Post-truth political appreciation

For once, I found myself nodding straight through a David Brooks column. Today he pays tribute both to Lincoln and to the new film by that name:

The movie portrays the nobility of politics in exactly the right way.

It shows that you can do more good in politics than in any other sphere. You can end slavery, open opportunity and fight poverty. But you can achieve these things only if you are willing to stain your own character in order to serve others — if you are willing to bamboozle, trim, compromise and be slippery and hypocritical. 

Say it's so, Joe, and say it loud

I don't often paste up a clip from someone else's post if I don't have more than two cents of my own to add.. My audience is too small; why bring buckets of water to the ocean? Or rather, I tote my buckets via Twitter or emails to the Dish.

But Joe Klein is out there loudly proclaiming something that so needs to be said -- and risking the full fury of the anti-semite police to say it -- that I feel compelled to add my kazoo to his bullhorn:

Netanyahu’s recent behavior is outrageous. He is trying push us into a war that is not in our national interest, a war that would only further destabilize a region that is already teetering near chaos. He is trying to get us to damage our relations with the rest of the world–especially the Russians and Chinese, whom we spent great diplomatic effort luring into the Iranian economic sanctions–so that he can pursue a strategy that even the Israeli military and intelligence communities find questionable. President Obama will not yield to this pressure, nor should he–and every American should know the implications of what Netanyahu and his American neoconservative allies, including Mitt Romney, are proposing...

GOP "cruelty" revisited, and redoubled

if your budget passes, thousands of poor people are going to suffer because of your Medicaid cuts. I will never sign your Medicaid cuts. I don't care if I go down to five percent in the polls. If you want your budget passed, you're going to have to put someone else in this chair.

Bill Clinton to Dick Armey, 1995 (in Joe Klein, The Natural, p. 148)

A fair look at Obama

With a good deal of pain, I have read, and ruminated over, and sometimes pushed back against, a large number of assessments of Obama in this season of failure following the debt ceiling debacle.  Today I think Joe Klein actually got the mix about right, providing some clarity:

In fact,the great conundrum of Obama’s presidency is that he has accomplished a hell of a lot–preventing a depression with his stimulus package, passing a plausible universal health care plan, fighting the good fight on financial regulatory reform, saving the auto companies–but it has worked to his political disadvantage. Dowd is correct about one of the reasons for this: the President simply isn’t a top-draw politician. If he were, we’d be talking about the Obama tax cuts–there have been two big ones–instead of the “failed” Obama stimulus package; the Obama Senior Citizen prescription drug benefit (he closed the donut hole), universal health coverage that you can never lose instead of death panels; the Detroit auto boom as a path to a revival of manufacturing. Most important, we’d be talking about jobs instead of deficits. We would never have played the Republican deficit follies these past nine months. He would be defining the political arena. Instead, the Republicans are. 

As Klein suggests elsewhere in the post, the policy vs. politics division is too neat.  Obama's timidity, his passivity in the face of Republican stonewalling and sabotage, his unwillingness to stage fights, goes to substance too. As Klein implicitly asks, why didn't he appoint Elizabeth Warren to head the Financial Consumer Protection Board, and embrace the fight when the GOP inevitably filibustered? For that matter, why isn't he orchestrating pressure now over their refusal to allow a vote on his more anodyne if able nominee, Richard Cordray? Why didn't he make noise when Richard Shelby blocked a confirmation vote for his FHFA nominee, Joseph A. Smith, who might have directed Fannie and Freddie to launch a mortgage writedown program? Or when Shelby successfully blocked Nobel laureate Peter Diamond from serving on the Federal Reserve?

A gloss on a 'quote of the day'

The Dish frames up an emotionally satisfying reality check from  Joe Klein:

"It's painful when reality intrudes. Here is the reality: the Republicans have spent the past 30 years creating deficits and the Democrats have spent the past 30 years closing them. The unimportance of deficits became an article of faith during the second Bush Administration: "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter," Dick Cheney famously said. It has been rather hilarious for those of us with even a minimal grasp of recent history to watch these folks pull fierce 180-degree turns on the issue--and it is even more hilarious to watch them accuse Obama of hyper-partisanship after the dump-truck full of garbage they visited upon his head these past few years."

Klein was reacting to Republican fulminations such as this from Pete Wehner (link in the Klein post):

President Obama's speech today was both outrageous and insulting, a practically perfect combination of demagoguery and shallowness. It was not a serious substantive speech; it was a political missile whose intention is was to destroy, through libel, the House Republican's 2012 budget. It was not an effort to engage in a serious discussion; it was an effort to create a cartoon image of Obama's critics.

I suspect that whatever else Americans of any political stripe think of Obama, they know he's no rhetorical flame-thrower.  In a battle over which side is excessively partisan, he wins -- poll after poll shows that Americans trust him to compromise far more than they do the Republicans.  For a second reality check, note that in this speech Obama partially offset his "partisan" attack -- that is,  a frank expose of the Ryan Plan's values and likely effects, and a short history lesson about the debt amassed in the 80s and naughties --  with a sharing of credit for the deficit reduction successes in between:

To meet this challenge, our leaders came together three times during the 1990s to reduce our nation's deficit -- three times. They forged historic agreements that required tough decisions made by the first President Bush, then made by President Clinton, by Democratic Congresses and by a Republican Congress. All three agreements asked for shared responsibility and shared sacrifice. But they largely protected the middle class; they largely protected our commitment to seniors; they protected our key investments in our future.

That is in service of his apparent continued belief that he can, against all the odds, strike a deficit deal with Republicans today:

Our future is not in manufacturing

As U.S. unemployment remains stubbornly, dangerously, high, calls mount for a manufacturing revival.  Hence James Fallows, blogging today from Aspen, puts forward a critique of the U.S. economy by Bharat Balasubramanian an engineering executive from Daimler AG in Germany, linking income inequality in the U.S. with a dearth of good manufacturing jobs:

"I will state that there will be a polarization of society here in the United States. People who are using their brains are moving up. Then you have another part of society that is doing services. These services will not be paid well. But you would need services. You would need restaurants, you would need cooks, you would need drivers et cetera. You will be losing your middle class.

"This I would not see in the same fashion in Europe, because the manufacturing base there today can compete anywhere, anytime with China or India. Because their productivity and skill sets more than offset their higher costs. You don't see this everywhere, but it's Germany, it's France, it's Sweden, it's Austria, it's Switzerland.... So I feel Europe still will have a middle level of people. They also have people who are very rich, they also have people doing services. But there is a balance. I don't see the balance here in the US."

Also today, Joe Klein, grudgingly admitting that increased hiring on Wall Street is good news of sorts, indulges in a prescriptive wish:

I guess I'm an economic curmudgeon, but I'd be a lot happier if the headline was: Green Energy Hiring Boom or Auto Industry Rebounds Strongly. But what we may be looking at is a continuation of the disease that forced the bailout in the first place: a distorted economy, where too many of the profits come from making deals and too few come from making things.

Making deals, bad; making things, good: that reminds me of the late-80s complaints that while Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry focused Japanese resources on vital industries, U.S. government planners didn't distinguish between production of microchips and potato chips when distributing government largesse.

Doubtless, it's good policy for the U.S. government to stimulate/incent development of "industries of the future" such as alternative energy and biotech.  Doubtless, the growth of such industries would stimulate some good, high-skilled manufacturing jobs -- for a while at least, though technological development tends over time to destroy manufacturing jobs rather than create them.  And yes, the U.S. financial sector has grabbed a bloated share of profits and has been a brain drain from other occupations demanding intense mental labor.

Still, I doubt that rising income inequality in the U.S. can be traced to a failure to generate good  manufacturing jobs. And I doubt that increasing the proportion of the U.S. labor force engaged in manufacturing is either a likely or desirable means restoring income growth, reducing income inequality, or raising job and life satisfaction levels in the U.S. In his 2010 book Rebound: Why America Will Emerge Stronger from the Financial Crisis, Stephen J. Rose shows that the steady shrinkage of the manufacturing sector over the past half century has on balance benefited U.S. workers.

Back from the cliff's edge: Rory Stewart hails Obama's limited goals in Afghanistan

There is perhaps no one writing about U.S. and allied policy in Afghanistan who exhibits a subtler and more comprehensive grasp at once of the realities on the ground and of the dominant conceptual frame of Western policy there than Rory Stewart. Armed with that understanding, he has taken the measure of Obama's policy review and redefinition and put his finger on the extent to which Obama has revolutionized U.S. aims and therefore, over the long haul, the likely means of fostering those aims.

In some ways, Stewart's latest assessment of U.S. policy and likely outcomes seems like a course reversal of his analysis prior to Obama's speech (in Senate testimony in September  and in The London Review of Books in July). Then, he warned that the U.S., gearing up for a troop surge, was preparing to drive off a cliff and pondering only details akin to whether or not to wear a seatbelt.  Then, too, he deployed a withering ventriloquism to expose what he regarded as circular logic in maximalist counterinsurgency aims:

On trusting Obama: the Af/Pak review

A friend who has read my posts on Afghanistan challenged me yesterday: "So what should we do?  I don't want to just read your presentations of what other people think. Take a position."

I responded that in this blog I try to remain conscious of my limitations. I am obviously no expert either on Afghanistan or on military strategy. My training, such as it is, is in literary criticism.  Don't laugh. That does equip me to assess the quality of evidence and analytical rigor that various informed commentators bring to the table, as in assessments of Matthew Hoh filtered through James Fallows here, an Oxfam survey of ordinary Afghans here, and Rory Stewart vs. Steve Coll here. In my view Coll, who has effectively expressed support for the outlines of McChrystal's proposed surge, and Stewart, who recommends that the U.S. and allies cut back to 20,000 troops and provided only targeted, decentralized aid for select projects in Afghanistan, have been the most effective advocates for the two poles of debate.

In limiting myself to close reading, perhaps I've equivocated. I took some comfort yesterday in confessions of ambvialence from Fred Kaplan and Joe Klein. Throughout Obama's long policy review, one has heard many variations from honest commentators of the theme, "I'd hate to be in his shoes."

Still, for the record: as indicated if not expressed outright in the posts of above, I find Coll's argument more convincing than Stewart's.

The David Brooks "consensus": Bring back George W. Bush

Reporters are often excoriated for relying on anonymous sources. I can understand why they often have to. But David Brooks takes this to another level. He's hiding behind an anonymous consensus.

Brooks tells us "I’ve called around to several of the smartest military experts I know" to get their take on Obama's deliberations over Afghan policy. These "several" have a mysteriously unified persona. They're very, very smart and experienced. And lo, they all have the same worry. And lo, it looks an awful lot like Brooks's:

They are not worried about his policy choices. Their concerns are more fundamental. They are worried about his determination.

In fact, this Brooks shadow cabinet longs for the return of George W. Bush:

But they do not know if he possesses the trait that is more important than intellectual sophistication and, in fact, stands in tension with it. They do not know if he possesses tenacity, the ability to fixate on a simple conviction and grip it, viscerally and unflinchingly, through complexity and confusion. They do not know if he possesses the obstinacy that guided Lincoln and Churchill, and which must guide all war presidents to some degree.

The unanimous chorus is mysteriously sanguine about the odds of defeating the Taliban:

Most of them, like most people who have spent a lot of time in Afghanistan, believe this war is winnable. They do not think it will be easy or quick. But they do have a bedrock conviction that the Taliban can be stymied and that the governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan can be strengthened.

"Most" of "several" believe this? Right, there's consensus among the informed about staying the course. Funny that Andrew Exum -- who helped prepare General McChrystal's report, who does support the counterinsurgency effort, and who could in fact be one of Brook's sources, writes

I know about 50 really smart people on Afghanistan with lots of time on the ground there, and no two have the same opinion about what U.S. policy should be.

Brooks does voice a set of concerns worth considering:

...if these experts do not know the state of President Obama’s resolve, neither do the Afghan villagers. They are now hedging their bets, refusing to inform on Taliban force movements because they are aware that these Taliban fighters would be their masters if the U.S. withdraws. Nor does President Hamid Karzai know. He’s cutting deals with the Afghan warlords he would need if NATO leaves his country.

On the other hand, as several informed parties, e.g. Matthew Hoh and Rory Stewart, have noted, there's considerable evidence that ramped-up U.S. military presence, far more than presidential deliberations, drives Afghan villagers to support the Taliban. And as Joe Klein has noted, Obama's very public pause is in part calibrated to pressure Karzai, who's been "cutting deals with Afghan warlords" since he was first elected/installed. Indeed, going forward, Exum suggests (in a piece aptly titled Take Your Sweet Time, Obama):

The Obama adminstration has, I believe, some leverage at the moment, which it could use to affect the composition and behavior of the next Afghan government. As long as Afghanistan’s ruling politicians—Hamid Karzai especially—think the United States might reduce its commitment to Afghanistan, they could be willing to accede to U.S. demands on key ministerial and provincial-level appointments....

while countless memoranda and manuals exist instructing U.S. servicemen on how to wage counterinsurgency campaigns at the operational and tactical levels, there is currently little guidance for how U.S. policymakers should use leverage over its Afghan partners. The Obama administration, if it's clever, will try to figure out the best way to use its leverage over Karzai and other Afghan politicians. And in that effort, they deserve time to succeed.

David Brooks purports not to trust the President. I do not trust David Brooks. I think the opinions he "reports" represent 57% of seven people he selectively elected to represent consensus, their musings massaged into unison by Brooks's authoritative editorial "they."

I do not fear that Obama will prove ultimately to lack "conviction" in his search for a policy that works in Afghanistan. I do fear that the powerful institutional forces of U.S. post World War II foreign policy consensus -- forces that shaped the policy of every President from Truman through Clinton, more for good than not -- will work with our latter-day polarized political shriekfest to constrain Obama into a full-blown counterinsurgency effort.

That effort might be the right choice. But politically -- and paradoxically, since public opinion is turning agains the war -- it's hard to see any President really putting on the brakes in mid-course.

Related posts:
Steve Coll vs. Rory Stewart
Obama to Karzai: No marriage no dowry?
David Brooks' lazy free market fantasy

Was losing Daschle a 'catastrophic' cost?

Assenting to the sacrifice of Tom Daschle on the altar of political reform, Joe Klein, it seems to me, views that sacrifice from the wrong end of the telescope:

The excesses of wealth, throughout the country, have become an American problem. The extremely rich have detached themselves from the rest of society, which was the point of Obama's story about private jets. In Washington, it is a bipartisan phenomenon. Democrats have their special interests too, and their lobbyists are terrific at what they do. A guy like Daschle, who knows the system cold, who could talk to both the insurance companies and the liberal advocates, would have been invaluable to Obama in bringing health insurance to everyone who needs it. But, as the man said, we're all going to have to sacrifice, and it now seems clear that Obama's sacrifice, if he wants to reattach Washington to a nation sick with cynicism about its government, will be to detach himself from the lobbyist élites who might have helped grease the skids for his policy goals.

The key phrase here is would have been invaluable to Obama in bringing health insurance to everyone who needs it. This country cannot restructure its economy and get a grip on future spending without reforming healthcare effectively. We can't roll back the great risk shift without shielding Americans from catastrophic medical costs and ending the risk of exposure every time a person loses or changes jobs. Daschle's understanding of healthcare policy is of the highest order, and his political skills and knowledge of the legislative process are matchless. Losing him could prove catastrophic to the most important policy initiative of Obama's first term.

It's true that Obama based his campaign on the premise that we can't reform our policies effectively until we reform our politics. It's also true that he has a unique opportunity now to break the lobbyist culture that Klein outlines. But Obama may have miscalibrated his ethics message and policies to a degree. In limiting lobbying and lobby-like entanglements, it's impractical to start from scratch. To rule out anyone who didn't now meet the kind of standards that make sense going forward is as constraining as trying to pick a cabinet that "looks like America."

The tax issues are tougher. You'd think that by this point anyone with ambition for high office would regard a "when in doubt, report and pay" principle as indispensable career protection if
nothing else. These "screw it, I'll keep it" tax reflexes are hard to excuse, particularly in the current climate, as the country reacts to decades of ever-increasing self-licensing excess from elites of all stripes. But they're also near-universal. What percentage of Americans with non-salaried income really chose to pay taxes on all income that would not readily show up if they didn't declare it?

As Ezra Klein points out, "The endlessly long vetting forms forcing deep tax and income transparency... in turn uncovered embarrassments that would never have emerged under past regimes." He also provides important perspective on the mode of Daschle's cashing in:

In recent days, there's been an effort to paint Daschle as one of Washington's most corrupt creatures. Jack Abramoff with an electoral history. But so far as sell-outs go, Daschle's sins were almost modest. His path frequently diverged from money. He never registered as a lobbyist or did any lobbying, even though you get paid more to ensure access than offer advice. He spent huge chunks of time working with the Center for American Progress and writing a technical book on health reform. None of that proved lucrative (his book advance was $22,000; poor for a political pundit, much less a former Senate majority leader). He endorsed Obama in February of 2007, when Clinton was far ahead in the polls. If she'd won -- and most thought she would -- his access to the White House would be close to nonexistent, and his value to clients would be greatly diminished.

Ultimately, though, Klein (Ezra) too embraces the Daschle withdrawal as the price of reform:

But it turns out that Obama's words, well, mattered. They made it harder to ignore scandal, as the Bush administration had done. The endlessly long vetting forms forcing deep tax and income transparency, which in turn uncovered embarrassments that would never have emerged under past regimes. This has made for a more troubled transition, but will probably also result in a cleaner administration. For all the embarrassments, this, in a concrete sense, is what change looks like. It's not an administration that decides to be clean so much as one that has little choice in the matter.

Cleanliness is never absolute, however, and it never lasts. The cycle of reform and corruption and new reform is eternal -- or rather, it's only broken when corruption becomes so endemic that reform is impossible, at which point democratic choice becomes an illusion. Our politicians will never be monks, and we shouldn't want them to be (in fact, monkish orders endure their own cycles of corruption and reform). Perhaps those vetting forms shouldn't have cut so deep; perhaps the lobbying guidelines should have been more forward-looking, more forgiving of past conduct. Obama should not have lost the people he's lost.

Bring on the realists: on attaining "very concrete things" in war zones

Joe Klein flags this "significant shift in tone from the Bush Administration" from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates:

I think one of the -- one of the points where I suspect both administrations come to the same conclusion is that the goals we did have for Afghanistan are too broad and too far into the future, are too future-oriented, and that we need more concrete goals that can be achieved realistically within three to five years in terms of reestablishing control in certain areas, providing security for the population, going after alQaeda, preventing the reestablishment of terrorism, better performance in terms of delivery of services to the people, some very concrete things.

Compare Obama, pushing Ryan Crocker toward an attainable definition of success in Iraq last April:

And, see, the problem I have is if the definition of success is so high, no traces of Al Qaida and no possibility of reconstitution, a highly-effective Iraqi government, a Democratic multiethnic, multi- sectarian functioning democracy, no Iranian influence, at least not of the kind that we don't like, then that portends the possibility of us staying for 20 or 30 years.

If, on the other hand, our criteria is a messy, sloppy status quo but there's not, you know, huge outbreaks of violence, there's still corruption, but the country is struggling along, but it's not a threat to its neighbors and it's not an Al Qaida base, that seems to me an achievable goal within a measurable timeframe, and that, I think, is what everybody here on this committee has been trying to drive at, and we haven't been able to get as clear of an answer as we would like.

Gates and Obama have long implicitly differed - and probably continue to differ - about the pace of withdrawal from Iraq. But they have long been on the same page when it comes to setting realistic goals and priorities with an eye to available resources.

Beware that fisher king thing...

I've always been struck by strange juxtapositions in our publications-- a tale of horrific suffering in some faraway place juxtaposed with an ad for a luxury item. A somewhat less accidental pairing on a Time Magazine web page almost feels like an Obama honeymoon jinx.

It's here: Joe Klein, in his latest column, gives George W. Bush a hard boot out the door. And a Time online page designer slams the door behind him:

That we have slightly more than one President for the moment is mostly a consequence of the extraordinary economic times. Even if George Washington were the incumbent, the markets would want to know what John Adams was planning to do after his Inauguration. And yet this final humiliation seems particularly appropriate for George W. Bush. At the end of a presidency of stupefying ineptitude, he has become the lamest of all possible ducks. (See TIME's best pictures of Barack Obama.)

See Time's best pictures of Barack Obama? And get your Barack Action Pack here?

I personally have tremendous hopes for Obama's presidency and feel a great grief over what Bush has wrought, and that he ever had the chance to take the reins. Yet I'm a little wary of the collective Wasteland mythologizing: out with the sterile old king, in with the new avatar of the fertility god, waving his stimulus wand and bringing his golden family into the palace.

I'm there, cheering at the gates. But I'm also fearing of the fates. Wondering, what dream is this. And warding off nemesis.

McMea Culpa coming? Was Joe Klein right, but early?

On September 10, Joe Klein, denouncing McCain for "one of the sleaziest ads I've ever seen in presidential politics," predicted that McCain would gin up an Act of Contrition some time after November 4. Last Friday, after McCain finally willed himself to check hysterically hostile supporters, I wondered

Which way will McCain swing at last? Will the mea culpa that Joe Klein predicted come before election day rather than after? Will he embrace the press in a warm bear hug, shower Obama with personal praise, and slam him for proposing a trillion dollars in new spending and premature withdrawal from Iraq, as he has every right to do? Or will he pitch himself down the path of all-out character assassination?

Now, William Kristol suggests that the worm is indeed about to turn -- that there will be one last sudden lurch toward reviving Mr. Straight Talk/Mr. Clean:

What McCain needs to do is junk the whole thing and start over. Shut down the rapid responses, end the frantic e-mails, bench the spinning surrogates, stop putting up new TV and Internet ads every minute. In fact, pull all the ads — they’re doing no good anyway. Use that money for televised town halls and half-hour addresses in prime time.

And let McCain go back to what he’s been good at in the past — running as a cheerful, open and accessible candidate. Palin should follow suit. The two of them are attractive and competent politicians. They’re happy warriors and good campaigners. Set them free.

This from the very sage, mind you, who was egging Palin on a week ago to "take the gloves off" and go after the Wright connection -- and who's for all practical purposes claimed credit for elevating that petty thug to the national stage (McCain's epitaph: relied on Kristol balls?). That he can now blithely suggest that Palin can morph into an "open and accessible...happy warrior" slides right past irony into farce.

Why not go all the way -- and dump Palin for Lieberman? If you're going to make a mad dash for the road not taken, you'd better drop your heaviest baggage.

McCain casts Obama as Bill Clinton

McCain has found a line of attack against Obama with which he's very comfortable: he used it repeatedly against Bill Clinton. Here it is, as expressed on Jul. 20 by advisor Randy Scheunemann:

Barack Obama says he wants a 'safe and responsible' withdrawal from Iraq, but is stubbornly adhering to an unconditional withdrawal that places politics above the advice of our military commanders, the success of our troops, and the security of the American people.

In his foreign policy pronouncements, McCain has always struck a Churchillian pose, casting various opponents as Neville Chamberlain against a succession of dictators (Milosevic, Kim Jong II, Saddam) in the role of Hitler. When Clinton starred (as he did repeatedly) in this Kabuki play, McCain liked to add a particularly nasty twist: the unfit commander-in-chief was not only weak and vacillating, but corrupt in the most fundamental sense -- placing his personal political fortunes ahead of the national interest.

Elsewhere, I've reviewed several instances in which McCain impugned Clinton's core motives in this fashion. Here, let one example suffice: in a lengthy foreign policy address delivered at Kansas State in March 1999 -- doubtless an early effort to establish his own c-in-c chops as he geared up for a presidential run in 2000 -- McCain devoted the bulk of his speech to excoriating Clinton's "strategic incoherence" and "self-doubt." He saved his harshest accusation to explain Clinton's conduct in a now-forgotten 'crisis,' U.S. transfer of technology to China:

In addition to their strangely relaxed attitude toward what looks to be an extraordinarily damaging espionage incident, they have tolerated, indeed, insisted upon extremely liberal licensing practices for transferring dual use technology to China. It is a sad sign of the times, that the best face that can be put on these lapses in judgment is that they were mistakenly committed for the sake of a stable bilateral relationship,

Far more distressing is the charge that they are, at least in part, a consequence of the President placing his own re-election before the supreme national interest. Sadly, that charge grows more credible every day. And if it is proven beyond a reasonable doubt, it will bring more of history's shame upon the President than his personal failings will, indeed, greater shame than any President has ever suffered.

Back in February '07, Joe Klein shed an interesting light on McCain's fondness for casting opponents of all-out military effort as self-interested. Noting that unnamed active duty officers of his acquaintance shared McCain's belief that opposition to the surge was politically motivated, Klein wrote:

Mission is a sacred word in the military. When you are given a mission, you are trained to complete it, to keep on trying new tactics until the objective is achieved. It is a matter of duty and honor. And so, when politicians criticize a mission, the reflexive military reaction is to assume they are acting dishonorably, putting politics above duty.

Klein, to his credit, added the necessary corollary:

...politicians have sacred missions too. Their duty is threefold: to be judicious about sending the troops off to war, to give the military everything it needs to complete the mission and, if it appears the mission is futile or compromised, to change it or end it.

It is doubtless emotionally satisfying as well as politically, er, expedient, for McCain to cast opponents' attempts to "change or end" a military course of action as cynical calculations against the national interest. And charges of political expedience are not outside the pale in our politics: Obama leveled that charge against Hillary Clinton. But for McCain, it's plainly a one-size-fits-all political strategy.

Was Primary Colors a Prophecy?

Thinking this morning about Primary Colors, Joe Klein's roman a clef inspired by the Clinton '92 primary fight -- specifically the scene where the Clinton figure, Jack Stanton, stymies a primary opponent in a call-in radio confrontation with an artfully selective cite of his past pronouncements on Medicare. Thoughts then drifted to how, after inspiring an on-air heart attack in that rival, Stanton-Clinton finds himself faced with an oncoming tsunami as a charismatic former governor emerges as a last-minute candidate and becomes the golden boy with the big mo'. Then comes the oppo research, and the discovery that the new rival was stoned through much of his tenure as governor and indulged in gay sex with a shady local honcho to boot. Stanton agonizes, Clinton-on-the-brink-of-ROTC style, about The Right Thing to Do (conscience goaded by the suicide of an old ally who dug up the dirt), and hits on bringing the material to the candidate himself, telling him, if we found this, so will the Republicans.... Double win - thanks for being a boy scout, and goodbye rival.

Thought was, maybe this was about '08, not '92. The Clintons are up against it now. Water's rising, and the Texas-Ohio levee's looking like a New Orleans defense. What are they going to pull?

p.s. Stray echo while flipping pages: Stanton caught out in an early debate, and smug defiict hawk opponent pronounces: "This man will say anything to get elected." Guess it's not the most original comeback in politics.

Feb. 5: Hillary's Speech was Better than Obama's

As a supporter of Obama and admirer of his rhetoric and the approach to politics underpinning it, I must say that I think Hillary gave the better speech on Feb. 5.

Both speeches were effective expressions of the speaker's philosophy of governance. Ultimately I think Obama's metapolitics - his claim that we can't craft effective policy until we fix our political process -- is what's required at the moment. Nonetheless...

Hillary, in the face of troubling returns, came out with impressive energy and ebullience. It's become a cliche that she relies on wonkish policy prescriptions, and she was indeed quite specific about what she wants government to do for various groups (mortgagees, veterans, students).

Her focus was narrower than Obama's. But she also concentrated fire more effectively on the Republicans than Obama did. Her attack had the pithy anaphoric logic of Bill Clinton's 2004 convention speech, with its refrain of "vote for them" (if you like destructive policies a, b, and c). Hillary's trope was a variation on 'more of the same':

Well, the Republicans want eight more years of the same. They see...tax cuts for the wealthy and they say, "Why not more?" They see $9 trillion in debt and say, "Why not trillions more?" They see five years in Iraq and say, "Why not 100 more?"

Well...they've got until January 20th, 2009 and not one day more.

Then the kicker, an effective projection of Hillary's pre-emptive 'don't tread on me' message to Republicans (and those who doubt whether she can beat them):

Now, we know the Republicans won't give up the White House without a fight. Well, let me be clear -- I won't let anyone swift boat this country's future.

Her peroration also had the rhetorical grace of strong repetition. Springing off the Statue of Liberty's "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free," Hillary converts it to a "scope of work" statement:

So today we say with one voice -- give us the child who wants to learn, give us the people in need of work, give us the veterans who need our care. We say give us this economy to rebuild and this war to end. Give us this nation to heal, this world to lead, this moment to seize.

The "us" here is of course a royal plural. That one voice is Hillary's, as the main effort is Hillary's. The speech expresses Hillary's p/maternalism: politics is "about the people who have shared their problems with me, looking for solutions."

There's a non-royal 'we' in the speech too. A litany of effective policies carried out in 'the America I see" ends with, "That's the America I see and that's the America we will build together." But the dominant chord is what Hillary can do for her country.

Obama's speech is already famous for a very different 'we', a we that is not royal but touches on the mystical:

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. (Cheers, applause.) We are the change that we seek. We are the hope of those boys who have so little, who've been told that they cannot have what they dream, that they cannot be what they imagine. Yes, they can. (Cheers, applause.)

We are the hope of the father who goes to work before dawn and lies awake with doubt that tells him he cannot give his children the same opportunities that someone gave him. Yes, he can.

(Crowd says in unison, "Yes, he can.")

We are the hope of the woman who hears that her city will not be rebuilt, that she cannot somehow claim the life that was swept away in a terrible storm. Yes, she can.

(Crowd says in unison, "Yes, she can.")

We are the hope of the future, the answer to the cynics who tell us our house must stand divided, that we cannot come together, that we cannot remake this world as it should be.

Some, confronted with this rhetoric, have cried a halt. Joe Klein today decries in "Inspiration vs. Substance":

And yet there was something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism — "We are the ones we've been waiting for" — of the Super Tuesday speech and the recent turn of the Obama campaign. "This time can be different because this campaign for the presidency of the United States of America is different. It's different not because of me. It's different because of you." That is not just maddeningly vague but also disingenuous: the campaign is entirely about Obama and his ability to inspire.

"It's not about me" is not disingenuous; it's paradoxical. Obama has come this far because he has the audacity to ask from the outset for a broad mandate. The power he seeks to 'transform our politics' depends on winning broad-based, lasting support . It's about him insofar as he asks, but it's about us insofar as we answer.

It's not hokum, either. The support he seeks cannot be won, he's told us, without him telling the truth consistently, and listening to all constituencies, and negotiating with all constituencies. Obama's political career began inside out, in organizing -- that is, asking disenfranchised groups what they needed most, and figuring out with them how to get the political establishment to respond. The career drama in Dreams from My Father is the process by which he learned to ask various constituencies (residents of the Altgelt projects) what they needed, and go for that, rather than try to determine what was needed himself. It's the listening skills, and the negotiating skills -- and the requisite political infighting skills -- that he's asking us to believe he can use to bring in enough voters and enough Republican lawmakers to pass an unabashedly liberal policy agenda.

Still, if I had only these two speeches to go on, I might have voted for Hillary, as I was inclined to do in the fall. On this night, Obama was a little too much MLK, not enough Hillary Clinton. His Denver speech packed in more specific policy prescriptions - and a much sharper attack on Hillary's career and campaign. Those attacks are important, because they bring him back to the process skills -- leadership skills -- that are at the core of his pitch. He's got to make sure he doesn't take off on us like the Wizard of Oz in his balloon.

Related posts:
Obama's Metapolitics
Obama: Man, those Klinton Kids are Something
Obama Praises Clinton, and Buries Him

Rotting from the Head Down

Joe Klein reports on the responses of a Republican focus group gathered by Frank Luntz during the Republican U-Tube debate:

In the next segment--the debate between Romney and Mike Huckabee over Huckabee's college scholarships for the deserving children of illegal immigrants--I noticed something really distressing: When Huckabee said, "After all, these are children of God," the dials plummeted. And that happened time and again through the evening: Any time any candidate proposed doing anything nice for anyone poor, the dials plummeted (30s). These Republicans were hard.

But there was worse to come: When John McCain started talking about torture--specifically, about waterboarding--the dials plummeted again. Lower even than for the illegal Children of God. Down to the low 20s, which, given the natural averaging of a focus group, is about as low as you can go. Afterwards, Luntz asked the group why they seemed to be in favor of torture. "I don't have any problem pouring water on the face of a man who killed 3000 Americans on 9/11," said John Shevlin, a retired federal law enforcement officer. The group applauded, appallingly.

Andrew Sullivan labels this display of sadism The Foul Core of the GOP. But what if we're witnessing the corruption of the American electorate as whole? That's what inevitably happens when leaders violate the norms and taboos of civilized governance. I think back to those experiments by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s in which participants proved willing to administer excruciatingly painful shocks (which were faked) to those they believed to be the experiment's subjects, and Milgram's claim that you could find a full staff for Auschwitz in any typical American town. That is probably always true of people everywhere -- and that's precisely why when the leaders start pushing the torture-is-too-good-for- our-enemies buttons, we're on the road to ruin if other leaders don't stand up in opposition.

On the largest issues of governance -- respect for minority rights, human rights, international law -- the leaders have to be better than the people. Bush's crime lies in violating norm after norm, taboo after taboo of U.S. governance -- politicizing the CIA, Justice Dept, EPA and just about every other federal department; nullifying legislation via signing statements; harassing nonsupporters at campaign rallies; suspending habeas; and institutionalizing torture.

For years I've believed that the electorate as a whole is smarter than any of us; I've had faith in the wisdom of crowds as a key to democracy's success. But lately I've been thinking that leaders in power can corrupt this process; they can corrupt the people.