Hard times for a columnist with deadlines to meet. Everything is in the air, variables multiply dizzily.
Handicapping the Middle East, more than ever, is mug's game. Years on, Obama is still an enigma wrapped in a candy bar wrapper, Putin... what does he want? Who is Angie Merkel really? She has destroyed the Liberals, will she now destroy the Greens?
For me the two most significant things of the last few days, things that I think will be seen as turning points a few years from now, have been the American people's, grassroots (both the right and left's,) refusal to be stampeded into another war and the new Pope declaring that he never has been a "right-winger". DS
The demographic shift evident in the last election and the growing estrangement of the aspirational middle class from the super rich and a general disenchantment with the "conservative revolution" is offering the president-elect some interesting opportunities. However it is still going to be a hard slog, lowdown and dirty. The question now is, can Obama fight?
The slow implosion of the Republican Party — along with the growing strength of a Democratic coalition dominated by low-to-middle-income voters — threatens the power of the corporate establishment and will force big business to find new ways to reassert control of the policy-making process.(...) Although the stars are lined up in favor of the anti-corporate left, American business, when its back is to the wall, has historically proved to be extraordinarily resourceful. Thomas B. Edsall - New York Times
There is a new playing field... Will the real Obama (if there is one) please stand up? In the next few months we are going to discover whether Obama is one the longest headed, devious, cold blooded politicians to ever sit in the White House or just an empty suit. Everything he has done in politics appears to have been programed to peak at this very moment.
It seems to me that since getting elected in 2008 Obama simply tried to do everything he could to get reelected and do nothing that might prevent him from getting reelected. That defines his first four years.
He followed the plan he describes in his biography, one he developed as a lone young black man surrounded by white people, which was to "be courteous, smile a lot and don't make any sudden moves"... It worked.
Whatever Obama may really be we will see from now on.
Taking on the gun lobby will be the real test of his mettle, if he dares to go to the mat with that monster and wins, we will be looking at a serious president, and that could be extrapolated to other areas. All other adversaries will be intimidated if he humbles the NRA. If he fudges on that he will begin to look vulnerable, even a bit lame duckish. This is to be or not to be.
What does he want to do?
It seems to me that by nominating Kerry and especially Hagel, that he wants to downsize America's military micromanagement of the world's affairs, which should have been done when the USSR collapsed (perhaps sooner) and use the resources thus saved on strengthening America's infrastructure and welfare state.
I think he will continue to be a huge disappointment on human rights. It seems impossible to close Guantanamo Bay prison since there is no place to send its inmates. Obama's solution seems to have been to simply take no more prisoners and kill all of them directly where they live. So I imagine he will continue with the drones because they are a very cost effective way of intimidating faraway poor people without putting boots on the ground and dispatching carrier battle groups. That simple, that cold.
If he wants to be remembered for anything besides having been the first African-American president though, he is going to have to hit the ground running. DS
Readers of mine should not be under the impression that I am a big fan of Obama's or of the Democrats... I wrote this back in 2008:
I find myself against almost everything that the Republicans stand for, but at least they seem to truly stand for what they say they stand for (although many evangelicals doubt this). I respect that quality, even in a jerk like Bush... He defends his people (the very, very rich) to the bone. But the Democratic Party to use highly technical language, really, really, sucks: with few exceptions, a herd of Judas Goats leading the poor to slaughter, bells a tingling.
Having said that I still say Obama is a better pick than Romney.
On the movie screen, Robert F. Kennedy’s appeal is obvious: authenticity. He cared. He showed it. People saw that and cared about him in return. With Obama, the process is reversed. It’s hard to care about someone who seems not to care in return. I will vote for him for his good things, and I will vote for him to keep Republican vandals from sacking the government. But after watching Bobby Kennedy, I will vote for Obama with regret. I wish he was the man I once mistook him for.
I realize that voting for Obama is not an attractive proposition; it's a little like having your leg cut off to save you from dying of gangrene... but that is the only thing on the menu. The Republican party is now in the hands of rogue billionaires who are stimulating fascism in order to evade taxes and regulation... They want to even go back and repeal the reforms of Teddy Roosevelt. This is really that simple: avoiding a ultra-right coup d´etat. DS
I had my doubts for a while, but now I think I might have been right to imagine in a previous post that President Obama threw the first debate, that he deliberately underperformed.
The question would have to be, why take such a huge, deliberate risk?
This is why I think he took that risk.
All the analysts are in agreement (and always have been) that this election is going to be very close... the economy is what it is and getting reelected with unemployment hovering around 8%, if not mission impossible, is mission pretty difficult. Playing it safe could turn out to be a bigger mistake than boldness when everything is playing out within the statistical error of the polls.
Analysts also agree that the Obama campaign was very smart to spend a lot of money early on in defining Mitt Romney as a hard hearted, tin eared, out of touch, clumsy, flip-flopping phoney. This early attack was successful in selling its narrative of Romney to voters before people were as over saturated with attack ads as they are at this stage. Then why put up such a weak defense in the first debate? Why encourage his opponent's aggression?
My reading is that Obama believed that if he had attacked Romney personally with the same brio in the first debate as he did in the second debate people might have found him overly aggressive.
Why would he think that?
Because there is probably no politician in America, black or white, with a deeper understanding of American race psychology. One of the reasons being that perhaps the most important person in his whole life was a nice, little old white lady from Kansas, the woman who raised him, his own grandmother, Madelyn Dunham.
"a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. (...) not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity – she doesn't. But she is a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know...there's a reaction that's been bred into our experiences that don't go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way, and that's just the nature of race in our society.(...) some of the fears of street crime and some of the stereotypes that go along with that were responses that I think many people feel. She's not extraordinary in that regard. She is somebody that I love as much as anybody. I mean, she has literally helped to raise me. But those are fears that are embedded in our culture, and embedded in our society, and even within our own families, even within a family like mine that is diverse."
And if you don't believe racism is alive and well in America, all you have to do is follow the Drudge Report, where a chorus of every imaginable racist dog-whistle is blown daily. I don't think a white person can get assaulted or mugged by a black person anywhere in America without Matt Drudge covering it, echoing it and trumpeting it. By his numbers, readers appear to lap it up
So I believe that Obama thought that if in the final weeks of the campaign he was going to be able to attack Mitt Romney cruelly, brutally, that he could not be seen to "throw the first punch", to be the aggressor, to be someone with a chip on his shoulder, looking for a fight. His goal is not to be seen as someone who starts fights, but to be the sort of person that the American psyche loves, the hero of every classic western, the person who "finishes fights".
In this case Obama didn't start the fight, he got up off the floor with a bloody nose and fought back.
The Obama administration has long been bumbling along in the footsteps of its predecessor when it comes to sacrificing Americans’ basic rights and liberties under the false flag of fighting terrorism. Now the Obama team seems ready to lurch even farther down that dismal road than George W. Bush did. Instead of tightening the relaxed rules for F.B.I. investigations — not just of terrorism suspects but of pretty much anyone — that were put in place in the Bush years, President Obama’s Justice Department is getting ready to push the proper bounds of privacy even further. Editorial - New York Times
A review of President Obama’s record suggests that he may have been for same-sex marriage before he was against it. New York Times
I miss George W. Bush more and more with each passing day.
What do I miss most about George W. Bush?
I miss "hope".
George W. Bush gave the American people hope.
When Bush was president I, and many like me, had the hope that the United State's fundamental problem was that the president of the United States was stupid.
Now that Bush has gone, and we have elected a president who is said to have a very high IQ and a suitable time has passed, and looking around, it is becoming clear that things are no better: Guantanamo is still there, the Patriot Act is still there, the people who caused the financial crisis are still there. The two wars that Obama inherited are still there, plus another one he has started on his own...
It is obvious that the problem we and the world are facing isn't as simple as presidential bandwidth and although Barack Obama is beginning to look a bit like William Faulkner's impression of Henry James, whom he described as, "one of the nicest old ladies I ever met"; whatever the problem is in American government, presidential stupidity is not at the heart of it.
It is beginning to look as if perhaps the American political system itself and perhaps even the country itself are stupid; that George W. Bush and the United States of America were a perfect fit.
And if that is true, then it is quite difficult not to lose hope.DS
Netanyahu avoided publicly committing himself to accepting an independent Palestinian state as the outcome of peace negotiations. Instead, he spoke of “self-government” for the Palestinians and laid down what sounded like a new precondition: The Palestinians would have to “allow Israel the means to defend itself.”
What Netanyahu apparently means by that is a Palestinian state minus the means to defend itself, or to control its airspace, or its international passageways. Not unreasonable concerns given Israel’s experience with Gaza, but to put forward such requirements at the outset looks more like a well-practiced Netanyahu negotiating tactic: Raise the bar as high as possible and require the United States to lift the Palestinians over it before he has to make any concessions.Martin Indyk - The Daily Beast
David Seaton's News Links It would seem that the Obama administration's goal is to create a "Palestinian State" that would be a giant Gaza: an Israeli prison camp, where the inmates would run the day to day affairs of the camp. In exchange for this Israel would have friendly relations with the Arab world and all of the mad mullahs of Iran's evil schemes would be forever foiled. We are led to believe that to achieve this wonderland Israel would have to make many of what Ariel Sharon used to call, "painful concessions".
Just as a hypothesis, mind you, let us assume for a minute that all of this is just so much bullshit, a good cop, bad cop pantomime.
I am playing with the possibility that not only is Barack Obama much more intelligent than George W. Bush, he may even be much more cynical than Bill Clinton, if this is possible. If you except that as a hypothesis then everything else falls neatly into place pretty fast.
Because if Barack Obama and Netanyahu had quickly emerged from the White House arm in arm and had announced that they had just agreed to a token settlement freeze, (not a dismantling) followed by the creation of this concentration camp cum Bantustan, without control of its borders or its airspace, then I think people might have noticed what a shafting the Palestinians. were getting. Something even more humiliating than Clinton's Camp David, Teba farce of 2000. If that was painting lipstick on a pig this would be a full porcine rhytidectomy.
Of course now Obama will have to be seen twisting Bibi's arm and Bibi will be pounding the mat in pain... just like the wrestlers on "Friday Night SmackDown".
If this live action has its desired effect, the "international community" will hurry to stiffen the sanctions on Iran and cease the UN investigation of Israeli war crimes in Gaza and put even more pressure on the Palestinians and eliminate further speculation on a "one state solution" and the end of apartheid.
Of course this farce could be dismantled by only one woman wearing an explosive belt in an Israeli supermarket, bus or movie theater... or something worse... and then everyone would understand that Israel doesn't have a "partner for peace," thus letting Israel play for more time and Obama receive full points for trying so hard.
There are no lack of willing young ladies and laddies ready to try this sort of thing, and all it takes for one of them to get through is for someone previously informed to look the other way. Oh and if Iran could be linked to it even better.
My bullshit meter's needle is really pushing off the dial on this one.DS
Niall Ferguson: He can give a great inauguration speech.
SPIEGEL: And what else?
Ferguson: Give more great speeches.
SPIEGEL: He can't do more?
Ferguson: No, because he will have the least latitude of all presidents we can remember. Obama wants to assemble a nonpartisan government, and we will experience a more cautious first 100 days than we did under Bill Clinton. He will be cautious to the point of being boring. This will be precisely his great strength.
SPIEGEL: Where does the problem lie?
Ferguson: With Hank Paulson.
SPIEGEL: What does the current treasury secretary have to do with Obama?
Ferguson: Because of his big bailout plan, Paulson has already spent the money for Obama's healthcare reform and for his tax cuts. The money is gone.
_______________________________
A big struggle over control of Barack Obama’s foreign policy has already begun with his first White House staff nominees. Many of the people currently advising him, and all of those behind past Bush policies, are going to tell him his administration must choose between “weakness,” on the one hand, and “strength” plus “global leadership.” The latter means a quest for American hegemony that won’t be any more successful under Obama than it has been under Bush, and along the way will destroy his presidency just as it destroyed George Bush’s. William Pfaff
David Seaton's News Links A window is opening briefly, people all over the world are impressed that the Americans have elected someone with African blood as their leader and most impressed of all are the Americans themselves. But racism will have actually died out when the novelty has worn off and the skin color of the US president finally becomes invisible and nothing else is seen but his job performance.
This "death of racism" is going to come sooner than many of Obama's well-wishers may feel comfortable with.
Obama has a favorable rating of 65%, and 66% of voters are somewhat confident or very confident that he can bring change to Washington. On the other hand, large majorities want him to compromise with Republicans (58%) and appoint an even mix of Dems and GOPers to his cabinet (61%).(...) As for the individual issues themselves, voters as a whole want movement on energy independence (24%), financial regulation (22%), a middle-class tax cut (21%), and national health care (15%). Obama's base of Democratic voters rank their priorities a bit differently: Middle-class tax cut 29%, financial regulation 22%, national health care 19%, and energy independence 13%.
I think that the results in California give a key to the complexity of the political climate today. Obama won by 61% to 37%, yet "Proposition Eight", to prohibit gay marriages, passed with the vote of African-Americans and Hispanics. It would appear that there is a very solid, socially conservative vote among those who voted for Obama and made a Democratic victory possible.
The Democratic coalition is made up of racial minorities, labor unions, and university educated "intellectuals": the gay issue is one that is basically for up market members of the last group.
Like the abortion issue, the gay issue is a dividing line between all these groups. What the California vote means is that there is still ample ground to grow "Reagan Democrats".
What is the synthesis here? What exactly does "change" mean in this context? A different face, a different way of talking, or the sort of sea change that Roosevelt brought about? Certainly the California vote is like a Zen koan. Why am I so skeptical that anything truly important is set to happen?
Simply because nobody is seriously talking about cutting defense spending in order to pay for all the "stimuli" or health or infrastructure reforms. Speaking from memory, I think Americans spend almost eighty percent of the world's total defense expenditure... something absurd like that and I don't hear Obama or anyone close to Obama talking about "Guns or butter".
It is bailout time, are the Chinese supposed to bankroll the Pentagon?
What I sense is that the ever cautious Obama has brought us to the shores of the Rubicon and is about to hand out fishing polls.DS
Those who think that they have just voted to legalize Utopia (and I hardly exaggerate when I say this; have you been reading the moist and trusting comments of our commentariat?) are preparing for a disillusionment that I very much doubt they will blame on themselves. The national Treasury is an echoing, empty vault; our Russian and Iranian enemies are acting even more wolfishly even as they sense a repudiation of Bush-Cheney; the lines of jobless and evicted are going to lengthen, and I don't think a diet of hope is going to cover it. Nor even a diet of audacity, though can you picture anything less audacious than the gray, safety-first figures who have so far been chosen by Obama to be on his team? (...) In other words, there is something pain-free and self-congratulatory about the Obama surge. This has happened before, of course, with the high-sounding talk about the "New Frontier," the "Great Society," and "Morning in America." It's just that this time it's more than usually not affordable. There are many causes of the subprime and derivative horror show that has destroyed our trust in the idea of credit, but one way of defining it would be to say that everybody was promised everything, and almost everybody fell for the populist bait. Christopher Hitchens - Slate
David Seaton's News Links There are many who still believe that history is made from the biographies of "great men", when in fact political reality is the product of the interacting forces generated by the natural conflict of interests of the sum total of the world's inhabitants who press against each other individually and collectively in their struggle to obtain some acceptable result... Some groups, notably the wealthy and the powerful press more than others, but the total interaction is infinitely complex and individuals have little effect on its outcome.
For a long time, many of the most scientific political thinkers were sure that the synthesis of all these conflicts would lead inevitably to a result that would benefit humanity and so the process was called "progress". Today most would agree that we are moving somewhere, but nobody knows really where, and almost no one thinks that we will ever "arrive", or if we did that we would be much pleased with the result.
We are talking about a process.
Truly no man or woman or woman living is above or outside this process.
Barack Obama is a product of the same social and political process that produced and elected Eisenhower (To go back any further than Eisenhower, before the days of television is to engage in political archaeology), JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, G.H. W. Bush, Clinton and... has elected and reelected, George W. Bush.
Many seem to feel that Barack Obama has been anointed more than elected and that he is somehow absolved of the same law of gravity that weighed upon his predecessors, illustrious and otherwise.
The major difference between Obama and his predecessors is not his color or his intelligence, it is the greatly diminished power that he will inherit.
Just as it is a very different thing to be the CEO of General Motors today then it was when "Engine Charlie" Wilson declared that what was "good for General Motors is good for the USA" (and by extension the world) so it too is a very different thing to be President of the USA today then it was in the Reagan period.
It’s another world.
At the end of WWII the United States was “the last man standing”.
At the end of the Cold War, the USA was the unquestioned hegemon.
That has all changed.
Not only is the USA now flat broke, its only unquestioned superiority, its massive military power, is proving ineffective in producing favorable and predictable outcomes.
Another massive change is that the Anglo-American version of capitalism is being seriously questioned, this, in economic terms, is as if Pope Benedict had hung out a “gone fishin’” sign on Saint Peter's, a great vacuum exists where recently there stood a temple of legitimacy.
Everyone around the world is pleased thst Obama, right down to his color, is nothing like Bush, but that doesn't mean that the hard men and women who manage things are so pleased that they will forget for a moment what their objectives are: nor will the stream of events open like the waters of the Red Sea to Obama's "soft power".
I think everything will be sweetness and light with Obama exactly until - and not one moment longer - he tries to show “leadership”: meaning trying to push people to go where they don’t want to go.
At that moment he will be just one more president of a bankrupt USA that loses wars and destroys shareholder value. DS
"Democrats are worried that the Obama spell will break between the time of his nomination and the time of the election, and deny them the White House. My guess is that he can maintain the spell just past Inauguration Day. After which will come the awakening. It will be rude."Charles Krauthammer - Washington Post
Erin go bragh?
David Seaton's News Links I admit I am having some second thoughts on my theory's present validity on reading Krauthammer.
I detest Krauthammer, a poisonous neocon, but he is very smart. With him, "every movement has a meaning". Each word he writes is dripping with intention. He seems to have already written off Hillary Clinton and is unloading on Obama. His idea, put briefly, is that Barack Obama is some sort of George McGovern with a cool tan.
I joined in an intense debate on Barack Obama in the great politics junky's venue, TPMCafe, and I got some interesting questions that I thought I'd paste in here at News Links.
David, do you think there is more racism in our country over the past, say, 20 years, less, about the same, different? Are your thoughts on that part of your sense of hopelessness? Do you think it is impossible to over-estimate the racism of the American people?
I think every American is race conscious. I say this because in the United States anyone with even a drop of African blood is considered "black". This is not true of Latin Americans, where to be black means to be just that, "black". I have had Cubans that were as "black" as Colin Powell tell me that they were Basques or Galicians and nobody thought this was strange.
This leads to some strange attitudes. For example my maternal great grandmother was Irish from Dublin, the boxer, Mohammad Ali's maternal great grandfather was Irish from Dublin too. Ali is loquacious, poetic, pugnacious, brave and funny. Irish, no? No, of course not, he is "black". Ha, ha! But if I say that I am Irish nobody laughs, and I can't fight my way out of a paper bag... I would say that as long as nobody would think to say how "Irish" Mohammad Ali is, America is a racist country.
Is it "too soon" for a "black" man to be President of the United States?
Well, it is fair to say that it is much too soon for most white men or women to be president, so, not being a racist, I imagine black people wouldn't be any different.
Having said that, I think it is important to also say that Barack Obama is not the first "black" man to be considered for the job. Not too many years ago, General Colin Powell was being talked about very seriously for the presidency and certainly before Bush spoiled him, few would have argued that he was not qualified for it. If we look at the field this year, Powell might be considered overqualified. He surely has a thicker CV than any recent candidate and a record of proven judgment: certainly if the "Powell Doctrine" had been adhered to, the USA would have never invaded Iraq. I think that if he were a Democrat he would already have been president by now.
David, what are your specific concerns about Obama? What do you think would happen if he were President?
Here I am afraid that I agree with the detestable Mister Krauthammer, which is why I quoted him above. Here is the whole thing. DS
Charles Krauthammer: The Audacity of Selling Hope - Washington Post There's no better path to success than getting people to buy a free commodity. Like the genius who figured out how to get people to pay for water: bottle it (Aquafina was revealed to be nothing more than reprocessed tap water) and charge more than they pay for gasoline. Or consider how Google found a way to sell dictionary nouns-- boat, shoe, clock -- by charging advertisers zillions to be listed whenever the word is searched.
And now, in the most amazing trick of all, a silver-tongued freshman senator has found a way to sell hope. To get it, you need only give him your vote. Barack Obama is getting millions.
This kind of sale is hardly new. Organized religion has been offering a similar commodity -- salvation -- for millennia. Which is why the Obama campaign has the feel of a religious revival with, as writer James Wolcott observed, a "salvational fervor" and "idealistic zeal divorced from any particular policy or cause and chariot-driven by pure euphoria."
"We are the hope of the future," sayeth Obama. We can "remake this world as it should be." Believe in me and I shall redeem not just you but your country -- nay, we can become "a hymn that will heal this nation, repair this world, and make this time different than all the rest."
And believe they do. After eight straight victories -- and two more (Hawaii and Wisconsin) almost certain to follow -- Obama is near to rendering moot all the post-Super Tuesday fretting about a deadlocked convention with unelected superdelegates deciding the nominee. Unless Hillary Clinton can somehow do in Ohio and Texas on March 4 what Rudy Giuliani proved is almost impossible to do -- maintain a big-state firewall after an unrelenting string of smaller defeats -- the superdelegates will flock to Obama. Hope will have carried the day.
Interestingly, Obama has been able to win these electoral victories and dazzle crowds in one new jurisdiction after another, even as his mesmeric power has begun to arouse skepticism and misgivings among the mainstream media.
ABC's Jake Tapper notes the "Helter-Skelter cult-ish qualities" of "Obama worshipers," what Joel Stein of the Los Angeles Times calls "the Cult of Obama." Obama's Super Tuesday victory speech was a classic of the genre. Its effect was electric, eliciting a rhythmic fervor in the audience -- to such rhetorical nonsense as "We are the ones we've been waiting for. (Cheers, applause.) We are the change that we seek."
That was too much for Time's Joe Klein. "There was something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism," he wrote. "The message is becoming dangerously self-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about how wonderful the Obama campaign is."
You might dismiss as hyperbole the complaint by the New York Times's Paul Krugman that "the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality." Until you hear Chris Matthews, who no longer has the excuse of youth, react to Obama's Potomac primary victory speech with "My, I felt this thrill going up my leg." When his MSNBC co-hosts tried to bail him out, he refused to recant. Not surprising for an acolyte who said that Obama "comes along, and he seems to have the answers. This is the New Testament."
I've seen only one similar national swoon. As a teenager growing up in Canada, I witnessed a charismatic law professor go from obscurity to justice minister to prime minister, carried on a wave of what was called Trudeaumania.
But even there the object of his countrymen's unrestrained affections was no blank slate. Pierre Trudeau was already a serious intellectual who had written and thought and lectured long about the nature and future of his country.
Obama has an astonishingly empty paper trail. He's going around issuing promissory notes on the future that he can't possibly redeem. Promises to heal the world with negotiations with the likes of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Promises to transcend the conundrums of entitlement reform that require real and painful trade-offs and that have eluded solution for a generation. Promises to fund his other promises by a rapid withdrawal from an unpopular war -- with the hope, I suppose, that the (presumed) resulting increase in American prestige would compensate for the chaos to follow.
Democrats are worried that the Obama spell will break between the time of his nomination and the time of the election, and deny them the White House. My guess is that he can maintain the spell just past Inauguration Day. After which will come the awakening. It will be rude.
