For a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics…Time for some investigative journalism about the Obama family’s background…
From Lisa Schiffren of the National Review. (h/t Patrick Appel.)
Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane of the Times have a solid piece today on Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr., the former head of CIA’s Directorate of Operations. The piece seems to suffer from a bit too much editing – but it gives the reader a flavor of the lurking back story behind Mr. Rodriguez’s role in the destruction of the interrogation tapes.
As an example of editing gone wrong, the story begins with this intriguing opening:
It would become known inside the Central Intelligence Agency as “the Italian job,” a snide movie reference to the bungling performance of an agency team that snatched a radical Muslim cleric from the streets of Milan in 2003 and flew him to Egypt — a case that led to criminal charges in Italy against 26 Americans.
That’s about as far into the matter as this story goes – although I’m sure the story isn’t breaking here for the first time.
I was left with both an admiration for Mr. Rodriguez’s character and an anger that it seems unlikely that he will face any consequences for blatantly and deliberately breaking the law. His lawyer characterizes the coda that led him to destroy the interrogation videos as well as cover up the abuses in “the Italian Job” operation as this: “I’m not going to let my people get nailed for something they were ordered to do.”
In describing his reason for destroying the tapes, the Times concludes:
Mr. Rodriguez, who was nearing retirement, saw the tapes as a sort of time bomb that, if leaked, threatened irreparable damage to the United States’ image in the Muslim world, his friends say, and posed physical and legal risks to C.I.A. officers on them.
Again – I sympathize with him. And his distrust of the administration – as well as any political administration – is well-founded. Sympathy cannot override the necessary condition of any free society: that the law must be held above any individual.
There is sometimes an esoteric poetry to scientific explanations of the world. In the Scientific American, Chip Walter described the “primal effects” of a kiss:
Visceral marching orders boost pulse and blood pressure. The pupils dilate, breathing deepens and rational thought retreats, as desire suppresses both prudence and self-consciousness. For their part, the participants are probably too enthralled to care. As poet e. e. cummings once observed: “Kisses are a better fate / than wisdom.”
[digg-reddit-me]I don’t quite buy the idea that you can judge a candidate by how well they run a campaign – after all, Karl Rove and President George W. Bush ran great campaigns. As The Onion appropriately explained in a headline: “2004 Reelection Campaign Better Planned Than Iraq Invasion.”
But especially in a race between three candidates for whom their campaign is the biggest thing each person has run, it gives some useful insight. Overall, I think campaigns show something – although they do not force candidates to demonstrate all the leadership qualities that are most essential to effective leadership.
Given this, the contrast between Mr. McCain – whose campaign went bankrupt when he was in the lead, and finally gained traction when he was, once again, the insurgent, and faltered again once he regained the lead – Ms. Clinton, whose is now trying to portray herself as the underdog getting delegates on a “shoestring budget” of over $130 million, and who didn’t plan to campaign past February 5th, going so far as to avoid opening up offices in the states holding primaries after that date – to Mr. Obama whose campaign has been masterful, thorough, and well-managed.
Here’s Andrew Sullivan making the point about Mr. Obama:
Then his strategy was meticulous organization – and you saw that in Iowa, as well as yesterday’s caucus states. Everything he told me has been followed through. And the attention to detail – from the Alaska caucus to the Nevada cooks – has been striking…
How did the candidates deal with this? The vastly more experienced and nerves-of-steel Clinton clearly went through some wild mood-swings. Obama gave an appearance at least of preternatural coolness under fire, a steady message that others came to mimic, and a level of oratory that still stuns this longtime debater. In the middle of this very hot zone, he exhibit a coolness and steeliness that is a mark of presidential timber. He played tough – but he didn’t play nasty. Keeping the high road in a contest like this – without ever playing the race card or the victim card – is an achievement. Building a movement on top of that is more impressive still. So far, he has combined Romney’s money with Clinton’s organizational skills and Ron Paul’s grass-roots enthusiasm. No other campaign has brought so many dimensions into play.
Compare this to Ms. Clinton – whose organization arrived months after Mr. Obama’s in many states, who has been out-organized, out-campaigned, and out-thought. Now, over a month-and-a-half after her loss in Iowa that should have demonstrated the power of Mr. Obama’s campaign, Ms. Clinton was not able to gather a full slate of delegates to run in the final primary in Pennsylvania, despite the fact that her vocal supporter, the governor, extended the time she had to get delegates by a week. Last week, Ms. Clinton’s campaign was 20 delegates short in Pennsylvania. After a week, she is only down “10 or 11”. Keep in mind also that Pennsylvania is one of three states that is considered essential for Ms. Clinton to stop Mr. Obama’s momentum – along with Texas and Ohio.
As John Baer of the Philadelphia Daily News observed:
For a national campaign stressing competence, experience, “ready day one,” one might expect a full slate in what could be a key state.
Indeed.
Ryan Lizza observes the “two sides of McCain” in a long and thoughtful piece that is much about the media’s love for Senator John McCain as it is about Mr. McCain himself:
There is the principled McCain, who, more than any other candidate running for President this year, has a record of sticking to a position even when it puts his political future at risk. In this campaign, his positions on the surge and on immigration (he supported a guest-worker program and a path to citizenship for illegals) almost sank him. But there is also the political McCain, who knows that a reputation for standing on principle is a valuable commodity, though only if it’s well advertised. If it takes flogging a dodgy quote to emphasize a larger truth about your own character, then so be it.
That seems to be as good of a preview as any of what the public will have to watch for in the coming months. I didn’t care for Governor Mitt Romney – and I was too focused on the Democratic primaries to care much about the Republican race for a few weeks there where the political McCain came barging onto the political scene, repeatedly using a fabricated point to make the case against Mr. Romney. In this instance, if not previously in his career, Mr. McCain demonstrated a willingness to go for the body blow, to kick a candidate when he was down, and to make sure his opponent wouldn’t be able to make a comeback in time for the bell. Politics is a contact sport, so I don’t begrudge Mr. McCain that.
But it’s worth noticing…and it’s also worth noting that Mr. McCain used an extreme distortion of his opponent’s position repeatedly and with almost Clintonian obtuseness.
[digg-reddit-me]The Obama backlash is beginning, but slowly. Two weeks ago we learned that Barack Obama is not Jesus; that’s a fair point to make. Earlier today David Brooks, who was a prominent conservative supporter of Mr. Obama warned that “the magic fades”. Mr. Brooks ends on this ambiguously positive note:
The victims of O.C.S. struggle against Obama-myopia, or the inability to see beyond Election Day. But here’s the fascinating thing: They still like him. They know that most of his hope-mongering is vaporous. They know that he knows it’s vaporous.
But the fact that they can share this dream still means something. After the magic fades and reality sets in, they still know something about his soul, and he knows something about theirs. They figure that any new president is going to face gigantic obstacles. At least this candidate seems likely to want to head in the right direction. Obama’s hype comes from exaggerating his powers and his virtues, not faking them.
Those afflicted with O.C.S. are no longer as moved by his perorations. The fever passes. But some invisible connection seems to persist.
Mr. Brooks column hits Mr. Obama a bit harder in the opening. Kevin Drum over at the Washington Monthly also sees storm clouds on the Obama horizon. Matt Yglesias also sees this coming. Paul Krugman, the partisan hack and gloomy prognosticator of recessions, also sees the backlash brewing. Though no one can describe Mr. Krugman as fair-minded regarding Mr Obama. As one of my next posts will demonstrate, columnists more ideologically conservative than David Brooks have recently taken to hitting Mr. Obama. It’s also worth noting that each of these liberals only cites one example. But I sense it coming too – because the media must be getting bored; because Mr. Obama is not as open to the media as Senator John McCain; because as Mr. Obama succeeds, some of his less grounded supporters, and some of those who are emotionally invested in the race for cheap thrills, are beginning to reach a critical mass.
But I think Mr. Brooks’ point holds: that even after the comedown, voters are still left with an emotional connection. More important from my perspective is that there are many who support Mr. Obama for reasons other than emotional thrills.
Aside from predictions of what Mr. Obama could do, and policy debates, and historical parallels, there is another set of clear realistic reasons to favor Mr. Obama.
As Roger Cohen wrote yesterday:
The fight between Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination is increasingly portrayed as one between romantics and realists.
But a realistic view of Obama would be that he is best placed to seize and shape a new world of such possibilities. He has the youth, the global background, the ability to move people, and the demonstrated talent for reaching across lines of division, even those etched in black and white.
The Nation’s Christopher Hayes made this argument for Mr. Obama regarding domestic policy.
Andrew Sullivan in his powerful December piece in the Atlantic Monthly explained how Mr. Obama’s sheer presence would “rebrand America”:
Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial—it’s central to an effective war strategy. The war on Islamist terror, after all, is two-pronged: a function of both hard power and soft power. We have seen the potential of hard power in removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. We have also seen its inherent weaknesses in Iraq, and its profound limitations in winning a long war against radical Islam. The next president has to create a sophisticated and supple blend of soft and hard power to isolate the enemy, to fight where necessary, but also to create an ideological template that works to the West’s advantage over the long haul. There is simply no other candidate with the potential of Obama to do this. Which is where his face comes in.
Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.
Patrick Ruffini in a critical but generally objective piece concludes that Mr. Obama’s “brand” has great potential:
The end result is that great brands are fungible. They can be all things to all people. The branding approach liberates Obama to be the candidate of the MoveOn wing and of national unity. That’s not a criticism. It is a compliment. Now we’ll see if it stands up in the land beyond the energized core, in the land of 50% plus one nationally, where evangelism alone is not enough.
Obama literalists may read back chapter and verse on his policy initiatives, but let’s be real here. Those aren’t the reasons for his success. Morover, they were never intended to be the underpinnings of the Obama candidacy. Millions of “HOPE” and “CHANGE” placards later, I think that’s fairly clear.
There is something fluffy and nice and fake about the Obama hullabaloo. But there is something real too. And even a pragmatist can see the value in what Mr. Obama’s brand has been able to accomplish so far.
A spokeswoman for the Pakistan People’s Party had this to say about the results from yesterday’s elections which are still not fully tallied:
We’re not getting the results. They have been delayed, which in Pakistan means they will be changed.
That’s often the sense I have here too – whether it be New Mexico in 2000 or 2004, Florida in 2000, or any other of the key races where there is a significant delay between voting and reporting.
I love the fact that Ms. Clinton is going around giving speeches, saying:
My opponent gives speeches. I offer solutions
To complete her thought fragment: “I offer solutions in speeches.” Such an incredibly empty point from my perspective. But obviously polling has shown that deriding”speeches” works – even if you do it in a speech.
I first noticed this on Ms. Clinton’s first appearance on Meet the Press after Iowa in which she, for the first time I noticed, repeated variations of the line, “My opponent is running based on a speech he made five years ago…” And, thanks no doubt to Mark Penn, she’s still going at it.
Morris Davis, an Air Force colonel, who was the chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, from 2005 to 2007 made a powerful point by telling this story from American history:
Twenty-seven years ago, in the final days of the Iran hostage crisis, the C.I.A.’s Tehran station chief, Tom Ahern, faced his principal interrogator for the last time. The interrogator said the abuse Mr. Ahern had suffered was inconsistent with his own personal values and with the values of Islam and, as if to wipe the slate clean, he offered Mr. Ahern a chance to abuse him just as he had abused the hostages. Mr. Ahern looked the interrogator in the eyes and said, “We don’t do stuff like that.”
Today, Tom Ahern might have to say: “We don’t do stuff like that very often.”