An Obama Twopher

Two notes about our President.  One, go and read the shrewd profile by Todd Purdum.    The Browser, endorsing Purdum, says "Nobody loves him; nobody fears him"--i.e., the President, not the profiler.  I think that is spot on and I wonder if the blurber understood that he was tracking a great predecessor:

Nasce da questo una disputa: s’elli è meglio essere amato che temuto, o e converso. Respondesi, che si vorrebbe essere l’uno e l’altro; ma, perché elli è difficile accozzarli insieme, è molto piú sicuro essere temuto che amato, quando si abbia a mancare dell’uno de’ dua.

And here comes in the question whether it is better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved. It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both; but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.

Machiavelli, of course, The Prince, Il Principe, Ch XVII, link, link.  So, we have a null set.

And two--I was idling through a back copy of Time Magazine the other day when I happened on the profile of another world luminary who put me in mind of our President.  The comparison is not exact, but what if I told you he is instinctively civil, well-intentioned by his own lights, seemingly eager to make the world a better place, yet emotionally paralytic.  Would you think our President?  Or would you think this guy?

Is Barack Obama Sane?

No, not rhetorical.  Here's British political theorist John Gray:

It’s hard to know what is going to happen now in US politics. What is significant about Obama, whatever his failures, is his palpable sanity. He is an immensely sane leader. 

Well now, that one ought to hold us for a while, shouldn't it?   Let's skip the all-night adolescent bull session and assume that we do have some working notion of what it means to be "sane:"  a modest reflectiveness, an awareness that facts are stubborn things, a recognition (however reluctant) that the voices inside your head are not God talking but just voices inside your head.  The Barack of, say Dreams of My Father (unless you want to argue that it is Bill Ayers who is really sane).  The Barack of the Nobel Prize acceptance, the Cairo speech--indeed, the Barack of perhaps a dozen speeches over the course of a not-very-long career.  I won't go do far as to say he is Lincoln (he is not) but aside from Lincoln, how many political leaders--ever--can deliver even one speech that seems focused, clear-eyed, at home in the world?

So what shall we make of the other Obama, the one who has left his most fervent supporters so chastened and disabused--the Obama of targeted assassinations, the Obama who stands in slack-jawed admiration of the Wall Street Money Trust, the  Obama who lets himself be the plaything of Mitch McConnell and Eric Cantor?    I'd say there's a problem here: I count myself as a disappointed supporter, if never exactly "fervent."  Disappointed, yes, but does the charge sheet support a finding of "insane?"   I shouldn't think so.  Wretchedly misguided some times, sure.  Wrongheaded, check.  Naive, oboyoboy.    But "wrongheaded=insane"--apoplectic as I may get some days, I'd say that's setting the bar a bit high.

And yet, and yet.   There is that gnawing annoyance about targeted assassinations, the comfortable (it seems) assurance that one's own life-and-death judgment is reliable, that one can, indeed, be the judge of one's own case.  Arrogance at least.  Blind megalomania?  Perhaps there is a subtle boundary,

But speaking of arrogance, perhaps we can broaden the inquiry.  Recall we are dealing here with a man who, five years ago, was a not-yet-one-term senator, whose most noteworthy prior achievement was to edit the Harvard Law Review.  We thought it was a bit of a stretch to think he might become President; what did he think?  What kind of self-assurance--how far outside the bounds of ordinary realism--to think you can scale that mountain from this tiny molehill.  I can't think of another example of ambitious overstretch in the history of American politics.  Well, with perhaps one exception: again, Abraham Lincoln.  And to confuse oneself with Abraham Lincoln--now, that does come close to insane.

Optional extra credit: Gray continues: 

And it’s an odd question to ask, but I wonder if sanity is a political advantage or disadvantage in these circumstances in America?

 This odd question is left as an exercise to the reader.   

 

Well, I Guess if you need a Real Man...

[Rewrite of an earlier post, in which I blamed it on the Washington Examiner; apologies for my error but perhaps they don't mind. Anyway--]

Here's The Washington Times on the execution: "Obama fulfills Bush goal." Couple it with an editorial headed "No Class: Obama snubs Bush, praises himself."

I should have thought Obama showed remarkable compassion in forbearing to call attention to one of the most colossal intelligence cockups in modern history. And for not reminding the voters of this

Today's Must-Read: Mead on Falling Between Two Stools

Today's must-read is Walter Russell Mead on what's wrong with Obama: not his impulse to compromise but his affinity for compromises that don't work, that tic off the base while enraging the opposition.  A more clever and imaginative--that is, probably, more experienced--compromiser would find ways of making each side feel surprised at how well they have done.  Go read the whole thing.

Mead mentions one point I've highlighted before: the discontinuity between Obama in reality and  Obama in expectation.  But Mead picks up on another point I hadn't noticed: the kid is looking punchy.  Somebody needs to take him back to his corner, pour a bottle of water over his head, and tell him that it ain't over, that he can really do it.  Wrapping both points together, Mead says:

The President looks like a man who is ridden by events; at just the moment when the nation craves a strong leader, the President looks weak, dodgy, uncertain.  The contrast with the inflated hopes that an untested and inexperienced Senator Obama did so much to build up is crippling.  Obama has fallen so far precisely because he and his supporters so hugely oversold him.

I think I've said before that the job of a President  is to make his predecessor look good. I won't say that Obama has made W look good yet.  But when it comes to deal-making politics, squaring the circle, we all know who was good at that--Bill Clinton.  Mead says: , "the moment the President seems to be envying Clinton’s talents and attempting to emulate rather than scorn them.  From anti-Clinton to aspiring Clinton is a long fall and it can’t be much fun."   

Birthers Everywhere

Say did you hear the one about the guy who crossed a crocodile with an abalone?  Tell you in a min.

Meanwhile, for no good or even barely adequate reason, I've been meditating on birth narratives as in, like, you know, maybe that the President was born in Kenya.  As so often I suppose I'm behind the curve here, but it occurs to me to marvel at how common--and persistent--are the stories of our remarkable beginnings.  Athena emerging the brow of Zeus, for example.  Or Aphrodite rising from the waves (on Cyprus, the tour guides will point out the exact spot; Aphrodite seems to have moved on).  Moses in the Bullrushes.  Jesus in a manger, but under a star. 

Sometimes, these stories meet with rude skepticism.  Shakespeare's Owen Glendower says of his birth "The heavens were all on fire; the earth did tremble."   Hotspur will have none of it:

O, then the earth shook to see the heavens on fire,

And not in fear of your nativity.

Diseas'd nature oftentimes breaks forth

In strange eruptions; oft the teeming earth

Is with a kind of colic pinched and vexed

By the imprisoning of unruly wind

Within her womb, which, for enlargement striving,

Shakes the old beldam earth and topples down

Steeples and moss-grown towers. At your birth

Our grandam earth, having this distemperature,

In passion shook.

 ...but one doubts that the speaker much moved by Hotspur's contempt.   In this field as others, deconstruction by evidence is rarely a successful strategy.   But there is another possibility here, hitherto unexplored: if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.  I therefore propose that Obama was indeed born in Kenya--in a manger under a star.  And the earth did shake when he was born.

Oh, as to the guy who crossed the crocodile with the abalone: he wanted an abbadile but all he got was a crockabaloney. 

The Real Bill Ayers Scandal

Among so many other Questions that Will Not Die (Where is the real birth certificate?  Where is Judge Crater?  Who is  buried in Grant's Tomb?)--I note that another: the notion that aging ex-terrorist Bill Ayers ghosted Barack Obama's autobiography.  But has anyone ever considered the possibility that it is just the other way round--that it is Obama who ghostwrites for Ayers?  Tactically, which is more damning--that the poster child of spoiled-rich rebellion is actually the fountainhead of perhaps the only readable presidential biography ever written; or that our Kenyan-born fantasy President is really a tiresome and contentious old  whiner?

Aside to Underbelly acolytes: no, no relation.  UB's doppelganger spells his name without an s.

History Lesson

Wishing to make a point about the alleged freedom of students to shout down speakers on campus, I went to Google Images and typed in "nazi brownshirts shouting down speakers."   I  got 2,240 images.  Adding the word "-Obama," I got 568.  Translated: roughly 75 percent of these images are trying to tell you that our President is a Nazi.  Next up: how Obama made himself Chancellor of  Germany in 1933.

Footnote: add "-Pelosi" and you are down to 529.

The Cumbaya Curse

I've tried to say this before, but probably not so well:

Obama's lack of artifice can be admirable, but it is almost never politic. For a while he even wouldn't wear that kitschy American flag lapel pin, 95 cents worth of patriotism. But blarney is as essential to politics as the evanescent lie is to seduction. I am referring now to convincing strangers that you understand their concerns, feel their pain, so that in the end you actually do. A good politician never speaks to a crowd. It is always a collection of friends. Obama speaks mostly to crowds. His hallmark has been his disconnect, a perplexing standoffishness that has hurt him politically.

So Richard Cohen, link.

Andrew Sullivan says Obama is Smarter Than You Think He Is

On repeal of DADT:

Like 2009's removal of the HIV ban, which was as painstakingly slow but thereby much more entrenched, this process took time. Without the Pentagon study, it wouldn't have passed. Without Obama keeping Lieberman inside the tent, it wouldn't have passed. Without the critical relationship between Bob Gates and Obama, it wouldn't have passed. It worked our last nerve; we faced at one point a true nightmare of nothing ... for years. And then we pulled behind this president, making it his victory and the country's victory, as well as ours.

Obama Explained

Bruce says:

He brought the Harvard Law Review to a knife fight.

Obama and the Pay Freeze: He Can Get Away With It

I feel no particular reason to cheer about the prospect of a federal employee pay freeze: I'm impressed by Jonathan Zasloff's argumente that it is not the park ranger's fault that Wall Street decided to gamble with the global financial system and lost.  I share Mark Kleiman's view that It’s lousy negotiating strategy, because it gives the right wing something it wants without getting anything back  But here's a hard truth: as far as Federal staffing goes, he can get away with it.  He can get away with it because we are in a nasty economy with near 10  percent unemployment and under constraints so bleak, just about any public job looks pretty good.  The critics say that a lot of these jobs come with lousy pay  They do, but they come with pay, and I'm remembering Joel who likes to talk about the Federal service in the 30s, and what good tax auditors we had because the nation was awash in good accountants and lawyers for whom this tight little boltholt looked like a fine place to ride out the storm.

The End of the Obama Presidency

I'm one who persist in believing that Obama can overcome rookie errors, lackluster leadership, paralytic centrism, even Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright to cruise to reelection in 2012 (and on balance a good thing, too).  But how the hell he expects to survive don't-touch-my-junk is beyond me.  Another week of this and he won't even put a shadow on a body scanner.

Bromwhich on Obama: Teaser, with an Afterthought

Here's the most telling single in David Bromwich's comprehensive takedown of our President:

Obama wants credit for the highest intentions even when conceding that he lacks the will to fulfill them.

 Link.  Oooh, that's gotta hurt.  But in the context of the Bromwich essay, it calls attention to an odd or unexpected truth about Obama: considering his resume, he is surprisingly lacking in street wisdom.  Read about his background (at least hastily) and you'd think you were looking at a kind who knew how to take those khaki neck-wallets off tourists in the souq.  Nothing of the sort: this is a kid whose forebears wanted the very best for him, and who lived a good deal of his life among people who wanted desperately for him to succeed.  Here's a guy who would have been so much better off with a round of Prince and the pauper, or hanging out for a bit at Mistress Quickly's tavern in cheapside.  He's full of the best intentions and we do remember, yes, what the road to hell is paved with?

David Brooks: For a Confiscatory Estate Tax?

One of Underbelly's crack team of policy advisers commends me to an offering from the sometimes-insightful David Brooks:

Obama will need to respond to the nation’s fear of decline. The current sour mood is not just caused by high unemployment. It emerges from the fear that America’s best days are behind it. The public’s real anxiety is about values, not economics: the gnawing sense that Americans have become debt-addicted and self-indulgent; the sense that government undermines individual responsibility; the observation that people who work hard get shafted while people who play influence games get the gravy. Obama will have to propose policies that re-establish the link between effort and reward.

Let's be fair:L this is not as wooly as some Brooks columns.  I'd agree there is a malaise problem, and I also wish that Obama would do more to try to confront it.  But  I really don't think it is a matter of "policies" as it is of leadership--he's turning out to be terrible at conveying his aspirations and his intentions.  This may sound like "mere salesmanship"--but /a lot/ of the presidency is salesmanship (and didn't your father tell you that every job is a sales job?).
  
Anyway, I cannot for the life of me imagine what the hell Brooks means by saying that "Obama will have to propose policies that re-establish the link between effort and reward."   When was the link dis-established, and by whom? Is he saying that Obama broke it?   Bush?  Jimmy Carter?     Andrew Jackson?

The only thing I can think that Obama has done so far to break a nexus between risk and reward is to make it microscopically more difficult for banks to predate upon us.   Brooks may lament that change but I am not sure how he would even track it.  Beyond that, the most meaningful alteration that I can remember in the risk-reward tradeoff is    the Bush efforts to destroy the estate and gift tax, creating a new generation of trust fund babies who really do not give a rt's ass whether school keeps or not.

I'm Tired of Birthers and Antibirthers

Know what I'm sick and tired of?  I'm tired of birthers--folks who swear that Obama wasn't born in the United States, or that Hawaii is not a state, or whatever. But I'm getting just as tired of people who roll their eyes and sputter and tell me in soporific detail just why the birthers are wrong.  They are almost always right on almost every point.   And entirely miss the point, and that is what makes me tired.

Let's stipulate for starters that the birthers are mostly deeply confused people who believe a whole range of silly and self-contradictory nonsense and who, not least, are splendid at spotting the little speck of granola in the other guy's teeth while missing the large intrusive crowbar through their brain.

Still, it's time that somebody said this: the birthers are telling us something real.  They're telling us that they feel fatally disconnected from our President: they don't recognize him; they don't understand him; as far as they're concerned he's from another planet--meanwhile, "born in Kenya" seems real enough.

Of course they've got a perfect right to feel as they--but you knew that.  What I'm trying to do is to get past patronizing dismissal and argue that they are also onto something important and right.  Specifically: they don't understand him because he hasn't made himself understandable. They are bewildered because he is bewildering.  I really can't remember a president in my lifetime, maybe ever, who has done a poorer job of conveying what it is what he is about and why he is doing it.

Don't misunderstand me here: of course Obama is"native born," and while we are at it, Hawaii is a state.  And in many ways, he has been a pretty good president: the health care bill might actually save us a bit of money, and some of the things in Dodd-Frank probably do more good than harm. And politics is the slow boring of hard boards. 

But I've said it before and I'll say it again: the job of a leader is to lead--to define issues, to mobilize coalitions, to scare the living crap out of opponents, above all to convey to friend and foe alike that you are in the cab pulling the throttle and dinging the bell.  It is what people, sometimes in a confused way, expect of a president, and they don't know what to do with one who is so strangely unwilling or unable to do that job.

Politics as a Blood Sport

The Economist tells you some stuff you pretty much know:

[A] funny thing is happening on the home front. Where the Muslim world sees just another president, Mr Obama is somehow becoming more exotic to Americans. In August a Pew survey found that nearly one in five, and a third of conservative Republicans, think that he is a Muslim himself. Only about a third of all Americans say he is a Christian and 43% say they do not know what religion he practises. Moreover, both the number who think he is a Muslim and the number who do not think he is a Christian have risen sharply since March 2009.  Mr Obama is in fact a Christian ...

And adds:

 and the reasons for the public doubt are perplexing.

If, by "perplexing," the editors mean that they cannot divine the reason, then I must object: the reasons are not perplexing; they are fairly straightforward, but no easier to deal with therefore.

The reason is this: for some segment of the electorate (exact quantity is open to debate), politics is not about "winning" in the conventional sense; it isn't even about "stealing" (though stealing is always fun).  It's about humiliating the enemy, making him look like an idiot, rubbing his face in the dirt, making him squeal like a pig. There's segment of the political arena--probably any arena of human conflict--that finds this activity of humiliation almost an end in itself.   It's the sensibility of the participant who would like to win dirty or clean but almost rather win dirty because it shows more contempt for the loser.  So also shenanigans like registering the homeless as green party candidates not so much because it will change any election results but precisely because it makes a mockery of the process.

You can see it at work in many places, but in politics particularly when yo see one team catch the other team off guard for a moment, hesitant, as if they feel they have something to apologize for.     "Obama is a Muslim" and its close kin "Obama isn't a citizen" are perfect for this sort of thing because they tap into a bit of unease among Obama defenders with the exotic background of their man.  No matter that many of the attackers have only the dimmest notion of what a "Muslim" is (or where Hawaii is, for that matter). They know it makes the defending team uncomfortable and that is where the fun is.

It's devilishly hard to know how to deal with this attack.  Treating it with the kind of austere disdain it so richly deserves is almost always  mistake: silence is read as an admission.   Meeting mockery with mockery can be helpful but the mockery had better be good.  Jon Stewart and Steve Colbert bring it off most of the time; Keith Obermann, rarely and Rachel Maddow, less and less (her fans will shout that she is smart and well informed; she is smart and well informed but that is almost entirely beside the point--in her attempts at humor, she mostly comes across as a tiresome scold).

Meeting ruffianism with ruffianism is dangerous because you never know in advance who is going to win a war.  Still it is interesting that the right tends to go easiest on the ones who they remember with a frisson of fear: Lyndon Johnson in particular; Jack Kennedy--more, ironically, after he was dead, when we finally came to know what a cad he really was.

At the end, the fact is that the "humiliation" impulse is hard-wired enough that we might as well think of it as part of mainstream culture.  In some circles, it even passes for "Christianity," although I must tread lightly here.  We've got millions of Christian-Americans, our fellow citizens, in this country. They're going to school with our kids. They're our neighbors. They're our friends. They're our co-workers. And, you know, when we start acting as if their religion is somehow offensive, what are we saying to them?  Why, even our President may be a--nah, bad example, forget it.

Here's a Quaint Complaint...

... about our President: he's not enough like Jimmy Carter.

Balz on the Mainstream Megaphone

Oh  jeezusmaryandjoseph do we have to go through this again.  Well, seeing that it is the Washington Post, I guess the answer is yes.  Yes, we have to go through this again.   That is: here's  Dan Balz in an actually rather interesting and helpful analysis of Obama as "the polarizing president."     Well, yes: Balz is surely right that Obama is far more "polarizing" than we or he suspected at the start, and Balz has  hoovered up some useful and instructive data to support the point.  For example, here's George C. Edwards III of Texas A& M University, noting that "the number of states that deviated significantly from the national vote was more than in any election in 60 years, including 14 that went for John McCain." '"Never before,'" per Edwards per Balz "''had many of these states voted so heavily against a victorious Democrat,' Edwards writes, citing the work of others."

And here's Gary Jacobson of the University of California at San Diego, noting (per Balz) "that Obama's coalition included one of the smallest shares of voters who identified with the opposing party on record. He won because of 'unusually high turnout among Democrats" and the fact that the Republican Party had shrunk during President George W. Bush's second term.'"

So far, fine. But then Balz tiptoes out onto the thin ice:

Views of Obama as a leftist, as an extremist, as a would-be socialist, as dishonest - all of which became commonplace among some "tea party" activists and other conservative opponents once he was in office - were implanted during the campaign against McCain.

"A large proportion of voters on the losing side in 2008 . . . had by election day come to regard Obama as the McCain-Palin campaign had portrayed him: as an untrustworthy leftist radical with a socialist agenda," Jacobson writes. "There was also an undertone of racial animosity."

 Yes, yes, yes.  But what occult presence still prevents Balz from pointing his finger at the giant toad in the tiny punchbowl, specifically, that Obama is not a lefty--??   You cannot understand this story--the weirdness and irony of it all--unless you understand how wildly inappropriate is the whole leftist paranoia thing.

Recall: I'm speaking not as a lefty here, and I'm speaking as one who is more than a little disappointed with our president.  But the idea that he's stumbled over into some left agenda is just ludicrous.  Item: Guantanamo is still open.  Item: the war continues--really, both wars.  Item, he's ducked immigration, he's caved on cape-and-trade, and he's wuzzing out on soak-the-rich taxation. Item, he's still in the lap of Goldman, Sachs. Item, his biggest legislative achievement, if it is an achievement, comes straight out of the playbook of Mitt Romney.  Item, he isn't willing to say anything that might hurt the feelings of a Republican.

That last, of course, points to the real failure of the Obama presidency--his ineffectiveness as a leader, his seeming inability to define the agenda, his allowing Republicans--and supposed "nonpartisans" like Dan Balz--to capture the narrative.

I'm sure Balz understands all this.  I think he's just hiding behind the laziness of supposed "objectivity."  But "objectivity" is  not the issue here:  with just a bit of effort here, Balz can perfectly well retain his cherished "objectivity" and still point out the glaring disconnect in the prevailing narrative.

Josh Marshall Surveys the Landscape...

...and comes up with a dead-on summary of the political turf:

Dems and Obama's poll numbers are so bad because ...
Republicans: Terrible policies and he's probably a Muslim.
Right Democrats: No CEOs in the administration. And why does he keep getting into the black thing?
Down-the-Line Obamaites: Economy's bad. Nothing he could do. Give it a rest.
Left Democrats: He wasn't liberal or tough enough and me and my eight friends are deeply disillusioned.
Politico: Chronic failure to win the morning.

I know where that leaves me: right up front harrumphing with Baron Hill, Heath Shuler  and the rest fresh-haircut, necktie-wearing Rotarians.  I'm not quite sure what I'm doing here: they certainly aren't nearly as interesting or (I suspect) fun as it would be to hang out with as the likes of Glenn Greenwald or Paul Krugman.  And strictly speaking, I'm not particularly exercised over "the black thing"--the fact that so many of his opponents on the right are raving loonies is really not his fault (though I do wish he could find better ways to defuse it).    And actually, while "No CEO" is tempting, I'd put it a little differently: what we seem to be experiencing is a gobsmacking failure of political leadership, at a time when we so desperately need it.  He's becoming the un-Roosevelt, the un-Reagan, veering desperately close to (may the tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth) the ghost of Jimmy Carter.

Rich on Obama

Frank Rich sets  forth the non-crazy (that would be me) critique of Obama, remarkably fair-minded in that, as he undertakes to explain, he doesn't really buy it:

To many, he is not and never really was a progressive, only a cautious pragmatist who pandered to primary voters in 2008 .... . Many see him as far too wedded to a naive and platonic ideal of bipartisanship that amounts to unilateral political disarmament when confronting an opposition party as nihilistic and cynical as the current GOP.  He lacks a fierceness in battle ... . 

--Frank Rich, "Why Has He Fallen Short?" New York Review of Books 10 (August 19, 2010)

Rich thereupon attempts to identify a rather different shortcoming: Obama's "elitism," in the sense that he figured a system that churned him to the top must be able to generate the best and the brightest.  Rich also sketches a case that the Rasputin of the piece is Larry Summers, the comforter of the comfortable and (if you credit Rich) the sharp-elbowed political infighter who can keep the noisome clangor of competing voices from penetrating the office.

Rich's account of Obama's elitism sounds like a shrewd call.  As to Summers, I don't suppose I (or you) know enough to judge, although it would be a good joke if we found unsuspected Richelieu qualities in a guy hitherto notorious for his legendary inability to tie his political shoelaces together.  In any event, you know who it is who works for the tsar.

Rich actually adds one more item to the catalog of conventional complaints outlined above.  I omitted it until now because it requires special attention.  Rich:

Obama is also faulted by disappointed fans for his surprisingly subpar political skills.  The master orator who left millions of Americans fired up and ready to go during election season has often come off as aloof once in office, and has proven a surprisingly prolix and lackluster salesman for his own policies.

 That's probably a pretty accurate account  of the conventional wisdom but I'm going to count myself as one who was not surprised.  I liked and like a lot of things about Obama, and I don't for a moment regret voting for him.  But the kumbaya campaign speeches made my skin crawl.  I recognized that they might be necessary to get him elected.  But for the long slog of office, I didn't see how they could do him anything but harm--building expectations he couldn't satisfy, seeming to make promises that he couldn't or wouldn't keep.  And they certainly showed none of the skill at the kind of rhetorical blood sports he was bound to need to sell is program.

I once called Obama an empty suit.  Except in a highly attenuated sense, this was wrong; he's certainly a person of substance, and he has more poise and staying power than I saw.    But reading Rich, I think I can hew to another earlier judgment of mine: I'm not that disappointed in him because I never really expected that much of him in the first place.