Trumpist ideology and style

It's unlikely in the extreme that Donald Tinyhands Trump or anyone in his entourage will go down in the history of ideas as major contributors to political theory.

But they do have some kind of operative ideology. Here are a couple of articles on his ideological influences.

Jamelle Bouie discusses the white supremacist/white nationalist component in Government by White Nationalism Is Upon Us Slate 02/06/2017. He discusses the contributions of Michael "Publius Decius Mu" Anton, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller and Jeff Sessions.

Arthur Browne in the New York Daily News in 2016 described Trump's political mentor, the truly deplorable Roy Cohn, The devil in Donald: How the ghost of ‘evil’ Roy Cohn lives on inside Trump 10/01/2016:

... it was lawyer Roy Marcus Cohn who taught Donald Trump how to live.

More specifically, Roy Cohn mentored Trump to:

- abuse the legal system to routinely cheat people;

- dodge paying taxes through use of — to be polite — inventively aggressive techniques.

- exploit falsehoods and innuendo to achieve his goals.

Josh Marshall has his own working theory of Trump's behavior (On Trump, Keep it Simple (In 5 Points) 02/06/2017): "Despite his manic temperament, impulsiveness and emotional infantility, this acumen [for branding] gives him real and in some ways profound communication skills. The two don't cancel each other out. They are both always present. They grow from the same root."

And on the ideas we wants to sell with his branding (bold in original):

Trump is Surrounded By Extremists and Desperados: Trump is primarily driven by impulse, grievance, the need to dominate and the need to be praised. There are core political beliefs Trump has had for decades which we should expect him to stick to. They almost all turn on being taken advantage of by other countries - whether in terms of trade or defense. The common thread is a deep belief in zero-sum relationships, whether in business or foreign affairs. As business columnist Joe Nocera put it after decades of observing Trump: "In every deal, he has to win and you have to lose." But if Trump's ideology is fluid, he has drawn around him advisors who can only be termed extremists. I believe the chief reason is that Trump's authoritarian personality resonates with extremist politics and vice versa. We should expect them to keep catalyzing each other in dangerous and frightening ways. [my emphasis in italics]

And David Bromwich, who had good insight into Obama's strangely ambiguous messaging and policy perspectives, writes about the new so-called President in Act One, Scene One London Review of Books 06/16/2017 issue, accessed 02/07/2017.

Comparing his style to his predecessor's, Bromwich writes, "If Obama often seemed an image of deliberation without appetite, Trump has always been the reverse. For him, there is no time to linger: from the first thought to the first motion is a matter of seconds; the last aversion or appetite triggers the jump to the deed." And, "[Trump] is the loudmouth at the bar, cocksure and full of himself and you may want him to stop, but you catch his drift. Trump is short-winded, vulgar and lowbrow, where Obama was long-winded, refined and impeccably middlebrow."

In this passage, he gives us a perspective on the Democrats' timidity on policy and how Obama's commitment to Bipartisanship fits within it:

With the election and partial legitimation of Trump against the massed energy of the Democratic Party, many Republicans and virtually all the mainstream media, we have witnessed a revolution of manners. Will a political revolution follow? What is ominous is the uncertainty and the leaderless state of the opposition. The Democrats are at their lowest ebb since 1920, and this is anything but a sudden misfortune: the loss of nerve started with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, which surprised the Democrats and shook their confidence in the tenability of the welfare state, and the threat to mixed constitutional government was clear in the 1994 midterm election, when 367 Republican candidates signed the Contract with America, with its pledge to slash government spending in the first hundred days of a new Congress. The contract was the precursor of the Tea Party – its instigator, Newt Gingrich, has become a leading adviser to Donald Trump. The Democrats behaved persistently as if the Republican hostility to government-as-such were a curable aberration. Yet eight years of Obama have ended with his party’s loss of the presidency, its relegation to a minority in both houses of Congress and – something that happened when no one was counting – the loss of 900 seats in state legislatures. Any return to majority status must begin at the local and state levels, yet in the 50 states of the union, the Republican Party has 33 governors and now controls 32 legislatures. The losses grew steeper with every mishap, from the delay of the Affordable Care Act in 2009 to the standoff over the national debt ceiling in the summer of 2011. Yet after Obama’s re-election, as the PBS Frontline documentary Divided States of America vividly recalled, he thought he was in 2008 again, the old mandate renewed, and would say to reporters in 2012 and 2014 just as he had done in 2010: ‘the [Republican] fever will break.’ [my emphasis in bold]

Bromwich also includes a sobering list of major elements of "national security state that Obama inherited and broadened, and has now passed on to Trump."

This is also a memorable observation, "The pride of a demagogue is never quite compatible with sanity; and none of Trump’s actions has so perplexed the media and dismayed his party as his ordering of an investigation into possible illegalities in the election that delivered Republican control over all three branches of government."

Unfortunately, so is this, "Democrats have forgotten what it means to constitute an opposition." Unfortunately because it's so sadly true.

David Bromwich's Obama

I find David Bromwich's analyses of President Obama's politics consistently helpful because he pays close attention to his public persona and parses the President's words carefully. So he often highlights important moments for understanding Obama's politics.

On the other hand, Bromwich sometimes overgeneralizes from the attitude Obama takes toward liberals and progressives. And he tends to psychologize Obama's politics a bit much for my taste.

We see the virtues and shortcomings of Bromwich's approach in The Leader Obama Wanted to Become and What Became of Him Huffington Post 03/09/2014. For instance, he writes:

In Confidence Men [2011], the most valuable study so far of the character and performance of Obama as president, the journalist Ron Suskind noticed the tenacity of the new president's belief that he enjoyed a special connection to the American people. When his poll numbers were going down in late 2009, or when his "pivot to jobs" had become a topic of humor because he repeated the phrase so often without ever seeming to pivot, Obama would always ask his handlers to send him out on the road. He was convinced: the people would hear him and he would make them understand.

He sustained this free-floating confidence even though he knew that his town halls, from their arranged format to their pre-screened audiences, were as thoroughly stage-managed as any other politician's. But Obama told Suskind in early 2011 that he had come to believe "symbols and gestures ... are at least as important as the policies we put forward."

I'm not sure about the original context of that last quote from Suskind. But it's something that I often think, that Obama is substituting "symbols and gestures" for substance. This is something all politicians do to some extent, of course.

But I would focus on Obama's version differently. It seems to me that Obama is particularly inclined to make the assumption that liberals and progressives will be satisfied with the symbolic satisfactions and not expect policies to back them up. But his pursuit of Bipartisanship has meant that he was far too willing to give conservatives the policy options they preferred.

The sequester is a case in point, one of his signature bipartisan compromises. It meant big cuts in domestic spending, something very much in line with conservative priorities and against liberal priorities.

His Grand Bargain, whose core turned out to be Obama's repeated proposals from 2011 to early 2013 to cut benefits on Social Security and Medicare, was definitely a substantive policy proposal. It wasn't just "symbols and gestures." Liberals were energized in opposition to it. And Republicans were so uninterested in Obama's treasured Bipartisanship that they passed up the opportunity to put those programs on the road to abolition and be able to blame Obama for it.

Suskind's Confidence Men spends a great many pages on the economic policy of the first Obama Administration, in which Obama deferred heavily to figures like Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, who were Democrats but very much on the conservative, lighter-regulation, don't-hold-the-banks-accountable-for-misdeeds side of those debates.

The psychologizing can be illustrated by this passage:

Perhaps the thin connection between Obama's words and his actions does not support the use of the word "conviction" at all. Let us say instead that he mistook his preferences for convictions -- and he can still be trusted to tell us what he would prefer to do. Review the record and it will show that his first statement on a given issue generally lays out what he would prefer. Later on, he resigns himself to supporting a lesser evil, which he tells us is temporary and necessary. The creation of a category of permanent prisoners in "this war we're in" (which he declines to call "the war on terror") was an early and characteristic instance. Such is Obama's belief in the power and significance of his own words that, as he judges his own case, saying the right thing is a decent second-best to doing the right thing. [my emphasis]

This and other parts of Bromwich's article suggests that Obama generally lacks conviction. But is that really justified?

In the immediately following paragraph, he suggests that a lack of conviction leads Obama to value conformity with the views of The Successful, and also includes one of those interesting observations I hadn't heard mention before, Obama's aversion to any association with Jimmy Carter:

More than most people, Obama has been a creature of his successive environments. He talked like Hyde Park when in Hyde Park. He talks like Citigroup when at the table with Citigroup. And in either milieu, he likes the company well enough and enjoys blending in. He has a horror of unsuccess. Hence, in part, his extraordinary aversion to the name, presence, or precedent of Jimmy Carter: the one politician of obvious distinction whom he has declined to consult on any matter. At some level, Obama must realize that Carter actually earned his Nobel Prize and was a hard-working leader of the country. Yet of all the living presidents, Carter is the one whom the political establishment wrote off long ago, and so it is Carter whom he must not touch. [my emphasis]

The appeal of conformity to the rich and powerful is easy enough to understand. On the other hand, being President of the United States is the standard proverbial definition of American Dream success. You know, we're the country where any child can grow up to be President! Which means that Presidents have a considerable number of options for pursuing success, both in office and in their post-Presidential careers.

It seems more likely to me that Obama is generally committed to the conservative Democratic vision he's largely pursued: neoliberal economics, a conventional continuation of the US positions as a global hegemon with a pragmatic emphasis on not getting stuck in protracted wars, extreme secrecy, the staggering domestic electronic surveillance, moderate regulations on banking, and a significant expansion of access to private health insurance. He's made some good court appointments, and the average democratic appointee to Cabinet departments and other parts of the bureaucracy are presumably on the average more liberal than a Republican President would appoint. His stimulus in early 2009 was enough to kick the economy into a better state than a continued free fall would have been. Whether the weak economy of right now will be seen as in a weak recovery or as a weak recovery in the middle of a longer depression remains to be seen.

Obama is a President committed to a transactive leadership style of relatively gradual tinkering with existing policies, not a transformative one who wants to create a new New Deal or Great Society. Even taking into account the extreme antics of the current Republican Party in Congress, I don't see any reason to believe that he lacks conviction in the general direction he's leading as just described. What looks like timidity to liberals - the restricted nature of the stimulus, the dropping of the public option from health care reform, his muted response to the massive BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico - isn't reflected in any lack of commitment to the more conservative policies he's adopted. The White House pushed back hard against liberals and progressives who wanted to keep the public option in the Obamacare package, for instance. And his steadfast defense of the NSA spying and his legal war on whistleblowers don't show evidence of timidity or lack of conviction.

Tags: barack obama, david bromwich, obama administration

David Bromwich again on Obama and the Syrian crisis

David Bromwich is a close scholarly observer of Obama and pays attention to his words and habits. He seems to have a dislike of the man that seeps into his writing and makes me wonder if he may not be trying a bit too hard to give a harsh reading to Obama's words and actions.

In Putin to the Rescue London Review of Books 35:18 (09/26/2013 issue; accessed 0918/2013), he discusses Obama's actions in the recent Syrian crisis. If the track to resolving the Syrian chemical weapons issue without war continues, the following will quickly drop into the memory hole. But the Obama Administration's case for what happened in the sarin gas attack of August 21 of this year was "dodgy," to recall a notorious word from the Iraq War buildup:

The unclassified four-page intelligence summary he released to the public – according to Congressman Alan Grayson, the 12-page classified document is no different in this respect – speaks from the position of 'We [the US government]'. The reason for the unusual grammar is that the document does not come from the American intelligence community. The Inter Press Service journalist Gareth Porter, piecing together the vague and generic evidence, the omissions and the grammar delivered by Kerry, reported on 9 September that the absence of the signature of James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, from the Kerry document was a significant detail. Clapper evidently had refused to sign off because the data had been cherry-picked (as Colin Powell’s had been for his UN presentation in February 2003). Kerry gave 1429 as a sure figure for the number of deaths in the August attack, but the figure is unexplained and at variance with first-hand reports: French intelligence estimated 281 deaths and Médecins Sans Frontières 355. The Kerry document was effectively discredited in less than a week, but only below the radar of the mainstream press and policy establishment. On the basis of a tissue of far-fetched inferences and assumptions, in which the most solid datum is a single radio intercept – a recording of a disturbed commander of Syrian forces given to the US by Israeli intelligence – Obama declared his intention to order an attack, and then asked Congress to authorise the use of force under wide discretion: he would be empowered to act in any way he deemed necessary to ‘respond to’, 'deter' and 'degrade' the military and defensive capabilities of the Syrian government. These are all words without a settled meaning, and they were chosen for that reason. To an amazing degree Obama's request for authorisation of September 2013 resembles Bush's request of October 2002. [my emphasis]

Bromwich notices that what Obama had proposed to do would have been a clear violation of international law:

The talk of 'punishing' Assad affected a stance of parental discipline and avoided the language of international law. This was not an accident. An attack on a sovereign state by another state that has not been attacked is a violation of international law. As for punishment, it is something a country may legally enforce on its own citizens, but it does not express a possible relation of one country to another.

He also notices what Charlie Pierce caught in Today in the March to Semi-War Esquire Politics Blog 09/06/2013, that Obama was saying we needed to attack Syria to prevent the erosion of international norms. Pierce: "Apparently, 'Norms' -- even ones about which the United States has been considerably blithe in the past -- are the latest dominoes over which to theorize."

The new Norm-ino Theory. Bromwich:

Early in the crisis, he tried to work around the law by a rhetorical stratagem: the United States and its allies, in punishing a gas attack on Syrians which had surely been ordered by Assad, would be ‘enforcing international norms’. ‘International norms’ is a phrase we are hearing a lot. A world without norms (the implication seems to be) is a world in chaos. Given the refusal of Russia to shelve its veto at the UN and take on trust French, British and American assurances that Assad ordered the attack, who will enforce such norms? Who if not the United States?

Cheney and Bush made a similar argument to invade Iraq without UN authorization, saying that we were enforcing the UN's own resolutions that the UN itself wasn't willing to enforce.

Bromwich also believes the British Parliamentary vote against war was an especially important moment in Obama's trajectory toward war: "It was only when the House of Commons voted against war that American war policy was made to hesitate. The president and his team were deeply discouraged by that vote."

And Bromwich also notes that the Administration offered very different notions to the public of what kind of military action he would be undertaking:

Even so, in the first week of September, Obama and Kerry appeared to stand behind both the ambitious and the minimal versions of their meditated attack. A decisive and damaging strike lasting many days: that was the version apparently offered by the president to Graham and McCain. On the other hand, the strike envisaged by Kerry, in remarks to the British press on 9 September, would encompass 'a very limited, very targeted, short-term effort ... That is exactly what we are talking about doing – unbelievably small, limited kind of effort.' The confusion didn't rest there; as recently as his speech to the nation on 10 September, Obama contradicted Kerry and said the attack would not be only a pinprick, adding gravely: 'The United States military doesn't do pinpricks.' (emphasis in original)

He does not mention the Syria war resolution that cleared the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which authorized a more expansive kind of action that what most people would think of as "a very limited, very targeted, short-term effort."

Tags: david bromwich, chemical weapons, preventive war, syria, syrian civil war, war crimes, war of aggression

Syria and liberal hawk temptations

Conservatives have kind of ruined the concept of "unintended consequences." They use to claim that any program designed to help poor or working people or to restrain corporate misconduct will have the opposite effect.

But in war, there are lots of predictable consequence that, intended or not, can create serious problems. Our war fans just prefer to pretend those aren't there.

The pseudo-scandal the Republicans have tried to whip up over the Benghazi attack is just that, a pseudo-scandal. But I do think that longtime Obama critic David Bromwich makes a valid point in Stay Out of Syria! New York Review of Books 05/23/2013:

The Benghazi killings were an indirect but predictable consequence of the NATO intervention that overthrew Muammar Qaddafi. Disorder was a necessary condition of the attack. The "light footprint" of NATO was never going to be sufficient to contain the forces the war released. With the death of Qaddafi and the instability of NATO’s interim arrangements, his troops and weapons moved southward in Africa; and the evacuation of US State Department workers in Mali in January and the attack on international workers in Algeria are now widely understood to have been another fruit of the NATO action in Libya. For Americans, of course, Libya is almost forgotten, but for North Africa and the watching Arab world, it remains a vivid and disturbing memory: seven months of air attacks, with thousands of sorties, 7,700 bombs dropped or missiles launched, and uncounted civilian casualties.

I wish our Presidential Administration, the press, the Congress, the courts, the Pentagon would all take military intervention and carefully than they do.

What Andrew Bacevich calls the "War for the Greater Middle East" (Naming the Nameless War BillMoyers.com 05/28/2013) is a continuing process. And decisions to intervene in one country affects events and policy options in another. One effect of the French-British-US military intervention in Libya, for instance, was to push Russia and China to oppose UN Security Council authorizations for exercising the "obligation to protect" (a relatively new but now-established international law concept) in Syria out of concern that NATO powers would use it as an excuse to militarily intervene on behalf of Syrian rebels.

Bromwich notes that many of the same old war gang who pushed for the disastrous war in Iraq are now pushing for a new one in Syria ( bracketed italics from Bromwich):

Meanwhile, within Congress, the voices that led the march to war in 2003 have been clamoring against any hesitation by Obama to take military action. About John McCain, it is no satire but simple truth to say that he cannot have enough wars. On May 8, McCain published in Time a characteristic editorial, "Syria: Intervention Is in Our Interest," which contained a list of practical suggestions. Since the column supplies answers without having asked questions, it may serve economy to list in brackets the questions that naturally occur to a mind less confident and rash:

We could train and arm well-vetted Syrian opposition forces, as recommended last year by President Obama’s national-security team. ["Vetted" by whom and with what expertise?] We could strike Assad's aircraft and Scud-missile launchers. [Inside Russian-built air defenses stronger than those in Libya?] We could destroy artillery and drive Assad’s forces from their posts. [All without ground forces?]

Yet much of the recent pressure for another American intervention is coming from liberals. Senator Carl Levin, for one, cosigned with McCain a letter to the president on March 21 which urged—among other "limited military options" — the launching of "precision airstrikes" against the Syrian air force, as well as "more robust assistance" to opposition fighters believed to be unconnected with al-Qaeda. One of the tricks of persuasion of the liberal section of the war party, from Iraq through Libya to Syria, has been to aestheticize war.

Stephen Walt offers what he carefully notes is a mostly "mostly speculative" observation in What is the U.S. REALLY doing in Syria? Foreign Policy 05/22/2013: "the Obama administration may secretly welcome the repeated demands for direct U.S. involvement made by war hawks like Sen. John McCain. Rejecting the hawks' demands for airstrikes, 'no-fly zones,' or overt military aid makes it look like U.S. involvement is actually much smaller than it really is." He also offers a helpful checklist on Top 10 warning signs of 'liberal imperialism' 05/20/2013.

Bacevich summarizs the last few decades of US policy in the Middle East this way:

Only after 1980 did things get really interesting, however. The Carter Doctrine promulgated that year designated the Persian Gulf a vital national security interest and opened the door to greatly increased U.S. military activity not just in the Gulf, but also throughout the Greater Middle East (GME). Between 1945 and 1980, considerable numbers of American soldiers lost their lives fighting in Asia and elsewhere. During that period, virtually none were killed fighting in the GME. Since 1990, in contrast, virtually none have been killed fighting anywhere except in the GME.

What does the United States hope to achieve in its inherited and unending War for the Greater Middle East? To pacify the region? To remake it in our image? To drain its stocks of petroleum? Or just keeping the lid on? However you define the war’s aims, things have not gone well, which once again suggests that, in some form, it will continue for some time to come.

David Bromwich cites this article from McClatchy's Nancy Youssef, Middle East in Turmoil 10 Years After Iraq Invasion 03/14/2013. She explains that the Syrian opposition groups that the US and the EU are supporting to some degree aren't exactly model Jeffersonain democrats:

No one knows how long the conflict in Syria will go on. President Barack Obama first called for Assad to step down 19 months ago. U.S. officials no longer say Assad’s days are numbered, and the United Nations published a report this past week that says neither side may claim the military upper hand, though rebel advances seem to outnumber those of the Syrian military.

The United States agreed earlier this month to provide the anti-Assad opposition coalition with $60 million to help it get organized, and the European Union agreed to ease its arms embargo to allow some direct aid to the rebels, including armored personnel carriers.

But with Russia and China firmly on Assad’s side and blocking a series of anti-Assad U.N. resolutions, there’s no legal basis for broader international intervention – and no consensus that such intervention would end the bloodshed.

Perhaps most surprising is how much the tone of the effort in Syria has changed. Though it once was presented as an attempt to bring democracy to the country, the Islamist militant groups that dominate the rebel fighting oppose the very idea. Unable to win on their own, democracy proponents have aligned with those groups, with the head of the U.S.-supported Syrian Opposition Coalition, Mouaz al Khatib, openly denouncing the State Department’s designation of the Nusra Front as an al Qaida-linked terrorist group.

Earlier this month, as anti-Assad fighters moved through Raqqa province – first capturing a strategic dam, then the provincial capital and then the government building itself – they distributed fliers calling democracy un-Islamic.

"Beware of democracy," they read.

In May, the EU foreign ministers failed to agree on a renewal of their embargo on arms sales to Syrian rebels, allowing it to expire. Britain was hardnosed in pushing for an end to the arms embargo, making it clear that a common EU policy on the issues was not a priority for them. Britain typically follows US direction on these things, although I haven't seen reports of what the US role in this particular decision may be. France supported Britain on the issue, though less overtly obnoxiously. It's noteworthy that both Britain and France have signed on to one of the favorite prowar slogans of the moment, a new "weapons of mass destruction" argument: Arthur Bright, Britain joins France in saying nerve gas used in Syria Christian Science Monitor 06/05/2013. It's worth remembering how reliable Britain's warnings about WMDs were in Iraq, i.e., completely worthless.

One consequence of the ending of the EU arms embargo is that Austria has decided to draw its UN peacekeeping troops from the Golan Heights, judging that the effect of more weapons flooding into the area heightens the danger beyond the level of which the peacekeeping troops are prepared to handle. (Österreich zieht Blauhelme so rasch wie möglich vom Golan ab Der Standard 07.06.2013) Russia's Vladimir Putin has offered to replace them with Russian soldiers. (Russland will Österreichs UN-Soldaten am Golan ersetzen Der Standard 07.06.2013) Phoebe Greenwood and Martin Chulov report in Israel reacts angrily to Austria's withdrawal from Golan Heights Guardian 06/06/2013:

Israeli officials say the withdrawal of Austrian troops from the peacekeeping force monitoring the demilitarised border area following the injury of a Filipino soldier during clashes on Thursday threatened the role of the UN Security Council in any future negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

In a statement issued late on Thursday afternoon, Austria announced its decision to remove all 380 of its troops from the 1,000-strong force on the Israel-Syrian border due to the "continuing deterioration of the situation in the area".

"Austrian soldiers face an uncontrollable and direct threat, which has increased to an unacceptable level. The development in the early morning hours of today has shown that it is no longer justifiable to watch and wait," said the statement issued by Werner Faymann, Austria's federal chancellor, and Michael Spindelegger, vice-chancellor, of its mission in the Golan.

Syrian rebels groups briefly seized control of the Quneitra border crossing after hours of sustained and intense fighting with tanks and artillery, during which several shells exploded inside Camp Ziouni, a UN compound inside the demilitarised zone, and three mortars reportedly exploded inside Israeli-occupied territory.

Aljazeera English reports, Syrian forces regain main Golan Heights crossing 06/06/2013:

Tags: david bromwich, syria

Bromwich on post-election Obama's style

David Bromwich in Chuck Hagel and the Trial-Balloon Method Huffington Post 12/24/2012 takes a look at President Obama's flawed and frustrating negotiating style and how his fixation on moderation for moderation's sake continues to damage his ability for constructive accomplishments.

Bromwich gives several examples of Obama's style:

It looks as if Barack Obama is about to withdraw the idea of nominating Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense. To stick with Hagel against substantial (though at the beginning, surmountable) resistance would mean declaring one of his own apparent commitments to be unshakable. The pattern of Obama's career and character, however, goes the other way. His preferred method has been (a) to give in silently and let the issue trail off; or (b) make an announcement of temporary surrender in the foreseeable future; or (c) string out negotiations until the farthest-out solution seems a possible but clearly dangerous option, and his own ratification of centrist conventional wisdom appears the result of profound reflection.

Of the three methods listed above, (a) was the protocol for announcing and a few months later scuttling the closure of Guantanamo, (b) was used to defer any action on global warming, and (c) for escalating the Afghanistan war after giving the generals the time and opportunity to leak their plans for a larger escalation. The apparent exception is the health care law whose passage lasted the long year between Obama's inauguration and its signing in early 2010. But the exception proves the rule: after the signing, Obama said and did little to defend the Affordable Care Act, and according to his advisers he expected it to be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. (That expectation was itself, of course, a reason for his silence. Obama does not like to be seen to struggle against "reality.") [my emphasis]

This is the first I've heard - or at least the first time it's registered on me - that Obama expected all along that the Supreme Court would strike down the ACA. That's certainly an important information point.

Bromwich also uses an interesting phrase, "the sickly trial-balloon method." He's specifically discussing the trial balloons for the potential nominations of Susan Rice and Chuck Hagel, but I'm not sure if he's calling trial balloons generally "sickly" or only those particular uses of them. Still, not all trial balloons are equal, and "sickly trial-balloon" is a useful subcategory.

The job of the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party for the next four years will be to keep pushing him as much as possible to act like a Democrat, even though he's far more comfortable being a 1970s Northern Republican.

Tags: barack obama, david bromwich

Obama's Wednesday press conference and the Grand Bargain to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid

President (and Social Security opponent?) Obama opened his press conference today saying "our top priority has to be jobs and growth."

But the austerity program he's been discussing as his alternative to the so-called fiscal cliff - or "austerity bomb" - isn't giving top priority of jobs and growth. Obama, not surprisingly uses the "fiscal cliff" term.

Obama has been framing the core of the Nov-Dec budget fight as being focused on taxes, and emphasized the value of tax cuts, echoing as he so often does the Republican framing on fiscal issues.

But he set a low bar for such a deal all the way through the campaign by demanding that the wealthiest show pay "a little bit more," a phrase he repeated in today's press conference as describing his electoral mandate. So his public opening position in the current negotiation is basically that the only compromise he needs from the other side is some nominal or cosmetic increase in the amount of taxes paid by the upper brackets. That's pretty weak tea. And he said he was "open to new ideas" and included his usual postpartisan praise for compromise, saying "compromise is hard."

And the Democratic President is certainly not making any emphatic promises that he will prevent any and all cuts to benefits for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. But he says he wants a deal that's "big" and "comprehensive." He did mention "entitlements" at one point in the context of locking in "long term" deficit reduction. "Entitlements" is a buzzword for cutting benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Which means he still wants to go for his destructive "Grand Bargain."

And, again, this is the starting point for what Cenk Uygur calls Obama's "legendarily disastrous negotiating". (Why the Grand Bargain Is One-Sided and Totally Unfair Huffington Post 11/12/2012)

At his press conference, he defended his caving to the Republicans in the lame-duck session two years ago on the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest.

If there was a glimmer of optimism for Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid supporters in today's press conference, it was that Obama seemed to indicated that he was willing to separate the issue of the Bush tax cuts out as a separate decision from the rest of the austerity package. The best outcome for Social Security supporters in the negotiations in November and December would be for that to happen, with the Bush tax cuts for the upper 2% either ended through a separate decision in the lame-duck session or through their simple expiration due to Congressional inaction. That would be a victory for Medicare supporters. (Or maybe I should say SSMM supporters, since I'm using the terms interchangeably.)

David Bromwich has followed Obama's public performance closely and is very perceptive about a lot of it, though he can't resist a bit of pop psychology now and then. Obama in the current "fiscal class" negotiations is continuing the pattern Bromwich describes in Now the Democrats Must Lead Huffington Post 11/14/2012: "His way of negotiating with the Republicans from 2009 through 2011 was to offer them everything in his opening bid. Their response was to ask for more; so Obama asked his party for more; and things ground to a halt."

Oh, and he also said he wasn't planning to do [bleep] about climate change.

Tags: austerity economics, barack obama, david bromwich, fiscal cliff, grand bargain, medicaid, medicare, social security

David Bromwich on Obama's speaking style

David Bromwich is a close observer of Obama's words and how they connect with his policies. Also he sometimes dabbles in pop psychology while doing it, I've found his analyses of Obama particularly insightful.

A couple of years ago in The Fastidious President (London Review of Books 32/22 11/18/2012), Bromwich talked about Obama's two basic speaking styles with particular reference to press conferences:

I recently listened to some of John Kennedy’s press conferences, and was struck, not by his charm and easy control of the press, the usual traits that people bring up, but rather by his quickness and conversational rhythm. Kennedy’s answers are detailed and matter of fact, and though he occasionally speaks of his own views, he treats Congress as an equal partner. He sometimes shows irritation and is none the less cogent for that. He can speak a whole paragraph when a thought comes all at once without a pause. Any observer of Obama realises that, by contrast, he is always slow, always circumspect, and he has two distinct registers of diction: one for talking to very clever but abstracted people, the other for talking to well-meaning people who are very young or very old and certainly need remedial help. In the higher idiom he talks of a ‘critique’ of policy and ‘trend lines’ and the ways to ‘incentivise’ better care and ‘prioritise’ the next steps of government assistance to show that we are ‘doing everything we can to accelerate job creation’. It is the language of a technocrat, the man at the head of the conference table. In the lower idiom, there are lots of ‘folks’, ‘folks who oppose me’, ‘a whole bunch of folks’, interspersed with vaguely regional comfort words like ‘oftentimes’. [my emphasis]

That second kind of diction was very much on display in the first debate with Mitt Romney. The next day, Obama was able to use a speech to ridicule some of Romney's position in a way that he was completely unable to do the evening before.

The second debate is set up in town-hall format, so we can expect Obama to be more in that second, "remedial help" mode there. Not that it's bad. After all, the man won the Presidency in 2008 as the first African-American elected to that office. He was obviously doing something right.

Although it's not entirely clear if Bromwich was including traditional campaign speeches in that two-dictions part, the one-way type speech when Obama addresses a crowd gives him a chance to use soaring but vague rhetoric, e.g., "the fierce urgency of now." Or, "This is our time, America!"

Bromwich has a recent piece in which he observes that Obama is comfortable with those types of speeches, how they are compatible with his seemingly compulsive centrist/postpartisan aspirations, and what it was about Biden's debate performance last week that was particularly effective: Saying It Straight in October Huffington Post 10/13/2012.

What Biden did that Obama failed to do in the first debate was to give people arguments against the Romney-Ryan positions and in favor of the Administration's. Jennifer Granholm on Current TV commented that Biden gave a lot more detail. But my impression watching the debate was Ryan seemed to be rattling of a lot of figures (of dubious reliability), the kind of talk that made him look like the punditocracy's dream of a Serious Conservative Policy Wonk. Biden shot that down by talking about specific policies but doing so with in a conceptual framework that let people view Obama's policies favorably and Romney-Ryan's unfavorably. It wasn't so much the detail as the relevance.

As Bromwich puts it:

By nature and disposition, Barack Obama is a man who blends and consolidates. The plaintive undertone that you hear sometimes, under his heartiest shout, really says to his listeners "How can anyone reject what I'm saying? This is so reasonable. And we know it already -- it's enough to remember what we know. Now, come along with me and agree that this is what we've always stood for."

But not everyone knows, not everyone agrees, not everyone will call it reasonable unless the arguments and history are laid out in a connected order. In last night's debate, Joe Biden brought a reminder of what it sounds like when a politician offers reasons. He did not vaguely concede and back away as Obama did a few nights earlier when he said he probably agreed with his opponent about Social Security. Biden recalled that Republicans want to privatize Social Security and that, as recently as 2005, they were for entrusting personal holdings to the stock market. How well would that have worked? Beyond the minutiae of Medicare and vouchers, Biden remembered that the Republican Party was unfriendly to Medicare from the start.

And he argues this was effective because, "These weren't extended reasons, and they didn't develop as full arguments, but they were reasons and arguments: the part of persuasion that Obama has always dismissed too lightly."

He uses as an example Obama's referring to "the mess we're in" being the result of previous policies. But Obama doesn't then give a sketch of what those policies were and how they harmed the country. Bromwich recommends that for the second debate and the rest of the campaign generally that Obama should "think twice about calling a time of widespread suffering 'the mess we're in.' It isn't something that someone spilled in the kitchen. The reality has a history, and there are names that can be named."

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama, david bromwich, joe biden

David Bromwich looks again at Obama's words and speculates about his personality

David Bromwich has another post about President Obama in the London Review of Books, simply title Diary 07/05/2012, though the link to it is called "A Bad President".

I've learned a lot from Bromwich's close scrutiny of Obama's words and actions as a candidate and President. But the more recent pieces of his I've seen have made me wonder whether he's created a closed feedback loop, allowing his dislike for Obama to dull the edge of his analysis. In this piece, that problem appears in the form of hazy pop psychology suggestions and comments like, "Obama has a harder time than any sane politician I have ever heard in admitting that his words are only words."

Justin Frank makes a more plausible case in Obama on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President (2011):

Despite his various blind spots, Obama maintains a generally high level of mental health. In light of the challenges he has faced, his mental health can be considered among his finest and most significant accomplishments - the ultimate achievement, perhaps, of a very driven and successful achiever. ... Most impressive to me as a psychoanalyst has been his capacity to bear psychic pain and to think in the face of anxiety.

Where Frank and Bromwich converge is in observing how Obama's fixation on being a compromiser and conciliator. Frank treats it as a basically strong and useful aspect of Obama's character and experience that sometimes serves him poorly.

Bromwich's more general dislike of the man gives his disapproval of this habit a gloomier twist:

He told a teacher once that words were the most dangerous power in the world; he seems to have meant they were the most powerful things. But to speak words that carry a distinct meaning on certain subjects, and then not to back them by deeds, is weaker than saying nothing. Obama, however, has seen himself all along not mainly as a politician but rather as a man of genius. His calling is to unite and reconcile opposites, as only genius can.

He has often echoed Lincoln's Second Inaugural, the canonical American speech of reconciliation. It has not occurred to him that our time may be more suited to the House Divided speech, in which Lincoln in 1858 showed why the slavery question was so important it might make the two sides irreconcilable. Obama's many House United speeches, by contrast, are always about unity for its own sake – a curious idea. Unity for its own sake will capture neither votes nor lasting loyalty among people who crave an explanation of the elements of political right and wrong. Obama likes to say that the truth always lies somewhere 'in between'. Fair enough at first glance. A tenable compromise between obdurate persons or opposite forces generally lies somewhere in between. But truth is different surely, truth occurs as it occurs, and often one finds it at the extremes.

It would be silly to expect a leading politician to have anything other than a high estimation of his own abilities, at least at some level of his mind. But Obama's confidence in the persuasiveness of his words is both well-founded in the persuasive communications skills he was developed for himself and in the high estimate with which even some of his sharpest critics themselves regard those skills. There's no need to invoke an unlikely difficulty "in admitting that his words are only words" to explain it.

Bromwich doesn't seem to fully appreciate the ideological element in Obama's approach. Not only Frank's book but Obama's consistent conduct suggest that he is basically a conservative, at least if we use that term in a more classical, general sense of wanting to "make haste slowly". I heard George McGovern use that description sometime around 1983 and it has stuck with me. McGovern was contrasting that attitude with the hardline Movement Conservatism that even today continues to tighten its dominance over the Republican Party.

Obama basically distrusts progressives because, well, he's not one. And he regards them with contempt, surely in major part because of his identification with the wealthy. Even in his tax speech two days ago, he made a point to refer to "the wealthiest Americans -- folks like myself". Pointing out telling verbal habits like this is one of Bromwich's strengths in looking at Obama. He has demonstrated repeatedly his distrust, even contempt of progressives, as Tom Tomorrow has captured in his Middle Man cartoons:

I think this lack of focus on Obama's own commitment to neoliberalism shows when he quotes John Maynard Keynes describing Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference, a passage in which he sees a clear parallel to Obama's general approach to governance: "But in fact the president had thought out nothing; when it came to practice his ideas were nebulous and incomplete. He had no plan, no scheme, no constructive ideas whatever for clothing with the flesh of life the commandments which he had thundered from the White House." That's a fair description of Wilson in Paris. But Obama doesn't thunder commands from the White House, unless we include things like Rahm Emanuel shouting at progressive groups that they were "f******g retarded" for running ads to pressure Blue Dog Democratic Members of Congress to support what was supposedly the President's own position on health care reform. (Rahm subsequently apologized to the retarded, but not to the Democratic activists he cussed out.) As Bromwich documents even in this piece, Obama proposes compromises from the White House in a pleasant tone to Republicans to who hate his guts and have no intention of making deals with him.

And on foreign and national policy, the Republicans have generally supported his specific policies, though they would obviously prefer to have a more warlike one. When it comes to government secrecy, prosecuting whistleblowers and using drones to commit acts of war and targeted assassination, we can't say that Obama has sought "the truth [that] always lies somewhere 'in between'." He adopted more extreme policies than the Cheney-Bush Administration.

Bromwich does describe the neoliberal drift of the Democratic Party which has been particularly marked under Obama. It's just that he tends to treat it as a personality quirk rather than a combination of Obama's personality and his ideology:

The Obama presidency has gone far to complete the destruction of New Deal politics which began when Bill Clinton brought Wall Street into the White House. The right won the political wars of the last two generations, the left won the culture wars, and we are now in a position to measure the gain and loss. On the one hand, greater tolerance of mixed marriages, the enforced habit of not showing race prejudice in public, gay rights. On the other hand, most Americans today with modest means and a modest chance in life are swayed by the gambling ethic: they speak in the commercial patois – which many of their grandparents would have scorned – of the 'entrepreneurial spirit' and the 'American dream'.

But he continues immediately by saying, "Obama did nothing to change this. He tried to wield the language of the dream more effectively than his opponents: a gambit that can now be seen to have failed." It was a bad gambit. But here it was only a failed tactic if one assumes that Obama was ideologically committed to the same general outlook.

Here I got go back once again to Obama's iconic keynote speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention which Justin Frank calls "the most important speech of his political career":

People don't expect -- People don't expect government to solve all their problems. But they sense, deep in their bones, that with just a slight change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life, and that the doors of opportunity remain open to all. [my emphasis]

Obama's alternative to Cheney-Bush social policies was just a slight change in priorities, the expression of the conservative temperament of a man who generally accepts the neoliberal economic/social outlook. His subsequent career has demonstrated how strongly that acceptance guides his actions.

Bromwich concludes by talking about Obama's position on war with Iran. I'm not convinced that Obama intends to go to war with Iran even after his re-election, so I tend to agree with Bromwich's framing here:

On Iran, for now, Obama has not joined the sabre-rattling, but his policy appears to be regime change, and he has done little to calm the voices in the Israel lobby and Congress who clamour for stiffer sanctions and will soon cry for blockade and war. He has not found the time or the wit to offer an explanation that would indicate the good sense of peace – in case the prospects grow brighter in the current negotiations. He has pledged to do whatever it takes to stop Iran from having a nuclear weapon, and has subscribed to the Netanyahu equation: too far on the road to a weapon is the same as having a weapon. Quite consistently, in his presidency, Obama’s method of stopping a measure, a tendency or a worldly development he opposes has not been to stand in its way but to try to slow it down. Indeed, this is almost his only tactic, as if he believed you could stop a train from arriving at the wrong terminus by padding the railcars with very good shock absorbers. His present strategy is to continue slowly towards war with Iran, but not be seen to have arrived there by November.

The biggest groaner in this article of Bromwich's is his comment that Woodrow Wilson and Barack Obama "share an odd quirk of the national character". At another point, he writes, "So the stranger and outsider becomes in America the axial personality through whom all the cross-currents of national character must flow." National character? Really, dude? I mean, I'm fond of the occasional 1950s nostalgia, too. But this "national character" stuff is just jive talk. National traditions, cultural assumptions, okay, but this "national character" business is worse than useless. It's a mystification of politics, and in Bromwich's case a vague notion like "national character" is an extension of his excessive focus on Obama's personality to the neglect of politics and political ideology.

Tags: barack obama, david bromwich

Postpartisanship: for Obama, the dream never dies

David Bromwich catches President Obama once again promoting his on-its-face delusional dream of postpartisanship, in which the Republican Party becomes cooperative and agreeable during Obama's second term: The Strange Bipartisanship of 2009, 2011, and 2013 Huffington Post 06/05/2012.

Before I get too far into this, I should emphasize that in many aspects of foreign policy, Obama and the Republicans are in bipartisan harmony. Green Greenwald may overstate the similarities a bit. But his basic point on that is correct, which he lays out in Obama the Warrior Salon 05/29/2012. Obama has continued and extended some of the very worst aspects of the Cheney-Bush foreign and military policies, and the Republicans have supported him in doing so. As Glenn puts it (emphasis his), "Romney has had a hard time identifying Obama’s foreign-policy vulnerabilities because there’s just not that much difference between the two." Tom Engelhardt addresses the same point in Praying at the Church of St. Drone: The President and His Apostles TomDispatch 06/05/2012.

This is important to evaluating Bromwich's analyses of Obama's postpartisan obsession, because his commentaries I've seen tend to ignore it. Bromwich leans heavily toward treating Obama's postpartisanship desire as a character flaw, and he's there's good reason to believe that is the case.

But if Obama is so desperate for bipartisan acceptance on an emotional level, why doesn't he get any particular evident satisfaction from the bipartanship he does get from the Republicans on foreign and military affairs? Why doesn't he hold that up in his speeches as a success of postpartisanship?

What I'm getting at is that there is also some significant amount of political calculation in Obama's insistence on bipartisanship and its alleged value. It's certainly true that on domestic policy, the Republicans have been taking a position of fundamental opposition, obstructionist and destructive. But Obama also supports a Grand Bargain that would seriously cut Social Security and Medicare benefits in exchange for nothing more than bare tokens in concessions from the Republicans. This isn't speculation. He actually did propose that in 2011 and the Republicans turned him down.

But facing a reelection campaign with a weak economy in danger of taking a body blow from European economic problems, he's still trotting out bipartisanship and the Grand Bargain as though anyone but investment bankers and rightwing billionaires support the latter and David Brooks and equally muddled Pod Pundits pine for postpartisanship. (Okay, I almost never do alliteration, but that time I couldn't resist.)

The speech to which Bromwich refers is officially called Remarks by the President at a Campaign Event -- Bachelor Farmer Restaurant, Minneapolis, MN 06/01/2012.

And so a lot of the tussles that we’ve had over the last three and a half years have had to do with this difference in vision, and it will be coming to a head in this election. We’re going to have as stark a contrast as we’ve seen in a very long time between the candidates. I mean, 2008 was a significant election, obviously. But John McCain believed in climate change. (Laughter.) John believed in campaign finance reform. He believed in immigration reform. I mean, there were some areas where you saw some overlap.

Yes, he's talking about McCain like a pundit with a man-crush, pretending that McCain is a Bold Maverick instead of being what he always has been, a nasty old rightwing militarist.

Here's the Grand Bargain, carefully restricted here to "only" Medicare and Medicaid:

In this election, the Republican Party has moved in a fundamentally different direction. The center of gravity for their party has shifted. And so things that we used to be able to take for granted, that’s been more difficult to take for granted over the last three and a half years.

And let’s just take one example: deficit reduction. We have a significant long-term debt that has to be dealt with. Now, our top priority should be putting people to work right now, because if our economy is growing faster, that actually will help reduce the deficit. But there’s no doubt that it’s unsustainable for us to keep on having health care costs in Medicare and Medicaid go up 6, 8, 10 percent, when the overall inflation rate and growth rate are coming in lower. That’s a recipe for long-term disaster.

So what we’ve said is, look, let’s cut out waste; let’s streamline programs; let’s reorganize government where we can. Let’s end the war in Iraq; let’s wind down the war in Afghanistan. Let’s use some of those savings for deficit reduction. Let’s tackle Medicare and Medicaid in an intelligent way that preserves this critical social safety net but also achieves significant savings. And let’s ask those of us who've been most fortunate just to pay a little bit more. And if we put that package together we can achieve $4 trillion of savings and we can pay right now to rebuild our roads and our bridges, and rehire some teachers, and grow the economy right now. We can package that together to make progress. [my emphasis]

Obama would be well advised to just shut up about the deficit. Nobody cares about it, least of all Republicans.

And, yes, this is a Democratic President, elected in what seemed like a minor miracle in 2008 as the first African-American President on a wave of progressive rejection of the Bush Administration, its disastrous economic policies, its anti-government negligence on things like the Katrina disaster, and its two endless wars. And the massive criminality and corruption that went along with all those things. And Obama took office in a severe recession, with the financial system tottering on collapse, with clear signs this could turn into a Japan-style depression. With the possible exceptions of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 and Lyndon Johnson in 1964,
no American President in the last century has taken office in a better position to press for sweeping domestic reforms.

Yes, the Koch-icized, Bircher-ized and Birther-ized Republican Party would have blocked a lot of it. But Obama largely squandered the chances he did have by his cautious pursuit and failed of bipartisanship on domestic issues. The man is fundamentally conservative. And if "conservative" in the American political vocabulary meant something other than poo-flinging nihilism in domestic policy, it would be common for people to refer to Obama as a conservative Democrat.

For him to be saying things like this is a tough reelection campaign is just sad:

Now, I believe that if we're successful in this election -- when we’re successful in this election -- that the fever may break, because there's a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that. My hope and my expectation is that after the election, now that it turns out the goal of beating Obama doesn’t make much sense because I’m not running again -- (laughter) -- that we can start getting some cooperation again, and we’re not going to have people raising their hands and saying -- or refusing to accept a deal where there’s $10 of cuts for every dollar of tax increases, but that people will accept a balanced plan for deficit reduction. [my emphasis]

I guess that would be nice if anyone actually cared about reducing the deficit right now. Okay, maybe Obama and possible David Brooks actually do. (Though I doubt it.) But none of the Democrats should be worrying about it 2012, least of all the guy at the head of the ticket.

Bromwich has an excellent question about Obama remarkable speculation there:

One sometimes gets a sense of unreality emanating from the White House that is almost a match for the Republicans. Granted the president and his advisers are less savage, less anarchic, and, from the point of view of the public good, less dangerous than the Tea Party which now holds the Republican Party captive. Then again, who is more untethered, the man who stomps around his back yard every night at midnight for 133 weeks, wearing sunglasses and reading the prose of Atlas Shrugged through a megaphone -- or the neighbor who looks on the scene benignly and concludes: "He really seems eminently reasonable underneath. I am sure he'll change and let us sleep next year, now that our kids are school age."

But the bad part is, whether Obama wins or loses, there is a real possibility that in the post-election lame-duck period, he will get Congress to go along with what he offered last year: significant cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid that will put the programs on the track to complete phase-out. If Obama wins, the Democratic base and every voter who wants to keep those programs intact had better turn intense attention to fighting for them just as soon as the polls close on Election Day.

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama, david bromwich, medicaid, medicare, social security

Why the Clinton analogy for the Obama Presidency is a poor one

David Bromwich gets to the nub of the political-style problem in Why Has Obama Never Recognized the Tea Party? Huffington Post 08/02/2011:

Obama likes to compare himself to Lincoln but the president he most nearly resembles is Clinton -- but it is Clinton without the knowledge of politics, without the passion for politics, without the sheer tenacity of devotion to the game of politics. Clinton beat his Tea Party and humbled their leader within a year of their midterm victory, and their only revenge was an impeachment which they also lost. Obama has awarded his opponents a hostage, the economy, which they won't release in a year, or two years, or ten.

I don't want to praise Bill Clinton excessively. This year, he endorsed Obama's proposed cuts to Social Security and Medicare, showing that his personal commitment to Democratic Party core values and programs is superficial at best.

But as President, Clinton understood that as the leader of the Democratic Party, part of his leadership job was to confront the opposition Republican Party at times and to confront them on the basis of the Democratic Party's program and priorities. Clinton famously practiced a political strategy of "triangulation," which meant establishing some kind of practical working relationship with both parties in Congress.

Whatever his deepest inner convictions on particular issues, Clinton gave his own partisans the impression that the compromises he was making like that on welfare reform were a pragmatic but undesirable adjustment to the reality of Republican strength in the Congress. Clinton could manage soaring rhetoric and come off as the national pastor. But he was also a Democratic partisan who was willing to fight the Republicans and cast the issues on which he was fighting them in a clear way. The Gingrich Republicans looked bad on the government shutdowns because Bill Clinton made sure that they owned the shutdowns in the eyes of the public.

Obama shares Clinton's neoliberal economic outlook and his mid-first-term attempt to navigate a political atmosphere that seemed to have turned in favor of the Republicans. But Obama's version is "Clinton without the knowledge of politics, without the passion for politics, without the sheer tenacity of devotion to the game of politics." (Bromwich)

Then there's the actual state of the economy. The US economy was in recovery in 1994-6, and the tech boom/bubble was beginning. Steve Kornacki in The futility of playing Mr. Reasonable Salon 08/04/2011, a misleading title because Kornacki is actually arguing that the President's Mr. Reasonable act seems to be playing pretty well, acknowledges at the end the large fly in the ointment of partisan optimism for the Democrats:

So while it's good news for Obama that his base still isn't in revolt (and probably never will be), he's got a much bigger problem: He seems intent on following Bill Clinton's 1995/1996 playbook, but the magic ingredient that made it work for Clinton -- a growing economy that made "pure independents" eager to give him the benefit of the doubt -- is missing this time around. Playing Mr. Reasonable looks a lot different to voters when they're out of work or fearing for their jobs.

Matt Stoller has an interesting analysis of Obama's approach to liberals in What Presidency? Naked Capitalism 08/01/2011. My summary here doesn't do it justice. But he argues that Obama's strategy toward liberals is to try to have them focus only "on the ceremonial non-governmental aspects of the Presidency. You do it by making sure that they focus only on the televised aspects of the Presidency." But he capsulises the political risks in his concluding paragraphs. Not only will some proportion of liberal voters be disgusted by what he's doing, as in the debt deal and the Libya War. His substantively bad policies present major risks to his re-election prospects and to the general prospects of the Democratic Party:

It is only by focusing on the governor-in-chief role that one sees a different focus of the Presidency. It is absolutely the case, as [Paul] Krugman notes, that Republican detachment from reality is a threat to democracy. But it is worth noting that in ascribing to this the sole cause of our political situation is to diminish the notion that creatively using power can achieve good things for people. For instance, it's true that having a press corps with more balance about the goals of Republicans and Democrats would create a healthier democratic society – but then, it’s probably also true that a real foreclosure prevention plan in 2009 would have dramatically restored faith in government by touching the lives of millions of people in an affirmatively positive instead of malevolent way.

All of this is to say that how one sees government is critical to how one judges Obama. And if the only consideration is the boundaries of television, then of course, Obama is going to look like a mediocre narrator-in-chief constrained by wild forces he cannot control. Of course, Congress will make him seem like a somewhat inept but well-meaning legislative leader or party leader. It is only in turning off the boundaries set by a narrow TV-dominated discourse that one truly sees Obama’s real handiwork – the wars, the bailouts, and most tragically, what could have been but never was.

Tags: barack obama, david bromwich, matt stoller, david kornacki

David Bromwich needs to remember how to love his monster

Years ago I read this passage in Gary Wills' review of Robert A. Caro's Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Vol. 2 (1990), Monstre Désacré New York Review of Books 04/26/1990 edition.

In 1944 Laurence Olivier began a run as Sergius in Shaw's Arms and the Man, unsuccessfully. When Tyrone Guthrie came by to see the Shaw play, he asked, "Don't you love Sergius?" Decidedly not, Olivier answered. "Well, of course, if you can't love him, you'll never be any good in him, will you?" Olivier called this the "richest pearl of advice in my life." Years later he could point to the exact spot outside the theater where he had received this pearl, after which he loved — and played — the hell out of Sergius.

Robert Caro needed a Tyrone Guthrie at some earlier stage of this long run with the life of Lyndon Johnson. "Love that stooge?" Olivier had asked Guthrie; but Sergius is simply a blusterer. It is easy enough, with effort, to love a vain child. Monsters are another matter, and Lyndon Johnson was clearly a monster of ambition, greed, and cruelty. What's not to loathe?

But it rots the soul to entertain, too long, an unmixed contempt for any human being, even the worst. There is something eerily obsessive about Caro's stalking of his villain. It is the inverse of gilding the lily, this continual tarring of the blackguard. Johnson's treatment of his wife was bad enough, one would think, that Caro need not exaggerate it. Yet Caro reserves information where it would partly exonerate, and produces it only when it further incriminates. We are told, early on, how Congressman Johnson flew home to his district on his patron's corporate airplane while his wife had to drive the long trip with their belongings. Though Caro admits that "Lady Bird disliked flying," he tells us that the principal reason for "this disparity in the Johnsons' travel arrangements," which proved that "he treated her like the hired help," was Johnson's parsimony where she was concerned.

In my mind, I compressed this down to the advice, "You have to learn how to love your monster." And took it to mean that when you are evaluating someone whose ideas or actions you find particularly unsympathetic, you have to find some way to empathize enough with them to understand how they approached things. Otherwise, you'll wind up doing what Robert Caro did in that installment of his four-volume biography of Johnson, disliking the subject so much that you look for ways to trash him, whether or not you're being consistent or making sense.

I've been very impressed with David Bromwich's various analyses of Barack Obama's, which he has based heavily on a close reading and listening to the President's speeches on the stump and as the Chief Executive. His Why Has Obama Never Recognized the Tea Party? Huffington Post 08/02/2011 continues that trend, and has some important and perceptive insights.

But I've begun to worry that Bromwich has reached a level of downright contempt for Obama that he's starting to slip into Caro's authorial mistake of looking too hard for reasons to trash him. In my own experience, looking at Obama's actions from the viewpoint of a Democrat who had cautious but substantial hopes for his Presidency, you don't have to look that hard to find substantial things to criticize.

Here Bromwich does again what he's been so good at doing: looking closely at what Obama public style and self-representation tell us about his decision-making and deal-making. But a distinct note of contempt is creeping in:

It is an abysmal failure like the larger strategy favored by Obama's handlers: the devising of ever more talking venues for him, on the assumption that if people disapprove of the way things are going, the reason must be that they don't see and hear enough of Obama.

Undertone: I'm sick of hearing this guy.

There follows the baby-talk explanation of "No Taxation without Representation" as if his audience were barely sophisticated enough to remember the rudiments of fifth-grade history.

Undertone: Really, I'm sick of hearing this guy.

Ever pliable and parental, Obama pronounces "healthy" the desire shared by both parties to see the country pay its debts.

Undertone: No, seriously, I'm sick of hearing this guy's voice.

Worse than the lofty disclaimer is the debonair condescension.

Undertone: Really, people, the sound of this guy's voice kind of makes my skin crawl.

The broad programs to which he thought he adhered, and talked as if he believed in, he has sold down the river.

Undertone: I'm sick of hearing this guy's voice; plus he's, you know, black.

That "sold down the river" phrase is a reference to slavery. It referred to slaves being sold to owners in the Deep South, where their chances of escape were less than those in states bordering on a free state.

I don't want to get all prissy about political vocabulary. But, just as with Matt Taibbi, Bromwich's introducing a well-known race-related phrase in a piece otherwise dripping with contempt for Obama is not a appealing thing.

I'm noticing these things more because my own impression is that Obama with his debt-ceiling deal and his offers to cut Social Security and Medicare has crippled his Presidency and almost certainly fatally wounded his re-election prospects. He's now seriously "damaged goods" politically. So for writers and pundits, attacking Obama is now something that can please a wide spectrum of the audience, not just Republicans. Defending him will look more and more like tying yourself to a doomed cause. Expect more commentators to pile on with criticisms tailored to win quotes from conservatives as "even the liberal so-and-so says ..."

Bromwich's analysis in that piece is generally sound. Obama has avoided directly confronting the Tea Party narrative. He does frequently speak in a way that sounds condescending, especially after hearing it over and over. That's a particular problem for a Democrat, because the Republicans have well established a narrative that says Democrats are "elitists" that look down on the Real Americans. And Bromwich is correct about Obama's failure as Democratic party leader:

For Obama has torn up the social contract which was the heart of the Democratic Party. Those who want to confine the blame to Republicans say that the opposition party follows the dictates of a fanatical faction. True; but a president in these circumstances would seem all the more obligated to confront the opposition.

One might quibble over whether the "social contract" has been shredded. After all, Social Security and Medicare benefits survived last weekend's Big Bad Deal. But the political contract between the Democrats and their electoral base that the Party would protect Social Security and Medicare.

But if Bromwich wants to keep his orientation in writing about Obama, he needs to remember how to love his monster.

Tags: barack obama, david bromwich

Obama's words, personality and policy

I've become particularly fond of David Bromwich's analyses of President Obama. His close reading of Obama's speeches often yields some perceptive insights.

In Obama: His Words and His Deeds 06/16/2011 (07/14/2011 issue), Bromwich brings the story up to date:

Few members of Congress as yet hold a fully articulated objection to America’s wars in Asia and North Africa. But other causes in play may trouble the President’s determination to show his sympathy with the Arab Spring by military action in Libya. Obama has an unfortunate propensity to be specific when it would serve him well to avoid particulars, and to become vague at times when dates, names, numbers, or "a line in the sand" is what is needed to clarify a policy. On Libya, he was specific. He said the American commitment would last "days, not weeks." It has now lasted a little under three months. Reliable reporters such as Anthony Shadid of The New York Times and Patrick Cockburn of The Independent have suggested that an end to the conflict is nowhere in sight.

The narrow aim of enforcing a "no-fly zone" to protect civilians, asserted by Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton as the limit of American aims, turns out to have been a wedge for an air war against Qaddafi, a war, in fact, as thorough as is compatible with avoidance of harm to civilians. The surest thing one can say about the end of this engagement is that the US—along with France, Great Britain, and perhaps also Italy, which arranged the intervention—will at some point install a client state and fit out a friendly government with a democratic constitution.

Stephen Walt is less generous in his evaluation of Obama's bizarre claim that the Libya War doesn't constitute "hostilities" by the United States under American law. In Obama, we're at war. Stop insulting us. Foreign Policy 06/16/2011, Walt writes:

... the Obama administration is claiming that it doesn't need congressional authorization for its Libyan intervention under the War Powers Act. Why? Because what we are doing doesn't amount to "full-blown" hostilities.

Oh, please. Let's start with the definition of "war" itself. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as "a state of armed conflict between different countries or different groups within a country." Now, let's see: what are we doing in Libya? What we know is that we've sent cruise missiles, and drones and U.S. aircraft to attack military targets in various places, including several attacks on Qaddafi's own compound. We are continuing to provide targeting information to our NATO allies, who are conducting additional raids on their own. Although U.S. ground troops are not present in force, it's a safe bet that U.S. special forces are operating in various places, probably helping provide some of that targeting info. And of course because the Obama administration isn't telling us everything that it's doing, we have no clear way of knowing exactly how involved we really are.

By any reasonable, common-sense standard, in short, we are at war. It doesn't matter that we aren't using our full strength to help the rebels or that other states are doing more than we are. The plain fact is that the United States is using its military forces and intelligence capabilities to attack Libyan forces. In plain English, we are killing (or helping to kill) Qaddafi loyalists (and occasionally innocent civilians), in an openly-acknowledged campaign to drive him from power. Sounds like war to me, and to anybody else who isn't being paid to find ways to evade or obscure reality. [my emphasis in bold]

Walt's comments points to one of the limitations of Bromwich's approach. Bromwich generally does a good job of looking at the policy context of Obama's words. But he tends to treat seeming inconsistencies in Obama's words as some sort of personality quirk. And in doing so, he sometimes makes useful assumptions, such as comments about his own personal wealth that suggest a strong identification with the wealthy and powerful. But it can also downplay policy and political concerns that make even more obvious explanations.

For instance, he writes:

Obama has always preferred the symbolic authority of the grand utterance to the actual authority of a directed policy: a policy fought for in particulars, carefully sustained, and traceable to his own intentions. The danger of the built-up speech venues — the Nobel Prize speech of December 2009 was another example — is that they cast Obama as the most famous holder-forth in the world, and yet it is never clear what follows for him from the fact that the world is listening. These settings make a president who is now more famous than popular seem not popular but galactic.

The speeches also display as a strength a personal trait that can seem, instead, an indulgence. For Obama, protracted moods of extreme abstraction seem to alternate with spasmodic engagement. The blend is hard to get used to. His detachment from congressional negotiations on health care and cap-and-trade was resented by Democrats, while leaders of the Palestinian Authority were at a loss to account for the dissociation from active pursuit of a settlement that followed his Cairo speech of June 2009. His decision to back the Libyan rebels was an instance of sudden engagement, against the prudential advice of a secretary of defense whom Obama trusts and admires. [my emphasis]

Yet he writes further on:

Obama in his Nobel Prize speech - which was in large part a defense of American conduct after 1945 and in smaller part a plea for the legitimation of humanitarian wars such as he has now committed the US to support in Libya - went on to say of the duties of a great power: “Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later.” The idioms of duty and utility are strangely mixed in that sentence. How can we be sure that an act that the President would like the world to see as benevolent will be seen as benevolent? It is surely easier to have that feeling if one knows oneself as the preeminent power, and believes oneself to be carried forward by the momentum of the world. [my emphasis]

Why do we need a psychological explanation postulating that Obama experiences "protracted moods of extreme abstraction [which] seem to alternate with spasmodic engagement" and that one of the latter moments was the Libya intervention, when Bromwich's observation that Obama used his Nobel speech in part for "the legitimation of humanitarian wars such as he has now committed the US to support in Libya" indicates rather than Obama was looking for such an opportunity as a matter of policy? There are indications, certainly, that the Libya intervention was poorly thought through. And even that Obama may have been suckered into thinking it was going to be quick and easy. But we don't need a speculation about a tendency on the President's part to "spasmodic engagement" to explain it plausibly.

Using grand phrases to deflect criticism from disappointing policies is a routine part of political speech and statecraft. Bromwich is also giving political theater too much credit in the matter of the health care negotiations. The White House was heavily involved with them but didn't make a big public deal about them. In summer of 2009, the White House cut their notorious deal with health industry lobbyists to make sure no public option would be included in the health care reform.

Bromwich gives a lot of attention to Obama's public rhetorical sparring with Benjamin Netanyahu. He thinks the Israeli Prime Minister got the best of Obama. But Bromwich leaves the impression that this is mainly because Obama failed to understand Netanyahu's rhetorical strategy. It seems more relevant to look at Obama's record to date, which strongly suggests that he never intended to apply major pressure to Israel to stop the West Bank settlements, which is essential to any remaining hope of negotiations leading to a viable two-state solution. A more parsimonious explanation of Obama's behavior is that he wanted to wave a diplomatic fig leaf to indicate that he tried to do something to get Israel to negotiate.

But Bromwich is being realistic when he writes, "Obama, as much as any American leader, is captivated by an image of America as the world-historical touchstone of generous conduct toward other nations." Politics, of course, require him to convey the impression to the public that he believes something along those lines. But Bromwich's conclusion in this case is consistent not only with Obama's words but his policy conduct.

Bromwich also seems to miss a basic and simple point here:

Walter Bagehot in The English Constitution divided government into two components, the dignified part and the efficient part. The dignified part is concerned with matters of ceremony, the arrangement and conduct of state occasions for celebration or mourning, the issuance of joint communiqués with foreign leaders and commands delivered from a majestic height. The efficient part is the part of government that governs - by making laws above all, but also by striking bargains between factions, and filling the positions of upper, middle, and lower functionaries, and threshing out party platforms on the way to becoming laws.

And he notes that Obama seems to have a distinct preference for the former. But one obvious distinction between the President and the British prime minister, and also the heads of many parliamentary governments, is that the President is both head of state (the role played by the Queen in Britain and the King in Spain) and head of government. That "dignified part" is a Constitutional role for the US President in a way that it is not for the British and Spanish prime ministers or the German Chancellor.

Also, how is Obama different in that way from other Presidents? The late John Kenneth Galbraith used to observe with his characteristic tone of sardonic amusement that Presidents and diplomats loved to go to summits and make foreign visits. And that the motivation was frequently primarily the pleasure of the trip. Think of Richard Nixon. As much as he may have enjoyed the less "dignified" aspects of his job, when was he enjoying himself more? Traveling to China and being hailed as a world statesman? Or sitting in his office with Haldeman and Ehrichman worrying about Jewish plots against him and planning domestic espionage crimes and figuring out ways of hushing them up?

This is also a useful observation on Bromwich's part:

The position of a moderate who aspires to shake the world into a new shape presents a continuous contradiction. For the moderate feels constrained not to say anything startling, and not to do anything very fast. But just as there is trouble with doing things on the old lines, there is trouble, too, with letting people understand things on the old lines. At least, there is if you have your sights set on changing the nature of the game. Obama is caught in this contradiction, and keeps getting deeper in it, like a man who sinks in quicksand both the more he struggles and the more he stays still. This is one lesson of his passage from inaction in Egypt to action in Libya, and from his summons of reform in Cairo in June 2009 to the guarded speech from the sidelines in May 2011. [my emphasis]

Here it's hard to avoid making judgments about Obama's personality, or at least the appropriateness of his leadership style to the current situation. A lot of frustrated Democrats have been saying, in some form or another, that the public interest in general and the Democratic Party in particular needed a transformative President. But Obama is instead a transactional one. And that's no doubt related to his own temperament and personality in some part. But it's also rooted in Obama's embrace of the neoliberal/Washington Consensus economic orthodoxy. He's a Democratic President who's made sure to keep the phasing out of Medicare and Social Security on the national agenda! It may be a personality quirk. But it's also a policy orientation.

Something similar is true in foreign policy broadly. Obama may want to wind down involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan to levels that are less politically disturbing. But his actions in Afghanistan have been consistent with the position he took in the 2008 campaign of supporting that war and promising to escalate it. The Libya War also shows that he buys into the interventionism that has loomed far too big in American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. And his embrace of the Patriot Act, his legal pursuit of whistleblowers and journalists, and his extreme claims for government secrecy and the right to designate Americans abroad for assassination on his own authority all indicate that Obama supports the basic structure of the national security state as Cheney and Bush defined it.

Obviously, the personality of a person with such enormous power as the President of the United States is a legitimate and necessary matter for study and concern. But when actions fit into a clear and intelligible policy context (whether or not one approves of the policies), we don't need to postulate personality quirks to explain them.

Tags: barack obama, david bromwich, libya war, stephen walt

Two views of Obama's Libya War

Three, actually. The third being Gene Lyons' cautious defense of Obama's action with particular reference to his Republican critics, Obama gambles his presidency Salon 03/30/2011. It's important to remember that this war has many aspects. There is the policy question of whether it's a good idea, which involves both strategic questions (is the current "global domination" strategy a good one?) and tactical ones (does this war make sense in terms of the current strategy?). There are also partisan (and intra-party) political issues, such as whether the various criticisms being directed at the Libya War make sense, and what they say about how other political players would handle this or similar situations.

As Gene writes of the bold Maverick McCain, "Bellicose chatter has simply become a reflex with McCain. If somebody told him global warming could be halted by bombing Antarctica, he'd start believing in it."

The two views of the title are focused on longer-term issues that relate to the Obama Administration's thinking and behavior: Steven Metz, An Obama Doctrine? Or: Why the president's speech reminded me of Donald Rumsfeld. The New Republic 03/28/2011; and, David Bromwich, The CIA, the Libyan Rebellion, and the President Huffington Post 03/31/2011.

Metz sees two key aspects of the amorphous entity that he and other commentators are starting to call the Obama Doctrine as expressed in Monday's Libya (non-)War speech. First is:

...the belief that the net effect of the Arab Spring is positive—that the operations of history are taking the Middle East toward better governance, greater respect for human rights, and, presumably, increased security and stability.

The second relates to the striking tone of restraint in how Obama describes the Libya War, which seems to daily become more of a contrast to its actual conduct:

The flipside of this view is the second, implicit theme in Obama's speech, which is that if the United States embraces the Arab Spring too tightly and attempts to dominate it, the results would be negative, perhaps even disastrous. Better to tolerate some things that the United States might not prefer than to attempt top control the revolution.

I've been impressed with David Bromwich's close observations of Obama. In this piece, he's engaging in some informed speculation that the United States and Britain may have been playing a bigger role all along in the Libyan uprising than we've been thinking. He observes:

President Obama, who had traveled far already from his origins when he reinstituted military tribunals and defended the treatment of Bradley Manning, is now seen to have cast his lot with a long history of secret wars and overthrows and kinetic military operations extending back to Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Vietnam in 1963, and Nicaragua in 1984.

However well-founded his speculation leading up to that may be (or not) - he's stretching when he tries to guess at what Tom Friedman is not telling us - his observations on Obama's concept of his foreign policy, so far as it can be determined from observation of Obama and what's in the public record, are worth considering. This seems fair enough, addressing the Obama's weird dancing around calling this a war:

Many things President Obama said on Monday were wishful. The affirmation that NATO "has taken command" was wishful. So, too, was the picture of the United States "for generations" as a unique force for justice and courageous sacrifice, in a world otherwise populated by the tyrannous, the craven, the selfish, and the weak. Many other things Obama said were half true: the suggestion for example that the consideration at the front of his mind when he gave his speech was the safety of American jets and American ships far beyond the reach of Libyan gunnery. But we have now, in this baffling administration, passed out of the twilight of ambiguity. We have entered the land of lies. It is a region where many comments add up to no comment, and where every partial truth must be parsed for legalistic reservations folded into fugitive turns of grammar.

This one is also well-founded, addressing the arrogance of power that is a chronic problem for US foreign policy:

Delusions of grandeur, which have always been the lower layer of President Obama's wishful commandments, were made more perilous in this case by delusions of convenience. The president likes things clean. But there is nothing clean about what we are doing in Libya.

In his opening paragraphs, Bromwich falls into the lingo of mindreading, when he tells us how Obama understands things "in his mind." But careless phrasing aside, it does address something important about how Obama sees the power of his own rhetoric:

One of Barack Obama's first acts as president was to say that Guantanamo must go. It did not go. Soon after, he said that the Israeli settlements must go. They expanded. Obama made his peace in the end with Guantanamo and the Israeli settlements. He restarted the military tribunals at Guantanamo -- a feature of the Bush-Cheney constitution which he once had explicitly deplored -- and recently went out of his way to defend the Guantanamo-like abuse (compulsory nakedness and sleep deprivation) inflicted on an American prisoner, Bradley Manning, in the Marine Corps brig at Quantico. One had come to think of "X must go" assertions by Obama as speculative prefaces to a non-existent work. His words, in his mind, are actions. When he speaks them once or twice, he has done what he was put here to do. If the existing powers defy his wishes, he embraces the powers and continues on his way.

The Egyptian protest of January and February saw a new siege of wishful commandments and reversals by the president. He told Mubarak to go. Then he told him to stay a while. Mubarak said he would stay, but after a time, he went, and in the mind of Obama, it appears, there was a relation of cause and effect between his initial request and the final result. He was consequently emboldened. [my emphasis]

I would suggest that the foreign and domestic versions of this could be understood in distinct ways. Lies and deceit are understood on all sides to be standard operating procedure in foreign affairs, along with spying and various other habits that would be considered disreptable in daily life. The American national security establishment tends to have a very elevated estimation of the power of the United States to direct events in other countries. So it's not surprising that a President would easily acquire an inflated sense of the power of his own words in foreign affairs - although the failure of his words to affect Israeli settlement policy that Bromwich mentions should give Obama cause for reflection on that score.

It seems to me that the domestic version may be a clue that Obama is operating on an notion that Nixon followed, which is that liberals were much easier to pacify with symbolism and rhetoric than conservatives are. Obama held fast to his campaign promise to escalate the war in Afghanistan. Other promises like closing Guantanamo, not so much.

Tags: barack obama, david bromwich, gene lyons, libya war, mccain, steven metz