While I took much issue with the Obama Administration’s initial response to the Honduran crisis in July, and especially the severe sanctions imposed, which achieve little more than hurting an already desperately poor population, I must admit that I’ve been quite happy with their actions in recent weeks.  To be sure, the deal they helped negotiate was far from perfect from my admittedly distant perspective, but it appeared to be a fairly good faith attempt to recognize that even if the Michelletti regime has not covered itself in glory and acted illegally in forcing Zelaya into exile, the Constitutional concerns that gave rise to Zelaya’s ouster were very real and legitimate rather than manufactured power grab. 

But today, that deal appears to have fallen apart in a deluge of finger-pointing.  This fact leaves a whole host of thorny questions for the diplomatic community with massive implications for millions of Hondurans.  First, who is to blame for the deal’s apparent collapse?  Is this just kabuki theater on Zelaya’s part? On Michelletti’s?  On both?  Can the deal be salvaged?  And most importantly, should any of this matter, especially if the elections at the end of the month turn out to be in accordance with international standards, or at least more in accordance with international standards than the “re-election” of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan?

From my distant perspective, this looks like it’s all just a chess match between Zelaya and Michelletti, in which neither side was particularly happy with the deal nor had much interest in complying with its spirit, even if they were willing to comply with its letter.  Certainly, it looks like Michelletti’s attempts to seek Zelaya’s input on a short-term unity government were half-hearted at best, undertaken solely out of the desire to appease the international community.  While I have no idea whether the deal required a vote on Zelaya’s reinstatement by yesterday, the delay in holding such a vote can only be described as spiteful and contrary to the spirit of the deal.  At most, a vote restoring Zelaya to the Presidency by yesterday would enable Zelaya to be a lame duck President for a few months at a time when all the branches of government, including the military, have made clear that their loyalties lay with Michelletti’s faction.  Zelaya will simply not have the time required to re-establish a power base within the government, and if he attempts to do so by dismissing the leadership of those other branches of government and replacing it with those loyal to him, he will quickly see the non-Chavez international community turn on him.

Meanwhile, Zelaya has to be largely aware of all of the above.   Indeed, Zelaya probably never had much interest in seeing the deal fulfilled, which is why he refused to respond to Michelletti’s half-hearted attempts to form a unity government.  What interest could Zelaya have in returning to the Presidency for perhaps a few months as a complete and utter lame duck?  Better to ensure that the deal falls through, make a plausible case for blaming the international pariah Michelletti for that fact, and watch as the international community refuses to recognize the results of the elections.  Once the elections have passed, Zelaya’s negotiating strength will likely increase dramatically as the new regime deals with widespread sanctions and intensifying international pressure and isolation. 

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The HuffingtonPost today is chalk chock-full of Obama:  What Happened?

Bill Maher, Drew Westen, and Arianna herself get in on the act.  To be fair und balanced for a second, there a number of alternative responses as well.

With the special elections today, a documentary coming out, a David Plouffe book being released, this one year retrospective since the election meme is in the air.

Not much of which (not surprisingly) I find really at all grounded or particularly intelligent (this goes basically for both the pro and anti-Obama positions).

To answer Fred Willard’s timely question: I think what happened is pretty much basically what was bound to happen and the people who are acting all disappointed now (or worse think Stalinism is inches away) just became overly wrapped in the emotion/hype of the campaign. A sober rational analysis of the guy’s past I think is pretty well 100% indicative of where we are now.

The three articles I linked to above all start from the premise that the place to begin the assessment of Obama’s presidency is so far is his campaign.  Which is a reasonable enough (I guess) place to begin, except that they start from the wrong data to be gleaned from the campaign. Basically my take is that all of them are just basically reading their own political perspective/point of view/ideology into Obama not actually looking at Obama himself.   (Again this also on the positive Obama side, say with Jacob Heilbrunn or Joseph Nye or Robert Creamer).

e.g.

Arianna:

Indeed, reading the book [Plouffe's book], I often found myself wondering what Candidate Obama would think of President Obama. Would he look at what the White House is doing and say, “that’s what I and my supporters worked so hard for?”

How did the candidate who got into the race because he’d decided that “the core leadership had turned rotten” and that “the people were getting hosed” become the president who has decided that the American people can only have as much change as Olympia Snowe will allow?

Westen:

Leadership is a quality Barack Obama showed on the campaign trail. It is a quality he has failed to show as president.

Maher:

Yeah, I’m disappointed, too. I thought we were sweeping into power; I thought change meant Change. I believed all that talk about another First 100 Days, a la Roosevelt. Well, that didn’t happen. The question is, is this as good as it gets from Obama, or is he pacing himself?

Now I’m known as something of a political determinist around these parts, so you can read what I have to say in light of that and argue that I’m just doing the same thing I criticize in the other writes–i.e. just projecting my point of view onto blank slate Obama.

The problem I have with these analyses is that they assume Obama’s campaign message and/or process was in any way indicative of what he would do as president.  While on the hand I’m often accused of being very cynical, I’m actually one of these people who think that politicians actually basically do tell you how they are going to be and what they are going to do when President.  If you do the supposedly boring (but actually illuminating) work of investigating their actual records. [Read more →]

Via Doug Mataconis, Andrew Coulson finds yet another one of those “little incidents” that add up to a pattern of choosing politics over respect for freedoms: [Read more →]

For a long while last year, I flirted with the idea of voting for Obama.  But after he showed a lack of backbone on warrantless wiretapping and the Libertarian Party nominated a reasonably serious candidate, I found myself voting for Bob Barr.  Still, I had passionately backed Obama during the primaries and thought he was the most promising major-party Presidential nominee on civil liberties issues in a very, very long time.  As between Obama and McCain, there was no contest that Obama was the far preferable candidate.

Sadly, I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that the Obama Administration has an extraordinarily low regard for some of our most fundamental freedoms.   This conclusion is not based on any one incident, but on the accumulation of many small incidents.  This is also not to suggest that the Obama Administration is on the verge of creating a secret police or anything resembling the totalitarian visions of our nightmares.  But there comes a point where it becomes clear that concerns for certain freedoms simply are not entering into the decisionmaking process.

To be sure, Obama’s been better than Bush on Guantanamo Bay, torture, the Fourth Amendment, and medical marijuana raids.  Then again, “better than Bush” is a low bar on these issues, especially when you consider that these are issues that by and large played a key role in his getting the nomination and eventually winning office.  What has frustrated me far more about the Obama Administration, however, has been its performance on civil liberties issues that are less important to the liberal base of the Democratic Party.  This performance suggests that the Obama Administration’s interest in Constitutional liberties goes little further than is needed to keep the liberal base happy. 

What are these small incidents?  In no particular order: [Read more →]

Transplanted Lawyer has the first – and thus far, only – truly sane take I’ve seen on the matter.  I was thinking about writing a post on this subject, but T.L.’s post says all that really should or can be said.  Say what you will about Fox News, but it is simply not the position, right, or responsibility of the Obama Administration to decide which news organizations are and are not “legitimate.”  Please do read the whole thing.

This is my third financial/economic/treasury round-up.  I am not an expert in these matters so what I’ve been trying to do is bring some expert voices to the League in order to better flesh out these thoughts.  If anybody wants to add more relevant links to the comments, I’d appreciate it, because this crazy treasury plan seems like bad news to me, but I want all the perspective I can get on it.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has published an explanation of his bank plan in the Washington Post:

We cannot solve this crisis without making it possible for investors to take risks. While this crisis was caused by banks taking too much risk, the danger now is that they will take too little. In working with Congress to put in place strong conditions to prevent misuse of taxpayer assistance, we need to be very careful not to discourage those investments the economy needs to recover from recession. The rule of law gives responsible entrepreneurs and investors the confidence to invest and create jobs in our nation. Our nation’s commitment to pursue economic policies that promote confidence and stability dates back to the very first secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, who first made it clear that when our government gives its word we mean it.

Responsible entrepreneurs?  Rule of Law?  It strikes me that we’re working with some very misguided, very wrong-headed assumptions, and it seems Paul Krugman agrees:

The Obama administration is now completely wedded to the idea that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the financial system — that what we’re facing is the equivalent of a run on an essentially sound bank. As Tim Duy put it, there are no bad assets, only misunderstood assets. And if we get investors to understand that toxic waste is really, truly worth much more than anyone is willing to pay for it, all our problems will be solved.

To this end the plan proposes to create funds in which private investors put in a small amount of their own money, and in return get large, non-recourse loans from the taxpayer, with which to buy bad — I mean misunderstood — assets. This is supposed to lead to fair prices because the funds will engage in competitive bidding.

But it’s immediately obvious, if you think about it, that these funds will have skewed incentives. In effect, Treasury will be creating — deliberately! — the functional equivalent of Texas S&Ls in the 1980s: financial operations with very little capital but lots of government-guaranteed liabilities. For the private investors, this is an open invitation to play heads I win, tails the taxpayers lose. So sure, these investors will be ready to pay high prices for toxic waste. After all, the stuff might be worth something; and if it isn’t, that’s someone else’s problem.

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