Running Against Hooverville–The Presidential Blame Game

February 26, 2010 by admin | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Bush Administration, Election 2012, George W. Bush, History, Obama administration, Politics, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 20 Comments 

In the immediate aftermath of the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, President John F. Kennedy stood before the nation accepting the total blame for what had happened. He referred to an old saying about victory having a thousand fathers, but defeat being an orphan, and identified himself as the responsible officer in the government. Even though the whole initiative had been first devised and planned by the Eisenhower administration.

JFK’s poll numbers moved dramatically—up. There is something refreshing—though sadly rare—about a political leader saying “My bad.”

In the 19th century, a British politician stood in Parliament and remarked that trying to get his particular point across was akin to flogging a dead horse to make it pull a load. We call this beating a dead horse today. And every time President Obama or a member of his administration plays the blame Bush card, he is beating that proverbial dead horse. It is also getting really old.

Everyone on Facebook has an information page and there is an entry labeled “relationship status.” Some mark “married” or “in a relationship,” others say “single.” Then there are those who put: “It’s complicated.” When it comes to Presidents and those who come before or after, it’s really complicated. Some chief executives have managed to rise above the propensity for personal paltriness—others, not so much.

And it goes way back.

Thomas Jefferson, who ran a particularly aggressive campaign against former-and-would-be-again-much-later friend, John Adams, in the 1800 race, continued the attack on his predecessor well into his own presidency. He regularly smeared Mr. Adams for maladministration of presidential powers, though apparently willing to benefit from things Adams had done that he had opposed at the time. The anti-military, anti-big government Jefferson, had no qualms about using navy Adams had built (opposed by TJ) to deal with the Barbary Pirates; nor did he hesitate to use broad executive powers in the whole matter of the Louisiana Purchase—the kind of action candidate Jefferson would have likely decried as tyrannical.

Democrat Andrew Jackson wouldn’t even pay a courtesy call on outgoing President John Quincy Adams. Mr. Adams then refused to attend his successor’s inauguration. Jackson spent significant time in office tearing down his predecessor—blaming Adams and the whole fierce campaign for his wife’s death after the election. That one was very complicated.

Speaking of Presidents and courtesy calls, Dwight Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie, sat famously in the car under the White House portico, snubbing the Trumans. But when it came to blaming his predecessor for the mess he inherited, he chose the path of just ignoring and dismissing Mr. Truman like the junior military officer he saw him to be.

Abraham Lincoln had great reasons and resonant issues to use to place blame for the country on the verge of disintegration he inherited in 1861 because his predecessor, James Buchanan, did virtually nothing to deal with the brewing national disaster. But Mr. Lincoln seemed to have a capacity to rise above cheap politics—dealings with his own Cabinet-made-of-would-be-rivals also demonstrated the 16th President’s ego tempering skills.

Of course, many times Presidents have succeeded men from the same party and, though they might have wanted to really make the guy before look bad, they realized that it was political suicide. Martin Van Buren could certainly have blamed the panic of 1837 on Andrew Jackson, who destroyed the National Bank, but party realities forbade it.

Warren Harding didn’t spend a lot of time or energy blaming Woodrow Wilson for the nation’s woes in the early 1920s. Ronald Reagan used Jimmy Carter as a punching bag for a short while, but quickly moved on. Even Richard Nixon didn’t waste time passing the buck back to LBJ. In fact, their relationship was remarkably good, considering their history.

Now, Franklin Roosevelt—well that’s another story. He used predecessor Herbert Hoover as his whipping boy for at least a decade—and one wonders if this example is the one that resonates with the current administration.

FDR ran a skillful campaign against Hoover in 1932, allied with the forces of economics and history in play at the time. Hoover was an unpopular president as a result of the onset of the Great Depression. Once hailed for his genius at organization and engineering, his name was even part of the vocabulary signifying good economy, as in the popular 1920 Valentine’s Day card:

“I’ll Hooverize on dinner,
On fuel and tires too,
But I’ll never learn to Hooverize
When it comes to loving you.”

By 1932, however, his star had fallen and shantytowns across America were dubbed, “Hoovervilles.” However, today’s prevalent narrative that Hoover was a do-nothing president and then the great activist Roosevelt rode to the White House on a white horse, is at best an apocryphal exaggeration—at worst, it’s a lie.

In fact, Mr. Roosevelt, famous smile and all, was simply an effective and cynical politician who knew how to practice demagoguery with the best of them. He was also a very petty man. One example is in the naming—better, renaming—of the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River. It had been named for Herbert Hoover in 1931 not just because he was the President at the time (there were already dams named for Calvin Coolidge and Theodore Roosevelt extant), but also because he had been a major driving force in the project since the early 1920s during his highly successful tenure as Secretary of Commerce. He, being an engineer by training and trade, even played a crucial role in how it would work and be constructed—effectuating something called the Hoover Compromise allowing the project to go forward at a critical juncture.

After his humiliating defeat by the Roosevelt juggernaut in November of 1932, Mr. Hoover stopped at the construction site of the dam and remarked for the press:

“It does give me extraordinary pleasure to see the great dream I have so long held taking form in actual reality of stone and cement. It is now ten years since I became chairman of the Colorado River Commission—This dam is the greatest engineering work of its character ever attempted by the hand of man—I hope to be present at its final completion as a bystander. Even so, I shall feel a special personal satisfaction.”

But by the time the project was completed in 1936, it had been renamed by the Roosevelt administration as the Boulder Dam and Hoover was never invited to be part of any festivities. Of course, by that time Mr. Roosevelt was running for reelection against Republican nominee Alf Landon of Kansas.

But FDR was really running against Hoover one more time.

The other day, during that good-for-nothing White House meeting on health care, there was a telling exchange between President Obama and Senator John McCain. He told McCain that the campaign was over. He meant their campaign.

The battle against all things George W. Bush, however, still rages. And most likely this will continue through the 2012 campaign. After all, if you can’t run on a record of accomplishment—find a dead horse to beat and hope the people are dumb enough not to notice the abuse and absurdity.

The big question is: Will George W. Bush be as durable a whipping boy as was Herbert Hoover—or better yet—is Barack Obama as arrogant, cynically petty, or politically cunning as was Franklin D. Roosevelt?

Follow The Money–It’s Going To China

February 19, 2010 by admin | Filed Under Asia, Barack Obama, China, Cold War, Economic issues, George W. Bush, History, International Affairs, Middle East, Money, National Security, Nixon Administration, Obama administration, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

The other day, President Barack Obama met with the Tibetan Dali Lama in the White House—doing so in the Map Room as opposed to the Oval Office in an apparent attempt to mute any “official” aura for the meeting. It was sort of like trying to kowtow to one audience while powwowing with another. Likely the nuance was lost on the government in Beijing. Of course, past presidents have received the Tibetan leader—a man who has become a symbol for freedom and a persistent reminder of the oppression of his people at the hands of the Chinese regime.

It was 38 years ago this week that President Richard Nixon played the historic China Card—a geopolitical masterstroke during the Cold War. It was all part of a strategic view of the world and effectuated from a position of strength. We were powerful; they were backward—technologically, culturally, and with obvious political deficiencies. That moment remains a high water mark in Nixon’s presidency—a moment in time that even the most determined critics concede positively to his legacy.

But what would Mr. Nixon think now?

These days, admittedly, the whole issue of U.S.-China relations is a sticky one for our current President. It is one of many examples of how different things are when you are governing as opposed to campaigning for office—although it is hard to tell which is which in Washington these days. Mario Cuomo famously talked years ago about politics being “poetry” and governing “prose.”

Dealing with potential adversaries—and even some friends—is always best when you do so from a position of strength. It’s true in military and national defense (“peace through strength”) and it’s true in economics, as well. The scriptures remind us, “The borrower is servant to the lender.” And when one party is deep in financial debt to another a certain measure of leverage is ceded to the lender.

How this dynamic will play out in the immediate future is anyone’s guess, but owing nearly $800 billion to the Chinese should raise a flag—a red one. And it should come as no surprise if and when those to whom we owe such copious amounts of money begin to squeeze us on the international stage.

President Obama has been making great pains to try to change our image before the world, one that he believes George W. Bush perpetuated and that has led to our virtual “blackball” by many nations. But in fact, what he really should be concerned about is not “blackball,” but rather “blackmail.” The Chinese dumped $45 billion of T-bills a couple of months ago—wave of the future? And why shouldn’t one nation operating out of its own interests use such leverage? We would.

In fact, we have.

In 1956, there were two hot spots with the potential of blowing up into World War III, a revolution in Hungary—and a crisis in the Middle East involving the Suez Canal. Seen now in hindsight against the backdrop of the Cold War and as the moment when the last vestiges of old world colonialism gave wave to complete bi-polar hegemony pitting the United States against the Soviets, the Suez Crisis was as much about the exercise of economic clout as it was a diplomatic-military affair.

Gamal Abdel Nassar had emerged as a leader in Egypt as part of a 1952 coup overthrowing King Farouk and by 1954 he was firmly in place as that nation’s maximum leader. He immediately undertook a complete transformation of his country with massive public works and the progressive nationalization of industry. He was enamored of the Soviet system and soon it became clear that his nation would be taking that side in the Cold War. One project near and dear to his heart was the building of the Aswan Dam, which America at first agreed to help fund. But when Nassar sold arms to Soviet satellite Czechoslovakia and then recognized the People’s Republic of China, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles withdrew our dam dollars.

In reaction to this, Nassar announced on July 26, 1956 a Nationalization Law freezing all the assets of the Suez Canal—in effect, a seizure of that vital passageway.

Opened in 1869, this 119-mile long man-made waterway connects the Mediterranean and Red Seas. Originally financed by the Egyptians and French, Britain became a major stakeholder and stockholder in 1875, and eventually the canal became part of the United Kingdom’s imperial portfolio in the region. Following World War II, and with the decline of the U.K.’s empire, the canal gradually became a diplomatic football—not to mention thorn. And the creation of the nation of Israel in 1948 caused tensions about the vital waterway to further increase.

In the aftermath of Nassar’s July 26 speech, Britain—led by Prime Minister Anthony Eden—and France, represented by Eden’s counterpart, Guy Mollet, began to plot how to ensure their access to the Suez Canal. Eventually, and in an alliance with Israel (a nation with the most to lose if the canal was closed to them), military action was planned and initiated.

Follow the money.

Meanwhile, the American President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, in the midst of a reelection bid, had already had a rough year in 1956—physically and politically. And shortly following election to a second term in the White House, he played some power politics of his own. Now, I should state here that I am not of the number in agreement with what he did in the Suez matter, anymore than I am about how we abandoned the freedom fighters in Budapest earlier that summer. I am simply using this story to describe a reality in all of life and politics—like it or not.

There is a golden rule in geo-politics: He who has the gold makes the rule.

Mr. Eisenhower did not want Britain, France, and Israel—all stated allies of the United States—creating a situation that might not play well with the Soviets and that had the potential to instigate a larger war. Here was the hero of Normandy putting the pressure on British Prime Minister Eden—a man who had worked closely with Ike while serving in Churchill’s War Cabinet.

“The borrower is servant to the lender.”

To apply pressure on Eden’s government to cease and desist, Eisenhower instructed U.S. Treasury Secretary, George M. Humphrey, to begin to sell off some of our government’s British bonds. Some of these bonds were holdovers from the U.K.’s World War II debt; others had been sold to us to help that nation’s economy rebound after the war. Eden’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, future P.M. Harold Macmillan, told him that the results would be devastating to the British economy.

Checkmate.

Anthony Eden was a broken man. He fled to a vacation-exile in Jamaica, spending time at Ian Fleming’s (of James Bond literary fame) estate there, but his health quickly deteriorated. He was taking amphetamines—had been for years under doctor’s orders after a botched gall bladder operation—and the drugs magnified his problems with insomnia and unraveling mental health. Soon, Mr. Macmillan took over at 10 Downing Street, but by then the Suez episode had hastened the sunset on the British Empire—and the Cold War morphed from a multi-national tag-team match into a virtual two-nation standoff.

Follow the money.

We are potentially in big trouble as a nation. Our security is threatened not only by Islamist terrorism—but also by some who have a lien on our title deed. Certainly, throughout our history we have dealt with nations and regimes in pragmatic and realpolitik ways, even having to hold our collective noses because of the stench of tyranny and oppression on the part of some of our momentary allies in a larger cause. But we have managed, for the most part, to deal with it—ugliness and all—because of the ability to approach everything from a position of strength: morally, militarily, and economically.

Now though, we not only depend on others for much of our energy, but we also owe an astronomical amount of money (the interest alone is unfathomable) to powerful entities. We should not be surprised that other nations no longer dance on cue—nor should we ever be surprised if and when some big bills come due with humiliating strings attached.

Or worse.

A Vital Political Question For 2010

February 5, 2010 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Annals of the Obama Administration, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Intelligence, International Affairs, Iran, Islam, National Security, Obama administration, Political Philosophy, Presidents, Terrorism, War on Terror | 1 Comment 

In the waning days of the 1980 presidential campaign, Republican nominee Ronald Reagan used his allotted time in the closing moments of his only debate with President Jimmy Carter to ask a question. It was one of the most effective rhetorical devices in American history.

“Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

Because most Americans answered a resounding “No” that night, Mr. Reagan was able to pull the line out again four years later, this time as President and against Walter Mondale, who ran a quixotic campaign to oust him. And Americans answered by electing Reagan to a second term.

Over the years, the question about being “better off” has been used to great affect by many politicians, including later aspirants to the White House. It became, in effect, a rhetorical trump card.

Now there is another question in the room—one that was asked, in a manner of speaking, during several recent special elections and will be commonplace this November as all of us go to the polls in the “off-year” ritual. The question is: “Are you safer than you were four years ago?”

It is hard to find anything about President Barack Obama’s first term—at least anything of substance—that can be realistically characterized as successful. And by successful, I mean accomplishing one’s stated goals. Whether it was the healthcare bridge too far, cap-and-trade, or dramatically improving the economy, this administration has simply not delivered on what it promised. Of course, in the area of national security they have tried to make good on pledges, but have found the resistance to every move to be surprising strong.

And one gets the feeling that not only did they not see failure coming in the euphoria of those early halcyon days in charge—but they really don’t have a clue as to where to go from here. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the area of national security and dealing with the very real threat of Islamist terror. And nowhere are the stakes any higher.

The other day, Leon Panetta, Director of CIA, in concert with other leaders in the national security community, told Congress that a terror attack (the indication being that this would be an attempt of significant magnitude) is likely during the next three to six months. It was also suggested that this warning is based, at least in part, on information gleaned from the man who tried to blow up an American airplane en route to Detroit on Christmas Day, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Presumably, this so-called “underwear-bomber” has been cooperating with authorities lately, following the intervention of some of his family from Nigeria, such intervention being prompted by FBI visits to that country.

With its too-sad-to-be-farcical “you-could-have-had-me-at-enemy-combatant” Miranda prolonged delay, this episode is in a real sense a window into the thinking—some would say, lack thereof—of the Obama administration on the whole issue of terror, Islamism, “detainees,” and national security. It seems that there is this naïve insistence on seeing and framing the issues as something nuanced—an almost “shirts versus skins” game—instead of a very grave matter of life and death.

A President is sworn to protect and defend the Constitution and by extension, therefore, those under its cover. The founders and framers did not fashion a document for global governance, nor did they seek to extend its protection beyond “we the people.” But these days we are witnessing the most ambitious attempt ever to broadly interpret its provisions.

On the domestic side, “we” the people is giving way to “for” the people, as those wiser-than-the-rest-of-us seek to “fundamentally transform” (to use Mr. Obama’s words) America. And when it comes to foreign policy and international issues, apparently now this new-improved understanding of our Constitution—one that makes Franklin Roosevelt look like a paleo-conservative in comparison—reads, “they” the people. It covers not only illegal aliens, but also non-U.S. citizen enemy combatants, giving them more rights than any of us would ever receive in some Islamist majority country.

“Are you safer than you were four years ago?”

Iran moves arrogantly and confidently forward to develop the materials and technology to soon become a nuclear power. Just the other day, its President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, talked of delivering a blow to “global arrogance” as that nation marks the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution on February 11.

Sure we protest, but words from a teleprompter don’t make much impact on a man who thinks he gets his ideas directly from Allah. And at any rate—the whole first year of Mr. Obama’s administration and its mea culpa “we like you” overtures to the Islamic world, notwithstanding—there is no evidence that anyone who hated us when George W. Bush was in town, hates us any less now.

In fact, someone in the White House should take a look at something else the mahdaviatist President of Iran said the other day in that same speech:

“If the Islamic Revolution had not occurred, liberalism and Marxism would have crushed all human dignity in their power-seeking and money-grubbing claws. Nothing would have remained of human and spiritual principles.”

Did you see that? The enemy is “liberalism and Marxism.” So as the current administration tries to pursue some kind of rapprochement with Iran and other Islamist nations, while at the same time trying orchestrate a decidedly more liberal agenda domestically—one that smacks of “Marxist” thinking at many turns—something ironic is happening. The new “good guys” who tell us that America is now going be loved more around the world because bad old George Bush and the cranky conservatives are gone, have missed a key plot-point: Islamists hate democratic liberalism—with its socialist vision—even more than they hate militaristic neo-conservatism.

Oops.

Of course, I hope and pray that we are spared any such terror attack this, or any, year. And I pray that there remains a sufficient remnant of discerning men and women in key areas of expertise and responsibility across the land, people who have not bowed the knee to the Baal of liberal statism and diplomatic naïveté, in place to forestall such a disaster.

But I must admit, there seems to be an inexplicable zeitgeist, combining lackadaisical apathy with arrogance that makes me feel anything but safe.

Someone talked to me recently about how, if we are attacked, people will rally around our new president like they did George W. Bush in 2001. I countered that I wasn’t so sure. That was a different time—before we really knew what terrorism meant on these shores. Post game analysis back then revealed so many areas of weakness leading to that dreadful day of terror on Sept. 11.

If such a thing, or anything similar, were to happen these days, I am not sure that those in charge now would get the kind of good will that translates into a political pass—or future.

Buck Or Hot Potato?

January 8, 2010 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, History, Intelligence, International Affairs, Islam, National Security, Nixon Administration, Obama administration, Presidential libraries, Presidents, Terrorism, U.S. History, War on Terror, economy | 3 Comments 

In the old West, when the boys played poker at the saloon, or wherever, along with the cards, chips, money, and various beverages, the table was also adorned with a knife–one with a buckhorn handle. The knife was moved from place to place, depending on the person dealing. If a player didn’t feel like dealing the cards, he could pass the responsibility to the next guy, along with the knife.

It was called “passing the buck.”

The phrase is, of course, most commonly associated with President Harry Truman–in fact, his desk on display at the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, has a famous sign bearing the words: “The Buck Stops Here.” One of his aides, Fred Canfil, had seen the phrase on a desk in El Reno, Oklahoma, and had the sign made for his boss. Interestingly, and largely lost to the legend according to biographer David McCullough, the 33rd President only kept the sign on his Oval Office desk for a short time while in the White House.

But the metaphor stuck.

It has been used by leaders–particularly presidents–ever since as the ultimate way of saying: “I’m in charge, it’s my responsibility.” Most recently, the phrase was brought out of White House mothballs and used by President Barack Obama in remarks about the Christmas Day 2009 foiled Islamist terrorist attack.

It remains to be seen whether or not the latest pronouncement about the proverbial buck will be remembered as Truman-esque, or more like the nervous stammer of Alexander Haig the day President Reagan was shot. I believe the President said the right things the other day–but will he and his administration really follow through, taking steps, making the tough calls, and keeping the issue of Islamist terror on their political radar screen?

A good indicator would be the willingness to call it what it is. We are not just fighting Al Qaeda as some kind of generic syndicate of bad guys, as with The Man From Uncle and “THRUSH” or Maxwell Smart’s “KAOS.” There is no way for us to win over an ideology, while being afraid or hesitant to call it what it is: Islamism.

To my mind, Mr. Obama is still not comfortable in his role as Commander-in-Chief, with its implied responsibilities of protecting the nation from “all enemies, foreign and domestic.” He is now saying many of the right things, but I wonder if his vocabulary and America’s dictionary are in sync? He forms phrases now like “we are at war” – but I can’t help but get the feeling that this is based more on manufactured energy than real passion. Does the President view what happened on Christmas and the whole megilla of security, intelligence, and such as important as, say, the economy, healthcare, and jobs?

In fairness, most presidents bring dreams to the job. Lyndon Johnson wanted to build a Great Society and Richard Nixon wanted to focus on foreign affairs, but both had to contend more than they would have liked with their less-favored part of the domestic-international presidential paradigm. Bill Clinton wanted it all to be about “the economy, stupid.” But the first priority of any president is to keep us safe so we can actually have an economy.

A strong sense of national security is, in itself, a potent economic stimulus.

Only time will tell if the new-found-but-pretty-darn-late war-speak (better: war-whisper) will really be about the buck stopping with the President, or mere words.

After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, President Kennedy faced the press and talked about victory having many “fathers,” but defeat being an “orphan.” He also acknowledged that he was “the responsible officer” in the government. It was, as was Mr. Obama’s recent admission, a statement of the obvious.

But accepting responsibility as a leader does not abrogate systemic culpability.

The old 1970s sitcom, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, had a character named Lou Grant (played by Ed Asner)–an irascible man who ran a newsroom. Mary’s boss once said: “Leadership is the art of delegating blame.” Actually, good leadership is somewhere between taking full blame and delegating it all away. Where there are mistakes there is blame to be found. To miss this is to ignore a vital piece of the puzzle preventing something else bad from happening.

Frankly, what needs to happen throughout the government is for various leaders in key areas to think about letting the buck stay with them for a while. When a president has to say “The Buck Stops Here,” it is at least a tacit acknowledgement that the buck has been aggressively mobile.

I think the buck stops every bit as much with Attorney General Eric Holder, as it does with the President. After all, haven’t we been given the impression that the whole send-the-Gitmo-gangsters-to-New York idea is really his and the President is above it all? Or does that buck make its way to Mr. Obama’s desk, too?

And how about Dennis Blair, our Director of National Security (DNI–one of the dumbest ideas to come out of the Bush administration)? Following Mr. Obama’s speech on Thursday, he issued a statement saying, in part:

The Intelligence Community has made considerable progress in developing collection and analysis capabilities and improving collaboration, but we need to strengthen our ability to stop new tactics such as the efforts of individual suicide terrorists. The threat has evolved, and we need to anticipate new kinds of attacks and improve our ability to stay ahead of them and protect America.

We can and we must outthink, outwork and defeat the enemy’s new ideas. The Intelligence Community will do that as directed by the President, working closely with our nation’s entire national security team.

Really? What has the guy been working on up to now–health care reform?

One of two things has been happening, as clearly indicated by the foiled Christmas Day Islamist terror attack: either subordinates are keeping bad or inconvenient details from the President of the United States, or the information has not, until now, been marked or received with requisite urgency. Whatever the case, heads should roll. Blair’s words are akin to those uttered by an erudition-challenged player after a football game, “Well, we needed to score more points to win.” Duh.

There really is no buck to pass in the Obama administration when it comes to National Security, there is only a hot potato few want to deal with or even acknowledge. Attorney General Holder, Janet Napolitano, and so many others in key roles these days have regularly dismissed or minimized the danger of our times, while forging ahead with the even-more-now absurd sending of Gitmo detainees back to Yemen (6 on December 20th), and making sure that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (pronounced: Abdulmutallab) is told he has the right to remain silent and to the full protection of the American justice system, as opposed to being treated as he should be: as an enemy combatant.

Sure, the President of the United States made a speech and said many of the right things, but what we need to figure out is if what we are really bearing witness to is a dynamic described to reporters by Former Attorney John Mitchell, back in 1969: “Watch what we do, not what we say.”

Beware Of Green Sheep Bearing Urgent Messages

December 11, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Environmental issues, History, International Affairs, Obama administration, Political Philosophy, Public Opinion, UN | 2 Comments 

Long ago, the wisest of all men who ever trod earthly sod reminded us to beware of those peddling false information, noting that they often appear in “sheep’s clothing,” but really they are nothing more than “ravenous wolves.” These days we are bearing witness to the resurgence of ideas that have long since been discredited in former form, so the wool suit has been brought out for stealthy reasons. But a closer look reveals that those sheep have really big teeth.

Dust off your old Orwellian “newspeak” dictionary, where words are set free from actual meaning. There is a new code in town and it is worthy of being broken – a barely cryptic puzzle, but one that may, in fact, deceive many. Socialism is not only on the comeback trail via a full frontal political assault in our country (never mind that is has never actually worked anywhere), it is also on the march under a new banner – though to see this we must look through the looking glass. Not only has terminology been tweaked, the political color chart is being revised, as well – while too few actually notice.

Green is the new Red.

The actual practical application of so-called socialist dogma since the days when its seeds were hydrated in the bloodbath of the French Revolution has never come close to living up to its utopian promises. The goals of equality and liberty – noble concepts themselves – have never been achieved through coercive collectivism. Countries have certainly tried to level the playing field – or, if you prefer “spread the wealth around” – but it has always been done at the expense of personal freedom, not to mention the fact that wealth has tended to disappear in the process of that “spreading.” Some of the wealth did, of course, survive – for a time at least – in the coffers of those who happened to be the ruling elite du jour.

In other words, although socialism has regularly been presented as the cultural and political pathway to fairness and prosperity for all, it has had a poor record in history. In fact, it has tended to actually make matters worse. But never mind that: let’s give the tired doctrine one more try. After all, we have smarter people in charge now and the fact that the math still doesn’t add up is irrelevant.

It’s the same with environmentalism. As the world watched what happened this past week in wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen, the mantra was about saving the planet. But lurking beneath and behind the machinations and rhetoric of this latest climate-change-kum-by-ya moment is the same old ideology, albeit with a leafy facelift. Saving the planet, we are regularly told by the smart people, requires more centralization of power and less individual liberty.

And if there is any doubt as to this agenda, we need only look back to a few days ago when Environmental Protection Agency Czarina, Lisa Jackson, told us all that the EPA regards carbon dioxide as a grave threat to mother earth and that the pollutant must therefore be controlled by government guardians. They’ll be the people wearing those special biohazard suits – yep, you guessed it, the ones made of wool.

It is emerging that there are plans, if the Congress doesn’t do the bidding of the new greed reds, to simply do a smack down on the economy with a method described as “command-and-control.” This is a management style popularized in the now deceased HBO series, “The Sopranos,” as in that memorable line, “I got your ‘command-and-control’ right here – badda bing, badda boom.”

You say, “cap-and-trade,” others say, “command-and-control,” why don’t we call the whole thing off?

Please don’t miss the significance of what Jackson has said. Our entire economy is based just as much on carbon as it is the dollar. A “command-and-control” approach is another way of saying: “You think a take over of health care is a power grab? Wait until you see this!”

What does this have to do with socialism? Environmentalism relates to socialism in much the same way that Marxism relates to Leninism – and for the same reason. Neither is really about giving people a better life or saving the planet. The ultimate agenda – the wolf in sheep’s clothing – is political power and the micromanagement of individual lives through collectivism, with all the strings pulled by an emerging political aristocracy made up of the “really smart” people. And I use that word “aristocracy” deliberately, though with tongue-in-cheek, because the word comes from the Greek and literally means: “the rule of the best.”

The problem is that this latest group of “the best and the brightest” has a clear and present problem with priorities. We are facing some very great crisis-level challenges in America, the top two being, 1. It’s the economy, stupid, and 2. The war against Islamism (or, reverse the order, if you like). But the body language of those “really smart” people is all about matters that, well, don’t actually matter to most Americans – at least not right now.

Seventeenth century British preacher, Thomas Fuller, a man who would have done well in the age of the sound bite, once said: “He that is everywhere is nowhere.” This is the same idea Steven Covey and other management gurus talk about when they warn that the “urgent” can be the enemy of the “important.” And Americans right now are living under a new tyranny – that of the neo-urgent. However, the present “urgent-priority” is being orchestrated by those who seem to simply want power centralized and personal liberties marginalized.

Oh, by the way, Thomas Fuller also famously said, “It is always darkest just before the day dawneth,” which gives me some comfort. That is, until I recall one college professor of mine many years ago – a particularly and regularly befuddled man – who once botched this quote while giving us a pep talk before a major exam: “Now, uh, class, uh, always remember what Thomas Fuller said, ‘It is always darkest before the storm.”

Will Mr. Obama Seize His Big Mac Moment?

November 27, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Afghanistan, American Politics, Barack Obama, Cold War, George W. Bush, History, Military, National Security, Obama administration, Presidents, Republican Party, Terrorism, U.S. History, War on Terror | 3 Comments 

This Tuesday, Barack Obama will travel to the United States Military Academy at West Point to deliver the most important address of his young presidency. He has obviously chosen the site for the speech with great care and in the hope that the backdrop – a storied scene on the Hudson – will engender an image of him as a strong and effective commander in chief.

It is probably a smart move, but one not without a measure of risk.

The President of the United States will be treated with respect and be received enthusiastically – all very appropriate and quintessentially American. But when the fanfare fades and the applause lines become fewer, he will have the tough job of articulating a compelling vision for the future of a war that has lost its name, if not its way.

Though Mr. Obama’s White House predecessor spoke at West Point twice – once in each term – not all presidents make this trip. Eisenhower, one of the two graduates of the academy who went on to become Commander in Chief (the other being fellow Republican, Ulysses S. Grant), never made a major speech there during his two terms as president. And his predecessor, the man from Missouri, avoided the place like the plague. President Truman saw West Point as a breeding ground for “stuffed shirts” – and at any rate, his firing of the academy’s former commandant – Douglas MacArthur – probably kept the presidential welcome mat in storage in the basement of the Thayer Hotel.

As Mr. Obama’s team prepares for this important speech, I wonder if the wordsmiths are taking time to consult the history of what has been said there by other presidents and prominent Americans?

Franklin Roosevelt gave the commencement address in 1939 to graduates who would soon be in harm’s way in Europe and the Pacific. He told that class:

During recent months international political considerations have required still greater emphasis upon the vitalization of our defense, for we have had dramatic illustrations of the fate of undefended nations. I hardly need to be more specific than that. Recent conflicts in Europe, the Far East and Africa bear witness to the fact that the individual soldier remains still the controlling factor.

However, when John F. Kennedy spoke to another graduating class on June 6, 1962 (inexplicably, for a president who prided himself on his sense of history, never mentioning that date as the 18th anniversary of D-Day), he shared a vision about changes in warfare, telling his honorable audience:

Your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces, but in less traditional roles. Men risking their lives, not as combatants, but as instructors or advisers, or as symbols of our Nation’s commitments.

He, though, never lived to see how quickly “instructors or advisors” would become “combatants.”

The most recent president to make a major speech at West Point was George W. Bush, a man who usually does not fare well in the eloquence department, especially when compared to President Obama. Yet, what he had to say back in 2002 should be reviewed, not only by White House speechwriters, but also by all Americans – because the words still ring true:

Because the war on terror will require resolve and patience, it will also require firm moral purpose. In this way our struggle is similar to the Cold War. Now, as then, our enemies are totalitarians, holding a creed of power with no place for human dignity. Now, as then, they seek to impose a joyless conformity, to control every life and all of life.

America confronted imperial communism in many different ways – diplomatic, economic, and military. Yet moral clarity was essential to our victory in the Cold War. When leaders like John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan refused to gloss over the brutality of tyrants, they gave hope to prisoners and dissidents and exiles, and rallied free nations to a great cause.

Some worry that it is somehow undiplomatic or impolite to speak the language of right and wrong. I disagree. Different circumstances require different methods, but not different moralities. Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in every place. Targeting innocent civilians for murder is always and everywhere wrong. Brutality against women is always and everywhere wrong. There can be no neutrality between justice and cruelty, between the innocent and the guilty. We are in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call evil by its name. By confronting evil and lawless regimes, we do not create a problem – we reveal a problem. And we will lead the world in opposing it.

However, if I were on Mr. Obama’s speech writing team (corpulent opportunity), I would spend some time going over another famous speech made at West Point. It just may be the most relevant to current realities, not to mention one that we all need to hear again.

The date was May 12, 1962 and the speaker was retired General Douglas MacArthur. The Old Man was 82 years of age and his frail movements reflected it. But there was a spark of eloquence left in him; one that he fanned that day into a brilliant rhetorical flame.

When I watch Mr. Obama’s speech this Tuesday, it will be Big Mac’s speech that I use as the gold standard reference point. Here are some excerpts. The words speak for themselves:

Duty, Honor, Country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn. Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean.

The unbelievers will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and, I am sorry to say, some others of an entirely different character, will try to downgrade them even to the extent of mockery and ridicule.

And through all this welter of change and development your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable. It is to win our wars. Everything else in your professional career is but corollary to this vital dedication. All other public purpose, all other public projects, all other public needs, great or small, will find others for their accomplishments; but you are the ones who are trained to fight.

Yours is the profession of arms, the will to win, the sure knowledge that in war there is no substitute for victory, that if you lose, the Nation will be destroyed, that the very obsession of your public service must be Duty, Honor, Country.

The long gray line has never failed us. Were you to do so, a million ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in blue and gray, would rise from their white crosses, thundering those magic words: Duty, Honor, Country.

The November Chronicles

November 6, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Cold War, Europe, History, International Affairs, Iran, Islam, Obama administration, Political Philosophy, Terrorism, U.S. History, War on Terror | Leave a Comment 

Mark Twain often suggested that history doesn’t always repeat itself, “but it does rhyme.” This chronological cadence is particularly true when you note some of the key events in the past century that happened in early November.

November 7, 1917 was when the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, unleashing a still too-often ignored and dismissed era of tyranny and terror (the idea of an “October Revolution” has to do with the difference between the Julian and Gregorian calendars). Long since discredited by the verdict of history, the ideas that formed the basis of what Ronald Reagan aptly called an “evil empire,” have found new adherents – some in high places in our land. But ignorant neo-Marxists in our midst notwithstanding, the reality of what took place under the czars-of-all-things-Soviet for more than seven decades was horrifying.

Much is rightly made of the atrocities committed by the Nazis in Germany and we are regularly reminded that we must never forget. I agree. But while remembering all the depravity wrought by Hitler and his henchman, why do Communist leaders and regimes so often get a pass these days? Even by conservative accounts, more than 100 million people died via Communist oppression. Yet some apparently feel that the ideas behind the system are somehow still valid. Really?

Fast forward to November 4, 1956, and see Soviet tanks penetrating the Pest side of the Danube in Budapest, Hungary, in their offensive to put down a nationwide revolt against the so-called Peoples Republic of Hungary. Brave patriots sought to wrest control of their nation from the grip of Soviet-style Stalinism.

Meanwhile, America stood sadly down. The great General, who had led the allies to victory 11 years before, sent mixed signals. Freedom fighters were emboldened by what we were saying on Radio Free Europe, but the official policy turned out to be nothing more than impotent ambivalence. Within days, the courageous movement was crushed.

Speaking of the 4th day in November and presidential impotence, let us now move ahead to the year 1979 – the moment Iranian “revolutionaries” seized control of our embassy in Tehran, initiating a 444-day Hell for 52 American hostages. This was the moment when many average Americans first came face to face with the ugly egregiousness of Islamism. Jimmy Carter lived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in those days, but his presidency would languish due to lack of foresight, insufficient resolve, and malaise-driven methodology.

Exactly one year later – yep, you got it – right smack dab on November 4, 1980, Ronald Wilson Reagan trounced Mr. Carter, who vainly sought re-election, with the networks calling the race even before many Americans had voted. The hostages would thereafter celebrate the very moment of Reagan’s inauguration the following January 20th as their moment of liberation. Clearly, the nuts running the show in Tehran had the requisite lucidity to know that they did not want to deal with the Gipper.

Another November 4th, this one in 1989, saw a crowd of nearly 1,000,000 people cram Alexanderplatz in East Berlin, rallying for freedom. This would lead in less than a week to something for many years thought to be unthinkable – the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. A little more than two years earlier, that same Ronald Reagan had challenged his Soviet counterpart-though-no-real-match, Mikhail Gorbachev, to “tear down this wall.” Those words penetrated hearts, minds, not to mention concrete that day, leading to the barrier’s ultimate demise as a metaphor.

Eventually, we came to yet another November 4th – this one in 2008, with Barack Obama’s election as U.S. President, an event that to many heralded a whole new world to come. But the “change we can believe” soon began to appear more and more like an awkward combination of antiquated socialism and naïve geopolitics. Frank Gaffney, president of The Center for Security Policy in Washington, suggests that the “Obama Doctrine” can be summed up in nine words: “Undermine our allies. Embolden our enemies. Diminish our country.”

You see, the toxins of Lenin’s bunch in 1917, and those of the gang in Tehran in 1980, share common and deadly DNA. To miss this leads to the very real potential for unparalleled peril.

Once we had leaders who instinctively understood the danger of sinister ideology. Now, all evidence seems to indicate that people in key roles overestimate Marxism and underestimate Islamism. The welfare state, once nearly dismantled after we had apparently learned its dark lessons, is now expanding exponentially once again with a vengeance. Our government preaches stimulation, but practices hegemony. Mr. Reagan always reminded us about the virtue of creating wealth. Mr. Obama seems dead set on redistributing it.

And this Monday, November 9th, on the 20th anniversary of the day Reagan’s instruction about that wicked wall was enthusiastically followed by a Berlin crowd, our new president will be a no-show. He has nothing against speeches in Berlin. Been there; done that. It’s not the venue that makes him uncomfortable. It’s the message.

When the wall came tumbling down, it was the most dramatic demonstration of the inherent bankruptcy of the ideas of Marx in actual practice. Sure, the doctrine promises hope, change, and the idea that human self-interest will one day “wither away,” but it has never really delivered – simply because it can’t. Harvard professor Richard Pipes has suggested the Soviet system collapsed because of “the utopian nature of its objectives.”

And when it comes to Islamism, the continued and persistent minimizing of its threat is not only misguided, it approaches political malpractice. The president, this past November 4th, reached out to Tehran seeking “a relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran based on mutual interests and mutual respect.” In response, leaders there vow to continue to show “unquenchable anger against the Great Satan.”

That, by the way, is how a clenched fist responds to an extended hand.

So here we are in another November in time and a 39-year old Army major – a psychiatrist and lifelong Muslim – climbs onto a table crying, “Allahu Akbar,” and opens fire on fellow-soldiers. Many die, while others cling to life. But will anything be learned?

It seems that the history of the past 100 years has been, in many ways, a battle of Novembers. At times, tyranny has temporarily triumphed; at other times freedom’s flag has flown. Yes, Mark Twain said that history could rhyme. But often these rhymes – so simple and clear – come across as riddles to those who are apparently determined to miss the obvious.

You Can’t Win ‘Em All

October 12, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Barack Obama, Humor, Ideas, Obama administration, economy | 2 Comments 

The winners of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics were announced today in Oslo.  Americans Elinor Ostrom and Oliver E. Williamson shared the award for their work in the area of economic governance.

Professor Ostrom, a political science professor at  Indiana University in Bloomington is the first woman Nobel laureate in this category.  She describes her work as studying “how local people, as well as government officials, have attempted to solve very difficult resource problems.”

Dr. Williamson is an emeritus professor of microeconomics at Berkeley.  He has developed a theory in which business firms represent alternate governance structures and are studied in terms of conflict resolution.

The Nobel Academy said that their work over the last three decades has “advanced economic governance research from the fringe to the forefront of scientific attention.”

The “First Take” wags over at Dow Jones’ MarketWatch took a different approach to the story.  Under the headline ”Obama fails to win Nobel prize in economics,”  Tom Bernis wrote:

LONDON (MarketWatch) — In a decision as shocking as Friday’s surprise peace prize win, President Obama failed to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences Monday.

While few observers think Obama has done anything for world peace in the nearly nine months he’s been in office, the same clearly can’t be said for economics.

The president has worked tirelessly since even before his inauguration to wrest control of the U.S. economy from failed free markets, and the evil CEOs who profit from them, and to turn it over to wise, fair and benevolent bureaucrats.

From his $787 billion stimulus package, to the cap-and-trade bill, to the seizures of General Motors and Chrysler, to the undead health-care “reform” act, Obama has dominated the U.S., and therefore the global, economy as few figures have in recent years.

Yet the Nobel panel chose instead to award the prize to two obscure academics — Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson — one noted for her work on managing collective resources, and the other for his work on transaction costs.

Other surprise losers include celebrity noneconomist and filmmaker Michael Moore; U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner; and Larry Summers, head of the U.S. national economic council.

It is unclear whether the president will now refuse his peace prize in protest against the obvious slight to his real achievements this year.

Laughing Matters

October 11, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Afpak, Barack Obama, Comedy, History, Humor, Obama administration | 2 Comments 

On Thursday the Daily Show turned its attention to the news about Afghanistan.  Jon Stewart’s deconstruction of Speaker Pelosi’s body language is inspired.  And the profile of General McChrystal —”he’s as strong as a grizzly bear and better at catching salmon; his mother was a yeti and his father a ‘68 Camaro”— covers some serious ground.

And this week’s issue of Time features a Fun with Photoshop Gallery of “Obama’s Other Awards” (in addition to his Heisman Trophy already noted here) — including an MTV Music Video Award, a Pulitzer Prize, an Oscar, and a Cy Young Award:

Laughing Matters

October 11, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Comedy, Obama administration | Leave a Comment 

Last night’s cold open. Less edgy, less risky and, perhaps not coincidentally, less funny:

A Milestone For The White House Fellowships

October 3, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Nixon Administration, Obama administration, Presidents, Richard Nixon, White House | 2 Comments 

Today is the 45th anniversary of the Executive Order that founded the White House Fellows program.

The Fellowships’s White House website describes the program’s origins:

Declaring that “a genuinely free society cannot be a spectator society,” President Lyndon B. Johnson announced the establishment of the White House Fellows Program in the East Room of the White House in October 1964. Prompted by the suggestion of John W. Gardner, then President of the Carnegie Corporation, President Johnson’s intent was to draw individuals of exceptionally high promise to Washington for one year of personal involvement in the process of government.

The White House Fellowship was created as a non-partisan program. It has strictly maintained this tradition during both Republican and Democratic administrations and, through the cross-fertilization of ideas and experience, has enriched the practice of public policy for more than four decades.

The mission of the non-partisan White House Fellows Program, as envisioned by President Johnson, was in his words, “to give the Fellows first hand, high-level experience with the workings of the Federal government and to increase their sense of participation in national affairs.” In return for the Fellowship year, President Johnson expected the Fellows to “repay that privilege” when they left by “continuing to work as private citizens on their public agendas.” He hoped that the Fellows would contribute to the nation as future leaders.

President Obama meets in the Oval Office with the 2009 Class of White House Fellows.

Several articles about the Fellows program recently appeared in the Washington Post’s “On Leadership” section.  A column by Rice University sociologist D. Michael Lindsay highlighted the results of a recent survey he conducted of program alumni.

This is a program based in Washington, but politics invariably seeps into the fellowship, even if it is designed to be nonpartisan. More self-identified Democrats are fellows during Democratic administrations, and more Republicans participate in the program when Republicans control the White House. However, the most recent administration (that of George W. Bush) had the most even balance of Democratic and Republican Fellows (35% and 37%, respectively with the rest being Independents) in the program’s history. The most partisan results occurred during the Reagan White House (with 66% Republicans and 18% Democrats) and the Clinton White House (with 71% Democrats and 11% Republicans). The study shows that more people of the president’s party apply, and this naturally shapes the partisan makeup of each class, even though political considerations are excluded from the selection process.

Overall, Democrats slightly outnumber Republicans among White House Fellows, but there are significantly more Fellows who self-identify as a “strong Democrat” (21%) compared to those who self-identify as a “strong Republican” (10%). And a majority of Fellows–whether Democrat or Republican–report being politically connected, even before beginning the program.

A column by Cindy Moelis, the new Obama-appointed Director of the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships, gives a thumb-nail view of the 2009 Class and their job placements.

President Nixon met in the Oval Office with the 1971 Class of White House Fellows.  Hard to believe as it may be, one member of the Class was not informed that the time of the appointment had been changed from late afternoon to early morning, and was absent from the photograph.

Several distinguished Nixon Administration Fellowship alumni are singled out  on the program’s website.

1968-1969

Robert D. Haas: Chairman/CEO, Levi Strauss & Co.

1969-1970

Michael H. Armacost. Shorenstein Distinguished

Fellow, Asian-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University; former President of The Brookings Institution; former Ambassador to Japan and the Philippines; former Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs

1971-1972

Robert C. McFarlane. Chairman and CEO, Energy and Communications Solutions; former National Security Advisor to President Reagan; former Counselor to  Department of State; former Special Assistant for National Security Affairs to President Ford; former Military Assistant to Henry Kissinger and Brent  Scowcroft.

Deanell R. Tacha.  Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.

1972-1973

Luis G. Nogales.  President, Nogales Partners; former CEO, United Press International, former President, Univision.

Colin L. Powell.  Former Secretary, U.S. Department of State; former Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff; founding Chariman, America’s Promise; General, U.S. Army (ret.).

1973-1974

Doris M. Meissner. Senior Fellow, Migration Policy Institute; former Commissioner, Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Peter M. Dawkins. Vice Chairman, CitiGroup Private Bank; former Chairman/Ceo of Primerica Financial Services, Inc.; Heisman Trophy winner; Brigadier General, U.S. Army (ret.).

Frederick S. Benson III. President, U.S.-New Zealand Council; former Vice President, Weyerhaeuser Company.

Dr. Delano Meriwether. Leukemia researcher; athlete.

Misplaced Priorities

October 2, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Barack Obama, Nixon Center, Obama administration, The National Interest | 1 Comment 

In The National Interest, The Nixon Center’s Executive Director Paul Saunders writes that the Obama administration’s failure to convince the IOC (International  Olympic Committee) to bring the games to Chicago in 2016 was the result of a systematic miscalculation in their diplomatic homework:

The International Olympic Committee’s stunning elimination of Chicago in voting for the 2016 games—as the first city dropped, with the least votes among four contenders—is of limited importance to the United States, but should be ringing alarm bells about the Obama administration and its foreign policy.

Having the 2016 games in Chicago would have been nice, but certainly should not be a major foreign policy goal for the United States. America has hosted the Olympic Games many times and does not particularly need the visibility or the expense.

Still, given President Obama’s roots as a Chicago politician, it was not inappropriate for him to lobby a little for his home city. He could have done this fairly easily by making a short statement in front of the cameras during any of a number of appearances in the United States in advance of the IOC ballot. “Chicago is one of America’s and the world’s great cities,” he could have said, “and Michelle and I are rooting for Chicago as the IOC meets this week. If selected, I know that Chicago will come together and organize a truly spectacular event that embodies the spirit of the Olympics and the spirit of America.” Then he would have been done and could check the box and move on.

When this could have been done so easily, why do more?

The answer seems to be a combination of several troubling factors. First is a worrying failure to set priorities. Candidate Obama was critical of the Bush administration—at times correctly—for misplaced priorities, but does not seem to have taken the lesson to heart. His administration has spent the last eight months trying to do too much too fast, both domestically and in foreign policy, and is now starting to pay the price.

Second is a profound over-estimation of President Obama’s personal persuasive power (again, both domestically and internationally). This has been clear at home in the health care debate, on climate change, and in other areas, where the administration seems mistakenly to have interpreted Obama’s election as a mandate to pursue his policy goals rather than as a rejection of the Bush administration. A similar dynamic is at play in foreign policy, where some in the administration seem to think that the President’s personal story and charm are sufficient to persuade others to sacrifice their own interests, abandon long-held perspectives, or change their minds even when they may have different preferences or evaluations. This can lead to dangerous and damaging miscalculations and will almost certainly lead to disappointment both inside the administration and abroad.

The root of this lies in a third factor, namely that other governments and peoples make their decisions about the United States based on what we do or persuasively promise to do. Former Russian President Vladimir Putin successfully personally lobbied the IOC to bring the 2014 Winter Games to Sochi by promising that the full power and resources of the then-oil-rich Russian state would stand behind the games. Failing to recognize this in the IOC’s new balloting, by focusing his remarks and the First Lady’s on uplifting rhetoric rather than the specifics of Chicago’s bid, is a relatively minor matter—although the impact of the loss will now be vastly inflated by the President’s ill-advised decision to become so deeply involved. But failing to see the difference on real issues—like the Middle East, where President Obama has done nothing to follow up his much-touted Cairo speech—has real consequences.

America doesn’t need a gold medal in a global popularity contest and neither does our president. What we do need is others to take us seriously. If the Obama administration doesn’t start to focus on what is important and to deliver some results, precious few will.

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

October 2, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Obama administration | 2 Comments 

The Powers That Be: the President and Mrs. Obama with Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley making their unsuccessful pitch for the ‘16 Olympics.

The Obamas’ journey to Copenhagen has produced a narrative more suited to Hans Christian Andersen than to David Axelrod.

The intrepid and hopeful young couple traveled far.  Along the way they encountered some scary individuals and faced many formidable obstacles.  And, although they didn’t get what they wanted, they returned home the wiser for the trip.  Kai never got the skates from the Snow Queen, but he and Gerda managed to live happily ever after (and probably even discovered a big pre-season Skates’R'Us sale at their local mall).

Of course, for anyone schooled in the RN approach to international travel —of which Rule One was: Don’t even think about getting on a plane until the favorable final joint communique has a been signed and sealed-– it’s hard to imagine how POTUS could have set himself up to take such a visible fall on a banana peel of such international proportions.

Far from flying towards a done deal, the smart money all along was on ABA —Anyone But America— with the odds in favor of Rio.  Perhaps there was even method in his madness.  Copenhagen may be just the latest stop in his ‘09 International Apology Tour during which the USA is being reintegrated into the family of nations by means of demonstrating that it is in no way exceptional.  Just as, in our pre-Obama past, we were capable of ungodly wrongs and injustices, so now, in our new age of enlightenment, we understand that we are one among many with no greater expectations (and no rights to them) than the least of our brethren.

All that said……a day is a lifetime in politics.  And by tomorrow we’ll be back focused on war or peace or something else.  And by the end of the year this incident will be ancient history even for the few who still remember it.

And maybe the Obamas’ Copenhagen rationale was far more simple and straightforward.  True, they won’t be officiating at the apotheotic hometown opening ceremonies of the Summer Games of the XXXI Olympiad in the final year of his second term (or sitting in the Mayor’s Box at the dedicatory opening ceremonies in the fourth year of his post-presidency).  But at least they can now rest assured that, come August 2016, there won’t be any protesters lined up outside their house in Hyde Park excoriating them for not having done their best to bring the Games home.

A good idea whose time has not yet come: the bad news reaches the Loop.

Sing For Your Supper

September 28, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Art, Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Election 2012, Ethics, Obama administration | 1 Comment 

The Washington Times ran a strong editorial yesterday —”Unanswered questions for the NEA“— on a story  that is sufficiently confusing to have resulted in its being relegated to B-sections and the blogosphere.

The Times‘ editors manage to make both its outline and its significance clear:

National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Rocco Landesman and the White House finally responded to a controversial effort by political appointees of both the White House and the NEA to “leverage” government funding of the arts into cultural support for the administration’s legislative agenda.

This is the short version of the Obama administration’s position: Nothing bad happened. The rogue employee who didn’t do anything bad has been relieved of his duties (and has now resigned). In an effort to make sure that the same “nothing bad” never happens again, the administration has distributed a memo and provided some new training on how not to do “nothing bad.”

The facts are simple and public. During the transition, President Obama’s top arts adviser made it clear that his ambition was for the arts to become an integral part of the West Wing. After the inauguration, meetings of artists and political activists at the White House explicitly discussed how to keep the arts community in campaign mode to back Mr. Obama’s legislative agenda. An NEA grants official, Mario Garcia Durham, was at one such meeting for which the attendee list is public.

As those meetings occurred, Yosi Sergant, a key cog in the Obama campaign’s outreach to artists, was transferred from a position at the White House to a position as the communications director of the NEA. When the grant spigots opened at the NEA, more than $2 million went directly into the coffers of arts organizations (and their members) attending these meetings and publicly backing elements of the administration agenda.

Does that prove laws have been broken? Of course not. The worst appearances can be completely innocent. However, the administration’s assertions that Mr. Sergant acted alone (“unilaterally and without … approval or authorization” in Mr. Landesman’s words) and that the administration’s efforts were “completely unrelated” to grant-making are at odds with the facts. The public deserves more than bland reassurances.

A full investigation by both Congress and the NEA inspector general is the only way to bring this story to a close. Answers to these questions would be only a start:

c What was an NEA grants official doing at a White House political meeting? What other grants officials have been meeting with White House political officials?

c So far we know about a handful of conference calls last month and White House meetings last spring. Is this the full extent of the coordination between the White House political staff and the NEA?

c Has the grant-making process been compromised by politics? How were the brand-new stimulus grants insulated from politics? Were any of the safeguards circumvented?

c On the same day that Americans for the Arts, a lobbying organization that also runs a partisan Democratic political action committee, endorsed the key elements of the Obama health care plan, the president of the group met with Mr. Landesman, the new NEA chief. What happened at that meeting?

c Why was activist Yosi Sergant transferred from the White House to the NEA? Who made the decision?

From Day One of this story, Mr. Sergant’s statements, the NEA’s official statements and Mr. Landesman’s statements have been riddled with falsehoods and bluster. There’s no reason to take anything the NEA has said so far at face value.

Some Kind Of Busy

September 28, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Obama administration, Supreme Couty | Leave a Comment 

C-Span is offering, as a teaser of its upcoming week of programs about the Supreme Court, an excerpt from an interview with newly minted Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

When asked to describe, for the record, how she received the news of her appointment, Justice Sotomayor tells —very charmingly and well— a richly detailed story what what, taken on at least one level, is a comedy of errors.

She was told that POTUS would be making up his mind over the weekend, and that she could expect a call on Monday. Not surprisingly, she was in her office by the phone at 8 AM.  After waiting all day, the Judge finally called the White House to find out what was up.

She then delivers, in complete deadpan, this remarkable sentence:

“What I was told was that the President had got distracted with some other important business that was going on at the time…”

This could mean that (a) right up to the last minute the President was undecided regarding the nomination, (b) there was some incredibly sloppy staff work being done in the West Wing, or (c) POTUS is some kind of scary busy when the subject that had been obsessing the administration and the nation for the preceding few weeks suddenly gets upstaged to the point that he doesn’t even have the time to make the call to close the deal.

And if it’s (c) — then at least some inquiring minds would like to know just what that “other important business” was.

You can see the whole seven-minute excerpt here.

Supreme Court Week at C-Span begins next Sunday, 4 October.

Learn Or Repeat

September 25, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Afghanistan, History, Obama administration, Overseas Contingency Operation, War on Terror | 2 Comments 

Byron York’s column in today’s Washington Examiner is too powerful to paraphrase and too important to excerpt.

He examines some recent stories and finds a disturbing pattern:

There was an international uproar when, on Sept. 4, in Afghanistan’s Kunduz province, an American fighter jet under NATO command bombed a group of Taliban fighters who had hijacked two fuel tanker trucks. The trucks exploded, the fighters were killed, and so were a still-undetermined number of Afghan civilians.

The civilian deaths sent shudders through the American military command, already fearful that civilian casualties would further alienate the Afghan public. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, was said to be angry and determined to tighten the U.S. force’s already-strict rules of engagement even more to avoid future civilian deaths.

Then something odd happened. When McChrystal met with local leaders in Kunduz, a few days after the bombing, he got an earful — but not what he expected.

According to a detailed account in The Washington Post — a story that has received too little attention in the ongoing debate over U.S. policy in Afghanistan — the local Afghan leaders told McChrystal to stop being so fussy and to go ahead and kill the enemy, which they said would help bring stability to the region.

Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran was given extraordinary access to the bombing investigation. According to his account, McChrystal began the meeting with a show of sympathy for those who had been killed or wounded. The general didn’t get very far before he was interrupted by the provincial council chairman, Ahmadullah Wardak.

The security situation has been getting worse in Kunduz, Wardak told McChrystal. American and NATO troops haven’t been aggressive enough in pursuing and killing the Taliban. In Wardak’s view, the bombing of the fuel tankers, rather than a mistake, was the right thing to do.

“If we do three more operations like was done the other night, stability will come to Kunduz,” Wardak said, according to the Post account. “If people do not want to live in peace and harmony, that’s not our fault.”

Chandrasekaran reported that McChrystal “seemed caught off guard.” Wardak clarified a bit more: “We’ve been too nice to the thugs,” he said.

So instead of receiving an angry lecture on America’s disregard for Afghan life, the general received an angry lecture on America’s hesitance to go after the enemy.

Cut from that scene to a letter written to Sen. Susan Collins last July. It was from a New Portland, Maine, man named John Bernard, father of Lance Cpl. Joshua Bernard, then serving with the Marines in Afghanistan.

John Bernard, himself a 26-year veteran of the Marines, was enraged by the military’s new, restrictive rules of engagement in Afghanistan. The rules are “nothing less than disgraceful, immoral and fatal for our Marines, sailors and soldiers on the ground,” Bernard wrote. Under those rules, U.S. forces “without reinforcement, denial of fire support and refusal to allow them to hunt and kill the very enemy we are there to confront are nothing more than sitting ducks.”

The letter, disturbing at the time, became heartbreaking three weeks later, when Joshua Bernard was killed fighting the Taliban in Helmand province.

His death became national news when the Associated Press published a clearly inappropriate photo of Bernard as he lay wounded. But the bigger news should have been his father’s concerns about the rules of engagement.

Now cut again, this time to Sept. 8, when four U.S. Marines were killed when the Taliban ambushed their patrol in Kunar province. The Marines were taken completely by surprise and pinned down under heavy Taliban fire. McClatchy reporter Jonathan Landay was with them and wrote a harrowing account of their desperate battle to survive.

The rules of engagement again played a role. “U.S. commanders, citing new rules to avoid civilian casualties, rejected repeated calls to unleash artillery rounds at attackers dug into the slopes and treelines,” Landay wrote, “despite being told repeatedly that they weren’t near the village.”

President Obama is in the middle of a new reassessment of his original reassessment of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. The big question consuming the press is whether Obama will send more troops, and if so, how many. But what American troops are actually doing in Afghanistan is even more important.

Will the president listen to John Bernard, to the troops who are fighting under tight restrictions, and even to Ahmadullah Wardak? Will he let them fight the fight? It’s simply wrong to place Americans at risk otherwise.

The controversy over the publication of the photograph of  Lance Corporal Joshua Bernard’s battlefield death, against the wishes of his family,  ignored the letter written by his father to Senator Susan Collins a few weeks before.  John Bernard, a USMC veteran, had written that the rules of engagement in Afghanistan were “nothing less than disgraceful, immoral and fatal for our Marines, sailors and soldiers on the ground”.

A Community Organizer Takes On The World

September 25, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Annals of the Obama Administration, Barack Obama, Cuba, Domestic issues, Economic issues, History, Nixon Administration, Obama administration, Political Philosophy, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, UN | 2 Comments 

President Barack Obama’s visit to the United Nations this past week, complete with a major address and some quality time with a gavel, was yet another step in the process of seizing a much sought after role. For decades, U.S. presidents have routinely been referred to as leaders of the free world. For all practical and theoretical purposes now, though, the appellation “free” no longer applies.

We should now be saying that he’s the leader of the world, period.

Until now, the various elements of a particular president’s philosophy and methodology have usually been categorized dichotomously: domestic policy and foreign policy. And since they both involve issues that seldom fly that close to each other – except for matters of trade – the occupants of the Oval Office have generally been analyzed and graded on them separately by historians.

The prevailing wisdom is that a particular president may have been strong on one and weak on the other. Rare was the leader who got high marks for what he did here as well as his approach to things abroad. Sometimes it had to do with passion. Richard Nixon was fascinated with foreign policy, seeing it as the premier role for a president. And in spite of a solid domestic record (which was impressive in some areas), the 37th President is largely rated highly for his achievements on the international stage.

Even for those who seemed to be effective both domestically and diplomatically, there were few similarities in philosophy and methodology between the two vastly different arenas. That is, until now.

Mr. Obama has a philosophy that runs as a common thread between his approaches to everything he touches from the U.S. economy, to national security, and even, yes, foreign policy. What is this important piece of the puzzle? Simple. Though he pays lip service to one of the most basic issues of human nature and how people relate to and interact with each other on a micro or macro scale, his actions actually minimize – or at least, marginalize – a fundamental instinct common to every person, group, community, and nation on the earth.

Self-interest.

The call du jour from the mountaintop at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is for all of us to rise above, or in new age parlance “transcend,” mere mortal self-interest. On the domestic level this means that capitalism – a mean, primal, greedy, and materialistic approach to economics that steals from the poor to give to the rich – must be replaced (slowly, but surely) with a more enlightened approach; one that emphasizes social justice and the equitable distribution of wealth.

This is all the rage these days. It may be called “progressive,” but it’s really a barely-if-at-all disguised form of socialism. If it walks like a duck, it’s a duck. If it digests food like a goose, it’s…well.

Never mind that this naïve experiment has never really worked well anywhere, and instead of practicing “to each according to need; from each according to ability,” it actually devolves into “to each according to need; from each according to lack thereof.” As Margaret Thatcher famously said: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

You also start running out of freedom. Planned economies involve a construct where the individual trades (wittingly, or not) liberty for some perceived value – all supposedly accomplished on the wings of so-called better angels. The bigger the wings and more aggressive the planners, the greater is the loss of freedom. Capitalism, on the other hand, though often accused of being selfish and cynical, recognizes man’s inbred propensity for selfishness and taps into it.

The father of capitalism, Adam Smith, who wrote An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776, referred to this as a “system of natural liberty.” And flaws, cycles, weaknesses aside, it has worked pretty well here in our country. This approach to economics is, in fact, woven into the national fabric.

Everyone gets free healthcare in Cuba. But it’s a good thing there, because the average wage earner in that nation makes less than $30.00 per month, including the doctors. And three out of four workers in that country – where a little more than 50 years ago economic development was the highest in Latin America and advanced even by European standards – now work for the public sector (read: the government tab).

But don’t hold your breath while waiting for Michael Moore to make a movie entitled, “Cuba: A Sad Story.” His current movie, a rant about the evils of capitalism, will be released next week in theaters. Of course, Moore wouldn’t make a movie, or do anything for that matter, out of self-interest. Would he?

It’s no secret if you want a high standard of living in countries with planned economies (the collective version of fixed incomes) you go to work for the government. As you climb the ladder you get better Dachas. This was only true here in the U.S. during the days of the Great Depression and New Deal.

Of course, in fairness, the anti-capitalists are just getting started.

On the international front, lip service may be paid here and there to the concept of national self-interest, as when Mr. Obama told the good old boys and girls at the United Nations the other day: “Now, like all of you, my responsibility is to act in the interest of my nation and my people, and I will never apologize for defending those interests.” However, one just knows that a big fat conjunction is coming signaling the real point: “But,” (see, I told you) “it is my deeply held belief that in the year 2009 – more than at any point in human history – the interests of nations and peoples are shared.”

Really?

The president’s hyperbolic assignation of this year notwithstanding, is it even remotely true that China or Russia share our interests? And even leaving the roguish states out of the discussion, is it at all realistic to ask any nation to act against, or in any way minimize, its own interest – no matter how compelling or romantic the call? And is it even just a little bit ironic that in a speech with the line, “No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation,” our president calls everyone to follow the magnanimous lead of America, now that the Bush administration has been replaced with a collection of more responsible political gnostics?

President Obama does not have separate principles for his domestic and foreign policy approaches. There is one common thread. It’s out with the old and presumably outdated self-interest and in with a brand new era of quasi-utopian-top-down-we-know-best-because-we-are-enlightened peace and prosperity.

Let bells all over the world ring as empathy breaks out all over.

“The time has come to realize that the old habits, the old arguments, are irrelevant to the challenges faced by our people,” President Obama told the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday. But as ambitious and idealistic – even resonant to some – as such a statement is, the fact is that our fundamental nature as human beings has not changed throughout the course of history. Technology has changed, knowledge has increased, landscapes have morphed, and kingdoms and nations have come and gone, but as the Shakespeare of the prophets recorded six centuries before Christ:

All flesh is grass, and the goodliness there of is as the flower of the field: the grass withereth, the flower fadeth… – Isaiah 40:6-7

The simple, resilient, and undeniable fact is that self-interest is here to stay as long as the world turns. And any philosophy or vision, utopian or otherwise, that fails to take this fact into account, is doomed to failure.

In the waning days of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, he would sometimes lie awake at night worrying about things; the war, his Great Society dreams, and even his own health (his father died relatively young, and Johnson feared the same fate). Occasionally he’d wander the halls finding his way to a portrait of Woodrow Wilson, a man who had been at the pinnacle of power and influence, only to be eventually devastated emotionally and physically by events and the pressures of his office.

LBJ wondered if he’d wind up the same way. After all, didn’t he just want something better for everyone – a higher standard of living and a world safe and at peace? And, hadn’t he been described as a colossus and the most powerful president since FDR, just a few years earlier?

Mark Twain used to say that “history never repeats itself, but it rhymes.” He was right. The cycles of history are not exact, but one time can resemble another and often does.

And one of history’s most enduring lessons is that if anyone begins a visionary journey with dreams and even ideals that fail to take into account the simple fact that people, businesses, communities (organized or otherwise), nations, and groupings of nations all share a passion for themselves, it is like starting with the premise that 2+2=5. This may only seem to be a small error, but when carried out exponentially it becomes a monstrosity.

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

September 24, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Obama administration, Presidents | Leave a Comment 

A face in the crowd: the “above the fold” photo from the UN Security Council meeting on The New York Times‘ website this morning.

First and foremost, there can be no prestige without mystery, for familiarity breeds contempt.  All religions have their tabernacles, and no man is a hero to his valet.  In the designs, the demeanor, and the mental operations of a leader there must always be ‘something’ which others cannot altogether fathom, which puzzles the, stirs them, and rivets their attention…aloofness, character, and the personification of quietness, these qualities it is that surround with prestige those who are prepared to carry a burden that is too heavy for lesser mortals.

—Charles de Gaulle in The Edge of the Sword

Bob Greene, Richard Nixon, Civility, And Mystique

September 21, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Healthcare, Hillary Clinton, Interviews, News media, Nixon Administration, Nixon in the News, Obama administration, Presidents, Public Opinion, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, TV News, U.S. History, Vietnam | 3 Comments 

Yesterday, Bob Greene – the veteran journalist, not Oprah’s trainer – wrote a column for CNN.com about the nation’s winter of partisan discontent. (Well, yes, it is September, but the air did get perceptively colder this morning.)

For decades, Greene’s column at the Chicago Sun-Times, then the Chicago Tribune, was syndicated across the country, and many of his two dozen books were bestsellers. Seven years ago this week, a scandalous incident from 1988 involving a female high-school reporter surfaced and resulted in Greene’s dismissal from the Tribune. Since then he has maintained a much lower profile, but from time to time he still has unexpected and fairly perceptive things to say.

Sunday’s column opens with a reference to high-school “chicken” races. As longtime readers of Greene know, the days of his adolescence in the early 1960s, and his childhood memories of the 1950s, are never far away from his mind, so the allusion to Rebel Without A Cause is not unexpected. Then he draws a comparison between teenagers frantically racing toward a collision, and the intensity of the current debate over health care and “big government.” Greene expresses the view that when compared to the feelings generated in the last few months, even the arguments surrounding the 2008 election seem to evoke a vanishing atmosphere of civility.

To prove this point, he tells of traveling the country last fall, asking various ordinary Joes (plumbers or not) and Janes whether they planned to vote for then-Senator Barack Obama or Senator John McCain – and then asking them what they found to admire in the man they did not plan to vote for. He quotes an Obama voter who, not unexpectedly, admired McCain’s fortitude as a POW in Vietnam, and a McCain voter who observed that Obama was energetic, charismatic, intelligent. “People seemed to welcome this exercise,” says Greene, but then he glumly muses: “Somehow, it feels that a similar experiment would be doomed to failure now,” and that “it feels like we’re all in one of those old hot-rod movies[....], speeding straight toward each other’s headlights.” And then he wonders what can be done about it:

One answer may be found in an unlikely place — in words spoken by the most divisive political figure of his era.

Richard Nixon, in his first inaugural address during a time of widespread public rage in the United States, talked about “reaching with magnificent precision for the moon, but falling into raucous discord on earth.”

Nixon’s presidency would end in shambles. But on its first day, here is what he said about how to soothe the anger that was consuming the nation:

“To find that answer, we need only look within ourselves. … To lower our voices would be a simple thing.”

Some people’s feelings about Nixon undoubtedly cloud their opinion of everything he ever did. Yet what he said as he took office in a time of nonstop partisan conflict is worth considering as we pass through similar days:

“In these difficult years, America has suffered from a fever of words; from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic rhetoric that postures instead of persuading.

“We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another — until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.”

Bob Greene has thought about RN’s life, and the lessons to be learned from it, for a long time. Indeed, in his mid-twenties he covered the 1972 campaign and wrote a book about it, Running. a decade later, he scored a one-on-one interview with the ex-President, which stretched over several of his columns and is included in his 1985 book Cheeseburgers, and extensively excerpted in his 2004 book Fraternity: A Journey In Search Of Five Presidents.

In that interview, Nixon reflected at some length about how a President should be perceived by the public. He told Greene: “A president must not be one of the crowd. He must maintain a certain figure. People want him to be that way. They don’t want him to be down there saying, `Look, I’m the same as you.’ . . .In all the years I was in the White House, I never recall running around in a sport shirt, let alone a T-shirt. Or sneakers and the rest.”

When RN said this, he had in mind leaders he greatly admired like Charles De Gaulle of France, Konrad Adenauer of West Germany, or Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore – men whose rather austere and remote personal style nonetheless commanded enormous respect and admiration from their countrymen (or, as would be said now, countrypersons). While this sort of political style has generally been less admired by American voters, as the careers of John Quincy Adams – or Richard Nixon – demonstrate, there’s no doubt that most Americans do want their Presidents not to be too folksy or too accessible to the public. Dwight Eisenhower certainly struck the right balance. He was from middle-class, heartland America – but he was not “the same as” the ordinary voter. Ronald Reagan, as “down-home” as he could be, was always meticulous about keeping a certain mystique around his personality.

In the case of Barack Obama, the mystique has started to fall away, in a rapid and, for many of his followers, disillusioning manner. Twelve days ago he delivered a speech before Congress on health care which, in itself, was a good effort at rallying the nation to his cause, though far from a grand slam or a home run – more like a double. Then the Congressional leadership became preoccupied with punishing Rep. Joe Wilson for shouting “You lie!” during the address, and forced a vote on the matter which seemed to many Americans like an exercise in pointless overkill. Obama’s latter-day Brain Trust seemed aware of this, but no one in the Capitol Hill Democratic leadership was bothering to take heed of their concerns.

Today, Newsweek.com has a blogpost about the latest poll data. It turns out that most of the surveys do find an increase in Obama’s favorability ratings following the speech – but by one or two or, in CNN.com’s survey, five points, from 53 to 58. Compare this to the polls following Richard Nixon’s November 3, 1969 speech on Vietnam, when 77 percent of Americans expressed support for his policies – a spectacular rise from the President’s numbers before the speech. Even Jimmy Carter’s notorious “malaise” speech in 1979 temporarily lifted his approval rating from 25 to 37 percent, before the Iranian hostage crisis lowered it for good.

Last weekend President Obama, evidently wishing to build on what small momentum his speech generated, took the unprecedented step – for a President, anyway – of appearing on five Sunday-morning talk shows on the same day: NBC’s Meet The Press, CBS’s Face The Nation, ABC’s This Week, CNN’s State Of The Union (formerly Late Edition) and Univision’s Al Punto.

This garnered the President the distinction of having achieved something approaching what media folk call a “full Ginsburg.” Back in 1998, in the first frenzied Sunday after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, that ex-intern’s attorney, William Ginsburg, appeared on the first four of the aforementioned shows as well as Fox News Sunday. This achievement remained unique for about five years, then Vice President Cheney duplicated it, to be followed by then-Senator John Edwards (during his weeks as Sen. John Kerry’s running-mate) and then-DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff. The last to manage it was then-Senator Hillary Clinton in the fall of 2007 when she was still the Democratic presidential nominee-apparent (and, in the minds of many in the media, virtually the President-elect).

But it’s one thing for even a Vice-President to undertake such a feat – and another for a President to think he has to make the rounds of the talking-heads programs. (Or, for that matter, the talk shows – if the Chief Executive feels he needs to make his case on The Late Show With David Letterman as I write this, can Carson Daly or Chelsea Handler be that far behind?) When that President pointedly declines to appear on Fox News Sunday, apparently because the network decided not to broadcast his speech to Congress, the semblance of a mystique certainly diminishes, and some, like Dwight Schwab of examiner.com, are even ready to compare Obama’s quarrel with Fox to Nixon’s difficult relationship with the networks. (For me, another analogy comes more readily to mind – former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura’s honeymoon with the media in 1998 that so rapidly turned sour. But that’s a subject for another post.)

So it makes sense for President Obama to try to follow in the path RN outlined in that first inaugural – a path RN himself found difficult to follow, because of the polarization that he inherited – and also to maintain an image befitting a President instead of a Sunday-morning regular. The right approach for him is not to start thinking about going on Olbermann, Matthews, King and Maddow – or Conan, Colin, and the two Jimmies – on the same night, but instead to focus on the effectiveness of getting his message across on the stage that only a President can command.

Gander Sauce Now Appearing On White House Menu

September 21, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, National Security, News media, Nixon Administration, Obama administration, Presidents, Public Opinion | Leave a Comment 

From the earliest days of RN’s administration he was plagued with leaks of highly classified material that ended up in the media.

RN condemned the leaks as undermining his ability to end the war and conduct the nation’s foreign policy.

The anti-war establishment justified them as acts of conscience, and the media celebrated them as examples of a free press at work and doing its very best.

Now everything old is new again, and it will be interesting to see how President Obama deals with the leaks that are already causing him problems.  The most serious appeared today as a story by Bob Woodward on the front page of the Washington Post:

The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan warns in an urgent, confidential assessment of the war that he needs more forces within the next year and bluntly states that without them, the eight-year conflict “will likely result in failure,” according to a copy of the 66-page document obtained by The Washington Post.

Gen Stanley A. McChrystal says emphatically: “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.”

His assessment was sent to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Aug. 30 and is now being reviewed by President Obama and his national security team.

How will —how can?— the President maintain his former equanimity regarding leaks now that he is actually in charge and his policies will be at risk because of them?  Will the goose sauce he dished out so liberally as a Senator and a candidate be so tasty now that he’s the gander?

RN knew how the  accumulation of leaks had driven LBJ into an increasingly narrow corner.

In RN, he vividly recalled his visit with Johnson at the White House  on 12 December 1968:

I sat on one of the sofas in front of the fireplace in the Oval Office while he sat in the king-size rocking chair that he had brought in to replace Kennedy’s smaller one…..

Jabbing his finger at my chest, his voice raised, he said, “Let me tell you, Dick, I would have been a damn fool to have discussed major decisions with the full Cabinet present, because I knew that if I said something in the morning, you could sure as hell bet it would appear in the afternoon papers.  It’s the same thing with the National Security Council.  Everybody there’s got their damned deputies and note-takers with them sitting along the wall.  I will warn you now, the leaks can kill you.”

But RN didn’t take LBJ’s advice to hunker down and only deal with a minimum of aides; and he was soon being threatened with the death of a thousand leaks.

The leaks began almost with the start of my administration, and before long I experienced firsthand the anger, worry, and frustration that Johnson had described.  In the first five months of my presidency at least twenty-one major stories based on leaks from materials in the NSC files appeared in New York and Washington newspapers.  A CIA report listed forty-five newspaper articles in 1969 that contained serious breaches of secrecy.

Within a matter of days after the NBS held its first meeting on the Middle East on February 1, the details of the discussion that had taken place were leaked to the press.  Eisenhower, whom I had personally briefed on this meeting, considered any leak of classified foreign policy information, whether in war or peace, treasonable.  When he saw the news story he telephoned Kissinger and warned him in no uncertain terms.  “Tighten your shop,” he said.  “Get rid of people if you have to, but don’t let this go on.”

Not only did it go on; a trickle became a tsunami.

Today, forty years later, leaks are an inevitable part of the Washington scene, where agendas and egos first mix, then match, and then go looking for a friendly reporter.

It will be interesting to see how the Democrats, so long used to enjoying the leaks undermining and embarrassing the Republicans, will handle this particular reality of the power they now possess.

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