Over at the Liberty Papers, Quincy offers a distinctive take on Obama’s attack on the Citizens United ruling.  Money quote:

It is not the thought of special interests influencing politics that scares the ruling class. It is the thought of special interests influencing politics without them that does.

Paul Krugman’s op-ed (for today) begins:

Lately many people have been second-guessing the Obama administration’s political strategy. The conventional wisdom seems to be that President Obama tried to do too much — in particular, that he should have put health care on one side and focused on the economy.

I disagree. The Obama administration’s troubles are the result not of excessive ambition, but of policy and political misjudgments. The stimulus was too small; policy toward the banks wasn’t tough enough; and Mr. Obama didn’t do what Ronald Reagan, who also faced a poor economy early in his administration, did — namely, shelter himself from criticism with a narrative that placed the blame on previous administrations.

I basically agree with this–I don’t think they could have gotten a bigger stimulus through, just as I was pretty skeptical they would ever get a public-option, but who knows.

Krugman’s third point is definitely valid.  For political cover, Obama should have spent the year saying he inherited a mess.  He can’t start now. In the public’s mind he now owns the financial (jobs?) crisis.

At the end of his piece, Krugman calls for pushing hard on regulatory reform.  Sam Stein says that it’s already in the works. That push will undoubtedly be peppered with a healthy dose of populist rhetoric, if not necessarily populist policy (whatever that may be).

There’s one crucial piece missing from Krugman’s analysis, something much deeper that anything he mentions.  It’s not just that Obama needed a narrative of laying blame at the feet of his predecessor, and not just that he didn’t catch on earlier to the rising populist rage (even within his own Democratic party), although he needed both of those. It’s that he needed to explain how these reforms (principally health care and now regulatory reform) fit into some larger, middle class-oriented project.  Obama needed (and needs) to offer a broader domestic vision.

On foreign policy Obama has also begun to articulate his vision.  It includes the acceptance of the end of American unipolarity and a call for more regional and nation-to-nation co-operation around common concerns: terrorism, environmental disasters, trans-national crime, etc.

But on domestic policy he hasn’t created any equivalent frame of reference.

I’ve said many times on this blog that I think the President (in fact, any President) has little to no real influence on Congressional legislation.  And that, in my mind, is as it should be.  The one thing the President can do is articulate his broader political vision.  Otherwise, as we’ve seen with Obama, he gets reduced to trying to argue nick-nack policy sub-points.  It plays into the worst stereotypes of Democrats as aloof managers–a stereotype that happens to have some real history behind it.

Obama’s campaign (through his speechwriter Jon Favreau) employed the narrative arc of American history.  All the Yes We Cans were meant to signal that the coming era of leadership and participation would write its own chapter in the ongoing saga.

I think this was very effective as a campaign slogan, but this approach has not produced any tangible political guidance.

The reason I’m harping on narrative is not because I’m obsessed with faux-political consultancy language; I’m not a narrative-monger.  The great philosopher Paul Ricoeur said that identity in a postmodern world (after the linguistic turn and the end of the philosophy of consciousness) occurred through the act of narration.  Narration works through emplotment or the organizing of data-streams and experiences along a certain course.  It gives a sense of meaning and operationalizes the hermeneutic circle, whereby any part is only understand in relation to the whole while the whole can never be understand except through its component parts.

In this case, the various reform bills are only comprehensible in relation to the over-arching narrative (the whole), which is largely missing from Obama’s agenda.  I think it would be wise for the Democrats’ larger narrative to include some targeted anger at banks and Republicans, but more genuinely (and certainly more in keeping with Obama’s style), it should also focus on a comprehensive vision and how to make it real.  To borrow Obama’s own terminology, it needs more light than heat .

I should add that I’m not advising a “narrative-only” strategy, i.e. some visionary rhetoric that will inspire people but has no actual plan of action behind it. Brighter minds than I need to come up with that element.

I’ve been out of pocket from the political realm for a week and a half, but President Obama’s claim that a health insurance mandate is not a tax strikes me as marginally good politics and absolutely terrible lawyering.  I think Jason Kuznicki (also here) and by extension Will, are absolutely, 100% correct that an individual mandate is necessarily characterized as a tax, and a regressive one at that.  But that’s not the interesting thing to me here. 

Accepting for the moment that it is only debatable – rather than certain - whether an individual mandate is a tax, Obama’s attempts to characterize the mandate as something else are hardly a make-or-break argument for passage of health care reform.  Health care reform is not going to pass or fail to pass because people think the mandate should be characterized as a “tax” or merely as an attempt to get the uninsured to “take responsibility to get health insurance.”  The people affected, whether you characterize it as a tax or as something else, are going to be the same people; the people worried about being affected are going to be the same people; the costs that the mandate will impose on them will be the same.  People for the most part get this.  Sure, it may be mildly politically embarassing for Obama to sign a tax increase on a subset of the American middle class in contradiction of his campaign pledge, but if the resulting bill is as good as Obama wants voters to think, it’s tough to see him paying much of a price at the polls for it. 

But by claiming that the mandate is not a tax, Obama undermines the single strongest argument that the mandate is constitutional.  [Read more →]

Peter Feaver writing in the Shadow Gov’t blog does an e-squat and drops a steaming pile of foreign policy cow manure.  But it’s worth reading insofar as it gives us a sense of Republican talking points in preparation for President Obama’s upcoming (Tuesday) Afghanistan policy announcement.

The entire piece is framed around whether or not Obama is really taking on his role of Commander in Chief, which needless to say (alright, I’ll say it anyway) is pretty stupid stuff.  It only goes downhill from there.

Here are Feaver’s bullet points (bullet points!), which list signs that Obama really is becoming an honest-to-God Commander in Chief (As opposed to whatever he’s been so far in office? WTF?):

• His follow-through on messaging is sustained and vigorous (and matched by a similar on-message effort by the senior White House staff and cabinet-level officials).
• He reaches out to Republicans, thanking them for their commitment to the war effort and promising to work with them. (If he really wants to show self-confidence, he might even say some kind words about President Bush and his courage as a war-time leader, but it is perhaps unreasonable to expect such a transcendently classy gesture at this stage.)
• He and his team describe the Afghan effort as a war to be won.
• He and his team sketch a vision of “success” in terms of achievable objectives. Any discussion of an “exit strategy” is similarly framed in terms of mission success.
• He and his team describe the American (and allied) troops who are fighting as heroes who are fighting to defend our freedoms against malevolent enemies that really do seek to do us harm.
• He thanks our troops as well as our allies, including our Afghan allies, for the sacrifices they are making and he promises them that on his watch he will do everything necessary to see that those sacrifices will be redeemed by seeing the war through to a successful conclusion.
• He levels with the American people about the costly road ahead, but explains why alternatives would be even costlier

Notice how many of these are built around emotion and rhetoric.

Obama should thank the troops for their sacrifices–and he’s done this on many occasions.  Unfortunately, I think Feaver’s misplaced his right-wing talking points.  I thought the line was to criticize Obama for being photoed while saluting dead soldiers. Obama should also thank Republicans?  What? Why? He should describe our soldiers as “heroes”—um, when does he not do this?

Another neocon classic–defining the fight as a “war to be won.”   Right, because that’s undoubtedly the only thing standing between us and victory.  Not, I don’t know, 30 years of war in Afghanistan, its status as just about the poorest and most violent country on the planet, its black markets in weapons and drugs, a terrorist sanctuary in Pakistan, its corrupt government, drug lords, war lords, and one of the most treacherous terrains imaginable for fighting an insurgency.

Forget all that, we just need some straightforward “messaging.”

In short, there are basically two intelligent points in there.

#4 Sketch a vision in terms of achievable objectives and #8 Be honest about the cost and make a case why the cost is worth it. These are just fairly rational, obvious points in my book.  If you are sending troops into a battle zone, you need to say you have a plan and why the risk is worth it.  Basically, everything else can be deleted or is so obviously going to happen (Is Obama really going to avoid calling our troops heroes?!) as to be unnecessary.

Feaver then follows up with a list of indicators that Obama is not really serious about being Commander in Chief.  Don’t bother asking how Feaver can get inside Obama’s head  and divine his inner feelings.  As you can imagine, these points are basically the opposite of list 1:  e.g. he calls the soldiers victims instead of heroes.

[Read more →]

At the risk of ruffling the feathers of a few of my blogging comrades, I think that Kevin Drum is basically correct when he asks LGBT activists to chill out a little:

Still, even putting that aside, there’s a big segment of the gay community that’s pretty pissed off at Obama right now.  In one sense, I understand: they supported him, his record on gay issues is pretty modest so far, and the only way they’re going to get what they want is by keeping the pressure on him.

At the same time, some of the criticism is way over the top.  Obama doesn’t suddenly become a different person whenever he’s dealing with whatever your particular hot button issue is.  He’s the same guy all the time: cautious, tactical, organized, and prone to prioritizing things pretty carefully.  For better or worse, he’s also sensitive about learning lessons from the Clinton administration, and Clinton obviously failed miserably when he tried to force the Pentagon to accept gays early in his administration.

The gay community has every right to be a little miffed with Obama, and it’s good that they are channeling that frustration into activism.  Even if it takes a little while, sustained pressure will encourage the administration to pick up the pace, and direct more time and energy towards changing the status quo.

That said, I think it’s also important for activists to understand that Obama is on their side, even if he is slow-walking reform.  Jeremy Levine (who blogs at the outstanding Social Science Lite) criticized President Obama’s Friday address as “an empty speech, void of action, conviction, or credibility.”  I’ll agree that Obama’s speech was “void of action,” but to say that it lacked conviction or credibility is more than a little unfair.  In fact, I think it betrays a lack of perspective.  Say what you will about Obama’s speech, the fact that the President of the United States declared his unconditional support for gay rights is kind of a big deal.  In fact, it’s a huge deal, especially when you consider that we aren’t even a year removed from an administration that refined anti-gay hostility and elevated it to a national pastime.

President Bush, if you remember, supported a Federal Marriage Amendment to the Constitution, and was generally supportive of state-based efforts to strip gay Americans of their rights.  Indeed, stoking fear and hostility towards gay Americans was part of the Bush administration’s reelection effort.  I mean, to just sort of underscore the degree to which it was open season on gay Americans, the White House consistently opposed the extension of hate crimes legislation to gays, even as the country saw a sharp rise in the number of hate crimes targeted at gays.  Activists are well within their rights to criticize Obama’s speech as “just words,” but in doing so, they miss an important fact about presidential rhetoric: it makes a difference.  It further brings gay concerns into the mainstream and gives them a sense of urgency.

This is certainly not to say that the gay community should ignore the fact that Obama has yet to really move on gay rights, but on the whole, I that it’s far more productive to at least acknowledge that Barack Obama is an ally, and – slow-walking notwithstanding – is openly supportive of gay rights.  Tearing him down politically – as opposed to lobbying and pressuring – only makes his job that much harder.

Noam Levey and Janet Hook writing in the LaTimes today:

Reporting from Washington – Despite months of outward ambivalence about creating a government health insurance plan, the Obama White House has launched a behind-the-scenes campaign to get divided Senate Democrats to take up some version of the idea for a final vote in the coming weeks. President Obama has cited a preference for the so-called public option. But faced with intense criticism over the summer, he strategically expressed openness to health cooperatives and other ways to offer consumers potentially more affordable alternatives to private health plans.

In the last week, however, senior administration officials have been holding private meetings almost daily at the Capitol with senior Democratic staff to discuss ways to include a version of the public plan in the healthcare bill that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) plans to bring to the Senate floor this month, according to senior Democratic congressional aides.

It’s an informative article and worth the read, but it comes across as if this were some big inside scoop.  And it might be (sigh, sadly) given the state of pathetic television media but it shouldn’t be.  Here’s the proverbial random blogger writing in his sweatpants from the basement (note: I do live in a basement suite but my mom doesn’t live upstairs) on August 19th:

2. People are also forgetting (or don’t know I guess) what they should remember which is that Obama has clearly laid out what his plan is.  Again, given what small role he does have, he has a plan for how to maximize it.  Another excellent Ezra post on the subject.  The Team Obama plan is to push hard in conference committee for the kind of plan it wants.  It said so specifically:

Conference is where these differences will get ironed out. And that’s where my bottom lines will remain: Does this bill cover all Americans? Does it drive down costs both in the public sector and the private sector over the long term? Does it improve quality? Does it emphasize prevention and wellness? Does it have a serious package of insurance reforms so people aren’t losing health care over a preexisting condition? Does it have a serious public option in place? Those are the kind of benchmarks I’ll be using. But I’m not assuming either the House and Senate bills will match up perfectly with where I want to end up.

In other words this is basically (by the political timeline if not the news cycle timeline) on target.  Harry Reid is going to try to get a public option through committee. It then forces the wavering Democrats/centrists not just to vote no on a bill with a public option but to support a Republican filibuster.  That can’t be electorally smart.  I’ve always thought the Democrats get a bill through, I think they probably get some kind of trigger or modified public option.  But the real issue for them electorally is how to sell it as a real achievement towards economic revival going forward.

The realist  in me says that’s a tough sell given my sense that the US is in a long running deflationary cycle (h/t John Robb) and that there is no such thing as a “jobless recovery.”  A jobless recovery is just another moment of speculative bubble creation til the next one pops.  And then pops. And then pops some more.

The cynic in me says that even though it can’t really actually work doesn’t mean it can’t be sold politically.  Though it wouldn’t be easy.

So here’s Bill Maher doing this thing and directing it at Obama.  I think it’s good that Obama get some real criticism from his left, but still I just have to my roll my eyes on this one.

Particularly with the whole “this isn’t what I voted for” schpeel.  Bill Maher should have done his homework.  If he had read (like I did) both Obama’s autobiography but more importantly his political manifesto book Audacity of Hope, he would have known that Obama is a very cautious reformer.  Obama likes all sides to play things out in front of him, wait to the direction turns in his favor and then insert himself into the mix.  That’s his MO. Maher is pissed that Obama isn’t Edwards.  Well, I suppose he should have voted for Clinton in the primary (maybe he did?).

Maher also should have read David Leonhardt’s brilliant piece on Obama’s economic outlook prior to the election.  And/or Cass Sunstein’s piece calling Obama (correctly) a University of Chicago Democrat.  Having done so would have allowed one to predict almost to the T how Obama was going to react to the financial crisis–seeing it as a banking crisis and therefore requiring a bank bailout.

The US discussion of politics assumes so much in the way of dishonesty and falsehood from our politicians.  But if you actually read their writings, look at their (where applicable) legislative/executive histories, and read profiles of their personalities, the truth comes out in the wash.  Politicians–particularly through a grueling primary/general election campaign like we now have–reveal who they are.  They communicate how they will be for those with eyes to see and ears to hear.  e.g. McCain’s history–and certainly his campaign–clearly revealed that he was not much interested in day to day running of affairs and we could have expected four years of insane internicine sibling rivalry and dysfunctional behavior from his staff and administration.  Come on, VP Palin?

Same with Obama.

As a wise friend of mine says, when someone shows you who they are, believe it.

At the end of the day, I just don’t believe people really change all that much.  Not really fundamentally.  Politicians least of all.  They change their positions on things sure, but they don’t change really who they are and how they operate at a fundamental level.  Whether John Edwards was the 2004 Second Coming of Bill Clinton Centrist or the 2008 Neo-Left Wing Populist, he was still a raging narcissist.

Which means in the final analysis, Obama is never going to be the guy Bill Maher wants him to be.  I happen to think that’s a good thing, but either way that’s the reality.

But deeper than Maher’s disillusionment–for which I think he has pretty much no one to blame but his own naivete–is a more problematic element.  Namely the lack of any calling out Congress and putting everything on the President.  In this sense, at least Maher is honest–he doesn’t care about The Constitution or the rule of law or the separation of powers.  He wants a popular charismatic strongman who will push through the agenda Maher wants to see. [Read more →]

The always worth reading Charlie Savage had a really important piece in the NyTimes four days ago which in the midst of all the financial meltdown news slipped through the cracks.

Savage writes:

The Obama administration has told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team.

Obama got some pushback from ertswhile progressive allies, arguing that this decision was indeed very Bush-like.

To me, what this signals is further proof that A)Obama was telegraphing exactly what he would do as president during the campaign and B)a lot of folks weren’t listening closely enough.

What Obama made clear was that he rejected George Bush’s frame of the Global War on Terror (emphasis on Global) but he did accept a War on Terrorism frame.  Or perhaps better War on Terrorists.  A war specifically on al-Qaeda in Afghanistan/Pakistan and its allies The Taliban(s).

The actions Obama has taken to date are logical corollaries of that basic premise.

Re: Ending The Global War on Terror

1)Shutting down Gitmo, supporting the SCOTUS ruling that Gitmo prisoners have habeus corpus rights.

2)Ending the War in Iraq.
–Bush’s Fight them in a place of our choosing rather, except that the “them” wasn’t the same “them” as who actually planned and executed the 9/11 attacks.

3)Ending Torture and Extraordinary Rendition. (Emphasis on Extra-ordinary–potential keeping of “non-extraordinary rendition”).
–This practice also was largely a factor of the global framework of Bush’s presidency.

Re: Undertaking a War against al-Qaeda/Taliban

1)Sending 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan

2)Expanding missile strikes into Pakistan

3)This legal decision (for the time being at the least) concerning detainees at Bagram in Afghanistan.

Savage notes:

The Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration’s legal view for prisoners held at Guantánamo in landmark rulings in 2004 and 2006. But those rulings were based on the idea that the prison was on United States soil for constitutional purposes, based on the unique legal circumstances and history of the naval base.

So on one level this decision by the Obama Justice Dept. is seen as supporting the Bush-Cheney Regime which argued that prisoners were not American citizens and therefore not open to US courts.  But Obama has done so only insofar as it accords with his Af-Pak view of the war as opposed to Bush’s Global War.  [I'm not necessarily defending this argument, only saying there is a difference and I can imagine a legitimate argument being made for the Obama decision]. On the other hand, Bush & Crew also argued that they were not uniformed soldiers in an army, hence outside the bounds of the Geneva Conventions–a position Obama seems quite opposed to.  Arguing that prisoners at a prison in Afghanistan should not have access to the US court system is not the same as saying they do not rightfully have Geneva Convention rights (e.g. no torture).

i.e. The Third Article of the Geneva Convention states:

d) The passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.

Such a regularly constituted court affording guarantees recognized by civilized peoples need not be the US criminal court system.  I think the US criminal court system passes that particular bar, but I can certainly (and easily) imagine a military court (or perhaps the International Court) that could just as well qualify under those criteria.

For all the howls that Obama is now a Bush-lite, the real issue is that any president Bush, Obama, Republican or Democrat to come, is making these decisions, when in reality they are the proper province of the Legislative Branch.  This point was the central and I think substantially correct one of Benjamin Wittes’ recent book Law and the Long War.  While I’m not sure I agree with all of Wittes’ later recommendations about how exactly he would like to see the legal frame enacted by Congress, he is 100% correct that the legal questions surrounding this war are really the job of Congress.  What we have had to date concerning is that the President makes some decisions and then at certain points is rebuffed by the Supreme Court (e.g. Boumediene case).  But the Supreme Court can only say what The Executive has done is wrong and not really promote what should be done instead.  Which is exactly where The Legislative Branch comes in.

Otherwise the legal issues will, as we have seen with Bush and are seeing with Obama, be subordinated to The Executive’s Foreign Policy Paradigm.  Rather The Congress should bind any and all Executives to a legal framework with which The Executive will have to work relative to its own particular foreign policy outlooks.

David Leonhardt writing in the NyTimes:

But while Washington has been preoccupied with stimulus and bailouts, another, equally important issue has received far less attention — and the resolution of it is far more uncertain. What will happen once the paddles have been applied and the economy’s heart starts beating again? How should the new American economy be remade? Above all, how fast will it grow?

The rest of Leonhardt’s article goes through some of the next layer of Obama admin plans:  climate change (“green jobs”), health care reform as stimulus, as well as a revitalized education structure.

I have to say on all those fronts I’m less than optimistic that any of that will come to be the future, production-based, of an economy.  Assuming Leonhardt is correct that the stimulus will work (which actually I think at best it may stave off a kind of financial armageddeon), this is the central question.  All of which is a variation on Thomas Friedman’s (et. al) calls for a new domestic Marshall Plan.  Whether of a green economy, health care & education reform or all three combined.  Oh plus infrastructure spending.

As of today Iceland has gone bankrupt as a country.  Britain could well be next (h/t Automatic Earth).  I just wonder if we have reached the point where any top-down mechanisms will actually work?  Whether we are witnessing instead the death spiral of a series of our institutions simultaneously (a la Homer-Dixon’s Upside of Down).  As a student of history, I know that at certain crucical periods the old order simply dies in an often catastrophic and rather quick end.  e.g. Alexander the Great’s conquest and destruction of the previous ziggarut/ancient Near Eastern model of governance and cosmology, replaced with Hellenization and the spread of the polis.  Or the Industrial Era’s mass upheveal.  While there was talk for some of the rise of the post-industrial economy as a new stage in economic history co-arising with the Counterculture of the 60s and the dying of the centrist liberal post WWII order–and I don’t want to minimize the upheveal that period created (e.g. rise in crime, drugs, urban black holes in the West, decolonialization and revolutions in the Third World), I think we can’t compare that period to the mass upheveal of say the Industrial Era.

The question that lingers on my mind is whether we are really headed into that storm now or very soon anyway.  We often hear tales (some tall, some more accurate) about writings days before the fall of the Berlin Wall discussing the inevitable existence of the Soviet empire and communism.  And then, poof, it was pretty well gone.  The potential I think is coming for there to be a similar shift–where what will occur on the far side of the interim nonequilibrium dynamics, i.e. when a new equilibrium of some sort is established, will look radically different than what we have today.

I think there was a time for the sort of top-down led program of shifting to a new productive economy (or at least top-down aided if not led):  that period was the Bush presidency.  That period was clearly wasted.  And I wonder now if it is gone and Obama’s plans are far too little, far too late.

Update I (3 hrs later):  As a somewhat silly-actually not example of the thing I am talking about.  Talking to our children and grandchildren about how we lived through 2009, the year the newspaper (and much else died) will be an interesting discussion. Discussing with them newpapers will be like for me hearing about Model Ts or horse and buggy.  I’ve seen them (in a museum in the former case, on the road once in Amish country in the latter), but that is the kind of thing on a smaller technological-social scale.  [Although on second thought I guess newspapers aren't exactly a small deal].  How crazy will it be on a larger scale?