Obama: read this blog
Political consultants ask Obama to do more philosophizing
A lengthy piece in today’s Politico quotes a wide range of political consultants, former high-level White House advisers, and pollsters who all reiterate the same shortcoming about President Obama:
By declining to speak clearly and often about his larger philosophy — and insisting that his actions are guided not by ideology but a results-oriented “pragmatism” — he has bred confusion and disappointment among his allies, and left his agenda and motives vulnerable to distortion by his enemies.
Obama’s predicament highlights an important role for political philosophy that even we here at The Public Philosopher tend to discount: it’s practical capacity to add clarity of vision to the messy business of governing. Read more
It’s the economy, stupid
Equality butts heads with freedom
Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith write at Politico that a new debate about first principles and the role of government has replaced the social issues at stake during the “culture wars” of the last three decades.
This dispute over first principles is deeply entwined with questions of national identity and the appropriate role of the government in the economy.
On one extreme is a minimalist state, in which the government is responsible for little more than upholding the rule of law and providing for a common defense. On the other extreme is a socialist state in which the government manages all facets of economic activity.
Neither extreme applies to any industrialized country today. Rather, the modern world is populated by welfare states of various stripes.
Mosque-ing the the real problem
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Mainstream media lets us down. Again.
Last night’s Daily Show had its usual fun with the political controversy engulfing plans to build a mosque and Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero. We’re going wall-to-wall on this topic here at TPP this week, both because it’s an important debate and because it touches so many basic moral and philosophical questions.
Of many pokes at the mainstream media during this clip, one worth noting in particular is Stewart’s scathing attack on news outlets that seem more concerned with the political fallout of what politicians say about the cultural center than whether building the thing is right or wrong. A New York Times headline from today underscores this media focus: “G.O.P. Seizes on Mosque Issue Ahead of Elections.”
Are there any issues where it is simply wrong to play politics? Read more
Sensitivity and principle
Last Friday, President Obama weighed in publicly on the mosque at ground zero. In doing so, he has joined Mayor Bloomberg as one of few major political figures who have openly voiced support for the project on the basis of freedom of religion.
However, polls indicate that Americans as well as New Yorkers overwhelmingly oppose the mosque’s construction to the tune of 68 percent. The poll reaffirms a truism that the writers of the Bill of Rights were grimly aware of: freedom often runs afoul of democracy. As one opponent of the mosque argues: ‘…[Obama]‘s lost sight of the germane issue, which is not about freedom of religion,” she said. “It’s about a gross lack of sensitivity to the 9/11 families and to the people who were lost.”’
Except the germane issue is exactly the balance between sensitivity and principle, and whether, as Jonathan asked yesterday, something can be “legally harmless but unpleasant enough for us to rightly or morally require legal intervention at the cost of others’ legal rights?” Namely, do people have a right not to be offended? Do they also have a right for their faith, beliefs, or values not to be challenged?
Greg Gutfeld of Fox News clearly believes not. In one of the most creative responses to the Ground Zero Mosque controversy, Gutfeld argues for both supporting the mosque’s construction and opening a gay bar next door. Now that might take equal opportunity offending to an extreme. But in a society in which we value both the principles of religious freedom and the “marketplace of ideas,” should we want it any other way?
-Charles
Image from Flickr user Johnnie Utah used under a Creative Commons Attribution license
The Obama paradox
How transformational change and buck-passing make odd bedfellows
Despite a tough economy, weakening approval ratings, and a recalcitrant Republican opposition, President Obama has managed to chase down two longtime liberal white whales, and is hot on the heels of a third (or fourth).
Earlier this year he signed into law a health care reform bill that many regard as the biggest piece of social legislation since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs of the 1960s. Congress is about to approve the largest set of financial reforms since the Great Depression. Now Democrats are hard-charging for a new energy bill (which may include a climate-related component). Even immigration reform seems possible.
While many find it surprising the President has been able to pursue such a sweeping agenda, one little discussed key to his (and Democrats’) success has been the consistent practice of front-loading benefits and back-loading costs:
Health care reform cracks down on insurers right away but won’t force people to buy insurance until 2014. A new consumer financial protection agency kicks in almost immediately under the Wall Street reform bill, but banks won’t feel its full force for more than 10 years. And even Democrats’ nascent immigration reforms include at least an eight-year wait before illegal immigrants can apply for permanent residency – after Obama leaves office.
Some say this is good politics, but is it right? Read more
Should snooping for gossip be illegal?
The breaking news yesterday about the FBI infiltration and arrest of a Russian spy ring left me wanting. The spies were not sent to obtain U.S. government jobs and access to classified information. They were sent to mingle with elites and think tankers and get juicy gossip and rumors about U.S. politics and foreign policy. Um, hello FBI? Have you met any 30-something policy wonks over happy hour? This rumor mongering is what they live for. Take a gander at Laura Rozen’s Politico blog or “The Cable” on Foreign Policy. There’s a whole media industry of political gossip. Is it really illegal to pass this stuff to foreign governments. Hell, Russia could have saved itself a ton of money and the trouble of, you know, a diplomatic crisis by just reading Wonkette. Could have had a laugh while gaining much more valuable intelligence from them than a “New York-based financier described as a fundraiser for a major political party” is going to get you.
-Marc
Photo by Flickr user Anonymous9000 used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Should Obama have fired McChrystal?
When is dissent appropriate?
General Stanley McChrystal has become President Obama’s MacArthur, as MacArthur was to President Truman: McChrystal failed (dramatically) to keep his frustrations and criticisms private, opening up a rift with the administration. The result? He was sacked.
There are a number of reasons to agree with the president’s decision. Obama needed to avoid creating the sort of situation that Truman found himself in when dealing with the insubordinate MacArthur in 1951. And although he is popular with public populations throughout the world, the president’s international reputation with the leaders of allies and enemies (and therefore his foreign policy initiatives in general) could be damaged. Read more
I, politician
Richard Cohen on Obama’s inscrutability
In the Washington Post Richard Cohen laments the obscurity of Obama’s politics and person, as if there were no distinction between the two, arguing that Obama’s guardedness derives from his father’s desertion and his separation from his mother when she twice moved to Indonesia. Surely there’s a necessary connection between one’s personal experience and their politics, but this seems to be taking it too far. Cohen writes:
Pragmatism is fine — as long as it is complicated by regret. But that indispensable wince is precisely what Obama doesn’t show. It is not essential that he get angry or cry. It is essential, though, that he show us who he is. As of now, we haven’t a clue.
There’s clearly something here, but it’s unclear what Cohen means by “show us who he is.” At its core, I think Cohen and others simply want to know Obama’s value priorities. But for a politician, that question is an interpretative one based on reading the tea leaves of his decisions, not on the way he does or does not ”wince” at the sight of an oil-covered bird or destroyed local economy. Cohen wants “a sign that this [oil] catastrophe meant something to Obama, that it was not merely another problem that had crossed his desk;” and then connects this seeming lack of concern to an argument that Obama’s pragmatic foreign policy is similarly amoral. If there’s no coherent theme to Obama’s policies, as Cohen argues, which probably is not true, then the there’s no coherent them to Obama’s policies. It’s doesn’t mean he’s obscure; it means he doesn’t have a clear, systematic, rigid political theory. That is the nature of pragmatism, especially one that deals with problems as they come. It provides useful ideological flexibility, but seemingly sacrifices any undying commit to any (cherished) principle. To throw some arm-chair psychoanalysis back at Cohen, he is projecting onto Obama, wanting the President to be something he’s not, asking him to have a holistic set of principles, when that’s not, I think, who he really is.
Ideological branding: Is Obama a centrist pragmatist or a communist?
The new categorical imperative
Norman Ornstein, resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, argues in a Washington Post op-ed that the Republican rhetoric on Obama’s supposed radicalism is overheated and off-base. He concludes:
This president is a mainstream, pragmatic moderate, operating in the center of American politics; center-left, perhaps, but not left of center.
This debate reveals that ideological description is policy prescription. How we describe, explicate, and categorize someone’s political theory or ideology, conceived holistically–say, either as American centrist or communist–affects how we understand an individual policy forwarded by that person.
If Obama’s whole project is categorized justifiaby as radical socialist, then most Americans will have good reason to scrutinize and be especially skeptical of any particular policy he proposes. Even if they support that given policy, they have to be wary of death by a thousand cuts, and worry that it might represent one step toward a path-dependency leading to a undesirable destination, or one innocuous piece of a larger malevolent project. Require people to purchase insurance now, central planning of the whole economy later.
If he’s branded as a pragmatic left-centrist, people will grant him more trust and give him the benefit of a reasonable doubt. Require people to purchase insurance now, require people to purchase insurance now; there is no worry of path-dependency in the wrong direction, or lurking shadowy projects. Obama has worked tirelessly to make this image stick; whether or not he’s been successful, Orstein argues pretty convincingly that it’s not just spin.
Tea Partyers for Medicare
Inconsistency or philosophical conservatism?
The New York Times had a fascinating look yesterday at the demographic and ideological makeup on the Tea Party movement. Long discussed, but little studied, The New York Times and CBS commissioned a poll this month to get a detailed look at the profile and attitudes of Tea Party supporters.
The poll found that the 18 percent of Americans who associate with the Tea Party movement tend to be white, male, married, over 45 and on the “very conservative” end of the ideological spectrum. Tea Partyers express “fierce animosity toward Washington, and the president in particular, [ ] rooted in deep pessimism about the direction of the country and the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich.”
But here’s the surprising stuff. While Tea Party supporters believe the goal of their movement is reduce the size of government and favor doing so even if it means cutting domestic programs, most happily partake in the three most expensive domestic programs: public education, medicare and social security. And they assert that these programs are “worth the cost to taxpayers.”
So what gives? Read more
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