Two questions about Obama's thinking about ISIS

Peter Baker has a purported insider's view of Obama's thinking about the ISIS crisis™, based on interviews with 10 people present at two recent dinners the president held with foreign policy experts and journalists. Like most such exercises, it's not particularly revealing (with one exception noted at bottom), as the president is putting best foot forward with his guests and the guests assess him through a partisan prism (Richard Haas is respectfully negative, Jane Harman equivocally positive).  

I was struck, though, by two questions Obama's not-so-private exegesis left unanswered. I don't doubt that he has considered these questions in depth, but he has not seen fit to address them directly.

The first concerns his decision to ramp up aid to "moderate" Syrian rebels and support them with air strikes as appropriate.

Obama picks his battleground

Those of us who have watched with distress a chastened post-election Obama revert to futile bipartisan gestures and gratuitous mea culpas have wondered what he would choose to take a stand on in the lame duck session, as Republicans move to stymie all meaningful action.  The Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest? Didn't look like it, though the signals have shifted a bit in recent days. DADT?  Votes to bust a filibuster probably aren't there.

Today we have our answer. There is one battle Obama can't afford to lose -- and will lose if he defers it. That is ratification of the New START treaty with Russia.  The treaty is essential to national security, future nonproliferation efforts, United States credibility on the world stage, and, by extension, Obama's ability to conduct foreign policy.

Since Kyl's betrayal on Tuesday, I have wondered why Obama has not wrapped himself round with the six secretaries of state, seven STRATCOM commanders and five secretaries of defense who have voiced support for the treaty. Today he did that. And cleverly, he brought Ronald Reagan to the table where also sat James Baker, Madeline Albright, Henry Kissinger, William Cohen, William Perry, Brent Scowcroft, Sam Nunn, along with his current national security team:

If we ratify this treaty, we’re going to have a verification regime in place to track Russia’s strategic nuclear weapons, including U.S. inspectors on the ground.  If we don’t, then we don’t have a verification regime -– no inspectors, no insights into Russia’s strategic arsenal, no framework for cooperation between the world’s two nuclear superpowers.  As Ronald Reagan said, we have to trust, but we also have to verify.  In order for us to verify, we’ve got to have a treaty.

I think that as with healthcare reform, Obama is going to go all out and get this one over the line.  Yesterday Dick Lugar laid out the blueprint: force senators to vote yea or nay on a treaty that the entire foreign policy establishment of the last thirty years not currently holding elective office supports:

"I'm advising that the treaty should come on the floor so people will have to vote aye or nay [even if there's no deal]," he said. "I think when it finally comes down to it, we have sufficient number or senators who do have a sense of our national security. This is the time, this is the priority. Do it."

Tax cuts in the stimulus were not just a sop to Republicans

I just stumbled on an Obama campaign speech that sheds some light on his claim in the Peter Baker interview that he made more than a third of the Recovery Act tax cuts on the merits, not as a sop to Republicans.

Here's what he told Baker (filtering out an explanation of the structure of the cuts):

The way we structured the Recovery Act was based on conversations with a wide range of economists and a recognition that there wasn’t going to be a single silver bullet to restart the economy; that we were going to have to have a mix of strategies.  So, for example, because each strategy had its strengths and its weaknesses, tax cuts had the advantage of speed. You can get tax cuts out pretty quickly; people have money in their pockets; hopefully they’re spending it....

So what we did was we put together the best possible package, given that we had to do it very quickly, and we presented it to Congress as a package without much thought to the politics of it. 

Obama girds for 1994 II

Arguably the most revealing passage in Peter Baker's long interview with Obama is the very last sentence:

Well, I’m actually looking at “The Clinton Tapes,” which is Taylor Branch’s chronicle of certain conversations he had with Clinton. It is fascinating.

Those "certain conversations" occurred throughout Clinton's presidency -- they represent Clinton's attempt to get a real-time record while memory was fresh.  (Clinton kept the tapes, but after each session, Branch recorded what he could recall while driving home).   When Branch published The Clinton Tapes in 2009, striking parallels in the Republican response to a moderate Democratic president were already coming into focus.  Awareness of the parallels doubtless shaped Branch's presentation somewhat. But the raw material is Clinton's contemporaneous recollection.

The fulcrum of Clinton's story is the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. By that point, Clinton was as proud of his legislative record as Obama is now. Here he is on Nov. 10, 1994:

What a great start for a presidency-with five million new jobs, peace initiatives around the world, headed into a third year of unprecedented deficit reduction--until the crash in Tuesday's election.

It was in the middle term -- after Clinton successfully staved off the Gingrich Congress's atempt to radically cut Medicaid and Medicare and once perception of rip-roaring economic recovery caught up with reality -- that those accomplishments bore fruit for Clinton.  And Obama plainly has that political rhythm in mind:

On whether the experiences of past presidents offer him any lessons.
Look, history never precisely repeats itself. But there is a pattern in American presidencies — at least modern presidencies. You come in with excitement and fanfare. The other party initially, having been beaten, says it wants to cooperate with you. You start implementing your program as you promised during the campaign.

The other party pushes back very hard. It causes a lot of consternation and drama in Washington.

People who are already cynical and skeptical about Washington generally look at it and say, This is the same old mess as we’ve seen before. The president’s poll numbers drop. And you have to then sort of wrestle back the confidence of the people as the programs that you’ve put in place start bearing fruit and people can suddenly start seeing, Hey, you know what, this health care bill means my kid isn’t losing her health insurance once she leaves college even though she doesn’t have a job yet. Or you know what, the credit-card company can’t jack up my interest rate suddenly, and this is actually saving me some money. Or I’m a small business, and lo and behold, I don’t have to pay capital gains on my start-up, and I can plow that money back into my business.

And what you hope is that over time, despite all the rhetoric, people start seeing concrete benefits from what you’re doing and what was a valley goes back into a peak.

Now what you also hope is that sort of the ups and downs, the highs and lows start evening out a little bit so that people don’t have unrealistic expectations about how quickly we can move on big issues in a democracy but people don’t also plunge into despair when it takes more than six months to transform the world.

Strange indeed is the psychodrama with Bill Clinton in which Obama finds himself enmeshed. Recall that during the 2008 campaign, Obama gave Bill Clinton "tremendous credit" for balancing the budget, while velvet glove-punching him (and by extension Hillary) for not being able to put through a legislative agenda:

(Re)hire this man....

My gut reaction to Obama's long interview with the Times' Peter Baker was to thank God he's President. I'd elect him to four terms if I could.

This kind of reflexive fan club admiration requires some internal pushback -- I need to remind myself that, while I know there's counter-arguments on each front, I suspect at least half-time that Obama & Co. started too low in their stimulus proposal,  never got on the right side of righteous rage against Wall Street, sought Republican support on healthcare for too long,  went deeper into quagmire in Afghanistan to very likely no good purpose, got rolled by Netanyahu on settlements, and did a poor job defending both the PPA and the stimulus.

But there is a perpetual split screen: the art of the politically possible vs. the optimal policy result. And the first measure is the only one that matters. By that standard, I think Obama's self-assessment substantially holds water (notwithstanding rather large caveats on the last item):

His speech will be pretty good

Just a wee bit of pressure has built up on Obama in anticipation of his health care speech before Congress and a national audience on Wednesday. Here's how Peter Baker's pre-game show in the Times, "Obama Faces a Critical Moment in His Presidency," frames it:

Of all the challenges Mr. Obama faces this fall, health care has come to dominate so much that the fate of the rest of his domestic program, particularly climate change legislation and new regulations on the financial industry, may depend in part on whether he wins this fight.

“He’s gone all in,” said Matt Bennett, vice president of Third Way, a Democratic-oriented advocacy organization, using a poker term. “Everyone’s watching. The bets are all on the table. And we’re just waiting to see what the cards say.”

I am reminded af a vignette in Ryan Lizza's July '08 New Yorker portrait of Obama:

Obama has always had a healthy understanding of the reaction he elicits in others, and he learned to use it to his advantage a very long time ago. Marty Nesbitt remembers Obama’s utter calm the day he gave his celebrated speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, in Boston, which made him an international celebrity and a potential 2008 Presidential candidate. “We were walking down the street late in the afternoon,” Nesbitt told me. “And this crowd was building behind us, like it was Tiger Woods at the Masters.”

“Barack, man, you’re like a rock star,” Nesbitt said.

“Yeah, if you think it’s bad today, wait until tomorrow,” Obama replied.

“What do you mean?”

“My speech,” Obama said, “is pretty good.”

My bets are on the President pulling out a health care bill that will disappoint many followers but that will be recognized in later years to have "move[d] this big battleship a few degrees in a different direction."