Obama/West Relationship Status Update: ‘It’s Complicated’
Cornel West feels jilted. In an article on him at Truthdig, Princeton’s Professor of African-American Studies and Religion criticizes President Obama for being ungrateful for West’s service to his campaign.
Much of the article reads like post-breakup grumblings. West describes how Obama never calls him back, “but then a month and half later I would run into other people on the campaign and he’s calling them all the time. I said, wow, this is kind of strange. He doesn’t have time, even two seconds, to say thank you or I’m glad you’re pulling for me and praying for me, but he’s calling these other people.”
Most interesting are West’s criticisms of Obama’s presidency. Like many former supporters, Professor West feels betrayed by Obama’s “same as the old boss” policies. In order to explain this, West engages in the quixotic pursuit of pathologizing President Obama. As Ilya Somin and Jonah Goldberg point out, this is oddly reminiscent of Dinesh D’Souza’s recent book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, and equally confusing. Run-of-the-mill liberal policies from a liberal president don’t need extensive and convoluted explanations.
Pathologizing political opponents is a difficult and largely self-serving task. Although there are many reasons we believe what we do, it does healthy intellectual discourse a disservice to classify opponents rather than try to refute them. Honest disagreements should not be relegated to the pages of the DSM-IV. Usually, this strategy only helps you feel better about your beliefs. While you have reason and arguments supporting your beliefs, all your opponent has is a long line of racial confusion and societal pressures.
According to West, President Obama (“my brother Barack Obama”) “has a certain fear of free black men” caused by his mixed-race background that has made him always “fear being a white man with black skin.” Obama comes from “Kansas influence, white, loving grandparents, coming out of Hawaii and Indonesia, when he meets these independent black folk who have a history of slavery, Jim Crow, Jane Crow and so on, he is very apprehensive.” Thus, “he has a certain rootlessness, a deracination.”
As Gene Healy has consistently pointed out, President Obama needs no explanation. In the era of the imperial presidency we have presidents who become imperious. Big surprise. What does need an explanation, however, is why Cornel West, an unquestionably intelligent man, still finds this surprising.
Or perhaps he doesn’t. The most striking thing said by West in the article is this: “The tea party folk are right when they say the government is corrupt. It is corrupt. Big business and banks have taken over government and corrupted it in deep ways.” Now, I don’t expect to see Professor West at Glenn Beck rallies, but maybe his disappointment in Obama will lead him to stop believing that the problems with government are personal rather than institutional—that is, that government can be fixed if we just put the right people in office.
Or maybe he’ll just support the next candidate who returns his phone calls.
What the Tea Party Hath Wrought?
The Internal Revenue Service is investigating campaign donations to groups incorporated under 501(c)(4) of the tax code. Some in the IRS apparently hope to apply gift taxes to the contributions.
Higher taxes on an activity would generally lead to less of that activity, especially if a good substitute exists that is not taxed. In this case, donors could give money to 527 groups. Such donations are exempt from taxation. But 527 groups are subject to disclosure of donors.
The IRS investigations involve tax provisions “that had rarely, if ever, been enforced.” Why now? We do not know. But 501(c)(4) groups played in a important part in the 2010 campaign. As you know, the party in power lost control of the House of Representatives in 2010. With the president’s re-election at stake in 2012, the administration might hope that that less money is available to fund the political speech of its opponents.
The White House has already issued a draft order requiring disclosure of political spending by government contractors. Now these investigations of donors. The IRS effort need not lead to legal complaints to be politically effective. As one expert notes, “The lack of clarity and the potential for not-insignificant taxation on these gifts will cause many of the biggest donors to think twice.”
Many people argue that mandatory disclosure of political spending has few costs and many benefits. Such laws are said to discourage few donors from funding political speech. If that is true, why is the Obama administration so interested in forcing donors out of anonymity?
Perhaps the administration believes deeply in transparency. Or perhaps the administration believes that attacking (no longer anonymous) donors will effectively discourage speech critical of the President in 2012.
The political misuse of the Internal Revenue Service should be a concern of everyone. During the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, presidents and their people decided, as John Dean put it at the time, to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” Have we forgotten that history?
A New Day? Obama Faces Reality
Today POLITICO Arena asks:
The president will address this new political reality at a 1 p.m. news conference. What should President Obama say to reckon with the reality of the Democratic debacle?
My response:
What the president should say and what he will say at his press conference this afternoon are likely to be two different things. He should say that he and his party seriously misread the 2008 election results: Americans were rejecting the Bush administration’s eight years of expansive government. But he can hardly say that without repudiating the last two years: After all, he doubled down on Bush’s policies. Yesterday the vast majority of Americans said, in effect, “And we mean it!”
Not everywhere, to be sure, but look at the House map this morning: It’s almost all red, with scattered pockets of blue. Obama should recognize that reality, but to do so would be to abandon the dream, and he is nothing if not a dreamer. Throughout this campaign administration apologists kept saying that the problem was not in the product but in the packaging – in the delivery. No. It was the product. Americans didn’t want it.
So Obama will doubtless give lip service to yesterday’s results and talk about the need for all to work together “to solve America’s problems” – as though we were all on some grand collective mission. But in his subsequent actions he will likely turn to the elites in those isolated urban and academic blue pockets on the map to try to fashion a comeback consistent with his dream, because a Bill Clinton pivot would be wholly out of character with a man who branded opponents as “the enemy.” We’re probably in for two years of gridlock before we can return to fundamental principles of limited government, and that’s good.
Yes, We Do Bribe Kids!
While politicians probably support many policies for college students in part because they think the policies will be educationally or otherwise beneficial, vote buying is no doubt also important. Of course, it’s hard to find a politician who will actually cop to the latter. On this morning’s Today show, however, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine came about as close to doing that as you could possibly hope for.
Responding to interviewer Ann Curry’s observation that President Obama has aimed a lot of campaigning at college students lately, Kaine noted that young people voted for Obama in record numbers in 2008, and “the message to young voters is pretty simple… we’ve done the largest expansion of the student loan program in American history… we’ve done a health care reform that allows youngsters to stay on their family insurance policy until age 26, and we’ve done important credit card reform that has helped young voters. So we have their attention….”
Translation: Kids, vote the right way, and keep that free stuff coming!
It’s Time for the Coalition to Step Aside
Today’s Washington Post reports that residents of Gizab, a village in southern Afghanistan, reclaimed their territory from the Taliban. One U.S. commander called it “perhaps the most important thing that has happened in southern Afghanistan this year.”
Gizab may eventually turn back to Taliban control, but at least for now, we can try and postulate as to why local residents successfully defended their territory, achieving what the coalition has been trying to do for years throughout the country but to no avail. Here’s a thought: allow Afghans to fight the Taliban themselves and slowly back away. Unfortunately, this story may reinforce the atrocious ”One Tribe at a Time” formulation, a strategy that entails coalition troops “going native” and unilaterally choosing tribes to side with against the Taliban–of course, without any proper understanding of tribal or community dynamics beforehand.
As I wrote several weeks ago, “merely increasing our knowledge of Afghanistan’s local politics will not guarantee success; presuming we can simply learn what ethnicities and communities can be ‘peeled off’ from militants does not necessarily mean we will reach the ends we seek or yield the outcomes we want.”
Many moons ago, Christian Bleuer over at The Ghosts of Alexander wrote about the follies of following the ”One Tribe at a Time” formula. “Seriously, go out and try to find the ‘tribal leadership.’ You will find that there is no clear, stable leadership. Things are in flux, and always have been. Especially since 1979. You will end up with a bunch of squabbling locals trying to call in air strikes on their rivals…. Please don’t let this anecdote draw away attention from how bad Gant’s paper is when considered in its entirety. The blind embedded, hyper-localized ‘adopted son’ mentality he shows should be a warning to all. Anthropologists do their best to not ‘join the tribe.’ So should soldiers.”
Indeed, Judah Grunstein wrote a while back in Small Wars Journal about this very same issue. “What’s also overlooked — by Gant [author of "One Tribe at a Time"], but also by more conventional COIN theory — is the fact that intervening in a social system creates both winners and losers. COIN bases its methodology in large part on the assumption that losers will shift loyalties in order to compete for the benefits on offer. Again, the lessons from the helping professions show that this is far from a foregone conclusion. The resulting power imbalances within the indigenous structure can instead lead to increased — and rigidified — resentment and hostility toward the helping professional.”
Most analysts in D.C. are waiting for that silver bullet, that one strategy that will help America “win.” But Afghans can “win” without our help, as villagers in Gizab have shown. It may not be easy, and Afghans will surely encounter setbacks, but coalition forces cannot continually recalibrate policy to accurately predict which areas of Afghanistan will prefer the corrupt centralized government we back and which ones will not. It’s time we get out of the way and let Afghans decide their future, Taliban or no Taliban.
Tea Party Defeats Palin in Idaho
State Rep. Raul Labrador walloped Republican establishment favorite Vaughn Ward in Idaho’s 1st District congressional primary. Idaho native Sarah Palin campaigned for Ward, who had worked in the McCain presidential campaign in 2008. Labrador drew strong support from Tea Party activists. According to Politico, “Ward’s defeat also came despite his high-profile support from former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who did more to assist Ward than she did for almost any other House candidate. Last Friday, she headlined a rally and fundraiser for Ward, and her parents and in-laws were supporters of Ward’s campaign.”
Lots of Republican incumbents lost their legislative seats, too, suggesting the continuing power of Tea Party activism and general populist unrest.
Lawrence Lessig’s Constitutional Amendment
Lawrence Lessig has proposed a constitutional amendment in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United. It reads:
“Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to restrict the power to limit, though not to ban, campaign expenditures of non-citizens of the United States during the last 60 days before an election.”
In Citizens United, the Court said that the First Amendment concerns speech rather than speakers. Congress has no power to discriminate against speakers; hence, a source of speech – people organized as a corporation – could not be prohibited from speaking (or funding speech).
Professor Lessig hopes to introduce a discrimination among speakers into the First Amendment. His proposed discrimination will not lose a popularity contest. He wishes to allow Congress to control the speech of non-citizens. He follows two lines of argument in support of his amendment, one less rational than the other.
The less rational line of appeal to the reader is both implicit and predictable. The Chinese are invoked along with the Chamber of Commerce. A denial of xenophobic intent follows immediately, and “We the People” appear near the end. Carl Schmitt would recognize the rhetorical construction of “friend and enemy.” Rather cleverly, Lessig manages to equate the foreign devils with the internal demons of the liberal mind. Corporations (including the Sierra Club?) and the Chinese (or other foreigner) are on one side of political struggles while “We the People” are on the other.
A Campaign Finance Lesson
The Washington Post offers an instructive campaign finance story this morning. The essence of the story: employees of banks and brokerage houses contributed more to candidate Barack Obama in 2008 than to his rival John McCain. A lot more in fact: such employees gave almost twice as much to the current president at they did to the Arizona senator.
Now, however, President Obama is attacking the banks and Wall Street for greed and selfishness, not to mention for ruining the economy. Moreover, Obama is proposing curbs on Wall Street pay and heavy regulation of banks. It would appear, in other words, that contributions don’t buy many favors with this administration.
But the story goes deeper. Wall Street is now shifting its contributions to the GOP. That’s not surprising. In fact, being an intelligent man, President Obama must have known his attacks on Wall Street might deprive his party of contributions. Yet, he went forward with the attacks and proposed laws.
Why? In the coming election, contributions will matter a lot less than votes. Obama thinks his attacks on Wall Street will cast the Democrats as the party of “us” against the detested “them.” The votes gained will greatly outweigh the donations lost. The currency of politics is votes in the market for election.
The next time someone tells you that donations are “legalized bribery,” ask them why Obama took $18 million from Wall Street and gave them in return endless abuse and hostile legislation.
Quid pro quo, indeed.
Emanuel on TV and Filkins on McChrystal
A. It’s encouraging to see Rahm Emanuel and John Kerry saying that we shouldn’t up force levels in Afghanistan without a reliable partner. But if we shouldn’t send 40,000 more troops to prop up a crooked government, why keep the 68,000 we have there? A focused counter-terrorism mission would require far less than that.
B. According to Dexter Filkins’ article in the New York Times Magazine, the war in Iraq taught General Stanley McChrystal the following:
No situation, no matter how dire, is ever irredeemable — if you have the time, resources and the correct strategy. In the spring of 2006, Iraq seemed lost. The dead were piling up. The society was disintegrating. One possible conclusion was that it was time for the United States to cut its losses in a country that it never truly understood. But the American military believed it had found a strategy that worked, and it hung in there, and it finally turned the tide.
What’s interesting about this claim is its utter confidence in the potential efficacy of US military power — it is not just necessary to solving Iraq’s problems, but sufficient. If this view is right, Iraqis themselves, and their civil war, were unnecessary to the limited political reconciliation that occurred there.
Filkins, surprisingly, seems to agree, depicting the evolution of the war this way:
For four years, the American military had tried to crush the Iraqi insurgency and got the opposite: the insurgency bloomed, and the country imploded. By refocusing their efforts on protecting Iraqi civilians, American troops were able to cut off the insurgents from their base of support. Then the Americans struck peace deals with tens of thousands of former fighters — the phenomenon known as the Sunni Awakening — while at the same time fashioning a formidable Iraqi army. After a bloody first push, violence in Iraq dropped to its lowest levels since the war began.
Note the use of the word “then” preceding the sentence about peace deals. It carries a heavy load. Filkins wants to say that the hearts and mind theory of counterinsurgency caused the Anbar Awakening. But he offers no real causal story about how they are connected; he just says that one happened and then the other.
Another view, one that leaves Iraqis some agency, is that the growth of the al Qaeda Iraq and the progress of the civil war changed the Sunni insurgents’ strategic calculus, such that they decided to cooperate with Americans to gain locally. And that in turn, limited violence. U.S. forces had a role in this — the covert killing campaign that McChrystal led and Filkins chronicles probably pressured insurgents and weakened AQI, for one. But the deals — the awakening — began well before the troop surge and before David Petraeus took command and tried to implement a new counterinsurgency doctrine. The key American decision was willingness to play ball with insurgent groups. This decision had little to do with winning hearts and minds via population security and increased troop levels. And by empowering forces at odds with the central government, it contradicted the goal of state-building in Iraq, at least in the short-term.
I obviously agree with the latter view. Our dependence on local politics limits what we can accomplish in counterinsurgency. We can certainly affect what happens in Afghanistan, but it is hubris to think we control it.
Filkins also quotes McChrystal on Afghanistan’s effect on Pakistan:
“If we are good here, it will have a good effect on Pakistan,” he told me. “But if we fail here, Pakistan will not be able to solve their problems — it would be like burning leaves on a windy day next door.
It’s sensible to conclude chaos nearby is unhelpful to stability in Pakistan, but it goes way too far to say that Afghanistan’s stability is necessary to Pakistan’s, which has been fairly stable for long periods while Afghanistan was not. What’s more, as Robert Pape argues, it is likely that U.S. forces are a cause of insurgency in both countries.
Obama: ‘Nobody’ Considers Health Care Mandate a Tax Increase
President Obama argued on TV talk shows this weekend that his proposed mandate for everyone to buy health insurance – or face a large financial penalty – is not a tax increase:
In a testy exchange on ABC’s “This Week,” broadcast Sunday, Obama rejected the assertion that forcing people to obtain coverage would violate his campaign pledge against raising taxes on middle-class Americans.
“For us to say you have to take responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase,” Obama said in response to persistent questioning, later adding: “Nobody considers that a tax increase.”
Well, I consider it a tax increase, so I guess that makes me nobody.
The real question is whether this tax increase is a good idea. My answer is no. If others disagree, then fine, let’s have that debate. But denying plain truths suggests that advocates of Obamacare are trying to pass something that Americans would not endorse if it were structured and explained clearly.
Watch:
‘We Don’t Put Our First Amendment Rights In the Hands of FEC Bureaucrats’
I (and several colleagues) have blogged before about Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the latest campaign finance case, which was argued this morning at the Supreme Court. The case is about much more than whether a corporation can release a movie about a political candidate during an election campaign. Indeed, it goes to the very heart of the First Amendment, which was specifically created to protect political speech—the kind most in danger of being censored by politicians looking to limit the appeal of threatening candidates and ideas.
After all, hard-hitting political speech is something the First Amendment’s authors experienced firsthand. They knew very well what they were doing in choosing free and vigorous debate over government-filtered pablum. Moreover, persons of modest means often pool their resources to speak through ideological associations like Citizens United. That speech too should not be silenced because of nebulous concerns about “level playing fields” and speculation over the “appearance of corruption.” The First Amendment simply does not permit the government to handicap speakers based on their wealth, or ration speech in a quixotic attempt to equalize public debate: Thankfully, we do not live in the world of Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron!
A few surprises came out of today’s hearing, but not regarding the ultimate outcome of this case. It is now starkly clear that the Court will rule 5-4 to strike down the FEC’s attempt to regulate the Hillary Clinton movie (and advertisements for it). Indeed, Solicitor General Elena Kagan — in her inaugural argument in any court — all but conceded that independent movies are not electioneering communications subject to campaign finance laws. And she reversed the government’s earlier position that even books could be banned if they expressly supported or opposed a candidate! (She went on to also reverse the government’s position on two other key points: whether nonprofit corporations (and perhaps small enterprises) could be treated differently than large for-profit business, and what the government’s compelling interest was in prohibiting corporations from using general treasury funds on independent political speech.)
Ted Olson, arguing for Citizens United, quickly recognized that he had his five votes, and so pushed for a broader opinion. That is, the larger — and more interesting — question is whether the Court will throw out altogether its 16-year-old proscription on corporations and unions spending their general treasury funds on political speech. Given the vehement opposition to campaign finance laws often expressed by Justices Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas, all eyes were on Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, in whose jurisprudence some have seen signs of judicial “minimalism.” The Chief Justice’s hostility to the government’s argument — “we don’t put our First Amendment rights in the hands of FEC bureaucrats” — and Justice Alito’s skepticism about the weight of the two precedents at issue leads me to believe that there’s a strong likelihood we’ll have a decision that sweeps aside yet another cornerstone of the speech-restricting campaign finance regime.
Hillary: The Movie
The Supreme Court is soon to hear a case that may drastically roll back campaign finance regulation in the United States:
The case involves “Hillary: The Movie,” a mix of advocacy journalism and political commentary that is a relentlessly negative look at Mrs. Clinton’s character and career. The documentary was made by a conservative advocacy group called Citizens United, which lost a lawsuit against the Federal Election Commission seeking permission to distribute it on a video-on-demand service. The film is available on the Internet and on DVD. The issue was that the McCain-Feingold law bans corporate money being used for electioneering.
The right position for the Court is that McCain-Feingold, and all other campaign finance regulation, constitutes unconstitutional limitation on free speech. This means reversing the Court’s 1974 Buckley v. Valeo decision, which held that government limits on campaign spending were unconstitutional but limits on contributions were not.
This distinction is meaningless. If it is OK for a millionaire to spend his own money promoting his own campaign, why can he not give that money to someone else, who might be a more effective advocate for that millionaire’s views, so that this other person can run for office?
More broadly, campaign finance regulation is thought control: it takes a position on whether money should influence political outcomes. Whether or not one agrees, this is only one possible view, and freedom of speech is meant to prevent government from promoting or discouraging particular points of view.
It would be a brave step for Court to reverse Buckley, but it is the right thing to do.
For more background on the case, watch this:
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