Category Archives: Barack Obama

In praise of humility [REPOST]

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NOTE:  I ran across this post from November 2009 while I was looking for something else, and was struck by it, so I decided to repost it.

 

There’s a fascinating piece up on Time‘s front page entitled, “The Case for Modesty, in an Age of Arrogance,” by one Nancy Gibbs. Gibbs begins,

Virtues, like viruses, have their seasons of contagion. When catastrophe strikes, generosity spikes like a fever. Courage spreads in the face of tyranny. But some virtues go dormant for generations, as we’ve seen with thrift, making its comeback after 40 years in cold storage. I’m hoping for a sudden outbreak of modesty, a virtue whose time has surely come.

In truth, what she really wants to talk about is not modesty but humility (which, as she notes, can be practiced in many ways: “Try taking up golf. Or making your own bagels. Or raising a teenager”); but I don’t have a problem with that, especially as she has good things to say about humility and its importance.

Modesty in private life is attractive, but in public life it is essential, especially now, when those who immodestly claimed to Know It All have Wiped Us Out. The problems we face are too fierce to accommodate arrogance. Humility leaves room for complexity, honors honest dissent, welcomes the outlandish idea that sweeps past ideology and feeds invention. We want to reimagine the health-care system, confront climate change, save our kids from a financial avalanche? The odds are much better if we come to the table assuming we don’t already have all the answers. . . .

Humility and modesty need not be weakness or servility; they can be marks of strength, the courage to confront a challenge knowing that the outcome is in doubt. Ronald Reagan, for all his cold-warrior confidence, projected a personal modesty that served his political agenda well. I still don’t know what President Obama’s core principles are, but the fact that he even pays lip service to humility as one of them could give him the upper hand in the war for the souls of independents—a group that’s larger now than at any time in the past 70 years. . . .

But I heed Jane Austen’s warning that “nothing is more deceitful than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast.” If Obama appears proud of how humble and open-minded he is, if he demonizes opponents instead of debating them, if his actual choices are quietly ideological while his rhetoric flamboyantly inclusive, he will be missing a great opportunity—and have much to be modest about.

Interesting closing comment, that.

 

Looking back from the last year of Barack Obama’s second term, Austen’s warning was aptly noted.  The President missed a great opportunity.  Here’s hoping somebody learns a lesson from his example; another term or two of that sort of attitude—from either party—could be disastrous.  The alarm Gibbs was sounding was urgent six years ago; it’s only the more so now.

 

Image:  Black hole Cygnus X-1.  Image credit:  NASA/CXC/M.Weiss.  Public domain.

Barack Obama, Manichaeus, and the Pharisees

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President Obama’s Rolling Stone interview is deeply troubling to me, for reasons that Commentary’s Peter Wehner captures quite well. As Wehner says, Rolling Stone

paints a portrait of a president under siege and lashing out.

For example, the Tea Party is, according to Obama, the tool of “very powerful, special-interest lobbies”—except for those in the Tea Party whose motivations are “a little darker, that have to do with anti-immigrant sentiment or are troubled by what I represent as the president.”Fox News, the president informs us, “is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world.”

Then there are the Republicans, who don’t oppose Obama on philosophical grounds but decided they were “better off being able to assign the blame to us than work with us to try to solve problems.” Now there are exceptions—those two or three GOPers who Obama has been able to “pick off” and, by virtue of supporting Obama, “wanted to do the right thing”—meaning that the rest of the GOP wants to do the wrong thing.

What really bothers me here isn’t the irony (which Wehner notes) of this kind of calumny coming from a man who promised our country, “I will listen to you, especially when we disagree.” What bothers me is the blind, unshakeable conviction that anyone who disagrees with him must be doing so for nefarious motives. It simply isn’t possible, in his worldview as he presents it, that anyone could disagree with him for reasons which are as honorable and as sincerely concerned with the good of our nation as his own; no, anyone who opposes him must be by virtue of that fact evil, incompetent, a deluded tool of dark forces, or some combination thereof.

Wehner goes on from this point to argue that “President Obama is a man of unusual vanity and self-regard,” and that people close to him need to stage an intervention before things get out of hand. That may be true or it may not be—I’m a preacher, not a telepathic shrink, so I won’t claim to know. But as a preacher, I am at least somewhat trained as a diagnostician of human sin, and I will say that one thing I think I see here is an awful lot of self-righteousness, to a degree that looks a lot like Jesus’ enemies among the Pharisees. It’s a degree of arrogant certainty about one’s own rightness and rectitude that leaves no room for the concept of honest differences of opinion; any disagreement or opposition has to be malignant, is perceived as personal, and thus must be destroyed.

Now, I hasten to add, this is by no means unique to the President, or to liberals; rather, to my way of thinking, this kind of Manichaean self-righteousness is the great blight in American political discourse these days, at every point on the spectrum of beliefs. Among the prominent voices, I think it’s more prevalent on the left, but that’s not much more than comparing pot and kettle either way, and certainly I’ve heard some ugly comments of this nature from conservative friends, relatives, and acquaintances. But still, to have this kind of language coming from our nation’s chief executive is an order of magnitude worse than to hear it even from prominent figures in the media and culture. When Candidate Obama said we needed to get beyond the ugly partisan spirit in our politics, this was the root of the problem at which he was pointing; to have President Obama exacerbating it instead of seeking to make it better is deeply dispiriting.

Update: Jay Cost has a great piece on this on the Weekly Standard website this morning; he makes the argument, I think correctly, that this is really the first time Barack Obama has actually had to deal in any meaningful way with actual conservatives. On that analysis, what we’re seeing is a reaction driven by disappointment (and fury?) that conservatives are not in fact proto-liberals who just need the right presentation to convince them. It’s rather like Martin Luther’s reaction when he realized that the Jews were Jews because they believed in Judaism, not because the Roman church had done such a bad job in presenting Christianity.

“What did the President know and when did he know it?”

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That was the question posed by Fred Dalton Thompson, minority counsel to the Senate committee investigating Watergate, and asked by his boss Sen. Howard Baker, the ranking minority member of that committee, that some say ultimately led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. It may be a question that now needs to be asked, in earnest, of President Barack Obama with regard to the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. According to columnist Kevin McCullough,

It seems incomprehensible that the president and other members of the administration still have jobs when it is now being reported that the federal government was apprised by BP on February 13 that the Deepwater Horizon oil rig was leaking oil and natural gas into the ocean floor.

In fact, according to documents in the administration’s possession, BP was fighting large cracks at the base of the well for roughly ten days in early February.

Further it seems the administration was also informed about this development, six weeks before to the rig’s fatal explosion when an engineer from the University of California, Berkeley, announced to the world a near miss of an explosion on the rig by stating, “They damn near blew up the rig.”

It’s also now being reported that BP was asking for the administration’s help on this matter long before the deadly accident and the now gushing well of tar.

If this is true, then the administration’s inaction—because they were unwilling to take their focus off getting ObamaPelosiCare passed?—was reprehensible. What did the President know, and when did he know it? It’s easy to see why he’s taking the “I was as surprised as you were” tack, telling us he accepted the assurances of others that nothing would go wrong; but if he truly, honestly didn’t know about this—why not, and what does that say about his administration?

Can he yodel?

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I’ve been thinking about the President’s Oval Office speech last week, and about his response to the BP disaster more generally. I saw Gov. Palin take him apart:

That wasn’t surprising, of course, but watching Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews hit him even harder definitely was.  Even harder on the President—no real surprise, since he’s less of a partisan than the MSDNC guys—was Andrew Malcolm of the Los Angeles Times in his “Top of the Ticket” blog:

The first two-thirds of the president’s remarks read just fine . . .

But watching the president and hearing him was a little creepy; that early portion of the address was robotic, lacked real energy, enthusiasm. And worst of all specifics. He was virtually detail-less. . . .

Trust me, the president said, tomorrow I’m going to give those BP execs what-for. As CBS’ Mark Knoller noted on his Twitter account, the president has allotted exactly 20 whole minutes this morning—1,200 fleeting seconds—to his first-ever conversation with the corporation responsible for the disaster.

Then, he’s got an important lunch with Joe “I Witnessed the World Cup’s First Tie” Biden. . . .

President Obama has said he doesn’t sense an appetite to address something as large as the illegal immigrant issue this year. But suddenly—watch the left hand over here because he wants you to not focus on how long it’s taken him to take charge of the spill—he thinks there’s a compelling need to spend a motorcade full of moola that the federal government doesn’t have in order to change the country’s energy habits.

And we’ve gotta start that right now because of an underwater leaking pipe 40 miles off Louisiana that we haven’t plugged and don’t really understand how it broke in the first place. So let’s do the electric car thing and build more windmills now.

And if, by chance, the nation’s politicians end up fighting over an energy plan during the next five months until the voting, maybe the politically damaging healthcare regrets and hidden costs will drown in all the words like so many thousands of seabirds in all the gulf’s still-surging oil.

Of course, no one reasonable expects the President to know how to fix the blowout. Gov. Palin isn’t criticizing him for that, because she doesn’t know how to fix it either. The problem is, we’ve gotten ourselves into a situation that nobody knows how to fix. Which means, you have to mitigate the problem, and it’s there that people do have ideas and that executive leadership is needed from the White House to enable the people who have the ideas and the equipment and the experience to go to work to fix what can be fixed—and it’s there that Barack Obama and his administration are not only falling down on the job, but in fact are being actively counterproductive; significant, experienced help was offered—and rejected.

I realize that most Americans don’t take the Dutch all that seriously (those of us who grew up around their American descendants don’t make that mistake, however), but as James Joyner pointed out,

As to the fact that the Netherlands government has a plan for this and we don’t, I’m not terribly surprised. It’s a small, maritime and riverine country surrounded with oil drilling.

What’s more, the offer came through official channels, via the Netherlands’ consul general in Houston, which means it should have been treated far more seriously and respectfully, and not just for environmental reasons:

You’d sure think taking advantage of an ally’s offer of assistance would have made sense, not only in terms of the spill itself but for building better relations with Europe. Given the scale of our economies, it’s rare that the Netherlands can bail us out. Why not let them when the opportunity arises?

Why not let them? Well, if you’re thinking like a Chicago Democrat, it makes perfect sense:

What about the decision not to waive the Jones Act, which bars foreign-flag vessels from coming to the aid of the Gulf cleanup? The Bush administration promptly waived it after Katrina in 2005. The Obama administration hasn’t and claims unconvincingly that, gee, there aren’t really any foreign vessels that could help.

The more plausible explanation is that this is a sop to the maritime unions, part of the union movement that gave Obama and other Democrats $400 million in the 2008 campaign cycle. It’s the Chicago way: Dance with the girl that brung ya.

What’s more important than getting the mess cleaned up? Making sure that if there’s any spending to be done, it’s your supporters who get the money. And, of course, making sure that whatever else happens, all federal laws and regulations are strictly enforced—don’t want to set any precedents for deregulation, now, do we?

Or the decision to deny Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s proposal to deploy barges to skim oil from the Gulf’s surface. Can’t do that until we see if they’ve got enough life preservers and fire equipment. That inspired blogger Rand Simberg to write a blog post he dated June 1, 1940: “The evacuation of British and French troops from the besieged French city of Dunkirk was halted today, over concerns that many of the private vessels that had been deployed for the task were unsafe for troop transport.”

Taken all in all, it’s no wonder that the best thing the President can find to do about this disaster is . . . blame Congress. To be sure, he was trying to blame just Republicans; but you might have thought he would have realized a) that all such comments would do is make voters more hostile to Congress in general, and thus more likely to vote against their current federal representatives, and b) that his own party currently controls Congress, and thus would be more likely to be hurt by the effects of his comments.

Were I a Democrat, I don’t think I’d be at all pleased with the way the President has shown in this situation. Since I’m not, I’ll just say that more and more, he’s reminding me of this guy:

What President Obama should have done about the BP spill

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It’s probably too late now, but this administration that’s so fond of appointing “czars” for various jobs should have appointed an oil-spill czar, told them (and everyone else) that they had the full authority of the executive branch behind them, sent them down to Louisiana and told them not to come back until the hole had been plugged. They would have wanted someone who met several criteria:

  • Available immediately—no point in naming someone whose appointment would only delay matters
  • Experienced executive, particularly in dealing with large, complex projects
  • Experienced politician—given the political fallout, the political complications, and the need to keep the public informed, the job would need someone used to working on the national political scene
  • Experience in working politically with Big Oil, but independent from them—not someone on the payroll of any of the oil companies, but someone familiar with energy issues who has a track record of keeping them honest and cooperative
  • Some familiarity with the Gulf states, and/or relationships with their governors—wouldn’t need to be someone from that area, but someone who could reasonably expect to work comfortably and effectively with state and local governments in a manner that showed respect and appreciation for the cultures of the region
  • Ideally, a Republican—it isn’t likely that the GOP would have objected to the establishment of such a position, but if so, naming a Republican would have drawn their fangs, and given the President a bit of a bipartisan boost; also, of the governors of the Gulf states, there are four Republicans, three high-profile (Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal, Haley Barbour, Bob Riley), and one who used to be (Charlie Crist), so naming a Republican would help in that regard

Now, it could be that I’m biased, but looking over this list, it seems to me that there’s one person above all others who would fit the bill: as Jason Killian Meath pointed out a couple weeks ago over at BigGovernment, it’s Gov. Sarah Palin.

The only downside here is that if Gov. Palin had performed well in that role, it would have boosted her political standing tremendously (though if she hadn’t, it would have hurt her but still helped the President). But if it was for the good of the country, and also the administration, wouldn’t that have been a price worth paying?

Maybe we should call him President BP Obama?

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The incomparable Michael Barone writes,

Looking back on all the presidential contests held since Obama as a Columbia undergraduate was parroting leftist criticisms of Ronald Reagan, it can be argued that Republicans have won the elections that turned on ideology, and that Democrats have won the elections that turned on competence.

Republican victories in 1984, 1988 and 2004 were clearly endorsements of Ronald Reagan’s and George W. Bush’s policies. Democratic victories in 1992 and 2008 were indictments of the two George Bushes for incompetence and in 1996 an endorsement of the competence of Bill Clinton.

The one election in this period that is hard to classify was in 2000 and had a split verdict, with the Democrat winning the popular vote and the Republican the Electoral College.

That makes sense, if you think about it; polls have pretty consistently shown the US to be a center-right country, closer ideologically to the Republicans (though not by a lot), but the Democrats have pretty consistently shown themselves more capable at actually running government, and particularly at doing so in a way that’s consistent with their ideology. Given that the ideological content of the President’s policies is not all that popular right now, anything that makes him and his party look less than competent is bad news—and it’s starting to look like this disaster in the Gulf could be very bad news indeed. Dick Morris wrote in The Hill,

Conservatives are so enraged at Obama’s socialism and radicalism that they are increasingly surprised to learn that he is incompetent as well. The sight of his blithering and blustering while the most massive oil spill in history moves closer to America’s beaches not only reminds one of Bush’s terrible performance during Katrina, but calls to mind Jimmy Carter’s incompetence in the face of the hostage crisis.

America is watching the president alternate between wringing his hands in helplessness and pointing his finger in blame when he should be solving the most pressing environmental problem America has faced in the past 50 years. We are watching generations of environmental protection swept away as marshes, fisheries, vacation spots, recreational beaches, wetlands, hatcheries and sanctuaries fall prey to the oil spill invasion. And, all the while, the president acts like a spectator, interrupting his basketball games only to excoriate BP for its failure to contain the spill.

Of course, Morris has been anti-Obama all the way along, so it’s not as if there was any support here for the President to lose; but how about Peggy Noonan, a certified Obamacan? From her, we got the anguished cry, “He was supposed to be competent!”

The original sin in my view is that as soon as the oil rig accident happened the president tried to maintain distance between the gusher and his presidency. He wanted people to associate the disaster with BP and not him. When your most creative thoughts in the middle of a disaster revolve around protecting your position, you are summoning trouble. When you try to dodge ownership of a problem, when you try to hide from responsibility, life will give you ownership and responsibility the hard way. . . .

I wonder if the president knows what a disaster this is not only for him but for his political assumptions. His philosophy is that it is appropriate for the federal government to occupy a more burly, significant and powerful place in America—confronting its problems of need, injustice, inequality. But in a way, and inevitably, this is always boiled down to a promise: “Trust us here in Washington, we will prove worthy of your trust.” Then the oil spill came and government could not do the job, could not meet the need, in fact seemed faraway and incapable: “We pay so much for the government and it can’t cap an undersea oil well!”

This is what happened with Katrina, and Katrina did at least two big things politically. The first was draw together everything people didn’t like about the Bush administration, everything it didn’t like about two wars and high spending and illegal immigration, and brought those strands into a heavy knot that just sat there, soggily, and came to symbolize Bushism. The second was illustrate that even though the federal government in our time has continually taken on new missions and responsibilities, the more it took on, the less it seemed capable of performing even its most essential jobs. Conservatives got this point—they know it without being told—but liberals and progressives did not. They thought Katrina was the result only of George W. Bush’s incompetence and conservatives’ failure to “believe in government.” But Mr. Obama was supposed to be competent.

Remarkable too is the way both BP and the government, 40 days in, continue to act shocked, shocked that an accident like this could have happened. If you’re drilling for oil in the deep sea, of course something terrible can happen, so you have a plan on what to do when it does.

How could there not have been a plan? How could it all be so ad hoc, so inadequate, so embarrassing? We’re plugging it now with tires, mud and golf balls? . . .

Republicans should beware, and even mute their mischief. We’re in the middle of an actual disaster. When they win back the presidency, they’ll probably get the big California earthquake. And they’ll probably blow it. Because, ironically enough, of a hard core of truth within their own philosophy: When you ask a government far away in Washington to handle everything, it will handle nothing well.

Of course, the President and other Democrats are trying to blame this one, too, on George W. Bush; but it just won’t wash. President Bush could have blamed 9/11 on Bill Clinton—if President Clinton had done his job better, al’Qaeda would never have been able to launch the attack (and Osama bin Laden might not even have been around to try). President Clinton could have spent all kinds of time at the beginning of his term blaming George H. W. Bush for the state of the economy. Ronald Reagan could have done the same with Jimmy Carter, since he inherited an economic mess that might have been worse than the one we’re in. Gerald Ford certainly would have had a great deal to blame on Richard Nixon. The list goes on. None of them did it; they took responsibility, rolled up their sleeves, and went to work solving the problems they’d been given to solve. That’s what Presidents do.

At the rate he’s going, we could expect to find Barack Obama in 2012 still campaigning against President Bush, still blaming everything bad on President Bush, as if he’d never been elected; this incessant blame game is indeed change, but not the kind of change people wanted—it’s unseemly. He needs to accept, as Noonan wrote months ago, that it’s his rubble now. That’s part of being the president, just as it’s part of being the captain of a ship: whatever happens, fair or not, it’s on you, and you need to step up and deal with it. Yeah, you get blamed for things that aren’t your fault. That’s life, it’s happened to every other president; you wanted the job, you got the job—all of it, not just the good parts. President Obama seems to be trying to only accept the good parts, and that has to stop.

To some extent, none of this should be at all surprising; at the time of his election, Barack Obama had no track record of successful executive experience to support the idea that he would in fact be a competent executive rather than just someone who talked a good game. I expected, wrongly, that we would see a major terrorist attempt on U.S. soil during his first year in office, as we had with his two immediate predecessors; I’m deeply glad to have been wrong about that, but not at all glad that the “ineffective, dithering response” I predicted to such a crisis has been the sort of response we’ve seen to the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Indeed, it’s been worse than I thought, because as well as ineffective and dithering (even to the point of hamstringing the state of Louisiana’s efforts to protect itself), the President’s response has also been remarkably disengaged, which is something I would not have predicted.

Taken all in all, it’s enough to make one wonder—something which, as Sarah Palin noted, the media certainly would have wondered about a Republican president—if there’s any significance here to the fact that

During his time in the Senate and while running for president, Obama received a total of $77,051 from the oil giant and is the top recipient of BP PAC and individual money over the past 20 years, according to financial disclosure records.

The administration and its allies have been trying to deny, play down, and obfuscate this fact, but the records show the falsity of their denials, and the fact that other oil companies have given more to other politicians really isn’t on point: the only actors here are the Obama administration and BP, and President Obama has been America’s biggest beneficiary of BP money. Has this influenced the way the White House has treated BP in all this? Did it play a part in their decision to “keep a close watch” on BP’s efforts and otherwise let the company deal with the mess as it chose? We don’t know; we ought to. The media ought to be asking, and they aren’t. Eventually, those questions are going to have to be faced, and answered. Right now, it certainly looks as if all that BP money to Barack Obama bought a fair bit of accommodation and slack from his administration.

As a final note, I think the guy who’s come off best in this disaster is James Carville. I’ve never cared much for the man, but I have to respect his honesty and passion on this one . . . this whole story makes me sick, and I’ve never even been to Louisiana—I can only imagine his agony at what’s happening to his home state.

Umm . . . about those “death panels” . . .

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The media may have assured us that Gov. Palin didn’t know what she was talking about when she coined that phrase, and the Democrats may have insisted there was no such thing lurking in ObamaPelosiCare’s shadows—but try telling that to the man President Obama nominated to take over government health care, Dr. Donald Berwick,

an outspoken admirer of the British National Health Service and its rationing arm, the National Institute for Clinical Effectiveness (NICE).

“I am romantic about the National Health Service. I love it,” Berwick said during a 2008 speech to British physicians, going on to call it “generous, hopeful, confident, joyous, and just.” He compared the wonders of British health care to a U.S. system that he described as trapped in “the darkness of private enterprise.”

Berwick was referring to a British health care system where 750,000 patients are awaiting admission to NHS hospitals. The government’s official target for diagnostic testing was a wait of no more than 18 weeks by 2008. The reality doesn’t come close. The latest estimates suggest that for most specialties, only 30 to 50 percent of patients are treated within 18 weeks. For trauma and orthopedics patients, the figure is only 20 percent.

Overall, more than half of British patients wait more than 18 weeks for care. Every year, 50,000 surgeries are canceled because patients become too sick on the waiting list to proceed. . . .

With the creation of NICE, the U.K. government has effectively put a dollar amount to how much a citizen’s life is worth. To be exact, each year of added life is worth approximately $44,305 (£30,000). Of course, this is a general rule and, as NICE chairman Michael Rawlins points out, the agency has sometimes approved treatments costing as much as $70,887 (£48,000) per year of extended life.

To Dr. Berwick , this is exactly how it should be. “NICE is not just a national treasure,” he says, “it is a global treasure.”

And, Dr. Berwick wants to bring NICE-style rationing to this country. “It’s not a question of whether we will ration care,” he said in a magazine interview for Biotechnology Healthcare, “It is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”

My one complaint with Michael Tanner’s article is its title, “‘Death panels’ were an overblown claim—until now” . . . are you really so sure about that? If the claim isn’t overblown now, maybe it never was. Isn’t it just possible, Mr. Tanner, that Gov. Palin understood from the beginning what it took you a while to figure out? So the Democrats said there were no death panels in the bill. So they also said, “If you like your present health insurance, you can keep it”—but they didn’t write the bill that way. (Rather to the contrary, actually.) Who’s really worth believing here?

Is a Clinton-Obama war brewing?

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This from Politico makes me wonder:

Former President Bill Clinton returned to his home state Friday to help a beleaguered ally and delivered a broadside against some of the most powerful interests in the Democratic Party.

Using unusually vivid language to describe the threat against Sen. Blanche Lincoln, Clinton urged the voters who nurtured his career to resist outside forces bent on making an example out of the two-term Democratic incumbent.

He pounded the podium with Lincoln at his side, warning that national liberal and labor groups wanted to make her a “poster child” in the June 8 Senate run-off to send a message about what happens to Democrats who don’t toe the party line.

“This is about using you and manipulating your votes to terrify members of Congress and members of the Senate,” Clinton said in the gym of a small historically black college here.

Clinton didn’t mention Lt. Gov. Bill Halter’s name—the lieutenant governor worked in the former president’s administration—or single out any specific liberal groups. But he didn’t need to.

Halter, who held the incumbent to under 50 percent in the May 18 primary election, has been the beneficiary of millions of dollars in advertising from liberal groups and unions angry with Lincoln over her hesitance to support labor organizing legislation and ties to the business community.

It’s a clash that pits the ascendant forces of the progressive left against a centrist Southern Democrat cut from Clinton’s own Democratic Leadership Council mold, a proxy fight that the former president and longtime Arkansas governor sought to underscore by noting that Lincoln’s “opponent is not her opponent.”

This is especially true given the way the whole Sestak story has played out, with the White House trying to focus everyone’s attention on President Clinton (as opposed to, say, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, whom they admit asked President Clinton to talk to Rep. Sestak on the administration’s behalf). I can’t imagine he appreciates the “when in doubt, blame a Clinton” approach (as Tabitha Hale put it) that the Obama administration is using here.

There’s more to the story than that, though, as Susannah of The Minority Report points out in a piece at RedState; specifically, there’s the relationship between President Clinton and Rep. Sestak. Susannah makes the case—circumstantial but compelling—that President Clinton submarined President Obama here, and that he did so deliberately. If so, this is something neither man wants to come out officially, for differing reasons, but if there’s a better explanation of President Clinton’s conduct during the PA Senate primary, I can’t think of it. And certainly, President Clinton has plenty of reason to want to bring President Obama down—not just for the way the Obama campaign treated the Clintons during the presidential primaries, but for the way the President has treated Secretary Clinton since taking office.

I do have a couple disagreements with Susannah; for one thing, I don’t think she goes far enough—if matters indeed played out as she speculates, I’m sure that President Clinton not only encouraged Rep. Sestak to stay in the primary, but that he actively encouraged Rep. Sestak to campaign on the fact that the White House had tried to buy him off. For the other, yes, James Carville has always worked for the Clintons, but I don’t think we can see their encouragement in Carville’s recent verbal defenestration of the White House, because I don’t think we need to. Carville’s a Democrat, yes, he’s a Clintonite, yes, but before either of those things, he’s a Cajun. He wasn’t speaking as a political operative there, he was speaking as a man of Louisiana, and good for him.

Now, she could be wrong, and I could be wrong, and everything could be just fine between Barack Obama and the Clintons; but given that there’s never been any evidence of that, but plenty of evidence to the contrary, given that it makes the best sense of l’affaire Sestak, and given that President Clinton seems to have come out and declared war on Barack Obama’s base—well, given all those things, at the end of the day, I don’t think we are. I will be shocked if Peter Ferrara’s recent prediction that President Obama will resign before November 2012 comes true, but as for his earlier prediction that the President won’t stand for re-election—that, I suspect, is the Clintons’ goal. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, and who ends up being the last one standing. For my part, I wouldn’t bet on Barack Obama.

Identity politics and the liberal fear of Sarah Palin

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Contempt and disdain for Sarah Palin, sometimes hysterical and violent, is practically a commonplace on the Left in this country right now. There are those on the Right who believe that contempt to be faked, a matter of political calculation, but I don’t think so; I tend to believe it’s truly felt, however unjustified I’m certain it is. I don’t see the evidence in the record to support it, but that’s because I don’t begin with the presupposition that conservative ideas are stupid; it’s also because I have no desire to believe her stupid, incompetent, malignant, a lightweight, etc., where many liberals clearly do.

The question is, though, if the Left honestly believes Gov. Palin is not to be taken seriously—which isn’t a unanimous opinion, but I do sense is held by the majority—why do they keep leveling every gun they can bring to bear on her? Part of that is probably contempt for the voting public, something akin to what we recently saw out of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown; after all, from the liberal point of view, if a majority of American voters actually chose to elect George W. Bush, there’s no telling what hyperbolically moronic thing we might choose to do next. Even if she really is as bad as they’re trying to tell us, we might go and vote her in anyway.

I think there’s something else going on here, though, which sits a good deal more uneasily with liberal consciences, to say nothing of liberal political analysis. When Barack Obama won in November 2008, a good chunk of his appeal could be boiled down to identity politics: “Vote for me because I’m black.” It wasn’t simply an appeal to “racial”* minorities, though—this was also a good chunk of his appeal to white swing voters, breaking down into two related appeals. One was “Vote for me to help make history by electing America’s first black president.” The desire to see history happen, and to help make it happen, is powerful even in a vacuum; that’s why if you go to a baseball game and the visiting pitcher has a perfect game going through five, six, seven innings, you’ll find an awful lot of the home fans start cheering him on, hoping to see him pull it off. After all, there’s another chance for a win tomorrow, but to see a perfect game . . . who knows if you’ll ever have another shot? But of course, Sen. Obama’s win wasn’t in a vacuum, it was in the context of the long indignity of white-black relations in this country, and the history he made truly was profound.

The other element in play here, of course, was “Vote for me and prove you’re not a racist”; as many people observed, Sen. Obama offered himself in a very real sense as the answer to white guilt over slavery, Jim Crow, and “racial” inequality, and as the hope for a post-racial politics in this country. It hasn’t panned out that way, but that was part of his promise and part of his appeal; in voting for a black President, white folks could do something constructive about the ills that have been done to black folks in this country.

In 2012, however, that appeal is gone. The history is already made; it can’t be made again. America has already proven it will elect a black President. A great many swing voters have already proven to themselves that they are perfectly willing to vote for a black President; if they decide to vote for someone other than President Obama, no one can reasonably say it must be because they’re racists. That’s gone, and it can’t be brought back; it may be propped up a bit, but “re-elect” just isn’t as resonant as “elect”—and if you try to tell swing voters that once wasn’t good enough, they have to vote for him again to really prove they aren’t racists and their country isn’t racist, you risk making them very angry.

That said, even the echo of the appeal to history and identity politics may have some resonance, depending on whom the Republicans run against the President. If it’s another white guy—Pawlenty, Romney, Daniels, doesn’t much matter—then you can refashion it a bit as the Republicans wanting to turn back the clock, or something; sure, independents have already voted for a black President once, but isn’t that still more heroic than just another pasty GOP dude? Of course, Bobby Jindal could always decide to run, and he could win the nomination, and yeah, he’s a minority . . . but Indians and other South Asians just aren’t that big a presence in US identity politics, and their history in this country lacks moments like Selma and figures like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; Jindal’s a minority, but not in a way that’s politically resonant (especially since he converted from Hinduism to a very American form of Christianity). His nomination would defang the “Republicans = racists” meme to some extent, but the Left could always claim that the GOP only nominated him because he’s not really black.

But if Sarah Palin (or, for that matter, Michele Bachmann or Liz Cheney) were to win the nomination . . . now that’s a kettle of fish of a different color. Now, all of a sudden, the appeal to history, identity politics, and guilt is powerfully back in play—but on the wrong side (from the Left’s perspective). All of a sudden, you have a candidate who can stand up and say, “Vote for me to help make history by electing America’s first female president”; you have a candidate who can go on TV and say, “Vote for me and prove you’re not a sexist.” The former would probably make some on the Right cringe a little, but far more would cheer her on; as for the latter, while I don’t see any conservative female candidate actually being so gauche as to say such a thing, she wouldn’t have to. Indeed, Gov. Palin could fire off volley after volley against the “old boys’ network” in Chicago and DC, and point out quite accurately that President Obama is a creature of those networks and has surrounded himself with their members; the principal point would be the true and important one that he’s just another machine politician doing politics as usual, but the undercurrent would have its effect.

Do I believe that Gov. Palin would consciously ask people to vote for her because she’s a woman? No, certainly not to the extent that Sen. Obama consciously used his skin color to political advantage; but her gender would be to significant political advantage nevertheless, just as his skin color was, and in ways that would really undermine the political foundations of his 2008 victory. This is particularly true given that, while there was no fair basis for calling John McCain a racist, one can make a pretty good argument that Barack Obama is a sexist, or at least that some of his closest advisors are. After all, just look at the way his campaign treated Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primary. Look at the way they treated Sarah Palin during the general election. Look at the language they used, over and over again, and at the ways they depicted their female opponents. If President Obama ends up having to run against a woman for re-election, charges of sexism could get real traction with independents—and even some moderate liberals—and that could really hurt him.

In short, I believe the reason liberals have been hitting Gov. Palin with everything including the kitchen sink ever since her appearance on the national stage is that they think of things, and the current administration certainly thinks of things, in terms of identity politics—something conservatives are far less prone to do—and are used to using identity politics in their favor (as they’re trying to do again with the latest round of accusations of racism); but if the GOP nominates a strong conservative female candidate for the White House, those identity politics will rebound on them in a big way, and pose a definite political threat. That, I think, is the biggest reason for the Left’s anti-Palin hysteria: if she wins the GOP nomination, she’ll turn their ace in the hole into a low club.To which I say, good on her.

*The whole use of the word “race” to categorize people by skin color and continent of ancestral origin really galls me. IMHO, there’s only one “race,” and that’s the human race. Anything else is majoring in the minors.

(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin).

He bowed to the Sa’udis, he bowed to the Emperor, now he bows to Wall Street

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A little over a month ago, the President stood beside Paul Volcker and announced his intention to prevent banks whose deposits are insured by the federal government from engaging in proprietary training. It wasn’t a popular move with Wall Street, and it was certainly a move that would have had downsides, but I believed (and still believe) it was a necessary one, for reasons that were laid out well by Jim Manzi of National Review:

The reason that it is dysfunctional to have an insured banking system that is free to engage in speculative investing is simple and fundamental. We (i.e., the government, which is to say, ultimately, the taxpayers) provide a guarantee to depositors that when they put their savings in a regulated bank, then the money will be there even if the bank fails, because we believe that the chaos and uncertainty of a banking system operating without this guarantee is too unstable to maintain political viability. But if you let the operators of these banks take the deposits and, in effect, put them on a long-shot bet at the horse track, and then pay themselves a billion dollars in bonuses if the horse comes in, but turn to taxpayers to pay off depositors if the horse doesn’t, guess what is going to happen? Exactly what we saw in 2008 happens. . . .

Make no mistake, many banking executives right now are benefiting from taxpayer subsidies. Even if they pay back the TARP money, the government has demonstrated that it will intervene to protect large banks. This can’t be paid back. And this implicit, but very real, guarantee represents an enormous transfer of economic value from taxpayers to any bank executives and investors who are willing to take advantage of it. Unsurprisingly, pretty much all of them are.

I gave the President a lot of credit last month for taking this step. As it turns out, that was premature of me, because he’s now caved to Wall Street, double-crossed Volcker, and abandoned the plan in favor of one amenable to J. P. Morgan and “Government Sachs” (Goldman Sachs was the second-largest donor to the Obama campaign, and J. P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon is a particularly powerful and important Obama backer). I suppose his decision two weeks ago to publicly endorse the multi-million-dollar bonuses given to Dimon and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein should have been a tipoff that President Obama wasn’t going to have the spine to stand up to them and put the Volcker Rule through; after all, crony capitalists never bring the hammer down on their cronies, only on businesses that don’t support them.

As such, the President’s bold announcement last month now joins his promise that “if you like your current health insurance, you can keep it” and his pledge not to raise taxes on households making less than $250,000 a year in the dustbin of political expediency. Lesson once again: don’t take this president’s word on it until it actually happens.