House of Eratosthenes

Just over three years ago, acclaimed author and campaign adviser Samantha Power published a memo outlining the foreign policy Barack Obama would pursue if elected president. It was called “Conventional Washington versus the Change We Need.” Power’s argument—aimed straight at then-candidate Hillary Clinton—was that merely replacing George W. Bush with a Democrat would not truly change American foreign policy. It would not truly change American foreign policy because many of Bush’s policies had been supported by “the foreign-policy establishment of both parties,” which remained enthralled to a “bankrupt conventional wisdom.” Obama, she suggested, offered something different. As with his opposition to the Iraq War, he would offer “fresh strategic thinking” undeterred by charges that he was “weak, inexperienced, and even naive.” He represented “a break from a broken way of doing things.”

Three years later, measured by the criteria Power laid out, Obama’s foreign policy has failed. The failure started soon after Obama’s election, when he assembled a foreign-policy team—led by Hillary Clinton herself—drawn from the very “foreign-policy establishment” that Power derided. The people Obama has installed in key positions are smart, earnest, and hard-working, but they lack exactly the quality that Power promised would define his foreign policy: a willingness to challenge conventional wisdom, even when it entails political risks. To the contrary, the foreign-policy wonks who did stake out provocative positions—Robert Malley, for instance, who incurred the wrath of the “pro-Israel” establishment for questioning U.S. policy toward Hamas, or Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon, who incurred the wrath of the liberal blogosphere for supporting the Iraq surge—did not get jobs. The people who did are, for the most part, foreign-policy versions of Elena Kagan: ambitious, talented people who have never publicly espoused a truly controversial opinion about anything. The difference is that in foreign policy, unlike the Supreme Court, there is no lifetime tenure, so habits of conventionality and caution, once learned, rarely go away.

All this helps to explain the absence of memorable Obama speeches about America’s relationship to the world. From his 2002 speech at West Point junking containment and deterrence to his 2005 inaugural promising a campaign to end tyranny, George W. Bush laid out his foreign-policy views in sharp, bold strokes. Most of Obama’s speeches, by contrast, are so exquisitely nuanced that they stop just short of saying anything that anyone could really disagree with. The Bush administration was a festival of grand doctrines and controversial figures; the Obama administration, for all its brainpower, is intellectually bland.

It is important to highlight this particular failing because it, like many Obama failures, is much bigger than Obama. A candidate demonstrates his value to a constituency through his boldness, and his boldness is manifested through charisma — once installed in the position, he doesn’t do anything identifiable. How many disappointed ladies have gone out on dates with a beau like this? How many bosses have you had like this? Every little thing they say, every little thing they do, could’ve been done by anybody.

The distinction is the pep and the zeal and the persuasion with which they argue against doing something else.

It causes a fundamental disagreement with others — which, of course, is blamed on the others. People who do generic things aren’t terribly tolerant of others who do distinguishing things.

Speaking for myself, this is a patch of earth I’d like to see sown with salt after the Obama weed is yanked out of it. It is the turf of the Seagull Manager.

The more years I see rolling on by, the more convinced I become that these people are the reason we’re all doing more fighting and becoming more contentious. I’m also seeing them as liars, whether they realize they’re lying or not. Their message is one of “bold new leadership” — change. How many times did Barack Obama talk about that? How many times did He make the point that “those folks” or “them folks” were guilty of “causing the mess we’re in,” domestically as well as with foreign policy. And didn’t “have any new ideas,” and only wanted “to go back to the failed policies of the last eight years.”

And now we see He’s really not about liberal or conservative, He just takes the path of least resistance. He is, in other words, the polar opposite of what He promised to be. He is precisely what He called others. Far from being a new idea, He is revealed as a new tactic by which old ideas can be argued.

The danger, of course, is that the world is not staying the same. A truly old idea, therefore, is all but guaranteed to fail disastrously. In fact, the old ideas of detente and treaty have been demonstrated to yield the inferior results. As black of an eye as confrontation has received in the media over the last several years, and in spite of the feelings it arouses to see body bags show up in cargo planes, we’ve seen it proven that confrontation at least some of the time is the right answer.

It is the doves who are arguing for a return to a failed ideology. If that were the right answer, it wouldn’t have to be propped up across the years with a money-saturated propaganda drive, and there wouldn’t have to be such a sustained and frenzied search for the best way to argue it.

Nah, he’s definitely a “liberal” in the progressive sense, through and through. But like most of them, his ego is all wrapped up in it, so he can’t stand criticism. He’s actually worse than most, being a full-blown egotist. So he avoids saying what he means, indeed, he avoids saying anything that means much of anything, except when he’s in bulldog campaign mode attacking his opponents on the vague “last 8 years” economic policy charge (even though it’s now about the last 10 years, and he’s been in office for two of them and the Democrats have had majorities in both houses for the last four of those — and that’s when the economy really tanked.) But the stage was set long before the last 10 years started with unsustainable ~~vote buying~~ spending on social programs and other pet projects and policies set up to force banks to sell to buyers who couldn’t afford them and the assumption that real estate prices would rise rapidly and forever.

Which really doesn’t have anything to do with tax breaks for “the rich”.

Or the middle class.

I heard Axelrod this morning countering John Boehner’s call to cut spending by saying that John Boehner wanted to “spend” 700 million dollars on tax cuts.

You don’t “spend” tax cuts. Taking less money from other people is not “spending”money. It wasn’t your money to begin with. Refraining from taking it can’t be spending it. The mindset is that it is all the Government’s money and they generously deign to let us keep some of it rather than us reluctantly giving them some of ours to run the essential business of the nation.
- philmon | 09/08/2010 @ 08:07
Nah, he’s definitely a “liberal” in the progressive sense, through and through.

Yeah I figured I’d get some deserved blowback from that comment about “really not about liberal or conservative.” To clarify, let’s look at previous administrations; for example Reagan & Bush I. Ideologically, they were more-or-less the same, in fact when it came to Supreme Court nominations you could say 41 was more strident than 40.

With any champion of a political faction, there is going to be some action and reaction. Newton’s law of thermodynamics doesn’t extend to the surreal world of politics because these are not equal. Reagan got a lot of reaction, but he also achieved a lot of action…whereas Bush I managed to arouse all the fury from ideological opponents without getting nearly as much accomplished.

If you read the liberal blogs, you see there are some big problems with Obama in terms of how little He is actually achieving for His side of the political spectrum — while arousing just as much resistance (which is somehow supposed to be racist all of a sudden). He’s appointed two left-wingers to the Supreme Court but they’re there to replace retiring left-wingers, with a net shift on the court of close to zero. As far as generating enthusiasm, rats are jumping off the sinking ship in droves and it’s more like a burning ship…the signs are all around. He’s hemorrhaging support because He hasn’t been taking a stand. He’s repeating exactly the same mistakes the Republicans made in 2006 and 2008, His supporters don’t see a reason to make it to the polling places and register their support.

It seems our system possesses an ingrained hostility against Seagull Managers, regardless of where they emerge relative to the political divide…but only over the longer term. BHO is something of an archetypal character for this phenomenon. It is His fundamental definition as a personality, and I would argue He is that, first, and a hard-left liberal politician second.

No cajones.
- mkfreeberg | 09/08/2010 @ 11:20
The stimulus and health care bills are what has most of the bad stuff he’s pushed for through his surrogate think-tanks.

We’ve been rather fortunate on other fronts that the two justices that did retire were relative liberals (I believe the two new ones are farther to the left than they were, though … and relatively young)… and that Kennedy, the supposed middle-of-the-roader, has said he won’t retire while Obama is president (which I think is telling … and perhaps he should be extra careful about possible “accidents” that may befall him because of this position … pray for the man, seriously!) and that Bush was right about Obama really not having many options in Iraq & Afghanistan but to basically continue doing what the Bush administration was doing.

But there’s some doozie shit there in the health care bill, and both it and the “stimulus” represent an enormous expansion of government, the effects of which will take a while to materialize. But when they do ….
- philmon | 09/08/2010 @ 13:58
Bush’s strong international stance had a stabling effect on the stock market.

It isn’t just the citizens of the USA that drive the prices of stocks. BHO’s tampering of (some very old priciples of ) capitalism is something many in other countries have seen before, and were running away from. Do we continue to see a run-up of the market the weaker Democrats become?

Time will tell.
- wch | 09/08/2010 @ 14:04

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Obama’s Foreign Policy Has FailedWednesday, September 8th, 2010

Obama’s Foreign Policy Has Failed
Wednesday, September 8th, 2010