Tobin Harshaw and Chris Suellentrop
January 31, 2009, 1:00 pm
Weekend Opinionator: Barack Obama, Culture Warrior?
By Tobin HarshawRemember the Culture Wars? They made the 1990s a grand time to be in the opinion business, and with the return of the Democrats to the White House and the rancor over California’s proposition 8, one might have expected to see the battle rejoined. Oddly, however, there has been a steadily growing feeling among the blogocracy that Barack Obama is the sole person with the power to take the nation above the fray. Andrew Sullivan wrote this more than a year ago in the Atlantic:
At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a momentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.
The discussion got a jump-start this week in the form of a column in the Daily Beast by Peter Beinart, the former New Republic editor, arguing that “when it comes to culture, Obama doesn’t have a public agenda; he has a public anti-agenda. He wants to remove culture from the political debate.” Beinart continues:
As recently as the early 1990s, the idea that a black man could end the culture war would have been unthinkable, because the culture war was—more than anything—about black versus white….
In the 1990s, things began to change. Crime declined, welfare was radically scaled back, and affirmative action receded from the political stage, in part because of the deep support it enjoyed from such conservative bastions as corporate America and the military. But the culture war didn’t end: It simply morphed from a struggle primarily about race to a struggle primarily about religion. In the 1990s, as the affirmative action, crime, and welfare debates subsided, the void was partly filled by gay marriage, an issue that pits not black against white, but secular against religiously orthodox. The impeachment of Bill Clinton was not a racial battle, but a battle over what standard of public morality would govern political behavior …
For Barack Obama, this shift has been useful. A black politician running in the midst of a racial culture war is virtually doomed. But amidst a religious culture war, being black is less of a handicap since blacks are the least secular element of the Democratic coalition. Barack Obama was more successful than John Kerry in reaching out to moderate white evangelicals in part because he struck them as more authentically Christian.
That’s the foundation on which Obama now seeks to build. He seems to think there are large numbers of conservative white Protestants and Catholics who will look beyond culture when they enter the voting booth as long as he and other Democrats don’t ram cultural liberalism down their throats. In this effort, Obama has two big advantages. The first is the economic crisis, a trauma of such historic magnitude that it makes issues like guns and gays seem trivial. The second is a generational shift taking place among evangelical Christians, in which younger leaders like [Rick] Warren are broadening their agendas to include issues like poverty and the environment, thus signaling at least a partial willingness to look beyond the culture war.
Obama’s effort could fail. After all, he’s not offering to split the difference with cultural conservatives, only to make his cultural liberalism less conspicuous. And while gay marriage may gradually fade as an issue as public attitudes shift, immigration may well gain in salience, perhaps igniting a whole new kind of culture war, pitting not white against black or secular against religious but immigrant against native-born.
Beinart’s column prompted Ed Kilgore, the Democratic Strategist, to raise some good questions.
Has the Cultural Right begun to run out of steam? Will the economic crisis radically reduce the salience of issues like gay marriage or abortion or church-state separation? Is there something about Barack Obama’s style and substance that tends to calm the cultural waters? And what if any accomodations should Obama or progressives generally make to neutralized culture-based opposition?
The first three questions are rather speculative and also perhaps premature, but I’d answer them “some,” some,” and “a little.” The last question is the real kicker, and the key thing here is to define who, exactly, we are talking about neutralizing or persuading.
On abortion, Kilgore expects little change, saying the changes of Congress passing a Freedom of Choice Act “that abrogates existing law on late-term abortions or the most frequent state harrassing tactics are extremely slim.” And because of Obama’s opposition to gay marriage, the “war” on that subject is now a civil one within the Democratic Party. There is however, Kilgore reminds us, religion:
The third big culture-war issue, church-state separation, is one on which Barack Obama can probably make the most direct and immediate progress. Remember that this is the same man who has strongly supported a continuation of federal “faith-based organization” policies, has reached out to all sorts of religious folk in his campaign and his inaugural events, and who also gave a shout-out to “nonbelievers” in his inaugural address. He’s a pretty good validator–as Bill Clinton might have been if not for the furor over his sexual behavior–of the very old and once invincible idea that believers can and should be comfortable with a continuation of the ancient American tradition of church-state separation as a protection of, not a threat to, religious liberty.
Tapped’s Tim Fernholz sees things in a similar light:
Culture wars end, I think, when one side “wins,” by way of having public opinion so strongly on its side that any objections are just outside of the national conversation — i.e. prohibition or slavery. This is what people are talking about when they forecast the eventual triumph of gay marriage advocates. But while I do believe that gay marriage is on the right side of history, it will take time for that view to set in, and it is certainly unlikely to happen anytime soon with issues like abortion, affirmative action, and the general role of religion in the public square.
Obama won’t end the “culture war” — if by culture war we mean these conflicting impulses — but what he is doing is making it more civilized and more broad-minded. Working with evangelicals to reduce unwanted pregnancies is a good idea, but Obama isn’t going to compromise on choice.
In his initial reaction, the New Republic’s Damon Linker, Fernholz’s occasional ideological sparring partner, didn’t feel an end to the culture wars, nonetheless victory, was in sight:
Now, I’m all for trying to undercut the political salience of culture-war issues. And I think symbolic gestures like these can be a very effective way to achieve this goal. But we need to be clear that keeping the religious right out of political power (by stealing the votes of its more moderate members) is not the same thing as ending the culture war. Indeed, the core of the religious right might very well respond to political impotence by becoming even more radical and more committed to its causes.
And mark my words: This unhappy outcome is guaranteed if President Obama signs anything resembling the Freedom of Choice Act that’s been kicking around Congress for the past few years — and which during his presidential campaign he famously (and for pro-lifers, notoriously) promised to sign. If he fulfills this promise, Obama will not only have failed to end the culture war. He will have ensured its survival for another generation.
These sorts of misgivings become, in the eyes of the Atlantic’s Ross Douthat, something more sinister:
There’s a lot to agree with in Peter Beinart’s piece about Obama’s quest to “end” the culture wars - particularly his point that as far as style and symbolism goes, a black liberal may be better-positioned than a white liberal to build the kind of bridges between the secular left and the religious middle that an enduring Democratic majority requires. (In a somewhat similar vein, I suspect the GOP’s quest to build a bridge between the religious right and the religious middle would have been better served had George W. Bush been a Catholic rather than an Evangelical - though that’s an argument for another day.)
But Beinart’s argument is shot through with the characteristic liberal conceit that the culture wars are a one-sided affair, in which right-wing culture warriors start fights and peace-loving liberals try to avoid them. In reality, what makes Obama promising to liberals isn’t his potential to “end” culture-war battles - it’s his potential ability to win them, by dressing up the policies that Planned Parenthood or the Human Rights Campaign or the ACLU or whomever would like to see in the kind of religiose language and fuzzy talk about consensus that swing voters like to hear. So waiting a day to reverse the ban on overseas funding for groups that provide abortions, for instance, isn’t a compromise in the culture wars, or an act of moderation - it’s a way of making a victory for the left seem like an act of moderation to people who aren’t that invested in the issue. And the same will doubtless hold true when the stem-cell debate comes around, or the next Supreme Court vacancy, or any flashpoint you can think of: Liberals will praise Obama for taking steps to defuse the culture war, but what they’ll mean is that he’s taking steps to win it.
One suspects that Douthat would recognize that “liberal conceit” in this line from E.J. Dionne’s Washington Post column about Obama’s order negating the so-called Mexico City Rule: “The consensual tone on this divisive issue reflects intense behind-the-scenes lobbying by Obama’s religious supporters, who asked him to put off for at least a day his executive order ending the ban on federal funds for groups involved in abortions overseas. The symbolism of the delay suggested that Obama intends to continue to poach constituencies that were once reliably Republican.”
The pithiest response to this came from The Corner’s Yuval Levine: “Wow, a whole day. Those religious supporters must be very proud. He’s bound to poach that pro-life constituency now.”
Mark Stricherz of New Catholic Politics manages to agree in part with both Beinart and Douthat:
Peter’s thesis is plausible. If the deep recession we’re in continues and worsens, then American politics will be similar to that of 1932 to 1948 and Democratic presidential nominees will win, though it should be noted that FDR won his last two elections on the strength of foreign policy rather than economic issues. But if like me, you think that our recession is analogous not to the Great Depression but to the recessions of 1973-74 and ’81-82, then plenty of voters will vote on the Cultural Issue (a subset of the Social Issue), and that has not turned out well for the Democrats. (Of course, the GOP is in sorry shape and as of now its candidates for 2012 can’t match Obama). While Peter’s first reason is plausible, his second argument is less so. Young evangelicals are more pro-life than their older counterparts, not less so.
Like Ross, I think that Obama, and national Democrats generally, want to win the culture war not merely to end it. So assuming the economy doesn’t cater, could Obama win the culture war or at least end it for generations? The answer is yes. He could nominate and get confirmed four culturally liberal justices to the Supreme Court; or he could nominated and get confirmed a pro-life justice and the court overturns Roe. He could repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, though this would surely inflame social conservatives. He could, in short, enact laws that are actually socially moderate, not conservative or liberal.
But as I mentioned in a blogginheads conversation with Amy Sullivan, Obama will need to enact policies and get justices confirmed; after all, laws were what ended the cultural wars of the 1920s, whether it was immigration or Prohibition or Evolution. Obama can’t just rely on rhetoric or hope for economic catastrophe and generational change.
Giving it more thought along similar strategic lines, the aforementioned Damon Linker wrote a post on Friday with a rather contrarian suggestion for bringing the abortion issue under wraps:
How could Obama — how could liberals, how could supporters of abortion rights — both win and end the culture war, once and for all? By supporting the reversal or significant narrowing of Roe, allowing abortion policy to once again be set primarily by the states — a development that would decisively divide and demoralize the conservative side of the culture war by robbing it of the identity politics that holds it together as a national movement.
But isn’t this a cure worse than the disease? Wouldn’t it be an absurd example of portraying a catastrophic loss for liberals and feminists as a victory? I don’t think so … the vast majority of Americans fall somewhere in the middle on abortion, leaning toward the pro-choice side, and that’s where the issue would be settled in most states. (Hell, even a state as conservative as North Dakota has recently shown its reluctance to go very far in regulating abortion.) Perhaps a few states — Utah, some in the deep South — would significantly curtail reproductive freedom. But it’s likely that the United States a decade following the reversal of Roe would look much the same as it does now, with many states making the democratic decision to go at least as far as most European nations in permitting women to legally terminate their pregnancies. But there would be one important difference: in this post-Roe America, opponents of abortion would no longer be able to blame their losses on a system unfairly rigged by secular-liberal jurists to delegitimate their views. They would lose, but they would lose fair and square, in the court of public opinion.
Or would they? Scott Lemieux, writing a snarky response at Lawyers, Guns and Money, sees all sorts of holes in Linker’s plan:
The idea that overturning Roe would “return the issue to the states” is transparently wrong, and the idea that having constant legislative battles about banning abortion at the state and federal level would somehow “end the culture war” is bizarre.
Linker’s claim that the pro-life movement was “conjured into being” by Roe is entirely false. Opposition to abortion legalization was very well-mobilized prior to 1973, which is why abortion was still illegal in most states with little immediate prospect for changing policy for the better. If the argument is that the movement expanded, this would seem to be the more trivial argument that winning creates more opposition. Linker’s answer that it would therefore be better to lose seems…unconvincing …
Canada, where abortion is a federally protected right, abortion is both largely unregulated and state-funded, and yet policy has been stable and abortion is not a salient issue in national politics. And since it completely destroys his assertion that the “culture war” over abortion is solely the product of judicial intervention, I think you can understand why.
While many posts supposedly about the culture wars are in the end, like many of those above, really just about abortion, Commentary’s Abe Greenwald thinks the battleground extends far beyond even Beinart’s description:
Beinart may have things backwards. The closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention center, for example, was not ultimately a foreign policy decision or an economic one. It was a sweeping nod from on high to one side in the culture wars, a gift to that portion of the Left who defines itself in opposition to George W. Bush and his policies. In fact, the practical dimension of the decision is such an afterthought that the Obama administration has not yet formulated a plan for trying or housing the detainees. Contra Beinart, President Obama — within 24 hours of taking office — made America’s system for handling enemy combatants a casualty of the culture wars.
Beinart points to President Obama’s opacity on traditional cultural issues as evidence of his wanting to remove them from political debate. But how does Beinart account for Obama’s opacity on political and economic issues, as well? After all, Barack Obama isn’t only pro-gay rights while being anti-gay marriage (Beinart somehow missing the latter point in his piece), but pro- and anti- missile defense, in favor of ending the war in Iraq while extending it, and both pro-tax hikes and pro-tax cuts.
Muddles don’t end wars. They draw them out. Winning (or losing) ends wars - cultural or otherwise. Beinart’s piece ultimately speaks to a worrisome trend among reasonable people: the desire for President Obama to sweep challenges under the rug — unmet. There is nothing presidential about ending cultural debate, randomly pausing wars, or gratuitously closing detention facilities without plans to deal with detainees. Americans want a recess from ugliness, but that’s not how history works. The winning of wars brings clarity and direction. And the West could use heavy doses of both at the moment.
O.K., even if you don’t think the culture wars haven’t reached this sort of epochal level, it’s hard to make the claim they’re in abeyance, given NBC’s rejection of an anti-abortion group’s ad during the Super Bowl; the Obama administration’s dismissal of AIDS relief czar Mark Dybul; Rush Limbaugh’s emergence as the torch-bearer for Republican opposition to the stimulus package; right-wing outrage over that bill’s containing financing for the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases; the continuing twists and turns of progressives’ efforts to overturn California’s ban on gay marriage; the continuing fallout on the left over Obama’s decision to give Rick Warren and inaugural pulpit; and the comments from former Republican presidential hopeful Gary Bauer that in overturning the Mexico City policy, Obama is “preparing to sentence innocent children to death through abortion.” We can dream of peace, but let’s face it, folks, when Gary Bauer is making headlines, consider war declared.
January 30, 2009, 3:01 pm
Will Karl Rove Ever Testify?
By Eric EtheridgeOn Monday, House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers Jr. issued a new subpoena to Karl Rove, seeking his testimony on the firings of the U.S. attorneys and other alleged politicizations of the Justice Department during the Bush Administration. Rove had sloughed off an earlier subpoena from Conyers, issued last May, citing absolute immunity.
With Obama in the White House, is Conyers any closer to getting Rove to testify? Or, as Daphne Eviatar put it in the Washington Independent, “Does Rove’s past claim of executive privilege, which Bush backed, still exist under the new administration?”
Handicapping put Obama in the hot seat, an early test of his commitment to a more open administration, primarily because once the new subpoena was issued, Rove’s lawyer promptly wrote to the White House counsel, asking for guidance.
Back to Eviatar:
Read more…
January 30, 2009, 9:25 am
Morning Skim: Obama’s Shame Game; Good Bank, Bad Bank; Supply Siders Repent
By Eric Etheridge- Swampland: Joe Klein on Obama’s calling Wall Street bonuses “shameful”: “You go, guy.”
- Culture 11: William Bennett says Obama’s remarks on Wall Street bonuses are “something I can agree with the President on. . . . I would urge the President to keep jawboning the banks and bank executives, there is no political or moral percentage in not doing so.”
- Open Left: Chris Bowers on Obama’s attempt to shame Wall Street:
So, let me get this straight:
January 29, 2009, 4:15 pm
How the Future of Online News Looked in 1981
By Eric EtheridgeTechCrunch surfaced this YouTube video this morning, a 1981 KRON news report on the San Francisco Examiner efforts to deliver its news online, calling it “pure gold.” That it is.
There’s much to enjoy, especially the “Anchorman” production values, but my favorite part comes when online newspaper reader Richard Halloran (who “owns home computer,” the KRON Chiron helpfully tells us) says what he really likes about getting his news online is having “the option of not only of seeing the newspaper on the screen but also optionally we can copy it . . . onto paper.”
As new media evangelist Clay Shirky told the Guardian in an interview earlier this month:
The 500-year-old accident of economics occasioned by the printing press - high upfront cost and filtering happening at the source of publication - is over. But will the New York Times still exist on paper? Of course, because people will hit the print button.
For the record, David Cole, the Examiner staffer interviewed in report, now runs the Cole Group, which publishes a newsletter on the newspaper business and also offers consulting services for publishers, helping them in “acquiring new technologies and . . . running their businesses more effectively.”
January 29, 2009, 1:09 pm
Where Did All the Republicans Go?
By Eric Etheridge
(Copyright 2009 Gallup, Inc. All rights reserved.)
Yesterday Gallup released a report on its survey of political party affiliation by voters at the state level. The results, depicted in the map above, show that only five states have a statistically significant majority of voters who identify themselves as Republicans. The data come from interviews last year with “more than 350,000 U.S. adults as part of Gallup Poll Daily tracking.”
Gallup’s map has popped up a a number of blogs and been the subject of much discussion.
Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight:
That’s right: just five states, collectively containing about 2 percent of the American population, have statistically significant pluralities of adults identifying themselves as Republicans. These are the “Mormon Belt” states of Utah, Idaho and Wyoming, plus Nebraska, plus Alaska. By contrast, 35 states are plurality Democratic, and 10 states are too close to call.
Silver does offer some caveats, including this one:
[P]erhaps most importantly is a point that both Michael Barone and I have raised at various times: one consequence of the Democratic coalition being larger, particularly as it tends to include a miscellany of groups that don’t always see eye-to-eye with one another (African-Americans, Hispanics, coastal liberals, union workers, young voters, etc.), is that it is more difficult to harness the entirety of that coalition in national elections. A Democratic presidential candidate from the North might have trouble appealing to voters in the South. A candidate from the South might have trouble appealing to voters in the North and West. . . .
Still, for things like gubernatorial elections and elections to the Congress, the Democrats’ upside is very high, particularly if the party is smart enough to tolerate and accommodate a diversity of opinions within its umbrella.
Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic:
There’s a reason for Romney - and Mormonism, in its religious deification of America, is the natural theological basis for a theoconservative movement that sees an American empire as destiny. I hope Republicanism doesn’t go that route. But it may be too far gone to turn back now.
Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Alaska, Nebraska, Kansas, and Alabama, and the last two are barely red. Total combined electoral votes: 35. The news isn’t quite as dismal as it seems — Texas is technically a blue state by this measure, even though it’s reliably red at election time — but eyeball the map . . . and note how many southern states are suddenly leaning Democratic.
David Frum at the NewMajority.com asks “Base? What base?”:
These are the numbers that make yesterday’s flexing of muscle by Rush Limbaugh over Georgia congressman Phil Gingery not merely ridiculous but actively dangerous. When Republicans line up behind Rush Limbaugh in this way, they are dividing the country 80-20 against themselves. Our supreme priority now has to be to reinvent ourselves as a pragmatic, inclusive, modern party of free enterprise and limited government. We have to relearn how to talk to moderates, independent, younger voters, educated voters, women – it’s a long list.
Instead, our congressmen talk to and about Rush Limbaugh like Old Bolsheviks praising Comrade Stalin at their show trials. Rush is right! We see eye to eye with Rush! There is no truth outside Rush!
Let’s keep on telling ourselves that Michael Steele shouldn’t be allowed to head the RNC because he dared to affiliate himself with Christine Todd Whitman and John Danforth. Let’s chastise the guy who said that the GOP needs to elect more moderates. Let’s just fire up the base (no matter how small it is), kick out anyone who happens to disagree with it on any minute point of orthodoxy, and hope that everything turns out alright. . . .
I know that to the relentlessly principled, it might feel fantastic to sit around, chattering to ourselves about how wonderfully right we are on all of the issues. But in the meantime, we have no influence on actual policymaking.
There is an obvious solution to this dilemma: simple re-branding. Speaking to issues that Americans really care about right now. Discarding identity politics. Stop applying rigid litmus tests to Republican Party membership. Dropping the identity politic of the culture war. Re-embracing pragmatism with a solid center-right agenda — without being afraid of the ‘center’ part.
January 29, 2009, 8:58 am
Morning Skim: The Stimulus Vote . . . and a Holder Deal?
By Eric Etheridge- FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver on the unanimous House G.O.P. vote against the stimulus package:
Zero is sometimes a big number . . .
[D]oes it do the party as a whole any good for having opposed the bill unanimously? . . . Their unanimous opposition reads as an emphatic rejection of the President and the President’s attempts at “bipartisanship”. And the President is very popular right now.
But — the base is happy, or at least reasonably so. Rush Limbaugh will be singing John Boehner’s praises tomorrow. I’m just not sure what message this sends to the other 78 percent of the country.
- Washington Independent: David Weigel on the unanimous House G.O.P. vote against the stimulus package:
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January 28, 2009, 4:35 pm
The Bad Bank Rally
By Eric EtheridgeIn the last few weeks, the precipitous fall in bank share prices in the United States and the U.K. triggered much discussion in both countries about the idea of nationalizing banks and creating a new “bad bank” to take over their toxic assets. Now bank share prices are recovering, and while the nationalization strategy is fading — the Washington Post reported this morning that both Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers think it’s a bad idea — the “bad bank” notion is apparently catching on with the administration, according to a Wall Street Journal report today, which says that’s why U.S. stocks, led by bank shares, are rallying today.
Dean Baker at TPMCafe thinks a bad bank absent nationalization doesn’t make sense:
Read more…
January 28, 2009, 12:19 pm
Updike Redux: The Mourning After
By Eric EtheridgeBefore reading about John Updike, maybe you want to read some Updike? Several bloggers pointed to “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” Updike’s account of Ted Wiliams last game, at Fenway Park in 1960, which originally appeared in the New Yorker. Commentary points to his essay On Not Being a Dove, from its March 1989 issue. The New Yorker points to his last short story for the magazine, “The Full Glass,” which was published in May 2008.
The New Yorker is posting tributes to Updike on its blog The Book Bench, including ones so far by John Cheever (who was notified erroneously once in 1976 that Updike had died); George Saunders, T. Coraghessen Boyle and Antonya Nelson. Here are excerpts from two others:
January 28, 2009, 9:05 am
Morning Skim: Blagojevich Blitz, Davos Shift and Obama’s Message to the Middle East
By Eric Etheridge- Daily Beast: Dan Abrams on the inartfulness of Rod Blagojevich’s TV PR offensive: “Gov. Blagojevich demands that his side of the story be heard, and then refuses to tell, well, his side of the story.”
- Huffington Post: Jeff Jarvis reports on the scene at Davos this year:
The first trend I spot here: the rise of government. News reports have been saying that this will be a dialed-down Davos, but I don’t see that; it’s the same Davos with the same pastries and parties. The change I do sense is less of a presence and apparent swagger from business and more from government. “Power has shifted from Wall Street to Pennsylvania Avenue,” said [one] speaker.
January 27, 2009, 1:17 pm
Obama Talks to the Arabs
By Eric EtheridgeBarack Obama sat for his formal formal interview as president with Al Arabiya, an Arabic-language news channel based in Dubai (read The Times’ report and see clips from the interview), and online the response has been swift.
For some on the right, the only comment necessary was short and to the point: At the American Spectator, Quin Hillyer’s brief post was titled “This . . . Blows . . . My . . . Mind.” And at Atlas Shruggs, Pamela Geller’s one-sentence post invoked the book of Matthew: “By his fruits we shall know him, and so we know the plant.”
Justin Webb, who blogs for the BBC from Washington, DC, thought the interview might cause some reconsiderations in Tehran:
This interview is a big deal. The tone is studiously non-belligerent. It will confuse some in the Middle East even further - in particular, perhaps, persuading Iran’s most senior leaders that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not perhaps the best man to counter the Obama appeal. Obama will do nothing dramatic for a bit but if Ahmadinejad goes (or is not allowed to stand in the next Iranian election, which seems at least possible) then the prospect of a real thaw seems real. And a quiet acceptance by the US of Iran’s domination of Iraq . . .
At National Review, Jim Geraghty was not happy with Obama for pointing out that bin Laden had taken no actions to improve health care and education for Muslim children:
I want the President to succeed in the war on terror. But I fear he’s making the error of mirroring, of thinking that those with very different cultures, backgrounds, and beliefs share the same drives, motivations, and goals as those of the average American. The members of the Muslim world who follow Osama bin Laden and Zawahiri do not do so because they think these guys can deliver better education or health care. They follow them for a lot of reasons—because they want to fight the infidel, to avenge past humiliations, because they just want to kill people—but nobody signs on to al-Qaeda for the health-care plan and tuition benefits.
At the Weekly Standard, Michael Goldfarb was unhappy with Obama’s statements on the possibility of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons:
Wouldn’t a simple ‘no, a nuclear Iran is unacceptable to the United States and our allies’ have sufficed? Instead Obama says that Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon is “unhelpful,” that it’s “not conducive to peace.” When Obama was in Israel, he said that “a nuclear Iran would pose a grave threat and the world must prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” He added that he would “take no options off the table in dealing with this potential Iranian threat.” In the first debate of the general election, Obama reiterated that the United States “cannot tolerate a nuclear Iran.” But when Obama has the chance to speak directly to the Muslim world, he can only muster retread rhetoric from his inaugural address about clenched fists and open hands.
At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey was also disappointed that Obama didn’t speak more frankly: “Instead of offering both openness and a tough assessment of the problems the Arabs have to solve for themselves, Obama seemed more interested in feelings than national security.”
In addition, Morrissey notes, Obama implicitly accepted the interviewer’s statement that West Bank settlements are at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian impasse:
The main driver of Israeli-Palestinian conflict isn’t settlements, and hasn’t been for some time. It’s the rocket launches coming from Hamas in Gaza, and to a lesser extent from Islamic Jihad there as well. How can we know this? Israel hasn’t had to conduct a military exercise in the West Bank for years, where the settlements are located. On the other hand, they’ve had to conduct several military operations in Gaza in the few years since Ariel Sharon dismantled the settlements there.
It was a “miserable performance,” summed up Eric Trager in his post at Commentary, concluding: “Obama’s personal charisma cannot mask his utter lack of substance on the Middle East. Here’s to hoping that Obama can fix this shortcoming before people start listening to what he’s actually saying.”
Marc Lynch, who blogs for Foreign Policy and has been arguing for precisely this kind of engagement with Arabs for several years, thought the president’s rhetoric and arguments were spot on:
His remarks hit the sweet spot again and again. He repeatedly emphasized his intention of moving past the iron walls of the ‘war on terror’ and ‘clash of civilizations’ which so dominated the Bush era. . . .
He clearly understands that this won’t be easy, that there are real conflicts and obstacles and enemies. . . .
[A]bove all, he understands that words are only the beginning, and that ultimately deeds and policy will determine Arab views of the United States. Public diplomacy is not about marketing a lousy policy — it’s about engaging honestly, publicly, and directly with foreign publics about those policies, explaining and listening and adjusting where appropriate. Obama gets it:
“But ultimately, people are going to judge me not by my words but by my actions and my administration’s actions. And I think that what you will see over the next several years is that I’m not going to agree with everything that some Muslim leader may say, or what’s on a television station in the Arab world — but I think that what you’ll see is somebody who is listening, who is respectful, and who is trying to promote the interests not just of the United States, but also ordinary people who right now are suffering from poverty and a lack of opportunity. I want to make sure that I’m speaking to them, as well.”
Lynch concludes his post with “three other important points which have thus far been missed in the general commentary”:
This is also outreach to Saudi Arabia. Al-Arabiya is the Saudi contestant in the Arab media wars, and scoring the first interview with Obama is a major coup. It has lost a lot of ground because of Gaza, and this will help it regain some buzz. After the initial perceived snub of the Saudis, Obama has now had a much-hyped phone call with King Abdullah and now given the Saudi al-Arabiya his first interview. Feathers have been smoothed in Riyadh.
Not al-Jazeera. Granting the first interview to al-Jazeera would have reached a much larger audience, and would have been more daring — like going on to Fox News instead of MSNBC. Bush administration officials almost always used al-Arabiya on those rare occasions when they wanted to talk to the Arab public, so this isn’t a change. That said, there will be time for al-Jazeera down the road, and I hope Obama doesn’t shy away from that challenge.
Not al-Hurra. Wouldn’t it be nice if the United States had its own Arabic-language satellite television station to present such exclusive, desirable interviews? Oh, wait… the U.S. has spent half a billion dollars on one which nobody watches. Forget the Broadcasting Board of Governor’s endlessly optimistic presentation of fabulous increases in al-Hurra’s audience and market share. Obama’s choice to give his ground-breaking interview to the Saudi al-Arabiya and not to the American al-Hurra is as clear a statement as it is possible to make of al-Hurra’s failure. It’s time to face the facts and clean house to recoup some of that investment.
January 27, 2009, 10:23 am
Morning Skim: Minnesota’s Senate, Banks and The Who
By Eric Etheridge- Powerline: Scott Johnson handicaps Norm Coleman’s legal challenge in the Minnesota Senate recount after Coleman’s first day in court: “At this point there is more suspense in seeing whether Senator Coleman can put in his case than in assessing the likely outcome of the proceedings.”
- Washington Post: Richard Cohen endorses a truth commission but not prosecutions in regards to any torture committed by the Bush Administration: “We were the ones, remember, who just wanted to be kept safe. So, it is important, as well as fair, not to punish those who did what we wanted done — back when we lived, scared to death, in a place called the Past.”
- CNN: Joseph Stiglitz says nationalization is the way to rescue the bank bailout: “To be sure, shareholders and bondholders will lose out, but their gains under the current regime come at the expense of taxpayers. In the good years, they were rewarded for their risk taking. Ownership cannot be a one-sided bet.”
- At his blog, Thomas Barnett links to an Economist article on the challenges cheap oil poses for Russia and notes, “The Kremlin doesn’t have the resources to play Santa like in previous years.”
The security guys (siloviki) are getting nervous about rising incidents of protest in the so-called monocities, where the entire local economy revolves around one big factory. The article says “there are no shortage of these in Russia.”
You have to go back to late 19th-century America to find an economy with these characteristics: entire cities defined by the one industry, the one factory cluster. Small towns still suffer this fate here, but in Russia today, we’re talking the big ones–very Leninist in its implications for instability.
- The New Yorker: Hendrik Hertzberg watches a new Pepsi commercial and ponders his generation:
Have you seen the new Pepsi-Cola commercials? Unbelievable.
One of them . . . is a visual mini-history of the last century of young singles’ styles. A nice piece of production design and film editing, but the startling part is the sound track: The Who’s “My Generation.”
My first reaction was indignation: Et tu, Who? But that was an old reflex, grown feeble with the passing years. It’s been a while since I could yell “Sellout!” with any real conviction. . . .
My second reaction was a suspicion that maybe Townshend hasn’t completely lost his subversive touch after all. Maybe he’s just redirected it inward. “Hope I die before I get old” . . . has a certain ironic, shamefaced piquancy now that the spokesmusicians for the sixties are in their sixties. That hope for a quick, Hendrix-like demise has been dashed, along with The Who’s retirement portfolio, if theirs is like everybody else’s. But renting out an antique anthem of rebellion isn’t just a way to ensure that the money will be there to pay for an assisted living facility, it’s also a subtly devastating comment on where and how our g-g-generation ended up. Good one, Pete!
- PlanetNetizen: There’s too much spending on highways in the stimulus bill, writes John Norquist, who argues that the structure of the Internet offers a better model for ranking transportation projects:
President Obama should insist that Congress move federal transportation policy in a new direction. He need only look to the Internet, employed to such definitive effect by his election campaign, for a telling example of how 21st century transportation systems should work. Internet traffic makes use of a network of linkages, breaking up large volumes of data into small packets and distributing them through a web of available nodes. It’s fast, and it’s reliable. The same model applied to transportation networks will allow all modes of traffic to flow over multiple redundant routes, making travel times quicker, driving, walking and bicycling easier, and transit service more viable. At the same time investment in streets will remove barriers to urban real estate development, promoting the proliferation of neighborhood amenities and leading, ultimately, to shorter commuter trips and fewer car trips.
Commentary: Eric Trager argues that the Obama Administration’s return to realpolitik in the Middle East dooms any effort a Facebook revolution in Egypt:
Even as young Egyptian dissidents have attempted to leverage new technology for challenging the regime, the Egyptian government has used classic authoritarian strategies - devious maneuvering, improved domestic monitoring, divide-and-conquer tactics, and violence - with great success. Sadly, dissidents’ prospects are unlikely to improve anytime soon: in the aftermath of the recent fighting in Gaza, the U.S. is relying on Cairo to negotiate a sustainable ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and is therefore unlikely to press the Mubarak regime on domestic reform. Indeed, in the aftermath of the short-lived “freedom agenda,” realpolitik has returned to Middle Eastern foreign policy - with young Egyptian liberals shouldering some of the burden.
- Armed and Dangerous: Responding to an article in the Monday’s New York Times, “$200 Laptops Break a Business Model,” Eric Raymond writes about the implications for Microsoft of the shift toward netbooks:
There’s simply not enough room in a $200 bill of materials to sustain Microsoft’s business model. . . .
Therefore, the scenario MSFT has to pin their hopes on combines major success for Windows 7 with a drastic downsizing of Microsoft so it can run on the seriously compressed revenue stream that is all netbook-land will afford. Viewed from this angle, Microsoft’s recent behavior makes complete sense. But there is no certainty that this strategy will land MSFT with a sustainable business model within its burnout time. And, even if we assume that it can, there is zero margin for error on the way there. Even one serious shock, such as a Vista-like failure of Windows 7 to gain traction, will sink them. . . .
This is how empires fall. Until the last minute it is difficult to see what’s coming, because they tend to hollow out from within long before the damage becomes obvious from outside. Microsoft lost its battle of the Teutoburger Wald when it failed to prevent Linux from going mainstream in enterprise computing around 2003. Now, with the layoffs and the first-time fall in Windows revenues, we’re seeing the retreat from the Antonine Wall to Hadrian’s.
As the final collapse nears, each successive retrenchment will come faster. If history repeats itself exactly, the splitting of the eagle into a Western (Windows) and an Eastern (Office) empire may be the next major step, with the Western Empire collapsing shortly afterwards and periodic attempts by Easterners to recapture the OS market coming to nothing.
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