The President's remark about the Cambridge police department was justifiable

Tom Shales, the television critic for The Washington Post, who's reviewed every presidential press conference for over 30 years, called President Obama's remark last night about the Cambridge Police Department's arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates "refreshingly blunt." But many in the media have railed against the president for calling the arrest "stupid." Was it? The President obviously based his remark on the fact that the policeman in question must be presumed to have been acting within what he believed was departmental policy. So the president was entitled to presume that that authorized arresting someone who had not otherwise committed a crime but who was loudly criticizing the officer. Is that "stupid"? It is, unless you believe that free speech about police officers to their face should be illegal. I would submit to you that any policeman who believes it is appropriate to arrest someone who is criticizing them too harshly had better opt for a line of work in a more sensitive setting, like a hair salon or a toy store.

Let's not forget that conservatives have been brow-beating us for decades about the sacrosanct status of anyone who wears a uniform -- that they can do no wrong, are the shining emblems of our national honor, and all the rest. Of the great majority of police officers, this may well be true. But we should not forget the fact that police brutality is a worldwide reality: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cases_of_police_brutality. Policemen have the capacity to overreact, just as those they encounter.

I once dated a woman who had been a police officer in a major American city for ten years, until she resigned because of physical harassment from male officers. She once told me: "Do not ever argue with a male police officer. Half the men on any police force are in that line of work because they enjoy physical confrontations. They are just waiting to be challenged." Was it stupid for Gates to yell at the officer? Yes. Was it stupid to arrest him? Yes. The President was right.

Obama challenges the Iranian regime's repression

Today President Obama quite forcefully though subtly challenged the Iranian regime, in his comments on events there. Instead of opining on whether he thought the elections were fraudulent, he focused on the issue of whether the regime's response to the protests was legitimate, suggesting that violence against peaceful protesters (his deft reframing of the issue of violence) was against a universal value, the right to dissent. He also said, "...there appears to be a sense on the part of people who were so hopeful and so engaged and so committed to democracy who now feel betrayed..." In other words, the Mousavi presidential campaign lifted the people's hope that their voices would count, and now they feel betrayed. Obama's test of a satisfactory course of events could therefore be defined this way, as if it were a statement to the regime: If what you do from now on sharpens that sense of betrayal, you will lose your people's trust and thus your legitimacy.

How could another Ahmadinejad anointment be anything but another betrayal? Every one of us with access to blogs or the media -- and especially to Iranian bloggers -- should keep repeating Obama's equation and perhaps lend it more specific political content, because the part of the regime not glued to Ahmadinejad needs to see that they have only one way to regain the people's trust, and that's to order a re-vote.

Right now the movement in the streets is based mainly on political rage -- it doesn't have a concrete goal. If the goal were a Guardian Council order for a re-vote, it would paint the regime into a corner -- courtesy of Obama's equation.

Cheney Unhinged

Self-righteousness is necessarily facilitated in intelligent people by a lack of self-awareness: The person who proudly and dogmatically claims he is right about a matter that otherwise rouses a respectable debate is usually a person who doesn't notice his own pride and dogmatism. So it was with former Vice President Dick Cheney's speech today, exonerating himself and his late administration (which in George W. Bush's present silence seems as if it belonged chiefly to Cheney) of any misdeeds in prosecuting their war on terrorists. He maligned the motives and mischaracterized the statements of Democrats, damned President Obama with faint praise when he wasn't implying that Obama is naive, ridiculed the president (without naming him) for using "euphemisms" in referring to the war on terror -- moments after the president said that it was indeed a war -- and then turned around and kept using the Republicans' insistent euphemism about torture: "enhanced interrogation techniques" (which congressional Republicans are now shortening to "EIT's", not even wanting to use that phrase).

While in the middle of a speech half-devoted to unctuous and sarcastic dismissal of those who disagree with him, and while denouncing unnamed individuals for "phony moralizing" about torture, Cheney's seeming inability to notice the ironies in his own language led him to say this: President Obama's decision "to completely rule out enhanced interrogation techniques...is recklessness cloaked in righteousness." To paraphrase one of the wisest people who ever lived, he who cannot see the stick in his own eye tends to complain loudly about the mote in someone else's.

Apart from condemning the new Administration's refusal to use "enhanced interrogation techniques", the other half of Cheney's speech dredged up the dread of further terrorist catastrophe that was widespread after 9/11 and warned of even worse future attacks which he implied were more likely because of President Obama's policies. This was the strategy of his speech: Recreate fear of an external enemy which he accused the present administration of taking lightly, in part to distract his listeners from the self-inflicted and widely acknowledged disasters of his own administration. Cheney even had the temerity to suggest that having a public debate about torture would exhibit "weakness and opportunity" to terrorists thinking of attacking again. In other words, free democratic discussion must be stopped, because it might get us killed. This is a man whose sensibility seems so drenched in fear of our enemies that he believes it justifies every bloody method wreaked upon them. It is a philosophy that sacrifices the principles he professes to defend in order, supposedly, to protect them. As one American military officer famously said in Vietnam, "We destroyed the village in order to save it."

But the macabre heart of Cheney's speech was this: "You cannot keep just some nuclear-armed terrorists out of the United States, you must keep every nuclear-armed terrorist out of the United States...When just a single clue that goes unlearned…one lead that goes unpursued…can bring on catastrophe -- it's no time for splitting differences. " In other words: Obama won't torture, so he will cause a nuclear attack on an American city. This speech must therefore be recognized for what it is: the single most demagogic political attack on an American president, by another American political leader, in living memory. That its central charge was insinuated and not directly stated does not dilute its malice. Cheney did not have the courage frontally to accuse the president of what he argued would be the consequences of the president's actions. But cowardice is often found in those who predicate their arguments on fear and loathing.

The mainstream news media seem oblivious to these back alley methods of Dick Cheney's political rhetoric, so mesmerized do they appear to be by his buttoned-down corporate style. But make no mistake about it: The former vice president realizes that the new president is well along in forging an entirely different public consensus about how the United States should conduct itself in the world. It isn't clear if the fear-ridden, hostility-feeding language which Cheney deploys arises from his own need for self-justification, or whether it may be part of a deliberate strategy by him and his acolytes in the conservative movement to try to reignite the recriminations and hostilities that surged back and forth through our political debates when he was in office. But whatever the reason, Cheney's belligerent speech today raises the stakes for those who would prefer to have America steered by the rationality and composure of President Obama's approach to the risks and threats facing the United States. The bile aimed at Barack Obama by Dick Cheney, and the rancor against him that it may further stir on the right, should make clear to all those who prefer a stable new course for our country that the president deserves our support as never before. We have to make the choice we made last November again, and again -- because those who lost have not conceded.

More on Obama's decision-making on torture issues...

Barack Obama is not a devious man. The chief reason he gave for changing his mind and declining to release the 29 photos showing American soldiers torturing Afghans and Iraqis was that military commanders, particularly in Afghanistan, asked him not to do so, because they felt it would heighten the risk of violence to their soldiers serving there. Because the Republicans had trashed Obama six ways to Sunday about his lack of national security experience for two solid years during the presidential campaign, with McCain practically accusing him of being an unrealistic peacenik, it was inevitable that he would have to build a trusting relationship with senior military commanders once he took office. So far he's done that skillfully. Declining to release photos now which the White House fully expects to come out later anyway is a tactical concession to these commanders, a sign of his respect for their judgment. And it's also a way to maintain distance between the White House and the developing four-alarm media circus about Cheney and his torture-defending road show, which could otherwise engulf the Obama presidency at this point if the president became a central actor in determining precisely what will happen in adducing evidence that could lead to meaningful legal actions against Bush officials.

The political moment for firmly establishing this presidency as likely to be formidable and successful is still fragile. A lot of political insiders are extremely impressed with how Obama is handling himself, and the public seems to agree. But the Washington press corps and the broadcast media are another matter. They're mischaracterizing what he is doing and saying on a daily basis, in their nightly cartoon strip of our politics. He has to maintain as much distance from that level of coverage as possible. The torture debate has already levitated away from the factual record and become an inside-the-Beltway slanging match. The only way to rescue it is for there to be patient, exhaustive congressional hearings, which Pat Leahy and others are organizing as we speak. If Obama were to instruct DOJ to start investigations, then the media would depict Obama as Inspector Javert pursuing the accursed Cheney, and the public would believe that Obama had been willingly caught up in another Washington political obsession rather than doing the job he was elected to do. The White House staying out of this debate as much as possible actually helps the debate about Bush's torture practices to be less political and more about real evidence.

In American history no president or vice president immediately after the completion of his term has ever been the subject of investigations -- initiated by the new administration -- for criminal violations. Until substantial evidence of that wrong-doing is evident to the public, any initiative by Obama for such investigations would set off a political firestorm not seen since Watergate. Let the evidence accumulate. Let the public come gradually to a judgment. Sometimes it's right for presidents to follow public opinion instead of lead it, particularly if collateral damage to the president's other priorities -- in the form of diminished news coverage and poisoning the political atmosphere -- can thereby be avoided. Obama was not elected to be an avenging angel imposing retribution on the political leaaders he supplanted. He was elected to save the economy, restore America's positive influence in the world, and change -- not reinforce -- our delirious political culture.

Why Obama didn't order release of the "torture photos"

Every elected democratic leader in history has required the respect and loyalty of the senior combat commanders of his military, especially if there are active military conflicts which he has to manage. Afghanistan may be in peril of slipping back into chaos or control by the Taliban, thanks to Bush's neglect of that conflict and the resources consumed by his war in Iraq. That could lead to the reconstitution of a terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan and vastly strengthen the Taliban position in Pakistan, where nuclear weapons are stored. That would not only defeat President Obama in '12, it would return the neo-con gang to power in Washington.

Barack Obama campaigned on the promise of finishing the job in Afghanistan, i.e. stabilizing the country to secure it against repossession of any of its territory by transnational terrorists. If you liked any of Obama's promises, you cannot fault him for wanting to make good on all of them. Two senior U.S. commanders responsible for Afghanistan asked Obama not to release the photos of U.S. soldiers torturing Afghan prisoners, because they were afraid that would endanger American soldiers -- by stimulating new acts of terrorism or other violence against them. It is not serious to believe that any president would disregard such a request.

The president knows that the torture photos are likely to be released eventually anyway. Not releasing them now does not give Dick Cheney or any Bush official any measure of protection against whatever sanctions can be taken against them by foreign or U.S. prosecutors, or further exposure of their crimes by congressional investigators. But by removing himself further from the causal sequence that leads to those hearings and investigations, he denies the news media any ability to claim that he is using his presidency to persecute his predecessor's -- a claim that the media as well as the Republicans would be sure to make. To have a successful or even historic presidency, he has to use his window of peak political power to begin to solve the central problems felt by the majority who elected him, and that means the economy, health care, and the other long-neglected public needs that jeopardize this country's ability not only to recover from this serious recession but to compete in a world changing faster than Bill Clinton can talk.

The choice that President Obama faced was not complex: Successful political leaders minimize political risks in order to keep dry the powder of their influence over all the other political actors in government who have to be herded toward the changes he wants to make. They also have to make sure that even non-political actors in the system, such as influential military leaders (or the heads of independent regulatory agencies, or even Supreme Court justices), believe that he respects their professional judgment -- or else they will be trashing his, behind his back. To release these photos over the objection of military commanders would have made more difficult the president's task of gaining more of their confidence for tougher decisions ahead where he may have to turn down their advice.

Torture is a Crime, Not a "Daring Proposal"

Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, America's most prestigious private organization commonly believed to represent the foerign policy establishment, has waded into the torture debate. He says:

The issue is whether those who argued that such techniques were not illegal -- and therefore should be available -- ought to be tried. They should not. To begin with, prosecution of Justice Department officials would have a chilling effect on future U.S. government officials. Few would be brave or foolhardy enough to put forward daring proposals that one day could be judged illegal. Putting things down in writing is a useful intellectual exercise that is also central to good decision-making. With the threat of prosecution, serious memos on controversial matters will increasingly become the exception rather than the rule. Prosecution would also set a terrible precedent. One would have thought today's politics sufficiently partisan and poisonous without adding legal threats to the mix. Even knowing this was a possibility would discourage people from entering government in the first place.

This sounds reasonable but is in fact outrageous. It has become clear that Bush Administration political appointees in the Department of Justice and in the White House prepared, endorsed and accepted policy recommendations that authorized "enhanced interrogation techniques" that are now regarded as internationally criminal prosecutable torture by a preponderant number of legal authorities and observers in the U.S. as well as in the governments of our allies. The hair-splitting and rhetorical convolutions in which the DOJ Bush lawyers engaged, as shown by publicly disclosed documents, suggest that they were aware of the potential that violations of law could be involved. For Mr. Haass to describe the endorsement and recommendation of potentially illegal acts as "a useful intellectual exercise that is...central to good decision-making" would be an ironic though understandable statement if the government were an authoritarian regime, but not if the government is democratic and bases its laws on the enforceability of human rights guaranteed by its own Constitution.

This has nothing to do with "partisan and poisonous politics." It has to do with whether the United States will or will not respect the rule of law and the international conventions it has endorsed which condemn torture. This is not an issue which can be decided as a matter of what is convenient for the careers of policy advisors. It is a question of fundamental values. Mr. Haass seems to have had difficulty noticing that.

The Republican Party: Defenders of Torture

Because the Republicans are now explicitly defending torture under Bush and Cheney (while using the euphemism, "enhanced interrogation techniques"), since it allegedly succeeded in getting information useful in stopping terrorist attacks (which of course cannot be disclosed), they are implicitly asserting that the ends justify the means. But if the same people who choose the means also define the ultimate ends (i.e. win a nebulous and perpetual "war on terror"), then how does even that justification become an enforceable standard? It's just another way of saying that if they have power, the Republicans will do anything to achieve what they have decided is in the national interest. This is a road to the same authoritarianism that they accuse, rightly or wrongly, Iran and Venezuela of practicing. So, they abandon morality in public life even as they demand that we practice their version of it in our private lives (e.g. stop being gay, practice abstinence), and they commit the rankest hypocrisy by asking for state power to torture you if you're suspected of being a terrorist, even as, ridiculously, they accuse President Obama --- who refuses to torture -- of being a dictator. This is a political party in an advanced stage of serious alienation from any rational standards of consistency, logic or public ethics. It has also abandoned respect for the rule of law and rendered itself unfit for national power so long as its present leaders and thinkers would set the agenda.

Cheney is contemptible

Comment on "Cheney Slams Obama Again, Calls Overseas Trips 'Disturing'", on The Huffington Post -

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/20/cheney-slams-obama-again_n_189268.html

Watch him on television and the first thing you notice about Dick Cheney is his corporate slickness, oozing a calm and reasonable manner, as if he were still CEO of Halliburton. But that masks a deep-seated, unreconstructed reactionary temperament. What first marked him out as someone who was willing to subordinate globally accepted standards of decency and human rights to his insistence on American hostility to perceived enemies everywhere was his vote in 1986 as a member of Congress against a resolution calling for the release from prison of Nelson Mandela, the leader then of the movement that eventually liberated South Africa from the racist, fascist grip of the apartheid regime, which had subordinated and brutalized its black population for a century. At the time, the Reagan Administration believed that Mandela’s movement was dominated by communists, a line of propaganda peddled by the Administration’s white friends in Pretoria. So it is no surprise now that Cheney is savaging Barack Obama, another man with an African name who, like Mandela, understands the real meaning of human rights and, unlike Cheney, comprehends the higher aspirations of the world's peoples. Dick Cheney helped plunge America into infamy with his advocacy of torture and helped persuade George W. Bush to waste $2 trillion on an unnecessary war in Iraq that killed or injured over 31,000 Americans and killed over 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians. He is beneath political contempt. He is not fit to shine Barack Obama's shoes.

Why Republicans Still Oppose Seating Al Franken

On his blog on the Think Progress web site yesterday, Matt Yglesias was trying to understand how and why the Republican Party is still pouring energy into former Senator Norm Coleman's futile litigation to prevent his Democratic opponent Al Franken from being seated in the U.S. Senate, in the wake of a Minnesota court's declaration that Franken won the election. Yglesias marveled at “the level of party discipline that the Republicans have been able to muster in 2009″ which he calls “really impressive.”

But that praise is misplaced, when you consider two underlying facts. First, there is no coherent substantive vision of what the Republican Party stands for, in the wake of their removal from national power last November. In the absence of substance, disputing process (e.g. a close election) is a substitute for thinking. It’s also an unconscious way of refighting 2008 and trying to get a different result. Second, the extremist sloganeering by broadcast bullies like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck has frightened into silence virtually all rational thinkers in the Republican elite, so the only outlet for the party's energy is trying to obstruct Democrats’ consolidation of power and their recasting of the purposes of government, through legislative or legal stunts as in Minnesota or absurdly ascribing socialist motives to a president whose ideology is quite unfrightening. Meanwhile puerile projects like the Fox News-promoted "tea-bagging" protests further define the president's opponents as grasping at straws while pleading for the world to please stop believing him.

It is one thing to muster party unity in the cause of constructive change. It is quite another to apply it to obstruction. The latter is only going to deepen the Republican Party’s association with negative, disruptive news. Until rational thinkers and speakers who have constructive ideas related to real public needs emerge among Republicans, they and their antics will be merely sound and fury, transfixing broadcast reporters and bloggers but very few other Americans outside their dogmatic base.

It's about Obama, not Geithner...

We tend to be over-focused in our politics on publicly visible policy-executing personnel rather than the philosophy and intelligence guiding those people, which hopefully reside in the decisionmaker to whom they report. In the case of Timothy Geithner, that's Barack Obama. The media and the right-wing don't give two cents about Geithner. It's Obama they've been after -- the right-wing to destroy him politically, and the mainstream media to chronicle the carnage and pick over the carcass. It's no accident that a media star like Arianna Huffington joined other on-screen avatars of liberal dogmatism in wanting to heave Geithner over the side, once the vultures appeared to be circling him. Better to burnish their reputations for leading the pack than having tediously to defend the president's political flank.

But once Geithner's plan was actually unveiled, the stock market promptly went up like a rocket. So does that mean Wall Street suddenly loves Obama, as liberals like Arianna were deserting his Treasury chief? No, and here's why: Stock traders -- who aren't exactly political geniuses -- had been in a state of nervous anxiety about Geithner's plan for weeks, fanned by negative media and Republican distortions. On Monday they read the plan, realized it had a chance of working, and were deliriously relieved (Rush Limbaugh may want a depression, but the business community really doesn't). Here's what Steve Pearlstein, an often contrarian and independently thinking financial columnist for The Washington Post had to say, in part: (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/23/AR200903...)

...the plan looks to me like it has a good chance of bringing significant amounts of private capital back into the financial system and relieving banks of some of their worst assets. On first blush, the Geithner plan looks rather complicated, but its general design is rather simple:

The government will go in as partner with private investors in newly created investment vehicles that will compete to buy up loans and securities backed by loans that banks want to sell in order to strengthen their balance sheets. As with most investment funds, this public and private equity or risk capital will be supplemented with additional funds that will be borrowed from Treasury, the Federal Reserve or from private investors who will receive a government guarantee that their loan will be repaid.

If the investments wind up making money, the profits will be split with the government in the same proportion as the equity that was put in. If the funds lose money, the initial losses -- roughly the first 15 cents on the dollar -- will be borne in the same proportion by the government and the private investors. Any losses beyond that will be borne by the government.

In the meantime, the banks will be able to strengthen their balance sheets in ways that will allow them to attract new private capital from investors who no longer will worry about the bad loans on the banks' books. They will also have the cash from the asset sales with which to make new loans...

The blogosphere was full of [Paul] Krugman-like criticism of the Geithner plan yesterday, with some complaining that it would be a windfall for hedge funds and other private investors and others arguing that it would fail to attract private capital. It's hard to see how both could be true...

Krugman's assumption...is that the current, depressed market prices for loans is the correct price, from which he jumps to the conclusion that all big banks are insolvent and need to be nationalized. But even a casual observer can see that these markets are broken not simply because many loans are bad, but because of a lack of investment financing. It is the interaction of the two problems -- in econospeak, solvency and liquidity -- that has caused the market to break down and prices to collapse.

As for the nationalization mantra, it's hard to see what that would accomplish. If the government were to take them over and assure depositors and creditors they would be repaid in full -- which is what you need to do to avoid a collapse of the financial system -- then there is little effective difference from a plan designed to rid banks of their bad assets. Nationalization doesn't make the bad loans go away -- it simply moves them from the banks to the government, with the government on the hook for any additional losses.

Pearlstein is paying attention to the substance of what the Obama Administration is going to do, not the theatrics of the surrounding political culture. From both the right and the left, most of the denizens and purveyors of that culture are assaulting Obama's plans and programs because they don't mirror their ideological preferences or they simply want him to fail politically. Unlike Bill Clinton, who habitually divided Solomon's baby and split the differences between his supporters and his opponents in order to cut deals he could celebrate as political achievements (politics being his arena), Obama is engaged in the art of what's politically possible without sacrificing the substantive core of what's needed to resolve the crisis at hand, in order to pave the road to change (the real world being his arena).

Obama is not trying to pull the rabbit of utopia out of the hat of economic disaster. He knows that that would be a bridge too far. Rather he's trying to quell that disaster so that political space remains in which to accomplish what he promised to do in his campaign -- to take the country in a substantially new direction in its economic conduct, its social fairness, its role in the world and, yes, its political culture.

The Geithner Plan and the Krugman Backlash

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman appears to have begun his own personal depression on the news of Treasury Secretary Geithner's plan to separate threatened banks from their nonperforming ("toxic") assets. But in attacking the Obama Administration for collaborating with the banks in order to prevent their implosion, he's made one misleading statement: "...the whole point about toxic waste is that nobody knows what it’s worth." The reality is that that is true only when such assets are sitting inert in a financially threatened bank's portfolio of assets. The only way that a financial asset's value can be determined is through a market, in which potential buyers bid the price up or down. All other methods -- such as a Nobel laureate speculating about its value -- are arbitrary.

Let's think this through: The Geithner plan assumes that lots of investors will buy nonperforming mortgage-related assets if they are stripped from banks and marketed via a public fund. Why? Not only because the government is assuming a good deal of the risk, but also because the underlying mortgages represent ownership of houses that will sell to buyers who can service those mortgages at a certain price, which is not zero (remember that wage-earners, who still comprise more than 90% of employable Americans, have regular income and need housing). If you can't service any longer your mortgage of $200,000 but could service a mortgage of $150,000, and the location of the asset in a fragile bank prevents the asset from finding a new investor, then a newspaper columnist's gloomiest estimate of its market value -- say, $100,000 -- might make it seem very toxic. But we know that such an estimate of that one asset is undervalued, because a $150,000 mortgage can be serviced. Until the asset, representing the nonperforming loan, is priced in a market, its true financial value can never be ascertained. That's the whole point of Geithner's approach: Let the only reliable mechanism (in our economic system) for determining the value of anything, a viable market, do that in the case of these assets.

When the Mellon Bank was on the brink of collapse in the late 1980s, an investment house created a "bad bank" into which Mellon's nonperforming assets were placed. This restored Mellon to solvency, and it became a healthy credit-issuing institution again -- and Pittsburgh heaved a sigh of relief. The "bad bank" eventually sold all of the bad loans, and very little money was lost. The point of doing this was to enable Mellon to do what it was supposed to do: serve the community as a source of credit. The latter is what many banks today cannot readily do because of uncertainty about the weight of these "toxic" assets on the banks' viability. The complexity of the Geithner plan is a function of the sheer scale of the general financial crisis today, as well as the administration's decision to acquire the cooperation of the financial industry instead of terrifying it with the prospect of broad nationalizations and prolonged Washington decision-making about its future.

At the present moment we may not like bankers all that much, because of their past egregious risk-taking, but we are having a historic crisis of confidence in our economic system which is unfolding too quickly for the president and the Congress to invent a whole new financial system, just because a lot of us are outraged and want to punish the bankers, or because some columnists don't want the government to do anything remotely similar to what the Bush Administration might have done. Obama picked Geithner to be Treasury Secretary because he knew he had an excellent working knowledge of the present financial system. Geithner's plan is going to be implemented, because congressional approval isn't necessary. Denunciations of the plan without constructive suggestions about how to improve it will accomplish nothing except fray public confidence in Obama's decision-making. That's the objective of the Republicans and right-wing populists, reinforced by the fear-mongering of most of the broadcast media (and now further abetted by populists on the left). If this onslaught succeeds in lowering Obama's poll numbers sufficiently, the general media may then pronounce Obama a failure, and that could put at risk most everything else that this new president is trying to do.

Paul Krugman has been a trenchant critic of the unexamined love for unbridled capitalism exhibited by the Bush Administration. But whether anyone likes it or not, we still have a capitalist economy, and its abuses have put at risk our collective economic future. Until the immediate effects of those abuses are flushed out of the system, the present toxicity of our national politics offers no prudent context for considering a more fundamental restructuring of the system. Populists picketing financial traders' mansions, gyrating congressmen predicting economic armageddon, and even fervent columnists with cosmic wisdom are not necessarily the best sources of guidance for either that restructuring or the hydraulics of the flushing that's necessary. There's a cooler cat in the White House, and we should listen to and not just lecture him.

Why the media keep getting it wrong about Obama...

Comment on The Field, 3/21-/09:

On Politico today there was a good example of how the media systematically "misunderestimate" Barack Obama: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/20254.html This article piles on the supposed evidence of how President Obama is allegedly overexposed, focusing on the venues of his appearances, his "branding" or his style -- while entirely missing the cumulative content of what he is communicating. One consultant was quoted as being skeptical about Obama "betting the success of his policies so heavily on the strength of his personality," as if the President was merely engaged in a series of personal performances. Just as they did throughout 2008 during the campaign, when the political press corps and their media-consultant talking heads continually criticized Obama for supposedly too-theatrical mass rallies and repetitive, boring town-hall meetings, they are paying far too much attention to the external aspects of his appearances and virtually no attention to what he is actually saying. The public doesn't merely see a presidential candidate or a president, it also listens to what's being said. On the Jay Leno show last night, Obama gave affable, concise, easily understandable but quite substantive answers to Leno's surprisingly numerous questions about the financial and economic problems facing the country. This was 20 minutes of pure, clear content, unfiltered by the disputatious egos and tendentious attitudes of White House pool reporters and political pundits, and it reached 15 million households. It was brilliant political television. We are dealing with an entirely new kind of president, for a new, far more serious time in our nation's life. The people get it. The media mavens don't.

Hillary Clinton's approach to human rights in China

When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton didn't precede or follow her recent visit in Beijing by lambasting the Chinese government for their human rights violations, she was harshly criticized by some American human rights advocates, both progressive and conservative. They overlooked her candid explanation that there were ways of assisting rights and democracy apart from a visiting dignitary denouncing the offending government. Indeed, a few days later, the State Department's annual report on human rights was sharply critical of China, which reacted by bitterly denouncing the U.S. Nevertheless the web site of one rights advocacy group focused on China harshly criticized Mrs. Clinton on its web site: “She chose what makes us animal over what makes us human. What good can come of filling our bellies at the expense of starving our spirit? Where does history tell us that our fortunes will improve by acquiescing to tyranny?” Mrs. Clinton hardly acquiesced to tyranny. This was a hyperbolic statement that probably says more about the ideological frame or emotional reaction of who it was coming from (and it wasn't that smart politically, as a way to persuade the Administration to be more vigilant about human rights).

Since the Tibet crackdown, few if any observers of China have been under any illusions about the authoritarian, repressive character of its government. A routine verbal swipe by Hillary Clinton would have done precisely nothing to make Beijing's rulers think twice about their contempt for the political rights of those they govern. But the world is in the middle of several overlapping crises: a slow-motion but still-unfolding financial panic, a serious nose-dive in production and employment in many nations, the possibly imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran (as well as the possible use of military force by Israel to forestall it), and turmoil in Pakistan. The Chinese can play a substantial, favorable role in global diplomacy on all of these four problems -- it would be in their interest. And, yes, we need them to buy plenty of Treasury securities so that our domestic, recession-fighting stimulus can be financed. These are all very serious matters. In the long term, there is nothing inconsistent with subdued official U.S. rhetoric about human rights at various moments and quietly increased U.S. assistance to democratic and rights activists around the world who are the ones whose action will really determine whether rights and democracy eventually come to countries like China. Hillary couldn't have liberated China on her first trip there, and she won't be the one who does it anyway.

The President's plan is not a "gamble"...

The British writer Godfrey Hodgson recently wrote on openDemocracy.net that there was a "reality gap" between President Obama's plans to resolve America's economic crisis and the resistance he faces, implying that the president's "rhetorical tools" might not be up to the task and that the "political obstacles" are ferocious (http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/barack-obamas-reality-gap). Another way of putting this, to use a British reference, is that Hodgson sees congressional foxes in the way of a presidential hedgehog. The ancient Greek reference -- "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing" (revived for modern consideration by Sir Isaiah Berlin) -- is apt. The one big thing that Obama knows is that the American public has decisively rejected not only the specific policies of the previous failed Republican administration, but also Washington's culture of special interests and obstruction of the national interest, which have immobilized the political system for most of the last two generations. By trying to obstruct Obama's proposals, his Republican opponents are merely re-enacting the despised failed narrative. So the president has enormous political wind in his sails, which is predicated on far more than his "rhetorical tools" or the public's yearning that we get through the present economic crisis with the American way of life intact. Obama's proposals are not, as the pundits are now wrongly calling them, a big political gamble, because he realizes that unless his proposals are seen by the people as proportionate to their manifold discontent, their support will quickly wane. He is not gambling on a political opportunity. He is embracing a political necessity. The stakes are no higher for him than they are for his country. The people recognize that the president understands their demand for bold action. That is the reason that he has their respect and, most probably, their patience.

The conservative obsession with the size of government

The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder remarked about President Obama's speech last night before a joint session of Congress that it read "as a President justifying his plans to expand government." In other words, a speech about the nation's economic crisis was not really about that, it was about some kind of liberal agenda to expand government. Only an ideologically blinkered conservative would have that interpretation, because only conservatives are existentially obsessed with the size of government. They have that obsession because they have an absolutist definition of individual freedom as always engaged in a zero-sum game with government, whether or not that government is based on the consent of the people. Equally hostile to the freely elected government in Washington or authoritarian-minded rulers in Iran or Russia, American conservatives are essentially anti-democratic. So they reject any innovative usage of government even in their very own democracy. And that's why they don't comprehend Obama. He's beyond a zero-sum view of freedom-or-government, because he realizes that if the people he democratically represents want him to exercise vigorous public leadership to solve public problems, he had better do that, or else he'll simply be using his paycheck to do his own bloviating -- which is the modern Republican equivalent of governing. Leading America in 2009 is not about parsing the size of government. It's about saving the economic system that created the recent boom in the first place -- something that Republicans, amazingly, don't seem to have any ideas about -- re-establishing a system of justice based on the rule of law rather than the whim of a president, and restoring a proper humility to the use of American power elsewhere in the world, so that national security is not reliant solely on military force. Republicans have no ideas about how to do those things, either. They are flat on their political backs. And we know who is putting fresh vitality back into national leadership. It ain't Bobby Jindal.

In defense of Cass Sunstein

Cass Sunstein, a lawyer and former professor at The University of Chicago Law School, has been appointed by his friend Barack Obama to be the new director of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a heretofore obscure job that Sunstein, one of the nation's leading public intellectuals, will no doubt make into a think tank influencing the full regulatory sweep of the Obama Administration. In a prolific career, Sunstein has ranged far beyond the law, writing books on FDR's fostering of new economic rights, the influence digital technology is having on democracy, and the roots of radical extremism. At the American Political Science Association annual meeting in Chicago in 2007, I heard Sunstein give a brilliant talk on the dynamics of group polarization (the kind of thing sociologists would study) and its role in creating terrorists. Sunstein's mind is supple and his writing is very accessible, two traits that the new president no doubt finds appealing.

On Hullabaloo yesterday (one of the major political blogs on the left, http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/), digby tore into Sunstein after confessing that she knew little about his work. Mischaracterizing it based on comments from other bloggers, she punished him for, among other things, suggesting that regulatory control should shift to the extent possible from coercive measures to incentives, and claimed that this meant it might as well be coming from the usual free market-worshipping conservative playbook. So much for trying to ascertain where a writer or thinker is actually situated along a spectrum of views from left to right (to the extent that that spectrum is still descriptively useful). For digby, if Sunstein is willing to think about modifying traditional regulatory schemes in order to coax markets toward outcomes consistent with national policy, rather than simply order them to comply, it means he's a right-winger in disguise. Apparently she's not willing to let Obama's people explore any fresh policy alternatives if they are not branded and vetted as issuing from the playbook on the other side of the ideological spectrum, which is presumably the one that worships command economies and state dictation of commercial life.

For another view of Cass Sunstein, it's useful to consider his ideas about political extremism in the context of the search -- in which Western foreign affairs ministries and law enforcement agencies are engaged -- for new long-term policies that might help curb terrorism, inasmuch as existing policies, on which enormous sums have been spent in recent years and which have required vast deployment of military forces, don't seem to have discouraged terrorist networks from replenishing their ranks. Sunstein has written a bracing book ("Going to Extremes") on one dimension of the subject: how radical extremism is incubated. Bringing behavioral psychology and political sociology to his analysis, Sunstein offers crucial support to the fundamental progressive understanding that radical groups hijack legitimate political grievances and that unless those who have those grievances see that extreme violence is likely to hurt and not help their causes, and that there are alternative ways to fight for their rights, there will continue to be a market for that violence. Clearly, Sunstein is a thinker so much more adept than most of the so-called conservative intellectuals that his appointment signifies that Obama wants not only to govern differently, he wants to extinguish the hold of the conservative paradigm on the political class.

Admittedly, Sunstein is not a predictable, programmatically minded social democrat, so if you deplore those who believe that effective government need not be "bigger government" -- which is to say, if you agree with conservatives that the debate about government should be about its size rather than its efficacy -- you won't be able to see how useful Sunstein's work is, in the struggle to rebuild a national consensus about the importance of public action, public resources, public regulation and public well-being. No new president, merely by being elected, can suddenly announce a new political order that everyone will happily embrace. Part of creating a new order involves changing the way people think. And that requires dismantling the default beliefs of conservatives, which have become the default beliefs of the political class. Conservatives have been "drugging the public mind" (a great phrase of Lincoln's, about Southern slave-holders' defense of states' rights) for two generations now. Sunstein has been a great ally in undermining the premises of their ideas.

It's not time "to scream bloody murder"...

Many vocal progressive bloggers seem to believe that Barack Obama is revealing himself -- by his appointments and his willingness to evaluate entitlement programs -- to be a closet conservative. One commenter on a major blog today insisted that "it's time to scream bloody murder" about Obama. The tendency of progressives to do this -- indeed, the habit of doing it, so well-developed (and well-motivated) during the Bush years -- is self-marginalizing when it comes to influencing the thinking of independent and not especially partisan voters whose support gave Obama such a decisive, mandate-creating majority last November. Obama obviously intends to reinforce and expand that mandate, and he's succeeding in doing so. Government is not merely a policymaking picnic, followed by spending programs. A president can't get change out of a democracy without developing and sustaining reliable popular support that will help him or her command the heights of governing, so that the elaborate, creaky, balky functioning of government -- legislative as well as executive -- can be pushed decisively to produce change. And again, that's obviously Obama's strategy. "Screaming bloody murder" at Obama will not only be regarded as irrelevant by anyone who does not already want to hyperventilate, it will lessen and not amplify the screamers' influence on actual events. Screaming at politicians may make the screamers feel better, but it will accomplish absolutely nothing. If you want to influence Obama, ignore him -- and persuade the kind of people who voted for him that he hasn't yet embraced the kind of change they voted for.

Claims of Obama's abandonment of his core beliefs are premature...

Today in his nationally syndicated column, E.J. Dionne claimed that Barack Obama is avoiding ideological differences and went on to claim that "ideological differences in the United States are rather small." Both of these claims are nonsense. Most Democrats in Congress as well as in the country have disagreed radically during the Bush years with most Republicans about the war in Iraq (Democrats believing that wars should not be used to rearrange other parts of the world politically); climate change (it's real, and not, as many Republicans insist, a myth); regulation of markets (on which Democrats have lately been proved right); and civil liberties (if they're sacrificed for security, we will cease to be the nation we thought we were). These are matters of profound ideological difference, and Democrats' beliefs imply one common belief: In a democracy, the instrument of the people's will is government, and it should be used to prevent the theft of our prosperity in the name of prosperity, and of our liberties in the name of liberty. There is no doubt that on all these fundamental questions, Barack Obama is an unambiguous Democrat. He is not and has never been a Republican, overt or covert. It remains to be seen if his decision to rise above emphasizing partisan differences at the time of his inauguration indicates that he is trying to rise above what have been his clear ideological beliefs. But we don't know that yet, and we have no evidence in his record or his life to suggest that he is only ephemerally attached to his ideas and beliefs. (Obama's recent disparaging of "ideology" is a clear reference to the kind of rigid ideology espoused by so many who served in the Bush Administration. The way he uses the word doesn't imply that he doesn't have core beliefs or ideas.) No one can read his account of how he felt about protecting the children of the projects on the South Side of Chicago, whose parents he successfully organized in order to force the city to free their buildings of asbestos, and really believe that he is a detached political calculator who does not feel deeply about the people who he is now going to lead as president. That kind of feeling is what makes a Democrat a Democrat. We're a long way yet from having to "go postal" about Barack Obama, as one prominent Democratic blogger -- digby on Hullabaloo -- suggests might be imminent, unless he stops showing so much solicitude for the views of Republicans. As his soaring approval rating shows, it is politically astute beyond the skill of any recent new president for him to be willing to listen to his opponents' views before undertaking action on many fronts that is sure to upset them.

The Kaine mutiny (of Virginia moderates)...

Based on a comment on the blog, The Field, 1/8/09:

Barack Obama has appointed Virginia Governor Tim Kaine to be the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee. This wouldn't have happened if former Virginia governor Mark Warner and then Governor Kaine hadn't turned the state from red to blue in recent years (preparing the way for Obama's capturing its electoral votes in '08). This was one of those things that seemed impossible at the outset -- and then inevitable once it was done, given the sudden discovery of demographic change in northern Virginia. But social statistics don't turn themselves into votes, without a political strategy to win those votes.

The strategy was deceptively simple: the Democratic aspirant for governor would stipulate the importance of good social values and campaign doggedly in socially conservative areas of the state, embracing and getting happy with everyone who'd turn out for a rally. Southwest Virginians couldn't believe the amount of time that Warner and Kaine spent down there. Each of them won just enough of that formerly hard-right base to require the Republicans to hold every last northern Virginia moderate suburban taxpayer.

Then the Democratic candidate would campaign heatedly in northern Virginia, emphasizing his pragmatic invest-in-education and invest-in-roads programs. This was catnip to moderate Republican businesspeople and distressed soccer moms who saw the grip on the state capitol held by anti-tax, anti-anything conservatives, who'd let the suburbs' traffic dissolve into gridlock and insufficient school budgets create visible angst at the local level. It didn't hurt that Tim Kaine was married to the daughter of one of Virginia's most beloved Republican governors. Caricatured by the right as a smiling socialist-in-disguise (heard that one before?), Kaine sailed right by those tactics and pulverized the right with pragmatism.

Now if you know Tim Kaine, you know that he comes equipped with a passionate social justice commitment, deepened by his time working with Jesuit missionaries in Honduras (and if you want deep history about that, see the terrific movie, "The Mission", with Jeremy Irons and Robert de Niro). So this improbable, cherubic-faced, balding, eyebrow-cocking nerdy guy who wants to remake the world followed in the footsteps of his telegenic precedessor Mark Warner, and completed the destruction of the time-tested electoral model for eternal control of Virginia by conservative Republicans. All that Barack Obama had to do in Virginia in '08 was paint by the same numbers.

The Virginia legislature still has a lot of John McCain types from Newport News, and Sarah Palin-loving types from down in Southside. But their comfy political tyranny in Virginia is history. No one should wonder why Barack Obama thinks a lot of Tim Kaine.

Blagojevich, Burris, the U.S. Senate, and Corruption

Those who believe that the U.S. Senate doesn't have the authority to refuse to seat Roland Burris, the former Illinois state official who was appointed to the seat by Gov. Rod Blagojevich, or who believe that it's embarrassing to refuse to seat a nice man who would be the only African-American Senator, are ignoring two crucial realities.

First, a seat in the United States Senate is not the property of any governor who has the authority to appoint a person to fill a vacancy, and any person so appointed has no "right" to occupy that seat on such authority. The seat belongs to the people. This is a political process, and as the Supreme Court has said on many occasions, the Congress needs to be given ample leverage as a body representing the people and as a separate branch of government to conduct its affairs, unless some egregious violation of rights is being committed.

Moreover, the Senate is entitled to act reasonably topreserve its integrity as an institution. The governor who made this appointment was only a few weeks ago arrested by the FBI because a federal prosecutor believed he had sufficient evidence to indict him for making such an appointment in exchange for campaign donations or other favors, and the timing of the arrest was dictated by the prosecutor's fear that the governor could imminently make a Senate appointment after having solicited such donations or favors. The Illinois political process has not had sufficient time to impeach the governor and remove him from office, but that is predicted to occur in a few weeks. Defiantly, the disgraced governor has gone ahead and made an appointment. It is impossible to know whether or not Blagojevich obtained any consideration from Burris for appointing him, but if the Illinois attorney general and secretary of state don't trust this appointment, why should the U.S. Senate? The Senate has every right to defend the integrity of its membership from any appointment made by this governor.

Second, no federal office should be occupied by someone appointed by an executive who is accused by a federal authority of extorting bribes from prospective occupants of the office. If our political leaders cannot prevent such an executive from using this kind of appointment for his own purposes, forget about discouraging corruption in our national political affairs. There is something much larger at stake here: the public's confidence in our democratic institutions. They will not believe that our politics is free from the suspicion or the fact of corruption unless and until it is.

Roland Burris is being used by Rod Blagojevich to enable him to cling to some appearance of political authority and effectiveness, in the face of impending impeachment. The Senate is not obligated to follow suit. This farce must end, without Blagojevich's appointee being accepted. If that is not the outcome, the public should assume that it will take much longer for our politics to undergo fundamental change.

Redefining the political narrative...

Comment on the blog Hullabaloo, 1/4/09

Unless President Obama or the activists, writers and political leaders who support him succeed in redefining the narrative of contemporary political history early in his presidency, any programmatic gains are likely to be short-lived. Bill Clinton's biggest failure as president was deliberately to avoid trying to refute Ronald Reagan's inaugural nostrum that "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Clinton bragged about outdoing Republicans in trying to make government smaller while making it more effective. He seemed happy to flail about in the ideological strait-jacket with which Reagan had fitted all Democrats: Government was an evil to be minimized -- it was a kind of theft, of money earned by good people (mostly white) but taken by government and given to bad people (mostly not white). This was the toxic brew that helped Reagan -- famous for emblematically attacking one particular black "welfare mother" -- to attract working-class Democrats. Given the flaccid, exhausted state of the intellectual right now, and the freaky guns-and-oil, states-rights hollering of the Palin faction (the only part of the GOP now with any energy, albeit negative), the time is perfect for a new framing narrative.

That narrative has to restore the idea that the people themselves, on whose power the Constitution is based from its very first line ("We the People"), should demand that government actually do what the Constitution says it must do -- "promote the general welfare" -- and if that means reinventing the health care system, regulating polluters as harshly as they poison the environment, and punishing Wall Street titans who use public bail-out money for personal bonuses, then such policies shouldn't merely be defined as pragmatic given the present crisis, they should be explicitly and repeatedly justified as supported by the people in having elected a leader from the other party and also as normal, positive uses of public power. That Obama is trying to transcend partisan rancor actually helps the work of constructing this narrative, since no enduring historical narrative can survive the inevitable vicissitudes of elections every two years unless it transcends party fist-fights on the Sunday talk shows. Let Obama trumpet a new era of tolerance, unity, and a kind of domestic patriotism tied to regenerating our economy and reconstituting our society. The greatest presidents were those who used government vigorously to fight back crises and build national strength by what were considered unprecedented means (Lincoln was the first president to institute an income tax, albeit temporary, and the first to have the federal government invest in universities). National majorities don't rally around minimalism in the face of huge challenges, quite the opposite.

Don't underestimate Obama's ability to summon this kind of spirit and elicit a sense of enthusiasm for a new bow wave of reform. But it won't be sustainable unless there is a new narrative. That narrative should certainly explain why the country has been driven into a ditch, and the predicate of that is simple: If we elect presidents who spend almost 30 years abusing the idea of government, and they appoint incompetent or corrupt people to run the government, we will get wretched government. Yet this shouldn't be a narrative in narrow partisan terms, but rather a narrative that subsumes progressive goals in a new definition of what it means to love and work for our country and of what we should expect our government to do.