Inactive: POTUS
Entries by Rick Shenkman
Welcome to POTUS. This group blog is devoted to politics, history and presidents.
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Friday, April 3, 2009
Why aren't people in the streets of America protesting and raising hell?
Where's Mary E. Lease? She was the Populist hell-raiser who tore across the country in the late 19th century. Yet her kind is not to be seen these days.
In the pages of the NYT they are flummoxed by the quietness. Like Bob Dole, some are wondering, where's the outrage?
(See the NYT letter to the editor page, 4/3/098.)
A pundit on the Times's op ed page suggested the other day that the clue lies in the new technology that has divided us from one another, leaving us to suffer in silent isolation.
Others suggest that the Obama administration's acknowledgment of the crisis and its obvious attempts to address it has taken the sting out of the reaction.
Here's a different explanation, from David Kennedy:
Among those who were perplexed by the apparent submissiveness of the American people as the Depression descended was Franklin D. Roosevelt. “There had never been a time, the Civil War alone excepted,” an associate recollected Roosevelt saying during the 1932 presidential campaign, “When our institutions had been in such jeopardy. Repeatedly he spoke of this, saying that it was enormously puzzling to him that the ordeal of the past three years had been endured so peaceably.” That peculiar psychology, rooted in deep cultural attitudes of individualism and self-reliance, worked to block any thought of collective – i.e., political – response to the crisis. Understanding that elusive but essential American cultural characteristic goes a long way toward explaining the challenges that faced any leader seeking to broaden the powers of government to come to grips with the Depression.
Kennedy's explanation doesn't account for the occasional outbursts of domestic violence that one finds in even the most staid US history textbooks. But it nonetheless has a lot of merit.
Monday, March 23, 2009
The election of 2009
In 2008 the American people voted. In the coming weeks Wall Street will be voting.
Whether Obama wins this second election is anybody's guess. If he loses I shudder to think what might happen.
If the bank bailout plan v. 2.0 goes over well with the Wall Street voters Obama will be able to take a brief bow before moving on to other matters of great importance. If it doesn't? He will be consumed by economic issues for the rest of his presidency, achieving little.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Bipartisanship
Just a quick observation today. Bipartisanship WAS easier in the old days. Now that both parties are more ideologically unified it's harder for a president of one party to pick people off from the opposing party. On what basis can he do so? Sectionalism? On a few issues, perhaps, but that's all.
Back ton the old days? A Reagan could pick off conservative Democrats and claim therefore to have bipartisan support. But when the Dems are nearly all pretty liberal and the Repubs are pretty all nearly conservative, it's a lot harder to cross party lines.
Therefore Obama's approach is deeply flawed. There aren't members of the other party whom he can turn to for support out of ideological sympathy.
You want bipartisanshjip? Then restore the old party system. Put conservative Southerners back in the Democratic Party. Put Northeastern liberals back in the Republican Party.
Short of that, appeals to bipartisanship are doomed to fail (except in foreign affairs, where a national consensus may be possible on some critical issues).
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Obama's stealth victory
The Senate has passed a version of the Obama stimulus bill by a vote of 61 to 37. This should feel like a big victory. It doesn't because it was secured with the votes of just 3 Republicans and Obama had set bipartisanship as a high administration goal. Bob Herbert in the NYT said yesterday that Obama's a genius at politics. Maybe not so much.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Obama's missteps
I plan to give Obama 6 months before saying anything definitive about his handling of his responsibilities.
But it is already clear that he has adopted an approach that is baffling.
How is it possible that he is having trouble giving away hundreds of billions of dollars? This is usually easy to do. It takes no talent.
He shouldn't be using up any of his political capital to get his stimulus plan through Congress.
So what's up?
He has made 2 mistakes. 1. He has given the Republicans a chance to define him: Unless they cooperate he's a failure by his own post-partisan standards. 2. He hasn't been bold.
The country elected him to be different. The stimulus plan is boring. It's money for a thousand little programs no one can keep track of except an accountant.
How about one clear objective, say, building a transcontinental railroad system that is the envy of the world.
Or giving us national health insurance.
I know, I know. National health insurance is hard. It's almost impossible to create a plan quick enough to have any impact on the economy. Even FDR waited a few years before proposing Social Security. But when will he be in a better position? A year from now or two years from now?
We'll still be in hard times.
This isn't 1993 where he has to prove himself with a few victories as Clinton needed to do to establish his legitimacy.
Obama is the elected president.
He should hit one out of the park.
One more point. He needs to address those toxic securities that are like sand in the gears of the economy. Mark Zandi says it will cost a minimum of $500 billion to get them off the books of the banks. He should do it. Now. If he doesn't and dawdles with less robust efforts we'll still have to do this but it will a year from now when things have gotten far worse.
Do it now!
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
The Obama two-step
Obama's decision to pair Rick Warren, the anti-gay preacher, with Gene Robinson, the gay bishop, could be the script Obama has decided to follow in controversial matters.
It may explain why he's talking now about entitlement reform.
This would seem to be an untimely time to address shortfalls in social security. Haven't we enough on our plate already? Obama might be planning a grand bargain: marrying concessions to the right on social security reform to national health insurance.
Could be interesting!
Friday, January 9, 2009
This recession's purpose is ...
The last major recession, at the start of Reagan's term, had a purpose. It was contrived deliberately by Volcker and Reagan to wring inflation out of the economy. It may have been Reagan's single biggest domestic achievement.
What is this recession's purpose?
I don't yet have an answer.
It may be it has no purpose.
That makes enduring the hard times ... harder.
Anybody want to suggest a purpose?
Friday, August 22, 2008
Our Childish Debate About John McCain's Marriage to a Wealthy Woman
[Mr. Shenkman, the editor of HNN, is the author of Presidential Ambition: How the Presidents Gained Power, Kept Power & Got Things Done (HarperCollins). His latest book is Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter (Basic Books). ]
We are supposed to be shocked that John McCain has so many houses he can't remember off the top of his head how many he actually has. Please. People who run for president tend to be wealthy.
We are also supposed to be shocked that he may have married for money. This so contravenes our democratic sensibilities that we cannot admit to ourselves even in a quiet moment that marriage is about anything other than love. Get over it, folks. You and I may have married for love. Most presidents haven't.
George Washington, out searching for a wife, did not just happen to marry the richest woman in Virginia. James Buchanan did not just happen to go after the daughter of the richest man in Pennsylvania. Abraham Lincoln did not just happen to marry one of Springfield’s few aristocrats. James Garfield did not just happen to marry the daughter of the founder of the college where he was a teacher. William McKinley did not just happen to marry the daughter of the local newspaper publisher. Franklin Roosevelt did not just happen to marry Teddy Roosevelt’s niece. John Kennedy did not just happen to marry a beautiful aristocrat. Lyndon Johnson did not just happen to court the daughters of three of the richest men in his part of Texas. Things like this don’t just happen.
Fact: Most presidents married up––or married someone who could do their career some good.
Fact:: No presidents married beneath themselves. If, like Warren Harding and Franklin Roosevelt, they happened to fall in love with someone who was beneath them, these women were kept on the side as mistresses.
These are distressing facts for a democratic nation to have to confront. We prefer to think that our presidents emerged from a log cabin in their youth, scrambled up the greasy pole of life all on their own, and then rose to stunning heights of power through the strength of their character. It's a lovely story, one that we can convince ourselves is true because we lack a history of hereditary kings, about whose ascendance there cannot be a smidgen of sentimental democratic posh. If only it were true.
So John Kerry married a Heinz, and John McCain wed a beer heiress. So what? If a disqualification for the presidency is to be social ambitiousness we shall have to rewrite history. If in our more democratic age we insist that from this day henceforth we shall only consider as potential leaders those who married for love we shall soon run out of candidates.
It's all so much nonsense. Do we think that people running for president are like the stars we see on the cover of Teen Magazine who confess that their one true desire is to find a soul mate, whether this person be rich or poor, pretty or ugly? These are childish illusions. And the sooner we part with them the better.
We care of course about their marriages because we are human beings and cannot help measuring presidents by the same yardstick with which we measure ourselves. This is a mistake. They are not like you and me, in the main. No normal person would put themselves through what presidents have to. Ambition defines them in a way we can hardly fathom.
We do not want to believe they marry for money or position because we retain the republican's simple faith that power should be thrust on leaders by a willing public and never be sought after. This too is an appealing story to a democratic people. It is also hogwash. I know of no president who won a place in society without making the most careful of calculations.
I find myself amused by the debate therefore about McCain's houses and his wife's wealth. It would seem that we are still so wedded to the myths of American democracy that we cannot imagine for a moment the calculations that go into a successful rise to the top. What McCain's marriage to Cindy says about him, I'm not sure; maybe he married for love, maybe he married for wealth, who knows? Maybe he himself isn't sure. But what our reaction to his marriage says about us is all too clear.
Friday, July 25, 2008
Ok--Turns out Obama HAS been to Europe before
A long time ago I cited a blog by Steve Clemons (New America Foundation) indicating that it was very possible that Obama had never visited the European continent. Clemons said he had asked the Obama campaign for a response and never got one.
I never saw Clemons's subsequent blog in which he reported that Obama had indeed visited Europe as a young man. But I just came across it. Here.
At the time I posted my blog entry on the subject I was assured by Obama supporters that it didn't matter if Obama had visited Europe or not. I thought this was an untenable position. I still do.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Superdelegates don't have enough power
The complaint that the superdelegates have too much power is backwards. They don't have enough power. They should be insisting that Al Gore be made the nominee and Obama the veep. I'm convinced that would be the strongest ticket Democrats could present to the country. I suspect Gore/Obama would win in a landslide. But in our democratic age party bosses (ie: superdelegates) don't rule. So the Dems will squabble and dither and possibly lose.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Question for fans of campaign finance reform
Obama outspent Clinton by 3 to 1 in PA but lost. We should be celebrating, right? Once again money failed to prove decisive! Yeah! But few campaign finance reformers are cheering. Why? Because Obama raised his money the new fashioned way: through the Internet. This raises lots of questions, which I don't have time to go into just now. But we can see from PA how the Internet has changed the old parameters of CFR debate.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Hillary's negative ads
Ok, the latest Clinton ad, the one featuring Osama bin Laden, plays on people's fears, no question about that. When Bush used a bin Laden ad I was furious at his politicization of bin Laden. And I suppose I should be upset with Hillary's use of bin Laden. Were I more objective I would be.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
The Debate
I am watching the debate as I am writing this. Obama was just asked by a voter in PA why he's not wearing an American flag pin.
Obama said in response that the issue is a distraction. Good! But he can't go further and say the truth even though he claims to speak the truth.
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
McCain's stumbles
This is from Juan Cole. I think it's worth drawing attention to.
Thursday, April 3, 2008
The new politics?
Consultants told him Americans might say in focus groups that they want a clean campaign but what they remember are negative ads. No, he answered, what Americans want is unity and idealism. Sick and tired of gridlock, they yearn deeply for someone to adopt a new politics that's a decisive break with the past.
Obama?
Saturday, March 22, 2008
An advantage thrown away
If being black was ever an advantage to Obama in this election--as I have argued it was--it no longer is.
He's opened Pandora's Box with the Pastor Wright controversy. Rather than transcending race, he's now embodying race, in all its complicated meanings in America.
This is too bad for him and for us.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Obama's speech
It's been a long time since I heard a speech by a presidential candidate which was intellectually coherent. It was still a speech. No professor would be caught dead delivering Obama's remarks as a lecture in a classroom. And because it was a speech it wasn't entirely analytical. But it was analytical enough to justify the encomiums it has received in the last eight hours.
One wishes other candidates spoke like this. One remembers a time when presidents did.
Having said that, I remain unconvinced that Obama has either solved the political problem created in the last few days by the videos of his "former pastor," as he carefully put it, or persuaded those who are worried about the friends he keeps.
First: Angry white males, who deserted the Democratic Party 5 decades ago, will not now be inclined to come running back. Obama's aside to their concerns--his sympathy for the struggles workers and immigrants face--was too brief to assuage them.
Second: He did not convincingly explain (to me, at any rate) why he didn't leave the church and find another after he heard his pastor celebrating Farakhan and damning the United States. I remain troubled by this decision. It shows either a tin political ear (an astute pol with national ambitions would have distanced himself from Wright before running for president as LBJ distanced himself in the fifties from Southern racists) or a wily politician's assessment that he needed the church to bolster his black bona fides in the initial stages of his campaign when many blacks were questioning his blackness.
Maybe I have trouble with Obama because as a Jew I am sensitive to anti-Semitism and suspicious of people who hang out with people who hang-out with anti-Semites (Farakhan and Wright even travelled to Libya together on a peace trip in the 1980s). But if I remain troubled by Obama's choice of pastors, I'll bet others will as well.
If Obama can remain high in the polls despite this past week's events--and it will take a couple of weeks for the news to sink in before we can tell--he has a chance to get himself elected president. But it won't be easy, even given the favorable political signs. America may simply not be ready for a black president whose pastor denounced America and said we had it coming on 9-11.
Friday, March 14, 2008
If Obama were a saint ...
After I finished speaking at Everett Community College yesterday a student challenged my generalization that politicians use myths to trigger emotional responses from voters. "But some politicians are idealistic," she said. "Yes, some are," I answered. But she was obviously distressed by my response.
It's only a guess, but I would bet she's an Obama supporter. She wants to believe the best about her candidate and wants to believe he's different.
But why would he be different? Doesn't he have to deal with the same system all other pols do? Doesn't he have to face the reality of voters who are often too ignorant or too distracted to pay attention to politics, which in turn leads them to play on myths?
Sunday, March 9, 2008
What does it say that in our system Obama is favored because he doesn't have a record?
In a rational system the more experience a politician had the more likely it would be that his colleagues and party leaders would think of him as presidential material.
But not in our system.
As Tom Daschle, an Obama supporter, told the NYT, he advised Obama in 2007 to run for president now rather than later because he did not have the weight of a long record hanging around his neck. "For somebody to come in with none of that history is a real advantage,” Daschle said. “I told him that he has a window to do this. He should never count on that window staying open.”
I do not want to belabor the obvious, but there's something wrong with a system which rewards being green.
It may be that Daschle was speaking specifically about US senators. Few senators have ever been elected president; in the last century there have been just two who were elected straight from the Senate: Harding and JFK. In part this is because long records in the Senate do indeed work against candidates for the presidency. The longer a senator has served, the more enemies he is likely to have made.
But we should all wonder about a system that encourages an individual with little experience to run for president.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Obama and Hillary on the same ticket?
UPDATED
A month back I suggested that a Hillary/Obama ticket might be inevitable. Crazy, sure? The first woman AND the first black on a national ticket by a major party? But crazier would be alienating Obama's supporters.
Now Hillary is suggesting she would be open to such a ticket (with her at the top, of course).
Could they win?
For the moment, let's frame a winning campaign based on their appeal. Obama would bring in blacks and young voters and -- surprise -- white males. White males because Obama lets them off the hook, as Shelby Steele explains in The Bound Man. Although Steele argues that Obama ultimately would drive whites away once they understand that beneath the candidate's outward calm there lies an angry black man, his main argument, with which I find myself in agreement, is that Obama appeals to whites because he strikes a bargain with them that they find irresistible. In exchange for their support he gives them absolution for the sins of slavery and racism.
If Steele is correct about this part of his analysis, this is a critical development. Democrats have been stigmatizing white men as racists for decades, one of the reasons the Dems have been on a losing streak for 40 years. As David Kuhn shows in The Neglected Voter, Dems haven't won a majority of the white male voter but once since 1944 (that was in 1964 when a turtle would have won against Goldwater). They would undoubtedly find the Democratic Party a lot more welcoming if they felt that they weren't being given the Archie Bunker treatment.
And Hillary? Who does she help bring to the party? Women, of course. And, curiously, white men (again! hurray!). This is counterintuitive. How can the first woman candidate draw in white male support? She can do it simply by using her candidacy as a celebration of white male broadmindedness. Rather than use her candidacy as a rebuke to men, it could be used as a celebration of men as well as women. She hasn't yet succeeded in selling this idea but it undoubtedly would be part of a fall campaign.
If I am right about the possibility of Obama and Hillary's appeal to white men we could have a landslide and one that changes the dynamic of American politics for a generation (I love that cliche!).
Might things go awry? Sure. But the chance that both could appeal to white men on liberal Democratic terms (that is, without pandering on issues like gun rights and all the rest), is one we should pursue.
Rather than the current rivalry between Obama and Hillary being viewed as a recipe for failure in November, it could result in a splendid success.
A person can dream, right?
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
The lesson of the Civil Rights Movement was ...
... that you can appeal to the conscience of America.
... that you have to mobilize activists by high-minded appeals to a cause.
... that you have to fight like hell for your rights because people in power do not make concessions just because you ask for them politely.
... that a leader can inspire people to action.
... that it helps immensely to have an arch-enemy (like Bull Connor).
My answer is: All of the above.
Is this history relevant? I think it is. Obama comes across like a Civil Rights Movement leader. His rhetoric inspires people the way Dr. King did. But he seems to be selective in his reading of the movement's lessons. He seems to believe that appeals to reason are ALL that is necessary.
IN today's NYT David Brooks argues that Obama has created a New Politics by demonstrating that when you change peoples' views at the grass roots the system changes. If this is what the New Politics is about I am afraid it will fail.
The Civil Rights Movement demonstrated that change also requires a good old fashioned enemy who can be easily ridiculed, hard-ball tactics, and the willingness to exert pressure on the weak points of the people in power who are blocking change.
Politics is not a tea party.
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Obama Kool-Aid: Drink Slowly
What if it turns out that Barack Obama is merely a man?
Not even Reagan, with whom Obama is now being compared, claimed to be above politics. So when he ducked controversies or was caught playing politics -- raising taxes, making peace overtures to the evil empire, and running up huge deficits -- he could shrug off the charge of hypocrisy. What mattered was that his supporters believed in their hearts he hadn't abandoned "the cause."
Obama's set himself a higher challenge. His cause is anti-politics. So he can't be caught playing politics. This is a difficult situation for a politician to find himself in. For at times he will of course have to play politics.
We have evidence at hand that he knows how to play the game as well as anybody. According to a report in the Houston Press, excerpted on our Breaking News page, he took credit for the legislative achievements of others in the state legislature of Illinois (including his signature bill requiring the taping of jailhouse confessions) in order to advance his state profile and make a run for the US Senate. His helpmate in the enterprise was the state senate president, Emil Jones, who bragged that he was going to make a US Senator! In return for Jones's support, Obama delivered millions in earmarks to Jones's district.
Me--I'm not upset by this in the least. This is politics baby. But it is inconsistent with Obama's rhetoric and it suggests his supporters are in for a shock. Their wunderkind is a politician after all.
(I am upset with the highflown rhetoric he employs. Get down off your high horse, Barack. You are a politician. Admit it!)
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
The Obama Mystery
I too have been impressed with Obama.
I too think he's a gifted writer.
I too share his social justice agenda.
But here's what's nagging me.
It seems that Obama has never visited Western Europe while a US senator, excepting a single one-day visit to London.
Worse, it may be that Obama has never visited Western Europe. Please somebody correct me if I'm wrong about this. But this seems to be the implication of the articles I have read here and here.
If this is true -- and I emphasize IF -- we should all be worried if he should become president. It means something that a man in his position with his opportunities failed to visit Western Europe. I don't know what it means, but it means something.
Is there another Harvard Law School grad who hasn't visited Western Europe?
For him not to have gone he would have had to go out of his way. He would have to have declined friends' requests to join him on a trip to Europe. He would have to have ignored the stories of friends who visited Paris and Berlin and Rome. He would have to have said to himself that he had nothing to learn from going to Western Europe.
Should he be elected president we will find out what his decision not to visit Western Europe means. I fear what we will find out.
But maybe he did visit Western Europe. I hope and pray he did. Nobody should become president of the United States in this day and age who hasn't. Not since Calvin Coolidge have we had a president who hadn't gone to the continent of Western Europe by the time he arrived in the White House. (Bush went to London; I do not know if he ever got to the continent.) Coolidge had an excuse; the jet plane hadn't yet been invented. What would Obama's excuse be?
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Keeping Score
First, we had David Brooks in the NYT raving about Obama. Now this week we have Dick Morris and the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes. I half expect to hear President Bush joining the chorus.
Is all this part of a grand conspiracy, a set up, or are these Republicans actually impressed with Obama?
I assume the feelings of respect are genuine. But something's up. Come November will these same folks still be singing Obama's praises? Me thinks not.
By November I doubt that Stephen Hayes will be seeing a lot of Ronald Reagan in Barack Obama.
But before the moment passes, let's be sure to pause and take notice. This is an extraordinary development.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Who's the man from Hope this year?
Look back at the Man from Hope video of 1992 and you see in an instant why Bill Clinton was so compelling a candidate. He was sunny and articulate and came with a mythical story of rags to riches. Americans find all that irresistible.
And this year?
It's not Hillary who offers hope, it's Obama.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
We've been here before
Of course, Hillary's a hard sell. This is 1976 all over again. As in '76 the country is tired of scandals, fed up with the Republicans, and anxious about the future. So naturally we want another smiling presidential candidate to offer us hope. Obama, like Carter before him, soothes our pain and offers a way forward. Hillary doesn't.
She is fighting the wrong war. She thinks she's in a battle with Obama. Her emphasis is therefore on experience, which she has and he doesn't. But the real war is with Bush. Obama, the candidate of hope, is running against Bush while she's running against Obama. Naturally, he's gaining ground.
What people yearn for desperately right now is what Obama's offering. Hillary, if you want to be president, drop the experience argument and give us hope. Otherwise, you face a rout.
You can't fight the zeitgeist.
Friday, February 15, 2008
If Obama makes it ...
How Obama gets to the presidency is one of the critical questions we should be thinking about. For how he wins will shape his presidency and our politics.
He could come to power in one of three ways.
1. Like Reagan, he wins in a landslide and is able to use it to enact a series of path-breaking reforms.
2. LIke JFK, he wins in a squeaker, but because he's so personally popular and charismatic he quickly gains the overwhelming support of the country. (By the time JFK took office his approval ratings were in the 70s, even though he barely won the election.) Assuming he brings in a big Democratic majority in Congress (which seems likelier and likelier no matter who the Democratic nominee is), he can pursue a big reform agenda as if he had won in a landslide.
3. Like Bill Clinton, he wins in a squeaker, but his victory is regarded as a partisan triumph only. Republicans are so angry about losing the presidency they refuse to give him their support and try to sabotage him every step of the way.
I have no idea which of these three scenarios is likeliest. But it's worth acknowledging that his charisma is an enormous political asset. Presidents with charisma have to make fewer compromises to get things done.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
This is straight talk
Both Obama and McCain fashion themselves straight talkers. Neither actually dares to say what people don't want to hear.
This, from Lincoln's 2nd inaugural, is straight talk.
The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
As in a marriage, so in a democracy: communication is vital. The challenge is to communicate what we need to hear not what we want to hear.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Who's starting the civil war in the Democratic Party?
Frank Rich warns in the NYT that the Democrats may be about to repeat 1968. A war is upon us, he claims, that could split the party wide open.
This is nonsense and Mr. Rich surely knows it. Democrats are united in their anger at the Republicans and no internecine fight between Hillary and Barack is about to stop most in the party from rallying in the fall behind the nominee no matter whose name is on the ballot.
But if there is a danger it comes not from Hillary's side of the party but from Barack's.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
The Next Obama
Before the Super Tuesday results pour in it might do well to pause and reflect on the Edwards campaign. I think that in his failure we can see a lot that's wrong with American politics.
I don't mean that Edwards should have been the nominee. He had serious flaws as a potential president, not least of which was his lack of experience in a high-pressure executive job. But why did he fail this time around? Why did he do worse in '08 than in '04?
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Why Hillary may have to take Obama as veep
I admit to changing my mind on occasion. Now is one of those times.
It may be that Obama becomes so popular--even if he doesn't take the nomination--that Hillary Clinton will have to take him as veep.
I have been saying for months that it would be crazy for the Dems to go with a double-precedent: the first woman AND the first black on a presidential ticket--but it may prove crazy NOT to do so.
If Obama isn't on the ticket there will be a lot of disappointed Dems: liberals infatuated with Obama and blacks. That is, two of the three main pillars of the Democratic Party (the third is labor, of course). They won't vote Republican come November but they just might sit out the election.
That could be a disaster for the Democrats. Even though this year Dems are certainly favored, McCain would be a formidable opponent.
Would it be good for the country if Obama was veep? It would! He needs the kind of experience the vice presidency could offer (assuming that Hillary would give her veep the same kind of responsibilities that Bill gave his veep).
I'd be thrilled to have both on the same ticket. But I'm not the audience. The American people are. Just how much change do people really want?
We'd find out in November if the Dems nominated H&B.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Why Dick Morris is worth listening to
If you don't watch Fox News or read the NY Post you probably never encounter Dick Morris these days.
Too bad.
He's a treasure house of information about politics and a world expert on the Clintons.
Of course, you have to discount the bile, of which there are mountains. But that takes little effort.
What prompts this encomium?
His latest column in the NY Post explains why Bill Clinton has been deliberately drawing fire.
Read it. Click here.
Related Links
Some question Clinton's role as ex-president who's involved in politics
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Please!
Nicholas Kristof is back from writing a book with a column in the NYT that suggests he should have remained on leave awhile longer.
His aim in the piece is to attack the claim that experience is important in a president. Fine: let's revisit the issue. But the column contributes zero to the debate.
First, he takes refuge in the hoary Lincoln analogy: "He had the gall to run for president even though he had served a single undistinguished term in the House of Representatives, before being hounded back to his district."
As I have pointed out on other occasions, Lincoln was sui generis. Unless you are confident your candidate is another Lincoln, it's best not to invoke the Lincoln analogy. It's the refuge of the desperate to draw parallels with the only president who had all of one-year's formal schooling. By the logic of the Lincoln Analogizers, we should be ready and willing to elect as president somebody who suffered from the same lack of schooling as Lincoln. I don't think we are quite ready for that, however.
Moreover, the presidency is a far more complicated office today than it was in Lincoln's time. Lincoln himself would find it difficult to run the government given his inexperience at a national level and in international affairs.
Worse than his analogy with Lincoln is Kristof's classic straw man attack. If experience is the criterion we must apply, then John McCain deserves to be president, he argues. Of course, no one is making this argument. No one is saying experience alone is what one should take into account when deciding who should be our next president. It is one of many factors.
I am puzzled why so many people seem reluctant or unable to discuss in the abstract the qualities we should want in a president. They seem basic enough to me: executive experience, good judgment, a finely-tuned political ear, party loyalty, a knowledge of the world outside the US, an ability to digest complicated matters and to listen to a wide spectrum of views, a high emotional IQ, a gift for communication, good character, and, most important of all, a commitment to the basic values the voter shares (on civil rights issues, for instance, income equality, etc).
We cannot conjure candidates out of thin air. We have to deal with those who volunteer for this most grueling of challenges. But we ought to be able to hold an adult conversation on the subject. Mr. Kristof as a New York Times columnist should be helping us have this conversation. Instead, he gave us a rant. Welcome back NK. Please do better next time out.
Friday, January 18, 2008
Anything new happenin' ?
Let's see. Since I last blogged: Huckabee and Obama won Iowa, McCain and Clinton won NH, Romney won Michigan.
What have we learned from this series of inconclusive social events otherwise known as elections?
1. Pollsters can't be trusted.
2. This is an exciting election year.
3. President Bush has become irrelevant.
4. Romney will say anything to become president.
5. Huckabee plays the guitar and is witty, but doesn't know much about foreign affairs or the Constitution (he thinks the Supreme Court should decide if a person born in the US is a citizen; as Stanley Kutler
points out, the Constitution has already decided this issue in the affirmative.)
6. McCain is old but still combative--and many people like him even if they disagree with him.
7. Hillary can weep in public--and people like it.
8. Obama gives a good speech whether he wins or loses --though he smiles less when he loses.
9. America's mayor will not become America's president.
10. This is no way to pick a president.
The Founding Fathers would be appalled at the process we have devised. Even if they could get over the fact that we allow women and minorities to vote they would have spluttered in rage at finding that our current system rewards candidates who tear up, tell jokes, run TV commercials, collect millions in campaign donations, and poll the voters to find out what they want to hear.
We should be appalled too.
If this is democracy, we might want to rethink the whole thing.
Monday, December 31, 2007
Huckabee's star
Watching Huckabee on Meet the Press this week was eye opening. He's a star. Love him or hate him, the man can talk. The quote of the week was an Arkansas pol cited in the NYT who said that Huckabee has the ability to pick up a rock and talk about it for ten minutes. From what I saw this was no exaggeration.
Tim Russert tried hard but failed to knock Huckabee off his stride. Russert showed that Huckabee's immigration policy is wholly incoherent. A few years ago the former governor conceded we can't throw all undocumented workers out of the country without severely damaging the economy. But his immigration policy announced a few weeks ago envisions requiring them to leave the country in 120 days (that's all 15 million of them!) before they can apply to be readmitted. But Huckabee succeeded in brushing off Russert's attack, burying the TV host in a flurry of generalizations.
The last pol I saw who was as agile on his feet was a fellow from Arkansas who came from a town called Hope.
Here's the relevant transcript excerpt. Decide for yourself. As you follow along watch carefully how Huckabee's rhetoric is designed to appeal to both liberals and conservatives:
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Is Obama our Grover Cleveland?
I can think of only one person who shot to the presidency with less experience than Obama: Grover Cleveland, who in 3 years skyrocketed from mayor of Buffalo to governor of NY to president. But that was at a time when the country wasn't nearly as complicated a place as it is now. Today a Cleveland, lacking foreign policy credentials, couldn't get close to the White House. (At least I would hope that's the case.)
Is Obama our Grover Cleveland? America turned to Cleveland because he was fresh and people were desperate for a candidate who wasn't soiled by a corrupt system. That has a familiar ring to it.
Friday, December 14, 2007
The myth of our uniquely negative campaigns: Video tells all (or does it?)
Below is a video I found posted on the interesting political science blog, Monkeycage. In light of events of the last few days--Huckabee's saying Mormons believe Jesus is the devil's brother and Hillary's NH co-chair suggesting Obama was a cocaine dealer--the timining seemed propitious.
The video suggests that negative campaigns were every bit as nasty in 1800 as in our era.
That may be true, but leaves a false impression. As Thomas Patterson points out in The Vanishing Voter, the ubiquity of negative TV ads and overall TV coverage of news makes political attacks today inescapable. There was nothing comparable in impact 200 years ago.
Still, the video's fun and it suggests that our politics grew out of the past, which is always a good point to make.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
What if we had acted more like a colonial power in Iraq?
I'll make this short since I admit at the outset not having thought this through.
What I have here is a germ of an idea, nothing more.
But here goes.
Is it possible that we would have been better off in Iraq if we had simply acted the part of a colonial power?
This thought came to me as I was reading Jay Winik's fine book, The Great Upheaval. Winik says that when Catherine the Great made war on the Turks she carefully instructed her officers to respect the prejudices of the people. Winik doesn't spell out what prejudices she had in mind. But it's not too hard to guess that one of hem might have been their preference for their own religion and the right to practice it as they always had. Not only did she not try to convert them, she actually gave money to the support of the mosques.
I dare say we would probably be in a better position today had we followed a similar approach in Iraq. But that of course would have meant giving up on the idea of an American-style democracy, something Jerry Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, was loathe to do. (He was adamant that the Iraqi constitution include an American wall between church and state.)
I suppose Niall Ferguson may say something along these lines in his books in which he argues in favor of an American empire. Note to self: I really need to read his books.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Obama and race
We keep saying Obama's being black is a major impediment to his candidacy. This has the logic of obviousness. We've never elected a black man president. Are we ready to now?
But maybe we're asking the wrong question. A better question, I think, is this:
Would Barack Obama be plausible as a candidate for the presidency at this stage in his career if he weren't black?
I doubt it.
What other senator with as little experience in national politics has ever run for the office after just 2 years in the Senate? Even John Edwards (elected 1998) had more experience under his belt when he first ran for president in 2004--and he was making a run for the White House earlier in his career than any other candidate in modern history except for Estes Kefauver. (Elected in 1948 from Tennessee, Kefauver ran for president in 1952 after winning acclaim for his nationally televised crime hearings.)
Obama's blackness, far from being a liability, is an asset. He has exploited it to gain a prominence he otherwise couldn't hope to achieve as quickly.
In his non-threatening manner--which he augments at every turn by emphasizing his reasonableness (he's the anti-Jesse Jackson)--he is everything white America would want in a BLACK president.
But is it what we should want in a president? Don't presidents have to be unreasonable at times? Politics isn't rational. It's more like a hockey game where defiance and hard sticks count for as much as talent and luck.
Obama could grow in office. After all FDR did. Roosevelt in 1932 had tried to be all things to all people, and by 1936 he was wailing that the rich hated him and "I welcome their hatred." But Obama is trapped by the myth of his own making. He's not a snarling pit bull like, say, Al Sharpton. That's what makes him plausible as a candidate. And were he to change in office into a harder-edged politician white America would likely respond negatively.
Having elected a nice black man, they wouldn't know what to make of a tough version.
No white man of course has to worry about this kind of reinvention. We expect our (white) leaders to be tough. But a black man does. It could reinforce all the negative stereotypes Obama has so successfully evaded until now.
In a way he's got the woman's problem Hillary faces--in reverse. She has had to prove in life that she's tough even though she's a woman. He's had to prove that he's soft. Both are battling stereotypes.
But Hillary has it easier. She can pivot and soften her image without penalty. He can't harden his image ever
without worrying that millions will resent him the way they resent Jesse Jackson.
Related Links
David Greenberg: Article in Dissent on the books presidential candidates have published, with a nice take on Obama's two books.
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Are Obama and Hillary too Ambitious?
A spat has broken out between the Obama and Clinton camps as to which candidate is the most ambitious. Obama says she is because since she was a child she has been scheming to be president. Hillary says he is and has a note from his kindergarten teacher proving it. (The teacher says Obama confessed when he was five years old that he wanted to be president.)
Am I the only one who thinks this is like two criminals on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List each claiming they're innocent, but that other guy, well ... he's bad, really really bad.
If there were a Nobel Prize in ambitiousness these two should share it.
Obama has apparently been actively conniving for the presidency from the moment he was elected to the US Senate in 2004. And he thought about running, if the Clinton campaign's opposition research can be believed, back in 1992 or maybe even 1988. (Did he or didn't he tell his friends it was his secret desire to be president? It's not exactly as spicy as Watergate's Big Question, "What did the president know and when did he know it?" but for now it's all we've got.)
And for a fellow who announced he's running for president after serving just two years in the Senate, he's in no position to be accusing anybody else of ambitiousness.
Hillary was probably bitten by the presidential bug sometime back in the last century when she had long straggly hair and still wore big ugly glasses.
Does it matter if they are ambitious?
History suggests we should fear the ambitious person. We don't want a Napoleon running for president. But at the same time--this is the little truth we seldom admit--all the presidents were ambitious and most were more ambitious than we'd like to think. Even Abraham Lincoln was too ambitious. Desperate for political success when he ran for Congress, he neglected to tell his constituents he opposed the Mexican War that most of them supported. When upon taking his seat he began to denounce the war the voters back home were stunned. Later, as president, he declined to place General Grant in charge of the army until after he had received assurances Grant wouldn't use his success at Vicksburg to challenge Lincoln in the election of 1864. No wonder Lincoln's law partner said of him: “His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.”
How much ambition is too much ambition? Presidents obviously need a measure of it in order to succeed. Every generation there aren't just one or two people who wish to be president--dozens do. Unless we are ready to scrap our democracy and go to a monarchy in which the top office holder inherits the job, we shall have to put up with the fact that necessity requires the winner to compete for power and that requires vast ambition.
Moreover, I am not sure we'd want anybody in the office who isn't ambitious. Ambition is essential to getting things done.
But before we can say how much ambition a person has we have to be able to define ambition. The easiest way to do so is to measure the sacrifices presidents are willing to make to obtain power and keep it.
Are they willing to sacrifice their families? Their health? Their principles? Their friends? The People's interests in order to accommodate special interests?
If the answer is yes to all of these questions you are entitled to conclude only that they are willing to do what just about every president has done with the exception of George Washington, who was given the office. As Lincoln said, “No man knows, when that presidential grub gets gnawing at him, just how deep it will get until he has tried it.”
We have inherited from the Founding Fathers a deep suspicion of ambitiousness. This is healthy for a democratic society. What we need to remember is what the Founders figured out. We cannot banish ambitiousness so we must marry it to the public's purposes.
How?
The Founder's solution was to convince the politicians in their day that the highest honor was to help in the creation of a commonwealth. (See Douglass Adair, Fame and the Faming Fathers.) In the pursuit of this distinguished honor (fame) the Founders would help themselves by helping the community at large.
We have long since stopped worrying about creating a republic. We have one (more or less). The question we face then is deciding how we can inspire our pols in a new way to do the public's bidding rather than merely their own.
Friday, November 30, 2007
Iraqi Sunni myths
Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City, which I am only now getting around to read, provides a splendid worm's eye view of the mess in Iraq as it unfolded under Jerry Bremer. It's must reading.
One of his observations deserves wide dissemination. Taking issue with John Agresto, the St. Johns academic brought in to reform Iraq's university system, Chandrasekaran says it wasn't a mistake for the Coalition Provisional Authority to provide quotas for Sunnis, Shiia and Kurds in the government. It was a recognition of reality. Much as we would have liked to build a nonsectarian government we couldn't.
Agresto believed that we could. He argued that before the war Iraqis didn't identify themselves by their ethnic background. Chandrasekaran says this is a myth created by Sunnis. Sunnis pretended that all Iraqis were equal in order to disguise the fact that a minority--Sunnis--was actually running the country. Meanwhile Shiia and Kurds went along with the myth to avoid incurring Saddam's wrath--and to get ahead. Only Shiia and Kurds who publicly embraced the myth could hope to land a job in the government (the biggest employer of Iraqis). Those who dissented faced discrimination or worse: imprisonment or death.
Once the CPA took over the natural tensions among the three groups surfaced. This was one of the awful prices of freedom.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Should we be alarmed by the new immigration stats?
Buried in this morning's NYT story about immigration -- "Immigration over the past seven years was the highest for any seven-year period in American history, bringing 10.3 million new immigrants" -- is a statistic that needs context.
The Times reports that 31 percent of both legal and illegal immigrants over the age of 25 have not graduated from high school.
Sounds alarming.
But to put this into perspective: In 1940, according to the US Census, 6 in 10 Americans had not gone past the eighth grade.
In other words, our era of highly educated Americans is an anomaly. We should not allow ourselves to think that our prevailing standards of education are either commonplace or essential to democracy. Simply because somebody is uneducated doesn't mean that they are 1. incapable of participating in a democracy, or 2. are a burden on society.
Obviously, I am not trying to minimize the disadvantages of low education levels. Our society needs more educational opportunities not fewer. In the 21st century education is more vital than ever. But we need not fear a population that is more schooled than most Americans were in 1940.
There are two reasons for thinking that education is vital to the prosperity of the United States: 1. People with more schooling are better equipped to deal with a 21st century economy. 2. People who are better educated are less likely to fall for demagogic appeals by politicians.
But we shouldn't overestimate the benefits of education. Studies show that schooling alone does not seem to make people into better citizens. If anything, better educated Americans today are less knowledgeable than Americans two generations ago about how our political system works and who's in charge. I won't go into it here, but there is a complicated explanation for this, having to do with the development of television and the increasing isolation of Americans from political parties.
A century ago when we witnessed the first great wave of immigration to the United States we worried about the challenge of turning immigrants into "good Americans." All sorts of schemes were concocted to achieve this goal including building parks in cities so that immigrants could supposedly absorb the lessons of rural life (I am not kidding). Today's debate about immigration seems wholly lacking in this dimension. No one talks about what we need to do to help acculturate immigrants. It's assumed that they will just become more and more like the rest of us over time.
Maybe that's what should give us pause.
Monday, November 26, 2007
What's wrong with political coverage by NYT ...case in point
I return from my month off from blogging with an angry post. It's because of this story in the NYT Week in Review: "Most Experience or Enough Experience?"
The article, by Patrick Healy, argues that the question the voters face is not whether Obama has as much experience as Hillary but whether he has enough experience. A parallel is drawn with Nixon-Kennedy in 1960. Nixon was more experienced but Kennedy had enough experience to assure the voters he'd know what he was doing.
Why do I find this article so infuriating?
Because it has a pretense of historical grounding and none of the substance.
Monday, November 5, 2007
Time off for Me
I am in the last throes of editing a manuscript for publication and will therefore not be blogging regularly if at all for the month of November. My apologies.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Obama's advantage over Hillary
Why does Obama seem like an idealist and Hillary doesn't?
One reason more than any other. As a newcomer, as Samuel Popkin pointed out many years ago, he hasn't had to "bargain and compromise." Popkin goes on: "When one candidate is all promise for the future and the other has a known record, the known candidate will often look insincere." (The Reasoning Voter, p. 203)>
Some (a certain former NYC mayor, for instance) argue that Hillary doesn't have much real experience and therefore should be considered as much of a neophyte as Obama. But this line of thinking isn't likely to convince many voters.
The rap on Hillary as first lady was that she exercised power. You can't now argue with a straight face that she has no experience exercising power. Either she didn't exercise power as first lady (in which case one wonders why so many Americans were upset with her) or she did.
I still would rather have a candidate who had run a war like Eisenhower than one who ran a failed health care initiative. But there aren't any Eisenhower's handy.
The bet you have to make is that Hillary actually learned something from her mistake. One certainly hopes so. But does she still believe in demonizing opponents? That may be the most critical question. Bill Bradley famously said that at the time of the health care debate she confided that the White House would demonize anybody who got in her way.
Politics ain't bean bag. But this demonization business is undemocratic and poisonous to the system. Let's hope she's changed her mind about the right way and the wrong way to win.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Read This Book
Go out now, today, this minute, and buy Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal.
It's a quick read and full of fascinating insights into history and politics.
The theme of the book is that following the Great Depression there was the Great Compression, a startlingly egalitarian period that lasted a generation and witnessed the greatest period of prosperity for middle income Americans. As incomes went up more than 2 percent a year, the wealth of the rich came down, and politics became less extreme. (The theory he advances is that extremism in politics is induced by extremes of wealth.)
You may not agree with everything Krugman says (I know I don't) but you'll never see liberalism in the same way again, I promise.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Jimmy Loudmouth
What to do with ex-presidents? Grover Cleveland, echoing the opinion of a St. Louis columnist, humorously suggested that they be taken out and shot. William Howard Taft said that they should be given chloroform to be followed by a funeral pyre. (Of course, he had more reason than most to be leery of ex-presidents.)
Which brings up the question of Jimmy Carter.
Carter keeps making the mistake of speaking the truth. Should we be alarmed?
The latest contretemps is over his statement on CNN that the Bush administration has tortured prisoners or allowed them to be tortured. Pressed by Wolf Blitzer to elaborate, Carter said that President Bush knows that we have tortured people. "So is the president lying?" when he insists we don't torture people? Wolf asked. Here's what Carter said:
"The president is self-defining what we have done and authorized in the torture of prisoners, yes."
Has Carter gone too far? There's no question he spoke the truth. We have indeed condoned torture since 9-11. If a foreign government did to an American what we have done to some enemy combatants -- water boarding, for instance -- we'd be howling that that's torture pure and simple.
Carter also spoke the truth last spring when he declared that Bush's foreign policy is the worst in history. (Initially he said Bush was the worst president in history, which may or may not be true; he's got some stiff competition.) I don't see too many people anxious for another president to repeat President Bush's "successes." Aside from the deal with Libya I can't think of one unless you include Afghanistan, which we are in the process of losing if we don't change our policy and quickly.
Carter has also said some controversial statements that either aren't true or are misleading. In that same interview with Blitzer he said that the US never violated the UN human rights charter until Bush. This is nonsense. He's apparently forgotten what the CIA did in its first 30 years. Earlier this year he accused the Israel Lobby of manipulating US foreign policy, which is a gross distortion of the facts.
But the question is do we want our ex-presidents speaking out?
The general unspoken rule is that ex-presidents shouldn't criticize their successors. All in all I'd say it's a worthy rule to be broken only in exceptional circumstances. We can have only one president at a time. When an ex-president speaks out he limits the freedom of the incumbent to set policy and shape the national agenda.
Besides we need our ex-presidents to graduate from the role of politician to statesman when they leave office if only to enable them to all play together nicely when occasions arise requiring their joint presence.
Carter is too convinced, as always, of his own virtue to pause long enough to wonder about the wisdom of his comments. But he might give silence a try.
He might ask himself during this moment of silence how he would have felt if an ex-president had criticized him for selling arms to the Shah. A case can be made that these sales, started under the Nixon administration, led to the Shah's vain gloriousness and arrogance, which resulted in his overthrow. Would Carter have wanted to debate an ex-president about the wisdom of the policy he had adopted? I'm guessing not.
Carter has convinced himself he's consistently championed human rights. But he should remember those arms sales to the Shah. They are proof that when he was in office he sometimes gave a higher priority to power politics.
We have had enough of Jimmy Carter's sanctimoniousness. Much as I agree with his blunt statement about Bush's foreign policy and dreadful human rights record he should just shut up.
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Greenspan lets the cat out of the bag
It's a "now it can be told" moment.
In his stunningly frank and honest memoir Alan Greenspan reveals what the Republican game plan was with tax cuts. And it was just what Democrats all along supposed. Tax cuts were the party's ticket to success at the polls and to hell with the budget consequences.
Greenspan relates a conversation he had with Jack Kemp, the Buffalo congressman who championed tax cuts and ran for vice president with Bob Dole. Kemp admitted in a conversation with Greenspan in the late seventies that large tax cuts would be irresponsible, but said he favored them nonetheless. The Democrats were always being irresponsible, increasing spending to win elections. When the Republicans eventually came to power they'd usually cut spending to balance the budget, earning them respectability but losing them votes. It was time, Kemp told Greenspan, for the Republicans to get a little irresponsible.
Greenspan says he was appalled at Kemp's logic. But few other Republicans were, it would appear. So for 25 years they championed tax cuts and more tax cuts. For much of that time they also won election after election. Tax cutting was very good politics.
You can almost wholly explain Republican success at the polls during that period by tax cuts and two or three other things: the move of the country to the suburbs, the Democratic Party's championship of civil rights, and Ronald Reagan's winning personality.
Thank you Alan for helping us all see more clearly what has been happening.
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Hillary's right
She's right about one thing, at least. The people (Maureen Dowd, I mean you) who think that Hillary and Bill Clinton are unique lightening rods for Republican attacks haven't been paying attention. This is politics now. Both Clintons are centrists. Neither did anything radical to draw the enmity of the opposition. Whoever the Democrats nominate will face the same relentless attacks they have.
There's just one way out of the bind for Democrats. Find an Eisenhower to run. (No, I don't mean John Kerry.) I mean a real honest to goodness super military hero like Ike, who is so popular with the American people that the opposition wouldn't dare try to defile him.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Greenspan lets the cat out of the bag
From Alan Greenspan we got this on Sunday's Meet the Press: "Social Security is not a big crisis. We are approximately 2% points of payroll short over the very long run. It's a significant closing of the gap but it's doable in any number of ways."
The camera unfortunately did not show host Tim Russert's face. I wish it had. I would loved to have seen his expression. For several years Russert has been singing from the George W. Bush sheet of music about "the crisis of Social Security." He has sneered at the Democratic Party politicians on his show who said the system is not in crisis and assured his viewers that the pols knew it was but lacked the courage to tell the truth.
Friday, September 21, 2007
Hats off to John Edwards
Paul Krugman notes in the NYT this morning that John Edwards's bold health care plan, announced months ago, put the issue back on the national agenda, forcing the other (Democratic Party) candidates to develop their own plans. Just this week we had Hillary's plan (which Krugman says is comparable to Edwards's).
This is history repeating itself.
In 1992 it was Gephardt who settled on health care as an important issue. Bill Clinton, knowing a hot headline when he sees one, grabbed the issue and made it his own. That's why we got the Hillarycare proposal.
Now once again a Clinton is being pushed into the national health care debate to fend off a primary challenger.
That's ok with me. This is how politics works.
Monday, August 27, 2007
The attack on FDR and the New Deal
I have not read Amity Shlaes's book deriding the accomplishments of the New Deal (The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.). But I have read enough about the book and similar indictments to have identified what I believe is a chief weakness in books of this sort.
All argue that it was WW II which brought us out of the Depression. This leads them to draw two conclusions: A. the New Deal was a failure and B. the free market should have been left alone to fix itself.
I have never understood how B follows A.
Friday, August 24, 2007
CIA: Finally doing what it's supposed to
The morning news that the CIA has offered a realistic picture of the leaders of Iraq is welcome news for anybody who believes truth matters.
Too often the government has lied to itself as well as the American people. Now at last the government seems to be willing to tell itself the truth.
This is a break with tradition.
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Are elections about the past or the future?
Every four years you hear presidential candidates say that this year's election is about the future not the past. Hillary Clinton says it every time she speaks to blunt the criticism, as Bob Shrum, the political consultant (now retired) has noted, that she is running a nostalgia campaign.
What have social scientists found? For half a century they have studied elections scientifically and for that same period they have always come up with the same answer. Elections are always about the past.
Even when a campaign seems to be about the future it's about the past.
Say a candidate (Obama?) comes to town and tells your friends and neighbors he offers a new politics (whatever that means). That sounds like somebody selling you something about the future. But what he is really selling you is hope. And he is selling you hope because he knows a lot of people, demoralized by Bush administration incompetence over the past six and a half years, are out of hope. That is to say, he is telling you the future won't be like the past. Translation: the election is about the past.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
What does this sound like?
Secret prisons. Torture. Lying. And incompetence. But I'm not talking about the Bush administration. This is the incredible story told by Tim Weiner in Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA about the agency under both Truman and Eisenhower.
Under these two presidents the CIA sent thousands of foreign agents to their deaths in both Eastern Europe and Asia and then lied to Congress about what had happened, telling senators that the agents dropped into North Korea were not agents at all. Word had leaked out that some of the agents had been captured and tortured and the source of misinformation sent back to the states and that others had turned out to be spies for the other side. Rather than admit to what happened CIA officials either said that the agents were casualties of war or that they'd known all along that the agents were spies and used them to gain information about the espionage work of North Korea and China.
The lesson of the book is that officials running a secret government will make mistakes over and over again because they can without fear of penalty.
A good example is Project Artichoke, which was personally overseen by Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and Frank Wisner. For years the CIA ran a secret prison in Panama where it tortured foreign agents and subjected them to drug experiments including heroin and LSD. Many died or lost their minds. The experiments continued even though there was no evidence we could control the minds of the prisoners, which was the goal of the operation. The immorality of the operation seems barely to have been considered.
Thursday, August 2, 2007
Pernicious reasoning by Victor David Hanson
There can be no doubt that past presidents have made mistakes in responding to acts of terrorism against the US. But in this article excerpted on HNN Victor Davis Hanson mistakenly equates their errors with Bush's.
Here's Davis's argument. Reagan, Clinton et al. let terrorists off the hook by not using the full might of the US against them when they attacked us. The result was that the terrorists had an incentive to continue attacking us. Hence the need for a new approach, which President Bush took after 9-11.
Davis is right of course that a new approach was needed after 9-11; given the scale of the attack EVERY president we've ever had including lilly-livered James Buchanan would have responded with force against the Taliban and bin Laden. But it does not follow that the fundamental approach of past presidents was in fact flawed in as serious a way as Bush's policies are.
Davis seems to believe that it is always within the power of US presidents to control events. If only Reagan had responded more forcefully to the attack on the Marines in Beirut UBL wouldn't have drawn the conclusion we were weak. Ditto for Clinton in Somalia. But would we really have been better off if these two presidents had launched invasions of Lebanon and Somalia? Iraq would suggest that invasions of these lands might not have gone as planned.
Clearly both Reagan and Clinton could have designed more effective policies in confronting the Islamist extremist threats we faced even in their day. But to equate their mistakes with Bush's is flawed reasoning. It was not clear in their time what other courses might be pursued. It has been clear throughout Bush's administration that his plans have been based on fairy tale understandings of the Middle East. His flaws have been greater by far.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Presidents who spoke foreign languages
Over at Language Log Bill Poser lists the foreign language abilities of the presidential candidates, for which we should all be grateful. The key finding: Some of the candidates have passing familiarity with Spanish, a few have let on that they know French, and Obama knows Indonesian.
But he mistakenly insists that aside from Jimmy Carter, who speaks Spanish, no other recent president can speak a foreign language. (George W. Bush's Spanish is said to be inadequate.) Actually, Bush's father is fluent in French and spoke with foreign leaders in French. FDR was fluent in both German and French. As a boy he wrote his mother letters in German.
JFK famously had trouble even memorizing a few words in German. On the flight over to Europe to give his Berlin speech he repeated the phrase Ich bin ein Berliner over and over and still had trouble remembering the pronunciation. (His wife jackie was fluent in French, of course.)
Woodrow Wilson of course was fluent in German (as a PhD in history he had to learn German). James Garfield taught the classics and was said to be able to write Greek with one hand and Latin with the other simultaneously.
Going back earlier takes you to Jefferson (French), Martin Van Buren (Dutch, as Bill Poser correctly notes), John Quincy Adams (7 languages, according to Wilentz, including French, and German).
And just to finish this off on a light note: You can always include Andrew Jackson, who when awarded a Harvard honorary degree was said to have replied: "E pluribus unum, my friends, sine qua non." He didn't. His enemies used the story to discredit him while his friends boasted that the phrase aptly summed up his philosophy, Our federal union, it must be preserved!
(Note: My list is incomplete. I suspect with a little research it would include many more names.)
UPDATE
Add TR to the list.
Received this from Lewis Gould: "TR recited poetry in French and German. 'German prose never became really easy to me in the sense that French prose did, but for German poetry I care as much as for English poetry.' TR Autobiography, Scribner's edition, 1926, p. 23."
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Clarity needed in executive privilege fight
I certainly believe that Harriet Miers should have showed up when subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee. But the NYT and others are simply flat out wrong to argue that because President Bush has said he wasn't involved directly in the matter under review--the purging of US attorneys--"the president's privacy interest is minimal." (NYT editorial, 7/26/07)
Whether the president himself was directly involved or not is irrelevant. The two questions that are relevant are: 1. Does Congress need the information it wants to fulfill its responsibilities and 2. Does the president have a reason to withhold the information.
Number 1 is obvious in this case; Congress obviously does have a responsibility to determine whether US attorneys were fired in furtherance of the Republican Party's agenda.
Number 2 is the tricky part. George Washington decided when he was president that the rule should be to turn over to Congress any information that is in the public interest and withold any information that's not. Subsequent presidents mainly stuck with this approach though some construed the "public interest" more broadly than others. Probably the broadest claim was asserted by Eisenhower who decreed that any member of the executive branch who responded to requests for information from Joe McCarthy would be fired. Ike got away with that broad assertion because most Americans by then were growing suspicious of McCarthy. In a fight between Ike and Joe there was no question most would pick Ike. President Bush is not beloved like Ike. His claims must be more modest therefore.
But it's irrelevant if he's trying to protect conversations he personally had with Miers or whether he's protecting conversations she had with others. What needs to be answered is how the public interest is served by withholding her testimony.
I can't think of a single reason myself.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Hillary 1, Barack 0
Fred Barnes in the Weekly Standard says that Hillary beat Obama at last night's debate.
I hate to admit agreeing with Barnes but he's right.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Why is Bush so self-assured?
A picture of Lincoln hangs in the HNN office. It's Alexander Gardner's famously haunting photograph from February 5, 1865. The toll of the war wears on the face of this seemingly old man who was still in his mid-fifties. The Lincoln Bicentennial Commission features the photo in its literature:
Monday, July 16, 2007
Which way is up?
If the economy is down and voters are feeling glum Dems should follow the strategy the NYT says they are ... appealing to populist grievances about the rich.
See NYT, page 1: A New Populism Spurs Democrats on the Economy .
But if voters seem to be feeling ok about the economy then Dems shouldn't be going populist.
See NYT, Week in Review, p. 4: Somehow the Spending Doesn’t Stop.
If the story on page 4 is right then the story on page 1 spells trouble.
Edward's Poverty Tour
If RFK was running for president today would he be going on a poverty tour like John Edwards?
My guess is no.
Able politicians respond to the times. Presidents have to grapple with the historic challenges of their age. Rural poverty was one of the great challenges of the 1960s. Today--not so much.
Concern with poverty is obviously a virtue in a president. After Katrina it might have become a national passion. But Bush let the moment go. Today the country's moved on to other concerns.
Edwards might be able to position himself as the candidate of the poor but if he does he won't be doing himself much good. He'd be repeating the mistake Democrats made in the 1960s when they allowed their party to become so identified with the poor than middle class Americans felt slighted.
This isn't a country one-third ill-housed, ill-fed, as FDR put it in the 1930s. It's a middle class country.
If Edwards wants to be brave he can tell Americans some uncomfortable truths about Iraq; that might do some good. He could start by saying that Americans themselves--not George W. Bush--need to take responsibility for this awful mess of a war. Blaming Bush alone is too easy. Th country went along with him because people were scared and willing to be bamboozled.
Tell people that, Mr. Edwards.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Imagine if Lincoln were president
We blame Bush. Bush blames his commanders.
That's one of the headlines out of today's news conference.
Here's the money quote:
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Why it's American to read newspapers
The Roosevelts (Eleanor and Franklin) were appalled, says Jean Edward Smith in his exceptional new biography of FDR, when they learned that President Wilson never read the newspapers. Busy and preoccupied, he had his aide Joe Tumulty read them for him and provide him with summaries. The Roosevelts believed that this was a shirking of duty and too great a burden to place on an aide. Presidents should read their own newspapers.
FDR began his day reading the papers, half a dozen or so by 10am. JFK also devoured the papers. Nixon famously set up an elaborate system to provide a summary of news stories in dozens of papers.
And then we have Mr. Bush. He told one visitor to the White House he never read the papers and didn't see why he should. His aides filled him in about what he needed to know. Laura quickly let it be known that both read the papers in bed every morning. But the damage was done. Once again Bush appeared to be out of touch.
Presidents should read newspapers. So should voters. Relying on aides or TV is insufficient.
This seems rudimentary. But here we are at the dawn of the 21st century and still we have trouble absorbing the point.
If you don't think it's vital to read the paper daily (and a good paper at that!) try an experiment this summer. When you return from vacation see if you understand what's really happening in the world as well as you did before you left (this is assuming you didn't read the papers while away, as most don't).
Now imagine never reading the papers.
Now you're starting to see how the world looks to most Americans.
Frightening, eh?
Friday, July 6, 2007
Why this war is different
FDR, the vice presidential nominee, was not surprised by the defeat of the Democrats in 1920. After every war the country turns materialistic and conservative, having tired of sacrifice, he wrote.
But could the Iraq War be different?
This war has required few sacrifices from Americans generally. Only those who have done the fightin' and dyin' have been encumbered.
Pew polls indicate that the country is now more prepared to embrace core liberal values than it has in years. Democrats expect to win the White House in 2008.
If the Democrats' hopes are realized President Bush will be to blame. But it won't just be because he bungled the war strategy in Iraq. A contributing factor will be that he never called for sacrifices to be made on behalf of the war, sacrifices which typically in other wars wore out people. Who's worn out now besides the fighters and their families?
Bush did indeed sound an idealistic note on occasion in this war. He intoned that we are fighting for freedom. But more often he has sounded notes of fear. These ring in our ears still.
If people are sick and tired of anything after 4 years of war it is not of sacrifice and highfaultinism but fear. What people want is hope.
If the Democrats can offer a feeling of hope they'll win unless we get hit yet again with another 9-11 style attack. Then fear will be in the saddle again and fear-mongering will be irrestible.
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Bush's Serenity
A Polish newspaper asked me to account for Bush's serenity in the face of continuing bad news.
My answer:
I see no sign that President Bush has become more flexible in recent months. He has dug in his heels on the Iraq War, rejecting the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations. A more politically agile president would have seized on the Group’s report to shift course. He has implacably stuck with Gonzales, his embattled attorney general, who embarrassed himself in hearings before the Senate. And he has now commuted the sentence of the vice president’s former chief of staff, Libby, either to placate his conservative base or to give Libby an incentive to remain quiet.
How does he keep going?
This is a puzzle of sorts. Few other presidents with similarly low poll numbers have managed to remain as serene as he appears to be. Nixon drank heavily during Watergate, Reagan retreated from public view for 8 months during Iran-contra.
I’d guess he remains convinced that he is doing God’s work.
There’s a connection in other words between his inflexibility and his serenity. Because he believes that God made him president he doesn’t seem concerned with the opinion of his fellow citizens. After all, he tells himself, he’s got God on his side.
Other presidents too thought that God was on their side, most notoriously Woodrow Wilson, who opined that God had made him president (his campaign manager had quite a different explanation).
Unfortunately, while a faith in God can be sustaining, the conviction that God is directing one’s fate seems to lead to rigidity. Bush, as Wilson before him, suffer from this.
Monday, July 2, 2007
Another visit to Cheneyland
Reading over an essay we plan to post next week by Bernard Bailyn I realized with how little depth I had approached the Cheney claim that he's part of both branches.
Bailyn, writing about another matter entirely, reminded me that the Constitution includes this proviso: “No person holding office under the US shall be a member of either house during his continuance in office.”
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Cheneyland
In Cheneyland the veep isn't a part of the executive branch except when it is convenient for him in which case, he is. Is there a case to be made for the argument advanced by Cheney lawyer David Addington, Cheney's Cheney?
The media have argued it is nonsense.
But as Eric Rauchway indicates in an interesting TNR post there's something to Cheney's position; Ike seemed to hold it. But then the Congress seems not to have agreed.
The money quote:
Dwight Eisenhower wrote in 1963 that he believed his vice president, Richard Nixon, "not being technically in the Executive Branch of government, was not subject to presidential orders." Yet Eisenhower had entrusted Nixon with vital executive duties: Someone not accountable to the president was executing the laws of the United States.If Eisenhower was interpreting the Constitution correctly, Congress contributed to this Constitutional anomaly: the 1949 National Security Act made the vice president a member of the president's National Security Council, on which no other non-executive officer sat. John Kennedy made the anomaly worse: He put his vice president in the Executive Office Building--which you might think would house executive offices.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Hillaryland
She was a liability to her husband while he was in office. Solid middle class citizens in the Middle West and the South disapproved of her. She exercised unprecedented power for a first lady, getting into serious policy issues while neglecting the more traditional duties of presidential spouses. Millions disliked her intensely. And of course there were all the questions about her marriage. Was it a real marriage? Did she and her husband actually love each other? Did they stay together mainly to satisfy the demands of their individual political ambitions?
Of course I am referring to ...
Thursday, June 7, 2007
Time off for Rick
I'll be taking the next two weeks off from POTUS to recharge my batteries.
Rick
Sunday, June 3, 2007
Shoe on the other foot
Conservatives are upset with President Bush. Why? It's only partly because they dislike his immigration stance. Mostly it's that they don't like the way he's selling his plan. When he said this week that his critics “don’t want to do what’s right for America” they cried foul.
Welcome to the club, boys.
Now you know why this president is so hated.
It's not his positions so much--bad as those are on issue after issue--as the way he demonizes opponents and questions their patriotism.
He's been president of the Republican Party for 6 years. Now the Republicans are learning how that feels to the rest of us.
Some uniter he turned out to be.
Friday, June 1, 2007
Good Reading
Two interesting articles for POTUS readers, both in the NYT (subscribers only):
Margaret MacMillan on the ridiculous stagecraft now used at State of the Union addresses (which she blames on television).
and
Geoffrey Perret's review of movies about presidents.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Finally: Talking to Iran
Needed perspective.
How long has it been since we spoke to Iran?
30 years.
How many years did the US and China not talk (according to Bob Dallek's new book on Nixon and Kissinger)?
25 years.
Whaaat?
There hasn't been an Iran Lobby to match the China Lobby. So how come we haven't talked for so long?
Friday, May 25, 2007
Puzzled by Immigration Bill
The bill gives priority to those with education and skills. Of course, we want well-educated people immigrating to the US. (People of India: This means YOU!)
According to a fresh poll in the NYT the American people support this part of the bill, which reverses 40 years of policy. (Formerly, we gave priority to immigrants with family ties.)
Americans say they want educated people coming here. Who doesn't? But isn't it poor people we need too? It's the poor who will do the backbreaking work on farms that Americans won't do. EG: Last night NBC News profiled an onion farmer who had been forced to let 40 acres rot because he couldn't find workers to do the work.
But instead of offering the poor a chance to come here and become citizens all we do for them is offer limited guest worker permits. This sounds 1. unfair and 2. unworkable.
My prediction: this immigration bill will not work as advertised. Illegal aliens will still come here, but not in sufficient numbers to help farmers harvest crops. The workers who do come here will be second-class residents.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Worst Adminstration Ever?
Mark Moyar, the historian who defends the Vietnam War in Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965, argues in the WSJ today that Carter and the Democrats should be wary of claiming Bush is the worst president ever.
I agree.
First, it's a silly parlor game. Worst ever? How does one weigh matters like this? Is Nixon better or worse than Bush II? Nixon's pluses were big pluses: detente with the USSR and the opening to China. Bush doesn't seem to have any big plusses, save possibly for getting the Republican congress to approve more spending on health care, including malaria treatments for African nations. But how do we weigh the negatives? Nixon's include: a generation of cynicism because of Watergate and tens of thousands dead in Vietnam. Bush's negatives include Katrina and Iraq. But fewer died on his watch from presidential ineptitude and connivance than under Nixon. So Is Bush better than Nixon?
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Flip Flopper
John Kerry was accused of being a flip flopper.
Now Mitt Romney is being accused of flip flopping. Same story? No.
Everybody knew where John Kerry stood on critical issues. He was a Massachusetts liberal and he made no bones about it.
But who is Mitt Romney and what does he stand for? Honestly I couldn't tell you. Which is the real Romney? The Romney who made liberal noises when he ran for governor of Massachusetts or the Romney who's making conservative noises now when running for the Republican nomination for president?
Was he really a conservative who sounded like a liberal? Or is he really a liberal who's sounding like a conservative?
He claims to be another Ronald Reagan. But no one ever had any doubt who Reagan was or what he basically believed even if he sometimes made compromises.
Romney will never get the Republican nomination, I'll bet. It will be because he's a Mormon and many Americans are prejudiced against Mormons. It is right that he not win. But it will be for the wrong reason.
Friday, May 18, 2007
Presidents Lie. Is it wrong?
Historian Eric Alterman argues that when presidents lie we all suffer. Economist Bryan Caplan argues that presidents lie because they have to. Who's right? My heart is with Alterman. My head is with Caplan.
Here's Alterman in a recent column:
I hope it's no secret to anyone that I published a book in 2004 called When Presidents Lie. The thesis of my argument was that while deception often appears politically attractive to chief executives in the short term, it is just about always a mistake because reality cannot be lied away. Instead of dealing with the problems created by the reality, politicians end up dealing with the consequences of their lies and ignoring the actual problem with which they were dealing in the first place. Left ignored, this problem tends to metastasize and comes back, almost inevitably, to bite the liar in the backside.
Sounds logical. We can all immediately think of examples. Nixon lying about Watergate. Clinton lying about Monica. Bush lying about the threat Saddam posed to America after 9/11.
But as I always say, if something's too good to be true, it can't possibly be true. Just because something feels right at an elemental level--say, that telling the truth is a good idea--doeesn't mean it is empirically right. It would be appealing to think that lying is always bad and truth telling always good. We want the good guys to win. But history suggests that life is more complicated than this Manichean approach allows.
Here's Caplan, a George Mason University economist, in a new book, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Princeton), I heartily recommend everybody read:
What happens if fully rational politicians compete for the support of irrational voters--specifically, voters with irrational beliefs about the effects of various policies? It is a recipe for mendacity. If politicians understand the benefits of free trade, but the public is dogmatically protectionist, honest politicians do not get far. Every serious contender must not only keep his economic understanding to himself, but "pander"--zealously advocate the protectionist views he knows to be false.
Both Democrats and Republicans find themselves in the quandry Caplan describes. Democrats have to deceive voters about their stand on free trade offering labor unions pablum about establishing fair labor standards in future trade agreements they know don't work. Republicans have to deceive their constituents about their stand on immigration, pretending to crackdown on illegal aliens in a sop to hardliners while endorsing policies that in effect give immigrants incentives to cross the border to find work in businesses that form a critical part of the Republican Party base.
Not all lies are alike. There are misdemeanors and felonies. But to argue that lying per se is bad in politics is naive. Politicans have to lie and deceive because the voters who elect them are irrational. Caplan has been brave to come right out and say this. Hats off to him!
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Why we have to fear both success and failure in Iraq
Updated 5-14-07
Why haven't we faced another attack at home since 9-11?
The obvious reason would seem to be that bin Laden doesn't need to risk another major attack as long as we are pinned down in Iraq. From his perspective it makes no sense to take the time and money to attack us here in the states if he can more easily attack us in Iraq.
The arithmetic of terrorism has changed. First, bin Laden and his ilk believed the way to achieve change in the Middle East was to attack the enemy at home. That's why the Muslim Brotherhood killed Sadat. But that didn't lead to broad change. So second the terrorists moved to Plan B. Instead of attacking the near enemy they would attack the far enemy. That is, the United States, which was propping up the enemy at home. We are now in the third phase. Instead of launching attacks on our homeland bin Laden is attacking us in Iraq. The logic is impeccable. Mired in Iraq, the US has become the near enemy as well as the far enemy. Why travel to America to launch an attack when you can blow up US soldiers in Baghdad?
So is President Bush right that we have to remain in Iraq or the terrorists will follow us home?
He is and he isn't. I admit--and this is a concession I haven't been willing to make until now--that our being in Iraq has saved us from another attack at home. President Bush is right about this. So is John McCain for that matter.
So why am I unwilling to say flat out that President Bush has been right and his critics wrong about the reason we haven't been attacked?
First, the president has used the argument in such a demagogic way that I am reluctant to embrace it. He has played on Americans' fears in a despicable manner. Second, and worse, he has obscured the issues by the way he has framed the debate.
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
Reading Osama's mind
It's been a pleasure watching Bush squirm. He fell into my trap and now the Crusaders are fighting amongst themselves while they waste billions on the Iraq War.
They've lost more than 3,000 soldiers already and will lose many more before we're through with them. Half a century from now the wounded will be walking the streets of America as grim reminders of Bush's failure and the turning point in the war on terrorism, which we will have won by then.
The Democrats I hear are claiming that Bush played into my hands in attacking Iraq and they're right. But they haven't thought through the consequences of their strategy to extricate America from Iraq.
Bill Richardson's Brilliant Ad Campaign
Bill Richardson will probably never become president. But his campaign is doing its darndest to show why he should be a serious contender. He's a serious person with a real record. In the old days of the bosses he's the kind of man they might have selected for president. This ad says it all.
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
I am unsympathetic to President Bush, but this is ridiculous
Both the AP, NBC and who knows who else have made a point of drawing attention to President Bush's slip of the tongue yesterday when Queen Elizabeth visited the White House.
Here's the AP's account:
... there was the president suggesting Queen Elizabeth was over 230 years old.
The president's slip of the tongue during welcoming speeches was inadvertent, of course, and quickly smoothed over with humor. But it wasn't exactly the flawless effort Bush had hoped would erase memories of the "talking hat" episode during the queen's last U.S. visit. (In 1991, during Bush's father's administration, a too-tall lectern left the audience able to see only the queen's hat behind microphones.)
The queen, a sprightly 81, gave an embarrassed Bush a gracious nod after he suggested she had celebrated the United States' founding in 1776. He meant to say she had attended 1976 bicentennial festivities.
"She gave me a look that only a mother could give a child," the president quipped, earning a reserved chuckle from his guest.
Later, Laura Bush made her own minor calendar mistake. She flubbed the year that she and her husband attended the state dinner hosted by President George H.W. Bush in honor of the queen, saying it was in 1993.
On NBC's NIghtly News last night Brian Williams twice referred to the slip in the teases before the story was broadcast.
As a viewer I was expecting Bush to have done something really dumb--like drink water out of a bottle as he did at a state visit to London a few years ago. (Colin Powell had had to correct him to drink from a glass.)
But this slip-up? It was certainly over-sold.
The media have gone from ignoring Bush's mistakes to overdramatizing them.
Sunday, May 6, 2007
Will Maureen Dowd please shut-up
A columnist who writes as well as Maureen Dowd--you know with a lead like this I am about to body-slam her--should be telling readers what they need to know.
Instead we get drivel like this morning's column, a profile of the French presidential aspirant Ségolène Royal that could well have been published in US or People if those publications had anybody on staff who writes with the panache of a Dowd.
It's all personality this and personality that.
Her opening two paragraphs give you the flavor:
It’s hard not to be drawn to a presidential candidate with a name like a Bond girl, a smile like an angel, a figure that looks great in a bikini at 53, a campaign style like Joan of Arc, and a buffet for the press corps brimming with crustless fromage sandwiches, icy chocolate profiteroles, raspberry parfaits, red Bordeaux, espresso and little almond gâteaux. (When in France, let us eat cake.)Ségolène Royal brought back the sizzle to socialism, raising the ire of Stephen Colbert’s right-wing TV host, who warned that “socialism is always a threat but never more so than when it looks like this.”
Friday, May 4, 2007
Well, it's just a theory, right?
At the Republican debate 3 candidates said they do not believe in the theory of evolution:
Mike Huckabee
Sam Brownback
Tom Tancredo
And they want to run this country?
Thursday, May 3, 2007
Reagan Library Debate
Republicans have hit upon a great idea: scheduling debates at presidential libraries.
But they should be braver.
How about holding their next debate at the Nixon Library? And the one after that at the Hoover Library.
Democrats could hold theirs at the Carter Library.
Of course, I am in fantasyland. Political parties are only interested in the libraries of presidents who succeeded. No one wants to "get right" with Nixon, Hoover, or Carter. And I would bet that there will never be a Republican Party debate held at the future George W. Bush Library. No one will want to "get right" with George W. Bush.
Getting right with former (and usually dead) presidents is an old American tradition. The first president pols wanted to get right with was Andrew Jackson. Two successors, Martin van Buren and James K. Polk, may be said to have owed their election in part to their ability to associate themselves with Jackson. Polk was even known as Young Hickory.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Vietnam and Iraq
A question for the day.
Did we lose the Vietnam War? Conservatives often seem to argue that we didn't lose so much as give up just as victory was about to materialize. If only the Democratic Congress had given South Vietnam $500 million more!
The same argument is being made now with regard to Iraq. We're in danger of losing just as we are about to win.
I suppose there's intellectual consistency in this. But do conservatives really want to make this argument? I don't want to tell them how to make their case, but this approach seems bone-headed.
One, it brings to mind Vietnam. Two, it's intellectually incoherent. If victory is just around the corner then why can't we start planning for our withdrawal? Victory can't be both around the corner and so fragile that the mere discussion of withdrawal is dangerous, as both Cheney and Bush claim.
Another point I can't help noticing is that the same conservatives who always insist we could have won in Vietnam describe Afghanistan as the Soviet Union's Vietnam. How can that be if Vietnam was such a near-win? When conservatives draw the analogy between Afghanistan and Vietnam aren't they in fact admitting that Vietnam was a #%!#!@!!!ed-up mess?
I think that's what they actually believe--just as liberals believe it. Vietnam was a mess.
So is Iraq.
It's time to admit it.
Victory isn't around the corner.
Victory is nowhere in sight.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
What's needed in Iraq is creativity
Romney wants to increase the military by 100,000.
McCain wants more surges.
Hillary wants to end the war quickly. Somehow.
What's missing from the national debate is imagination.
Can't we get a little creative? We're sick of the war. So are Iraqis. We could all use some fresh ideas.
Here are a few.
1. Call for an election in 60 days in Iraq to decide whether America should stay or go. If they say "stay" we stay but only if the Iraqi government agrees immediately to form a unity government based on genuine shared power and above all an oil deal to split revenues proportionate to population. If they refuse we use the referendum to back a strongman to force change on Iraq.
If they say "go" we go in 6 months. We will then have to watch as Iraq either crumbles or someone emerges to provide a strong central unified command. We hold out the possibility that a strongman gets a billion dollars if he can manage to stop the violence without becoming another Saddam. The model might be Fujimori.
2. We renounce all interest in permanent bases.
3. We agree to fund a vast New Deal make-work program to get money in the hands of ordinary Iraqis. To qualify a person simply has to renounce terrorism. Like Lincoln, we require this pledge in exchange for amnesty (excepting the worst of the worst).
Three ideas. Radical? #1 certainly is. But these are the times that cry out for radical creative solutions.
More of the same won't work.
I'd bet that a little creativity would go a long way toward changing the dynamic of public opinion both here in the states, over in Europe and in Iraq and the region.
It's certainly worth a try.
UPDATE: NYT reports today that in Iraq 80% of Shiites want the US to leave and 97% of Sunnis.
Monday, April 9, 2007
On Israel, Iraq and the limits of American power
Can the US lean on Israel to force the government to abandon the settlements and cut a deal with the Palestinians?
The last US president to try was George H.W. Bush. He cut off loans to Israel in an intense effort to push the Israelis to abandon its aggressive settlement policy.
The political cost for Bush was high. And the Israelis went right ahead anyway doing what they wanted to do.
I have often thought the US could do even more, but now I am not so sure.
Why should we think that we can force a deal between the Israelis and Palestinians when we can't even get the Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq to compromise? The US will shortly have 173,000 troops in the country. And we are pouring billions of dollars into the place. And yet not even with all that leverage have we been able in FOUR years to force the Shiites to give the Sunnis enough power to enlist their support in the new government.
There is an obvious lesson here about the limits of American power.
Are we willing to learn it?
Friday, April 6, 2007
Hitler and other underdogs
A strange encounter at the swimming pool the other day has left me stunned.
Vien, we'll call him, is a 30 something Vietnamese American. His mother was Vietnamese, his father a white American soldier. From his looks you might think he's a more handsome Barack Obama and with a similarly multi-ethnic background similarly blessed with a very modern perspective.
I have talked with Vien at other times and knew he is actually tortured by his past. At a young age he was taken in by foster parents who regularly beat him. He escaped to America where he has no family.
By dint of hard work he has managed to build a middle class life for himself. He even owns a house in the suburbs. But the scars of the past left heavy welts on his emotional well-being.
This became evident the other day when he began talking about his upcoming vacation to Corsica. Why had he decided to go to Corsica, I wondered. It's not the usual tourist's destination.
Vien said that he had always been fascinated by Napoleon. Then, in a kind of dictator synapse, he somehow segged from Napoleon to Hitler. Then came the part that stunned me.
Speaking in a tone of voice he might use when ordering French fries at McDonalds, that is, very matter of factly, he said that he had always admired Hitler because Hitler's an underdog.
I asked him to repeat the statement. His English is not always perfect and I wanted to make sure I heard him.
I tried to reason with him telling him who Hitler was and what he had done. I noted that in a world where Hitler ruled he would not have much of a life. 1. He's not white. 2. He's gay. 3. He's an immigrant.
But no matter. He still liked Hitler.
He just happens to find Hitler appealing.
From his perspective, the perspective of an underdog in a dog-eat-dog world, Hitler is another underdog.
How can this possibly be?
When I mentioned all the people Hitler killed Vien retorted that Americans had killed millions in Vietnam. When I pointed out the all too obvious differences he insisted that I was just seeing things from the American point of view.
But how was Hitler the underdog?
Vien's reasoning--and I am only guessing here--is that 1. America is the world's superpower. 2. Hitler is always being castigated by Americans. Hence 3. Hitler is the underdog.
Next time I hear that skin heads have gone on a rampage or roughed up some Jews I will think of Vien and wonder: What combination of individual emotional wounds and history lay behind their deeds.
We are mystified these days about the kinds of societies that produce terrorists. All too often we succumb to easy generalizations as an explanation. Vien's case shows how difficult it is to generalize. He's not poor. He's not under the spell of fanatical leaders. He's not religious.
He just happens to like Hitler. (Thankfully, he does not seem to want to implement Hitler's program of murder.)
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Are we fighting for a myth in Iraq?
This is a subject fit more for an essay than a blog, but I raise it anyway.
Is it possible we are fighting in Iraq for a myth?
A clue is President Bush's insistence that we remain in Iraq as long as it takes to achieve victory. The subtext is that we can't abide failure. Failure would stain the country's reputation. It is thought that what he really means is that it will stain his reputation and I have argued as much in earlier posts. But it's also possible that he is sincere about his insistence that victory is vital to America. If he is, why does he insist we must win?
Losing of course is unpalatable. No one likes to lose. But there are any number of circumstances in which losing might be preferable to winning. Losing a short war, for instance, might be better than winning a long one which cost many more lives and much more national treasure.
Why then can't we openly discuss the possibility of losing? It is because of that old American myth that we are winners. This same myth kept us in Vietnam for years and years despite evidence that our goal of victory was elusive and it may now be what is keeping us in Iraq.
The victory myth took a beating in Vietnam, of course. Policymakers in the Johnson adminstration could truthfully convince themselves that we had never lost a war when they were contemplating action in Vietnam. At that point we had not. But now? We lost Vietnam. And yet we remain (seemingly) as wedded to the myth of victory as we have ever been.
I am not sure what defeat might look like. But we should be talking about it, which we haven't. We have an idea of defeat in Iraq that is no more specific and realistic than our concept of the boogeymonster that haunts us in our dreams as children.
Shouldn't we, if we are rational, consider specifically what defeat might entail? It might just be helpful.
I am afraid however that we shall never engage in such a rational debate despite our commitment to freedom and reason. Our myths won't let us.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
When do presidents assert executive privilege? When it's in their interest
Voters might think that the assertion of executive privilege is a matter of course for a president. It is not. When it's in their political interest they assert it, wrapping themselves in the flag as Defender of the White House! When it's not in their interest they relent and let Congress have what it wants.
Nixon's is the most famous case. He refused to turn over documents (in this case the Watergate tapes) until a unanimous supreme court made him. But he didn't have to resist. In the next major imbroglio the president chose to defer to congress. Gerald Ford marched up to capitol hill and testified in person about his pardon of Nixon. Invoking executive privilege apparently never occurred to him, which was fortunate. After Nixon the last thing the public wanted to hear was that another president was refusing to come clean.
The next big scandal was of course Iran-Contra. Once again Congress wanted to know what the president knew and when he knew it. Reagan decided to give them everything they wanted.
Clinton was the next president to face a major scandal. He chose to fight congressional demands for documents and testimony.
In each case there's one simple theme. Self-interest.
If President Bush wants to assert executive privilege, let him go ahead. But we shouldn't be under the impression he has to for the sake of his office. The Decider can decide the issue without worrying that he is under any obligation to assert a privilege on behalf of his successors.
Bill Clinton: What's wrong with front-loading the primaries
This is an excerpt from an interview Michael Beschloss did with Bill Clinton back in May, 2003:
Beschloss: When John Kennedy ran in 1960 he was in a nominating process that took about seven months . . . The process next year will probably take about four weeks - it will be very front-loaded. Do you think the new process is better to choose a president?
Clinton: I would like to see the old one. . . . I know you can say this is my bias because I'm from a small state. I've watched Senator Kennedy here in Massachusetts, and this is not a small state. He does a lot of what I'd call retail politics. He knows the names of most of the people in this room . . . One of the things that bothers me about the whole presidential nominating process is that more you front-load it and put it into big primaries, the more you consign these candidates to spend all their time raising money . . . But the presidential campaigning is supposed to be for the candidate as well as for the voters. It was good for John Kennedy to have to go to West Virginia to see all those white poor people - all those Protestants living in the hills and hallows. Good for him to have to go in to the inner city. Good to have the time and obligation to go and listen to the stories of people who were different from you. That's the thing I loved about New Hampshire. For its quirkiness, it's a beautiful place, because they had a sense that they owed the country something. They owed the country a good decision and they were determined to give everybody a listen.
Friday, March 16, 2007
Democrats ride to the rescue of historians and archivists
This is how Lee White, the new director of the National Coalition for History, describes the impact on historians of the new Democratic Congress:
Anyone who wondered if a Democratically-controlled Congress would make a difference for historians, archivists, and journalists need look no further than what transpired in the House of Representatives on March 14, 2007. On that day three bills mandating increased public disclosure by the federal government all passed the House by substantial margins.
Republicans treated historians well in other areas, I would add, increasing funding for history projects (though the Bush administration zeroed out funding for the NHPRC).
Still: we're better off with the Democrats. They get the issue of open records; Republicans don't seem to.
History & Perceptions
I went on CNN the other day to talk about second-term presidencies, a topic I have written about previously on HNN. I didn't think I was being pro-Bush. But afterwards a viewer complained that it sure seemed I was.
What led to the misimpression was my contention that virtually all second-term presidents run into serious trouble. To the viewer this understandably made Bush's current difficulties seem less a reflection on his own inadequacies than some more general symptom of institutional weakness. If the presidency is prone to second-term blues then Bush's low poll numbers are hardly a measure of his adminstration's record. Hence, concluded the viewer, I had been shilling for Bush.
Is there a way to tell the story of second-term presidencies without appearing to excuse Bush's many mistakes? Sure. You can come right out and say that he's mainly having difficulties because the chickens are coming home to roost. All the bad mistakes he made in the first term are now facing him in his second.
But there's a risk in being so straight forward. Supporters of Bush will conclude you are shilling for the Bush hating crowd.
I see no way to solve this problem. Somebody is always going to be peeved at the way one employs history to shed light on current events. But it's important to remember when we go on TV and write op eds that we will always face charges of bias. It's inescapable.
Monday, March 12, 2007
Our weak political parties
We live in a paradoxical age. This is simultaneously a period of high partisanship and weak political parties.
The NYT reports today that the Democratic Party has lost its bid to control the primary schedule for '08. Some 23 states are now considering holding elections on February 5. The Party would prefer them to wait until later in the season.
The Party issued threats, saying it might refuse to seat the delegations of any states that held unauthorized early contests. The states have ignored the Party.
Whether the Party is right or wrong in thinking that an early virtual national primary is good or not (the arguments on both sides are compelling), the weakness of the Party is distressing.
Parties are supposed to mediate between the government and the voter. If they're weak they can't. The upshot is that the voters are increasingly on their own, unguided by their political leaders.
Political parties were an American invention. We are watching their inexorable decline.
I know that voters like to think that it's more democratic for them to exercise more power. And they're right. It is more democratic. But is that necessarily a good thing?
We should be debating that question. We aren't. That's a bad thing.
Friday, March 2, 2007
LBJ Tapes: Two reavealing exchanges
As I mentioned the other day I have been listening to the LBJ tapes.
Twice in the course of a week LBJ in the summer of '64 is heard complaining about leaks. Now this isn't surprising. All presidents have complained about leaks, starting with George Washington. But the two leaks LBJ is concerned about tugged me in two directions. I wish one leak had been ignored by the media and that the other had made frontpage news. History might have turned out differently.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
LBJ Tapes
I am listening to Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes 1963 1964, edited by Michael R. Beschloss.
It's a stunning experience.
Listening to LBJ agonize on the phone with Robert Kennedy and Dick Russell about Vietnam in the spring of 1964 one realizes just how difficult a position he was in. Couldn't get out but also couldn't say why we were in. You hear LBJ saying as we do now that we don't want another Vietnam, that he didn't want "another Korea." And why should he send American boys to fight in Vietnam ? He couldn't come up with a reason.
He tells an aide that Ambassador Lodge needs to understand that we can't turn Vietnam into America overnight. Hey, isn't that what historians have said LBJ didn't understand?
You also hear RFK telling LBJ that we can't win Vietnam militarily. We need to win it politically. LBJ agrees.
All the stereotypes about Johnson come crashing down as you listen to these tapes. He was a liberal's liberal? Yet we hear him on the tapes saying that he wanted welfare reduced because poor women were getting pregnant and having baby after baby on the government's dime. Sounded pure Reagan.
It's history as it happened, not neat and tied up in a ribbon the way it's usually remembered. There's the conversation with J. Edgar Hoover about the threat of assassination. Hoover tells him he was astonished to learn that the bubble top was not bullet proof. Hoover recommends that LBJ take one of the FBI's two bullet-proof cars for his own use. He says he ought to use the car even when he's down at the ranch where anybody could take a shot at him if they wanted. LBJ is incredulous. You mean I can't even ride around the ranch in my convertible. That's what I'm saying, Mr. President, Hoover tells him.
Yet a short time later, after LBJ has gotten grief for having a bloated staff, we hear him tell the head of the secret service that he wants to reduce the size of his retinue of agents when he goes out in public. Having 6 or 8 agents around him was too many. In his typical LBJ style he says that if they can't arrange for him to be accompanied by fewer agents then he'll just stay in the White House and never even go outside to take a piss.
It's pure LBJ.
And it's absolutely entrancing.
Monday, February 26, 2007
Iran Iran Iran
Suppose we can prove that Iran's leaders have been providing weapons to the Shiites in Iraq. Would this be surprising? And in any case, and more importantly, what's the implication?
The Bush administration seems to hint that if Iran is providing weapons we should attack the country. But on what grounds? Have we not supplied weapons to our allies in war after war? Have our enemies not done likewise?
To take an example. The Soviets provided billions in weapons to North Vietnam during the war there. But no one ever seriously suggested that we should therefore have attacked the Soviet Union.
To take another example. The US provided millions of dollars in weapons to the Contras. Did that give Nicaragua's Sandinistas grounds to bomb New York?
And in both cases, I might add, the countries continued to talk to one another. We maintained diplomatic ties to the USSR throughout the Vietnam War and we maintained an embassy in Nicaragua during the Contra war.
So what's going on here? Somebody--care to name names?-- is framing this issue in a way that could possibly lead to war if we don't watch out. By focusing on Iran as a source of weaponry we are being led slowly but surely down a path to war.
Of course, it is important to know if Iran is supplying weapons. We should try to cut off the supply if possible through diplomacy, economic pressure and military patrols along the borders. But go to war over this?
Friday, February 23, 2007
Tom Vilsack, R.I.P.
I was thrilled to read that Tom Vilsack has dropped out of the race for president. Now I won't have to rewrite the chapter in my new book in which I poke fun at his attempt to run entirely on his ... appealing story! (He's an orphan who raised himself up by his bootstraps and became rich and successful.) If his lackluster campaign had actually taken off it would have ruined my entire argument.
Thanks Tom!
I can use the time anyway to rework some other parts of the book.
PS: If you don't know who Tom Vilsack is, don't worry about it.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Signing Statements
Stanley Fish, the ambidextrous, they should call him. He writes about everything with élan.
Recently he tackled signing statements.
It's a good piece.
He comes down hard on the theory advanced first by Meese and Alito and more recently by Bush that because the president plays a role in legislation his views about legislation should be made part of the record and be held in regard by courts trying to establish the intent of the authors of the legislation.
Click here (NYT subscribers only).
Friday, February 16, 2007
Madison should sue!
Have you seen this?
It's the new coin honoring James Madison.
The others in the new series aren't much better. But jeezelouise, this is awful. It makes Madison look like Dolley's got her big foot pressed down hard on his ankle.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Picture of the Day: GW Listening to iPod
This is from an audible.com promotion.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Mea Culpa: Ford's Pardon
You are probably well past the point of finding the discussion of Ford's pardon of Nixon tiresome.
But one thing has been bothering me. Neither I nor any of the commentators I saw on television during FORD FUNERAL WEEK plainly stated how unusual the circumstances of Ford's courageous pardon were. Usually, a president taking an unpopular stand is taking it with the full backing of elites. Not this time. Elite opinion as well as the public's opinion was generally opposed to a pardon. President Ford was challenging both elite opinion and the public's opinion.
That took guts.
Why do I feel badly that I didn't make this point?
Bush press conference
Just heard the president summarize the key two points of the deal with Korea.
6 years into his presidency he still sounds like a C student who's trying to remember what his teacher told him.
He got his points out.
But they were obviously memorized.
There was no thinking going on.
Maybe next time Americans will hire a president who has a nimble mind.
He's not stupid by any means. But we should expect more from a president than "not stupid." That's a pretty low standard.
Monday, February 12, 2007
Why pols nowadays wear their religion on their sleeve
Did you hear Obama say during his coming out speech that he is a Christian?
I admit I didn't like hearing it. Oh, here we go again, I thought. Another pol using his religion to advance his political ambitions.
He and oher pols might learn something from Richard Nixon.
Nixon, a Quaker, rarely mentioned religion in his speeches and certainly seldom referred to his own religion. He explained that he didn't wear his religion on his sleeve. He found other ways to connect to voters than through their religion.
But I am not hear to sing the praises of Richard Nixon, even though it's always fun when you have a chance to hold him up as a model of rectitude.
I want to explain why pols in the old days usually followed Nixon's approach.
Admittedly this is a complicated subject. There are many reasons religion now crowds the political table like some giant Turkey at Thanksgiving. Religious people were engergized by Roe v Wade. Pols like Reagan and Bush II have showed that there are votes in exploiting religion. And of course churches have helped Republicans reach a sizeable group of citizens.
But I remain convinced that the overriding reason why we hear so much about religion these days is because Protestants have learned that they can now talk about religion without having to worry that they'll be suspected of anti-Catholicism.
Until John Kennedy broke the Catholic line in American presidential politics Catholics often felt under seige. Ever since Catholic immigrants began showing up in America in large numbers they faced discrimination and sometimes outright rhetorical bigotry. To be a Catholic hater was ok in many places in this country.
Protestant pols who might have hought of using religion to advance their causes had to worry that Catholics would see nefariousness in the business. A Protestant couldn't say he was a Christian without a Catholic thinking he was being excluded. Catholics didn't refer to themselves as Christians, they referred to themselves as Catholics (usually).
So in a way we have Kennedy to thank for the freedom pols now feel to wear religion openly. Once he took the White House and overt bigotry against Catholics subsided Catholics could listen to a speech by a Protestant and not feel excluded when the subject of religion surfaced.
I wouldn't want to go back to the bad old days when Catholics felt discriminated against. But it's unfortunate politics has taken the turn it has. I believe we were all better off when pols kept their religious views to themselves.
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Obama declares
What do we know about Obama's past?
His father was a leader from a small tribe in Kenya, his mother a white American from Kansas.
Did you know that Obama's mother spent her teenage years on Mercer Island in Washington State? No, of course not. Neither did I until Obama came here and told the crowd about his Mercer Island connection. I'm betting you won't hear much about this in the coming months. Kansas sounds better than Mercer Island.
Voters clearly don't know anything much at all about Obama except that they like his personality and the emphasis on "hope."
Political scientists refer to this as low-information reasoning. In the absence of real information voters use a few facts and anything else they can conjure up from the cursory coverage they've seen and develop an impression of somebody. Because of what's known as Gresham's Law of politics new information based on personality trumps old information about issues. So personality is key in the early stages of a campaign.
But personality is never enough. At some point the voters will demand to know more, especially when rivals attack the candidate's record (or lack of a record).
Vide: Gary Hart in 1984.
It will be at that moment that we'll know if Obama is the real thing or just another passing celebrity phenom.
My fear is that he's not a passing phenom and that there's a real chance the Democratic Party will nominate him.
This would be bad for him and bad for the country, for reasons outlined in previous posts.
For his sake and ours: I hope he loses the race.
Thursday, February 1, 2007
Bush gets an "A" in history
In a long interview with the editors of the WSJ President Bush was asked about his administration's policy on immigration.
His response would have merited a high grade in almost any professor's classroom:
GWB: I think raiding a business is more about enforcing the law. And conservatives tend to want to enforce the law. . . . This is an emotional issue. It's interesting. There have been periods in our history where nativism has had a strong appeal. Sometimes nativism, isolationism and protectionism all run hand in hand. We've got to be careful about that in the United States. The 1920s was a period of high tariff, high tax, no immigration. And the lesson of the 1920s ought to be a reminder of what is possible for future presidents.
Where has THIS Bush been all these years?
(I am unsure what he means by it being a period of high taxes. Taxes were famously low in the 1920s. Give him an A-. )
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Did he mean Obama is clean-cut?
I am not sure what the fuss is about if, as some suggest, it's about the word "clean." NBC led the news tonight with the story about Joe Biden's saying Obama is clean.
But what did he mean? Until we know it's a stretch to consider the line an insult.
Clean with Gene--remember that slogan?--was a compliment.
Clean cut--if that's what he meant--is also a compliment. And no he wouldn't describe too many of his colleagues that way because old men generally aren't called clean cut. Young men are. Obama is young.
Or maybe Biden was alluding to Obama's reputation as a clean pol (distinguishing him from so many other Illinois pols).
Who the heck knows?
If the controversy is about Biden's description of Obama as the first mainstream African-American candidate for president, well, Biden was precisely right. All of the others were regarded when they ran as politically marginal figures.
Biden's statement that Obama is the first articulate African-American to run for president is the one that is the damaging. Clearly Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Shirley Chisolm were articulate. It was indeed their ability with words that made them memorable and influential. But it's not clear that Biden meant to say that. Surely he doesn't believe it. What he did was string together a series of adjectives with an improper antecedant. This is a blunder, but it's not frontpage news and certainly didn't belong at the top of NBC's broadcast.
If this is how the 2008 campaign is going to go I'm already sick of it.
Friday, January 26, 2007
Krugman's wrong
In today's NYT Paul Krugman says the country is polarized because of growing inequality.
This is economic determinism 101.
Here's his thesis:
You see, the nastiness of modern American politics isn’t the result of a random outbreak of bad manners. It’s a symptom of deeper factors — mainly the growing polarization of our economy. And history says that we’ll see a return to bipartisanship only if and when that economic polarization is reversed.
After all, American politics has been nasty in the past. Before the New Deal, America was a nation with a vast gap between the rich and everyone else, and this gap was reflected in a sharp political divide. The Republican Party, in effect, represented the interests of the economic elite, and the Democratic Party, in an often confused way, represented the populist alternative.
In that divided political system, the Democrats probably came much closer to representing the interests of the typical American. But the G.O.P.’s advantage in money, and the superior organization that money bought, usually allowed it to dominate national politics. “I am not a member of any organized party,” Will Rogers said. “I am a Democrat.”
Then came the New Deal. I urge Mr. Obama — and everyone else who thinks that good will alone is enough to change the tone of our politics — to read the speeches of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the quintessential example of a president who tackled big problems that demanded solutions.
For the fact is that F.D.R. faced fierce opposition as he created the institutions — Social Security, unemployment insurance, more progressive taxation and beyond — that helped alleviate inequality. And he didn’t shy away from confrontation.
“We had to struggle,” he declared in 1936, “with the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. ... Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.”
It was only after F.D.R. had created a more equal society, and the old class warriors of the G.O.P. were replaced by “modern Republicans” who accepted the New Deal, that bipartisanship began to prevail.
What's wrong with this thesis?
It doesn't get to the nitty gritty. We are polarized today because the postwar consensus has collapsed and nothing has taken its place. The consensus was held together in the 1930s by fear of depression and in the early postwar period by fears of communism. Once we put in place a safety net that protected Americans from the threat of economic disaster and Cold War tensions eased natural divisions in the society surfaced. Fear in effect had kept us united.
But fear only explains so much. To complicate the story even further: Periods of consensus occur when one party or the other dominates society so completely that almost no one dares challenge its hegemony. After the New Deal Republicans were so badly defeated that they shied away from confrontation for nearly half a century. Robert Taft tried to swim against the liberal tide; he drowned. Barry Goldwater tried; he also drowned. Not until the liberal consensus was undermined by both Vietnam and the race riots and the failures of the Great Society did Americans start to doubt the liberal assumptions they had shared since FDR. Liberal failures inspired a conservative resurgence.
Today the country is fairly evenly divided politically. Because both sides can taste power and neither is convinced their basic ideological approach is unpopular, they persist in battling for their ideas.
Don't like polarized politics? Too bad. They're here to stay until one side or the other achieves paramount political victory. This victory will have little to do with the size of the gap between the rich and the rest of us.
Thursday, January 25, 2007
The Deficit: Truth Squad
President Bush bragged the other night in his address to Congress that the deficit had been cut in half three years early. He predicted it would be balanced by 2012.
Now we learn the details.
A story in the NYT this morning explains that the deficit disappears in the next decade if and only if all of the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire as planned and only if the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) isn't reduced.
In other words, if the country returns back to the tax levels of the Clinton years the budget will once again be in balance.
Do we need more evidence that the Bush tax cuts were wrongheaded?
The AMT needs to be addressed. If nothing's done the tax will take a huge bite out of the paychecks of middle class families. Fixing the AMT will cost the government 1.2 trillion over a decade. That alone would keep the government in deficit territory.
Because tax policy is complicated the American people do not understand the flim flam of the Bush administration. All they care about is that their taxes went down under Bush.
This is one of the downsides of mass democracy. When unscrupulous pols like Bush take advantage of people's ignorance bad policies result.
Monday, January 22, 2007
My advice to Bush for his State of the Union Speech
The White House last week leaked that President Bush plans to come out in favor of a plan to cover the uninsured. Then Saturday in his radio address the president himself provided a few details.
Smart or dumb move?
On the surface it looks like a smart move. A Wall Street Journal poll just out says that health care is the public's leading domestic issue. So there's plenty of interest. And anythin g he can do to get the country's attention off Iraq is probably of benefit to the White House.
But politically what's in it for Bush? Not much as far as I can see. If he's serious about negotiating with the Democrats, that would be welcome. It would be good for the country. But it will be the Democrats who get the credit for any deal. They own the health care issue.
If all Bush is hoping is to change the subject he might as well stay home tomorrow night. There's no chance he'll be able to get Americans to think about anything else but Iraq.
Speaking of Iraq ... What tone will Bush strike? What tone should he strike?
He's being urged by some pundits to tell the honest, grim truth. He should. But he shouldn't expect to be rewarded for candor. Americans, despite what they always say, don't really want the truth. They want a little bit of truth and they want it sugarcoated.
All presidents in bad times have sugarcoated the truth, as an article by me posted on the homepage indicates. There's a reason for this. They want to give people hope. You can't leave people feeling hopeless. That's not leadership. That's defeatism.
I still think he ought to give it to us straight and then try to provide some hope. FDR on occasion gave the public honest assessments of WW II, telling them the news out of Burma wasn't good, for instance, as HNN intern Caleb Miller reported last week. And it went over well because people knew we had to face up to reality. In the communal spirit of the times FDR was able to tap a deep feeling of national unity. So his appeal worked. Instead of being discouraged by the bad news, people were encouraged by the evidence of solidarity.
Bush is no FDR. He does fear not hope. And he isn't much for telling us the truth. And furthermore--strike 3--he's not much of a uniter.
So I am not expecting him to give us the truth and give it to us good and hard. Which is too bad. We need the truth. And we need a president who can rally the country around communal sacrifice.
Guess we have to wait two years.
And pray.
Friday, January 19, 2007
Obama the Camelot Hero?
The NYT compares the appeal of Obama to John Anderson (1980), Gary Hart (1988) and Ross Perot (1992).
This misses the mark. Those fellows never inspired the kind of ecstatic joy that Obama does.
I think a more apt comparison is with RFK and JFK. Like them, Obama seems to embody the virtues of the Camelot hero. Democrats have not seen his like since the 1960s. Like Richard Burton he has swept America off its feet. Of course, we all hope that in the end he gets the girl and saves his kingdom. We pray that the tale doesn't end in tragedy like JFK's did.
Republicans fall for mythmakers, too. Reagan was their version of Camelot. Like JFK he offered people hope and a promise of a better world.
Scholars distinguish between myths and fairy tales (see Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment). Myths are about super heroes, fairy tales about ordinary mortals. Myths make demands on us, fairy tales put us at ease. Myths almost always end badly, fairy tales always end happily.
Using this framework, JFK was far more a creature of myth than Reagan. JFK demanded sacrifices, Reagan promised a free lunch. If ever there was a fairy tale ending to a presidency it was Reagan's. Within three years of his exit the dragon he had attacked fell to the ground and expired.
One other difference between JFK and Reagan. JFK always seemed an extraordinary figure. He was wealthy beyond the comprehension of most Americans and came from an unreachable rung on the social ladder. Reagan, by contrast, was all-heartland, despite his Hollywood patina. He was the ordinary man tapped for extraordinary tasks. Pure fairy tale.
What kind of hero is Obama? I don't think we can know for sure quite yet, though he seems very JFKish to me. But that he is in the heroic mold can't be doubted.
The question we have to ask ourselves is whether what we need is a hero or a president. Sometimes presidents can be heroes. But rarely. Me. I'd settle for a president who shares my basic outlook and is competent at the job. I'll leave the hero stuff to Friday nights at the cinema.
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Obama's In!
Hey, let's celebrate!
Sorry, I can't.
Obama's in a long line of pols who by virtue of television put themselves before the public as serious candidates for the presidency.
It began with Estes Kefauver in 1952. Kefauver, the Democratic senator from Tennessee, had been elected a mere four years earlier. But after heading the famous crime hearings of the early fifties he became a household name. He immediately ran for president. NBC did a special at the convention, Kefauver versus the special interests (ie: bosses).
The bosses still ran things then so Kefauver went down to inglorious defeat (with Truman's connivance). The truth is he didn't have a prayer.
He was ahead of his time. But since then TV has given pols with short resumes like Obama and Estes the opportunity to make serious runs for president.
I wouldn't wish to go back to the era of the bosses. But the seriousness with which they took politics is impressive compared with our period's insufferable inanity.
Wednesday, January 3, 2007
The Ford Funeral ... one for the books
Under ordinary circumstances it would have been a strange funeral.
Kissinger, that Banqo's ghost from the past, standing near Cheney, the neo-con's neo-con who despised detente.
The man who was right about Iraq (Father Bush) standing next to the man who was wrong (Son Bush).
And we forget now in the hazy glow of history how divided the Ford administration was. These guys from the past wanted to kill each other under Ford. It was Nixon people vs. Ford people. Hardliners vs. Detenters. Betty supporters vs. Ford handlers. And Ford himself at the top unable to do anything about it because he was such a nice guy.
And as if all that weren't enough, you have this roomful of people who read just a few days before what Ford himself actually thought of them. Maureen Dowd caught this aspect of the funeral superbly in this morning's NYT:
As Poppy spoke from the altar, praising Mr. Ford’s generosity, he must have been mulling that his predecessor was ungenerous in spitting on him from the grave. Mr. Ford told Mr. Beschloss that Bush Senior had sold out the party to the hard right and had taken a phony, pandering position on abortion.
Poppy had to have enjoyed watching Dr. K get up and lavish praise on his old boss, after Mr. Ford had sniggered to Bob Woodward that the “coy” Bavarian diva had “the thinnest skin of any public figure I ever knew.”
W. graciously walked Betty Ford down the aisle, even as he must have curdled inside about her husband’s telling Mr. Woodward that it had been “a big mistake” on the part of W., Dick Cheney and Rummy to justify the Iraq war with nonexistent W.M.D. “I just don’t think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our own national security,” he said.
The only one missing from yesterday's event was Al Haig.
Apparently he had the good sense not to show up. (Was he even invited?)
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Ford both a man of the past and the future
One of the anchors on CNN made a sharp and insightful comment the other day about Gerald Ford.
His administration pointed both backward and forwards. In his ability to work with colleagues across the aisle he was decidedly a man of the past. But in the role his wife cut as a first lady his administration was decidedly in the forefront of change.
Betty Ford was thrust into the role of first lady. She never anticipated becoming first lady anymore than her husband ever anticipated becoming president of the United States. But she helped redefine the role.
The media are wrong to suggest she was much of an asset to her husband. She wasn't. She may well have cost him re-election, as Gil Troy argues in his fine book, Mr. & Mrs. President. The country wasn't ready for a first lady who tolerated premarital sex, embraced abortion, and championed the ERA. She was simply too liberal and too involved in policy for many Americans. Unlike most first ladies she wasn't always the most popular woman in the country. Good Housekeeping reported that Pat Nixon was far more popular.
After Betty Ford no first lady until Hillary Clinton dared take on a policy role and none were as free as she to express unpopular positions.
All the same she reinvented the "office" of first lady. Never again would a first lady simply stand by her man.
Both she and her husband did what they thought was right regardless of the political consequences. They were very much alike in that regard, though they were very different people: he was strong and ambitious, she was often a nervous wreck and undisciplined.
But just as historians like to give presidents credit for taking the country in a direction they should go but aren't quite ready for, we should also give Betty Ford credit for redefining the role of first lady.
As the NYT reports today, it may be that she had a more lasting impression on the country than he did.
Certainly she made more of a flourish. The GOP noted early on that audiences reacted strongly to her when she came into a room. Consultants who wanted to get on the ERA bandwagon cleverly put her in front of large audiences. Only when she began phoning up legislators in states like Florida which had yet to vote on the amendment did Republicans begin to have second thoughts. Betty by then couldn't be stopped. If the ERA had passed (it needed just five more states to become part of the Constitution) she would have received a large part of the credit.
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
What Gerald Ford tells us about American politics
Gerald Ford always said he never wanted to be president. Almost certainly, but for the twisted poliics of the Watergate Era, he never would have been.
This says something about Ford. But more importantly it says something about our political system. If Ford looks good in retrospect, we should wonder why a Ford couldn't get elected president.
David Broder said that Ford was the least neurotic president he knew. Is it possible to be a normal person and get elected president in this country? I have my doubts. A normal person wouldn't put themselves through what you have to go through to be elected president.
Ford was picked in a backroom deal, in effect, between Carl Albert, Mike Mansfield and Rchard Nixon. Do we get better people this way? If we do, what does that say about our system of mass politics. The more democratic it has become the wierder the people have been whom we elect. Cause and effect? Maybe.
Ford's two chief decisions as president were both taken in the face of public opinion. 1. His pardon of Nixon and 2. his decision not to pump up spending in 1976 when he faced Jimmy Carter. Both decisions look good in retrospect.
What dos it say abou our system that a president was punished for doing what was right?
We should take this moment to ponder this question. We spend so much time lionizing the system it is worth remembering how it fails us.
Thursday, December 21, 2006
Training armies
Am I the only person to notice the disconnect between the requirements for training the American army and the Iraqi army?
The Pentagon says that at best it can train an additional 5 to 7,000 new troops a year over and above what it has already planned for. Thus, it would take several years to raise troop strength by 35,000, the new goal.
At the same time the Pentagon is bragging about having "trained" some 100,000 Iraqi troops in the past twelve months or so.
Something's wrong here.
If anything, it should take less time to train Americans. For one thing, American troops can be counted on to be loyal to their country. So why is it taking us longer to train our troops than Iraqis?
The obvious answer is that our training is more involved. When the Pentagon says it is "training" Iraqis it doesn't mean it is TRAINING them as we train our own troops.
What does it mean?
That is anybody's guess.
The media need to find out what training Iraqi troops involves.
Where's Baron von Steuben when you need him?
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Quiz: Any other veep ever testify in court?
The NYT reports:"Cheney to Be Defense Witness in C.I.A. Leak Case."
And now the media want to know ... would Cheney be the first to testify in court while a sitting veep?
Anybody know?
I know of no other veep called to testify; Aaron Burr of course was indicted while a sitting veep for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel.
At least 8 presidents testified in court or answered questions put to them in a case under consideration by a court:
1. WHILE PRESIDENT: Jefferson was subpoened in the Aaron Burr case.
2. WHILE PRESIDENT: Monroe answered questions about a court martial case.
3. WHILE PRESIDENT: Grant filed a deposition in the case of his chief of staff, Orville Babcock, who was accused of fraud in the infamous Whiskey Ring. (Babcock was acquitted.)
4. WHILE PRESIDENT: Nixon answered questions put to him by lawyers for Ehrlichman. As an ex-president he testified before a grand jury investigating Watergate. He also testified on behalf of Mark Felt, who was later identified as Deep Throat.
5. WHILE PRESIDENT: Ford gave videotaped testimony in the trial of Squeaky Fromme.
6. WHILE PRESIDENT: Carter gave videotaped testimony against a Georgia state senator accused of corruption.
7. Reagan testified as an ex-president in the Iran-contra trial of Admiral Poindexter.
8. WHILE PRESIDENT: Bill Clinton testified before the grand jury convened by Kenneth Starr.
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Inside Bush's Brain
Jim Baker says he's not going to go there. Doesn't ever try to put presidents on the couch.
That's a good thing. We Bushes especially don't like to be psychoanalysed. What man of action does?
Anyway, I don't even let Laura inside my head and I certainly am not about to let Baker.
Right now in any case would be about the worst time to invite a visitor to roam around up there.
I am a little confused.
I thought after 9/11 that I knew why God had put me here. It was to rid the world of terrorism and to remake the Middle East. It was to liberate the people of Afghanistan and Iraq.
I did just what I thought God wanted. But it's a mess.
Instead of liberating the Iraqis I've created a hell on earth for them. Even Afghanistan looks like it might go to hell.
Maybe God is just testing my resolve. That's what my gut tells me.
If this were easy he'd have picked a different messenger. But he picked me because I'm one tough sonofagun.
Serving the Lord isn't easy. For five thousand years He's put the Jews through hell.
They haven't stopped to question whether they were the chosen people or not. So I'm not going to question whether God put me here to carry out this mission.
Still, I'm a little confused because I thought that by now the Iraqis would be doing better than they are.
Did I misread God's messages?
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Hillary and Obama
Time for some unconventional wisdom.
It is certainly true that it would be historic if either Hillary or Obama became president. It is already noteworthy that these two--a woman and a black man--are the two leading candidates for the Democratic nomination.
But the chief hurdle each faces has little to do with either their gender or race.
Hillary's problem is that she's a Clinton. (It's also true that her chief attraction as a candidate is that she's a Clinton.)
Obama's chief problem is his lack of experience.
Is America ready for a Madame President? Or a black president? I assume the country is. But rather than cheer at the prospect I wonder what took us so long.
India had a female leader 40 years ago.
Israel 30 years ago.
Great Britain 20 years ago.
America, sad to say, is more conservative than these other countries on this issue.
History Factoid: Nearly half the states did not allow women on juries as late as the 1940s. Only in 1973 did the Supreme Court decide that women MUST be allowed to serve on juries.
Yes, this is a pretty conservative country.
Thursday, December 7, 2006
One President. Two Commissions. He Wanted Neither.
Presidential commissions are almost always appointed at the behest of a president. What's notable about the two main commissions of the Bush presidency is that the administration resisted the creation of both of them. He resisted the creation of the 9/11 commission and scorned the establishment of the Baker-Hamilton commission.
That's why we are having this strange debate about whether or not he'll accept the findings of this commission.
Commissions usually are useful to presidents to help solve a political problem. Reagan turned to a commission after his administration bungled the reform of social security. Alan Greenspan came riding to the rescue, helping defuse a potentially politically fatal controversy.
Tuesday, December 5, 2006
Using political science to understand Bush
There's a useful political science insight into the way voters vote that is helpful in understanding President Bush.
For decades political scientists have observed that voters often base their decisions on the past. Not knowing what the future will bring, they look backward and cast their ballot on what they do know. Some will look back only four years, some will look back decades. Thus, in any one election, you will have some voters voting 1960, others 1932, and still others 1860. The year they pick tells you a lot about who they are, what values they cherish and the events that shaped their world view.
Applying this insight to President Bush, what do we find? I think it is that President Bush was shaped by two years: 1980 and 1992. This distinguishes him from so many members of his generation who were shaped by 1960 and 1968. But those years evidently mean little to Mr. Bush. 1980 appears to be very meaningful. He refers to Ronald Reagan's election frequently.
Why? He seems to like the Big Ideas of President Reagan. He especially seems to like the idea that a president can gamble with history and come out on top. He wanted his tax cuts to be like Reagan's and he wanted the war in Iraq to be like Reagan's. (The war would end terrorism once and for all as President Reagan helped bring an end to the Cold War once and for all.)
Then there's 1992. We know what happened then. His father lost. This president doesn't like to lose (who does?). But what lesson did he take away from the loss? It wasn't that he should fight dirty to win; he absorbed that lesson from his father in 1988. (As the first President Bush confided once, you do what you have to do in a campaign and then don't look back.) It was that you have to cater to your base.
We are all prisoners of our own world views. One reason President Bush may find it difficult to change in the face of changing circumstances is that 1980 and 1992 are so indelibly a part of his make-up that he cannot see that the lessons they seem to teach are inappropriate to the circumstances in which he now finds himself. He's a prisoner of the past in very much the same way that Iraqis are a prisoner of their past.
Sunday, December 3, 2006
Where Bush ranks as President
Over on the Breaking News page we posted this news item:
The Washington Post asked four historians to rank President Bush.
Eric Foner says flat out that Bush is "the worst ever."
David Greenberg says that Nixon is still the worst but Bush's record is certainly comparable.
Douglas Brinkley ranks Bush with Hoover.
Vincent J. Cannato says it's too early to tell.
Thursday, November 30, 2006
The Decider Has Decided
Will he or won't he change?
Well, now we have our answer.
The NYT reports: "Bush Dismisses Iraq Panel’s Pullback Plan."
As noted in an earlier blog, Bush faced two choices:
A. President Bush is basically an inflexible person. He will therefore remain comitted to the losing course he has chosen in Iraq and won't give up his goal of a democratic vision there. As he keeps saying, we will win as long as we have the will to win.
B. President Bush, worried about his legacy and the prospects of the Republican Party in 2008, will adopt the Baker-Hamilton commission recommendations, even if they radically change our goal and strategy, in the hope of ending the Iraq War in the next two years.
Assuming his announcment this morning is final, he's picked A.
Unfortunately, he's made the wrong choice.
We will suffer. Iraq will suffer.
And he will go down as one of the worse presidents in our history.
Note this date. It's a turning point.
Monday, November 20, 2006
What Bush will do about Iraq
Take your pick:
A. President Bush is basically an inflexible person. He will therefore remain comitted to the losing course he has chosen in Iraq and won't give up his goal of a democratic vision there. As he keeps saying, we will win as long as we have the will to win.
B. President Bush, worried about his legacy and the prospects of the Republican Party in 2008, will adopt the Baker-Hamilton commission recommendations, even if they radically change our goal and strategy, in the hope of ending the Iraq War in the next two years.
The answer?
I don't honestly know.
In recent weeks I have gone back and forth on the answer. One week I have felt confident that he is a man so rigid and self-righteous that he will refuse to make substantial adjustments in his Iraq policy. The next week I have been equally confident that he will give in to the pressure to end the war (or our involvement in it) by 2008 to help his party.
Both answers cannot be true. He must either change or stand pat. And yet I can make a strong case for both.
I am led to the conclusion that at this point the only thing one can say with confidence is that we know enough to know the right question but we don't know enough to say what the right answer is.
The right question is what kind of man is President Bush? Is he really a Christian zealot who believes he was put in the oval office to liberate 50 million people (the combined populations of Iraq and Afghanistan). Or is he really deep down just an ordinary politician worried about the next election (and his party's prospects in the election, which will substantially affect how he is viewed by his peers).
Before January 20, 2009 we will have our answer.
My hope is that he proves to be a politician. A politician will recognize reality and make needed adjustments. A zealot will take us down the holy road to hell.
Friday, November 17, 2006
A parallel between Iraq and the midterms
It's unseemly to find parallels between Iraq and the midterms. In Iraq real people are dying. In the midterms it was a political party licking its wounds.
All the same, there's one unstriking parallel and one striking parallel.
The unstriking parallel: In each case the strategy for victory failed. The striking parallel: In each case it's clear that no strategy may have been successful.
Sometimes (switching metaphors) you just have a bad hand.
Of course, in each case the Republicans dealt themselves the bad cards they held.
Both failures stem from a single decision: the decision to invade a country that hadn't attacked us.
How long will we have to wait for Bush to admit this?
Neither LBJ nor Nixon ever admitted they had erred. My guess is Bush won't either.
Now go and have a nice weekend.
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
America doesn't want to lose
It's official. The American people do not necessarily insist on winning the Iraq War but they sure as hell don't want to lose it.
I read this in the New York Times today. It must be true.
Here's the context:
Senator John McCain is accustomed to staking out a lonely piece of ground, but on Iraq he is virtually an army of one. Nearly alone among major political figures in calling for an increase in American forces in Iraq, Mr. McCain is either taking a principled stand or a huge political gamble. Or both.A majority of Americans now say they think invading Iraq was a mistake and would like to see the withdrawal of at least some of the nearly 150,000 troops there, polls say. Only one in seven Americans agrees with Mr. McCain that the United States should send more soldiers and marines. Even President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, who assert that victory is the only acceptable outcome of the war, have not dared publicly to advocate additional deployments....
Leslie H. Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said Mr. McCain had painted such a dire picture of the consequences of defeat that he almost had to advocate a more forceful effort to win. If Mr. McCain were to join the chorus of those agitating for a fast or slow withdrawal, he could alienate a large swath of voters he needs to win the Republican presidential nomination, Mr. Gelb added.
“He’s making the bet — and it’s not a crazy bet — that the country doesn’t want to lose,” he said. “The public realizes we can’t afford to win and probably can’t win, but it doesn’t want to lose. And the Republicans probably won’t nominate anyone who’s prepared to accept that now.”
Other analysts said Mr. McCain was risking his reputation as a realist and someone who knows when to fold a losing hand by sticking obstinately to his current position.
“He would just repeat the mistake of Vietnam,” said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution, the liberal-leaning research group in Washington. “If McCain refuses to acknowledge that some wars can become simply unwinnable, he may be exposing a weakness in his thinking that ultimately deprives him of the presidency.”
This is an event worth noting.
40 years ago President Lyndon Johnson stuck it out in Vietnam because he was convinced the American people would insist on winning. Now we are ready simply not to lose.
That's a measure of the effect of Vietnam on American mythology. Losing is still unthinkable but "not winning" is no longer essential.
Midterm Numbers
Here's a shameless plug for an article I posted on the HNN homepage.
Don't miss it. Click here:
http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/31774.html
It's Richard Neumann's analysis of election stats.
Chief Finding: " The Democrats were robbed in both the Senate and the House."
Judging by the number of votes Democratic candidates actually won, their majorities in both houses should be far larger. In the House the D's should have won 250 seats at least based on their winning between 53 and 54 percent of the national vote.
In the Senate D's will now represent 95 million voters over the R's 85 million.
What stopped D's from picking up overwhelming majorities in both houses? Our old friends: Gerrymandering in the HR and Sherman's Compromise in the Senate.
Thursday, November 9, 2006
The Two George W. Bushes: Which One Will Prevail?
There are two Bushes. There is the governor who worked well with Democrats in Texas. And there is the president who has scorned bipartisanship.
Which one will we now see?
I'm guessing we'll see the same Bush we've seen for the last six years.
First, presidents usually don't change their stripes once in office. They assume that the approach they have taken while president is what got them where they are, so why change? I know of no president who suddenly reinvented himself in office. By their sixth year the die is cast.
Second, were Bush to change he would seem inauthentic. We would be left wondering just who he is. This would unnerve his supporters.
Third, he has more reason now than ever to please his base. Without them he has no support at all. He cannot afford to alienate them. Catering to them while striking a bipartisan note is almost impossible.
Fourth, as we go forward from here he will be sorely tempted to blame the collapse of Iraq on the Democrats. He will be looking for every excuse he can to claim that their policies and statements are undermining American morale and giving hope to the enemy. He cannot pursue this approach at the same time that he is making nice to the Democrats (though he will pretend to be making nice to them in order to claim later that he did everything he could to meet them halfway).
I therefore predict that he will continue to make bipartisan noises but will not seriously engage the opposition.
Wednesday, November 8, 2006
The restaurant law of history
I know I should be talking about the election. That's what readers are interested in today. But I can't help talking about Iraq after reading Tom Friedman's column today in the NYT. And anyway Iraq is what the election was about.
Friedman says that Iraq was "always a struggle of hope against history." He's right. That's why I opposed the war from the start and am shocked that anybody after 9/11 supported it. What 9/11 should have taught us is that we have to take a cold-eyed look at things and accept them as they are and not as we would wish them to be.
In the only editorial HNN has ever published, we said this after 9/11:
Bush faces a Democratic Congress
Well, once again we have divided government.
It's back to normal.
Of the last six presidents, going back nearly 40 years, only one has not faced a Congress where at least one house was held by the opposite party. (The exception was Carter, who found one-party government wasn't all its cracked up to be.)
Of the 43 presidents of the United States, 33 came in with majorities in both houses of Congress. 18 (including Bush II) lost at least one branch during their term in office.
So what has happened this year is hardly anomalous.
That said, the election is a watershed moment. Few presidents have been as soundly rebuked by the people as Bush has in this election, which, judging from the polls, turned on Iraq more than any other issue.
Bush bet his presidency on Iraq. As Tim Russert said this morning on NBC News, he lost it last night.
Well, that may be an overstatement.
It will be years before we can say for sure if he won or lost his bet. But the odds are Russert's right.
Friday, November 3, 2006
A week of hope and despair about American democracy
Two stories this week point in opposite directions. Take your pick as to which you think is more telling about American democracy.
Early in the week the substantive debate the country has been having about the Iraq War was blown off the front pages by a silly dust-up involving Sen. Kerry's poorly-worded joke about President Bush. Until he finally apologized the media wouldn't leave it alone. It almost felt like 2004 all over again. Bush v. Kerry. Help!
Later in the week came the NYT/CBS poll indicating that "80 percent said Mr. Bush’s latest effort to rally public support for the conflict amounted to a change in language but not policy.” This was a relief to hear. For once the public wasn't being bamboozled by the White House.
The question is: which of these two is more representative of the state of our democracy?
Thursday, November 2, 2006
Mea Culpa: When history is a bad guide to elections
It's confession time.
This was how I opened an article in the Baltimore Sun in 1998:
So much in life is unpredictable that I instinctively refrain from ever making predictions. Will the stock market continue its downward trend? I don’t know and refuse to guess. Will Yeltsin finish his term? Don’t know that either. But I can tell you with the utmost certainty that this November, no matter how the public eventually comes to feel about Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp, Kenneth Starr or Bill Clinton, the Republicans are not only going to hang onto their majority in Congress, they are going to add to it.
Monday, October 30, 2006
Why Democrats Will Win
I am not predicting that Democrats will sweep the elections in both the House and the Senate. But political science findings over the years confirm that when people are discontented they shift parties.
It doesn't matter what Democrats say they are FOR. Voters will vote for them because they are AGAINST what the majority party has done.
People don't vote for something so much as they vote against something.
Elections are referendums on the past. As V.O. Key noted in The Responsible Electorate (1966):
Critics of the American party system fret because the minority party does not play the role of an imaginative advocate heralding the shape of a new world. In truth, it gains votes most notably from among those groups who are disappointed by, who disapprove of, or who regard themselves as injured by, the actions of the Administration. The opposition can maximize its strength as it centers its fire on those elements of the Administration program disliked by the largest numbers of people.
Given the lengthy list of what's gone wrong recently--Iraq, Katrina, budget deficits, out of control spending, etc.--voters are naturally inclined to favor Democrats.
The election is not so much about the Democrats as it is about the Republicans. Before a single campaign ad was broadcast the Republicans were in for a shellacking.
Sunday, October 29, 2006
Burying Private Ryan
Why did Private Ryan do so well and Flags of Our Fathers so poorly at the box office?
Today the NYT tackles this question in a thoughtful piece by David Halbfinger.
Halbfinger surmises that during a war a movie about war is less appealing since real dead bodies are omnipresent. So it's no surprise that Flags is flagging.
It was easy, says one Ryan fan, to feel nostalgic for WW II when you "could put sort of a mental distance to it. Now if you see it happening on the sands of Iwo Jima, you know it's happening in Iraq, at the same time, and for a lot less noble cause."
No doubt all this is true. But there's another reason Flags isn't attracting much of an audience. It's not that the movie has come out too late to catch the WW II nostalgia craze. It's that it's come out too soon to catch the inevitable disgust-with-war craze.
We're not yet ready for Deer Hunter.
And this movie is in the same vein. While the movie celebrates the war the soldiers are fighting the undertow of doubt about the way it was sold is what drives the story line. And this parallels too closely what happened in the Iraq War.
Thursday, October 26, 2006
On Systemic Failures
Ok, I am going to try again.
What's wrong with Obama's candidacy?
It's that the very idea of his candidacy isn't shocking. It should be shocking to any proponent of rational governance given his meager experince. But we are so far from expecting rationality in American politics that we accept as a given that it is irrational.
Let me cast my net wider than I have been in this discussion by quoting (hold your fire liberals) Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation.
After the Iran-contra calamity he made a trenchant observation:
... our current system institutionalizes amateurism. Unlike European parliamentary democracies, we have no 'shadow cabinet,' no group of experts who are groomed by their party for decades before they take office. Our presidents can be peanut farmers or Hollywood actors........ If we are going to be a serious nation, we need a serious system for selecting our leaders and advisors.
Weyrich believed we needed to establish a shadow government. I am not sure about the wisdom of that suggestion. But I am sure that we all ought to be thinking hard about what's wrong with our system if serious people can suggest Obama should be taken seriously as a candidate for the presidency of the United States.
Again, it's not Obama who's the problem. It's us. It's us for being so desperate for idealism that we are willing to consider his candidacy seriously. And it's us for not realizing instantly that any system that produces an Obama candidacy is seriously (insert dirty word here) ______.
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Obama Fever: Once More
I have been surprised by the number of people who think Obama should run despite his inexperience.
I conclude that the Obama boomlet tells us more about us as a nation than it does about him as a candidate.
We are desperate for somebody in whom to believe.
We have been here before.
In 1976 Americans were depressed by Watergate and Vietnam and desperate for fresh leadership. Answering their call was Jimmy Carter, another bright and articulate candidate from the hinterlands with little experience.
I ask you. Do you still feel good about voting for Jimmy Carter as president?
(I should hasten to add that I'd vote for him for ex-president in a jiffy. He's been one of the best ex-presidents we've had.)
Obama might make a better president than Carter did. But before I buy the car he's selling I'd like to take it out for a spin first.
Sunday, October 22, 2006
Obama Fever
Mr. Shenkman is the editor of HNN and the author of Presidential Ambition.
(Click here and here for more recent POTUS blogs on this subject.)
I was hoping the Democrats' Obama fever would break quickly. If it's going to happen there's no sign of it yet. It's Obama Obama Obama. Everywhere Obama.
I have nothing against Obama. In fact, I like him. What's not to like? Anybody who can run the Harvard Law Review and sound as articulate and intelligent as the charismatic Obama should be considered a comer.
But presidential material? Come on, Democrats. Let's get serious. Put the US government in the hands of someone who's been a senator for all of two years?
Frank Rich in today's Times says that Obama's short resume should be no more of a bar to running than Bush's was. Huh? Now we are going to use Bush as the gold standard against which to compare future presidents?
The reverse is what's needed. Anybody like Bush we should run away from.
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
So Bush can't control the price of oil?
The other night the CBS Evening News (do they still call it that?) reported that there is no way President Bush could control the price of oil ... no way, in other words, that he could lower the price in the months before the midterm elections to help fellow Republicans retain their mortal grip on Congress as so many conspiracy nuts surmise.
Whaaaaaaaaaat?
There is abundant evidence that presidents for years have been influencing the price of oil. It's one of the few commodities whose price they can affect.
All they have to do is call up the Saudi ambassador and ask them to increase the supply of oil.
This is something they do from time to time.
As Bob Woodward reports in STATE OF DENIAL (read it, read it!), p. 287:
Prince Bandar was back in the Oval Office on Friday, February 20, 2004, to meet with Bush, Rice and Card. ... Bush repeated his appreciation for the Crown Prince's vision and efforts on democratic reform. "Maybe the speed of this process could be sort of expedited," Bush said, agreeing that the reforms had to be homegrown. He then thanked Bandar for what the Saudis were doing on oil--essentially flooding the market and trying to keep the price as low as possible. He expressed appreciation for the policy and the impact it could have during the election year.
Woodward doesn't say but it's obvious his source for this account is Bandar. I have no reason to doubt it.
I have no idea if President Bush has asked the Saudis to flood the market this election year or not. He might not even have to. The Saudis certainly know what would be of help to the Republicans without anyone so much as making a simple phone call. All I am saying is that it is ridiculous for CBS and others to maintain that the president has no power to influence the price of a gallon of gasoline. That's foolishness.
Condi Rice plays Henry Kissinger
Over on the HNN homepage I posted an account last night of a lecture by Vassar historian Robert Brigham:
http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/30895.html
Brigham contends that Secretary of State Rice has hopes of arranging an old-fashioned 19th century deal (think: Congress of Vienna) to settle the Iraq mess.
She's playing Kissinger in other words. Instead of getting China and Russia to help out with Vietnam, she gets Syria and Iran to help out with Iraq.
If she pulls this off she will have outdone Kissinger, who never had to contend with non-state actors as key players. All of the groups fighting the Americans in Vietnam were controlled by Hanoi.
What I want to see is how she'd sell this deal to the American public. She and Bush have employed such idealistic rhetoric in defense of their policies that it is hard to see how they could turn around now and settle on an openly Machiavellian approach. Maybe they won't admit what they are doing. But then what will they say in public about their approach? They have to say something.
It will be fascinating to watch.
Saturday, October 14, 2006
Want the Iraq War to End? Elect a Republican Congress in Nov.
What's wrong with this logic? Nothing that I can see:
If the Democrats come to power in November Bush will have the excuse he needs for failure in Iraq: The Democrats are to blame.
It won't matter what the Democrats say or do, Bush will blame them for the fiasco there. And as long as he can blame somebody else for his failures he'll stay in Iraq.
If the Republicans win they will have to accept responsibility for Iraq. Ergo: They will have to get out by 2008. There is no way they will be able to go to the country in 2008 if the war is still going on.
Conclusion: The anti-war vote this election is to vote Republican.
Heaven help us all.
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Bush--Conservative Pariah?
Peter Beinart takes on the rightwingers who now want to disavow Bush, claiming he's not a conservative.
Here's what Beinart says about Bush's spending reputation:
"To listen to Bush's critics, you would think that discretionary, nonsecurity-related spending has exploded on his watch. But it hasn't. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has shown, when you take account of inflation and population growth, it grew a mere 2 percent between 2001 and 2006. And, as a percentage of GDP, it actually fell. What has exploded--rising 32 percent after inflation and population growth--is spending on defense, homeland security, and international affairs. And the people most responsible for those increases are conservatives themselves, who demanded an expansive war on terrorism. "
Click here to read the full piece.
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Frank Rich, Historian
Last night I had the pleasure of seeing Frank Rich at Seattle's beautiful Benaroya Hall. I enjoyed his lecture and agreed with his main observations about the failures of the media and our culture. But he's not much of a historian.
He dates the transformation of America's media-driven culture to the debut of Roots, which began, he says, the blurring of the line between fact and fiction. Since then, he argues, Hollywood values have driven out journalistic values, placing a premium on pandering, ratings, storylines and the like rather than the investigation of facts. Now even ours wars come with packaged music and special graphics.
Monday, October 2, 2006
Foley off to Rehab ... The Oldest Story in the Modern Pol's Playbook
Mark Foley hasn't a prayer of public redemption. But he's following the pol's traditional playbook by checking himself into rehab and claiming he has an alcohol problem.
Of course, he didn't troll for teenage boys because he is an alcoholic. He became alcoholic because he wanted to go after teenage boys and knew he shouldn't.
(Note: I am told by a CNN producer that friends are saying they never saw him drink, period, so it may be that he actually doesn't have a problem with alcohol.)
Pols who have been caught in scandal always look for ways to redeem themselves. But it's only in the modern period that they have taken refuge in the bosom of the alcohol treatment center.
Sunday, October 1, 2006
Foley on Clinton
Without comment.
"It's vile. It's more sad than anything else, to see someone with
such potential throw it all down the drain because of a sexual
addiction."
--Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL), commenting on President Clinton, following release of the Starr Report, September 12, 1998.
Hat Tip: Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo
Thursday, September 28, 2006
CRS study: Bush's signing statements are an afront to Congress
We posted over in the Breaking News Department a link to a new CRS study that concludes that the Bush administration is using signing statements to significantly tilt power back to the executive in dangerous ways.
Click here:
http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/30317.html
1 out of 10: Congress: 2 President: 8
Had the Senate troika of McCain, Warner and Graham not stepped in to confront Mr. Bush's aggrandizement of power in the fight over detentions Congress would have merited a black eye. But even with their changes to the proposed law on detentions the administration still has far too much power to lock people up it suspects of terrorist connections.
So much of the NYT coverage has been written badly it was hard to figure out just how much the administration was giving up. Thankfully, the Times editorial board has sorted out the issues in this timely and concise piece.
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Bush Seeks Retroactive Immunity for Violating War Crimes Act
This is the headline above an article by Elizabeth Holtzman, the former prosecutor who's been angling for Bush's impeachment.
Here's the case she makes:
"Thirty-two years ago, President Gerald Ford created a political firestorm by pardoning former president Richard Nixon of all crimes he may have committed in Watergate - and lost his election as a result. Now, President Bush, to avoid a similar public outcry, is quietly trying to pardon himself of any crimes connected with the torture and mistreatment of US detainees."
She's got a point.
Click here:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/092706J.shtml
Saturday, September 23, 2006
The People: A Great Beast?
Historians often have quibbles with the way Noam Chomsky uses history.
Here's another reason why.
In the (new) Amazon bestseller, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, which the NYT excerpts today, Chomsky says:
Those who want to face their responsibilities with a genuine commitment to democracy and freedom — even to decent survival — should recognize the barriers that stand in the way. In violent states these are not concealed. In more democratic societies barriers are more subtle. While methods differ sharply from more brutal to more free societies, the goals are in many ways similar: to ensure that the “great beast,” as Alexander Hamilton called the people, does not stray from its proper confines.
Hamilton did not hold The People in high regard. But did he refer to them as a "great beast"?
I well remember my Vassar College history professor, Jerry Frost, promising us a prize if we could find where Hamilton made this remark. He could safely offer an award. No one has ever found any evidence that Hamilton made the statement.
Andrew Jackson, Cocaine User
NYT columnist John Tierney has been criticized lately for repeating himself. He's getting hoarse saying that drugs should be legalized. Today, once again, he repeats his message. (Click here to read his column--if, that is, you hold the keys to the Magic Kingdom of 42nd Street.)
His problem is that his material is getting stale. How many times must we be told that the war on drugs has been lost and that it is turning honest farmers into outlaws? How many times must we hear the tired analogies with Prohibition? I suggest that Tierney try a new approach. He can begin by talking about Andrew Jackson's use of cocaine. (How's that for a tease. Click on the READ MORE button if you want to know more about this.)
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
The Curious Passivity of Mr. Bush
Week after week the evidence piles up indicating that our generals in Iraq do not know how to win (however winning is defined).
And week after week Mr. Bush insists he will not replace them.
I do not know if anybody can achieve "victory" in Iraq but I am struck by Mr. Bush's passivity in the face of tragedy and defeat. Almost any other president by now would have held his generals accountable for failure and replaced them. Lincoln famously replaced general after general until he finally found a general who would fight (Grant, of course).
But not Mr. Bush.
This is curious.
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Clinton in the New Yorker
Huffington Post has a good summary of the David Remnick profile of Bill Clinton in the New Yorker.
Money quote: "I am sick of Karl Rove's bullshit." -- Bill Clinton
Sunday, September 17, 2006
Why politics are soooooooooo polarized
Why has President Bush been able to govern by catering to his base rather than to the middle? Isn't this approach a serious break with the past--or at least with conventional wisdom? Aren't pols supposed to cater to the base in primaries and then in general elections cater to the middle--and to continue catering to the middle after they take office?
An answer to these questions can apparently be found in Thomas Edsall's new book, Building Red America.
Here's the money quote from the NYT review:
Securing the base, Mr. Edsall argues, became a central Republican strategy, especially after Mr. Bush’s chief pollster, Matt Dowd, sent a memo to Karl Rove, the Republican mastermind, in the wake of the highly contested 2000 presidential vote. The memo — which declared that the center of the electorate had collapsed, that true swing voters made up a mere 6 percent of the electorate — destroyed, in Mr. Edsall’s words, “the rationale for Bush to govern as ‘a uniter, not a divider,’ ” as he had promised. Instead, it “freed Bush to discard centrist strategies” and promote “polarizing policies designed explicitly to appeal to the conservative Republican core.”
John Yoo: Drinking the Koolaid
Don't miss John Yoo's NYT op ed, excerpted on HNN:
http://hnn.us/roundup/12.html#29973
It's hilarious.
The presidency, he contends, was weakened in Watergate. Thanks to President Bush, it's now once again strong and resiliant.
Actually ...
Friday, September 15, 2006
Bush and Torture
Perhaps President Bush should visit a torture museum.
I did this summer. It was a devastating experience. One evil treatment for homosexuals involved hanging a man by his heals and then using a two-handed 6 foot saw to litrerally cut him in half, beginning in the crotch.
I was repulsed by the exhibit.
How, I wondered, could anyone justify the treatment? There was no shortage of justifications: God hates sodomites. Sodomites are evil. Children must be protected from sodomites.
At the bottom of all of the explanations was the belief that the torturers were good people and the tortured were bad people. Once that sharp line had been drawn between them anything was justifiable. Anything good people do is perforce legitimate.
Thursday, September 14, 2006
Impeach Bush?
If you have wondered whatever happened to the Impeach Bush movement that drew so much attention in the spring, well, it's still going.
A typical example of the indictment appears on the leftwing website, Counterpunch: "Five Years of High Crimes and Misdemeanors." (http://www.counterpunch.org)
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
The abc's of the ABC controversy
Still haven't watched the docudrama, but one point needs to be made now before I forget.
If Clinton failed to focus on UBL in 1998 and 1999 and 2000 the Republicans share part of the blame. As I have noted repeatedly the impeachment of Clinton always came with a price that Republicans were unwilling to acknowledge. In a complicated world it served as a distraction for both the media and the political establishment. And although it often seemed like opera bouffe the consequences were serious.
A contrary viewpoint is expressed at Media Matters by Jamison Foser, who argues that Clinton never allowed impeachment to distract him. I find his accumulation of evidence fascinating but unconvincing.
Clinton, Albright, ABC and the Truth
How's that for a catchy title?
I haven't yet had a chance to watch the broadcast. I've TiVo'ed it and plan to watch it later this week.
But there's a fascinating take on the show by a blogger named Farangi. Click here. (Thanks to Ralph Luker for the tip at Cliopatria.)
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Juan Cole on Bush
Is Bush a narcissist?
Juan Cole makes the case at Informed Comment.
Monday, August 21, 2006
You go into an election with the candidates you have
It is ridiculous, I admit, to be talking about 2008. But because I was asked to comment on the election I began thinking about it seriously.
From our vantage point today it appears to me that 2008 will either be 1920 or 1952.
In 1920 the country repudiated Wilsonianism and highfalutin make-the-world-safe-for-democracy rhetoric. After several years of war Americans simply wanted to return to normalcy. Trading in their soldiers' uniforms for shirts and ties and coveralls, they went to work and made money.
In 1952 the country was in the middle of a war (Korea) and the country once again was tired of high-flown rhetoric. They wanted the war to end and they wanted to get on with their lives. But unlike 1920, they were not prepared to shuck their global responsibilities and withdraw ostrich-like behind Fortreess America.
Thursday, August 10, 2006
Disarming Hezbollah
I have one question for Condi Rice and everybody else who is demanding that the Lebanese government disarm Hezbollah.
If the United States of America can't disarm the militia of Muqtada al-Sadr in Iraq, how can wwe expect Lebanon to do so?
We have been trying for 3 years. We have spent upwards of $300 billion. And we have had the use of an army of 140,000 soldiers.
Lebanon has nowhere near our resources or unity.
So I ask again: How can we expect them to do so?
Wednesday, August 9, 2006
Functioning Democracy in Iraq
Max Boot writes in the Weekly Standard (http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/29076.html) that a functioning democracy may yet somehow, someway, who knows, emerge in Iraq.
Whether that is possible or not, should that be our goal?
I should have thought that by now, after Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, we would have gotten over the infatuation with democracy. What we want in the states of the Middle East are regimes that foster liberty. LIBERTY. If we are lucky democracy will follow. But first must come a respect for liberty.
Readers may think--what's the difference. Aren't they the same?
In America they end up being the same. But if we remember our history we will remember that a love of liberty preceded democratic norms.
This is too big a topic for a blog. I just thought I'd mention it.
Thursday, August 3, 2006
Signing Statements
We have heard from the American Bar Association about Bush's signing statements.
Now we have heard from some of the country's leading law professors. They also object to the Bush practice, but on different grounds.
Click here:
http://gulcfac.typepad.com
Dereliction of Duty ?
Reading Thomas Ricks's monumental book about the Iraq War--FIASCO--I couldn't help but think about H.R. McMaster's DERELICTION OF DUTY.
In Vietnam top military brass harbored great doubts about the war plans of the civilian leeadership--and largely kept quiet. Then they mislead Congress about those plans, claiming we had not shifted to an offensive war when we had (in 1965).
In the lead up to the Iraq War, once again top brass harbored grave doubts about the war plans drawn up by the civilian leadership (in this case, by Rumsfeld in league with a bamboozled Tommy Franks) and spoke out on occasion (as Army Secretary Shinseki did).
Different responses, but the same outcome: mess.
One of the post-mortems on this war will have to be rethinking the military's relationship to civilian leadership. How many more wars do we have to fight where the civilian leadership ignores the objections of the military officials who have to wage their wars?
Tuesday, August 1, 2006
Where does W. rank?
Over at Big Tent they're having fun rating presidents. Stephen Tootle has George W in the top 12 (ahead of Clinton, Cleveland, his father).
That's at odds with HNN historians, who in a poll 2 years ago ranked W. as among the worst in our history.
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
About Those Signing Statements
Reading the American Bar Association task force report on the history of signing statements has changed my mind about them.
Click here:
http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/28588.html
The report persuades me that Bush's use of them is iniqitous. I urge readers to read the long excerpt we published on HNN.
While other presidents issued occasional signing statements most of these indicated presidents' support for the measures they signed. Only on a limited number of occasions did presidents indicate they opposed the measure they were signing and on only a tiny number of occasions did presidents indicate they wouldn't carry out a particular provision.
Bush has gone further. He has objected to more than 100 laws (while signing them!) and promised not to carry out dozens of provisions. Like a king he refuses to provide a detailed accounting of his actions. It is apparently a matter between him and God. So we don't really know what provisions he has ignored or the circumstances.
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Bush's View
President Bush in his whispered comment to Blair indicated he thinks the way out of the Lebanon mess is for Syria to tell Hezbollah to ... cut it out for crissakes.
Juan Cole says this is simplistic.
Syria doesn't control Hezbollah anymore than the US controls Israel.
Both rely on the money and support of their patron, but neither is wholly dependent on their patron.
Both are preoccupied first and foremost with their own publics. Whatever they do they will do with one eye on their patron and both hands on their publics. Publics come first.
Is Condi Rice explaining this to the president? Or is he free to think whatever he likes without guidance?
Friday, July 14, 2006
Guess Who?
He's a graduate student at one of America's most prestigeous business schools.
He is the leader of his class basketball team.
Without provocation, he hits the leader of the opposing team in the jaw to stop him from making a shot. A few minutes later, he blocks another shot by the same man by smashing his legs on a jump shot.
Years later after both had become successful businessmen, the fellow who'd been struck twice was still wondering what the hell all that had been about. One day he happened to run into the man's brother, now the governor of a state. Could he explain it?
Well, yes. You see, in Texas there are people who get satisfaction from being hard. This was an example of Texas hardness.
This explains a lot, I think.
Source: Ron Suskind's new book, The One Percent Doctrine.
Rove, Libby, Novak
Now he has spoken. Finally, Robert Novak has explained that he 1. cooperated with Prosecutor Fitzgerald (we knew this all along, didn't we?), 2. gave up his sources (he says he did this after he learned Fitzgerald already knew their names).
If you want the details read David Corn's column in the Nation. Corn was the first journalist to argue that the leak of Plame's name was a crime.
http://www.thenation.com
Thursday, July 13, 2006
Is Bush Smart Enough to Be President?
The Chronicle of Higher Ed reports that a psych prof at UC Davis, Dean Keith Simonton, has measured the IQ of every president. Bush ranks (just above Harding) at somewhere between 111.1 and 138.5. The smartest president? John Quincy Adams (between 165 and 175).
How can you measure the IQ's of presidents who never took the standard IQ tests? I have no idea. The Chronicle summary doesn't say how Simonton justifies his assessments. His results are published in the current edition of Political Psychology under the title, "Presidential IQ, Openness, Intellectual Brilliance, and Leadership: Estimates and Correlations for 42 U.S. Chief Executives." Unfortunately, the article is only available to subscribers.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Bush's Blinders
At one of the most important moments of his presidency--his meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah at the Crawford ranch in the spring of 2005--the president failed to address any of the points the Saudis had indicated beforehand they wanted to discuss. Shrewd bargaining? Not according to Ron Suskind's new book (which I heartily recommend): The One Percent Doctrine. Bush didn't address the Saudi's agenda because he hadn't been told about it. The Saudi wish list had gone to Cheney not Bush.
As Suskind puts it, this was a major blunder. This was arguably in the age of terrorism one of the most important meetings Bush was to have.
Simple oversight? Suskind's story is that Cheney is driving our foreign policy. This story is just one of many examples he uses to make the case.
Monday, July 10, 2006
Cheney's Cheney
If Bush relies on Cheney, who does Cheney rely on? It's a fellow named David Addington, a sharp super smart lawyer whose hidden hand has been behind the torture policy, Guantanamo, military commissions, etc.
You can read all about him in the New Yorker's fascinating profile, "The Hidden Power: The legal mind behind the White House’s war on terror," by Jane Mayer.
Friday, July 7, 2006
Don't Miss This
E.J. Dionne has an analysis of the Mexican election that should (but won't) have Republican partisans saying, "hey, wait, a minute, what are you saying?"
The money quote:
Sunday, July 2, 2006
CBS story an embarrassment
I have wanted to give CBS White House reporter Jim Axelrod some time to mature before criticizing him (he's only been on the beat a few months). But restraint is no longer in order. His story tonight set a new low standard in mainstream journalism.
In his two minute propaganda story about the president turning 60, Axelrod used every superlative in the English language to remind the audience how fit Mr. Bush is. This is a feat, said Axelrod, who noted that the presidency has destroyed the health of other presidents like LBJ and Nixon.
A feat?
I would expect that any president who has presided over as many disasters as this one has would be damn near broken. That Mr. Bush has retained his health by daily exercise (up to two hours) and a famous indifference to details (he lets others do the heavy lifting) is his special talent. But should we be celebrating it?
A month or two of vacation every year?
And in bed by 8:30pm at night?
We should all lead such lives.
Friday, June 30, 2006
Is Karl Rove Losing Iraq?
Don't miss Peter Beinart's New Republic piece, which is summarized in TNR's newsletter this way: "How Karl Rove is losing Iraq."
Opening paragraph:
"Why doesn't George W. Bush want to win in Iraq? Seriously. The past several weeks have forced him to choose between two big goals: demonizing Democrats to help the GOP retain control of Congress and fostering a domestic climate that gives the new Iraqi government the best chance to survive. And, again and again, he has chosen door number one. This is what ex-Bush officials like Paul O'Neill and John DiIulio warned us about--and what Hurricane Katrina reaffirmed: that what matters in this administration is not policy, but politics. For all his talk about America's historical mission to defeat tyranny and spread freedom, there is only one mission to which George W. Bush has shown consistent devotion: winning elections. He acts less like the president than like the head of the Republican National Committee."
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Presidential Signing Statements
Yesterday the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing to examine the president's use of so-called signing statements.
Click here for the Senate testimony.
Click here for a news story in the Wa Po.
Monday, June 26, 2006
Latest Outrages
Must be something about Mondays. I always seem to begin my week with a fresh outrage or two.
1. You might have missed Ben Stein's column in the Sunday NYT Business section. It shows that his sense of humor is exceptional. Stein, the former Nixon aide who has been lionizing George W for years now says that the new treasury secretary has to raise taxes or face the possibility of American economic ruin. Stein notes that if we don't do something our bond rating will fall to junk status by 2020.
To which I add: NOW he has finally figured this out?
Thursday, June 22, 2006
Gerson's departure
David Kusnet in TNR mourns the departure of Bush speech writer Michael Gerson. But, hey, it might be for the best anyway. While Gerson's speeches were written plainly in Bushspeak and therefore passed the plausibility test, they also promised too much:
Can Democrats win without the South
The blogosphere is debating the Democrats' prospects for victory in the South. James Cobb over at HNN's Cliopatria blog says that liberal Dems who focus on the differences they have with mainstream Southerners on gay rights, abortion and labor issues will doom the party to defeat.
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Cheney: Last Throes
Should the media call Cheney a liar for saying no one anticipated the level of violence that has made life in Iraq a misery?
Howard Kurtz in the Wa Po tackles this question. Here's the money quote:
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Cheney, Cheney, Cheney
Three stories about Cheney to report.
1. Dan Froomkin in the Wa Po reports that Ron Suskind's new book documents Cheney's supremacy in Bush foreign policy.
2. Cheney has confessed to pulling a practical joke on a NYT reporter he hated back in '76 during the Ford presidency. It shows Cheney's mean side.
3. Cheney says he stands by his 'Last Throes" comment.
Bush's Credibility Gap Just Got Wider
The Wa Po reports that a secret cable signed by US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad indicates that the security situation in Iraq is deplorable and getting worse. (Click here for analysis.)
Wasn't it just the other day that Bush said things are looking up? "The progress here in Iraq has been remarkable when you really think about it."
The Cunning Realist compares the cable with George F. Kennan's famous X gram. Kennan warned prophetically that the government had to be truthful about the communist threat:
Our first step must be to apprehend, and recognize for what it is, the nature of the movement with which we are dealing. We must study it with same courage, detachment, objectivity, and same determination not to be emotionally provoked or unseated by it, with which doctor studies unruly and unreasonable individual.
Bush seems to have modelled his approach on LBJ's. That is, to be as untruthful as one can get away with.
Here & There
The Sunday New York Times carried 2 stories of particular interest to readers of this blog.
James Traub in the Magazine explained why George W. isn't William McKinley, contrary to Karl Rove's contention.
In the Week in Review Mark Leibovich wrote a fun story about the latest pol to throw their hat in the presidential ring: Tom Tancredo. Tom Who? He's the obscure Colorado congressman who wants to build a wall on the Mexican border. Tancredo's not serious about running. But just being mentioned has raised his profile. A Democrat quoted in the piece says it can't hurt unless something weird happens. This is big loophole. Joe Biden still hasn't lived down the Neil Kinnock plagiarism of the 1988 campaign.
And on PBS there's the new Frontline show, "The Dark Side." Hmm. Who? Three guesses. Let me give you a hint. He's the John Foster Dulles of this administration. (Hint: As Stephen Kinzer explains in June's HNN Book of the Month, Dulles was so sure that Guatemala's Arbenz was a communist he got Ike to order the overthrow of the Central American government even though there was no shred of evidence in support of his suspicions. Dulles was convinced that Moscow was behind Arbenz's nationalistic program. It wasn't.)
Monday, June 19, 2006
Outrage of the Week
This week's outrage (and it's only Monday!):
Wa Po headline: Obama's Profile Has Democrats Taking Notice
Popular Senator Is Mentioned as 2008 Contender
Are Democrats nuts? Of course, this country elected Carter (1 term governor of Georgia) and Bush II (5 years experience as a governor) so we shouldn't be surprised by anything the parties do. Irresponsibility is birpartisan.
But really.
Thursday, June 15, 2006
Bush--Power Grab?
Elizabeth Drew has an interesting piece in the NY Review of Books: Power Grab.
The money quote:
Bush Plans Vast Protected Sea Area in Hawaii
This is the headline in today's NYT.
More Americans should know how we came to possess Hawaii. I recommend for starters Stephen Kinzer's Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, which is HNN's Book of the Month. The first chapter is about Hawaii.
As Kinzer explains, Hawaii was the first country whose government the US government overthrew. The story begins with the idealistic missionaries who came to Hawaii in the middle of the 19th century, two of whom (Castle & Cook) decided after a spell that sugar planting was both more profitable and interestng than missionary work. By the end of the century the white planters controlled the monarchy through a pliant king and all was well (for the whites). Then the king died, his sister took over, and she threatened to impose a constitution restricting the vote to native Hawaiians.
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Bush Is No Truman
Max Boot says in today's LAT that the liberals should stop their carping and admit that Bush and Truman have a lot in common. If anything, says Boot, Truman was the lone wolfe in foreign policy while Bush is a multilaterlist.
I am no great fan of Truman's. But this is turning history upside down. If Boot were teaching in a Florida school no doubt he'd have to be fired for practicing revisionism. (See Jonathan Zimmerman's essay on the HNN homepage, which also appeared in the LAT.)
The man who founded the UN and NATO cannot in any way be compared with the man who appointed the UN-bashing John Bolton.
Monday, June 12, 2006
The most popular president is (drum roll) ...
Dr. History has used Google Tracker to find out who the most popular president of the United States ever was, by Google's measure at least.
The answer is George Washington.
This will come as a shock to most Americans, who frequently rank Reagan or JFK as the best.
I don't have the time to vouch for Dr. History's calculations and charts. But they are interesting.
Bush to leave office with lower ratings than he had going in ... so?
Over at Skimble there's a chart ("borrowed" from the WSJ) showing that only Bill Clinton of recent presidents left office with higher ratings than he had going in.
This supposedly reflects well, I take it, on Clinton. I suppose it does. But does it reflect badly on the others?
Thursday, June 1, 2006
Bush-- Worst President, Say Americans
Ok, well now it's official.
It's not just historians who believe Bush is the worst president ever. Now The People! are saying it.
A poll by Quinnipiac reports:
"Strong Democratic sentiment pushes President George W. Bush to the top of the list when American voters pick the worst U.S. President in the last 61 years."
34% say Bush is the worst.
17% say Nixon is the worst.
16% say Clinton is the worst.
Now these polls are meaningless, of course. Most Americans only know about the presidents who served during their own lifetime. And I am not sure they even know much about them.
But this poll suggests that Americans are at any rate paying attention. This is a welcome change.
But where were they during the first term when Bush was installing hacks like Brown at FEMA, passing ill-conceived and brazenly falsely advertised tax cuts, and invading a country that hadn't attacked us?
Have The People suddenly awakened to his deceptions?
I doubt it. High gas prices have unnerved them. That's first. Second, is the war.
Thursday, May 4, 2006
Why Bush Won't Fire Rummy
I'll get right to the point.
W. won't fire Rummy because loaylty is built into his DNA code. It's the one thing he and his father have in common. It's the one Bush I characteristic that Bush II has never tried to rebel against.
Recall: Bush I loyally stuck by John Sununu long after he should have fired him--and paid the consequences. He stuck by Quayle after it was clear that Quayle would be a drag on the ticket in a bid for a 2nd term.
Going back even earlier in Bush I's career: He stuck by Nixon until 3 days before the president resigned from office.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Where weakness is strength
Is war with Iran likely?
Everybody is saying that Bush is too weak to risk another war or even a bombing run over some desert dusty corner of Iran.
But step in his shoes for a moment. He's so low in the polls now that he may be figuring (cue the dreamy sequence from one of those old sixties TV shows)...
... heck, what have I got to lose? I probably can't go much lower in the polls, ten percent at most. And a quickie war with Iran might just be the big gamble I need to take to retake the initiative. My numbers would probably go up.
Wednesday, April 5, 2006
Iraq Needs an Ike
I have been saying for months that what Iraq needs is a strongman. I am apparently not going to get my wish.
Ok, what then?
How about just a plain ordinary military hero? A genuine war hero could by becoming a national symbol unify the country and help squelch sectarian divisions. A genuine war hero could help the squabbling pols to reach a compromise government. A genuine war hero could stand outside politics and thereby help to establish a rival center of power to the mullahs. (Pols can never hope to rival the mullahs in power.)
In short, what Iraq needs is a George Washington or an Ike. If Americab found it useful to have military heroes to rally around shouldn't Iraq, too? Why shouldn't Iraqis have the chance we had to have a genuine military hero as president?
Here's the problem with my scenario:
Monday, March 20, 2006
Guess who this is about?
This was in the Weekly Standard last week.
What were they thinking?
It's about as good a defense of Bill Clinton I've seen.
But this was about Profumo.
We report. You decide.
Thursday, March 16, 2006
What word would you use to describe Bush's photo op with a disabled child?
You know what I'm referring to.
The scene the other night showing our president hugging the autistic child who made people weep after he scored one amazing hoop toss after another in the final minutes of his team's basketball game.
What word describes what the president--our president--did?
A contest this is.
Join in.
Let me know.
I'll go first.
Disgusting.
UPDATE: What would make this a better story would be to find out that Bush had cut funding for autistic research. I mentioned this to a reader.
Monday, March 13, 2006
Censure Bush?
Sen. Russ Feingold's proposal to censure President Bush won't go anywhere.
But while the subject is in the news it's a good time to correct some of the mistakes the media keep repeating about the history of censure.
I corrected the mistakes in a piece published in 1998 at the time of the Clinton scandal. It follows:
Friday, March 10, 2006
Will we stand down as Iraqis stand up?
Over at TomDispatch.com Michael Schwartz outlines our failure to create an Iraqi army:
Its troops are directly integrated into the occupation structure commanded by the American military. This is not just a matter of who makes command decisions. The Iraqi military has no air support, no artillery, and almost no armored vehicles; nor does it have a logistics capacity that would allow it to resupply its fighting units. As a result, even if the Iraqi government could "take command" of its army, it could not fight battles on its own. This distinguishes the Iraqi Army from virtually every other military on the planet. None of its units can go into battle unless they are integrated into the American military.
Are we serious then about standing down as the Iraqis stand up? It would appear we are not.
Wednesday, March 8, 2006
More on impeachment
Some readers have been complaining to me off list that my previous discussion was flippant.
As one fellow complained:
I'm guessing that you don't have a child who came home from Iraq dead, or missing a limb, or two limbs, or three limbs, or paralyzed, or blind, or horribly burned. And I also have a strong suspicion that if you did, you wouldn't be so cavalier in dismissing George W. Bush's doing the worst thing that a president (or anyone else) could possibly do - ordering other people's children into the horrors of war under false pretenses. I seriously doubt that "But of course presidents almost always lie about war" would be a concept you would so readily embrace in your grief.
Tuesday, March 7, 2006
Impeach Bush?
Flying under the media radar--until recently--has been the attempt by the far left to persuade Americans that President Bush should be impeached.
Now the effort is really getting rolling.
A guy running for a seat in Congress in Michigan pledges he'll introduce a bill calling for impeachment if he's elected.
I am sure Bush is worried.
Thursday, February 16, 2006
Cheney's Bad Day
Too much has been made of the Cheney story.
But his statement to Brit Hume that Saturday was one of the worst days in his life--which he said with real feeling--is disturbing.
Cheney has never made a similar statement about the war in Iraq, which he helped bring about. Did he not have sleepless nights after advising President Bush to go to war?
Wednesday, February 1, 2006
Bush Speech: Our war with Islamists
Was Harriet Miers asleep? It was said after she was nominated for the supreme court that she combs through the president's speeches with a fine-tooth comb. She must have have left it home when going through the State of the Union Address.
Just one point at the moment:
The president said: "We've entered a great ideological conflict we did nothing to invite."
What?
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Ted's NYT Op ED
Congratulations to POTUS member Ted Widmer for getting an op ed into the NYT: "The State of the Union Is Unreal."
The piece includes a kind of multiple choice test. The Warren Harding answer is a hoot.
On Sunday Lewis Gould wrote in the Washington Post that the State of the Union address should be abolished. Ted doesn't go quite that far. But given his evidence he might easily be lumped in the same camp.
I predict, fearlessly, that presidents will not follow the advice of the historians who want to abolish the address.
Monday, January 23, 2006
The problem with those oil-rich third world countries
Why can't those states rich in oil and other natural resources get their act together? Why do the oil-rich countries seem more cursed than benefited?
President Bush thinks it's because they're undemocratic. The cure ... elections, Millenium grants from the US taxpayer (for states that are worthy of our lucre), and unfettered corporate capitalism.
These after all are the ingredients we have stirred into the Iraqi stew. Surely, success will crown our efforts.
I have one word of advice for Mr. Bush. Look at Louisiana.
Saturday, January 21, 2006
Reading Richard Reeve's Book on Ronald Reagan
Before I get to the point of this blog, I thought I'd pass along the news alert just sent out by MSNBC:
Fears rise for stranded whale.
Was this a reference to the presidency?
No, it was a reference to a real whale somewhere.
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
What Bush could do to pump up his ratings
If George W., Bush were a TV show, he'd be cancelled by now.
What could producers do to retool this aging franchise and draw back viewer support?
Kreistof in the NYT today suggests that W begin waging an all-out war on world poverty. Nice idea. But even if W agreed to do so that wouldn't help him much.
He has two problems. 1. Iraq. 2. Democrats don't hear him hitting the notes that might draw their support.
Sunday, January 1, 2006
Disputed Election Followed by Big Spending Congress: Sound Familiar?
After his election with fewer popular votes than his opponent the president went on to preside over a government that by all accounts was profligate. A projected surplus turned into a deficit. And eventually people grew disenchanted with the party in power.
No, we're not talking about President Bush. This is the story of Benjamin Harrison and the infamous Billion Dollar Congress of the 1880s.
Friday, December 23, 2005
Limits of Partisanship
Bob Dallek in the LAT is quoted as saying that what Republicans "are coming up against now is the limits of partisanship -- the limits of dividing the country so decisively."
Dallek is right.
What galls me is that Bush and his supporters complain that the Democats are full of hate for Bush without taking responsibility for the divisive practices and rhetoric of this adminstration which inspire hate.
Let Bush show that he is president of the US and not President of the Republican Party and he'd discover the wellspring of goodwill people would demonsrate.
But of course at this late date many may no longer wish to respond in a positve way.
Saturday, December 17, 2005
So Cheney Is Worried About the Decline of the Presidency
First, I want to second everything Jeff Kimball says in the previous post.
But my reason for blogging today is to give Dick Cheney a little free advice.
Sunday, November 27, 2005
Is David Brooks Kidding?
The same scenario plays out over and over again in Iraq. We take a town full of insurgents, clear them out and then leave, only to have to return later and retake the town again.
After noting that Americans have had to retake Ubaydi, David Brooks notes in today's NYT:
Every time you delve into the situation in Iraq, you come away with the phrase "not enough troops" ringing in your head, and I hope someday we will find out how this travesty came about.
What?
Monday, November 21, 2005
The Vietnam Parallel No One's Talking About
This may be rather late in the day for Iraq analogies, but what the heck. And the analogy I have in mind may just answer the one question that has puzzled even sympathetic pundits of the Bush administration: How did the Bush White House convince itself that Iraq would be a cake walk?
After two and a half years of war it is hard to believe that anybody ever thought our soldiers would be greeted by sweets and flowers, as pro-war supporters predicted. But this is just what was predicted--and it wasn’t lunacy either. Officials had people like Chalabi and Kanan Makiya telling them the war would be a cakewalk. And they had the experience themselves of the Afghanistan war behind them. Afghanistan was quick. Why couldn't Iraq be quick, too? (Of course in Afghanistan we had the help of the much-despised essential warlords. Iraq had warlords, too, but Bush chose to sideline them, destroy the Baath army and start from scratch.)
Saturday, November 19, 2005
The Cost of "Acting White"
I don't object fundamentally to John Tierney's column in today's NYT about "the cost of 'Acting White.'" He seems to be describing a phenomenon that is quite real. I have a black friend who was valedictorian of her class in Norfolk, Virginia who remembers being accused of "acting white" by black classmates. Numerous studies, cited by Tierney, back up the anecdotal stories of my friend.
But I couldn't help but think as I was reading his column that it's not just blacks who refuse to "act white." So do some white people. Doing well in school is considered by many subgroups "uncool." When I was in high school the football players received public acclaim, the kids like me in the debate club did not. Teachers gave us tests, but the school rewarded those who did well on the athletic field. If my values had been formed solely by the school culture and not by my parents I'm sure I would have neglected my studies. Why study if the school rewards kids who don't study? (The athletes were notorious slackers in the classroom.)
Monday, November 7, 2005
What GW Might Say to GWB About Guantanamo Bay
Pete Henriques has a book coming out on George Washington. He passed along a quote from GW. (It went from Pete to Roy Rosenzweig to me.)
Here it is:
If there were good grounds to suspect that the proscribed and banished characters were engaged in a conspiracy against the Constitution of the People's choice, to seize them even in an irregular manner, might be justified upon the ground of expediency, or self preservation; but after they were secured and amenable to the Laws to condemn them without a hearing; and consign them to punishment more rigorous perhaps than death is the summit of despotism. [December 4, 1797.]
Prediction: GWB will wish (soon) that his administration had followed the policy of GW. The longer those prisoners are held without a trial the harder it will be to settle the matter--and we will have to settle it.
Wednesday, November 2, 2005
JFK's Advice
On Meet the Press the other day Michael Beschloss reminded viewers that JFK's poll numbers went up dramatically after he took responsibility for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, suggesting there may be a lesson in this for Bush.
It was good advice, though I don't think Bush will take it.
Monday, October 31, 2005
Welcome to H.W. Brands
He is the author of three biographies of American presidents: a short biography of Woodrow Wilson (part of the Schlesinger series), and full-scale biographies of Teddy Roosevelt, and Andrew Jackson. His range includes books on Texas, the Cold War, gold, Ben Franklin, and the failures of the Great Society. He is the author of the Wages of Globalism: Lyndon Johnson and the Limits of American Power and the editor of The Foreign Policies of Lyndon Johnson: Beyond Vietnam. He also edited the Selected Letters of Theodore Roosevelt.
He is currently busy giving interviews about his Jackson biography, which has won rave reviews.
Saturday, October 29, 2005
What Did Cheney Know and When Did He Know It?
Lost in the hubbub yesterday is a key question about Vice President Cheney's conduct. Has he known for the last two years that his chief of staff was claiming to have learned about Mrs. Wilson's identity from reporters? If so, then he knew his chief of staff was lying. According to the Libby indictment, the vice president was one of several people in the government who told Libby that Mrs. Wilson worked for the CIA in a classified position:
On or about June 12, 2003, LIBBY was advised by the Vice President of the United States that Wilson’s wife worked at the Central Intelligence Agency in the Counterproliferation Division. LIBBY understood that the Vice President had learned this information from the CIA.
Friday, October 28, 2005
Where Does this Scandal Rank?
Mr. Shenkman is the editor of HNN and the author of Presidential Ambition.
How bad is it?
There are three types of scandals that strike presidents. They involve either or in some combination: 1. money, 2. power or 3. sex.
Ranking the scandals is difficult, but here are several questions to keep in mind: Did the scandal prevent the president from implementing his agenda? Did the scandal affect his poll numbers? Did the scandal result in the dismissal or resignation of high officials or of large numbers of officials? Did members of the president's own political party agree with the critics of the administration regarding the scope and impact of the scandal or was the scandal largely considered a partisan affair? Was the president's own integrity damaged? Was there a cover-up? Did the scandal damage the president's popularity with his own base? Was there an abuse of power? Did the scandal damage the institution of the presidency? How did the scandal affect the president's reputation and historical legacy?
Thursday, October 27, 2005
Malaise (Take Two)
Is Peggy Noonan kidding?
In today's WSJ she moans that the wheels seem to be coming off the American trolley. She even suggests that presidents might not be up to all the challenges we face. (Even if hero Ronald Reagan were in the White House, Ms. Noonan?)
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Is Bush Distancing Himself from Rove Already?
Twice in the last week Bush has gone out of his way -- while claiming he wasn't making any comments about the leak probe -- to praise Patrick Fitzgerald and the leak investigation. Bush last week said that the investigation was being conducted in a dignified way. Then today he said the investigation was serious. Both comments deprive Bush of the opportunity later to 1. Lambaste the prosecutor and 2. Dismiss any perjury charge as insignificant.
Did Bush misspeak? Or are his comments part of a calculated strategy to let Rove twist in the wind should an indictment come down?
Friday, October 21, 2005
Bush, Papa Bush and Ike
One of the most familiar features of American politics is back. Rightwingers are again eating their own. Or I should say, they are eating those who share the same party identification.
The first modern Republican president to feel their wrath was Eisenhower. He had actually agreed to run for president only because Taft refused to promise to adhere to an internationalist approach in foreign affairs. Fearful of a return to isolationism Ike agreed to risk his considerable prestige on a run for the White House. But damn those pesky rightwingers kept nipping at his heals. First they almost succeeded in depriving him of the nomination at the 1952 convention. Then they allied with Joe McCarthy, whom Ike loathed. Then they pushed for the Bricker Amendment to the Constitution, which would have tied the hands of presidents in foreign policy. By 1956 Ike had had enough. He got so fed up with the rightwinger attacks on him and his administration that he actually considered forming a third party. At the least he hoped to be able to rid himself of Nixon by putting him in the cabinet and out of the line of succession. (Nixon refused the offer and Ike felt he was stuck with him.)
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Borking Miers
Now that the Republicans have borked their own president's nominee they will never again be able to accuse the Democrats of borking.
This frees the Democrats to bork any future nominee--perhaps Miers's replacement if she either withdraws or fails in the Senate.
That will be a legacy of Bush's that Republicans will long rue.
The Supreme Court has a way of tripping up presidents. Look at the long list of troubled nominations.
LBJ and Fortas.
Nixon and Haynesworth and Carswell.
Reagan and Bork.
Bush I and Souter (who was mislabeled).
And now Bush II and Miers.
Monday, October 10, 2005
Bushspeak
This is a message for liberals: If you want to start your week off right click here, which takes you to a hilarious spoof by the comedian Andy Dick. It features clips of President Bush. Needless to say, the camera has caught the president at moments he would probably prefer to forget.
I should add: Of course, all politicians make errors in speaking. Ted Sorenson recalled in his bio of JFK that Kennedy was so bone-tired one day on the 1960 campaign trail that he kept repeating himself. Finally he joked that they should put his remarks to music.
Now if only all politicians could joke about their own rhetorical mishaps with as much grace think what a better country this would be.
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
About that Drinking Story that's Making the Rounds
On a blog like this one it is incumbent on us to comment, it seems to me, on the National Enquirer story that George W. Bush has fallen off the wagon:
Family sources have told how the 59-year-old president was caught by First Lady Laura downing a shot of booze at their family ranch in Crawford, Texas, when he learned of the hurricane disaster. His worried wife yelled at him: "Stop, George."
Monday, September 26, 2005
The Case of the Purloined Story (?)
Last week NBC anchor Brian Williams led off an op ed about Katrina with a story (recounted at POTUS) of LBJ's response to Hurricane Betsy in 1965.
Now this week David Remnick in the New Yorker hasled off his Katrina account with the same story (but in much greater detail).
Williams's story appeared on 9-24-05, Remnick's on 9-26-05. Did Remnick pick it up from Williams? Or did Williams somehow get wind that Remnick had it and preempted him?
Sunday, September 25, 2005
Why No One Is Saying Let Bush Be Bush
Over on the HNN homepage Judith Klinghoffer has a provocative piece about Iraq. She suggests that Bush needs to apply the same lessons he supposedly learned from Katrina to Iraq. These lessons include: firing officials who are incompetent, breathing down the necks of bureaucrats, micro-managing major events, and getting reliable information instead of relying on biased accounts from a handful of aides.
What struck me after reading this piece is what she wasn't advocating. She wasn't saying that Bush has messed up because his aides tried to stop him from doing what he really wanted to do. There's no hint in her piece of the old cry of Reaganauts, to Let Bush Be Bush.
This is interesting.
After 5 years with Bush even his supporters now acknowledge his many flaws. None dare argue that his mistakes are owing to errors by subordinates.
The trouble is with the King.
Saturday, September 24, 2005
LBJ & Bush
Brian Williams, the NBC anchor, has a nice piece in the NYT today about LBJ's response to Hurricane Betsy in 1965. The Johnson tapes captured a phone call from Senator Russell Long telling LBJ to get down to Louisiana to offer help. When LBJ said he was busy, Long hit the politics of the trip hard: "If you go there right now, Mr. President, they couldn't beat you if Eisenhower ran!" Naturally, LBJ went.
The implication of the story is that modern presidents use natural disasters to help themselves politically, which is true enough. But Williams, perhaps slyly, hints at one big difference between LBJ and Bush. LBJ, Williams notes at the opening of his piece, not only kept up on the news of the storm by watching his three famous TV sets, he also monitored the "news service wires clacking away inside the soundproof cabinet next to his desk."
Bush, in contrast, had to be given a video by his aides to find out what was happening after Katrina struck.
LBJ and Bush. Both Texans. Both stuck with unpopular wars (though one inherited his war and the other started it). But one man was curious about the world and the other isn't.
Sunday, September 4, 2005
Why Didn't They Drop Food? Can You Spell R-A-C-I-S-M?
Why didn't the National Guard make food drops this past week?
Because, we are now being told, the Arkansas Air National Guard feared riots.
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Comparing Our War with WW II
President Bush at a ceremony in California honoring WW II vets yesterday (again) compared the war against terrorism (his term) with World War II. Won't someone please stop him from drawing this insulting analogy?
Here's the quote:
Sixty years ago this Friday, General Douglas MacArthur accepted the Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. With Japan's surrender, the last of our enemies in World War II was defeated, and a World War that began for America in the Pacific came to an end in the Pacific. As we mark this anniversary, we are again a nation at war. Once again, war came to our shores with a surprise attack that killed thousands in cold blood. Once again, we face determined enemies who follow a ruthless ideology that despises everything America stands for. Once again, America and our allies are waging a global campaign with forces deployed on virtually every continent. And once again, we will not rest until victory is America's and our freedom is secure.What do our war and WW II have in common?
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Accused of Statutory Rape
The NYT features on the frontpage today an article about a young man of 22 in Nebraska who faces a statutory rape charge for having relations with a 14 year old whom he subsequently married. They now have a baby. They went to Kansas to get married because the law there allows marriage at age 12.
It's a fascinating story about marriage, changing mores, and our law-centered culture.
Reading the story I couldn't help but think about James Madison.
Monday, August 29, 2005
Disaster or Triumph: You Decide
Sunday (Guardian):
In a conversation on Wednesday night, Bush spoke at length to Hakim from Nampa, Idaho, where he had just delivered a fierce defence of the Iraq war. The call was prompted by news that Shia leaders were poised to end negotiations and put the document to a referendum, in the face of Sunni opposition. Bush held that such a move would be a disaster, isolating even further the Sunni communities who are at the heart of the anti-American insurgency.
Monday (NYT):
A Sunni member of the constitutional committee, Mahmoud al-Mashadani, said, "We have reached a point where this constitution contains the seeds of the division of Iraq."
In the face of those developments, President Bush, at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., praised the constitution as a milestone in Iraqi history, congratulating Iraqi leaders for "completing the next step in their transition from dictatorship to democracy."
In other words ... What was a disasterous prospect on Wednesaday became a triumph on Sunday when the president failed to persuade the Shiites to accomodate the Sunnis. If this isn't spin, what is?
"Bush Hails Constitution" (NYT Headline 8-29-05)
If Bush were president in 1861:
At Fort Sumter this week our forces were fired upon as needed provisions were being sent in to supply our troops with food and water. Crowds are said to have cheered as the cannon fire began. Within 34 hours the fort surrendered.
We deplore the resort to violence by the enemies of freedom. They will be rounded up and brought to justice.
There is much that we can be grateful for. No lives were lost during the attack. And as our vice president has indicated already, this attack indicates that the rebellion against federal authority is in its final throes. Virginia, Arkansas and Tennessee, you will recall, have recently voted down resolutions of succession. We expect that other Southern states will do so as well after Fort Sumter.
Southerners are Americans first. They don't want to see the flag of the United States fired upon anymore than those in the North do. Faced with the prospect of war, Southerners will recoil and return to the fold. By summer we expect to be able to announce that peace has broken out in the South. We will of course have to increase the number of troops in the federal army by 75,000 during the transition to peace.
God bless America.
Friday, August 26, 2005
Bush's Poll Numbers
The Harris Poll shows Bush's approval rating down to 40. The American Research Group says it's down to 36.
Is this because of Iraq or the economy?
Ask Americans and they'll tell you Iraq is the biggest issue facing the country, not the economy.
But is it bad news from Iraq that's driving down Bush's numbers? I doubt it.
It's just a hunch, but I bet it's the spike in gas prices that has triggered the decline. Red state Americans love their cars. Red state Americans love Bush. But given a choice between their cars and Bush they prefer their cars. Result: Bush's spell has been broken.
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
White House Line on Books Bush Is Reading
Two weeks ago, just as his vacation was getting under way, the White House put out the story that President Bush would be reading three books at Crawford: Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky, Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar by Edvard Radzinsky and The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History by John M. Barry. The NYT didn't bother with the story but the Los Angeles Times bit, devoting an entire article to the news on August 16: "Bush Salts His Summer With Eclectic Reading List." It was one of the few positive stories about Bush published during the opening weeks of his ill-fated vacation and came just after the Washington Post published an eye-opening front page story in which administration officials admitted that the original Iraq timeline for a working, successful democratic state was "never realistic":
The Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the United States will have to settle for far less progress than originally envisioned during the transition due to end in four months, according to U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad.
Come to find out--surprise--the book story wasn't even true. On a marathon bicycle trip the other day--it was a long, hard slog, 18 miles through Texas back country--Bush told reporters invited along that he is reading an Elmore Leonard book.
Monday, August 22, 2005
Our Trillion Dollar War
There was a fascinating article and accompanying graphic in the NYT on Saturday which laid out in detail the ultimate cost of the Iraq War in dollars and cents. "The cost goes well beyond the more than $250 billion already spent on military operations and reconstruction.," argued Kennedy School of Government Professor Linda Bilmes. Add up all the long-term costs--particularly health and disability benefits--and you are staring at a bill of about a trillion dollars.
This came as news to me and I am sure would come as news to most people. I asked Professor Bilmes if she knew if anyone had conducted similar analyses of the financial cost of past American wars. She said she didn't. If anybody knows of such a study please contact me by clicking on the CONTACT button at the top of this page.
If no one has undertaken such a study before this would be a great opportunity for either an MA thesis or dissertation.
Monday, August 15, 2005
Is It a Struggle or a War?
A big deal is being made about the administration’s seeming confusion about the fight we're in. Is it a war as President Bush insists or is it a struggle against violent extremism as Donald Rumsfeld stated two weeks ago?
Sunday, August 14, 2005
Should We Be Asking Why the Bush Twins Haven't Volunteered to Go to Iraq?
Two years into the war with Iraq, with public support declining, people finally are beginning to ask why the Bush daughters haven't volunteered to join the military. (See NYT letter to the editor 8-13-05.)
Friday, August 12, 2005
Welcome Eric Rauchway ... And Thanks to ...
I am delighted to welcome another member to the blog, Eric Rauchway.
Eric is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis and the author of Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America. Eric is the one blogger at POTUS who didn't need instructions on blogging as he has frequently subbed for Eric Alterman at Altercation. Eric ... WELCOME!
Thanks are in order. Within minutes of becoming a group blog yesterday the word got out and generous bloggers began spreading the word. (Ok, it was Ralph Luker over at HNN's Cliopatria who got the word out; thanks Ralph!) But we also want to thank ... Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit, who drove hundreds to the blog; Tom Bruscino at Big Tent, Kevin Drum's Political Animal, Crooked Timber; and Richard Jensen over at the list conservativenet.
I thank you. My mother thanks you ... THANKS!
Thursday, August 11, 2005
Wecome Mat Is Out!
Ralph Luker over at HNN's Cliopatria does this best, but here goes.
POTUS welcomes into its ranks 15 new members as of today. Since there was just one member before--me--that's a whole lot of new members.
I will tell you a bit about each one of them.
- Kathleen Dalton is the author of a biography of TR that is comprehensive, authoritative and a delight to read.
- Alonzo Hamby is the author of a biography of Harry Truman. Lon, as he is known to his friends, knows more about Truman than anybody (though he is too shy to say so himself).
- Joan Hoff is famous for her book about Richard Nixon, which ushered in a generation of fresh thinking about this much-maligned president.
- Jeffrey Kimball is well-known as a scholar on Vietnam; recently we had the pleasure of publishing one his pieces on HNN: Why It's Time to Use the "E" and "I" Words to Describe American Policies for 200 Years.
- Stanley Kutler is known chiefly for his fight to force the Nixon people to give up control of the Watergate tapes. But as readers of HNN know, he has scholarly observations to make about many subjects and he is always interesting.
- Allan Lichtman is known at the moment as a presidential historian at American University, but he may become more famous soon as a candidate for the US Senate in Maryland. We'll be watching.
- Timothy Naftali works for the Miller Center and recently published a dazzling history of counterterrorism (which was HNN's Book of the Month in July.
- Chester Pach is working on the University Press of Kansas history of the Ronald Reagan administration (earlier he did a book in the same series on Ike).
- James Pfiffner is a scholar of the modern presidency; you'll see him quoted just about everywhere.
- Mel Small did the Kansas book on Nixon, which was celebrated for its even-handedness.
- Gil Troy works in Canada, where he is a professor of history at McGill, but his area of study is the American presidency. Gil's latest book: Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s. (Disclosure: Gil is a member of HNN's Advisory Board.)
- Ted Widmer, a speech writer for Bill Clinton, now runs the CV Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College and recently wrote a wonderful biography in the Schlesinger series on Martin Van Buren.
- Larry Wittner is one of the leading scholars of American nuclear history and the author of numerous essays for HNN including, most recently, Will We Still Remember Hiroshima After the Last Victims Die?. I first encountered him some 30 years ago. He was leaving Vassar just as I was beginning there as a student.
- Julian Zelizer, Professor of History, Boston University, is another scholar whose name you come across frequently in the media. He writes about presidents and Congress.
And now--soon!--you'll be hearing from them all. (Pardon my boosterism. It's in my job description.)
Monday, March 21, 2005
Back from Crawford
President Bush has raced back from Crawford to sign the emergency legislation designed to throw the Schiavo case into federal court.
Just one question.
Did he interrupt his Crawford vacation when he got that PDB warning that bin Laden was trying to attack he United States?
Saturday, September 4, 2004
The Convention that Was
Busy hiring new interns and new editors this week I only now got the chance finally to blog about the convention.
As a Democrat, of course, it was an ordeal. Like going to the dentist. I could feel the drill burrowing deep. I'm sure I would have felt better if I had just ignored the thing (like my mother and many friends did).
As a citizen it was an even worse ordeal. Like open heart surgery. If democracy were a patient, this was the week the patient took to his bed complaining of ulcers, headaches, and heart strain.
While the Republicans celebrated their commander in chief the soldiers he commanded to Iraq were dying in a murky cause in a country he doesn't understand for an unlimited length of time. And yet he had the gall to pretend all is well. And he still insisted, against the facts, that his invasion would result in a democratic Iraq. I had thought it was a sign of realism a few months ago when the administration dropped the claim that Iraq would become a democracy but here was the president reviving his wholly improbable rhetoric of a year ago.
Ronald Reagan was condemned for getting some anecdotes wrong, and mangling facts. President Bush has managed to misconstrue an entire country's prospects.
In an interview with the Today Show's Matt Lauer, the president almost seemed ready to embrace a realistic understanding of the "war on terrorism," explaining that it can't be won. By the next day, after the Democrats had seized on his admission, he had backed down, claiming it can be won. Can you spell f-l-i-p f-l-o-p-p-e-r?
Candidate John Kerry immediately went on TV to say that the war on terrorism can be won. Another low moment in American democracy. Shouldn't he have said that he was happy to learn that the president had finally abandoned the apocalyptic rhetoric of a good versus evil, war on terrorism? Instead, preferring to score some meaningless political points, Kerry passed up the opportunity to inject a note of realism into the national debate and tried to out-Bush Bush. Note to Kerry: You can't out Bush Bush. If this is a contest between candidates who take a simple view of the world Bush will win that fight. He's been doing simple for years and knows how to pull it off.
Max Boot observed that Bush's admission to Matt Lauer was a classic example of the Washington gaffe. Inadvertently, Bush had let the truth slip out.
So both parties let us down last week. I don't see much reason to think the remaining 8 weeks of the campaign will go much better.
Thursday, July 22, 2004
Clinton's Impeachment ... And Its Consequences
Stanley Kutler writes in his otherwise perspicacious and wise review of the Clinton memoir:
Impeachment is Clinton's Scarlet Word. He likely will be best remembered as the first elected President to be impeached. He is deservedly bitter, but his bravado--that it is a "badge of honor"--fails to consider his best defense. Only a forceful recognition that the impeachment was a farce from the outset might protect his reputation. The tack taken by Senator Ted Stevens, that most loyal of Republicans, might offer Clinton a beginning. Stevens cast one of those curious, bifurcated votes, clearly to appease the more fanatical partisans, as he voted to convict the President on one charge and acquit him on the other. But Stevens had no illusions. For him the world was still a dangerous place, and he said he would not support removal if he thought his vote would be decisive. With striking candor, Stevens said that Clinton had "not brought that level of danger to the nation which...is necessary to justify such an action." Stevens correctly gauged the national mood; the trial simply was not serious.
What Kutler overlooks is that this "farce" had serious consequences. For a year Bill Clinton was hampered in the execution of his most important responsibility: safeguarding national security. One of the themes of the emerging literature of 9-11 is that the Clinton administration repeatedly missed opportunities to deal a death blow to al Qaeda. The Republicans just this week claimed that the 9-11 commission report is really an indictment of Clinton not Bush. After all, as Hastert and Delay observed, the report concerns 8 years of Clinton mistakes and only 8 months of Bush's.
Democrats may cringe at the thought that Bill Clinton abdicated his responsibility to protect the U.S. from terrorist attacks, but the record indicates that he didn't always do what was necessary to fend them off. He rarely met with his FBI director. He did not insist that the FBI hunt down terrorist cells in America. He did not back up his CIA director's claim that we were at war with al Qaeda with action.
It is overly harsh to blame Clinton for failing to do before 9-11 what we obviously needed to do after 9-11. Holding Clinton to a standard set after 9-11, an event that took place after his presidency, is an example of the worst form of present-mindedness, a historian's no-no.
Richard Clarke insists that Clinton did much to trounce the terrorists. He approved every request to snatch terrorists. He approved plans to kill bin Laden. And he told officials after the East African bombings in 1998 to prepare to act even though critics would argue that he was using the bombings as an excuse to divert public attention from the Lewinsky scandal. (The bombings took place one week before he was scheduled to be deposed by Kenneth Starr at the White House.)
But Clarke also notes that Clinton lacked the clout to remake the FBI and focus the agency on terrorism because of his preoccupation with the Lewinsky scandal. That includes the year he spent fighting off his impeachment and trial.
No one will ever be able to say how he may have reacted if he was not distracted by the Lewinsky affair. (Some graduate school students presumably are already beginning dissertations to piece together the twin strands of the story of the scandal and terrorism threats--at least I hope so.) But to dismiss the impeachment and trial of Clinton as farce is to ignore the consequences of the imbroglio.
Contrary to what Kutler says, Clinton's most effective argument would be to point out the devastating consequences this supposed "opera bouffe" had on his presidency and the country. It would be too easy to conclude that 3,000 people died on 9-11 because the Republicans stage-managed the impeachment of a president a couple of years earlier. But neither is it out of bounds to wonder if their all-out war on Bill Clinton didn't contribute to our losing the battle on 9-11.
Say Anything ... To Win
Even by the standards of American politics, President Bush's promise to Iowa voters that the next four years will be peaceful is extraordinarily audacious.
1. No president can say whether there will be war or peace on his watch. Look no further than Woodrow Wilson, who promised the voters in 1916 he "kept us out of war" and then promptly dragged the country into war after his inauguration a few months later.
2. This president has warned us that the war on terrorism will go on for years and years. What happened to that war? Did we win it? Is it over? Did I miss the announcement of victory? Or is President Bush saying that the war on terrorism can go on while we continue to live in peace?
3. And what about North Korea? Has North Korea agreed to disarm? Is the threat from North Korea lessening now that the country is known to have increased its stockpile of nuclear material? Did the North agree not to give terrorists nuclear bombs?
If President Bush has answers to these questions, let's hear them. If not, he should immediately withdraw his ill-conceived promise of peace.
FDR in the 1940 campaign promised he would never send American boys into a foreign war. His advisors thought he had made a mistake. FDR rationalized that if we were attacked, it would no longer be a foreign war. He was wrong to make the promise he made. The American people were right to forgive him. They had wanted peace at any cost in the 1930s while FDR had maneuvered to give Great Britain the assistance needed to fight Hitler. After Pearl Harbor Americans knew FDR had been right to come to the aid of Great Britain and they had been wrong to resist.
But President Bush has not been in a similar position. Before 9-11 he had largely ignored the threat terrorists posed. After 9-11 he reacted as most Americans did after Pearl Harbor. Like the country at large he recognized a threat to our national security and made war on our enemies. (I am referring to the war against al Qaeda and the Taliban, not the attack on Iraq.) He deserves no points for going after our enemies once they had attacked us. Any president would have done so.
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