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June 10, 2014

If They Asked Her, She Would Write A Book

Personally, I thought it was hilarious, the day last year when I was invited to "like" the Facebook page Ready For Hillary. I mean, laugh out loud (that's LOL, kids) funny. Like, um, I was "ready for Hillary" before 2 of my 3 nephews were born.

The news this week - and the last month - is that Hillary Clinton wrote a book. From this we can conclude that she is running for President. Again. Or maybe not. Or something.

It might not be a great book, but people who've read it seem to think it's interesting, and at least readable. Or at least, that's the impression I get. Like following "Ready For Hillary," I try to follow the news about Mrs. Clinton. But spending a lot of time discussing her, and her plans, and all the rest... not so much.

Look, brass tacks and all, I think we know where this is headed. What strikes me is how we all seem to know, all seem resigned to it, without necessarily being enthused. I get that in, say, conservatives. I'm sort of fascinated by that block of Hillary supporters, of which I was a part, many of whom also seem to have let go of the passion. The fight was then. Now, it seems, well, old news.

I disagree. Since running in 2008 - to the point of, essentially, a tie - Mrs. Clinton has served as Secretary of State, throwing pretty much any discussion of lack of experience or preparation out the window. She remains the person who can take this country past theoretical and futuristic discussions and give us the actual example of an actual woman President. And she's spent pretty much her whole lifetime and several careers espousing the kind of ideas Democrats claim to believe in most.

Why, really, are we having a discussion plagued with doubts about where this is headed?

Probably, I think, because that's where we left off.

There's basically no one who has run for President in the past 50 years (outside incumbency) with the resume of Mrs. Clinton at this point in her career, with the possible exception of George H.W. Bush. Executive Branch experience, including time in the White House. A legislative career. Experience running a state. Regional expertise in several parts of the country. International experience.

I have lived my life in the northeast, where sophisticates often take credit for feminist advances that hadn't actually happened. How New York had never elected a woman to state wide office until Mrs. Clinton, in 2000. How Massachusetts never elected a female Senator until Elizabeth Warren. Yet, we were told, what wonderful progress women had made. Just look at all the possibilities. It's like we had a woman Governor... even though we never did (Jodi Rell, Connecticut).

It's easy to sympathize with the passionate liberals - progressives, if we must - who feel that Mrs. Clinton now doesn't represent the challenge to vested interests she represented even 6 years ago. We can't know, really, what might have happened differently, or not differently, on her economic watch. But it's telling that we hear these conclusions about her opinions before she's even expressed them. We just know, don't we? We know it all.

Feminism and sexism, of course, are not supposed to be the issue with Mrs. Clinton. Not now. When we ask, now, if America is ready for her, it's just you know, a person. Not about how we see women. Or don't see women. Because we know she's a woman, okay? We get it.

So all those articles, all that discussion about "pitting Mrs. Clinton against Monica Lewinsky" about debating whether she had a "traumatic brain injury" and was unfit to serve, when we dredge up Whitewater and Vince Foster and all the rest... that's not about denigrating a woman. It's about, you know, her.

It's nonsense, of course. It's readily apparent that when a woman runs for President, we will, in fact be discussing America's attitudes towards women. And sexism. And feminism. When people express those familiar feelings of feeling lukewarm about her, the "I just don't trust her", the "I never really liked her..." sure it's about her. It's also about how she's been presented, and talked about, and vilified at times, and raised to heroic status at others.

Mrs. Clinton has written several books. She's engaged in fairly thoughtful policy discussions in each one, though we rarely mention that. This book may well be just one of those campaign tools that seem to be part of the candidate landscape these days. Few of the others will be able to talk time served as a Cabinet Secretary. But you know, it's not as if she's special, or anything.

So maybe she runs for President. If she does, it seems to me the point of all this should be that we will be able to elect an experienced, thoughtful, well rounded person ready to take on difficult issues and engage in a healthy debate. And maybe I've kind of lost track of what we look for in Presidents. Maybe that's the book we need... and I'm pretty sure she could write that one, too.

Posted at 08:31 PM in 2008 Elections, 2016 elections, women | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Beyond Obama

Much the way Hurricane Katrina became the beginning of the end of the Bush Presidency, I suspect this past week marks the start of a shift in the national mood about President Obama. Between the fiasco of Veterans Affairs and the disastrous handling of Bowe Bergdahl, what was left of the President's elan - a sense that, even in the tough moments, he could calmly reassure at least his supporters of his own groundedness - seemed pretty much gone.

It's been a tough thing, trying to get a read on this Presidency, provide a kind of critical, but balanced evaluation through a minefield of personal popularity and cultural expectations. From the beginning, support for Barack Obama wasn't just about politics, it was a cause, for some nearly a belief system. Part of the intensity came, obviously, from the newly energized young people he brought into the process. Less obviously, it was an older generation of liberals who found their own idealism rekindled in the image of electing a black man President.

I've never been entirely on board for that idealistic rush; it's lovely to think our national history can be solved with symbolic achievements, but reality is messier and more difficult and we're picking a government, not a symbol. "Hope and Change" really was never the issue. From the beginning, this Presidency has been ill defined, as a practical matter, in clearly stated, practical goals, and understanding the day-to-day process of the unglamorous business of simply making government work.

We forget that the "Stimulus Bill" which was hailed as the first achievement wasn't a particularly fresh or new idea - discussion of such a package was already underway, and the process was largely driven by the newly resurgent Democrats taking over in Congress, joined by a President of the same party. It's also easy to forget that the process of developing "Obamacare" had not been the signature plan of the President; its creation, too, was overtaken by Congressional forces who had long hoped to develop a national plan. It's not to downplay the significance of these accomplishments; but context matters. And from the start, this has been a Presidency challenged to take lofty, ambitious rhetoric, and translate it into the practical, achievable results of how we actually make government work.

Nowhere has that disconnect been more apparent than in the unwinding of the economic mess that led to the near collapse of our financial system, and the steps taken to try and correct it. The actions of Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke are - despite Geithner's attempt to, yet again, dismiss all critics - nowhere near settled as the best or generally correct course of action. Poverty remains at near record levels. More people on food stamps than ever before. Levels of economic inequality not seen since the thirties. These are not the successful accomplishments of a strong economic policy. In part, President Obama has always talked around these issues by governing in the future tense - where we are is not where we will be, and if we talk enough about how good it will be eventually, then now may seem not so bad. In part, Mr. Obama simply ran out of future to promise. The future, at some point, is now.

It's easy - too easy, really - to lay the challenges and failures of the Obama Presidency on the heightened level of partisanship, the polarization of left from right and an especially dysfunctional Congress in recent yers. It's worth remembering that the initial period of this Presidency, with Congressional majorities in both houses, was only marginally more successful in achieving consensus or demonstrable results - and arguably, Nancy Pelosi's leadership of the House was every bit as polarized and single party as Boehner's has been since. If anything, the story of the Obama Presidency and its challenges in governance are all about the battles of the House of Representatives. Until that House finds comity and an approach to governing that's bipartisan, arguably, we remain sunk.

But this is a President who has done little to bridge those divides, who promised much in the way of finding a way to forge new bonds, but arguably added to the distance. There may be little common ground, maybe none. But it can't help to say in one breath that you want "consensus," in the next call out one side as the problem to finding it, and in the third argue that partisan resistance is the only solution. Time and again, this is a President whose rhetoric starts out lofty and unifying, only to sink into finger pointing and partisan sniping. And yes, that's what his loyalists want and lefties expect. Still, this is a Presidency that proves that you really can't have it all ways at once. In the end, President Obama has been the bulwark on which Democrats have hardened their partisan edges. That's a great political success; it's been a less than effective approach to actually governing.

In the end, this has been a Presidency of loyalists and insularity, too likely to believe their own press and too convinced of the rightness of their every good intention. In 2010, and again in 2012, this is a President who spoke publicly about doing soul searching and making "changes" to his governing approach; at best, every change was cosmetic and temporary, and made no alteration to the fundamental architecture of his Administration. It's a very top down, male dominated approach that's been, in its way, a quiet, undiscussed embarrassment to many true believers. The President has been slow to remove poor performers, tetchy when challenged, and reluctant to admit mistakes. And that's well before delving into that "best and brightest" quality of elitism that has been especially egregious in picking only top drawer, Ivy League types to join him at the top.

If anything, this Presidency has been an illustration of the mediocrity in excessive meritocracy, where the names and prestige matter more than the result. That's the real underlying dismay of self proclaimed "progressives" looking for some real action on key liberal points. These are the educated, successful professionals who should "get it"; they say as much, but somehow, it never happens. And it doesn't, I'd argue, because this educated professional elite has always been liberal in theory, but less so on the level of practical detail and execution; upper middle class liberalism has never been that far - physically or emotionally - from the classic Country Club Republican. It's mainly "let's read about a social problem, and pay someone to go there and fix it." And that really only works well when you know how to manage people and inspire them to do their best. And that, really, seemed like something the President might be able to do. But he hasn't.

He's not the worst President, by any stretch; if anything, President Obama has surely outperformed the disastrous example of the man who preceded him. But that's not really the point. The point is that this President didn't promise "adequate," he promised the moon and the stars, hopefulness on a grand scale untethered from practical concerns. It was always a doomed equation - literally overpromising and surely aimed to under deliver. He is, as I think he always could have been, an okay President, good at times, not really great. And we gave him a good 6 years to figure out how to both right size the expectations and deliver at least in some modest way, on our lowered expectations. It's not complete failure, but at this point, all but the most devoted are really going to keep looking to him for solutions. At this point, I think, we have decided it's time to start looking at what comes next (and how conveniently timed, you say, to Mrs. Clinton's book tour, right?). We are after all, much better about designing our future than confronting our past.

Posted at 12:29 PM in 2014 elections, anger, Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

June 06, 2014

Magnolia

Mississippi ranks first on my personal lists of States In Which I Never Plan To Set Foot, and among the many reasons ("I'm black" being first) is because I cannot imagine a more frustrating exercise than being a Democrat in a state so thoroughly controlled by white Republicans.

It's through this prism that I've been watching the debacle of Thad Cochran, one of the longest serving, and possibly least impressive Senators in the Senate. Cochran was elected in 1978, having been the second Republican elected to the House since Reconstruction (and elected at the same time as his eventual colleague Trent Lott). Cochran was handpicked by his predecessor James Eastland, one of the legendary Democrats from the South who opposed, you know, everything having to do with Civil Rights in the fifties and sixties. Eastland was also one of the longest serving Senators, meaning that for 80 years - and most of the twentieth century - Mississippi has been represented by Eastland and Cochran (and Lott, preeded by similarly long serving John Stennis).

Cochran is going for his seventh term, which is testament to his remarkable ability to fly under the radar of prominence, because most people with 35 years experience and major seniority, you know, you kind of know who they are. No one particularly knows Cochran or where he stands, and mostly, he's won reelection after reelection the old fashioned way, by being a champion of spectacular amounts of federal largesse to Mississippi, which is 3 for 1 in getting more tax money than its residents pay in (possibly because most of them are really poor), and generally 48th-50th in state rankings of positive things, like, you know, poverty or literacy or high school graduations.

It would be nice - and/or remarkable - if Cochran's reelection was in trouble because someone wanted to change those dismal realities, but Cochran's in trouble mostly because he's about the last dinosaur of the GOP who hasn't died, retired or faced a Tea Party opponent. Until now. Chris McDaniel is a former radio talk show host (most of them are) who has taken Cochran to task for being to much a product of Washington, too driven by pork barrel politics, and not especially interested in the extremes of conservative politics espoused by, say, Ted Cruz.

The race got really ugly and weird when McDaniel's side, which had been whispering for months about Cochran's living arrangements in DC with a woman on his staff in her apartment, took things a step further. A blogger supportive of McDanel broke into a nursing home in Jackson and took video of Cochran's elderly, bed-ridden wife, who is in late stage dementia and hospice care. That's the ugly part.

The weird part is that it seems to have helped McDaniel pull within shouting distance of a win.

In a world where most of us would be shocked and appalled by behavior such as filming and elderly woman in an especially vulnerable and intimate setting, it's a good indication of just where conservatives are morally and politically that McDaniel was still able to make an issue out of Cochran's behavior as a spouse. The right may grimly disdain Democrats as "anything goes" loose living hedonists, but it takes a special kind of judginess to kill an elderly man's career because he appears to have a companion during the difficult final days of his wife's life. Sure, McDaniel's overall exploitation of a relatively ageist line about Cochran being too old and something of a hack also appeals to conservatives, but nearly 50% of voters, knowing that several people from McDaniel's supporters had some role in the video escapade didn't deter them one bit. Rewarding McDaniel - who claims no knowledge of or tolerance for the incident - for months of trying to make Cochran's private life yet another example of "not in line with conservative values" just seems bizarre.

If Cochran can prevail in the runoff that's now required, since neither candidate pulled over 50%, it's hard to see how he will lose in November. That's also kind of true for McDaniel, though he seems sightly more vulnerable to the actual Democrat in the race, Travis Childers, thought Childers is running because he was dumped from the House after redistricting for, well, the Republican who won the State Senate seat of Mississippi's now other Senator, Roger Wicker. Which is to say, Childers doesn't seem to have what it takes to beat Republicans, these days, in Mississippi.

Me, I'm pretty much where I was long before this year and this strange scandal that is about the only thing enlivening the Spring/Summer primary season - I'm just glad I don't live in MIssissippi. Having these choices as my choices would drive me mad. At least living in New Jersey gives you New York City just a bus ride away, and Corey Booker's at least a Democrat. Thirty six years of Thad Cochran!? Or the Ex Radio Host!? I may never get to sleep tonight just thinking about it.

Posted at 11:48 PM in 2014 elections | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 04, 2014

Guantanamo-ra

Of the three issues surrounding Bowe Bergdahl's release - the questions of his service and behavior, the deal to release him, and the timing and presentation of it - it's the middle part, the questions about the deal and about those Taliban leaders traded, that that may actually be easiest to sort out.

That's apparently what the Administration thought, since reporting on what has already become five days of spectacular miscalculation suggests that the White House figured controversy over the prisoner swap would be trumped by "thank God he's home." The "whoops" on that one, apparently, was not being up to speed on Bergdahl's story.

"What do we do about Gunatanamo" is back front of mind for Americans, a topic that's been largely avoided for years. "Close Guantanamo" was a big piece of the rallying cry for Democrats in 2008, and a big attraction for liberal voters who supported Obama, but as much as what's happened since is purely political theater, I think it's also clear that Obama's Mandate to Close Guantanamo was not as overwhelming as it looked on first blush.

Gitmo, as its called, was certainly the worst post-9/11 idea the Bushies had - in that, I'd argue, "a nearby prison port to torture terrorists" kind of covers all of their worst instincts. Torture, too, was a terrible idea, but actually doing it might have been less easiy accomplished without building a place to do it full time. Guantanamo has been, from the start, a legal mess, a visible embarassment, and one of those prime examples of why it's best not to do bad things in the first place. Undoing them becomes worse than the thing itself.

Since rounding up a fairly random collection of "bad guys" from international locations, we've discovered that terrorism and its prevention can be better handled a) as law enforcement, b) with some controversial, but generally conventional preventive intelligence gathering, and c) by conducting traditional legal processes on folks after arresting them in a fairly conventional manner. All of this, let's recall, was scoffed at by the enthusiastic defenders of torture and offsite detention, mainly Dick Cheney and a small band of his co-conspirators (that's Mom's word for that). Dick and his daughter Liz still serve, mostly alone, as the fervid defenders of all that was done in the name of Making Sure It Never Happens Again.

More than ten years after 9/11, we have the hindsight to see these things for what they were: excessive, poorly thought out plans that should have been nipped but lost out when fear overruled common sense. Undoind Guantanamo is complicated because of what our bad deeds hath wrought: damaged souls, a sense of permanent outrage, and a handful of serious criminals whose treatment has badly compromised most any reasonable effort to rationally prosecute their identifiable offenses.

"Close Guantanamo" has never been my rallying cry because it strikes me as obvious - of course it must and will be closed, at some point. Process geek that I am, the part that concerns (and always did) me is less that it will be closed, but how - what happens to the detainees, how safe we will be once some are released, and the bbarriers we put up to have it never happen again.

The Taliban Five may animate the right now and into the furture at least short term, but in the long run, I doubt that this lingers, as "scandal" or controversy or much else. It's just five more examples of acts we probably should never have done in the first place, five lives we as a nation treated in an especially cavalier manner, and five messes we cleaned up by basically sending them away and hoping they'll never trouble us again. Maybe they will, but I tend to think not.

What the prisoner swap has dredged up most, though, is basically our eternal sense of guilt. The reminder that this mess we're cleaning up is the mess we made, the mess we could have avoided, the mess we cannot just turn away and ignore. And in that, I think we get to see what President Obama's Presidency has been best at: force feeding us the unpleasant medicine of facing our nation as we actually are, not as we wish we could be seen. We don't like this version of our nation, and we never have - the nation of slavery and Jim Crow and discrimination, where fear and hysteria push us to bad choices and terrible deeds. I released five people from that terrible mistake we made at Guantanamo, Obama tells us, so you could get back a missing soldier. That's as good as this gets. And if you wanted better... well, tough.

No wonder we're going to make this about the missing soldier.

Posted at 04:03 PM in anger, Issues, Politics, War and Peace | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

June 03, 2014

Leave No Man Behind

If anything seemed odd to me about the return of Bowe Bergdahl as "our last captured soldier" it was the decision to open with President Obama announcing it in the Rose Garden. That seemed oddly... big, given that most Americans seemed to have no idea that Bergdahl was even missing, let alone that his return was a massive government priority. If there's a reason this story around Bergdahl's return has bloomed into something so "controversial," it's worth remembering that we're here in part because of the big deal drawn to it by the White House itself.

I've been thinking about that first move because so much of what's come up since the announcement - the questions about Bergdahl himself and his actions prior to being captured, to the controversy over the trading of prisoners for his release - stem from attempts to, in essence, fill in the blanks of a major story that was thin on initial detail. Which again brings up... what was the White House thinking? Didn't they think these details through?

Short-sightedness and an excessive faith in its own good intentions has, I think, become part of the key to understanding the Obama Administration and how it acts and reacts. It's not for lack of thinking long term that the Administration gets caught short on its actions, but too often their public relations seem to be about the immediate impact, not where the story goes a day or two later. And always, we are reminded by the Administration, they are a bunch of smart people always focused on doing the right thing. How can we question their decisions, goes their implicit response to being challenged, when their motives are always so pure?

In the case of Bergdahl, those pure intentions are summed up in a talking point - the notion that "we leave no soldier behind on the battlefield." It's a trope, really, but it's intersting, I think, that liberals have absorbed this language almost verbatim from the President's initial remarks. It's become the shield for almost all the conservative criticism of every aspect of the Bergdahl story. Is he a deserter? That's not important if "we leave no man behind." Was the deal to release prisoners from Guantanamo in exchange for Bergdahl ill advised, possibly even illegal? That's not important if we will do whatever we can to "leave no man behind."

If Americans are often using current policy to fight the last war, perhaps the most instructive aspect of the presentation of Bergdahl is that it's meant to resolve lingering bad feelings about Vietnam. We don't discuss Vietnam much (not that we ever did), but Bergdahl's parents carefully aligned themselves with a bloc that seems to have colored the Obama Administration's response - the well organized groups of Vietnam verterans focused on "POW/MIA" issues.

Liberals are often terrible at discussing military issues and war, especially after 50 years of antiwar activism that's been blended into the DNA of left wing politics out of Vietnam. Though the idea of "leave no soldier behind" is a longstanding military tradition, just what that means in our modern conflicts has not been simple. And nowhere was that more apparent than Vietnam, where the questions of prisoners and people thought to be missing in action dragged on for years after the cessation of military involvement.

That long, difficult history, I think, provides more context for the Obama Administration's presentation of Bergdahl's rescue than perhaps anything else. The prospect of ending hostilities in Afghanistan while even or only one soldier remained in captivity had to be a concern. While Bergdahl's deteriorating health may have added a sense of urgency - though it's hard, just now, to see what medical condition changed the equation so suddenly - defusing a potential scenario of a renewed "POW/MIA" mess had to also play into the decision making.

It's also true that, since Vietnam, we've avoided a lot of the POW mess by operating most of our conflicts at a careful remove from direct combat engaging an enemy at close range. Until the wars in Iraq, and our long foray into Afghanistan, our military campaigns have largely been conducted offshore, from ships and by plane. It's worth remembering too that incidents like "Black Hawk Down" and violence at US outposts - long before Benghazi - have colored our sense of just when and where we should be and to what level we should be present - and what it means to "leave no one behind." Some kidnappings matter more than others, and sadly, that's often a tale of how visibly missing or captured they seem to be. Hence, Bergdahl's disappearance seems to have been largely undiscussed by officials rather than raise the profile of it and make it more of a cause.

The Obama Administration, I think, probably made a calculation that couching Bergdahl's return in the language of post-Vietnam POW rhetoric would silence most critics. You may be troubled by the swap, you may have questions about the gtiming... but hey, we leave no soldier behind. Amirite? That the company line failed to take hold, and failed to stop all debate is a reminder that we aren't, in fact, fighting the last war. Such platitudes have become, well, kind of simplistic. Americans understand that our conflicts and our role in the world is actually rather complicated and however important it is to leave no one behind, we will still ask... at what cost? Amd for what reasons? And of course, questions about Bergdahl stem, in part from trying to hide his POW/MIA status for as long as they did. "We got him back1" Well, gee, did we know he was missing?

Of course, part of this story is the optics of opposition - conservatives looking for any and all reasons to oppose Obama, no matter what. And that antwar DNA of the left doesn't help liberals try to take the high ground - parroting a line about "leave no soldier behind" can't stop cold a right wing more plugged into the military community and more hawkish on defense issues. The questions, especially, around just what sort of soldier Bergdahl was, and his behavior years ago should have been better anticipated, and better answered. And probably would have been, if there was a left as plugged into military issues as the right remains.

Moreover, though, there's an underlying abivalence around all of this that actually has everything to do with Vietnam and the ways we try not to, ever, rethink what happened then and why. Our ambivalence, as a nation, about retrieving every soldier, every body, is very real and very much about the painful realities about whetehr or not we really want American militray involvement ever, anywhere. We're embarrassed to admit, fundamentally, that Americans like wars best when no American has to be captured or killed. We like being seen as simply a force for good. We hate being reminded that war is messy, and difficult, and that people die and others will treat people horribly. Leave no soldier behind... but do we have to send them out there at all?

No one wanted Bowe Bergdahl left behind. But it's instructive, I think, that so many of us, for so long, really didn't even know Bowe Bergdahl was missing, or why. And it's simplistic, really, for the Obama Administration to have thought any and every question about Bergdahl and his release gets absolved by "leave no soldier behind." The problem of POW and MIA soldiers isn't who we leave... it's who we sent into battle to begin with. And why.