The Republic of Dissent

The limits of political magic

Ah!:

In truth Mr Obama’s problems extend well beyond the confines of the capital’s Beltway. The president’s headache is that his winning majority resembles the hamlet in “Brigadoon”. It exists all right, twice sending him to the White House. But, like that Highland village, it is hard to see or touch most of the time. (...) The magic at the heart of Mr Obama’s two victories was his ability to expand the electorate itself, mobilising sporadic voters who shun politics most of the time, notably the young and minorities. Now that he is no longer on the ballot, his loose coalition risks being no match for the intense ideologues who fight and oversee Washington’s partisan battles.

 

Softness and diplomacy

From Vali Nasr, author of a new book on Obama's foreign policy The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat:

The White House was ever afraid that the young Democratic president would be seen as ‘soft’ (...) It did not want to try anything as audacious as diplomacy. It was an art lost on America’s top decision makers.

Race conscious

From Denis Lacorne: 

The most popular French politician is Barack Obama. Nearly 80 percent of the French would vote for him if they were given the opportunity! The traditional, white, Catholic or secular elites are not really representative of the new French reality: an immigrant society, in which traditional religions are fast disappearing; an ethnically and religiously pluralistic society, which finds more affinities with a black U.S. president than with native, white French presidents. But French society is not as race conscious as its American counterpart. Barack Obama sees himself as an "African American," and this is the category he chose in the 2010 Census form that was submitted to him. For the French, who prohibit the use of racial categories in the census, Obama is simply un métis, a mestizo, a multiracial individual, like many young Frenchmen. He is, in other words, "one of us."

A powerful speech and then nothing as usual!

From Helen Epstein :

The administration’s neglect of human rights in Africa is a great disappointment, since the president began his first term by laying out ambitious new goals for the continent. In July 2009, when his presidency was only six months old, Barack Obama delivered a powerful speech at Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, the point from which millions of African slaves were shipped across the Atlantic. He called on African countries to end the tyranny of corruption that affects so many of their populations, and to build strong institutions that serve the people and hold leaders accountable. The speech seemed to extend the message of his much-discussed Cairo address a month earlier, in which he called for a new beginning for Muslim relations with the West, based on non-violence and mutual respect. Many thought that the policies of the new president, himself of Kenyan descent, would depart from those of the Bush administration, which provided a great deal of development aid to Africa, but paid scant attention to human rights.

After more than four years in office, however, Obama has done little to advance the idealistic goals of his Ghana speech.

Oh Well as the one himself once said words matter and the trouble here starts with the fact that having an 'african' policy doesn't mean much for there is no africa. Moreover, the saddest fact  is that reality when it comes to Obama's deeds in countries on the african continent doesn't matter because of the worst and most dangerous anti-intellectual form of identity politics.

I bet that at least some Nigeriens are happy to have a drone base in Niamey.

Obama as a militaristic social democrat

I disagree partly with Professor Bainbridge on this:

Obviously, Obama is no socialist. But ask me if I think he's a (surprisingly militaristic) social democrat and you'll get an affirmative answer, which in my book makes him a lot more of a liberal on domestic issues than any other modern Democratic president.

I don't think Obama's militarism is surprising at all for it takes guts, audacity to be anything else these days in American presidential politics and Obama is only audacious in his speeches; furthermore Obama's liberalism is both a fantasy and an glitzy accessory used to keep him fashionable.

Excessive trust in one's own judgment

Sugary excerpt of the day from Conor Friedersdorf:

Obama and [John] Brennan may both be more thoughtful men than most, as their supporters argue. The problem with both is their excessive trust in their own judgment. A prudent person does not trust himself with the unchecked power to kill in secret, nor does he trust the executive branch with so extreme an unchecked power in a system constructed around checks and balances.

Our era is the one of Me so nothing new here.

 

 

 

The “Yes We Can” president

From Arundhati Roy:

What good are weapons if they aren’t going to be used in wars? Weapons are absolutely essential; it’s not just for oil or natural resources, but for the military-industrial complex itself to keep going that we need weapons.

Today, as we speak, the U.S., and perhaps China and India, are involved in a battle for control of the resources of Africa. Thousands of U.S. troops, as well as death squads, are being sent into Africa. The “Yes We Can” president has expanded the war from Afghanistan into Pakistan. There are drone attacks killing children on a regular basis there.

Well, America and the world for that matter love charlatans who are solely great orators!

 

 

Convinced of their own goodness

From Glenn Greenwald:

Political leaders and political movements convinced of their own Goodness are usually those who need greater, not fewer, constraints in the exercise of power. That's because - like religious True Believers - those who are convinced of their inherent moral superiority can find all manner to justify even the most corrupted acts on the ground that they are justified by the noble ends to which they are put, or are cleansed by the nobility of those perpetrating those acts.

Political factions driven by self-flattering convictions of their own moral superiority - along with their leaders - are the ones most likely to abuse power. Anyone who ever listened to Bush era conservatives knows that this conviction drove them at their core ("you are with us or with the Terrorists"), and it is just as true of Obama-era progressives who genuinely see the political landscape as an overarching battle between forces of Good (Democrats: i.e., themselves) and forces of Evil (Republicans).

Well, four more years...Bush + Obama = ?

Moral distance

I agree with professor Bainbridge on this:

After all, the moral distance between Bush and Obama has gotten quite narrow.

Benghazi and nothingness

Sugary excerpt of the day from Democracy in America :

The Obama administration could not rationally have believed it would have derived any benefit from inaccurately claiming the attack on the Benghazi consulate grew out of a demonstration; why on earth would they engage in a cover-up of something that makes no difference?

Mainstream

Sugary excerpt from Philip Delves Broughton:

Perhaps the greatest shock of his second term will be the hardening realisation that Obama’s reality is not his rhetoric. He is a very mainstream, and not uncommonly partisan Democratic haggler, who will become more so the longer he stays in office.

I have to admit that it is hard to accept the fact that America doesn't like reality.  Sometimes, I wish that Amerians were more French than they are and can probably ever be.

Falling back on identity

From Sean Collins at Spiked:

In a campaign devoid of ideas, people fell back on identity. Obama’s victory was a victory for the Democrats’ strategy of winning on social values and cohering support among women and minorities, an approach which was very pronounced at their national convention in September.

Identity politics is very much the present and the future of not only American politics, but of world politics. That said, I think Obama's victory was impressive!

The new normal

From llya Somin:

Obama’s reelection victory cements the idea that having an African-American president is normal.

Ah America and its love of symbols to avoid hard work and harsh/difficult questions!

Just the facts

I never agree with Erick Dickinson, but this is a special night and he is right when he says this:

The Obama campaign ran a very good campaign. The Republicans did not. There was no fraud. There was no stealing the election. There was just a really good ground game from Barack Obama and a lot of smoke and mirrors from Team Romney and outside charlatans, many of whom will now go work for Republican Super PACs making six figure salaries, further draining the pockets of rich Republicans when not on television explaining how awesome and expert they are. Whether you can bring yourself to say it or not, like it or not, Barack Obama is, today, your President.

Obama is the POTUS, I wish he wasn't so, but it is, accepting it is essential for a healthier political debate in America

4 more years!

Obama won!

So? I have no idea, but Obama kicked Romney's you know what by showing him that he may not be able to run a country, but he knows how to run a campaign.  I'm impressed!

For the sake of the US, let's hope Obama II is better than Obama I.

Wow, I expected it to be closer. I guess Romney just learned that to be inauthentic and successful in politics, you have to be a transcendent figure and be willing to stand for something.  

Tiny gains

From Ana Marie Cox:

The No 1 force moving America forward is the inertia of tiny gains. But, by golly, those add up: there's a black man in the White House – and that can never ever be undone.

Ahh the soft bigotry of little dreams and symbolic nothings as George W.  Bush might have said!

Monsieur What if

From Mickey Kaus:

I’ve never written this before, but it’s hard not to be annoyed at the allegedly neoliberal Chicago-born journalists (including some of my friends) who helped foist Obama on the nation.  Wasn’t it clear to them, as it is to us now, that he didn’t have the experience you’d want a president to have? It’s not just that he didn’t realize there were no “shovel ready” projects, as he jokingly admitted to one of the Chicagoans, Jonathan Alter. (Ha ha! So funny.) It’s that he hadn’t acquired a capacity for legislative wheedling or a facility for public explication. He was promoted too far too fast (yes, because of his race. Duh.). Worse, as Peggy Noonan notes, he has shown little public inclination to admit error or adjust course (though I’ve heard some slightly more encouraging stories from ex-aides).

Kaus is right except that quoting Noonan obscures and cheapens his argument.

Obama is Monsieur What if, that incredible athlete who got there because he scored the goal that won the game, has an amazing personal story, became the One because he seized the day, but is never going to have the time to reach his potential as an athlete because he will be out of the game when he has matured because fate made him an offer he could not refuse.

Obama is going to make an awesome former president tomorrow (not going to happen), but more than likely four years from now.

Silver linings or not...

Best stuff I read all weekend on Nate Silver's assertion that there is a 80.9% chance that Obama will win Tuesday's election and is thus, the favorite, from Justin Fox :

Silver has repeatedly, and not very convincingly, tried to explain his percentage forecasts in the context of a football game: Romney is behind, but could still win with a last-minute touchdown. The problem with this metaphor — as, of course, Silver has acknowledged — is that we don't actually know the score of the game. We're standing outside the stadium and guessing the score based on crowd noise. So the source of uncertainty resides at least as much in the potential for mismeasurement as in the potential for last-minute game changers.

What Silver's 80.9% forecast technically means is that, if the Obama-Romney 2012 election were contested 1000 times, he thinks Obama would win 809 of them. This is a way of thinking derived from games of chance, which is where modern ideas about probability originated. In poker or blackjack or roulette or craps, you can (until you run out of money) repeat many iterations of the same gamble. But this particular election is only being contested once. So the closest approximation to the games-of-chance approach would be to expect that, if Silver forecasts four-fifths odds of victory in five different elections, he should correctly pick the winner four times. That's a ridiculously tiny sample size, though. You'd really want to look at dozens or hundreds of elections to judge Silver's reliability. Maybe, if he keeps doing this for another couple of decades, we'll be able to judge him by that standard. In the meantime, it's Silver's reasoning that probably offers the best clues to whether his forecasts are credible.

I agree with both Silver and Fox.

Obama, failed progressive

From Clive Crook:  

(...) if Obama loses this election, it won't be for what many will say are the obvious reasons -- because the economy is weak and Obama's an African-American. It'll be because he ran as a failed progressive rather than a successful centrist.

I don't even think that Obama is a successful centrist, although he is for sure not a progressive...

 

Where Africa is

From Howard W. French:

And across Africa, a feeling of letdown at the Obama administration’s lack of engagement with the continent is palpable. Because of his background, expectations were higher for the incumbent president in this regard than they have been for perhaps any of his predecessors.

After a rousing early trip to Ghana in the summer of 2009, where he praised that fast-growing country’s maturing democracy and summoned African leaders to serve their populations better Obama has all but abandoned direct personal engagement with the sub-Saharan portion of the continent, squandering his great potential for strong personal connections with the continent and the soft power benefits that go with it.

This is more than a personal story, though. The reason why American leaders tend to ignore Africa is linked to a traditional belief, deeply seated in our foreign policy establishment’s mindset, that the United States has no vital interests in the continent. An important associated thought is that Africa can only and forever be a burden, with the US called upon to foot the bill when major crises erupt there.

Africa isn't a country! That is the essential part of the problem.  Howard French, Barack Obama and most Americans and people think that it is. 

It's still Bush's world

Best comment on last night's debate from Gregor Peter Schmitz over at Spiegel:

Romney and Obama exchanged carefully prepared platitudes as though they were trapped in a world order created for them by White House predecessor George W. Bush.(...) Indeed, it appears as though Stevens' death in election year 2012 has been enough to overshadow the killing of Osama bin Laden and several other top terrorists from al-Qaida and other networks. It has been enough to keep America fixated on the war on terror and preoccupied with the Middle East.

The paradox of this fixation shown by both candidates is that neither Obama nor Romney have shown a real interest in the Muslim world. Despite overtures early in his term, the president did little thereafter to ensure that progress was made. The only regional issue that appears to be high on his priority list is Iran's nuclear program. Romney's plan for the region appears to consist almost entirely of unconditional support for Israel. Both candidates want to continue using drones unhindered.

There is so much cause for concern and the scariest thing is the paralysis of the American media.

Drones and the final debate

I agree totally with Tony Junod on this:

We have been told, many times, that each killing carried out by the administration is accompanied by vigorous and even agonized debate about its legality, advisability, efficacy, and morality. That debate, however has remained staunchly internal — has remained secret — and it has become clear that the only way to find out what our two presidential candidates think about the implications of the Lethal Presidency is to ask them, tonight, at the debate in Florida. President Obama has limited his comments to all but the most self-serving circumstance, and Governor Romney has spoken only through inference and through the often confounding comments of his foreign-policy surrogates. Bob Schieffer should know that if he does not ask a question about targeted killing tonight, he is — we are — unlikely to get another chance.

Unfortunately,the main concern of most journalists and of most Americans is to protect America by whichever means necessary. Thus, until Americans feel secure, they are going to be willing to let the president do whatever it takes to keep them safe even if they sense that the means used are wrong and will mean apologizing and regretting them in the future. 

Token hires

Interesting stuff from Jennifer Vanasco: 

Most every story covering the debate mentioned how Romney’s “binders full of women” instantly became a social media meme, including a snarky Tumblr, an anti-Romney Facebook page, a website bought by a Democratic group, and a proliferation of original songs or mashups on YouTube.

Some good reporting from the Associated Press revealed that Romney actually didn’t ask for those resumes - instead, he was approached by the Massachusetts Government Appointments Project, a coalition of women’s groups that had requested and culled them because they were trying to boost “the number of women in top state government jobs.” However, a terrific Washington Post opinion piece explored why, even if Romney had requested the binders, the fact that he didn’t know any qualified women offhand from his days at Bain Capital suggests that he thinks of women as token hires. Writer Jena McGregor says that his answer during the debate gave the impression “that he thinks such groups [as MassGAP] hold the keys to special ‘binders full of women’ who can’t otherwise be found through normal human-resources channels such as leadership development programs, succession plans, and internal and external recruiting.’”

My only question about the issue is whether acknowledging the problem isn't as important as trying to fix it.  The question is in my view critical because I believe that both parties treat women as children who can vote and who will always value candy (pun intended) over anything else

. It may be small of me, but I don't believe that just because Obama is pro-choice and pro-equal pa he is more pro-women (what does that mean?) than Romney.

Frog pajamas

From Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash:

Today Obama follows Clinton's path as another useful idiot of Wall Street, relying on their stoolie Tim Geithner for his hands-off policies towards the big banks. 

So where is the real progressive alternative to Obama's GOP-lite policies?

I like to repeat a little too much my contenton that Obama represents Clintonism with a black  multiracial face and that the problem with that is that we are not in 1992 and that he hasn't learned from the failures of Clintonism because he doesn't have to...

Guess who's back?

What about the second debate? Well before its start, I wrote:

Obama will be proclaimed just seconds after the end of the debate, the comeback kid unless the sky falls over or Derek Jeter miraculously recovers and leads the Yankees to a win over the Tigers.

I was right, but the most disturbing aspect of it all is the predictability of the post-debate commentary, which just drowns out the already meager substance of the process. I hated the format and the fact that the candidates were debating in New York instead of a swing state. But at least, Robert Wright is happy.

So? Obama still has a slight edge for until Romney proves that he can win Ohio, he will just have to accept that he is going to lose a close race.     

 

Losing the vision thing

I agree with John Holbo on this:

[Ezra] Klein asks: when did Obama lose ‘the vision thing’? He thinks Obama had it in 2008, but it’s worth considering the counter-hypothesis that it was lost long before. Free and Cantril documented loss of liberal mojo in their 1967 book, based on survey data from the 1964 election. ‘Americans are philosophical conservatives but operational liberals.’ If that’s how it goes in 2012, that just goes to show how it goes, for the past half century.

 

Debate, second round

Robert Wrght on what Obama needs to do tonight:

So Obama has to do two things on Tuesday: (1) convert the new "smooth, sure footed Mitt" meme into the "suspiciously slick Mitt" meme--get Romney's energetic, articulate self-assurance, which so wowed people in the first debate, to start creeping them out; and (2) drive home the "heartless plutocrat" meme in spades.

Honestly, I think that Obama is going to be great tonight, but I think that what matters is how good or bad Romney will/appear to be comparing to him.  If the question after the debate is about Romney's inability to relate then he 'lost' the debate, but if it is about the fact that  he didn't cede any ground to the Potus, then he will be fine until he loses barely on election night.

My prediction: Obama will be proclaimed just seconds after the end of the debate, the comeback kid unless the sky falls over or Derek Jeter miraculously recovers and leads the Yankees to a win over the Tigers.     

Mess and accountability

I agree with Walter Meade on this:

But there is a larger failure in Libya. Just as George W. Bush couldn’t dodge responsibility for the decision to go to war in Iraq on the basis of nukes that never showed up, President Obama owns the Libya mess in which the attack in Bengazi was just an incident—as Abu Ghraib was an incident in Bush’s war. Libya, thankfully, is nowhere near as big of a mess as Iraq, but even as President Obama mulls the possibility of retaliatory strikes, it’s not clear that we won’t get sucked further in. And if anything, this president should have learned from Bush’s experience in Iraq: overthrowing governments in the Middle East when you don’t know what comes next is a dangerous hobby.

Clinton can’t deflect final responsibility for that decision from President Obama, and she can’t cover over the mess that has the United States now puzzling over how to fight Al Qaeda and its allies in Mali as well as in Libya — or how to respond to the increase in terrorist strength in Niger and Nigeria to boot. This is a real mess and a serious one, and it flows from a set of poor decisions that the President and no other person made.

Why do I have the feeling that this is the beginning of something awful precisely because American foreign policy is just manufactured badly? 

 

4 ans de plus...

From Lexington, a scene at an Obama Rally:

Just before the president spoke, a hip-hop singer and producer, will.i.am, popped up on a small podium to the side of the main stage, nattily turned out in a velvet smoking jacket, pale bowtie, tight jeans and tartan, crested slippers.

It requires a certain swagger to pull off such a look in broad daylight, in front of a crowd of 15,000 people who mostly came to hear a political speech, but he pulled it off, mixing very loud dance tracks with calls to re-elect the president and suggestions that America should invest in education in order to gain market share in high-tech manufacturing. “I want my iPhone made in the USA, I want my computer made in the USA,” he chanted. “I want my education made in the USA.” At this point, sensing a muted reaction from the crowd, he stopped the music, and challenged his audience. You don’t want your education made in the USA, he demanded to know? Here of all places? (...)At the grassy oval of OSU in Columbus, the musician was encountering a different reaction. “Four more, four more, four more years,” called the singer from his podium, urging the crowd to chant and raise their hands. Only scattered hands rose. Many more remained stolidly watchful. Only a few children danced with abandon to the music, scampering around a fenced-off lawn. Four more years is a less stirring rallying cry that “yes we can”, especially after a first term in which even staunch Obama partisans have learned that, in the real world, their idol often cannot.

The saddest thing about it all is that America remains the land where people seriously and faithfully believe that a billionaire can marry a hooker and live happily ever after or  that a politician can magically transform a country without citizens doing any of the hard work.

Spoiled brats!

Ian Leslie demonstrates that Obamabots and Obamaniacs are mostly spoiled brats who can't stand disappointment and failure:

It must have been hard for the people who have been busting guts to get him reelected, and who have done such an exceptional job to get him into pole position, to watch their candidate step in and screw it up all by himself. It must be depressing for all the volunteers in swing states who have been knocking on doors and throwing themselves into a cause for which they feel, in their heart of hearts, less enthusiastic than they did last time - because it turns out the man on whose behalf they're working appears even less enthusiastic than they are.

An Obama email to supporters this week was entitled "I can't do this on my own". To which Andrew Sullivan, one of the president's most influential and passionate supporters in the media, replied, "Oh, yes you can, Mr President. You just did. All by yourself. And we watched you live."

Come on! Obama is neither perfect nor exceptional! Get over already it and accept his faults! Give the guy a break, he is just another bad president not Michael Jordan refusing to play basketball to be a baseball player!

Core beliefs

Sugary excerpt of the day from Hendrik Hertzberg:

All the evidence indicates that Romney has no “core beliefs” beyond a gauzy assumption that the business of America is business and an unshakable, utterly sincere conviction that he, Mitt Romney, ought to be President, deserves to be President, and, for the sake of the country, must be President. His ideological rootlessness, which excites the mistrust of the Republican hard right, is what makes him the most dangerous opponent Obama could have drawn.

Interesting for what Hertzberg expresses is my belief about Obama: the conviction that he has no or rather few core political beliefs.

But to address the real issue, I think that neither Romney nor Obama are ideologues and that the biggest differences between them is about how comfortable they are at faking it. Obama fakes extremely well and is worshipped for it while Romney doesn't and is accused of being an arrogant and empty rich guy. I'm on the side of the guy who, at the very least, doesn't make America cheer for mediocrity because it is flashy and comforting.     

Obama, race and political ambition

 

More reasons to love Glenn Loury (the father) and to realize that great people tend to raise decent children!

John the Baptist

Words of the morning from llya Somin on last night's presidential debate:

(...)by nominating the father of Romneycare, the GOP cost itself an opportunity to attack the most politically vulnerable part of Obamacare. That’s what happens when, as economist Bryan Caplan once put it, the Republicans nominate the John the Baptist of Obamacare to run against the program’s Jesus Christ.

Because he was never believed to be god or his son, John the Baptist would have made a better American president than jesus.

Presidential debates don't matter for they are too manufactured. Their impact is  minimal at best for both the media and voters have attention deficit disorder and will focus  as soon as they can on the next shinny object , a gaffe, a poorly constructed and thought out scene or whatever else will feed their need to be stimulated and to prove their  biases and presumptions right. 

Thus, I am counting the hours before the next hysteria over a Romney gaffe that will once again mean that he has already lost the election. 

The banality of Obama

I agree with this old quote of Ilya Somin re-quoting himself because it is still pertinent:

In a weird way, critics like D’Souza and West have much in common with the enthusiastic Obama supporters who in 2008 believed that Obama represented a fundamental break with politics as we know it. Both groups assume that the president is a lot more special than he actually is.

Tthe most irritating thing about Obama is actually that belief, which  overcomes reality that he is special and the one for reasons that have nothing with what he does, but with what he is supposed to symbolize.

 

Selling out

Sugary excerpt of the day from Henry Farrell over at Crooked Timber:

On key foreign policy and human rights issues, Obama hasn’t been a disappointment. He’s been a disaster. You can make a good case, obviously, that his main opponent, Mitt Romney, would be even worse. But it isn’t at all clear that the consequences of voting  for Romney over the longer term, would be any worse than the consequences of voting for the guy who was supposed to be better on these issues, and was not. Indeed, the unwillingness of American left-liberals to criticize the opprobrious foreign policy of a Democratic president (and the consequent lack of real public debate over this policy, since most of the right tacitly agrees with the bad stuff) weighs the balance in favor of voting against Democrats who you know are going to sell out.

I have to say that the fact that the election coverage, so far, is done as if Obama doesn't have a record and as if he was the (sugar) pill that Americans have to swallow to cleanse their country's soul drives me nuts.

The meaning of America

Sugary excerpt of the day from Stanley Fish commenting on the dishonest, vile and more importantly willfully stupidly ideological 'documentary' on Obama from Dinesh D'Souza who must have perfected at Dartmouth what seems to come naturally to him, prostitution :

(...) the meaning of America is continually contested in essays, books, backyard conversations, talk shows and, most of all, in elections. It is often said, and it is true, that the opposing parties in an election have “different visions for America.” There are many ways of describing the alternative visions offered to us in a year like this; but describing one of them as un-American and its proponent as a foreign intruder is not to further discussion but to foreclose it and to replace the contest of ideas with the rhetoric of demonization. (Democrats have been as guilty of this as anyone.) Obama may have a vision for America that you don’t like, but it is a vision for America put forward by an American. If you don’t like it, vote against him, not in the name of Americanism but in the name of the ideas and outcomes you, also an American, prefer.

Via Professor Bainbridge, a pick to illustrate this point and the futily of the attempt to de-americanize Obama:

In short, Obama is as American as apple pie.  Unfortunately that fact isn't enough to make him a good president.

I found it thought-provoking, compelling and even morbidly ironic that Obama is considered "foreign," European, and even socialist when it is Mitt Romney who spent critical parts of his youth in France. It tells me that Romney is actually more worldly than Obama and that fact explains, in great part, in my opinion, his obvious discomfort with his political 'family.'       

La fin justifie les moyens...

Two quotes on Obama's kill list and assassination powers.

The first from Glenn Greenwald:

In fairness to Obama, he did campaign on a promise of change, and vesting the President with the power to order the execution of citizens in secret and with no oversight certainly qualifies as that. (...)to summarize the Obama campaign’s apparent argument: it’s absolutely vital that we know all about the GOP nominee’s tax shelters and financial transactions over the last decade (and indeed, we should know about that), but we need not bother ourselves with how the Democratic nominee is deciding which Americans should die, his claimed legal authority for ordering those hits, the alleged evidence for believing the target deserves to be executed, or the criteria used to target them. So low are one’s expectations for an American Election Year that there are very few spectacles so absurd as to be painful to behold, but the Obama campaign’s waving of the transparency flag definitely qualifies.

The second from Joseph Lelyveld:

Just how is a president supposed to take on terrorists thousands of miles away whom he believes to be targeting the country he’s sworn to protect in a constitutional manner? Should he file an extradition request with the government in Islamabad or, as Bill Clinton did before September 11 but after the attacks on the USS Cole and the embassies in East Africa, lob cruise missiles from the Arabian Sea and hope for the best?

To settle this debate, we only have to quote Karl Marx or rather to use a Marx's quote used by Camus in the Rebel:

An end which requires unjustified means is no justifiable end.

 

WASP

At last Walter Mead says what I have been saying for 4 years, Obama is a WASP:

In his own way, however, President Obama is one of the neo-Waspiest men in the country. He is not a product of Kenyan villages or third world socialism. He was educated at the Hawaiian equivalent of a New England prep school, and spent his formative years in the Ivies. He has much more in common with Harvard-educated technocrats like McGeorge Bundy than with African freedom fighters and third world socialists of the 1970s.

Barack Obama is neither a citizen of the world nor an exotic creature, he is as American as Georges Bush!

Preacher man

I agree with Marbury on this:

Obama is a preacher, not a persuader. He's terrific if you already agree with him, but doesn't have much impact on those who don't.

It is hard to be touched by Jesus when people keep asserting that he is a god not a man!

Foreign America

I agree with Alex Massie on this:

From a foreigner's perspective, the places Barack Obama fares least well are likely to be the places in America the foreigner feels most foreign.

Obamacare as the French Revolution

The dumbest sentence of the day comes from Alex Massie who can be too cultured for his own good:

Like the French Revolution it remains much too soon to say what the consequences of the United States Supreme Court's decision to uphold Obamacare will be.

Barack Obama as Tim Tebow

David Bromwich on President Barack Obama:

Obama has a harder time than any sane politician I have ever heard in admitting that his words are only words. He told a teacher once that words were the most dangerous power in the world; he seems to have meant they were the most powerful things. But to speak words that carry a distinct meaning on certain subjects, and then not to back them by deeds, is weaker than saying nothing. Obama, however, has seen himself all along not mainly as a politician but rather as a man of genius. His calling is to unite and reconcile opposites, as only genius can.(...) Obama sees himself as the coolest head, the most reasonable listener, the practical man in a world of theorists and fanatics, but none of these traits qualifies one person to render alone a decision that twelve could only with difficulty make in good conscience. There is a point, after all, where messianic fervour and the love of executive power may converge. In commandeering the drone assassinations in Pakistan, Obama has taken on himself to judge without legal process and to kill with impunity persons he thinks ought to die. This fact we learned only recently and are still digesting. When it comes to the president’s emergency measures, his admirers, who normally speak of his ‘pragmatism’, switch to a different register. They mention Augustine and Aquinas and say the president has been studying just-war theory. Yet the difference between moral right and political expedience is not overcome by a shift of gears from the most secular of philosophies to the most theologically saturated. By a more general decree of the president, a civilian Afghan male of fighting age who is killed by a drone aimed at a terrorist is now himself also counted as a terrorist. The reason is that the identity of terrorists is well known by all natives, and the innocent avoid their company. This juggling, as several commentators have remarked, takes us back to the days of the Vietnam body counts, whose method Sartre described with summary accuracy: ‘A dead Vietnamese is a Viet Cong.’

And yet there is no alternative to Obama.

It is distressing to realize that some on the left can only criticize Obama if they tell themselves that he may be a disappointment but there is no alternative to him. The point is an essential one because it is the number reason why I resisted Obamania: it was a cult uninterested with results for its Jesus was the only candidate who could have made  failure and the unacceptable acceptable and justifiable. 

America doesn't want Obama to fail because it is afraid of what that would say about its history and its essence.  It is for that reason that Americans will only give themselves the permission to vote against Obama if they come to the realization  that they can no longer afford him, that the syrupiness of the soda is making them too fat to live a healthy life.

Barack Obama is the Tim Tebow of American presidential politics! People believe in him because of whom they believe he is and overlook everything when they feel that all he does is win which in this case means keep America safe and cool

Worms and Broccoli

Best comment on the US Supreme Court's decision on Obamacare from Jack Balkin:

The specter of vegetables still haunts us. We may be safe from broccoli mandates, but we are not safe from broccoli taxes.  (...) It's hard to predict what will flow from this opinion doctrinally. If President Obama manages to appoint a majority of liberal justices in his second term, most of the innovations in this case will be forgotten. The new spending clause doctrines will be confined, and the Commerce Clause language treated as dicta or made practically irrelevant. If Mitt Romney wins, on the other hand, he may be able to appoint a strong conservative majority to work with Chief Justice Roberts. Then, in hindsight, Roberts' seemingly compromised opinion won't be very compromised at all. His apparent flip-flop won't be understood as a change of mind. Instead, his opinion may turn out, in hindsight, to be the beginning of an important transformation in constitutional law. What will happen can't be deduced from the four corners of these documents. It will depend on the Supreme Court appointments of the next decade.

I have to admit that I am puzzled and saddened by the whole political spectacle around an issue that ought to be pretty simple, but isn't in great part because Obama tried to split the baby in half thinking that he was wiser and cooler than Solomon and killed it.  Thus, the US will continue to fight over peanuts because it is the God of Small things and because even when it want to give its people broccoli or something else than they need, it has to take all the nutrients out of it because it is un-American to be as decent, as candidly good and straightforward as Canadians.

'Black' is the new Bush

Frightening fact from Peter Van Buren :

The Obama administration has been cruelly and unusually punishing in its use of the 1917 Espionage Act to stomp on governmental leakers, truth-tellers, and whistleblowers whose disclosures do not support the president’s political ambitions.

Thankfully, hope is dead

Sentence of the day from Marbury:

The 2008 Obama campaign was particularly good at creating the sense that there was a place, just out of frame, in which "all political contradictions are solved".

I can't believe people bought it.  Well, that just shows how little I know about how conforting it is to choose blissful ignorance  . 

The appearance of toughness

Former National Intelligence director Dennis Blair on the use of drones by the Obama administration:

It is the politically advantageous thing to do--low cost, no U.S. casualties, gives the appearance of toughness. It plays well domestically and it is unpopular only in other countries. Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term.

 Boy did Obama punk the Norwegian Committee which gave him the Novel Peace Prize believing that he would be a worldly American president because he asserted that he was a citizen of the world!

The post-post partisan president

Fascinating (and old) stuff from Ryan Lizza:

Obama sprang coatless from his limousine and headed up the steps of Will’s yellow clapboard house. He was greeted by Will, Michael Barone, David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Lawrence Kudlow, Rich Lowry, and Peggy Noonan. They were Reaganites all, yet some had paid tribute to Obama during the campaign. Lowry, who is the editor of the National Review, called Obama “the only presidential candidate from either party about whom there is a palpable excitement.” Krauthammer, an intellectual and ornery voice on Fox News and in the pages of the Washington Post, had written that Obama would be “a president with the political intelligence of a Bill Clinton harnessed to the steely self-discipline of a Vladimir Putin,” who would “bestride the political stage as largely as did Reagan.” And Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard and a former aide to Dan Quayle, wrote, “I look forward to Obama’s inauguration with a surprising degree of hope and good cheer.”

Over dinner, Obama searched for points of common ground. He noted that he and Kudlow agreed on a business-investment tax cut. “He loves to deal with both sides of the issue,” Kudlow later wrote. “He revels in the back and forth. And he wants to keep the dialogue going with conservatives.” Obama’s view, shared with many people at the time, was that professional pundits were wrong about American politics. It was a myth, he said, that the two political parties were impossibly divided on the big issues confronting America. The gap was surmountable. Compared with some other Western countries, where Communists and far-right parties sit in the same parliament, the gulf between Democrats and Republicans was narrow. (...)If there was a single unifying argument that defined Obamaism from his earliest days in politics to his Presidential campaign, it was the idea of post-partisanship. He was proposing himself as a transformative figure, the man who would spring the lock. In an essay published in The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan, a self-proclaimed conservative, reflected on Obama’s heady appeal: “Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us.”

What happened? Well, one thing it is impossible to be a cultural icon for what one 'is' symbolically and to unite a country that is in the midst of vicious and anti-intellectual culture wars. In short, Obama got elected for what he appeared to be and couldn't do what he wanted to do not only because experience matters, but also because his symbolic self got in the way of his political aspirations.

Inside Baseball

Via Marbury fascinating stuff about Obama and Clinton (Bill) :

Obama's political identity was formed in part through opposition to Clinton, as a president and a personality. Where President Clinton was a trimmer and a compromiser, Obama would be a bold Reagan-style reformer (hmm). Where Clinton was a natural politician, who loved and lived for the game of politics, Obama would disdain Washington and its ways. Where Clinton was undisciplined and messy in his professional and personal lives, Obama would be self-controlled, precise, punctual.

(You could, by the way, say pretty much the same about Bush and his relationship with Clinton. Both the presidents that succeeded Clinton were extremely keen on not being Clinton. Which is surprising when you consider that Clinton was a relatively popular and successful president.)

What strikes me as odd is that Obama doesn't really value Clinton's advice, and seems very wary of him. Although he occasionally meets with Clinton or plays golf with him, you get the sense that he is doing so for the sake of the pictures, and the reassurance that it brings a large part of the Democratic base. I say it's odd, because Clinton is so clearly worth listening to. First, just as an ex-president. Second, as a genius-level analyst of politics, not just in the grand strategist sense - how to win the positioning battle versus the Republicans - but as someone who has an unparalleled ability to understand voters and articulate their fears and aspirations.

It's almost as if Obama fears being overwhelmed by Clinton's personality, or infected by him somehow - as if he might come back from that round of golf demanding all-night pizza sessions with his aides and eyeing up the intern.

More broadly, I think this is symptomatic of a blind spot in Obama's personality: he has a suspicion of disorder, even when it is creative. He likes everything to be just so; organised, thought-through, and planned, down to the last detail. The problem for him is, that's impossible when you're talking about an organisation the size of the US government, a war on the scale of Afghanistan, or a vast ecosystem like the one that constitutes US healthcare.

I  made the point at the beginning of Obama's presidency that he represented Clintonism with a biracial face. I haven't changed my mind, the problem is that we are in 2012 and that Obama isn't Obama because he got 'there' too soon. and by faking it brilliantly.

It's the hoodie, stupid!

Via Mister Fish:

Something is rotten in the state of America and Obama, I have to say it, isn't helping by making himself part of the story believing that he is America.  There is a need in America when it comes to tragedies such as the one of Trayvon Martin for more than emotions, powerful assertions, or symbolism. There is for a fearless willingness to transgress the current morbid narrative to avoid justifying the unjustifiable and demanding absolute justice.

Creepy Obamania

Well Glenn Greenwald has said all that needs to be said. Sometimes, it feels like Obama is Kim Jong Il and that some of his admirers believe religiously, Santorumly that he is the one and came to earth to save America.