Empire Notes

December 28, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Summing up Obama

In a recent New York Times piece, Adam Nagourney takes the liberal left to task for their anger at Obama over the sorry mess that health-care reform legislation has become, suggesting that they should have understood from the beginning that Obama is someone who plays within the rules, even if they are an arbitrary set of conventions that grew up in a recent period of political and ideological retrenchment by liberals, who doesn't try to change the system but simply works with it, and that by this token a health-care bill that individually appeases every single player that could have blocked it, from the AMA to insurance companies to pharmaceutical companies to Max Baucus and Joe Lieberman is what was always in the cards.

Obama himself tried to suggest much the same by telling the Washington Post, "I didn’t campaign on the public option."

Technically, he is correct. He talked about a lot of things, like a public option, as desirable, but he didn’t promise he would deliver it.

It has become fashionable to say that he has delivered everything he promised. He said he wanted to escalate in Afghanistan, and he’s done it. He ran as an economic centrist and he has delivered.

But in every real sense he has overtly turned his back on his promises. He built much of his campaign around a claim that politics in Washington is dysfunctional and needs to be shaken up. In this, of course, he is like every American politician for 200 years. But he differed in that he actually talked coherently about his vision of how to do that -- and it was a vision that one simply doesn't hear from major presidential candidates. He was going to go over the heads of the politicians and the entrenched interests and try to build a mass movement. It was not going to be much of a mass movement, since there was supposed to be no ideological core; it was going to be held together by Obama's charisma and a bunch of vagueness about how much all of us normal people have in common.

That last part was fatuous, though it’s a fatuity that many of our left rabble-rousers share. And the whole program was ridiculously unworkable -- how was a president going to anchor something like that without being excoriated by every opinion leader for "playing politics" with his office? But he said he was going to do it and he didn't make the slightest motion toward lifting a finger to actually do it. He didn’' even do the traditional "bully pulpit" thing on health-care. Right from the beginning, he acted as if the only players in the game were in DC, even though he had promised us he was going to change the game by bringing all of us into it, even if it was as a great undifferentiated mass.

He also promised us, at least implicitly, that he was an original and independent thinker. That, plus of course his personal biography, was the only reason I had any interest in him. No president since FDR had been any such thing, and I thought it would be interesting to watch him try it out. I didn't think that he was anything but a moderate liberal politically; I had no illusions that he was some sort of stealth leftist. But I did expect that he would occasionally manifest insight.

He has not. He made some forays, like his speech in Cairo, which, for all its flaws, was not something one would expect from an American president. And, more subtly, he tried to signal to Latin America, after the Honduran coup against Zelaya, that the "war on terror" would no longer be used to refight the battles of the Cold War.

He did retain at least some of his capacity to think originally -- a very difficult feat for a president, since they are bombarded from day one with a thousand slightly different versions of the conventional wisdom by people who usually can't imagine anything outside it.

Unfortunately, he had no real commitment to any of his own ideas. His backtracking on settlements in occupied Palestine and on restoration of Zelaya and abrogation of the coup government at the slightest signs of resistance show that.

Indeed, as far as I can tell, Obama is passionate about only two things -- the idea that "reasonable people" can always find technocratic solutions somewhere in the muddled middle, and that his personal biography is not just a matter of world-historic import but a profound moral principle. Interestingly, these are exactly the two passions that Hillary Clinton has, making one wonder once again why we wasted all that time following the primaries.

Posted at 10:44 am.

December 17, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- A Legislative Travesty

Whether it was Otto von Bismarck or some unheard-of American lawyer who actually originated the famous aphorism about the making of laws and sausages, he was very unfair to sausage-makers. After all, they don't really try to hide the fact that their final product, the sausage, is a revolting mixture of ground-up bits of waste gristle and fat encased in cleaned-out intestines, or even the fact that they will send you to an early grave. And they're very clear that they make them in order to make money.

Laws, on the other hand, like the so-called "health care reform" that may eventually pass through Congress, are frequently dressed up to hide the innumerable rat parts that somehow got included in them or at least to distract the average citizen from thinking of them.

The "public option," in whatever emaciated form might conceivably have emerged, is dead. The passage of an individual mandate requiring that everyone buy health insurance will mean a gigantic boondoggle for private insurance companies, who will at one stroke get 40-odd million new subscribers. In return for making this gigantic sacrifice, insurance companies may be allowed to lower the already low rate of premium repayment; i.e., not only will the numbers of subscribers increase, the profit per subscriber may well increase as well.

On the other hand, the poor and young, who are often just scraping by, will be required by law to give money to insurance companies while in general receiving considerably less health care than they are paying for. If not, they will have to pay a penalty.

Yet another bright idea: an excise tax on so-called "Cadillac plans." What this may well mean in practice is that those of us with half-decent health insurance through unions or because we are public sector employees will be hit with extra costs to help finance the extra profits of insurance companies. These groups, of course, vote Democratic, so the geniuses on the Hill will be hurting themselves.

Perhaps the most obvious reform was eliminating "rescissions," the charming practice of many insurance companies by which they retroactively drop coverage when somebody gets sick -- without repaying their premiums -- if they can find the slightest misrepresentation, accidental or otherwise, on a form. Instead, there will probably be a loophole allowing rescissions in cases of "fraud," i.e. business as usual.

About the only real reform will likely be the requirement that insurance companies cease discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions. This is a small price to pay when you are delivered a gigantic new captive market.

There is no doubt a tremendous rogues' gallery here. One can certainly include every Republican. And then there are various wonderful blue-dog Democrats like Max Baucus, Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, and a sea of political mediocrities. And, as always, the ever-noxious Joe Lieberman, who never met a super-exploitative oligopolistic cartel he didn't love (except those run by Arabs, of course), and who somehow manages to maintain his air of preening sanctimony whether he is arguing against accountability for torture and sexual abuse or in favor of increasing corporate profits by denying decent health coverage to millions of people.

But, honestly, it takes remarkable contortions to avoid criticizing President Obama for this, as well as every other debacle he is so calmly plunging into. He was exactly right during the primaries when he emphasized that major legislative changes could not be made by worrying about Washington, inside-the-Beltway culture, and picayune partisan politics; in order to get real change, he said, what was needed was broad principled appeals meant to mobilize the masses and force legislators to consider their concerns rather than those of entrenched interests. If you weren't convinced of that before, watching all those Congressmen in the pockets of insurance companies should have done the job.

The problem was that he resolutely disavowed, then and afterward, every kind of broad principled argument on every conceivable issue. He tried to create a national crusade on health-care "costs," as if costs were a problem in themselves. Why shouldn't we spend more money on health care, instead of on plasma-screen TVs and SUVs? The problem is not how much we spend on health care but how little we get for it. And talking about that requires the unmentionable word "profits." That is divisive and not Niebuhrian and Obama would not do it.

The truth is that we are not more alike than our politics would suggest. We are in large part what our politics make us. The Republicans, crazy as they are, understand this.

Posted at 7:58 am.

December 7, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Climate Change Theater

It's always disturbing when one finds oneself agreeing with George Will, but his disparagement in a recent op-ed of the "climate change theater" going on at Copenhagen are right on target.

Barack Obama is talking about a 17% reduction in carbon emissions in the United States (from 2005 levels) by 2020, with an 83% reduction by 2050. So far, the United States has proved itself incapable of even saying in any meaningful way that it will cut carbon emissions -- forget any question of actually doing so. Although liberals whined a lot when Bush pulled us out of the Kyoto protocol, the truth is that the Senate never ratified it. Even the pathetic 17% reduction Obama is talking about will only result in a massive barrage of verbiage from the Republicans until it is drowned in nonsense.

And yet we actually talk about how much reduction will be achieved by 2050. That is absurd, in a country where six months ahead is a long-term forecast, but to say that the reduction will be 83% is just insulting to whatever passes for our intelligences. Assuming Will's numbers are right (and you should never assume this), this will commit us to carbon emissions per capita at the level we had in 1875. Does anyone believe this? Does anyone outside of the radical ecologistic far left even have the courage to talk about what kind of life this would mean?

In truth, as is always the case with claims like this in America, "by 2050" just means "we're not going to do anything about it now." And yet on the strength of a couple of cheap numbers, the United States is being hailed for its newly constructive role in climate change politics and Obama will surely be much feted at Copenhagen. It's just a shame there's no Nobel Prize for the Environment.

And then there are India and China. They have a valid case for not being treated the same as the countries of the First World. After all, it is the Europeans and their descendants who created the problem, while simultaneously despoiling the Third World (and perhaps even creating it, if you go along with Mike Davis's thesis in Late Victorian Holocausts). But instead of putting forward an argument in terms of equity, or in terms of the equal right of every individual to the bounties of the earth (per capita emissions even in China are far below those in the United States and still well below those of Europe as well), they have actually attempted to compete with Obama in cynicism.

India says it will reduce its "carbon emissions intensity" by 20% by 2020, and China will reduce it by 40-45%. "Carbon emissions intensity" is a physically and atmospherically meaningless quantity -- carbon emissions per dollar of GDP. The environment really doesn't care how much you say various pieces of paper you produce are worth. Will rightly derides the use of this farcical phrase, although, since he is himself an apotheosis of dishonesty, he doesn't mention that this is a severe case of "monkey see, monkey do" -- the concept of emissions intensity was a creation of the Bush administration intended to prove that the United States was such a good environmental citizen that it didn't need to do anything.

Although one must admire these countries' cleverness in using America's folly against it, institutionalization of this pernicious concept is a serious price to pay.

The Europeans are no better; with few exceptions, the only countries that have met their Kyoto emissions targets are those of the former Soviet bloc, which did it through imposed deindustrialization and social dislocation.

Let us not forget the other half of "climate change theater," as underscored by Mike Tidwell of the Chesapeak Climate Action Network -- Buying your friends carbon offsets for Christmas, talking about voluntary adoption of compact fluorescent light bulbs, and generally trying to make people think that all they have to do to save the environment is to consume different products.

In the last two years, the level of concern with and belief in global warming among the American public has turned around and started heading down. This has to do in part with the resurgence of the far right wing, which has now taken over right-of-center politics, but it also has to do, I think, with the feeling that it's being taken care of. You don't even actually have to buy a compact fluorescent light bulb; just knowing you're supposed to has almost the same effect on individual psychology.

Nonsensical posturing about targets that no one intends to meet and that are likely not even socially or politically possible to meet is actually part of the problem.

Posted at 10:56 am.

December 2, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- To Surge or not to Surge

Well, Hamlet has finally made up his mind. After a major strategic review of Afghanistan, an equally major review of the review, and then several months of reviewing both reviews, he has finally committed himself to a course of action. Whether it involves his pretending to be insane or just treating the rest of us as if we are, next week he will be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize just after announcing a major military escalation.

Obama's speeches have been variously criticized over the past few years for soaring rhetoric untethered to actual facts and circumstances and for dry wonkish attention to policy detail, so he cleverly arranged this time to satisfy all critics by having neither.

Indeed, if you set aside the increase of 30,000 troops, repeatedly telegraphed by the White House, there were only two things noteworthy in the speech -- first, his completely unforced reiteration of the commitment to withdraw completely from Iraq by the end of 2011 and second, his bizarre new commitment to start withdrawing the troops he is now throwing into Afghanistan within 18 months.

What the latter means is very unclear. If it were Clinton or Bush, I would ignore it as verbiage, a mere hole in the air, but Obama does not throw away words and has an uncanny consistency between what he says and what he ends up doing -- look at how he promised to escalate in Afghanistan while campaigning and has already doubled the U.S. troop presence since taking office.

I would guess the genesis of the promise is the growing pressure on him from Democrats in Congress. On Afghanistan, he is in the unenviable position of being dependent on the Republicans and at odds with his own party. Obama has tried to split the difference, thus pleasing nobody.

Still, being Obama, he no doubt had to convince himself that this commitment motivated by domestic political considerations is actually an important part of the optimal strategy in Afghanistan -- presumably, his reasoning is that he is signaling to the U.S.-propped Afghan government and to Hamid Karzai that the U.S. commitment is far from open-ended. He is also, I imagine, trying to signal to himself that he is not Lyndon Johnson.

The truth, though, is that if you're going to fight a counterinsurgency -- and that is the course he has clearly put us on -- this is a ridiculous way to do it. Why not just withdraw now? The chances that something climactic will happen in the next 18 months are minimal -- and if it does, it will likely be something horrible. In Iraq, things came to a head within a very short time frame from 2005-2007 because of the descent into a nightmare of internecine carnage, followed by desperate attempts by various groups to step back from the edge of the precipice. Of course, if such a thing were to happen in Afghanistan, it would provide the foundation for another great counterinsurgency "success" like Iraq, but it's very unlikely -- 8 years of occupation has seen no major sectarian violence.

Short of that, 18 months will not suffice to eradicate the neo-Taliban -- especially since all indications are that they're still growing and that things are still in the phase where more counterinsurgency means more insurgency.

I do have some hopes that the increase in troop numbers will not lead to significant additional violence against Afghans because of partial implementation of Gen. McChrystal's "kinder, gentler" rules of engagement -- it's worth noting that Germany's August airstrike on a tanker near Kunduz that killed up to 145 people has already caused the resignation of their chief of staff and their defense minister at the time.

Although the lesson that killing civilians may be militarily counterproductive has been absorbed, it is still amazing how many lessons have not. In his introductory boilerplate, Obama attributed the rise of the Taliban to the Soviet occupation, the ensuing civil war, and the fact that American attention had "turned elsewhere;" by some prodigious effort, he has avoided learning that the rise might have had something to do with what America was doing before its attention "turned." Similarly, he presents Pakistan's turn to a more militaristic approach as a realization at long last that Pakistan is endangered by "extremism." In fact, of course, Pakistan faced virtually no internal terrorist attacks before the 2001 war and subsequent ones are entirely a product of American and Pakistani military operations in the area.

Barack Obama was the only American president in living memory capable of absorbing the decidedly non-Western idea that in some cases doing nothing might be more productive than "doing something" -- witness his immediate reaction to the election tumult in Iran -- but by this point it seems all possibility of insight has drained out of his foreign policy. This lesson is apparently not one that Americans will ever learn.

Posted at 8:55 am.

February 2, 2006

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