How Obama's Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics

[Amskeptic]

NEWSWEEK MAGAZINE
Jan 16, 2012
by Andrew Sullivan

The right calls him a socialist, the left says he sucks up to Wall Street, and independents think he's a wimp. Andrew Sullivan on how the president may just end up outsmarting them all. You hear it everywhere. Democrats are disappointed in the president. Independents have soured even more. Republicans have worked themselves up into an apocalyptic fervor. And, yes, this is not exactly unusual.

A president in the last year of his first term will always get attacked mercilessly by his partisan opponents, and also, often, by the feistier members of his base. And when unemployment is at remarkably high levels, and with the national debt setting records, the criticism will—and should be—even fiercer. But this time, with this president, something different has happened. It’s not that I don’t understand the critiques of Barack Obama from the enraged right and the demoralized left. It’s that I don’t even recognize their description of Obama’s first term in any way. The attacks from both the right and the left on the man and his policies aren’t out of bounds. They’re simply—empirically—wrong.

A caveat: I write this as an unabashed supporter of Obama from early 2007 on. I did so not as a liberal, but as a conservative-minded independent appalled by the Bush administration’s record of war, debt, spending, and torture. I did not expect, or want, a messiah. I have one already, thank you very much. And there have been many times when I have disagreed with decisions Obama has made—to drop the Bowles-Simpson debt commission, to ignore the war crimes of the recent past, and to launch a war in Libya without Congress’s sanction, to cite three. But given the enormity of what he inherited, and given what he explicitly promised, it remains simply a fact that Obama has delivered in a way that the unhinged right and purist left have yet to understand or absorb. Their short-term outbursts have missed Obama’s long game—and why his reelection remains, in my view, as essential for this country’s future as his original election in 2008.

The right’s core case is that Obama has governed as a radical leftist attempting a “fundamental transformation” of the American way of life. Mitt Romney accuses the president of making the recession worse, of wanting to turn America into a European welfare state, of not believing in opportunity or free enterprise, of having no understanding of the real economy, and of apologizing for America and appeasing our enemies. According to Romney, Obama is a mortal threat to “the soul” of America and an empty suit who couldn’t run a business, let alone a country.
Leave aside the internal incoherence—how could such an incompetent be a threat to anyone? None of this is even faintly connected to reality—and the record proves it. On the economy, these are the facts:.
When Obama took office, the United States was losing around 750,000 jobs a month. The last quarter of 2008 saw an annualized drop in growth approaching 9 percent. This was the most serious downturn since the 1930s, there was a real chance of a systemic collapse of the entire global financial system, and unemployment and debt—lagging indicators—were about to soar even further. No fair person can blame Obama for the wreckage of the next 12 months, as the financial crisis cut a swath through employment. Economies take time to shift course.

But Obama did several things at once: he continued the bank bailout begun by George W. Bush, he initiated a bailout of the auto industry, and he worked to pass a huge stimulus package of $787 billion.

All these decisions deserve scrutiny. And in retrospect, they were far more successful than anyone has yet fully given Obama the credit for. The job collapse bottomed out at the beginning of 2010, as the stimulus took effect. Since then, the U.S. has added 2.4 million jobs. That’s not enough, but it’s far better than what Romney would have you believe, and more than the net jobs created under the entire Bush administration. In 2011 alone, 1.9 million private-sector jobs were created, while a net 280,000 government jobs were lost. Overall government employment has declined 2.6 percent over the past 3 years. (That compares with a drop of 2.2 percent during the early years of the Reagan administration.) To listen to current Republican rhetoric about Obama’s big-government socialist ways, you would imagine that the reverse was true. It isn’t.

The right claims the stimulus failed because it didn’t bring unemployment down to 8 percent in its first year, as predicted by Obama’s transition economic team. Instead, it peaked at 10.2 percent. But the 8 percent prediction was made before Obama took office and was wrong solely because it relied on statistics that guessed the economy was only shrinking by around 4 percent, not 9. Remove that statistical miscalculation (made by government and private-sector economists alike) and the stimulus did exactly what it was supposed to do. It put a bottom under the free fall. It is not an exaggeration to say it prevented a spiral downward that could have led to the Second Great Depression.

You’d think, listening to the Republican debates, that Obama has raised taxes. Again, this is not true. Not only did he agree not to sunset the Bush tax cuts for his entire first term, he has aggressively lowered taxes on most Americans. A third of the stimulus was tax cuts, affecting 95 percent of taxpayers; he has cut the payroll tax, and recently had to fight to keep it cut against Republican opposition. His spending record is also far better than his predecessor’s. Under Bush, new policies on taxes and spending cost the taxpayer a total of $5.07 trillion. Under Obama’s budgets both past and projected, he will have added $1.4 trillion in two terms. Under Bush and the GOP, nondefense discretionary spending grew by twice as much as under Obama. Again: imagine Bush had been a Democrat and Obama a Republican. You could easily make the case that Obama has been far more fiscally conservative than his predecessor—except, of course, that Obama has had to govern under the worst recession since the 1930s, and Bush, after the 2001 downturn, governed in a period of moderate growth. It takes work to increase the debt in times of growth, as Bush did. It takes much more work to constrain the debt in the deep recession Bush bequeathed Obama.

The great conservative bugaboo, Obamacare, is also far more moderate than its critics have claimed. The Congressional Budget Office has projected it will reduce the deficit, not increase it dramatically, as Bush’s unfunded Medicare Prescription Drug benefit did. It is based on the individual mandate, an idea pioneered by the archconservative Heritage Foundation, Newt Gingrich, and, of course, Mitt Romney, in the past. It does not have a public option; it gives a huge new client base to the drug and insurance companies; its health-insurance exchanges were also pioneered by the right. It’s to the right of the Clintons’ monstrosity in 1993, and remarkably similar to Nixon’s 1974 proposal. Its passage did not preempt recovery efforts; it followed them. It needs improvement in many ways, but the administration is open to further reform and has agreed to allow states to experiment in different ways to achieve the same result. It is not, as Romney insists, a one-model, top-down prescription. Like Obama’s Race to the Top education initiative, it sets standards, grants incentives, and then allows individual states to experiment. Embedded in it are also a slew of cost-reduction pilot schemes to slow health-care spending. Yes, it crosses the Rubicon of universal access to private health care. But since federal law mandates that hospitals accept all emergency-room cases requiring treatment anyway, we already obey that socialist principle—but in the most inefficient way possible. Making 44 million current free-riders pay into the system is not fiscally reckless; it is fiscally prudent. It is, dare I say it, conservative.

On foreign policy, the right-wing critiques have been the most unhinged. Romney accuses the president of apologizing for America, and others all but accuse him of treason and appeasement. Instead, Obama reversed Bush’s policy of ignoring Osama bin Laden, immediately setting a course that eventually led to his capture and death. And when the moment for decision came, the president overruled both his secretary of state and vice president in ordering the riskiest—but most ambitious—plan on the table. He even personally ordered the extra helicopters that saved the mission. It was a triumph, not only in killing America’s primary global enemy, but in getting a massive trove of intelligence to undermine al Qaeda even further. If George Bush had taken out bin Laden, wiped out al Qaeda’s leadership, and gathered a treasure trove of real intelligence by a daring raid, he’d be on Mount Rushmore by now. But where Bush talked tough and acted counterproductively, Obama has simply, quietly, relentlessly decimated our real enemies, while winning the broader propaganda war. Since he took office, al Qaeda’s popularity in the Muslim world has plummeted.

Obama’s foreign policy, like Dwight Eisenhower’s or George H.W. Bush’s, eschews short-term political hits for long-term strategic advantage. It is forged by someone interested in advancing American interests—not asserting an ideology and enforcing it regardless of the consequences by force of arms. By hanging back a little, by “leading from behind” in Libya and elsewhere, Obama has made other countries actively seek America’s help and reappreciate our role. As an antidote to the bad feelings of the Iraq War, it has worked close to perfectly.

But the right isn’t alone in getting Obama wrong. While the left is less unhinged in its critique, it is just as likely to miss the screen for the pixels. From the start, liberals projected onto Obama absurd notions of what a president can actually do in a polarized country, where anything requires 60 Senate votes even to stand a chance of making it into law. They have described him as a hapless tool of Wall Street, a continuation of Bush in civil liberties, a cloistered elitist unable to grasp the populist moment that is his historic opportunity. They rail against his attempts to reach a Grand Bargain on entitlement reform. They decry his too-small stimulus, his too-weak financial reform, and his too-cautious approach to gay civil rights. They despair that he reacts to rabid Republican assaults with lofty appeals to unity and compromise.

They miss, it seems to me, two vital things. The first is the simple scale of what has been accomplished on issues liberals say they care about. A depression was averted. The bail-out of the auto industry was—amazingly—successful. Even the bank bailouts have been repaid to a great extent by a recovering banking sector. The Iraq War—the issue that made Obama the nominee—has been ended on time and, vitally, with no troops left behind. Defense is being cut steadily, even as Obama has moved his own party away from a Pelosi-style reflexive defense of all federal entitlements. Under Obama, support for marriage equality and marijuana legalization has crested to record levels. Under Obama, a crucial state, New York, made marriage equality for gays an irreversible fact of American life. Gays now openly serve in the military, and the Defense of Marriage Act is dying in the courts, undefended by the Obama Justice Department. Vast government money has been poured into noncarbon energy investments, via the stimulus. Fuel-emission standards have been drastically increased. Torture was ended. Two moderately liberal women replaced men on the Supreme Court. Oh, yes, and the liberal holy grail that eluded Johnson and Carter and Clinton, nearly universal health care, has been set into law. Politifact recently noted that of 508 specific promises, a third had been fulfilled and only two have not had some action taken on them. To have done all this while simultaneously battling an economic hurricane makes Obama about as honest a follow-through artist as anyone can expect from a politician.

What liberals have never understood about Obama is that he practices a show-don’t-tell, long-game form of domestic politics. What matters to him is what he can get done, not what he can immediately take credit for. And so I railed against him for the better part of two years for dragging his feet on gay issues. But what he was doing was getting his Republican defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to move before he did. The man who made the case for repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” was, in the end, Adm. Mike Mullen. This took time—as did his painstaking change in the rule barring HIV-positive immigrants and tourists—but the slow and deliberate and unprovocative manner in which it was accomplished made the changes more durable. Not for the first time, I realized that to understand Obama, you have to take the long view. Because he does.

Or take the issue of the banks. Liberals have derided him as a captive of Wall Street, of being railroaded by Larry Summers and Tim Geithner into a too-passive response to the recklessness of the major U.S. banks. But it’s worth recalling that at the start of 2009, any responsible president’s priority would have been stabilization of the financial system, not the exacting of revenge. Obama was not elected, despite liberal fantasies, to be a left-wing crusader. He was elected as a pragmatic, unifying reformist who would be more responsible than Bush.

And what have we seen? A recurring pattern. To use the terms Obama first employed in his inaugural address: the president begins by extending a hand to his opponents; when they respond by raising a fist, he demonstrates that they are the source of the problem; then, finally, he moves to his preferred position of moderate liberalism and fights for it without being effectively tarred as an ideologue or a divider. This kind of strategy takes time. And it means there are long stretches when Obama seems incapable of defending himself, or willing to let others to define him, or simply weak. I remember those stretches during the campaign against Hillary Clinton. I also remember whose strategy won out in the end.

This is where the left is truly deluded. By misunderstanding Obama’s strategy and temperament and persistence, by grandstanding on one issue after another, by projecting unrealistic fantasies onto a candidate who never pledged a liberal revolution, they have failed to notice that from the very beginning, Obama was playing a long game. He did this with his own party over health-care reform. He has done it with the Republicans over the debt. He has done it with the Israeli government over stopping the settlements on the West Bank—and with the Iranian regime, by not playing into their hands during the Green Revolution, even as they gunned innocents down in the streets. Nothing in his first term—including the complicated multiyear rollout of universal health care—can be understood if you do not realize that Obama was always planning for eight years, not four. And if he is reelected, he will have won a battle more important than 2008: for it will be a mandate for an eight-year shift away from the excesses of inequality, overreach abroad, and reckless deficit spending of the last three decades. It will recapitalize him to entrench what he has done already and make it irreversible.

Yes, Obama has waged a war based on a reading of executive power that many civil libertarians, including myself, oppose. And he has signed into law the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without trial (even as he pledged never to invoke this tyrannical power himself). But he has done the most important thing of all: excising the cancer of torture from military detention and military justice. If he is not reelected, that cancer may well return. Indeed, many on the right appear eager for it to return.

Sure, Obama cannot regain the extraordinary promise of 2008. We’ve already elected the nation’s first black president and replaced a tongue-tied dauphin with a man of peerless eloquence. And he has certainly failed to end Washington’s brutal ideological polarization, as he pledged to do. But most Americans in polls rightly see him as less culpable for this impasse than the GOP. Obama has steadfastly refrained from waging the culture war, while the right has accused him of a “war against religion.” He has offered to cut entitlements (and has already cut Medicare), while the Republicans have refused to raise a single dollar of net revenue from anyone. Even the most austerity-driven government in Europe, the British Tories, are to the left of that. And it is this Republican intransigence—from the 2009 declaration by Rush Limbaugh that he wants Obama “to fail” to the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s admission that his primary objective is denying Obama a second term—that has been truly responsible for the deadlock. And the only way out of that deadlock is an electoral rout of the GOP, since the language of victory and defeat seems to be the only thing it understands.

If I sound biased, that’s because I am. Biased toward the actual record, not the spin; biased toward a president who has conducted himself with grace and calm under incredible pressure, who has had to manage crises not seen since the Second World War and the Depression, and who as yet has not had a single significant scandal to his name. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” George Orwell once wrote. What I see in front of my nose is a president whose character, record, and promise remain as grotesquely underappreciated now as they were absurdly hyped in 2008. And I feel confident that sooner rather than later, the American people will come to see his first term from the same calm, sane perspective. And decide to finish what they started.

[ruckman101]

Republicans pushed a decision on the controversial Canadian pipeline Obama initially put off until after the election. Kabash. They got their decision. I was heartened. A bold move finally. And that also got my mind going, going along the lines of another term with an end date. I'm looking forward to the possibilities. Somehow I suspect a "lame duck" presidency will need a bit of redefinition.


neal

[3072]

If I sound biased, that's because I am. Biased toward the actual record, not the spin; biased toward a president who conducted himself with grace and calm under incredible pressure, who has had to manage crises not seen since the Second World War and the Depression, and who has yet has not had a single significant scandal to his name.

Oooh.. dunno.. wouldn't say that. Although he didn't start that Fast & Furious gun running debacle, he's certainly gotten his hands soiled by trying to deny knowing anything about it. Under his administration.
He could have immediately came clean about the whole thing to save face.

What about all those bailouts? Certainly didn't help us regular folk. Just his wealthy supporters (whom doesn't want to be known as rich).

There's also that detainment 1867 bill - which he once said he would "never sign".

I imagine if you'd be able to dig further than what the media reports (or is not allowed to report on); you'll probably find all sorts of juicy shenanigans that Obama has done in secret.. He's no angel.

[Amskeptic]

Somehow I suspect a "lame duck" presidency will need a bit of redefinition.
neal

I hope to see Obama come into his own in his next term.
I think he has been stunned and blunted at the same time by his own naivete and the obstreperousness of those hostile to him from day one, to wit: "our goal is to see him as a one-term president".

Takes a while to sally forth once more after a beating, but if he does get his feet back under him, I think he will outclass his opponents and not allow them to define his presidency.
Colin

[Amskeptic]

Oooh.. dunno.. wouldn't say that. Although he didn't start that Fast & Furious gun running debacle, he's certainly gotten his hands soiled by trying to deny knowing anything about it. Under his administration.
He could have immediately came clean about the whole thing to save face.

Nope, not giving you this one ....


THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Charlie Savage
July 26, 2011

WASHINGTON — A federal agent who helped supervise the gun-trafficking investigation known as Operation Fast and Furious told Congress on Tuesday that he had made mistakes during the effort to dismantle a network that was funneling assault weapons to Mexican drug cartels.

In his first public appearance to talk about the operation, William Newell, the former special agent in charge of the Phoenix field division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said he should have more frequently reassessed the risk associated with monitoring — rather than intervening with — particular people who continued to acquire weapons that ended up with the cartels. The most prolific of these “straw” buyers bought more than 600 of the 2,000 weapons linked to the ring.

But Mr. Newell defended the broader strategy of seeking to identify the people running the network, rather than merely arresting the low-level buyers recruited to go into gun stores. He argued that it was so easy to replace straw buyers that intervening too quickly would have no meaningful impact on the flood of American guns into Mexico.

“The whole plan was to take out the whole organization, but I realize in retrospect that there were times when I should have conducted more risk assessments,” Mr. Newell said, during nearly six hours of testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Affairs, alongside William McMahon, another A.T.F. supervisor, and several bureau agents based in Mexico.

Operation Fast and Furious ran from late 2009 to early 2011, and is part of a still-open larger investigation into the gun-trafficking ring. The operation’s tactic of not quickly seizing guns and arresting straw buyers in the hope that they would lead investigators to higher-ups in the ring prompted controversy within the firearms bureau.

Those concerns erupted after guns linked to Fast and Furious straw buyers were found at the scene where a Border Patrol agent was killed in December 2010.

“You had the same people buying weapons repeatedly, leading to the same cartel, and you didn’t quit because you hadn’t made your case and so continued selling until had you had a dead federal agent and a scandal,” Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican who is chairman of the committee, told Mr. Newell.

The current and former A.T.F. agents based in Mexico on Tuesday also sharply criticized the operation and said they had been kept in the dark about its tactics, which they said ran counter to the bureau’s traditional training and procedures.

While members of both parties criticized the tactics used in Operation Fast and Furious, a partisan divide opened over the direction of the Congressional investigation into it. Republicans sought to tie the operation to Obama administration political appointees, but Democrats released excerpts from staff interviews of officials who said that there had been no briefings of high-level A.T.F. or Justice Department officials about the tactics used in the Phoenix operation.

Previous reports and letters released by Mr. Issa and Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, have quoted other excerpts from the interviews of those officials — including the acting director of the firearms bureau, Kenneth Melson — but made no mention of the sections that undermined the notion that top Justice Department officials sanctioned or knew about the tactics.

“The committee’s report promotes unsubstantiated theories by selectively releasing excerpts of transcripts while ignoring testimony and other information,” said Tracy Schmaler, a Justice Department spokeswoman, noting that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. had ordered an inspector general investigation into the operation.

Mr. Issa did not address Democratic accusations that his reports have been misleadingly selective, but he and other Republicans sparred extensively with Democrats about another dispute: whether their close look at gun trafficking along the Southwest border had demonstrated a need for tighter gun control laws and greater support for the bureau despite opposition by gun rights lobbyists.

“Congress’s hands are hardly clean on this subject,” said Representative Gerald E. Connolly, Democrat of Virginia.

Noting that the Senate had refused to confirm a permanent director for the bureau for more than six years, Mr. Connolly added: “We have done everything in our power in Congress to try to defang the A.T.F. to make sure that it’s toothless. We’ve done everything we can to fight your budget and reduce it so that you don’t have the resources to do the job.”

The hearing ended with a tart exchange between Mr. Issa and Eleanor Holmes Norton, the nonvoting Democratic delegate from the District of Columbia, whom Mr. Issa accused of being “radically against the Second Amendment.”

Ms. Norton brought up a bill that would create a federal statute against illegal firearms trafficking; proponents say such a statute would give A.T.F. agents more leverage to persuade straw buyers to take the risk of providing information about higher-level criminals. She asked Mr. Issa if he would co-sponsor the legislation.

“No, ma’am,” Mr. Issa replied.

“Enough said,” she said.

What about all those bailouts? Certainly didn't help us regular folk. Just his wealthy supporters (whom doesn't want to be known as rich).

You are stating here that the bailouts were some sort of Obama directed quid pro quo to his supporters? The bank bailouts all were constructed and largely executed before he was sworn in. Does anybody realize that the TARP funding has been largely paid back to the Treasury ... with interest. The automobile company bailouts on his watch, worked as well, saved jobs and the loans were paid back with interest!

We gotta step up our game if we are going to figure out how to save this country from the corporate malfeasance that has been all too obvious for some of us for a very very long time. Honestly. You think Obama is the problem?
Colin

[dingo]

Obama brought in Summers, Geitner, Immelt......are you kidding..? these guys are the crookedest of the crony capitalist scum...and thus he directly facilitated the continuing wholesale fraud

[Bleyseng]

copied from the Atlantic Magazine Jan 21, 2012

CONOR FRIEDERSDORF - Conor Friedersdorf is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs. He lives in Venice, California, and is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction.

Dear Andrew Sullivan: Why Focus on Obama's Dumbest Critics?

After reading Andrew Sullivan's Newsweek essay about President Obama, his critics, and his re-election bid, I implore him to ponder just one question. How would you have reacted in 2008 if any Republican ran promising to do the following?

(1) Codify indefinite detention into law; (2) draw up a secret kill list of people, including American citizens, to assassinate without due process; (3) proceed with warrantless spying on American citizens; (4) prosecute Bush-era whistleblowers for violating state secrets; (5) reinterpret the War Powers Resolution such that entering a war of choice without a Congressional declaration is permissible; (6) enter and prosecute such a war; (7) institutionalize naked scanners and intrusive full body pat-downs in major American airports; (8) oversee a planned expansion of TSA so that its agents are already beginning to patrol American highways, train stations, and bus depots; (9) wage an undeclared drone war on numerous Muslim countries that delegates to the CIA the final call about some strikes that put civilians in jeopardy; (10) invoke the state-secrets privilege to dismiss lawsuits brought by civil-liberties organizations on dubious technicalities rather than litigating them on the merits; (11) preside over federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries; (12) attempt to negotiate an extension of American troops in Iraq beyond 2011 (an effort that thankfully failed); (14) reauthorize the Patriot Act; (13) and select an economic team mostly made up of former and future financial executives from Wall Street firms that played major roles in the financial crisis.

I submit that had Palin or Cheney or Rumsfeld or Rice or Jeb Bush or John Bolton or Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney proposed doing even half of those things in 2008, you'd have declared them unfit for the presidency and expressed alarm at the prospect of America doubling down on the excesses of the post-September 11 era. You'd have championed an alternative candidate who avowed that America doesn't have to choose between our values and our safety.

Yet President Obama has done all of the aforementioned things.

Pretend that you knew, circa 2008, that President Cheney or Palin or Rice or Rumsfeld or Giuliani would do all those things -- but that, on the bright side, they'd refrain from torturing anyone else, end Don't Ask, Don't Tell, sign a bank bailout, and pass a health-care bill that you regard as improving on the status quo starting in 2014. Would you vote for them on that basis?

I submit that you would not. And if they were elected, and four years later were running for re-election, would you focus on the stupidity of the least persuasive attacks on their tenure? Or would you laud their most incisive critics? I believe that you'd be among their most incisive critics.

Back to the present.

The Newsweek cover headline for Sullivan's piece is "Why Are Obama's Critics So Dumb?" It's entirely defensible to point out that many critiques of Obama are laughably disconnected from reality -- I've done that myself on many occasions -- so it's arguably a fair headline.

But the one I've chosen is fair too: "Why Focus on Obama's Dumbest Critics?"

No, Obama isn't a radical Kenyan anti-colonialist. But he is a lawbreaker and an advocate of radical executive power. What precedent could be more radical than insisting that the executive is empowered to draw up a kill list of American citizens in secret, without telling anyone what names are on it, or the legal justification for it, or even that it exists? What if Newt Gingrich inherits that power?

He may yet.

Over the years, Sullivan has confronted, as few others have, American transgressions abroad, including torture, detainee abuse, and various imperial ambitions. He's long drawn attention to civil-liberties violations at home too, as a solo blogger and as lead editor and writer of a blogazine. When I worked for Sullivan, he not only published but actively encouraged items I found that highlighted civil-liberties abuses by the Obama Administration, and since I parted ways with The Daily Dish, he and the Dish team have continued to air critiques of Obama on these questions.

But his Newsweek essay fits the pattern I've lamented of Obama apologists who tell a narrative of his administration that ignores some of these issues and minimizes the importance of others, as if they're a relatively unimportant matter to be set aside in a sentence or three before proceeding to the more important business of whether the president is being critiqued fairly by obtuse partisans.

Sullivan should reconsider this approach.

During President Bush's first term, Sullivan will recall the most unhinged attacks on him -- the comparisons to Hitler, the puppets burned in effigy, the comparisons to a chimp. There wasn't anything wrong with lamenting those attacks, just as there's nothing wrong with pointing out exaggerated and baseless attacks on Obama, which have spread through most of the Republican Party. But the priority put on rebutting the least persuasive left-wing critiques of Bush, and pre-election 2004 worrying about the flaws of the Democratic field, are part of what postponed the backlash against Bush's ruinous policies. The backlash should've been the priority all along.

The same is now true of Obama. Like President Bush, he is breaking the law, transgressing against civil liberties, and championing a radical view of executive power -- and he is invoking the War on Terror to get away with it. As much as it was in 2003 or 2007, it is vital in 2012 that there be a backlash against these post-9/11 excesses, that liberty-loving citizens push back so that these are anomalies that are reined in, rather than permanent features of a bipartisan consensus that can only end in a catastrophically abusive executive operating in an office stripped by successive presidents and their minions of both constitutional and prudential checks.

Beyond strenuously objecting to the focus of his piece and what it doesn't mention, and agreeing with some of Sullivan's points, I have important disagreements with others. "Where Bush talked tough and acted counter-productively, Obama has simply, quietly, relentlessly decimated our real enemies, while winning the broader propaganda war," Sullivan writes. "Since he took office, al Qaeda's popularity in the Muslim world has plummeted." But it's surely relevant that, according to surveys like this one from James Zogby in 2011, "After improving with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, U.S. favorable ratings across the Arab world have plummeted. In most countries they are lower than at the end of the Bush Administration, and lower than Iran's favorable ratings (except in Saudi Arabia)." And in the areas where Obama's drone strikes are killing innocent civilians, he is trading short-term terrorist deaths for the possibility that our policies will create more terrorists in the long run. It's a tradeoff some people consider prudent; but that's different from saying he is "winning the propaganda war." In fact, the predictable effect of some of his policies is to increase hatred of the U.S.

Says Sullivan, "Obama's foreign policy, like Dwight Eisenhower's or George H.W. Bush's, eschews short-term political hits for long-term strategic advantage." But there are cases when the opposite is true. When the CIA sponsored a fake vaccination campaign in Pakistan as a ruse to get bin Laden's DNA, the Dish cited commentators who argued that it was egregiously shortsighted, and quoted an infectious-disease specialist's fears "that disclosure of the CIA's vaccine ruse actually will turn out to kill more people than bin Laden ever did." The bin Laden raid itself, combined with the steady drone campaign in Pakistan, has done so much to destabilize Pakistan that its generals, fearful of American interference, are more frequently moving its nuclear weapons around the country in lightly guarded trucks, as reported by Jeffrey Goldberg and Marc Ambinder. Surely Sullivan should acknowledge that it is possible that the raid and drone strikes will ultimately turn out to be a case of sacrificing long-term strategic advantages for a short-term hit. (That might not be the case -- the point is that it's premature to give Obama credit. We're still operating in the short run.)

Says Sullivan, "From the start, liberals projected onto Obama absurd notions of what a president can actually do in a polarized country, where anything requires 60 Senate votes even to stand a chance of making it into law. They have described him as a hapless tool of Wall Street, a continuation of Bush in civil liberties, a cloistered elitist unable to grasp the populist moment that is his historic opportunity." Without getting into all the issues contained in that passage, it is in fact true that Obama represents a continuation of Bush policies on civil liberties! And in some respects he has gone even farther than Bush.

"Under Obama, support for marriage equality and marijuana legalization has crested to record levels," Sullivan writes. Yes, but no thanks to Obama, who opposes both marriage equality and marijuana legalization! This is the height of illegitimate Obama apologia: attributing to his credit policies he hasn't advanced because a change in public opinion happens to have coincided with his tenure. By this logic Bush also deserves credit for the increasing support for gay marriage during the aughts.

To Sullivan, this is the big picture story of the Obama Administration: "the president begins by extending a hand to his opponents; when they respond by raising a fist, he demonstrates that they are the source of the problem; then, finally, he moves to his preferred position of moderate liberalism and fights for it without being effectively tarred as an ideologue or a divider." Like the whole of his essay, it takes as its lodestar the two-party system and defines Obama as a centrist within it, as if the most coherent way to judge him is by comparison with other establishment politicians.

But centrism inside a consensus that is steadily eroding civil liberties, doing away with checks and balances, and increasing executive power is nothing to support, never mind something to celebrate. "Yes, Obama has waged a war based on a reading of executive power that many civil libertarians, including myself, oppose. And he has signed into law the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without trial (even as he pledged never to invoke this tyrannical power himself)," Sullivan states. "But he has done the most important thing of all: excising the cancer of torture from military detention and military justice. If he is not re-elected, that cancer may well return."

That sums it up, doesn't it?

Obama has transgressed against what is arguably Congress' most essential check on executive power -- its status as the decider of when America goes to war -- and he has codified indefinite detention into law, something that hasn't been done since Japanese Americans were detained during World War II. But at least he doesn't torture people! How low we've set the bar.

It isn't that I object to Sullivan backing Obama's reelection if his GOP opponent runs on bringing back torture. Is he the lesser of two evils? Maybe so. But lauding him as a president who has governed "with grace and calm" and "who as yet has not had a single significant scandal to his name"? If indefinite detention, secret kill lists, warrantless spying, a war on whistleblowers, violating the War Powers Resolution, and abuse of the state secrets privilege don't fit one's definition of "scandal," what does? If they're peripheral flaws rather than central, unacceptable transgressions, America is doomed to these radical, illiberal policies for the foreseeable future.

[Amskeptic]

copied from the Atlantic Magazine Jan 21, 2012

CONOR FRIEDERSDORF - Conor Friedersdorf is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs.

I've lamented of Obama apologists who tell a narrative of his administration that ignores some of these issues and minimizes the importance of others, as if they're a relatively unimportant matter to be set aside in a sentence or three before proceeding to the more important business of whether the president is being critiqued fairly by obtuse partisans.


Says Sullivan, "From the start, liberals projected onto Obama absurd notions of what a president can actually do in a polarized country, where anything requires 60 Senate votes even to stand a chance of making it into law. They have described him as a hapless tool of Wall Street, a continuation of Bush in civil liberties, a cloistered elitist unable to grasp the populist moment that is his historic opportunity." Without getting into all the issues contained in that passage, it is in fact true that Obama represents a continuation of Bush policies on civil liberties! And in some respects he has gone even farther than Bush.

"Under Obama, support for marriage equality and marijuana legalization has crested to record levels," Sullivan writes. Yes, but no thanks to Obama, who opposes both marriage equality and marijuana legalization! This is the height of illegitimate Obama apologia: attributing to his credit policies he hasn't advanced because a change in public opinion happens to have coincided with his tenure. By this logic Bush also deserves credit for the increasing support for gay marriage during the aughts.

It isn't that I object to Sullivan backing Obama's reelection if his GOP opponent runs on bringing back torture. Is he the lesser of two evils? Maybe so. But lauding him as a president who has governed "with grace and calm" and "who as yet has not had a single significant scandal to his name"? If indefinite detention, secret kill lists, warrantless spying, a war on whistleblowers, violating the War Powers Resolution, and abuse of the state secrets privilege don't fit one's definition of "scandal," what does? If they're peripheral flaws rather than central, unacceptable transgressions, America is doomed to these radical, illiberal policies for the foreseeable future.

Realpolitik is disturbing for sure. But I do believe that Obama is far more alert and intelligent and open to growth than any of the alternatives.
We citizens have work to do to clean up our own country.
Colin

[dingo]

Realpolitik is disturbing for sure. But I do believe that Obama is far more alert and intelligent and open to growth than any of the alternatives.
We citizens have work to do to clean up our own country.
Colin

I agree, we have work to do...but not thru the diseased political arena...thats just an utter waste of our collective energy

[Lanval]

Realpolitik is disturbing for sure. But I do believe that Obama is far more alert and intelligent and open to growth than any of the alternatives.
We citizens have work to do to clean up our own country.
Colin

I agree, we have work to do...but not thru the diseased political arena...thats just an utter waste of our collective energy

What other arena is there?

Michael L

[Amskeptic]

What other arena is there?
Michael L

Yep. If we citizens have not done our duty to inform our representatives of our wishes, it seems a little hasty to go all Revolutionary on them. Our voting participation has been below 30-40%, and many of us ... make decisions in the voting booth based on some pretty thin rationales.

Let's try active participation first. It worked just yesterday with the SOPA bill being withdrawn after 10 million signatures, 3 million emails, and a few petitions. Hot dog. SEE?
Colin

[Velokid1]

Voting is important but this also sounds a little like someone being mugged by the same person on their way home every day (americans being victim, corporations being mugger) and when they ask a friend for advice, the friend says "well have you tried asking him to stop?"

Uh, should we have to? Should we have to perpetually remind our politicians at the polls that we wish to not be harmed or robbed?

[Amskeptic]

Voting is important but this also sounds a little like someone being mugged by the same person on their way home every day (americans being victim, corporations being mugger) and when they ask a friend for advice, the friend says "well have you tried asking him to stop?"

Uh, should we have to? Should we have to perpetually remind our politicians at the polls that we wish to not be harmed or robbed?

It is not so much "should we have to" as "we must."

We all have been harranged at some point in our lives, "do I have to ask you to clean your room a thousand times a day??"

The reason we are in this predicament, is that we allowed the game to go on for so long that it became the New Normal.

It is like Mom passed our pigsty room for three years and one day comes in and starts yelling "I am taking you to the orphanage!!"

We watched scandal after scandal occur, from Iran Contra through S&L debacle to Enron/Dynergy to repealing Glass Steagall to not asking for a serious debate before going into Iraq, and we citizens looked at this all with detachment because it "did not affect us".

Now we have stepped into the pig-sty room where Congress is lolling on the bed with pizza boxes. Should we harrangue our Congresspeople? Heck yeah. Consistently.
Colin

[dingo]

Voting is a waste of time if the masses are uneducated on the details. SOPA was a simple 'dont take my wiki away' and thats the basic level it has to be for any mass response i.e. 'do i get what i want or dont i'

the main economic issues are well beyond the acumen of the mases, the politicians and even those in the banking industry who didnt know what derivatives were until it was well into the collapse stage, for example.

Dodd-frank will be a leviathan of swiss cheese loopholes by the time it emerges from under the weight of the lobbysists billions. Corporate-citizen and it's briefcase of cash is always well ahead of joe-the plumber. By the time the public is even close to being sufficiently educated to vote or lean on congressman, the looters have already built the next bubble, paid themselves off and sipping a margharita in the Caymans

[dingo]

I agree, we have work to do...but not thru the diseased political arena...thats just an utter waste of our collective energy

What other arena is there?

Michael L

yeah, this is a big question, and thus requires a thoughtful answer.....for now, the only fuzzy answer i have is some form of un-impeded capitalism, maybe community based. I think capitalism in its pure form (nothing we have experienced in this country for any length of time) is self-regulating and beneficial to all levels of society....unlike democracy, which is too artificial a construct, and can thus be easily hijacked