Category: Barack Obama

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Barack Obama Law Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere

The Games Obama Plays

[digg-reddit-me]Thesis: Obama is a systematic thinker – and given some of his clearly expressed views on the presidency – he may be setting up a situation where the other branches of government will be able to definitively limit the powers of the presidency. This is preferable to the president voluntarily renouncing powers – as it places the responsibility for checking the executive branch on the system rather than on the chief executive himself.

The Rest: In his inaugural address, Barack Obama seemed to clearly repudiate the Bush administration’s lawless approach to the War on Terror with this oft-quoted line:

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.

In this, and in many other instances, Obama made clear that he would restore the Rule of Law – and that he considered himself, as president, to be subject to the law. This may seem to be a fundamental and basic understanding for any chief executive in a liberal democracy, but for the last eight years, the Bush administration advanced arguments and pursued policies as if it were not subject to the law.

Every time the Supreme Court ruled against the Bush administration, Congress passed a law to restrain the executive branch in some way,some quasi-independent parts of the executive branch opposed him –  it was always uncertain what Bush would do – whether he would simply ignore the attempts to check his power; whether he would declare the checks unconstitutional and then ignore them; whether he would secretly ignore them and prosecute anyone who informed authorities that he was breaking the law; or whether he would attempt to force Congress to pass a legislative justification for his actions. In fact, Bush at one time of another did all three of these. Obama has made clear that he not only respects the Rule of Law but considers checks and balances on the presidency to be part of the democratic process set out by the Constitution. Obama is mindful of the chief executive’s role is in this system – and that, as Gregory Craig, White House Counsel explained:

[Obama] is also mindful as president of the United States not to do anything that would undermine or weaken the institution of the presidency.

Combine this statement with Obama’s decisions regarding rendition, the state secrets privilege, and investigating abuses of the Bush administration – and many civil libertarians and critical observers of the Bush administration from Glenn Greenwald to Andrew Sullivan to Charlie Savage are preparing to be disappointed.

Let’s take a step back for a moment and postulate that Obama holds these three relatively uncontroversial and related positions that he has articulated on numerous occasions:

  1. He believes the president is subject to the law and is committed to upholding the Rule of Law.
  2. He believes that correct processes should be followed and that, “Each branch of government is balanced by powers in the other two coequal branches.”
  3. At the same time, he has little desire to use his political capital and energy prosecuting Bush administration officials.

Obama articulated these three sentiments in a response to a question by Sam Stein of the Huffington Post at his February 9, 2009 press conference:

My view is also that nobody is above the law, and if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen; but that generally speaking, I’m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards.

Dahlia Lithwick, another chronicler and critic of the Bush administration’s legal abuses, interpreted Obama’s statements and actions this way:

…by keeping the worst of the Bush administration’s secrets hidden, the Obama Justice Department can defer awkward questions about prosecuting the wrongdoers. In his press conference Monday night, Obama repeated his mantra that “nobody is above the law and if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, people should be prosecuted just like ordinary citizens. But generally speaking, I’m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards.” The principle once again is that Obama is for prosecuting Bush administration lawbreaking only when proof of such lawbreaking bonks him on the head. All the more reason to keep it out of sight, then.

But to me, this sounds like an invitation to push him to do what is right – as FDR said to numerous audiences who came to ask him to pay attention to their issue (and here I paraphrase):

I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it

Supporting this, aside from Obama’s many statements on these matters, are the public opinions of many of those he appointed to key positions in the Justice Department, including the attorney general:

Our government authorized the use of torture, approved of secret electronic surveillance against American citizens, secretly detained American citizens without due process of law, denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants and authorized the use of procedures that violate both international law and the United States Constitution…. We owe the American people a reckoning. [my emhpasis]

Here is where the speculation really starts though – and only time will determine if these guesses are correct. Obama, as president, does not believe it is his role to give up executive power. For one, by doing so, he is antagonizing certain elements of the executive branch that he needs to bring to his side – in the state secrets case, for example, the CIA.

Secondly, by voluntarily renouncing a power, he is in some sense affirming the inherence of this power. Bush believed he had the power to say an entire subject matter was a state secret and thus have an entire lawsuit revoked; if Obama claimed he didn’t have this power, and the Courts then ruled he didn’t, the Court would not be “checking” the president so much as deferring to the new president’s view of his own powers. However, if Obama maintains he has this power – and the Court rules that he does not – it does provide a check. If Congress passes a law restraining the president’s use of this power, it will again provide a check. Each of these scenarios provides a firmer check on presidential power than does Obama’s giving up of these powers. It places the responsibility for checking executive powers not on the President, but within the system, where it should be.

Third, Obama has a number of crises to deal with right now and realizes that there are significant elements who feel strongly about these balance-of-powers issues. What he wants then – is for those groups that are passionate about these issues to prepare the public and to force him to act on them. This way, he can preserve his political capital – and by merely responding to issues forced upon him can avoid charges of looking like he is merely out for retribution.

If this is Obama’s thinking, then we can expect him to not oppose efforts to reign in his powers too strongly – and to accept those limits once they have been legitimated by the Courts or the Congress. If this isn’t Obama’s thinking, we can still attempt to force him to act but the outcome will be less certain.

Categories
Barack Obama Financial Crisis Politics The Opinionsphere Videos

What Are Republican Principles Again?

[digg-reddit-me]Dan Akroyd joined Saturday Night Live to explain how Republicans were using this crisis to move past business-as-usual while staying in touch with the citizens they represent:

(h/t TPIP for the link. I had already seen the clip, but was fruitlessly looking for it on Hulu until I saw it on his blog.)

I must commend the Republican Party for discovering the value of fiscal responsibility, of Congressional oversight, and of Congress’s proper role as a coequal branch of government and a balance to the executive branch now that they have no elective power except a slender foothold in Congress. A few more losses in Congress and we might see the Republican Party start making the much maligned case for judicial activism – as our federal court system is filled with conservatives, despite protests to the contrary.

It seems to be part of the nature of our oppositional party structure that such ideological shifts make fools of politicians from time to time. Sometimes I think it would be better for them if we just booted them all out so they wouldn’t need to face the embarrassment of changing their opinions on how things should work so obviously based on political calculations. 

Of course, giving the lie to the Republican’s newfound financial responsibility (aside from their continued support for such expensive programs as continuing Bush’s tax cuts and funding the various imperial activities which together cost some trillions of dollars and got us in the financial pickle we are in now) is their response to the Obama stimulus plan – a tax cut plan that would expand the deficit even further:

 

At the end of the clip, that was Kimberley Strassel of the Wall Street Journal. In response to her: yes, we all did notice that there are no Republicans in charge of anything in Washington anymore. I wonder how and why that happened?

At the same time, the Republicans are now trying to make a big deal of business-as-usual in Washington – after embracing the same practices while in power. This is, of course, standard fare in itself. As Republican opinion-makers suddenly begin to decry how Congressmen and women did not have time to read the stimulus bill, I think most of us remember that infamous exchange from Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 in which a Congressman explains why no one read the PATRIOT Act before it was signed into law:

My purpose is not to defend these practices – but to point out the hypocrisy in suddenly objecting to them. The Republicans, led by Eric Cantor, are acting with the transparent hypocrisy of an Inspector Renault:

In all honesty, I do welcome the Republicans embrace of fiscal responsibility, of Congressional oversight, and of Congress’s proper role as a coequal branch of government and a balance to the executive branch, hypocrisy and all. Their sanctimony on the subject though is hard to stomach.

Categories
Barack Obama Economics Financial Crisis Political Philosophy

A Scientific Approach To The Economic Crisis

[digg-reddit-me]There are relatively few serious political figures who argue that our economy does not need fiscal stimulus at this time – few political figures are comfortable advocating inaction while serious disruption occurs. But there are a significant minority who do take this position – including, it seems likely, some number of Republicans who though publicly are not advocating this extreme course, position themselves to oppose what Obama is doing in whatever ways are feasible.

The majority of Republicans in power seem to advocate stimulus by enormous tax cuts while railing against deficit spending (although the proposed tax cuts cost more than the proposed spending). This piece does not address their concerns – although independent, non-partisan Congressional Research Service did – explaining why the economic consensus was that tax cuts stimulated less and less quickly than spending – and I will address them again later today. A significant number of other Republicans simply have a bad feeling about the stimulus and are looking for which approach best suits them to oppose it.

For those who do oppose any form of stimulus, James K. Glassman’s article in Commentary has proven to be a rallying cry. But it has also provided ammunition to many others who seeking to oppose Obama by any available means. Cited by House Minority Leader John Boehner and many others, this article has found a large audience despite Glassman’s previous infamous prediction (as an author of Dow 36,000) that the stock market was undervaluing companies in 1999 at the height of the tech boom. I addressed some of the questionable historical claims Glassman made to build his case in an earlier post, but now I’m going to address his broader, more basic argument.

Glassman makes two points which leads him to label fiscal stimulus a folly repeated throughout recent economic history:

  • Economics is a limited profession and we can never quite understand the market enough to affect it the way we intend to; which is why, “Government simply cannot know enough to direct an economy successfully.”
  • “Meanwhile, left alone, what Hayek called ‘spontaneous order’ will find its way forward;” meaning the market is self-correcting as long as the government does not interfere.

The inherent contradiction is obvious. If we do not understand the market enough to affect it deliberately, how can we predict how it will act. If economics is such a limited profession that it cannot provide us with enough information to affect the economy in any predictable way, how can we trust an economist’s presumption to do nothing? The market – as Glassman describes it – is a kind of god who we must have faith in. Letting our economy slide deeper into recession while taking no is the economic equivalent of a “leap of faith.” Given this understanding, economist are little more than priests of the free market – who cannot predict or effect their god’s will – but whose job is to assure us that this god will bless us eventually with plenty in its own good time, but only if we trust it and restrain sinful (government) interference.

But Glassman then says something extraordinary given the two above statements and the inaction he is advocating now:

[I]n the 1930’s, “something in the normal regenerative process was missing.”

He doesn’t offer an answer to this – but the economist he derides throughout, John Maynard Keynes, does.  My meager understanding of Keynes suggests he believed the economy, like an engine, would need to be primed from time to time to prevent it from stalling – and he saw the best means of doing this as stimulus spending. The spending boom of the Second World War, for example, can be seen from a Keynesian perspective, as finally getting the world economic engine started again.

Obama however seems to have incorporated Hayek’s admonition that he “cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the [economic] events possible” with a cautious Keynesianism. For those who believe that grand challenges such as possible financial collapse demand a grand ideological vision, Obama’s approach will disappoint. But the kernel of wisdom in Hayek (as well as many other truly conservative thinkers) is that grand visions are as likely to fail as minor tinkering projects – except when they fail, they will cause far more damage than the tinkering. 

Obama’s approach to the crisis is in this mold; some call his bill too cautious and too small; some call his stimulus bill an ideologically mixed up mash with a little of everything; some are frustrated his bailout approach focuses more on process than results. But all of this makes sense if Obama is approaching this crisis as a tinkerer. 

Hayek believed that the economy was a mysterious thing and that, to quote another philosopher/economic thinker, we shouldn’t “disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time [as w]e don’t understand their logic.” This other thinker, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, believes that if we must act, we should “tinker” to use his word. As “[w]e have the ability to identify our mistakes eventually better than average,” we can avoid the worst outcomes, and potentially latch onto the best innovations:

Look at the three big inventions of our time: lasers, computers and the internet. They were all produced by tinkering and none of them ended up doing what their inventors intended them to do…We choose the iPod over the Walkman. Medicine improved exponentially when the tinkering barber surgeons took over from the high theorists. They just went with what worked, irrespective of why it worked.

Instead of the paralysis and faith preached by Hayek, Taleb offers us a path forward – one of action tinged with doubt, of trial and error, of identifying mistakes quickly, of evaluatinr results honestly. His approach to economics is, at its base, science, in it’s most basic and primitive form. 

This seems to be the approach Obama is taking – pragmatic, cautious, aware of the wisdom of both Hayek and Keynes. He’s tinkering. And that’s exactly what we need.

Categories
Barack Obama Financial Crisis Politics

Interpeting Obama’s Stimulus Strategy

Noam Scheiber at The Plank:

Barack Obama is nothing if not a master rope-a-doper. For months last year, anxious liberals pleaded with him to respond to John McCain’s lacerating attacks. And, for months, Obama soared above the fray. Then, in early September, the McCain campaign squeezed out two ludicrously dishonest ads—accusing Obama of force-feeding sex education to kindergarteners and of calling Sarah Palin a pig. The press screamed bloody murder—Joe Klein labeled the former “one of the sleaziest ads I’ve ever seen;” Joy Behar of “The View” personally told McCain they were “lies.” At which point Obama saw an opportunity. With the media having pronounced McCain the aggressor and him the victim, Obama began to whale away—on healthcare, on McCain’s age, even Charles Keating—with virtual impunity.

My sense is that we’re seeing something similar play out with the stimulus.

Andrew Sullivan quotes one of his readers:

What many do not understand is that the government is playing for time, not some brilliant economic miracle. We do not have the money or political leverage to solve this problem from the top down by divine fiat. We have to buy time — literally — for the ten-thousand smaller acts of restoration and renewal to take place. All this flow of money, this vast seemingly indiscriminate transfusion of economic blood, has one purpose: to keep the patient’s heart pumping until the systemic crisis is past — another 6-12-18 months. It is messy, sloppy, gross heroic medicine.

Andrew Sullivan has his own just slightly less optimistic interpretation.

Yglesias points out some of what Obama is dealing with as Representative Steve Austria explains his opposition to Obama’s stimulus in historical terms:

“When (President Franklin) Roosevelt did this, he put our country into a Great Depression,” Austria said. “He tried to borrow and spend, he tried to use the Keynesian approach, and our country ended up in a Great Depression. That’s just history.”

“That’s just history.” The article Yglesias cites points out the slight problem with this “history”:

Most historians date the beginning of the Great Depression at or shortly after the stock-market crash of 1929; Roosevelt took office in 1933.

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Barack Obama Economics India

Friedman is annoying, but essentially correct

Tom Friedman apparently spent last week talking to a slew of Indian businessmen – after all, he is in Bangalore – and he found that they were attempting to say something to him, that they were:

trying to make a point that sometimes non-Americans can make best: “Dear America, please remember how you got to be the wealthiest country in history. It wasn’t through protectionism, or state-owned banks or fearing free trade. No, the formula was very simple: build this really flexible, really open economy, tolerate creative destruction so dead capital is quickly redeployed to better ideas and companies, pour into it the most diverse, smart and energetic immigrants from every corner of the world and then stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat.”

The prose and the formulation is Tom Friedman at his insufferable worst. And I think Friedman is fundamentally wrong in his point – America did not get to be “the wealthiest country in history” by acting as Friedman describes. No – we got there by building up our infrastructure, exploiting our vast natural resources, and creating an enormous manufacturing base. Friedman was right about the immigrants part.

The reason we stayed enormously wealthy as a nation after this old manufacturing economy began to be outsourced is our higher education system – and the other stuff that Friedman mentions. 

Which is to say that Friedman’s frustratingly dumbed-down “letter to America” that many Indian businessman are trying to speak to Friedman – is essentially correct in its prescriptions if not it’s history. We cannot have institutions “too big to fail” – and we cannot allow the massive government intervention into the economy to last. (On this though, Obama and Geithner seem if anything overcautious.) We cannot prop up “zombie” institutions. We cannot “protect” jobs – except temporarily. We need to create new jobs. We need smaller and more nimble companies. 

This is what we need to keep our nation strong as we enter the period of the market-state – in which governments will succeed based on the amount of opportunity they are able to offer their citizens.

Frustratingly, I think Friedman – even with such dumb prose – is essentially correct.

Categories
Barack Obama Financial Crisis Politics The Opinionsphere

Obama’s Long Game

Peter Baker quotes Robert Gibbs, Obama’s press secretary, in his description of Obama’s take on the state of politics and the stimulus bill:

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, decried what he called a “myopic viewpoint in Washington,” disconnected from the troubles of the country.

“It’s illuminating because it may not necessarily be where cable television is on all of this,” Mr. Gibbs said. “But you know, we’re sort of used to that. We lost on cable television virtually every day last year. So you know, there’s a conventional wisdom to what’s going on in America via Washington and there’s the reality of what’s happening in America.” [my emphasis]

John Dickerson of Slate makes a similar case:

Remember back in the Democratic primary, when the consensus was that Obama was too soft, too deliberative, and too nice to win the election? These current gripes remind me of those days. It takes time to govern.

Overall, this reinforces my post of last week about why I am (still) confident about Obama in which I wrote that:

This seems to have been Obama’s strategy – to allow his campaign to take hits and play defense, sticking to an overall strategy that would gain him a final decisive victory rather than exhausting his staff fighting every daily flair-up.

Obama is once again playing the “long game” on this stimulus fight. I wonder how many times Obama will be able to do this – lose the daily fight while winning the broader point – before the media figures out his game. Clearly some of the more astute observers have.

Categories
Barack Obama Criticism Law National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere

The Abuse of the State Secrets Privilege

Glenn Greenwald, yet again demonstrating his usefulness, holds Obama’s feet to the fire for the apparent decision of his Justice Department to maintain the Bush administration’s radical view on state secrets. Highlighting the ridiculousness of the Obama Justice Department’s legal position here, Greenwald points out that:

The entire claim of “state secrets” in this case is based on two sworn Declarations from CIA Director Michael Hayden – one public and one filed secretly with the court.  In them, Hayden argues that courts cannot adjudicate this case because to do so would be to disclose and thus degrade key CIA programs of rendition and interrogation – the very policies which Obama, in his first week in office, ordered shall no longer exist.  How, then, could continuation of this case possibly jeopardize national security when the rendition and interrogation practices which gave rise to these lawsuits are the very ones that the U.S. Government, under the new administration, claims to have banned? 

Greenwald follows up today with a piece that gets to the core of the issue:

Nobody — not the ACLU or anyone else — argues that the State Secrets privilege is inherently invalid.  Nobody contests that there is such a thing as a legitimate state secret.  Nobody believes that Obama should declassify every last secret and never classify anything else ever again.  Nor does anyone even assert that this particular lawsuit clearly involves no specific documents or portions of documents that might be legitimately subject to the privilege.  Those are all transparent, moronic strawmen advanced by people who have no idea what they’re talking about.

What was abusive and dangerous about the Bush administration’s version of the States Secret privilege — just as the Obama/Biden campaign pointed out – was that it was used not (as originally intended) to argue that specific pieces of evidence or documents were secret and therefore shouldn’t be allowed in a court case, but instead, to compel dismissal of entire lawsuits in advance based on the claim that any judicial adjudication of even the most illegal secret government programs would harm national security.  Thatis the theory that caused the bulk of the controversy when used by the Bush DOJ — because it shields entire government programs from any judicial scrutiny – and it is that exact version of the privilege that the Obama DOJ yesterday expressly advocated (and, by implication, sought to preserve for all Presidents, including Obama).  

Greenwald ends his piece by misconstruing a remark made by Marc Ambinder – who in fairness to Greenwald probably misunderstands the essence of this issue – and turning it into a strawman he can take down. This is Greenwald at his worst – but the start of the article is Greenwald at his best, explaining succinctly and cleary why outrage is called for. I’m sure Greenwald mocks Ambinder only because his comments are illustrative of the wrong-headed Washington establishment thinking.

More important though is the question of, ‘What’s next?’ Greenwald clearly explains how this use of the state secrets privilege is abusive – and how Obama and Biden clearly opposed it when used by Bush. So, how do we begin to pressure Obama to change this position?

Categories
Barack Obama Economics Financial Crisis

The Obama I Remember

[digg-reddit-me]This is the Obama I remember – the one I’ve been waiting to appear since his election back in November:

If you wonder where his urgency comes from, check out the following graphs:

This first one is from Nancy Pelosi’s blog, The Gavel:

[Click on the above image for a full size version.]

CNN released this graph at the beginning of this year, attempting to place 2008’s job losses in historical perspective:

What’s scarier is that before September, 2008 was not shaping up to be a bad year in terms of job losses. Instead, in the last four months of the year, almost 2 million jobs were lost. 

This final graph is from Stephen at Live Granades:

As you can see, the 1974 decline was steeper – and the economy was able to bounce back from that quickly – although that recession was controlled all the way by the Fed – which now has exhausted it’s power.

The escalating rhetoric out of Washington today actually reminds me a great deal of the Bush administration’s reaction to September 11. After the attack, Cheney and Bush and the rest of the team demanded unfiltered intelligence briefings regularly – and as they saw the scope and depth of the dangers that might be facing us, they panicked. Every moment, they were staring into the abyss – and they decided to take any measures possible to prevent “the next attack” which everyone saw as imminent. Their fear was an existential fear – which led them to mistake the threat from Al Qaeda for an existential threat. They weren’t entirely wrong – but where they went extremely wrong was in how they refused to back down from their emergency measures after it became clear that another attack was not imminent – or that we were not under constant assault. 

Today, Obama faces a similar crisis – one that seems – with it’s precipitious declines in economic and financial measures – to be existential. It may be so. No one knows exactly what to do to fix this problem – but they know they must do something. As with the George W. Bush administration, mistakes will be made – and given the size of the government, they will probably be large mistakes. 

But the difference will come in the next step. Responding to an unprecedented crisis, any administration will likely screw up. If you get it right, it will largely be by accident. But following the crisis – when things are beginning to improve and the imminence of the threat to the nation is no longer pressing – we must reevaluate our entire strategic framework, see what worked and what didn’t, what backfired and what might be able to be improved. The great tragedy of the Bush administration was that they refused to do this for the War Against Terrorism. They never took a step back from the emergency mentality that set in after September 11 to evaluate if our strategy was actually working – and instead attacked as weak and even traitorous anyone who suggested doing so. 

Obama will do well to remember that the measures he is taking now are emergency measures to rescue the economy – and to be prepared to re-think America’s financial and economic model as soon as this crisis has passed. He has indicated he plans to do so – with his talk of a Grand Bargain. We need to make sure he follows through.

Categories
Barack Obama Conservativism Criticism Liberalism The Opinionsphere

Greenwald’s Rhetorical Tics

[digg-reddit-me]As a regular reader of Glenn Greenwald’s blog, I have come to admire his legal precision, his passion, and his indefatiguable interest in some of the most important issues of our day. I’m sure these account for his now significant blog readership. He is certainly one of the voices I would choose to listen to if I were in a position of power – and I hope those in power do choose to look to Greenwald for advice and counsel. But as a regular reader, I’ve noticed a few rhetorical tics which stand out. I bring this issue up not because Glenn Greenwald’s blog is itself important – although one can make the argument that it is rather influential – but because these rhetorical tics are illustrative of the broader problem of political rhetoric in general. 

See if you can identify the patters I’m talking about by reading these selections of some (mostly recent) posts – all bold emphases are my own:

Rhetorical tic #1

Regarding Marty Peretz:

Objections to the Israeli attack are just “whining.”  Those are the words of a psychopath.

On Right-Wing Bloggers:

There is a reason why those who seek to demonstrate the alleged extremism and hate-mongering in the anti-Bush blogosphere need to go digging for anonymous commenters. And the converse is also true: those who document the extremism and sociopathic mentality in the right-wing blogosphere do so by citing the twisted writings of leading right-wing pundits, not randomly chosen commenters with no connection to the content or theme of the blog.

On Tom Friedman:

One should be clear that this sociopathic indifference to (or even celebration over) the deaths of Palestinian civilians isn’t representative of all supporters of the Israeli attack on Gaza. 

With a picture of Norman Podhertz:

Face of a psychopath: Norman Podhoretz casually calls for the slaughter of countless Iranians, and suggests that they be bombed to “smithereens”.

On Charles Krauthammer:

It is difficult to find someone with a more psychopathic indifference to the slaughter of innocent people in pursuit of shadowy, unstated political goals than Charles Krauthammer – he who lectures today on the evils of associating with Terrorists as a reflection of a person’s character.

On the Bush movement:

It is hardly possible for us to lose that “war” more devastatingly than we are losing it, and the obvious cause is the twisted, bloodthirsty and sociopathic mentality – shared by Osama bin Laden and the Bush movement alike – which was laid out with such ugly nakedness by the Vice President yesterday.

 

Rhetorical tic #2

On Susan Estrich:

Few things are less relevant than Susan Estrich, but this is still worth examining because it is the dynamic that predominates in our political process…

On Eric Holder:

Everyone can decide for themselves how much weight to assign to that eight-year-old episode.  It doesn’t substantially alter my view of Holder’s nomination, which I still view as being, on balance, a positive step.  The reasons for that conclusion raise some points that are well worth examining – not so much about Eric Holder, but about the Washington establishment.

On Ruth Marcus:

I want to re-iterate, [Ruth Marcus’s logic] is worth examining only because it’s the predominant mentality in the Washington establishment.

On Tom Daschle:

Just to be clear:  I didn’t write about Tom Daschle’s sleazy history in order to initiate a crusade to defeat his nomination.  I wrote about Daschle because the ways in which he is sleazy are illustrative of how the Washington establishment generally works.  Daschle is noteworthy only because he’s marginally more tawdry and transparent than the average Beltway operative…

On Peggy Noonan:

What a stupid and vapid woman this is, but respected and admired by our media class because she fits right in with them – endlessly impressed by her own sophistication, maturity and insight while drooling out platitudes one never hears except in seventh-grade cafeterias and on our political talk shows. As always, this isn’t worth noting because the adolescent stupidity on display here is unique to Noonan, but precisely because it isn’t. This is how our national elections are decided: by people like her, spewing things like this. 

These tics are rather prominent. One of the great strengths of blogging is that the reader gets a sense of what exists beyond the public face of an individual, as the sheer volume and relative lack of editing that define the medium make it hard to hold back one’s deeper feelings. When reading Greenwald’s more polished works or when seeing him speak in public, these tics are not as prominent or as repetitious as they are here, for example. 

I am not going to argue that Greenwald is wrong when he states that any of these individuals are sociopaths or pyschopaths – or that this or that individual person deserves to be castigated because their ideas are representative of a broader trend which is abhorrent. He very well may be right in his judgments – I do not know these people well enough to judge. What I want to respond to though is the pattern which I think reveals a less than objective view of those he is criticizing. 

Politics is essentially visceral and personal. Greenwald clearly is passionate about politics – and these tics reveal two things about his passion: that it leads even a nuanced and rational political thinker such as Greenwald to demonize his opponents; and that it leads him to realize this to some extent, thus his repeated need to qualify his personal attacks by rationalizing them as part of a broader problem. 

I have a theory about politics and history – and though I am sure it is not unique, I am not aware of which thinker I should credit it to – that we determine our political affiliation almost entirely based on who we empathize with in historical settings. Post World War II, for example, the dominant struggle of the time saw almost all Americans serving as or rooting for our soldiers fighting in an existential struggle. Thus, as long as their war remained the most prominent national memory, America remained largely united. After the struggles of the sixties became the dominant national memory, America fractured – as some who empathized with the police took a certain view; others empathized with hippies, etcetera. The hodge-podge of policies that make up the so-called “liberal” and “conservative” parties in America can be better explained by historical sympathies than any ideological underpinning. Our reaction to these national memories though are – in a large part – visceral – at least after we have been introduced to them as children.

It is due to this baseness of emotion that so much political debate seems to involve individuals speaking past one another. Obama’s solution to this has been civility and the avoidance of stereotypes (or perhaps the conflation of stereotypes). Obama sought to deflate the escalating moral outrage of his supporters rather than to stoke it, sometimes even scolding his supporters saying, “You don’t need to boo: you just need to vote.”

Reading Glenn Greenwald, one can clearly see the dynamic of escalating moral outrage at work. While one can make the case that any particular individual is a psychopath, it seems conventient when so many of the people you are disagreeing with turn out to be psychopaths. Greenwald demonstrates a clear contempt for these individuals – which they are often times deserving – but which nevertheless clouds his judgment. 

Seeing this at work in an intelligent and eminently rational writer such as Greenwald helps one to appreciate the serendipitous nature of Obama’s rise at this moment – with his unflagging civility and his desire to deflate the escalating outrage of his supporters as well as oppionents.

Categories
Barack Obama Politics Videos

Weekend Update: Obama Screwed Up; So Did Kellogs

[digg-reddit-me]There were only two bits worth repeating in last night’s Saturday Night Live – at least for a political junkie like me – both of them on the Weekend Update.

The first was Seth Myer’s take on the Obama, “I screwed up” admission:

 

The second was a sort of defense of Michael Phelps and put-down of Kellogs. The last “Really…” is of course the best – and the one mainly unexplored part of the story.

Continue reading “Weekend Update: Obama Screwed Up; So Did Kellogs”