Obama gets a nod from Larison

While the insane right has been having conniptions about Obama's Latin America trip, the sane right (in this case, Daniel Larison) offers praise:

Instead of the almost-obsessive need to celebrate American achievements, Obama’s handling of foreign relations has shown a steady, humble confidence in the United States...Obama has acted as a leader who feels no need to overcompensate for any perceived weakness and no need to apologize for giving priority to rebuilding damaged international relations with both allies and rivals. Indeed, it seems that the problem Obama’s critics have with him is not that he has been admitting American mistakes, but that he has failed to cringe and apologize to them for pursuing the course of action he thinks best for the United States.

Look, I'm an Obama guy, but I don't think he's perfect and I think he's made some mistakes. Not having thought through the torture endgame--indeed, not even seeming to realize the gravity of the situation--strikes me as a problem. But I do think he has extraordinary potential--I think he's probably the greatest natural politician this country has produced in a long time, and these times seem to provide the opportunity to implement a broad and deep vision for change in America. If he doesn't back down and doesn't get tripped up in all the bullshit (his staff shouldn't be watching cable news, for starters), I do believe he has the capability to be a great statesman, and one of the greatest presidents we've ever had. Of course, having a hated and batshit opposition probably won't hurt either.

Change vs. more of the same

Andrew Sullivan looks at two right-wing critiques of Obama's national security policy, and shoots down both of them. The post is worth reading, but I think the problem with the right's view on foreign policy and national security at this time is that the right has no idea what it believes anymore on those areas (let alone about Bush himself and his legacy), though they likely still believe in spreading "freedom" abroad while restricting it at home. Outsourcing freedom? Seems like the sort of pithy, demagogic but nonetheless largely right description of what these folks are up to.

But the right is paralyzed right now, which is probably why you're not hearing much on these subjects. As Andrew shows, Republicans can't agree on whether or not Obama is different than Bush. They can't agree whether he's a dangerous change or just more of the same. Ultimately, however, both critiques are fundamentally the same: Republicans are arguing that their policies were absolutely, positively necessary to keep the country safe, regardless of the moral implications. It's just that the path you take to get there is different: if you are arguing that Obama = Bush, then you're arguing that even Obama admits that Bush's policies were necessary. If you're arguing that he's a dangerous change, you're arguing that Obama is deviating from Bush's necessary policies. At this point, it seems like only Cheney is taking the latter position, as nobody seems much interested in defending Bush. In fact, I suspect that you'll hear lots more of "more of the same" from Republicans in the future because it accomplishes everything they need to accomplish--it's not a swipe at Bush since the base still loves him, it doesn't require a defense of Bush's policies, it allows conservatives to allege liberal hypocrisy--and if there's something they enjoy doing more than that, I don't know what it is. What it won't do is allow political space to blame a potential terror attack upon the United States on Barack Obama, though I suspect that they wouldn't try to do that anyway. People rally to their leaders after national disasters, and anyone who remembers the rapidity with which Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were drummed from the conversation after their comments about 9/11 will remember that pinning the blame on individuals and groups during a crisis doesn't really look too good, PR-wise.

And I have no objection to Republicans trotting out the "more of the same" line when Obama does something like use the state secrets privilege to throw out lawsuits, though. Keeps the right sort of pressure on the man. But I wonder when (if?) Republicans will decide to get back on the human rights bandwagon and if there will be a thorough accounting of what went wrong intramurally. Somehow, I doubt it.

Give the man some time

I tend to agree with this, and I'd go even further. I'd like to think I'm a fairly smart guy, and I have a good education, though I am neither an economist nor a finance guy. I got a 97% in my Econ 1A class back in college, so here goes. From what I understand, there are few options for Obama to explore, and all of them are bad. He could do another round of TARP, which probably wouldn't work, would require taxpayers to take another hit, and which would probably be dead on arrival with the public, which has steadily been becoming more anticorporate over the past few months. I know I have.

Obama could do something along the lines of what Paul Krugman wants to do: nationalize the worst banks, wipe out the shareholders, strip out the bad assets, sell off the banks and create an aggregator bank that will handle the toxic assets. This makes sense to me, but I see two problems with it: one, it is illegal and two, even talking about this would send bank stocks even lower. Maybe Obama's considering this, but I know my history: Harry Truman tried to nationalize coal plants during the Korean War, and it got struck down in the courts. If government seizing private business was illegal then, it's probably illegal now. I guess Obama could eliminate all doubt and ask Congress for a law allowing him to nationalize, but the very act of asking would be an indication that he's considering it, which would crash bank stocks as people would be worried they'd lose their money. Or maybe he could roll the dice and hope that the Roberts Court is more left-leaning than the New Deal Court. Err...yeah, that seems likely. And he could just do it on the notion that he would be able to administer a coup de grace before the judicial system could react, but after eight years of a president who played by his own rules I am not enthusiastic about the prospect of more of the same.

This is not to say that nationalization is the wrong strategy--indeed, it's probably the least bad one. It's clear that there are many thorny issues to iron out, and that Obama's team is being cautious because they're only likely to have one chance to do things right, and whatever it is, it's going to be costly and chancy. I also don't think it's a coincidence that the people, like Megan McArdle and Will Wilkinson (and most Republicans), who are making the "He's not doing anything!!!!1!!" argument, are more likely to either have not backed Obama in the first place of to have done so reluctantly, because they already have a negative view of him and don't think he knows what he's talking about. Strangely enough, I'm beginning to think that the Republicans might inadvertently have had a point about banking during the stimulus debate. Tax cuts for the purpose of stimulus are not very useful because people tend to save or pay down debt with them, especially with one-time tax cuts. In most cases this is why tax cuts aren't useful to grow the economy, but at this moment I think that this predictable feature makes them more useful than stimulus spending since money spent or used to pay down debt would go to the banks that need it. What's more, it's not a giveaway to the banks and it doesn't subsidize bad choices, as people who lived prudently will just get some more money to spend, which helps the economy. I wonder whether Obama is going to wait to see if his tax cuts helped the banking system, and then take action. Now, the Republicans just mindlessly support tax cuts no matter the conditions, based on a half-baked scheme of supply-side economics that has never been as effective at creating growth than traditional economics (aside from creating a growth in millionaires and billionaires at our expense). Tax cuts, contra the GOP, are not the solution to every economic problem. I'm beginning to wonder whether they might not have helped with this one.

About Jedi Mind Tricks

As I've maintained before, conservatism today is less a philosophy and more a tribe united by various cultural markers. That Obama is deftly manipulating the hive mentality shows a superior awareness of his enemy. Man knows his Sun Tzu.

I wonder how much further this can go. Letting Limbaugh set the terms of the opposition will prove disastrous to the Republicans, but I wonder whether you couldn't ratchet it up a bit. I think Obama ought to introduce an immigration bill along the lines of McCain-Kennedy. With Limbaugh running things the reaction will be overheated and likely further poison the well of GOP minority outreach. It will shatter the GOP for some time. Not that he needs my help...

A tale of three leaders

Have y'all been looking at Rush Limbaugh's CPAC performance on Sunday? It was rather illuminating. Limbaugh is being touted by Democrats as the de facto Republican leader, and Republicans wary of his power seem disinclined to agree. What struck me about the new Republican Pope is how intellectually hollow his address was. Philosophical statements are thrown around and are not argued or defended, merely asserted, as though the act of saying something along the lines of "the war on poverty has made America worse off" were enough to make it so. There was the standard-issue slurring and mudslinging at the left--why many on the right can't just admit that liberals are decent people who want much of the same things as they want is beyond me. Reagan could actually do that--he could speak about the failures of the left at the time without malice, and it spoke well to his essential decency (his managerial ability, though, ensured a steady stream of corruption within his administration).

This is Limbaugh's party, though. At least, it is for now. It's not like there are tons of other plausible leaders of conservatism out there. Still, for a party that has suffered back-to-back humiliating losses his advice is almost singularly unhelpful. Clearly, the quote getting the most attention is his injunction that better policy ideas won't save the Republican Party. It's true that better ideas wouldn't help the GOP get back into power, necessarily, though the point of said ideas is to actually govern well so that you don't get kicked out within a few years of regaining power. Limbaugh's speech doesn't represent a revolution in Republican thought so much as the end of conservative thought--principles are asserted and not debated. Arguments go unmade. People who need to hear arguments are not true believers, and do not deserve to be in the movement. I live in California, where the state GOP has been in a similar suicide spiral for a few years now, so it has been interesting to see my state's politics come to represent the nation's as well. Yet another way that Cali has been ahead of the curve. We invented jogging, bans on public smoking, seatbelt laws, and dammit we deserve our due.

But it seems to me that what the Republican Party could use most of all is less invocations of Reagan and more Reagan--at least, more of a Reagan-like awareness of the political scene of his day. You see, Reagan was a far right-winger--even to the right of Barry Goldwater. He wasn't particularly compromising in his beliefs, and even though his 1980 campaign dropped his demands to trash Social Security and Medicare I doubt it was because he suddenly became a convert to those programs' benefits. Reagan was a Goldwater conservative but it seems to me that he realized that he couldn't govern like one. Even during the much more conservative 1980s it wasn't as though old folks decided they'd had enough of the government's checks, or poor people decided that they didn't like the government's intrusion into their personal freedom by offering them free healthcare. And middle class families didn't stop liking the free public education that the government offers them.

One suspected that Reagan understood all these things. Don't get me wrong, I think he screwed up the country big time by tweaking the tax code in a way that eventually exploded income inequality, which was further hurt by his disempowering of unions--ostensibly because they were communist fronts, though since communism died conservatives haven't bothered to articulate why they continue to hate one of the few institutions that improves income distribution across the spectrum. This is all not to mention the crappy debt he left us, as well as a legacy for blatant disregard of debt and deficits to a Republican Party that had earlier been keenly and rightly worried about such things. But Reagan never tried to gut Social Security--in fact, he tried to save it. And he never touched Medicare or Medicaid, or public education. Reagan fundamentally left America's infrastructure in place, he just added a few incremental tweaks to the machine to try to make it more conservative. I think those tweaks were really fucking bad but they nevertheless didn't change much in terms of what the government provided for the people.

What can one conclude from this? Only that Reagan is much smarter than the current crop of conservative "leadership", as he understood that the country, despite electing Republicans like himself, had never given him a mandate for Goldwaterism. Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam have argued--correctly, in my opinion--that Goldwaterism was never popular and that the GOP succeeded because it had a better pitch on issues like taxes, crime, foreign policy, welfare, etc. where Democrats had failed to deliver. I believe that Reagan understood this and proceeded to work incrementally in areas where he had been given a mandate, which is why the guy had any success at all. Compared to Margaret Thatcher he accomplished very little, but the American system of government is famously hostile to broad change.

This seems to be something that conservatives don't understand, but it is something that Barack Obama understands. Just as I don't believe that Reagan's election was tantamount to electing Barry Goldwater sixteen years later, I do not believe that Obama's election represents the election of, I don't know, Nancy Pelosi. America hasn't broadly endorsed American liberalism, but it has given Obama a mandate on the economy, healthcare, climate change, Iraq and foreign policy more generally. Because Obama, like Reagan, is an exquisite observer of political trends he has been moving incrementally to accomplish reforms in the specific areas in which he has won the argument. Unlike, say, Bill Clinton, who didn't really win a mandate at all and immediately got sidetracked by social issues that hadn't been a part of the campaign, Obama is sticking to what he was elected to do, and liberal wish list items like FOCA are off the table for the time being.

It seems to me that Obama and Limbaugh represent two extremes in more ways than one--Obama is a keen political observer who can sense why he won and what he has been empowered to change, while Limbaugh hasn't any clue what the public wants and, what's more, is hostile to the notion that people might want something other than "Reaganism" as he sees it. Of course, Obama was elected and Limbaugh wasn't, and Obama is an intellectually serious figure while Limbaugh isn't. One hears in his dismissal of "better policy ideas" a clarion call to an enhanced right-wing nihilism that will stubbornly refuse to change with the times. Indeed, Leader Limbaugh promises little else.

Update: The speech must have sucked if Hugh Hewitt liked it. John Cole observes that Romney is looking downright presidential compared to the rest of the GOP, and I cannot help but agree.

The first thirty days

Since we're exactly a month into the Obama Administration, I guess it's time to assess how things are going. In general, I'd say they're going pretty well. Obama has managed to pass a stimulus bill, which is big, but also worthy measures increasing childrens' health insurance and gender pay discrimination. The housing plan seems to be generally thought to be a good idea throughout the interwebs. And most of the administration's team is in place.

There have been some slipups, though. Obviously Geithner and Daschle could have been handled better, and I wish the order of their scandals had been flipped, as I'd be more confident with Larry Summers at Treasury and Tom Daschle at HHS, taking steps toward health care reform. Plus, we wouldn't even be confronted with the possibility of taking Kathleen Sebelius out of Kansas, where she might win an otherwise impossible Senate victory for the Dems next year. Still, I'm guessing Geithner will eventually rise to the challenge, though his bank plan rollout was botched. And I don't really think Obama lost too much ground with his Commerce nominations. The Secretary of Commerce isn't that important, and the Judd Gregg drama was hardly a blip on most peoples' radar screens. The administration could have done a better job initially of selling the stimulus, as it seemed for a while as though Republicans were babbling nonsense for quite some time. Obama stepped up to the plate in time and got it done, and hopefully lessons have been learnt so that things go more smoothly when EFCA and health care roll around.

So far, Obama has been good at sticking to his plans--perhaps too good, in some instances. Clearly Tim Geithner was not prepared to announce his bank plan when he did. Take this with the Afghanistan surge and it looks like the major flaw to watch for in Obama's team is in sticking to the plan for too long--Geithner's announcement was set, and he wasn't going to change the time. And there was a bit of this with the stimulus debate as well. To be fair, though, in the latter instance Obama did adapt when necessary, and if he can do that he will likely have a pretty productive term.

Pragmatism, always pragmatism

I tend to think that this E. J. Dionne article is right on, and deserves reading in full:

The Williamsburg speech let loose a great gnashing of teeth from those who seem to believe that bipartisan form matters more than substance. But the new tone reflected the very thing about Obama that has won so much notice: He's a pragmatist who takes a method and tries it until it no longer works.

Initially, Obama hoped to win broad Republican support for his stimulus package, but most Republicans preferred to bloody up this new, young president. Obama adjusted. If the GOP wanted a fight, he would not back down.

Some liberal blogs are saying that Obama was wrong to engage Republicans to begin with. I tend to think that that analysis is wrong: he had to do it in good faith to show that he had done it. If it had worked, hey, it worked. If not, well, then he can say he tried, and then win a crucial PR victory in the process. There's also this:

His politics are more neo-Truman than neo-Woodstock, more compatible with It's a Wonderful Life than Easy Rider.

He supports abortion rights but argues for fewer abortions. He supports religious liberty, but thinks religion has a legitimate public role. MTV loyalists love him, but he models a family life more likely to play on the Disney Channel.

I tend to think that this is why Obama resonated so much: even though he really is a historic figure, he's also a bit of a throwback in terms of political style and values. There is something fundamentally American about the guy, which is why the attempts by McCain and Clinton to "otherize" him never worked. Obama may not be just like you and me, but I think he's the kind of person that we want to see ourselves as. I don't see this as hypocritical--quite the opposite, in fact: I think that it is very much a kind of honesty about our country's aspirations. You really can mention Barack Obama in the same sentence as Frank Capra and, unlike some of our recent presidents, it is not in the context of a comparison with Mr. Potter or the mentally challenged guy who lost all the money.

Colin Powell for VP?

Yesterday, Sullivan floated the notion of an Obama/Colin Powell ticket here. It would be rather a genius idea in the ways he described, and it would entice Republicans who have become irritated at the way the Bush Administration has chosen to operate in the world. My take is that, outside of the oil companies, business conservatives are really angry at the Administration's foreign policy, because having everyone else in the world hate us is bad news when you're trying to sell them something. These conservatives might blanch at the concept of voting for a liberal Black Democrat, but with Powell on the ticket, I can see many of them bolting from the GOP to vote for Obama/Powell. It might be the only bipartisan fusion ticket that stands a chance of working (largely because Powell's stances on social issues are generally liberal), and despite his speech at the U. N., Powell is still pretty much universally admired, in part because of his consistent criticism of the Bush Administration in the past few years. I personally like this idea because of the statement it makes: instead of left vs. right, it's realists vs. neocons (i.e. Giuliani and most of the GOP field, minus Ron Paul). I do agree with Sullivan that, with this ticket, the election would be over, and it would be smart for Obama to tease this angle--the whole "me and Colin are a package deal" thing. I don't even think the all-Black ticket issue would matter, since both politicians are hardly traditional Black pols (i.e. Jesse Jackson) and have strong appeal with Whites.

This quote by the former General here is only going to feed the speculation.

Status Update: Sullivan brings up the topic again today. No mention of Powell's U. N. speech as a stumbling block among the left, but I happen to agree that this would be a pretty awesome ticket. Then again, in order for it to ever happen, Obama needs to beat Hillary first, which is where the real trick lies...