Cold War 2.0?

Is a tempting alternative to western democracy gaining currency in the developing world? So I wondered when I read the warning in yesterday's Times by Mohamed Keita, Africa advocacy coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, of growing media suppression across Africa:

As Africa’s economies grow, an insidious attack on press freedom is under way. Independent African journalists covering the continent’s development are now frequently persecuted for critical reporting on the misuse of public finances, corruption and the activities of foreign investors. ...

Keita attributes the trend in large part to

the influence of China, which surpassed the West as Africa’s largest trading partner in 2009. Ever since, China has been deepening technical and media ties with African governments to counter the kind of critical press coverage that both parties demonize as neocolonialist.

True Newt, false Newt

Hate-mongering demagogue though he may be, Newt Gingrich spoke one truth and illustrated another in a response to one question from moderator David Gregory in yesterday's GOP debate in New Hampshire:

GREGORY: Speaker Gingrich, if you become President Gingrich and the leader of the Democrats, Harry Reed says he’s going to promise to make you a one term president, how would you propose to work with someone like that in order to achieve results in Washington?

GINGRICH: I think every president who works with the leader of every opposition knows they’re working with someone who wants to make them a one term president. I mean you know that -- that’s the American process. I worked with Ronald Reagan in the early 1990’s. Tip O’Neil was speaker. He wanted to make Reagan a one term president. We had to get one-third of the Democrats to vote for the Reagan tax cuts and we did.

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):

Homo electus in all his glory

Bill Clinton is not faking here (to John F. Harris and James Hohmann of Politico, 9/23/10):

Clinton finished his political analysis on a lyrical note about democracy and how voters make themselves heard by their leaders: “That’s why every election is magical. The American people are like Mozart, writing a different symphony. They use the same words, in greater volume and different order. It’s like notes. You’ve got to hear it.”

As evidence, I can only cite more (indirect) Clinton (to Taylor Branch, in 1993):

Obama, Clinton, Woodward, Branch

Much chatter today about Bob Woodward's portrayal in his forthcoming Obama's Wars of division and debate in Obama's foreign policy team. The Times' Peter Baker emphasizes the negative:  Biden calls Holbrooke "the most egotistical bastard I've ever met." Holbrooke says the strategy in Afghanistan can't work, Gates says that Jim Jones' deputy Thomas Donilon would be "a disaster" as national security advisor. Bush apologists like Mark Thiessen are having a field day.

I recall reading The Agenda, Woodward's book on Bill Clinton's first year in office, which makes the tortuous process by which the administration shaped its first budget and squeaked it through Congress look like a chaotic, raggedy mess. That was the budget that put the U.S.on course for its greatest peacetime economic expansion in decades. Of the process and Woodward's treatment of it, Clinton had this to say to Taylor Branch, as reported in Branch's The Clinton Tapes:

What upset him was an obsessive focus on style above substance, especially in media discussion of The Agenda.  Debates within his administration were lampooned as contests of seesaw mismanagement suited to a romper room, full of temper tantrums and panicky showdowns pitting "true Democrats" against coldhearted bankers, or realists against doctrinaire liberals. The president objected first to exaggeration. He said fierce argument is healthy for free government--and infighting inherent--even on small matters. "It's the nature of the beast," he said. By fair comparison with the hacks of many administrations, or even the talented backstabbers around Lincoln and FDR, the president called his budget advisers models of decorous public service. Their victory in Congress had momentous stakes for every citizen. Could the package really tame our deficit? Might we dare to balance the national budget for the first time in two generations?  At what cost? How would it affect tomorrow's grandchildren to be spared trillions in public debt? [Ai!] Clinton lamented that the Woodward reviews ignored these core questions. They buried the central issue under a mountain of finger pointing and factional score-keeping (166).

When Democratic Presidents reappoint Fed Chairmen

Regarding Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's refusal to juice the economy at this point with further extraordinary measures such as a new round of quantitative easing, Jonathan Bernstein suspects that "Obama re-appointed Ben Bernanke without assuring himself that Bernanke would carry out policies that Obama presumably supports on the merits, and would have had the benefit of helping the Democrats in the 2010 election cycle."

Bernstein does grant that "it's possible that when Obama re-appointed Bernanke he thought he had such assurances, and it's possible that he believed that Fed policy to that point combined with fiscal stimulus would be sufficient to beat the recession, so that he underestimated the importance of the Fed in getting the economy back up to speed."  Finally, he arrives at what may have been the key point for Obama decision:

It's also fair to say that a year ago, in the wake of the financial crisis, reassuring the markets and keeping in place the person who had experience dealing with those issues was probably a more legitimate concern than it is today. 

As is the case on so many fronts, Bill Clinton, facing a rejectionist Republican majority, worked under constraints similar to those confronting Obama (and if Republicans capture one or both chambers of Congress this November, as seems increasingly likely, the operating environment will be more similar still).  According to Taylor Branch in The Clinton Tapes, when Clinton reappointed Greenspan in 1996, he

had wanted badly to replace chairman Alan Greenspan with Felix Rohatyn, the shrewd investment banker from Lazard Freres, but he ran into vexing constraints everywhere. Rohatyn himself advised Clinton to reappoint Greenspan instead, arguing that the Republican Senate would confirm no one else. Wall Street could not elect a U.S. president, Rohatyn told him, but it could surely un-elect one.  If threatened, financial, financial powers would sacrifice short-term profits to drive interest rates higher, hurting blue-collar workers with layoffs and shaky pension funds. In the end, Rohatyn refused appointment to both posts -vice chair as well as chair], and Clinton suspected that Greenspan had engineered this result by warning of political friction and terrible drudgery at the Fed.  He thought the wily incumbent protected his brittle ego from comparative scrutiny alongside Rohatyn, who was just as accomplished and a far more persuasive, attractive public speaker (p. 348).

Hillary Clinton on Memory

A casual reminiscence in Taylor Branch's The Clinton Tapes perhaps sheds a sidelight on Hillary's false memory, voiced repeatedly in the '08 campaign, of ducking sniper fire on her landing at Bosnia's Tuzla air base in March 1996.

Branch had worked with the Clintons for McGovern's campaign in Texas in 1972. Looking back, the three find their memories fuzzy:

We reminisced about how hard it had been to figure out what was real and right at the time (re Vietnam), but fickle memory dulled our access.None of us could remember even where our apartment had been located in Austin during the McGovern campaign of 1972. The president had an image of a complex near the Colorado River.I recalled being on a hill past the interstate. Both of us still knew the address of our headquarters on Sixth Street, but nobody could place the home retreat. Hillary absolved us, saying we had traveled so much that the three of us were seldom there together, but our vagueness and the Vietnam tapes (Johnson's) made her reflect on the trickiness of memoirs. If she ever wrote them, how could she reconstruct her own past accurately? Their lawyer David Kendall knew more about a surviving paper trail of her life than she did. And he remembered it better. She said Kendall was truly gifted (p. 470).

It's still a bit hard to fathom how Clinton could 'remember' ducking sniper fire when she was in fact greeted by children with flowers on the runway. But those of us with less crowded memories have little means of imagining ourselves into a mind packed with tens of thousands of meetings with strangers in thousands of settings. Not to mention into a mind with a politician's reflex for optimal self-presentation.

More on The Clinton Tapes
A Clinton-eye view of Republicans
The long view from China 
Bill Clinton, Happy Warrior

A Clinton-eye view of Republicans

A note from the road on Taylor Branch's The Clinton Tapes, which so far (I'm in 1995) makes Clinton seem almost like a policy monk, repeatedly willing to do the right rather than the politically easy thing -- e.g., deficit reduction, Mexican bailout, Haiti invasion (forestalled by last minute capitulation),assault weapons ban, bombing of Bosnian Serb positions, not to mention the pending showdown - understood in clear outline by Clinton before it developed -- with the Gingrich-Dole Congress over their proposed radical cuts in social spending.This is admittedly Clinton's view of Clinton. But it's true that none of those decisions were short-term political winners --and also that Americans rewarded Clinton with consistently high poll ratings in later years because of good results. At the same time, Clinton is frank about not being able to do the right thing when the politics are impossible, as in ending the embargo on Cuba. "Clinton agreed with FDR that there were times when embracing a farsighted goal could be wrong, even in principle,because the reaction would undermine a leader's strength for other causes" (301).

But I digress. Structure is hard on a Blackberry. What I wanted to flag was a long-term if not quite eternal truth of American politics: "Bluntly, said the president, the difference between the two political parties is that the Democrats sell access and the Republicans sell control. 'Businesspeople know a bargain when they see one,' Clinton observed. 'They'd' rather have the control, and they're willing to pay a premium for it'"(280).

So much of this book is deja vu all over again. Of course, it was published in '09; Branch was doubtless aware of and in some ways accented the contemporary resonance.

Related posts:
The long view from China 
Bill Clinton, Happy Warrior

Beating the Bushes for START

Another flashback from The Clinton Tapes: when Clinton found himself 20 votes short for NAFTA passage in the House,

he shifted back to presidential chemistry at the kickoff event for NAFTA. Carter and Bush had stayed with him overnight...Gerald Ford joined them for dinner on the night of the Middle East ceremony, and then again for a private breakfast before the NAFTA presentation. Clinton's staff found no prior record of so many presidents eating meals together at the White House (pp 50-51)

Four presidents for NAFTA...could Obama -- or Gates -- not call on George H.W. Bush to counter the ignorant demagoguery of Mitt Romney and other Republican "leaders" posturing against ratification of the  START arms reduction treaty with Russia?  And, for that matter, on the Prodigal Son, not to say Bill Clinton himself? 

Incidentally, The Clinton Tapes has got to be the worst-indexed book I've ever encountered.

The long view from China

One disturbing moment that resonates now in Taylor Branch's The Clinton Tapes is Clinton's short-range reminiscence about his first meeting in 1993 with Chinese president Jiang Zemin. The stage is set with an account of the lack of personal connection or real dialogue (quite unusual for Clinton):

What stuck with him from Seattle was a tough private talk with the Chinese president, Jiang Zemin. Clinton said he and Jiang had sat across from each other at a small table about the size of the card table between us now, with only a translator on each side, as Jiang read a speech to him about the glorious history of China and the folly of attempts to influence her internal affairs. It went on so long that Clinton said he finally felt obliged to interrupt. Speaking in direct sentences, with all the charm he could muster, he invited the Chinese leader to get down to business. He told Jiang he didn't want to change China's political institutions. Nor did he object to prisons. In fact, America had lots of people in prison, and Clinton wanted to put away even more. But he did care about basic human rights, and, even if he didn't, he had a Congress that did. To improve relations, Jiang needed only to do a few things already permissible within Chinese standards and law. Clinton named four, including an effective ban on export goods made by prison labor. When he finished, however, Jiang simply resumed his speech.
 
The president said he and Jiang talked persistently past one another in disconnected monologues, and stiff formality further inhibited conversation  (87-88).

Then, recalling a later session, Branch tacks back to the upshot of Jiang's long-range view and its sobering effect on Clinton.  The passage segues from discussion of Russia:

Bill Clinton, Happy Warrior

Perhaps it's silly to record reactions to a book while you're still reading it, particularly early on. But what's a blog for? I want to flag an early snapshot of Bill Clinton from Taylor Branch's The Clinton Tapes that in one sense runs counter my general impression of the 42nd President -- though I suspect that it captures a complementary, not contradictory aspect of his personality and presidency.

My snapshot memory of the Clinton years is of a couple careening from crisis to crisis, with Clinton generally on the ropes and often red-faced with rage against his multifarious tormentors, from the media to the "vast right wing conspiracy" to the Gingrich Congress (the last is where my error may lie).  I sometimes think of him in concert with the Phillies' closer of the early nineties, Mitch Williams, a.k.a. "Wild Thing," who would generally struggle through his inning with lots of walks, hits and other fireworks but usually get the job done (until he didn't; his two blown saves cost the Phillies the '93 World Series).  On the other hand, there was the post-impeachment dictum, "If Bill Clinton were the Titanic, the iceberg would have sunk."  By the end of his tenure the loathesome Gingrich was down, and his scummy successor as Speaker Bob Livingston was down, and Dole was down, and the deficit was down, and crime was down, and income inequality was briefly down, and it really was, briefly, a kindler, gentler America than in the Reagan years. But still it was a wild ride.

No doubt Clinton can nurse a grudge with the best, and one generally doesn't think of him as a Zen master of detachment. But this, from Branch's earliest discussions with the new President in 1993, also rings true -- and explains much of Clinton's success: