Category Archives: Barack Obama

The War is Over

We may look back at President Obama’s speech yesterday declaring a shift in counter-terrorism strategy, as one of the most important addresses of the last 20 years.

For over the last decade, our nation has spent well over a trillion dollars on war, helping to explode our deficits and constraining our ability to nation-build here at home. Our service members and their families have sacrificed far more on our behalf.

Nearly 7,000 Americans have made the ultimate sacrifice. Many more have left a part of themselves on the battlefield or brought the shadows of battle back home. From our use of drones to the detention of terrorist suspects, the decisions we are making will define the type of nation and world that we leave to our children.

So America is at a crossroads. We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us. We have to be mindful of James Madison’s warning that no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

It has been the contention of this writer that American renewal cannot begin until “The Long War” ends. Part of the problem is the President’s realization how right Madison really was.

Meanwhile, we strengthened our defenses, hardening targets, tightening transportation security, giving law enforcement new tools to prevent terror. Most of these changes were sound. Some caused inconvenience. But some, like expanded surveillance, raised difficult questions about the balance that we strike between our interests in security and our values of privacy. And in some cases, I believe we compromised our basic values — by using torture to interrogate our enemies, and detaining individuals in a way that ran counter to the rule of law.

So a good start in restoring Democracy will be to change the Administration’s policy on Press Freedom.

President Obama ordered a review on Thursday of the Justice Department’s procedures for legal investigations involving reporters, acknowledging that he was “troubled” that multiple inquiries into national security leaks could chill investigative reporting.

But the much bigger task will be to rethink the whole National Security State that has grown exponentially since 9/11. So while I agree with Obama that, “we must define our effort not as a boundless global war on terror but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America”, that does not mean we need the massive domestic counter-terrorism industrial complex that has gorged itself on the public treasury with little to show for it as the Washington Post pointed out in their breakthrough “Top Secret America”.

We have a long way to go before we can really begin America 3.0–the renewal project I have been talking about since the eve of the 2008 market crash. Obama’s speech yesterday was a start down that road. Let us not underestimate the forces that profit from being in a perpetual state of war. Senator Saxby Chamblis spoke for them yesterday.

Some Republicans expressed alarm about Mr. Obama’s shift, saying it was a mistake to go back to the days when terrorism was seen as a manageable law enforcement problem rather than a dire threat.

“The president’s speech today will be viewed by terrorists as a victory,” said Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee. “Rather than continuing successful counterterrorism activities, we are changing course with no clear operational benefit.”

I have been feeling that Washington is just some sort of reality show, in which everyone–politicians, press and lobbyists are playing their role according to a script. But this fight over the end of the Global War on Terror is actually important to those of us who believe power and taxes must be handed over to the states and cities. Ultimately the whole Federal establishment will get smaller. Congressional Staffs, Federal Bureaucracies and most importantly the Pentagon and Homeland Security will shrink. The DC property bubble will burst and Lobbyists will be less important. How long Saxby Chambliss and his forces can fight a rear guard effort against the inevitable is probably the most important story of the next 12 months.

Uncle Chump

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As I warned a month ago, President Obama overplayed the scare tactics leading up to the Sequester. It now appears that the large polling advantage Obama had over the Republicans on the issue of the economy has vanished in the last month. As I wrote last month the protestations that the economy if the Sequester went through would collapse were hollow.

To say that an $85 billion cut out of a $3.7 Trillion budget is hardly cause for alarm. After the military budget doubled in 8 years under both Bush and Obama, reducing the Pentagon budget by 6% hardly qualifies for endangering our national security. This kind of scare talk should be left to John McCain and Lindsay Graham and will only backfire on the President when it turns out that the sky did not fall after the Sequester went through. Anyone who has run a business–big or small–knows that taking 5% out of a budget can be done without killing the enterprise.

Democrats have to be very careful they don’t get themselves in the position of defending Big Government against a natural reform movement that goes beyond party labels.Andrew Kohut wrote an amazing analysis of the Republican’s Presidential problems on Friday. He made it clear that the right wing media has painted the party into a corner, but he also noted the unique blend of opinion that was expressed in the November election.

Voters generally agreed with the GOP that a smaller government is preferable to a larger, activist one, and therefore they disapproved of Obamacare. However, exit polls showed popular support for legalizing same-sex marriage and giving illegal immigrants opportunities for citizenship.

This combination of conservative and liberal views is typical. To win, both parties must appeal to the mixed values of the electorate. But it will be very hard for the Republican Party, given the power of the staunch conservatives in its ranks.

What is so fascinating is that there is a natural constituency for a real reform movement that crosses party lines. Continue reading →

Don’t Cry Wolf

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Readers of this blog know that I believe that President Obama has been very effective in setting the course of the nation since his reelection. But I must point out that the news conference yesterday on the Sequester was pretty tone deaf.

President Obama on Tuesday painted a dire picture of federal government operations across the United States should automatic budget cuts hit on March 1: F.B.I. agents furloughed, criminals released, flights delayed, teachers and police officers laid off and parents frantic to find a place for children locked out of day care centers.

To say that an $85 billion cut out of a $3.7 Trillion budget is hardly cause for alarm. After the military budget doubled in 8 years under both Bush and Obama, reducing the Pentagon budget by 6% hardly qualifies for endangering our national security. This kind of scare talk should be left to John McCain and Lindsay Graham and will only backfire on the President when it turns out that the sky did not fall after the Sequester went through. Anyone who has run a business–big or small–knows that taking 5% out of a budget can be done without killing the enterprise. The Pentagon is the most bloated enterprise in America. These cuts can only help the lazy planners realize that we live in a new Post Empire World. The quicker the President realizes that fear mongering won’t work, the sooner we can get back to the real work of American Renewal.

For me, the place to start that strategic renewal is Patrick Doherty’s amazing essay in Foreign Policy, A New U.S. Grand Strategy.

The status quo is untenable. In the United States, the country’s economic engine is misaligned to the threats and opportunities of the 21st century. Designed explicitly to exploit postwar demand for suburban housing, consumer goods, and reconstruction materials for Europe and Japan, the conditions that allowed it to succeed expired by the early 1970s. Its shelf life has since been extended by accommodative monetary policy and the accumulation of household, corporate, and federal debt. But with Federal Reserve interest rates effectively zero, Americans’ debt exceeding their income, and storms lashing U.S. cities, the country is at the end of the road.

Abroad, Washington’s post-Cold War pattern of episodic adventurism and incremental crisis management only creates further uncertainty, and rising powers will not lead. Other major economies have little appetite for altering the global order and hence are doubling down on the old system, exacerbating trade imbalances and driving record resource extraction. As commodity prices rise, global powers are hedging ever more aggressively — stockpiling resources and increasingly becoming entangled in conflicts in resource-rich areas. As the global economy falters, unrest rises and the great unresolved conflicts of the 20th century — the Middle East, South Asia, North Korea, Taiwan — grow increasingly enmeshed in the power dynamics of this new era.

Simply put, the current U.S. and international order is unsustainable, and myriad disruptions signal that it is now in a process of collapse. Until the United States implements a new grand strategy, the country will face even more rapid degradation of domestic and global conditions.

Read the whole essay and then let’s discuss. May we live in exciting times.

Bad Actors

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A continuing source of frustration for many Americans has been the fact that no one on Wall Street has gone to jail for the mortgage fraud that nearly crashed the world financial system in 2008. But in the last three weeks the dam has broken and the indictments are beginning to emerge. It may have taken a long time, but perhaps the departure of Tim Geithner, the boy with his finger in the dyke, will signal a new attitude by the Obama administration towards the Wall Street Miscreants.

The first step was the amazing Frontline episode The Untouchables, which depicted a craven Assistant Attorney General, Lanny Breuer, who went out of his way to protect the bankers, fearing an indictment would crash the financial system. Soon after the program aired, Breuer announced he was returning to private practice, probably to represent the big banks.

Next came the Department of Justice suit against Standard and Poors for their outrageous rating as AAA, securities that they knew were junk. The suit quotes internal S & P emails.

“Rating agencies continue to create an even bigger monster — the C.D.O. market,” one S.& P. employee wrote in an internal e-mail in December 2006. “Let’s hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of card falters.”

Another S.& P. employee wrote in an instant message the next April, reproduced in the complaint: “We rate every deal. It could be structured by cows and we would rate it.”

Finally comes word this morning that Jamie Dimon and his pals at JP Morgan Chase were just as involved in mortgage fraud as any other bank, despite Dimon’s attempt to paint himself as the good guy during the 2008 meltdown.

According to the court documents, an analysis for JPMorgan in September 2006 found that “nearly half of the sample pool” — or 214 loans — were “defective,” meaning they did not meet the underwriting standards. The borrowers’ incomes, the firms found, were dangerously low relative to the size of their mortgages. Another troubling report in 2006 discovered that thousands of borrowers had already fallen behind on their payments.

But JPMorgan at times dismissed the critical assessments or altered them, the documents show. Certain JPMorgan employees, including the bankers who assembled the mortgages and the due diligence managers, had the power to ignore or veto bad reviews.

The real problem with establishment types like Tim Geithner and Lanny Breuer is that they went to Ivy League schools and couldn’t imagine that their establishment peers would possibly commit fraud. And even if they saw evidence of the fraud, then preserving The System became more important then sending their classmates to jail. President Obama bought into that establishment trope in his first term. He surrounded himself with people like Geithner, Larry Summers and Bob Gates. But I sense something has changed. The appointment of Mary Jo White to head the SEC could be a sign that heads are going to role, but the real change will come from more lawsuits filed like the S & P case. Certainly the other ratings services, Moody’s and Fitch, are equally guilty of pay to play services. One of Obama’s greatest legacies could be a real financial reform agenda.

Obama’s Second Term

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I must say I am looking forward to the President’s second Inaugural Address on Monday. In my lifetime there have only been two second term Democratic presidencies and Bill Clinton began his second term with the shadow of the Whitewater and Trooper gate allegations hanging over him. He had already begun his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, and so the events that led to his impeachment were already in motion. Barack Obama on the other hand begins his second term with a much bigger mandate (51% of the popular vote to Clinton’s 49%) and no threat of scandal.

Equally important, the Republican Party is in complete disarray, as can be seen by their cave in today on the debt ceiling. David Brooks wrote an unintentionally humorous column today complaining that Obama is being too tough on the Republicans at the very moment of their meltdown. After laying out how he would hope Obama might propose some small bore initiatives that Eric Cantor could agree on, Brooks then states he doesn’t think that is going to happen, unintentionally laying out a perfect strategy for the Democrats..

It’s more likely that today’s majority party is going to adopt a different strategy, which you might call Kill the Wounded. It’s more likely that today’s Democrats are going to tell themselves something like this:

“We live at a unique moment. Our opponents, the Republicans, are divided, confused and bleeding. This is not the time to allow them to rebuild their reputation with a series of modest accomplishments. This is the time to kick them when they are down, to win back the House and end the current version of the Republican Party. Continue reading →

Obama’s Victory

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I said my piece before the vote as to what the election would mean for the Republicans (thank God Nate Silver was right), but a few quick thoughts on what it could mean for President Obama and the Democrats.

The Fiscal Cliff-My advice would be to do nothing during the lame duck session. Let the Bush Tax cuts expire and let the sequester kick in, effecting the first major cut in defense spending in 60 years. Then in January with a slightly stronger Democratic Senate, push for a middle class tax cut combined with some tax reform that eliminates corporate tax breaks and try to revive the Jobs Act to spur some of the lost government fiscal stimulus. The economy is recovering and so private demand will take up some of the slack.
Filibuster Reform-The Senate has once again got to be a functioning legislative body. Anyone who wants to filibuster a bill is going to have to play Jimmy Stewart in Mr Smith Goes to Washington. They are going to have to come to the floor of the Senate and talk until they are hoarse. They are going to have to have the people that oppose cloture on the floor for continuous votes. My guess is we will not have another session of 350 filibusters if that was enacted.
America 3.0-When asked how a huge bureaucratic company like IBM became so flexible, the CEO Sam Palmisano said, “We had to lower the center of gravity” at IBM, by which he meant push power out to the edges of the company. Obama has to use the miracle of the Federal system to get money to the states and cities to experiment with solutions for education, transportation, energy and housing.
The Smart Grid-As Hurricane Sandy proved, we are operating with a 19th Century energy grid in a 21st Century world. As the folks in Chattanooga Tennessee have proved, a smart grid can recover quickly after a catastrophic weather event and that makes all the difference.
Climate Change-Maybe Sandy will also get the climate change deniers to STFU. Energy independence and green power are of a piece. If Germany could run 50% of its electrical power off of solar for a couple of days last summer, surely the US could do better with vast stretches of desert just waiting for large solar and wind arrays.

The Tell

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Chris Christie is a smart politician. His full scale embrace of President Obama in the last three days was not done without consideration for the political value going forward. My guess is that Christie has seen enough internal Republican polling to understand that Obama will probably win on next Tuesday. He doesn’t want to be too closely associated with a loser like Mitt Romney. But more importantly he is thinking about 2016. Romney was losing badly until he did his frantic pivot to the center in the first debate. It must be clear to Republicans that a “severe conservative” cannot win a Presidential campaign. Given that Paul Ryan has made it clear that he would like to run for President, that leaves Christie as the centrist candidate in the party. Embracing a Democratic President in bi-partisan ardor, cements that position for 2016.

I think Christie is probably right about Romney losing. The ever dependable Nate Silver has raised Obama’s chance of victory to 79%, the highest it has been since just before the first debate.

Mr. Obama continues to hold the lead in the vast majority of polls in Iowa, Nevada, Ohio and Wisconsin, the states that represent his path of least resistance toward winning the Electoral College. This was particularly apparent on Wednesday, a day when there were a remarkable number of polls, 27, released in the battleground states.

Christie’s apostasy has of course unleashed a fury on the far right. My sense is that if Romney loses the Republican circular firing squad will be out in force. El Rushbo will say Romney lost because he softened his conservative message in the closing weeks, ignoring the clear polling that the moderation was the only thing that got him close.

The closing days are going to be interesting, but I am beginning to feel pretty confident of an Obama victory.

Mitt Romney, Peacenik

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When months ago Mitt Romney’s spokesman suggested he could Etch a Sketch his way back to the political center, I expected the Convention to be the venue for this makeover. But that was not to be, as a hall full of Tea Party fanatics would have actively booed a moderate acceptance speech from Romney. So they waited until the debates which had an additional benefit of catching Obama flat-footed in responding to Moderate Mitt.

The third debate last night was the most amazing part of the Etch a Sketch strategy. Since the beginning of the campaign, Romney has surrounded himself with George Bush’s most aggressive Neocon foreign policy experts, like John Bolton and Dan Senor. I would have given a lot to watch John Bolton observing Romney twist and sweat himself last night into the ultimate peacenik in his closing statement, “I want to see peace. I want to see growing peace in this country. It’s our objective.” But of course, just like all of Romney’s instant transformations, this one is not credible.

I’m convinced the Kumbaya routine from Romney comes from his pollsters who are telling him that America is tired of fighting wars in the Mideast and Romney’s bellicose rhetoric towards Iran is scaring voters. Obama needs to drive this home just the way LBJ used the famous daisy bomb ad to scare voters about Goldwater’s finger on the nuclear trigger. Obama already has an ad that makes this point. He should put it up nationally this week.

Obama by a Knockout

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George Will said on ABC that last night’s debate was the best he has seen in his lifetime and I agree. He also said Obama won–and I agree. Determined to erase the memory of his poor performance two weeks ago, the President turned the first question of the night (on jobs) into a good right jab to Romney’s chin–”when Governor Romney said we should let Detroit go Bankrupt”–and never let up for the rest of the night.

The coup de grace came in the final exchange. Just like in a great prize fight I could see in slow motion that Romney had left himself open to a knockout when he began his final statement by saying, “I care about 100% of the people.” I said to the people in the room I was watching with ,”here comes the 47%”, and Obama did not disappoint.

I believe Governor Romney is a good man. Loves his family, cares about his faith. But I also believe that when he said behind closed doors that 47 percent of the country considered themselves victims who refuse personal responsibility, think about who he was talking about.

Folks on Social Security who’ve worked all their lives. Veterans who’ve sacrificed for this country. Students who are out there trying to hopefully advance their own dreams, but also this country’s dreams. Soldiers who are overseas fighting for us right now. People who are working hard every day, paying payroll tax, gas taxes, but don’t make enough income.

And I want to fight for them. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last four years. Because if they succeed, I believe the country succeeds.

When my grandfather fought in World War II and he came back and he got a G.I. Bill and that allowed him to go to college, that wasn’t a handout. That was something that advanced the entire country. And I want to make sure that the next generation has those same opportunities. That’s why I’m asking for your vote and that’s why I’m asking for another four years.

That was the closing line of the debate. Romney was on the canvas. The Governor had tried to work the ref all night, but in the end he was outclassed. This was the comparison I had been waiting for. This is still going to be a very tight race, but I’m pretty sure Obama has stopped Romney’s move up. The instant polls all showed Obama winning the night, but Karl Rove and company are about to unleash a tsunami of advertising in the swing states. My guess is that the number of undecideds (who are these people?) is very small, so that November 6 will be all about enthusiasm and turnout. In that game, Obama just fired up his troops.

Obama’s Debate Challenge

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President Obama was caught off guard in the first debate by Mitt Romney’s pivot to the center and his embrace of the Compassionate Conservative position. That Obama allowed Romney to blur their differences on healthcare, social security and even taxes was distressing for Democrats and clearly has shaken up the race. Tonight the President has an opportunity to draw a bright line between his foreign policy and that advocated by Romney. Failing to do that would probably lead to Obama’s defeat in November.

Two weeks ago Mitt Romney’s Foreign Policy Director Alex Wong told reporters that a President Romney would ensure “the restoration of a strategy that served us well for 70 years.” Here is what that 70-year strategy looks like in terms of money spent. That much of the world has been free riding on our blood and treasure is the issue of the moment.

Romney assumes that the aggressive military strategy of the George Bush administration still enjoys the support of the American public. He surrounds himself with Bush Neocons like Dan Senor and John Bolton who recently stated that America should “not grant any validity to international law” because it will be “used by those who want to constrict the United States.” But the country has turned away from the preemptive war strategies of the Bush era. The Libertarian wing of the Republican party (estimated to represent almost 24% of the voting public by a recent Reason-Rupe Poll) is staunchly anti-war, calling for a pullback of American forces stationed abroad. Even the Republican Realists like former National Security Director Brent Scowcroft have acknowledged that, “the decision (by Bush 43) to …..try to deal with those problems (terrorism and the empowerment of non-state actors) as a unilateral nation-state using traditional military power, is what brought America to the point of crisis.”

President Eisenhower warned the country in his Farewell Address that, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.” But he would have been shocked to see how far that power has been extended. A view of our current budget priorities tells the tale.

What is really remarkable is that Congress has already passed laws (the Budget Control Act of 2011 and the Sequester) that reverse the 70-year policy of continuous increases in the Military budget. For the Pentagon, the Sequester would mean about $50 billion a year in less defense spending from fiscal year 2013 to FY2021, on top of the roughly $450 billion in reduced defense outlays from the Budget Control Act according to the Congressional Budget Office. And while the Corporate Welfare crowd like Senator Lindsay Graham vow “that I will fight this with every ounce of my being”, he is on the losing side of the political argument. As an April 2012 ABC News Washington Post Poll found “two-thirds of Americans now say the War in Afghanistan has not been worth fighting.”

As Gary Wills pointed out in an important essay, President Obama came in to office trapped by the facts on the ground of the National Security State–what Wills calls “the Entangled Giant.”

The permanent emergency that has melded World War II with the cold war and the cold war with the “war on terror”—all these make a vast and intricate structure that may not yield to effort at dismantling it. Sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers (1941–2009) have made the abnormal normal, and constitutional diminishment the settled order…

Here is the irony. Reagan and the neoconservatives managed to convince their followers that the only thing the government knew how to do well was fight wars. All the rest–building the Interstate Highway System or the Internet, running Social Security and Medicare—the government must be incompetent. But it is the financing of the National Security State that prevents us from providing a world-class universal health care and K-College education system. Nothing else. And what is Mitt Romney offering us? A return to Reaganomics, with higher military budgets and lower taxes on the wealthy, leading to endless deficits. The tragedy of Ike’s warning is that both Democrats and Republicans alike have embraced the Military Keynesian model, which Romney used in his convention speech: “we can’t cut the military budget and sacrifice all those good defense industry jobs”. Even Bill Clinton, presiding after the fall of the Soviet Union, never delivered a peace dividend because his own draft record left him too vulnerable to take on the Pentagon. Now Obama has a once in a lifetime chance to do some nation building at home instead of in the Middle East. He must seize the opportunity or become a one term President.

Jonathan Taplin

Director, USC Annenberg Innovation Lab