Obama bends over backwards, and does not yield

Obama's post-summit bid for a comprehensive health care bill, unveiled in a letter to the Congressional leadership, extends his paradoxical  approach to Republican intransigence: bend over backwards/do not yield.  That is, keep suggesting -- and trying to showcase -- the meme that Repubicans can be right at the margins but are missing the big picture.

The White House blog stresses that the President is proposing to include "even more Republican ideas" (!) and the revised plan incorporates several proposals voiced by Republicans at the summit. Yet at the same time, Obama's letter insists "that piecemeal reform is not the best way to effectively reduce premiums, end the exclusion of people with pre-existing conditions or offer Americans the security of knowing that they will never lose coverage, even if they lose or change jobs." In other words, the damn bill -- a blend of the bills passed by House and Senate Democrats -- will pass. 

A health care strategy in Obama's pregnant pause?

Two days ago, I started a post in which I was planning to contrast this intrepid declaration by Nancy Pelosi with what I viewed as mixed messages from Obama:

"You go through the gate. If the gate's closed, you go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we'll pole-vault in. If that doesn't work, we'll parachute in. But we're going to get health care reform passed for the American people."

Paraphrasing Steve Benen, I wrote, "Compare Pelosi's strength and determination with the ambiguity emanating from Barack "identify those core elements of this package" Obama" (Benen's comparison was with Mary Landrieu).  The epithet came from Obama's Jan. 20 interview with George Stephanopoulos, in which the President had seemed to me to be pulling in two directions -- first suggesting that a health care bill might have to be stripped down to win some Republican support, and then explaining why the core elements of the bill could not be pulled apart.

But a funny thing happened on the way to "publish post."  I reread the interview, searching for the wording for my epithet, and began to think I had misread it the first time.  That's partly Obama's fault; his language was unclear.  But his thinking at that point was, I think, completely consistent with his presentation of the health care reform task in the State of the Union address a week later. In both cases, he studiously avoiding speaking as a tactical party leader. He gestured toward one more reach-out to Republicans.  He left the door open to picking up a Senate Republican vote or two and therefore going back to negotiating a merged Senate-House bill, rather than trying to navigate the much messier process of the House passing the Senate bill and negotiating fixes to be achieved through reconciliation.

But also in both, he asserted that the HCR bill had been misrepresented, that its key parts were interdependent,  and that a full-scale bill must be passed. In the interview, when he said, " I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on," he was not talking about a scaled-down package. "People" may have nominally included Republicans (or not nominally, if he thinks that his own advocacy may pull in a Republican or two). But essentially, Obama meant that Democrats need to recognize that the core elements in both bills cannot be pulled apart, and that they therefore need to find a way to negotiate or live with whatever parts of the bill they find objectionable and get the core elements -- i.e., in all likelihood, the Senate bill -- passed.

Did Obama read Ezra Klein today?

Obama this afternoon to George Stephanopoulos:

“If there’s one thing that I regret this year,” Mr. Obama said, “is that we were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values”....



“I think, you know, what they ended up seeing is this feeling of remoteness and detachment where there’s these technocrats up here making decisions,” Mr. Obama said. “Maybe some of them are good, maybe some of them aren’t, but do they really get us and what we’re going through?”...

“That I do think is a mistake of mine,” Mr. Obama said. “I think the assumption was if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on this provision or that law or if we’re making a good rational decision here, then people will get it.”

Here's Ezra Klein this morning, assessing Obama's first year:

But that candidate bears little relation to this president. The speeches are over, for one thing. Obama's use of the bully pulpit has been rare and restrained. He gave a major address on health-care reform when he needed to save the legislation in the Senate, but he didn't begin health-care reform with a big speech meant to explain the issue and his approach to voters. He talked up the passage of stimulus at his first press conference, but he never did what FDR did with the banks and explained clearly and slowly why stimulus was needed. A president who promised persuasion has instead offered legislation. And his speeches have been timed to affect the legislative process, not to convince the country of his cause and leverage popular support in his negotiations with Congress. It's been all inside game, pretty much all the time....

The White House has played an inside game, focusing on helping Congress pass legislation rather than helping the public understand it. That game was almost enough to pass health care -- and it may still succeed on that count. But Brown's election throws it into doubt.

Obama's diagnosis is accurate, perhaps, and fine for Obama to say. It's somewhat akin to confessing that you're overly zealous about helping old ladies cross the street. But then why not rally the troops, try to get the Senate bill through the House with pre-negotiated reconciliation patches, and then go do the Great Communicator thing?

I've left out, too, the more substantive part of Klein's critique - that Obama did not use the bully pulpit to push early and hard for elements of each piece of legislation that would have made it stronger -- a bigger stimulus, a public option.

Is Obama signalling no more troops to Afghanistan?

Slightly distorting Obama's words in the retelling, George Stephanopoulos headlines a blog post about his interview with Obama aired this morning:

President Obama: "Skeptical" on More Troops for Afghanistan

That's almost but not quite true. Per the exchange below, I think Obama was characterizing himself generally as "skeptical" when fielding military requests for more troops - skeptical as a matter of principle and habitual procedure.

Which is not to say that Stephanopoulos was not picking up a genuine signal. What struck me, below, was the way Obama characterized his March decision to send 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan:

STEPHANOPOULOS: You were for a flexible time line in Iraq. Some people now are saying that's exactly what should happen in Afghanistan if the same conditions hold. Do you agree with that?

OBAMA: Here's what I think. When we came in, basically, there had been drift in our Afghan strategy. Everybody acknowledges that. And I ordered a top to bottom review. The most important thing I wanted was us to refocus on why we're there. We're there because al Qaeda killed 3,000 Americans and we cannot allow extremists who want to do violence to the United States to be able to operate with impunity.

Now, I think we've lost -- we lost that focus for a while and you started seeing a -- a classic case of mission creep where we're just there and we start taking on a whole bunch of different missions.

I wanted to narrow it. I did order 21,000 additional troops there to make sure that we could secure the election, because I thought that was important. That was before the review was completed. I also said after the election I want to do another review. We've just gotten those 21,000 in. General McChrystal, who's only been there a few months, has done his own assessment.

I am now going to take all this information and we're going to test whatever resources we have against our strategy, which is if by sending young men and women into harm's way, we are defeating al Qaeda and -- and that can be shown to a skeptical audience, namely me -- somebody who is always asking hard questions about deploying troops, then we will do what's required to keep the American people safe.

Those troops were sent "to secure the election"? I don't believe that the stated rationale was that circumscribed when the deployment was announced. The reinforcements were sent to staunch an acknowledged deterioration in the fight to contain Taliban influence. Moreover, the effort to "stabilize" the election is universally acknowledged to have failed to prevent massive election fraud.

Does that retroactive mission-tightening suggest a current reluctance to commit more troops?

Obama, drinkin' Lincoln

Obama may be taking this Lincoln thing a bit far. Today, he told George Stephanopoulos that in preparation for his inaugural address he's been reading Lincoln, and

Every time you read that second inaugural, you start getting intimidated...

Okay, so in his own terms, how does Obama frame the challenge?

And so, I think that the main task for me in an inauguration speech, and I think this is true for my presidency generally, is to try to capture as best I can the moment that we are in...

Wait...what moment is it 'that we are in'? March 4, 1865:

...let us strive on to finish the work that we are in...

As Obama elaborates, it's clear that the moment that he's in -- deep -- is that damned speech...

I mean, I think that when you have a successful presidential speech of any sort, it's because that president is able to say -- is able to put their finger on here's the moment we're in. This is the crossroad that we're at. And then to project confidence that if we take the right measures that we can once again be that country, that beacon for the world.

Something like this?

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Of course, the optimism that became de rigeur for presidents along the way was not exactly Lincoln's style. I doubt Obama will be wondering aloud on Jan. 20 whether it's God will that all the wealth piled up by the credit card shall be sunk before we pull ourselves out of the financial mess "that we are in."

Hillary's Snarl is like an umbrella

Give George Stephanopoulos his due. In his interview of Hillary Clinton yesterday, his questions about her proposal to extend a nuclear umbrella not only to Israel but to Iran's Sunni Arab neighbors exposed the incoherence of the scheme.

Clinton cast the NATO-like alliance as a way to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. When Stephanapoulos pressed her on the logistics and the practicalities of a multi-state alliance, she explained: "The theory that I'm putting forth is, we have to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. We have to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons throughout the region, because I'm not so concerned about them falling into the hands of states, which is bad enough, as I am about falling into the hands of terrorists." When Stephanopoulos asked, on the Cold War analogy, whether "an attack on Riyadh is the same as an attack on Indianapolis," Clinton refused to say yes. Instead, she switched the focus repeatedly to deterrence:

So, instead of having Saudi Arabia saying, well, you know, Iran and we are, you know, not on the same page here; we've got to have our own weapons, what we want to work toward is some kind of security agreement to prevent that proliferation.

And we're talking about the potential deterrable effect of our being able to say, don't even think about it, Iran; I don't care who's making the decisions; come join the rest of the world community; be part of the world economy; be part of us trying to have a more peaceful and prosperous future.

In other words, the "umbrella" is a bluff -- bluster, really, like the talk of obliteration. The idea seems to be that we simply float the proposal, and presto, Iran backs off nuclear weapons development. If Clinton will not say "an attack on Riyadh is the same as an attack on Indianapolis," she can't be serious about implementing such an agreement.

Looked at another way, it's campaign talk. It's of a piece with using surrogates to literally attack Obama's manhood; it's pushing the ridiculous meme that Hillary is "tough" because she refuses to drop out of a nomination battle that she can only (barely) conceivably win by completing her transformation into a Rove Republican.

Obama's response to Clinton's bluster on Meet the Press today showed the superiority of his grasp of geopolitical strategy. He laid bare the absurdity of threatening to form a multilateral alliance to defend against a threat that doesn't yet exist:

MR. RUSSERT: Senator Clinton also called for an umbrella of deterrence in the Middle East, defending not only Israel, but she said "other countries in the region," suggesting that perhaps Saudi Arabia, Jordan, other places in that region. Should the U.S. have an umbrella of deterrence to protect Arab nations?

SEN. OBAMA: Well, it--look, this is presupposing something that I'm unwilling to presuppose, and that is that Iran's going to get nuclear weapons. My intention is to make sure they don't. And the way we do that is, as I indicated before, to rally the international community, to engage direct talks with Iran, to send a clear signal about the consequences of continuing to develop nuclear weapons, but also to send a signal that if they are willing to stand down, that we can provide them with the kind of assistance that they need in order to help their people. So my central goal is to prevent them from getting nuclear weapons.

I, I'm troubled by the idea that, as a throwaway line in the debate, you start expanding the U.S. nuclear umbrella potentially to a whole host of other countries without any clear idea of what these criteria are, who might be involved and so forth. I think there's no doubt that we need to think about what our strategic posture is with respect to Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other ally--other friends in the region. But, you know, right now we don't have a formal alliance with many of these other countries. And if we are to develop that, we should do it prudently, cautiously, in consultation with Congress.

As Johnson, running against Barry "there-can-be-no-extremism-in-the-defense-of-liberty" Goldwater, asked the American people: whose finger would you want on the nuclear trigger?

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On the same page: Gates, Mullen, Powell, Obama
Breaking the Commander-in-chief Chokehold