Ouch:
"The only question is why The Washington Post thinks it’s a good idea to publish columns that are designed to mislead its audience rather than to inform its audience, or why they think customers would want to pay money for a publication that behaves that way."
Desperation explains the column, I think. The end of an era.
Norm Geras has posted songs from all fifty states – just in time for July 4.
Jesse Helms just died.
Commissioned three years ago by NPR (audio here), today is as good a day as any to remind myself why I love this country, even as I wait to see if I will be allowed to stay here:
I believe in life. I believe in treasuring it as a mystery that will never be fully understood, as a sanctity that should never be destroyed, as an invitation to experience now what can
only be remembered tomorrow. I believe in its indivisibility, in the intimate connection between the newest bud of spring and the flicker in the eye of a patient near death, between the athlete in his prime and the quadriplegic vet, between the fetus in the womb and the mother who bears another life in her own body.
I believe in liberty. I believe that within every soul lies the capacity to reach for its own good, that within every physical body there endures an unalienable right to be free from coercion. I believe in a system of government that places that liberty at the center of its concerns, that enforces the law solely to protect that freedom, that sides with the individual against the claims of family and tribe and church and nation, that sees innocence before guilt and dignity before stigma.
I believe in the right to own property, to maintain it against the benign suffocation of a government that would tax more and more of it away. I believe in freedom of speech and of contract, the right to offend and blaspheme, as well as the right to convert and bear witness. I believe that these freedoms are connected — the freedom of the fundamentalist and the atheist, the female and the male, the black and the Asian, the gay and the straight.
I believe in the pursuit of happiness. Not its attainment, nor its final definition, but its pursuit. I believe in the journey, not the arrival; in conversation, not monologues; in multiple questions rather than any single answer. I believe in the struggle to remake ourselves and challenge each other in the spirit of eternal forgiveness, in the awareness that none of us knows for sure what happiness truly is, but each of us knows the imperative to keep searching. I believe in the possibility of surprising joy, of serenity through pain, of homecoming through exile.
And I believe in a country that enshrines each of these three things, a country that promises nothing but the promise of being more fully human, and never guarantees its success.
In that constant failure to arrive — implied at the very beginning — lies the possibility of a permanently fresh start, an old newness, a way of revitalizing ourselves and our civilization in ways few foresaw and one day many will forget. But the point is now.
And the place is America.
This strikes me as an obvious distinction:
I’ve watched this campaign unfold pretty closely. And I’ve listened to Obama’s position on Iraq. He’s been very clear through this year and last on the distinction between strategy and tactics. Presidents set the strategy — which in this context means the goal or the policy. And if the policy is a military one, a President will consult closely with his military advisors on the tactics used to execute the policy.
This is an elementary distinction the current occupant in the White House has continually tried to confuse by claiming that his policies are driven and constrained by the advice he’s given by his commanders on the ground. There’s nothing odd or contradictory about Obama saying that he’ll change the policy to one of withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraq with a specific timetable but that he will consult with his military advisors about how best to execute that policy.
But it also remains true that a withdrawal longer than sixteen months because we want to preserve as much of the security gains of the past few months is nonetheless an adjustment. Of course it’s an adjustment. I would hope there is an adjustment. Any potential president who is uninterested in the facts on the ground in calibrating his Iraq policy would be … another George W. Bush. And the brilliance of this is that Obama’s trip to Iraq and statements thereafter will be parsed and examined and focused on like no other. This campaign remains all about him. And in the short and long run, that’s less desperately needed oxygen for McCain.
A classic today, but this is the money quote:
Obama’s strategy is obvious. The country is in a deep malaise and eager for change. He and his party already have the advantage on economic and domestic issues. Obama, therefore, aims to clear the deck by moving rapidly to the center in those areas where he and his party are weakest, namely national security and the broader cultural issues. With these — and, most important, his war-losing Iraq policy — out of the way, the election will be decided on charisma and persona. In this corner: the young sleek cool hip elegant challenger. In the other corner: the old guy. No contest…
As Obama assiduously obliterates all differences with McCain on national security and social issues, he remains rightly confident that Bush fatigue, the lousy economy and his own charisma — he is easily the most dazzling political personality since John Kennedy — will carry him to the White House.
They figure it out eventually (apart from the notion that Obama will "lose" any "war"). Having spent much of the year attacking Obama as a commie atheist alien (Hewitt only this week called Obama’s post primary position a series of "lurches left"), the neocons are now going to have to attack him as a more electable version of the Clinton they came to love and praise in the primaries. Worse: they fear that Obama has shifted because he wanted to – not because they bullied him into it – and so they have no control any more. They won’t be able to use all the usual FoxNews Rovian crap they have long been used to throwing at the Democratic nominee. Charles finishes with a question:
Of course, once he gets there he will have to figure out what he really believes. The conventional liberal/populist stuff he campaigned on during the primaries? Or the reversals he is so artfully offering up now?
I have no idea. Do you? Does he?
It’s a rhetorical question but I’ll answer it. Yes, I do. And yes, he does. He wants withdrawal from Iraq as prudently as possible. That this might take longer than sixteen months, even though that is the goal, is Bush’s fault, not Obama’s. Yes, he does want to expand access to private healthcare, engage Iran with more than bluster, raise taxes on the successful, pass immigration reform, end torture, and restore America’s moral reputation in the world. And he intends to do it without acting like a rigid, purist ideologue, of the kind Krauthammer admires and of the kind that has driven us into a ditch in Iraq. His adjustments in the post-primary campaign take the hard edges off his clear policy positions, defuse some obvious weaknesses, move aggressively to the center … and use his money advantage to win the thing. Er: he’s a skilled politician. I know the Republicans are used to Democratic candidates being knocked about and defined and pummeled from the get-go. But Obama is different. Hadn’t you noticed that yet?
Next question.
(Photo: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty.)
Larison opines:
Obama does a lot of backward walking these days, and so it’s not surprising that he keeps tripping all over his own promises. Of course, there are two ways to look at this latest news: either Obama’s original antiwar stance was never very strong and any “refinements” he makes now are just small modifications to an originally weak position, or he has started yielding to the conventional wisdom that his position on Iraq has to change because of the “success” of the “surge” (whose success, as I have said before, might better described as failure). This either confirms that he was never much of an antiwar leader, or it means that he will align himself more and more with the Washington consensus the closer he comes to being elected.
Marc:
So there may be a change of emphasis, rather than a change of position, consonant with the facts on the ground — which is, to Obama’s credit, what he, in more reflective moments, said he would base his Iraq policy on. But it’s also clear that Obama wants to make sure the contrast between himself and John McCain is sharp.
Matt:
Basically, unless Obama comes out and says something like "I’m a totally unreasonable person whose views on Iraq will in no way be influenced by anyone’s advice or any possible factual developments" he’s now a flip-flopper.
These strike me as less a signal of a coming change in his position on withdrawal and more like a combined effort to defuse the charge that he’ll withdraw recklessly and to preserve flexibility as commander in chief.
Obama’s rightward lurch since the end of the primaries is really an astonishing display of cynicism. It is an old cliché that presidential candidates play to the base during the primaries and then run to the center in the general election, but I don’t know when we’ve seen nearly as clear and shameless an example as we are now witnessing with Obama. If you actually look at the last few decades of presidential elections, most candidates have not been all that different before and after clinching the nomination. Bush was a "compassionate" conservative in both cases, Clinton was a new Democrat in both, and the senior George Bush and Ronald Reagan certainly didn’t attempt any huge changes in persona either. Surely none have reversed themselves on quite as many prominent issues quite as quickly as Obama: from trade to wiretapping, gun control to Iraq.
For Obama to say that he knows for sure, right now, exactly what he will do, in every detail, and that neither the advice he receives from the commanders on the ground nor anything that happens in the intervening months could possibly change his mind, would be idiotic. Politically expedient, perhaps, but idiotic nonetheless.
Saying that he will be open to advice and new information, however, is not the same as saying that his fundamental views on Iraq are open to change, absent some genuinely unpredicted and catastrophic development. It’s one thing to be open to a somewhat different pace for troop withdrawal, and another thing altogether to change your mind about the wisdom of getting out of Iraq in the first place. But I honestly don’t see where Obama got near saying he was open to changing his mind on that score, even before he held the second press conference, at which he explicitly denied this.
Not everyone is happy with Hitchen’s waterboarding himself. Phillip Carter:
I thought we learned in grade school to be a little smarter than this — that it wasn’t necessary to stick a metal fork in the electrical socket to know there was electricity there. Unfortunately, for some people personal experience trumps all other forms of learning, and they must learn at the school of hard knocks. Or, in this case, the school of hard torture.
Join SJFWT! That’s Stop Journalists From Waterboarding Themselves, @TAC’s new help group. According to the CIA, only a handful of terror suspects have been waterboarded. Yet SWJT reports that thousands of journalists, suffering from chronic lack of inspiration, have had themselves asphyxiated for the sake a crumby article. Worst of all: it’s entirely self-inflicted.
I’m relieved that he has shifted exactly as I hoped he would: to a pragmatic commitment to a withdrawal strategy that does not jeopardize the fragile and reversible gains of the last year or so. I don’t see this as a U-turn, any more than I regard my own attempt to understand the situation in Iraq as best I can and to remain open to good, as well as bad, developments as some kind of flaw. Very few people foresaw the extent of the gains we have made this past year, in part because a new counter-insurgency had the luck to coincide with some real shifts among Sunni tribes and the Sadrite opposition. But facts change. Shouldn’t tactical policy respond? I would never have felt that Obama would be a good president if I felt he’d stick to a position on an issue irrespective of empirical data. As long as the goal is total withdrawal from Iraq as soon as possible, and the man doing it has the vital characteristic of having opposed the war in the first place, I’m fine with pragmatism. Any conservative should be.
And this shift is yet another instance of Obama’s remarkably shrewd post-primary strategy. He is slowly undermining every conceivable reason to vote for McCain. If you want to withdraw from Iraq – as prudently as possible – Obama is your man. He won’t risk chaos in a precipitous withdrawal regardless of the strategic and tactical situation. Unlike McCain, he is also unafraid of Baker-Hamilton diplomacy; and unlike McCain, he does not threaten a hundred years of occupation and the suspicion that he’d like the U.S. to stay there for ever. What can McCain say now? All he can say, I think, is that Obama is cynical. I don”t think that’s fair: there’s a distinction between cynical and pragmatic.
When you put this together with Obama’s defusing of the patriotism issue and his brazen cooptation of Bush’s faith-based social services policy, you see what a gifted strategist Obama is. And if you don’t see the power of it, just check out the Bush-right blogs right now. They’re veering between a splutter and a strange new respect.
Heh.
(Photo: Hiroko Masuike/Getty.)
The Dish 