off what admittedly should be the focal point, though -- Hoh's argument against a large military footprint -- one thing that struck me in the Post's coverage was the reaction of senior officials, particularly Holbrooke, to his resignation letter:

The reaction to Hoh's letter was immediate. Senior U.S. officials, concerned that they would lose an outstanding officer and perhaps gain a prominent critic, appealed to him to stay.

U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry brought him to Kabul and offered him a job on his senior embassy staff. Hoh declined. From there, he was flown home for a face-to-face meeting with Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"We took his letter very seriously, because he was a good officer," Holbrooke said in an interview. "We all thought that given how serious his letter was, how much commitment there was, and his prior track record, we should pay close attention to him."

While he did not share Hoh's view that the war "wasn't worth the fight," Holbrooke said, "I agreed with much of his analysis." He asked Hoh to join his team in Washington, saying that "if he really wanted to affect policy and help reduce the cost of the war on lives and treasure," why not be "inside the building, rather than outside, where you can get a lot of attention but you won't have the same political impact?"

Can you imagine how the Bush Administration would have reacted to such a resignation? They probably would have blacklisted Hoh, smeared him, perhaps had him prosecuted on some trumped up charge.

Holbrooke's reaction recalls his recruitment practices as related in George Packer's recent New Yorker profile:

One night in April, Holbrooke was on the last Delta shuttle from Washington to New York when Rina Amiri recognized him. An Afghan-American woman in her thirties, Amiri came from a royalist family in Kabul that had fled to America when the Afghan king Zahir Shah was overthrown, in 1973; since 2001, she had been working in Afghanistan on political and human-rights issues, for the U.N. and then the Open Society Institute. Amiri sat in the row behind Holbrooke and pressed him about a constitutional problem related to the Afghan elections. After a few minutes, Holbrooke suddenly said, “You know, I’m building this team.”

“I know,” Amiri said. “But I’m here to lobby you.”

“I’m very efficient. I just turned your lobbying into a job interview.” Holbrooke fixed her with a steady look. “Do you realize no one will offer you the type of opportunity I’m offering to affect your country?”

She asked him for more specifics. “You will have a lot of latitude,” he said. “That’s the way I work.”

Amiri was wary of losing her independence. She also worried about Holbrooke’s reputation for abrasiveness. Would she be in a meeting in Kabul where her American boss pounded his fist on the table? It took a month, but eventually Holbrooke won her over, hiring her as an Afghanistan expert. (Henry Kissinger once said, “If Richard calls you and asks you for something, just say yes. If you say no, you’ll eventually get

Obama's best and brightest may well prove capable of disastrous miscalculation. But their mental habits are reassuring.

Swallowing the fly in Afghanistan

A moment of illumination in George Packer's profile (subscription required for whole) of Richard Holbrooke and the conundrum he's trying to manage in "AfPak":

James Dobbins, now with the RAND Corporation, couches the problem this way: "There is a gap between the reason we're there and what we're doing. The rational is counterterrorism. the strategy is counter-insurgency."

I'm reminded of the old song:

She swallowed the cat, to catch the bird,
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider...,
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly...

The problem is that the "fly" does need to be swallowed, and there may be no viable direct path, in an environment that breeds flies.

Then too, this conundrum is really always true of counterinsurgency, or rather of an outside power's support/control of a counterinsurgency. You're not there out of benevolence, but to check the empowerment of a force you perceive as malign and a threat to your own security.

McCain's truth, with a pound of Salter

Mark Salter unloaded his alternate-universe view of how the media has viewed the rival campaigns today, in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg. Wounded, angry, aggrieved, Salter makes Hillary Clinton's aides in their post-caucus shellshock sound (retroactively) like jolly good sports. In Salterland, the media invented the McCain's-gone-Rovian narrative out of whole cloth:

The other guy is much more negative, by some almost immeasurable factor. His message on McCain has been consistently negative since the North Carolina primary. Barack Obama has not made a public statement in this country which did not include a full-throated attack on McCain. It's just a fact. They have ads saying McCain opposed stem cell research. McCain voted for stem-cell research as he got ready to run for President. He offered, against the consensus advice of his staff, the immigration bill. Obama runs an ad saying, "He's turned his back on you." For three weeks Obama has walked around this country calling McCain a liar, dishonorable, and erratic. Those are character-based attacks that he has been leveling at us for weeks and weeks and not a single reporter has called him on it. It's just insane. McCain won't even use Rev. Wright, out of an abundance of caution. So he raises the next guy, Bill Ayers, and you know what we get? We get called racist. How is that racist? You got me.

God, where to start?

Not all "negatives" are alike. Of course Obama "has been consistently negative" when talking about McCain: he's running against him. The question is whether you go after policy or character. At the outset, Obama chose the former; McCain, the latter. At the Democratic Convention, the major speakers all killed McCain with kindness. Their personal praise for his heroism and his Senate record was sustained and specific; they then each lit into his current policies as a continuation of Bush's policies. The refrain of Obama's convention speech was the antithesis of a character attack: "It's not because John McCain doesn't care. It's because John McCain doesn't get it."

McCain, in contrast, began his campaign against Obama with character attacks. First, Obama was a vapid celebrity, a political Paris Hilton. Fine: very funny. Next, the truly vicious -- and a McCain signature against past rivals: Obama "would rather lose a war than lose a campaign." In other words, he puts his personal interest above the national interest; in other words, he's no patriot and has no 'honor' - always a McCain monopoly in McCain's narrative. Then, the insinuations that rose almost to the level of incitement to violence: he's not one of us. He pals around with terrorists. Who is Barack Obama? Barack Hussein Obama?

As for Obama's later "character" attacks: he called McCain on his lies after McCain had been verifiably, relentlessly lying for months about Obama's positions and actions. Remember? Obama canceled a visit to wounded soldiers when he learned the press could not accompany him. He favored teaching "comprehensive" sex education kindergartners. He voted against requiring hospitals to keep viable fetuses alive. A press corps generally acknowledged to be very favorably disposed toward McCain was virtually unanimous: McCain's distortions of Obama's positions and record were orders of magnitude more extreme that Obama's slanting of McCain's. Karl Rove acknowledged that "McCain has gone in some of his ads -- similarly gone one step too far." But to Salter, McCain's descent into filth is a storyline invented by the media.

Yes, Obama did call McCain's behavior "erratic." That's only because it was; Obama was one of a very large chorus. The charge was hard to counter:

His first response to this crisis in March was that homeowners shouldn’t get any help at all. Then, a few weeks ago, he put out a plan that basically ignored homeowners. Now, in the course of 12 hours, he’s ended up with a plan that punishes taxpayers, rewards banks, and won’t solve our housing crisis. This is the kind of erratic behavior we’ve been seeing from McCain.

This from Obama after weeks of being impugned as a terrorist pal and alien. Hardly a scurrilous "character" attack. In fact, Obama has been far gentler than no less a Republican stalwart and uber-hawk than Ken Adelman, who astonished even himself with a judgment confessed today to George Packer:

When the economic crisis broke, I found John McCain bouncing all over the place. In those first few crisis days, he was impetuous, inconsistent, and imprudent; ending up just plain weird. Having worked with Ronald Reagan for seven years, and been with him in his critical three summits with Gorbachev, I’ve concluded that that’s no way a president can act under pressure.

For weeks, when confronted about his own lies and smears, McCain and his surrogates have simply blamed Obama. A dirty campaign? Obama drove him to it by declining to play by McCain's rules and debate on McCain's terms. Ads 100% negative? Obama runs more negative ads in absolute terms (never mind that they're 1/2 to 1/3 of Obama's total, or that they're focused on policy as opposed to character assassination.) Salter takes this reversal of reality to the extreme, and apparently believes it:

JG: What do you say to people who say, "The McCain I like I haven't seen in two or three months, and I hope he comes back to us."

MS: That's the McCain who's running in this race. You just don't report what you see. It's the whole thing about our rallies. Ninety-nine percent of our rallies, if there's a disruption, if there's something ugly shouted, they're Obama supporters.

Having built his identity around ghost-writing McCain's, Salter insists that the campaign has not changed McCain. On that one point, we should probably believe him. In the Land of McCain, the hero on center stage is always honorable, the opponent is always corrupt, and those who don't buy into this narrative don't report what they see.