Published for Contentious on commentarymagazine.com, September 7th, 2010:

In his excellent memoir, A Journey: My Political Life, Tony Blair writes about his electoral victory in 1997:

We were very quickly appreciating the daunting revelation of the gap between saying and doing. In Opposition, the gap is nothing because “saying” is all you can do; in government, where “doing” is what it’s all about, the gap is suddenly revealed as a chasm of bureaucracy, frustration and disappointment … I was afraid because, at that instant, suddenly I thought of myself no longer as the up-and-coming, the challenger, the prophet, but the owner of the responsibility, the person not explaining why things were wrong but taking the decisions to put them right.

Blair’s words touch on a truth which those of us who have served in government, and especially in different administrations and in the White House, can attest:

A president’s capacity to control and influence events is often more limited than it’s imagined. It’s not unusual for presidential directives to be ignored or undermined by the bureaucracy. Thousands of personnel decisions, some seemingly insignificant, can come back to bite you. An administration is held responsible for what happens on its watch, whether or not that’s justified. Urgent, complex problems demand a response even if the information needed to act on them is incomplete. The political culture is unforgiving. And all presidents and their aides, like all people, are flawed and fallible.

When you’re out of power and in the opposition, these truths are quickly tossed aside or simply forgotten. Governing seems much easier when all one is doing is critiquing others in columns and blogs, in speeches and on television. Position papers are simpler to write than policies are to enact. This tendency is particularly pronounced among political commentators, many of whom have no first-hand experience at what it means to govern.

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Published for Contentious on commentarymagazine.com, September 7th, 2010:

The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait continues his indefatigable political defense of ObmamCare. One of his recent efforts, “Health Care as Political Scapegoat,” can be found here. He writes, as proof of his thesis, that “a recent Gallup poll shows that Democrats fare about evenly (+1) versus Republicans on health care — it’s one of the only issues where they don’t have a disadvantage.”

Now what might be missing from Chait’s analysis? Context.

As I pointed out here, in October 2006, the Democrats held a 64-percent v. 25-percent advantage over Republicans regarding health care. Today the lead is 44 percent v. 43 percent — a 38-point swing in favor of the GOP. That is a substantially larger swing than we’ve seen on combating terrorism (29 points), the economy (27 points), and handling corruption in government (26 points).

There is no other issue, in fact, over which Democrats have lost as much ground as quickly as over health care. What was once the strongest issue in the Democratic arsenal — an issue on which Democrats enjoyed public support for generations — has now turned politically neutral with respect to the support each party enjoys on it. Politico reports that it appears as though no Democratic incumbent in the House or in the Senate has run a pro-health-care reform TV ad since April, while a handful of House Democrats are making health-care reform an election-year issue – by running against it. Senator Ron Wyden, one of the Democratic Party’s leading experts on health care, recently wrote a letter to Bruce Goldberg, the director of the Oregon health authority, encouraging Oregon to seek a waiver from the individual mandate, which is a fundamental feature of Obama’s health-care overhaul (Wyden is running for reelection). And last month more than 70 percent of Missouri primary voters rejected ObamaCare’s individual mandate. It’s no wonder that Charlie Cook declared that pushing ObamaCare was a “colossal miscalculation” for Democrats.

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Published for Contentious on commentarymagazine.com, September 7th, 2010:

According to the Wall Street Journal:

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said the planned burning of Qurans on Sept. 11 by a Florida church could put the lives of American troops in danger and damage the war effort.

Gen. David Petraeus said the Taliban would exploit the demonstration for propaganda purposes, drumming up anger toward the U.S. and making it harder for allied troops to carry out their mission of protecting Afghan civilians.

“It could endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort,” Gen. Petraeus said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “It is precisely the kind of action the Taliban uses and could cause significant problems. Not just here, but everywhere in the world we are engaged with the Islamic community.”

General Petraeus points out that hundreds of Afghans attended a demonstration in Kabul on Monday simply in anticipation of the plans of Florida pastor Terry Jones, who has said he will burn the Koran on September 11. Afghan protesters chanted “death to America” and speakers called on the U.S. to withdraw its military convoy. Military officials fear the protests are likely to spread beyond Kabul to other Afghan cities.

Some people may believe this is all overdone. Jones, after all, leads a church of just 50 people. He clearly does not speak for the overwhelming number of Christians in America. And of course, in a nation of more than 300 million people, there are a handful who can be found supporting every imaginable crazed cause.

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Published for Contentious on commentarymagazine.com, September 3rd, 2010:

What are we to make of the most recent jobs report, which shows that (a) unemployment increased from 9.5 percent to 9.6 percent and (b) nonfarm payrolls fell by 54,000 last month? If you’re White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, you tweet, “Don’t be fooled — the economy added 67,000 private sector jobs, 8th straight month of added private sector jobs, job loss came in Census work.” Picking up on this, David Mark, Politico’s senior editor, writesthis:

At the White House Friday morning President Obama praised the private sector addition of 67,000 jobs in August, the eighth straight month of job growth. “That’s positive news, and it reflects the steps we’ve already taken to break the back of this recession. But it’s not good enough,” the president said. And Christina Romer, outgoing chair of the president’s Council of Economic Advisors, said the jobs figures were “better than expected.” Do they have a point about a slowly-but-surely improving jobs situation?

The answer is “no.” To understand why, it might be helpful to put things in a wider perspective.

For one thing, the so-called underemployment rate, which includes workers who are working part-time but who want full-time work, increased from 16.5 percent to 16.7 percent. During our supposed “Recovery Summer,” we have lost 283,000 jobs (54,000 in June, 171,000 in July, and 54,000 in August). And for August, the employment-population ratio — the percentage of Americans with jobs — was 58.5 percent. We haven’t seen figures this low in nearly three decades. As Henry Olson of the American Enterprise Institute points out, “Since the start of this summer, nearly 400,000 Americans have entered the labor force, but only 130,000 have found jobs. … America’s adult population has risen by 2 million people since [August 2009], but the number of adults with jobs has dropped by 180,000. The unemployment rate declined slightly despite these numbers, from 9.7 percent to 9.6 percent, because over 2.3 million people have left the labor force entirely, so discouraged they are no longer even looking for work. ”

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Published for Contentious on commentarymagazine.com, September 3rd, 2010:

In his superb column today, Charles Krauthammer highlights a paragraph from Peter Baker’sNew York Times story on Barack Obama as commander in chief:

One adviser at the time said Mr. Obama calculated that an open-ended commitment would undermine the rest of his agenda. “Our Afghan policy was focused as much as anything on domestic politics,” the adviser said. “He would not risk losing the moderate to centrist Democrats in the middle of health insurance reform and he viewed that legislation as the make-or-break legislation for his administration.”

“If this is true,” Krauthammer writes, “Obama’s military leadership can only be called scandalous.”

Quite right. And it’s not the first time such a thing has been said about Obama. Here is a paragraph from a June 23 Washington Post article on the controversy then surrounding General Stanley McChrystal:

McChrystal’s apparent disdain for his civilian colleagues, and the facts on the ground in Afghanistan, have exposed the enduring fault lines in the agreement Obama forged last fall among policymakers and military commanders. In exchange for approving McChrystal’s request for more troops and treasure, Obama imposed, and the military accepted, two deadlines sought by his political aides. In December, one year after the strategy was announced, the situation would be reviewed and necessary adjustments made. In July 2011, the troops would begin to come home. [emphasis added]

These are damning admissions — war policies not only being influenced by partisan considerations but in important respects being driven by them.

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Published for Contentious on commentarymagazine.com, September 2nd, 2010:

As the Obama presidency and the Democratic Party continue their journey into the Slough of Despond, it’s interesting to watch Obama’ supporters try to process the unfolding events.

Some blame it on a failure to communicate. E.J. Dionne, Jr., for example, ascribes the Democrats’ problems to the fact that Obama “has chosen not to engage the nation in an extended dialogue about what holds all his achievements together.” Joe Klein offers this explanation: “If Obama is not reelected, it will be because he comes across as disdaining what he does for a living.” And John Judis points to the Obama administration’s “aversion to populism.”

Others are aiming their sound and fury at the American people. According to Maureen Dowd, “Obama is the head of the dysfunctional family of America — a rational man running a most irrational nation, a high-minded man in a low-minded age. The country is having some weird mass nervous breakdown.” Jonathan Alter argues that the American people “aren’t rationally aligning belief and action; they’re tempted to lose their spleens in the polling place without fully grasping the consequences.” And Slate’s Jacob Weisberg has written that “the biggest culprit in our current predicament” is the “childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.”

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Published for Contentious on commentarymagazine.com, September 1st, 2010:

1. The most Obama could say about George W. Bush is that “no one could doubt President Bush’s support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security.” That’s correct; no once could doubt it, which is why there was no need to say it.

The real issue was whether Obama would praise Bush for the surge — one of the most courageous and wise presidential decisions in the modern era and one Bush pushed through over fierce, widespread opposition, including from Obama and his vice president, Joe Biden. But for Obama to praise Bush for the surge would be to admit his own massive error in judgment in opposing it — and a man of Obama’s vanity could not bring himself to do that. So Obama could only say that Bush was well-intentioned rather than right.

As for his own record on Iraq, the Obama administration is now trying to corrupt the historical record, with press secretary Robert Gibbs making assertions that are not only wrong but the opposite of the truth.

2. On Iraq, Obama did say that while our combat mission is ending, “our commitment to Iraq’s future is not.” But you could be forgiven for believing, amid all the talk of page-turning and missions ended and over, that Obama has detached himself from a war he opposed and wants to have nothing more to do with it. He clearly considers it a distraction from his larger ambitions to transform America here at home.

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Published for Contentious on commentarymagazine.com, August 31st, 2010:

I’ve been critical of Glenn Beck in the past, but it strikes me that James Freeman of the Wall Street Journal got it just about right when he wrote:

Pundits will debate whether the crowd at Glenn Beck’s Saturday rally in Washington was the largest in recent political history, but it was certainly among the most impressive. Mr. Beck is a television host and radio broadcaster with a checkered past and a penchant for incendiary remarks. But if he’s judged by the quality of people of all colors that he attracted to the Lincoln Memorial, his stock can’t help but rise. One would not be able to find a more polite crowd at a political convention, certainly not at a professional sporting event, probably not even at an opera.

What was politically smart was to use the rally not as a forum for anti-Obama anger but for expressions of gratitude to our military, to figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., and to God. I found Beck’s comments the next day on Fox about President Obama’s Christianity to be more troubling — but in terms of the rally itself, it was, from the coverage I saw, a fairly impressive display by Beck and, mostly, by those whom he was able to draw to Washington.

Critics were waiting to strike, but it turned out there was no target at which to aim. And so people like Bill Press were made to look like fools (see this takedown of Press by HotAir’s Ed Morrissey).

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Published for Contentious on commentarymagazine.com, August 31st, 2010:

Fox’s Gretchen Carlson was too aggressive in her interview with Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, but it did allow Gibbs to display his unparalleled snideness and condescension. For a man who is part of an administration that is unspooling, you would think Gibbs would show a bit more humility. But you would be wrong.

As for substance: Mr. Gibbs is once again out of his depth. What he can’t seem to understand – or perhaps what he has chosen to willfully ignore – is that the surge was critical in both the success of the Anbar Awakening and the political progress that we have seen in Iraq. The surge allowed everything else that is good to take place. Without it, the Iraq war would have been lost and Iraq itself would be consumed in a bloody civil war and possibly genocide. And if Gibbs’s boss had gotten his way in 2007, that is exactly where things would now stand.

As for who has handled the diplomatic/political situation better between the Bush and Obama administration: here again, the Bush record is superior. Compare Bush’s ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, who was a spectacular diplomat, with Obama’s ambassador to Iraq, Chris Hill, who was not (Hill served in the Bush administration; his achievement as Ambassador to Korea and head of the U.S. delegation to the six-party talks could hardly be termed a success either).

Robert Gibbs often doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But to combine ignorance with such preening arrogance is uncommon even for Washington.

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Published for Contentious on commentarymagazine.com, August 31st, 2010:

“Nearly all of the gains Democrats have made in public approval of the health-care overhaul since it passed in March have been washed away, according to the Kaiser Health Tracking Poll for August,” Politico’s Mike Allen reports. According to the Kaiser poll, Americans are about evenly divided on health reform this month, with 43 percent holding favorable views of the new law and 45 percent unfavorable views. This represents a 7-percent drop in support from July, and a 10-percent uptick in opposition.

It’s worth noting that the Kaiser poll has in general shown greater public support for ObamaCare than other polls — yet even Kaiser shows that opposition to President Obama’s signature domestic achievement is higher (and more intense) than support.

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