George Will's Odd Argument for Congressional Term Limits

Although I understand the sentiment behind term limits, dissatisfaction with career legislators, a "throw the bums out" attitude, and the like, I have not been particularly impressed with the reality that they create. Specifically, rather than having perhaps a few too many career legislators we seem to end up with far too many neophytes, many of whom fully intend to have long political careers by transitioning from one office to another as they're term limited out. It also seems that the point at which many legislators are term limited out of office roughly corresponds to the point at which they finally have enough experience and seniority to actually do their jobs effectively.

George Will wrote an editorial in favor of congressional term limits, based principally upon his personal dislike of Democratic Presidents Congress's failure to assume its role in a decision to take the nation to war. Will tells us,

The president should present to Congress the case for war. The House, structurally the government’s most democratic institution (short terms, small constituencies), should express itself. The Senate, whose powers (to approve treaties and confirm ambassadors) give it special pertinence to foreign policy, and whose structure (six-year terms) is supposed to encourage sober deliberation, should speak. Then the president, through relevant civilian and military officials, executes the approved policy.

Okay, fair enough. But despite being in near-constant military conflicts since WWII, we have not had a declared war since that time. So, what gives?

What has actually transpired since Barack Obama’s Sept. 10 address to the nation has been, Corbin and Parks argue, “a parody” of propriety. In his address about the Islamic State (which did not mention Khorasan, the asserted imminent threat that supposedly justified acting without Congress), Obama spoke to the public, not to the public’s institutional embodiment, Congress, whose support he said would be “welcome,” implying that it is unnecessary. Next, the administration argued with itself about what it was that Obama was going to do without congressional approval. (This was before his press secretary identified it as war.) Then the House tacked onto a spending bill its approval of arming certain Syrians (the “vetted” moderates?) and dispersed. The Senate, having added its approval without discernible deliberation, also skedaddled.

So, pretty much what we have seen in every armed conflict since WWII, except the President happens to be a Democrat?

I've commented before on this particular failure of Congress -- and make no mistake, it is a failure of Congress. The fact is, Congress does not want to have any responsibility for the entry into our outcome of armed conflicts, and thus does its best to wash its hands of the issue. The net effect is that they delegate war-making power to the executive. Will is correct in his inference that only one branch of government can correct the imbalance that this delegation creates -- Congress, the very branch that doesn't want that responsibility.

I can't help but think of Jack Kingston's admission, some months back, in relation to Syria and ISIS:

”A lot of people would like to stay on the sideline and say, ‘Just bomb the place and tell us about it later,’ ” said Representative Jack Kingston, Republican of Georgia, who supports having an authorization vote. ”It’s an election year. A lot of Democrats don’t know how it would play in their party, and Republicans don’t want to change anything. We like the path we’re on now. We can denounce it if it goes bad, and praise it if it goes well and ask what took him so long.”

For the House of Representatives, every other year is an election year -- but truly, they never go out of election mode. Kingston correctly identifies the strategy of the opposition party -- do everything it can to avoid having any responsibility for military action, and criticize the President no matter what happens. A president's own party, though, doesn't want responsibility either, so the biggest difference is that by avoiding authorizing military action they can avoid taking responsibility for the outcome, but with less finger-pointing at the President.

Will cites a professor from a small Catholic college, who argues that Members of Congress are seeking office "for something other than the power, for power is something with which they are not merely willing but often eager to part." I think that's incorrect. I think that Members of Congress want power without responsibility, and that there remains plenty of power within the halls of Congress but that when they are looking at a context in which they may have to face voters over a bad outcome they are happy to let somebody else make the decision and take the heat. Congress as middle management. While Will seems to endorse the professor's theory, "[Congress] has an ever-higher portion of people who are eager to make increasingly strenuous exertions to hold offices that are decreasingly consequential", I have little sense that the power of Congress has in fact lessened.

The professor believes that long-term politicians who should be "more competent [and] confident" aren't standing up to the President, apparently because "something has gone wrong with Federalist 51’s assumption that members of Congress seek office for power and not perquisites", and that the solution would be term limits:

[']Members of Congress who serve for brief periods will have . . . every political reason for taking up the power available to them while they can. . . . Members so situated will be likelier to defend their branch as a branch.”

Except perhaps those new, less confident, less competent legislators will in fact be more likely to defer to the executive. And perhaps those neophyte legislators, looking at a short term of office, will be more interested in perquisites, more interested in moving onto their next jobs, than they are with legislating or standing up to the White House. What is the incentive for a Member of Congress, being term limited out of office, to take a strong stand? Congress is to soar on the wings of lame duck legislators?

erm limits are Madisonian measures, altering the incentives — the “interests” or “personal motives” — for entering and using public office. Term limits can define a conservative agenda of taming executive power by enhancing the power of Congress.

To me it seems more likely that term limits would weaken Congress in favor of the executive, and potentially make Congress even less functional. But even if I presuppose that Will is correct, I can't help but think of how recently the "conservative agenda" involved expanding executive power through the theory of the unitary executive. As Will himself once put it,

Because contemporary conservatism was born partly in reaction to two liberal presidents -- against FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society -- conservatives, who used to fear concentrations of unchecked power, valued Congress as a bridle on strong chief executives. But, disoriented by their reverence for Reagan and sedated by Republican victories in seven of the past 10 presidential elections, many conservatives have not just become comfortable with the idea of a strong president, they have embraced the theory of the "unitary executive."

This theory, refined during the Reagan administration, is that where the Constitution vests power in the executive, especially power over foreign affairs and war, the president, as chief executive, is rightfully immune to legislative abridgements of his autonomy. Judicial abridgements are another matter. When in 1952 Truman, to forestall a strike, cited his "inherent" presidential powers during wartime to seize the steel mills, the Supreme Court rebuked him. In a letter here that he evidently never sent to Justice William Douglas, Truman said, "I don't see how a Court made up of so-called 'liberals' could do what that Court did to me." Attention, conservatives: Truman correctly identified a grandiose presidency with the theory and practice of liberalism.

You'll notice an inherent inconsistency to Will's thinking -- he argues that Truman, who was not a particularly liberal President, was rebuked by the Supreme court when attempting to seize control of steel mills, rendering the expansive view of executive power relatively inert until it was revived by Reagan and kicked into overdrive by George W. Bush -- and thus it's a liberal theory. Will can call it what he chooses, but to the extent that he believes that modern conservatives eschew the unitary executive in favor of a weak President, it would be because he sees in them a reflection of his own thinking -- that it's absolutely horrible that the President continues to have power when he's a Democrat -- and he can expect their concerns about executive power, like his own, to face the moment a Republican takes office.

Golf is the Game of Presidents, So Get Over It

Presidents play golf.... Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter (although after his presidency), Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush II, Obama.... Dana Milbank knows this fact, but nonetheless....

On June 14, Sunni rebels threatened Baghdad after seizing much of Iraq — and President Obama fearlessly played a round at the Sunnylands Golf Course in Rancho Mirage, Calif.

The next day, the militants posted pictures of their mass execution of Shiite members of Iraq’s security forces — and Obama boldly teed off again, at Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s Rancho Mirage estate.

These split-screen scenes were reminiscent of the weekend in March when Russia was about to annex Crimea. Obama played golf both Saturday and Sunday at Key Largo, Fla.’s Ocean Reef resort with former NBA star Alonzo Mourning and former NFL player Ahmad Rashad.

It’s enough to make one wish the president would take up a different pastime — like, say, stamp collecting.

Yes, a president needs down time. And, yes, he can run the country whether he’s in a sand trap or the Situation Room. But Obama’s golf habit needlessly hands his critics a gimme.

Only if reporters like Milbank treat it as a serious accusation, rather than dismissing it as tripe.

Former vice president Dick Cheney, writing in the Wall Street Journal with his daughter Liz, complained: “Terrorists take control of more territory and resources than ever before in history, and he goes golfing.” House intelligence committee Chairman Mike Rogers gave a TV interview asking Obama to “please come back from the golf course” and find an Iraq solution.

An appropriate response to Rogers might be, "What do you imagine that the President might do to solve Iraq's problems that he is not already doing?" That would go for the Cheneys as well, but the absurdity of the Cheney accusation triggered another memory in Milbank:

I was one of the many who had fun with George W. Bush’s classic tee shot in 2002: “I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you. Now watch this drive.” But as The Post’s Colby Itkowitz noted, Bush hung up his spikes after the Iraq invasion. (He busied himself with other leisure pursuits, such as clearing brush.)

Bush earned himself the jokes not by playing golf, but by foolishly adding the "Now watch this drive" line to what should have been a serious response to a serious issue. Had Bush stopped before that final sentence, it would have been just another day on the golf course. Don't take it from me -- take it from Milbank:

Don't watch this drive. In his first three years in office, Bush played golf 16 times. But, according to the White House's unofficial statistician, CBS News's Mark Knoller, Bush has not teed off since Oct. 13, 2003. Some muse that Bush was cowed by filmmaker Michael Moore's mocking of Bush's golf habit in "Fahrenheit 9/11" which featured footage of Bush mixing remarks on Middle East violence with a command to "watch this drive." But Bush's golf ban far predates the Moore film and seems to coincide with Bush's discovery of mountain biking -- a better sport for appealing to the common man.

For goodness sake, even Dwight Eisenhower played golf. Woodrow Wilson played golf. Harry Truman didn't play golf at all, so there's no inference to be drawn from his abstention. And really -- the staged brush clearing photo ops on the ranch G.W. sold immediately upon retiring from the White House? Milbank believed that stuff?

As former Texas agriculture commissioner Jim Hightower, who dubbed the Crawford digs a "ranchette," said in 2004, "Bush is always inviting the media out to take pictures of him clearing brush. In my experience real ranchers spend virtually no time clearing brush. They're usually tending cattle....the cattle you see as part of the photo op aren't even his. They're somebody else's that he rents the land to."

Milbank complains,

The image problem isn’t from leisure activity per se but the type of leisure activity. A majority of Americans now believes that Obama doesn’t understand their problems, and images of him playing golf — perceived, fairly or not, as a rich man’s game — confirms this out-of-touch reputation.

Yet Reagan was a man of the people, and G.W. was a guy you would want to drink a beer with.... Go figure. Maybe Milbank would have the President take up a real "man of the people" hobby, like watercolor portraiture?

This is similar to the problem that dogged Mitt Romney, and now Hillary Clinton. The Post’s Philip Rucker this week noted that influential Democrats are concerned that her “rarefied, cloistered lifestyle could jeopardize the Democratic Party’s historic edge with the middle class.”

Wait... this happened because Hillary Clinton plays too much golf? Because if not, perhaps opportunistic demagogues like Rogers and Cheney aren't sincere in their mention of golf, but are using it as a basis for a criticism that they would be making no matter what the President were doing in his leisure time. Ya think? And as for Mitt Romney, he doesn't play golf, either... so it's actually possible to be perceived as elitist and out-of-touch without playing golf? Who would have thought....

Perhaps this is the real problem....

The game has driven another wedge between the president and White House reporters who, during their turns on pool duty, chronicle with envy his weekly outings with friends and aides.

“Beautiful day for hitting the links,” the Washington Examiner’s Susan Crabtree wrote from Fort Belvoir. “Unfortunately pool is headed to the base rec center for the duration.”

“Looked like a nice place to play golf,” wrote the Houston Chronicle’s Kevin Diaz from the “exclusive” Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Gainesville, “at least from the maintenance shed where pool spent the day.”

How... moving. It must be tough to have to watch the President from a distance, rather than getting an up-close view as you're handed packaged talking points and photo ops.

Heck, if Iraq is so much more serious than golf, why are reporters following the President to a golf course where they know they won't get a story? Why is Milbank writing a story about those poor, unfortunate reporters? Think of all the shoe leather and column inches they could be devoting to stories on Iraq! I have to ask, though, did Milbank offer similar sympathy to White House reporters when they watched G.W. race off on his mountain bike?

I know that he has columns to write and deadlines to meet, but when his game is on Milbank can do so much better than this.

Just Add the Word "Republican"...

Daniel Larison is not impressed with Michael Gerson's argument on why Congress needs to authorize force in Syria:

Insofar as the ability of future presidents to wage wars of choice on their own authority would be limited or even slightly constrained by a no vote from Congress, that would be a welcome and very desirable outcome. Gerson is drawing attention to one of the possible benefits of the resolution’s defeat. Even so, the president would retain enormous latitude in the conduct of foreign policy, and he would he hardly have his “hands tied behind his back.” It is laughably false to claim that the president’s ability to conduct foreign policy or his role as commander-in-chief of the armed forces would be seriously impaired, and it could hardly be dangerous for the powers of the presidency to be restrained after growing virtually unchecked over the last forty years.

Gerson’s argument is an attempt to blackmail members of Congress by claiming that they will inflict massive institutional damage simply by carrying out their own constitutional responsibilities and by reaching a conclusion different from the one Gerson wants. It is a fairly desperate move, and it is the sort of argument that should make more members of Congress recoil from what they are being asked to support. Gerson is horrified that Congress might actually vote down unnecessary and deeply unpopular military action, which speaks volumes about his priorities. Americans should not be afraid to let their representatives do the work they were elected to do by speaking and voting on behalf of their constituents. In this case, that obviously means voting down the resolution, and that is what I hope most members will do when it comes up for a vote later this month.

As happens all too ofter, Gerson's editorial is risible from top to bottom,

Obama is inviting members of Congress to share responsibility for a Syrian policy that has achieved little to justify their confidence. In fact, he has undermined political support for the legislative outcome he seeks. For more than five years, Obama has argued that America is overcommitted in the Middle East and should refocus on domestic priorities. Now he asks other politicians to incur risks by endorsing an approach he has clearly resisted at every stage.

Gerson would apparently have us believe that the President has spent five years resisting Republican calls for additional military intervention in the middle east, and has reached the point where he has actually convinced the Republicans in Congress that "America is overcommitted in the Middle East and should refocus on domestic priorities". Oh, their poor heads must be spinning, having spent five years giving the President a fair, deferential hearing and now, just when they had decided that there was no situation grave enough to justify additional military action in the Middle East, being told that there actually are situations in which the President believes that military intervention is appropriate.

Obama attempts to rally the nation around a reluctant exception to his ambivalence. And this exception — a calibrated punishment for the use of chemical weapons — seems more of a gesture than a strategy.

Gerson proposes instead, what... the George Mallory philosophy of military intervention?¹

Gerson does not want the President to have completely unlimited discretion to attack any nation in the world without the consent of Congress:

This does not, of course, amount to blanket permission for self-destructive military actions such as attacking China or surrendering to Monaco.

But, you know, short of that.... As long as it's some other nation that is being destroyed, Gerson's "compassionate Christian" perspective seems to be, "Go for it!"

Nations such as China, Russia and Iran would see this as the triumph of a political coalition between the peace party of the left and the rising isolationists of the right. And they would be correct.

They would be correct because... they're stupid?

Larison suggests, "There is no way to know what long-term effect the defeat of the Syria resolution might have on the actions of future presidents, and it is even less certain how other governments would interpret a Congressional rejection of the resolution", and that's true to a point, but history suggests an answer: The next President will not feel bound to follow the policies or priorities of the current administration, and foreign nations understand the difference between a nation led by Ronald Reagan vs. George H.W. Bush vs. George W. Bush vs. Barack Obama.

One might anticipate that foreign leaders will look at the past five years of Congressional obstructionism, and then look at the fact that it was the Republicans who were blocking military action, and conclude, "More than a half-century after the start of the Vietnam war, hacks like Gerson still believe they can sell the Democrats as a 'party of peace'? And given that same history, that 'isolationists of the right' will have any influence the day after the next Republican President takes office? Seriously?"

And those who claim that this credibility has already reached bottom are lacking in imagination.

I suspect that most of those who read Gerson know that the President and Congress have a long way to go before reaching bottom.

Try reading Gerson this way:

[Repubican] Legislators are not arguing between preferred policy options, as they would on issues such as health care or welfare. They are deciding if they will send the [next Republican] chief executive into the world with his hands tied behind his back.

As in, the next President might feel compelled to consult Congress before acting, the Democrats might feel free to vote against military adventurism, and war opponents would be able to point to any number of comments made by Republicans in the present debate that suggest naked, partisan hypocrisy. Gerson's mistake,² of course, is assuming that the next President is going to care.

Really, the best argument Gerson can make for a military assault on Syria is that if Congress evaluates the situation and finds an attack to be inappropriate, future Presidents might hesitate before launching wars of choice, and the world will scoff, "The United States isn't going to attack us unless they have a UN mandate, a NATO mandate, a Congressional mandate... or the President feels like it"? The horror!
---------------
1. "Why do you want to attack another country in the Middle East, Mr. President?" "Because it's there."

2. Or should I say, one of them.

Rich People Need Not Apply

Joan Walsh writes,

Anyone who purports to care about income inequality who encouraged New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s flirtation with a 2012 third party presidential run – as Nader did in 2011 – is a hypocrite. Trusting enlightened multi-billionaires to lead us out of political paralysis and toward economic equality is anti-progressive.

That's right. After all, what sort of rich person would want to run for the White House to advance progressive causes or would enact policies that result in significant movement toward economic equality and an expanding middle class?

If you really want to advance progressive values, you need a candidate who knows what it's like to be poor, who gives up Harvard in favor of a local college because he's needed at home, who went to law school not on a trust fund, but on scholarship. I don't see how you could go wrong, trusting somebody like that to lead us out of political paralysis.

(If you don't understand where I'm going with this post, please follow the links before you comment.)

A Lethal President?

Same as it ever was.

It's not that I don't appreciate the concerns raised by those who question the targeting of a secret list of enemies of the state, whether by drone or by commando raid. Those concerns are for the most part well-founded, and the issues will only become more pressing.

Drone technology will continue to advance. It's easy to imagine a future in which drones the size of birds or insects can be used to strike somebody who has been declared an enemy of the United States, with minimal chance of damage to anything or anyone beyond the target. But such an advancement would not resolve the question of who should be placed on a "kill list" or why, what due process should be available to a targeted individual, or how accurately the government determines who should be on the list. Similarly, the U.S. military is likely to increasingly rely upon special forces, and small, targeted raids, rather than full-scale land invasions.

As these trends continue, some questions wil become more pressing. Will improved drone technologies inspire a rapid escalation of the use of drones and the circumstances under which they're deemed appropriate? As drones continue to take the place of boots on the ground, will the temptation be to rely upon drones to kill people who could or should have been taken prisoner? Will the margins blur in relation to who is an appropriate target - terrorists and their sympathizers vs. the political leaders of rogue or enemy states? And as drone use is legitimized and expanded, what happens when other nations inevitably gain similar technology and start applying it to contexts that they deem equivalent to ours?

History implicates all of those questions, and then some, in relation to pretty much any protracted conventional or asymmetrical conflict, anywhere in the world. When under threat, developed nations with well-educated populations tend to tolerate, accept, even applaud the use of tactics that they once deplored - and perhaps continue to deplore when exercised by other nations. Indefinite detention without trial? Torture? Dismissing the Geneva Conventions as outdated relics? The Bush Administration's decisions on those issues were in many ways regrettable, but the U.S. was far from the first nation to rationalize that actions we used to describe as crimes and human rights violations were necessary to achieve the greater good.

Cato Institute Policy Scholar Jason Kuznicki's reaction to "kill lists" and drone strikes is about as strident as you'll find. He points out that the President's "kill list" can include U.S. citizens, even minors, "including within the United States. Including children sleeping peacefully in their homes."

If Obama wanted to, he could put all of Mitt Romney’s delightful, gingham-clad grandkids on the kill list, then send commandos to kill them (or drones, it hardly matters). He wouldn’t need to show any cause, and no one could stop him or tell him otherwise.

Do not say that he wouldn’t. Of course he wouldn’t. The problem is that someone else might. And that’s enough.

Kuznicki declares,

Yet the very act of claiming the power also calls into question anyone’s good judgment. How exactly does someone conclude that he, personally, deserves the unchecked power of life and death? I couldn’t. I would be ashamed to show my face in front of you or to call you my equals. I might be a god or a beast, but not a man in a society.

I'm not going to argue that it's a job I would want. It isn't. But although the mechanism has changed, what Kuznicki is describing has been part of the President's job from day one. Every armed conflict, domestic or abroad, involved strategic decisions that may prioritize destroying a block of buildings or even a town or urban area in order to harm the enemy's ability to produce weapons, mobilize, feed its troops, or may even be justified by the belief that a "high-value" individual is in the targeted area. You want to talk about the deaths of children sleeping in their beds? There's a reason that allied commanders were concerned that fire bombing raids in Germany and Japan might be deemed war crimes.

We are presented with a modern myth of surgical warfare, collateral damage is minimized, civilians aren't harmed, our soldiers are less likely to be killed. There's a disturbing sequence in the movie, Waltz With Bashir, in which a series of efforts to target militants result in the deaths of civilians, presented in the manner of a comedy montage. The film also highlights how a thin veneer of rationalization can help somebody who might otherwise be wracked with guilt decide that his role in an atrocity was marginal or excusable. I'm not trying to argue that an individual citizen or soldier will change the course of history by speaking up, but it's much easier to disregard our role if we think of ourselves as noble heroes, at least trying to do good and minimize harm, offloading responsibility for collateral damage or atrocity onto local forces or our enemies.

Kuznicki knows our nation's history, so he knows we have a long history of legal presidents and generals, deciding from a distant war room what military measures to take, estimating losses to their forces, our forces and civilians, drawing up lists of individuals who should be captured or killed, dispatching special forces and snipers to capture or kill specific individuals. He knows that the Constitution was drafted with that lethality in mind - the Constitution's suspicion of standing armies, preservation and reliance upon state militias, placing a civilian President in charge of the military, and attempting to create a system of checks and balances to rein in excess. Yet Kuznicki writes of the President,

We know that no one gets to review his decision. Ever. The ones who might do it have all abdicated the responsibility.

Kuznicki, in essence, declares that he is never again going to vote for a candidate who has a realistic chance of winning the presidency because Congress and the courts aren't doing their jobs. Frankly, I would view skeptically even the most sincere promise of a third party candidate to change the practice if elected, not only because presidents tend to accept any expanded powers achieved by their predecessors, but also because he'll have to directly face and address the consequences of a policy change.

I don't want to overstate the role of the courts, as Congress hasn't provided either the courts or prospective litigants with much of a framework for these issues, but their overall history is to defer to the executive on issues of national security and to quietly regret any mistakes only in future decades. The branch of government that has been least willing to do its job in this context is Congress. You'll find Republicans like Darrell Issa angrily demagoguing about issues of embassy security, but when there's hard work to be done - when they are asked to take ownership of their own failings - you'll find excuses ("Our refusal to fund increased embassy security has nothing to do with the fact that it wasn't increased") or silence. You can get objections out of Republicans like Issa over drone and cruise missile strikes - if they produce favorable media coverage; "The President did that to distract you from domestic politics, wag the dog, wag the dog!" But that type of reaction is not a substantive objection - its a politically calculated claim that relates only to timing.

We don’t need an elected beast-god with a kill list. We need to end the system that proposes, every four years, to place one of our human equals into that role. A role any decent human would refuse. And this election just isn’t going to do it.

This election won't do it, the next one won't either, nor the next.... To prevent Presidents from having this power, we would need a constitutional amendment. And as long as Congress pretends that this is not an issue, and the general public reaction is to accept the notion of surgical strikes with no collateral damage (the key rationalization, if you're innocent you won't be near the target, right?), and the media at large treats the issue with a collective yawn, nothing will change.

In Esquire, addressing the fine line that can exist between targeted killings and murder, Tom Junod argues that, unlike his predecessors, President Obama "had to answer an additional question before you took the job. Other presidents had to decide whether they could preside over the slaughter of massed armies, and the piteous suffering of whole populations." But again, that's more a question of degree, and of technology, than it is of fact. Sure, Ronald Reagan had to launch a significant air raid on Libya to try to kill Gadhafi. George H.W. Bush had to indvade Panama to capture Manuel Noriega. Clinton, though, sent cruise missiles to try to kill Osama bin Laden.

One could argue based upon that history that the new way is better - that as technology has advanced, in many contexts we can avoid the type of massive collateral damage that results from a full-scale invasion, even if we won't have to subsequently occupy the nation whose leader we've toppled. It's possible to point to the history of "boots on the ground" in nations like Somalia, and argue that the President can get at least as much cooperation from local warlords by making them aware of the possibility of a targeted drone strike, without putting large numbers of soldiers into the nation at great expense and considerable risk to their lives.

One could reply that history doesn't yet demonstrate that those possibilities are now reality, but the come-back would presumably be that a failed intervention by drone will cost far less in terms of money and lives than the cost of a failed intervention by land. If the choice is to "try drones and special forces" or "do nothing", what does an advocate of "humanitarian intervention" do? If the choice is between attempting to achieve a surgical victory, even if the surgery will be a lot less precise than the government or media are likely to admit, and a massive on-the-ground assault, can we really presuppose that the latter will be less lethal to civilians, more precise, or more likely to bring about and sustain the outcome we want?

A rather compelling objection to targeted killings, particularly in the context of asymmetrical warfare or a distributed target organization, is that the strategy can degenerate into trying to fight a hydra - cut off one head and two grow back. There was a period under Bush during which it seemed like a month wouldn't go by without a successful strike taking out the #2 or #3 man in al Qaeda. Either the strikes were a lot less accurate than the Bush Administration let on (and in some cases we know that to be the case - with the targeted individual turning up alive at a different location) or the U.S. was encountering the same level of "success" as nations have traditionally achieved by capturing and killing "terrorist" leaders - they're pretty easily replaced, and sometimes "martyring" the leader helps with recruiting efforts. Also, while collateral damage may seem modest and acceptable to somebody sitting in the U.S., you can rest assured that the populations hit by those attacks don't share our detachment when it's their loved ones who are being killed.

If Kuznicki wants change, he has a decent platform from which to advance his opinions in the public sphere. Far better than most. But if he wants to influence a political actor, rather than refusing to vote for the President and implicitly urging others to follow, he should be attempting to turn up the heat on Congress.

Looking for Proof of Intelligent Life in the Political World....

Sometimes political events bring to mind the classic Ronald Reagan SNL sketch, in which whenever cameras were rolling or members of the public were around he would play the part of an affable grandfather, but the moment they were gone he turned into an energetic, detail-driven dynamo. There was probably some truth to it, that we never got to see the "real" Ronald Reagan who was concealed by a carefully contrived cowboy persona. Whatever his actual behind-the-scenes persona, Reagan was comfortable with his public image.

A few decades later, G.W. Bush offered the public a similarly contrived public persona, that of a Texas rancher who liked to drive around in a pickup truck and clear brush in his spare time. No pictures of G.W. on horseback - to put it mildly, he was not that much of a rancher. And never mind that the ranch was purchased as a campaign prop and sold pretty much the minute G.W. retired from the White House. But the public image worked... to a degree.

Bush apparently chafed at the public's perception that he was not very bright. So, during his presidency he arranged for some meetings with authors and other prominent individuals in which he would attempt to wow them with his deep understanding of their work, before ushering them out to share the news of how brilliant he was. The principal tool appears to have been flattery - convince the participant in the meeting that the President had read their work, thought about it, compared it to other ideas, and found it compelling. Flattery will get you... a lot of places.

I suspect that the campaign didn't succeed - at least, not to the degree the White House had hoped. That is, although I do recall hearing a number of people, some of whom were unquestionably intelligent, claim that the President was very impressive in their meetings, the formula was pretty obvious. But more to the point, it raised the question of why a man who is so impressive in a controlled meeting behind closed doors demonstrated none of the same brilliance and insight in any other context.

All presidents have aspects of their personality that they would prefer to hide from the public, and often they are quite successful in managing their public images. No matter how it is created, once a public persona is firmly established it can be difficult to overcome. John McCain seemed like something of a maverick until he fully embraced G.W., and some who scrutinize his record question the extent to which the label ever truly fit, but the image was strong enough to carry him through his presidential campaign. At the time, the public would have been shocked by some of the behavior attributed to Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, and while we now view Watergate as consistent with Nixon's personality, the Nixon you hear on tape is not the Nixon people thought they elected.

Negative images can stick, as well, which is no small part of the reason why political campaigns work so hard to tar opponents before they're known to the public. "Dukakis in a tank". Gerald Ford was probably less clumsy than the average president, but a few prominent incidents led to him being regarded as somewhat accident prone. Al Gore was not the dissembler that his detractors claim, but any number of myths persist about supposed false claims or exaggerations that made for good headlines but turned out to be misrepresentations of what Gore had actually said.

In G.W.'s case, it's difficult to believe that we were simply talking about stage management. That is, once his team made the decision to play up his intellect, it should have been possible to modify his public persona to better display his intellect. Once the decision was made to push his intellect, it should have been possible to demonstrate publicly what was reportedly being demonstrated in private. The fact that G.W.'s P.R. team failed in that effort suggests that the public persona was more genuine than what was going on in controlled, private meetings.

Here's the thing: Yes, the President and his team have enormous power to craft a public image and push that image forward. If it resonates with the public, it can be difficult to overcome, even with facts. By virtue of his intellectual incuriosity and desired "blue collar, man of the people", Bush was able to convince people that he was less intelligent than he actually was. But when he became uncomfortable with that persona, the public simply knew too much about him for him to take it to the other extreme. Had he settled for the middle, where by all appearances the truth most likely would have been found, he might have achieved at least that much.

In contrast with G.W. or Reagan, some candidates want to be seen as intelligent, even brilliant, and work to advance that perception. Sometimes they don't have to work very hard at it - our nation loves dynasties, business and political, and it also associates wealth with intelligence. So if you're rich and have a strong family name, you are 90% of the way to selling yourself as brilliant.

Even if you turn out to be Donald Trump, crass, boorish, prone to making absurd claims and statements, you are likely to maintain your reputation as a business genius simply by virtue of your claimed wealth, no matter how many failed ventures, bankruptcies and dubious licensing schemes you leave in your wake. Frankly, you can see why somebody like Trump would seethe at the "you didn't build that" misquote, because at this point there's little left to the myth behind his fortune - he looks like a narcissist of middling intelligence who learned the building trade (and got some very important connections) through his father, then got very lucky gambling with his inherited fortune.

But the fact is, when somebody is brilliant you can usually find evidence of that. Not in nebulous, Chauncey Gardener-type statements that require you to either defer to the speaker's brilliance or invite you to read into the statement the "brilliant" insight you are hoping to hear (yes, I'm talking about Alan Greenspan). But in documented, public actions, statements and writings that demonstrate the claimed level of intellect. When somebody tells you, in essence, "Trust me, when he's alone in private he says smart things," tell them, "I'll believe you when I hear the tape."

Attacks on Bain and Romney Aren't Attacks on Capitalism

Although some like to pretend otherwise, and to invoke the age-old tactic of suggesting that a political opponent a hypocrite,

Over the years of his presidency, Obama has not been a critic of globalization. There’s no real evidence that, when he’s off the campaign trail, he has any problem with outsourcing and offshoring. He has lavishly praised people like Steve Jobs who were prominent practitioners. He has hired people like Jeffrey Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric, whose company embodies the upsides of globalization. His economic advisers have generally touted the benefits of globalization even as they worked to help those who are hurt by its downsides.

But, politically, this aggressive tactic has worked. It has shifted the focus of the race from being about big government, which Obama represents, to being about capitalism, which Romney represents.¹

that argument has two significant flaws. First, there's no hypocrisy. Second, attacks on Bain, Romney and outsourcing are not attacks on capitalism.

On the first issue, David Brooks complains that the President seems to like leaders of industry such as Steve Jobs, and has employed people like Jeffrey Immelt. And you know what? Had Mitt Romney been applying for a job as a guy who pioneered a similar program in Massachusetts, and wanted to be personally involved in sharing that success with the rest of the nation, I suspect the Obama team would have considered him for the job. But liking somebody, expressing admiration for them within their sphere of competence, hiring them in one capacity or another... none of it constitutes the expression that "This person is qualified to be President".

I can acknowledge that Steve Jobs helped create Apple, and through that company transformed the way we interact with computers. I can say that he was both willing to make and learn from mistakes, and that some of his business and strategic decisions at Pixar and Apple showed tremendous insight and foresight. I can also say that I don't think that those skills would have translated into his being a great President of the United States and that, given his well-documented personality quirks, he might not have even ranked as good. Would Brooks disagree with any of that? I doubt it. So we're on the same page: Being a good to great business leader does not automatically translate into a qualification to be President.

On the second, the issue is not whether Obama has tried to stop globalization. If we're honest about it, it's a done deal. It would take years of enormous effort to significantly reduce our nation's role in the globalized economy, let alone to stop it, and there would be serious consequences to retreat.

Although Brooks acknowledges the upside of globalization, he brushes off the downside. His suggestion that the President is a hypocrite and his pretense - and I do believe he knows better - that the President is attacking capitalism is meant to distract people from the fact of that downside. Does Brooks doubt that, if interviewed or directly asked about global markets, the President would freely and ably address the upside of globalization? Again, I doubt it. But if not, we're effectively again on the same page: The problem isn't that Obama is attacking capitalism and globalization. The problem is that he's able to recognize and speak to the downside, while Mitt Romney is not.

The problem is that, despite Brooks' hagiographic effort to reinvent Romney's work as that of "an efficiency expert", taking "companies that were mediocre and sclerotic and try[ing] to make them efficient and dynamic". The problem is that, under that narrative, the American workers who are laid off in favor of outsourcing, domestic or international, are actual people, many of whom worked extremely hard for years in ways and under conditions Brooks can't even imagine. Obama's message to them is not "I'll stop globalization", it's "I understand your situation, and we need to work to find ways to get you back into the workforce in a decent job at reasonable pay."² Romney's message, so far, seems to be "We had to fire you because your wages were too high. By the way, it's my opponent's fault that you're unemployed."³

And that's the rub.
---------------------
1. Obama represents big government, it would seem, because he obtained passage of a healthcare reform package that is roughly the same as the one Romney ushered through in Massachusetts.

2. Brooks can call that a "big government" attitude if he wants, but this would be the same David Brooks who describes "doubling spending on science, pre-K education and adult retraining" as a "big idea". Does that make Brooks a big government conservative? An enemy of capitalism?

3. Brooks characterizes Romney's role as head of a private equity firm as follows,

It has been his job to be the corporate version of a personal trainer: take people who are puffy and self-indulgent and whip them into shape.

What about when the "personal trainer" decides it's better to kill his client, carve him into pieces and sell off the parts?

Brooks presents a cute metaphor, sure, but it misses the point. The private equity firm is out to make money, and to maximize the return on its investment over the shortest possible period. That often will involve improving efficiency, particularly if the plan is to sell the company, but the goal is to maximize profit, not to obtain the best outcome for any particular acquisition. If you look at the mismanagement of Chrysler under Cerberus Capital Management, you can see pretty clearly how little regard they had for the long-term viability or competitiveness of the company. They were out to put in as little money as possible while extracting as much value as possible.

If you identify a company with significant real estate holdings, low debt, and a highly paid workforce, the "efficiency" introduced by a private equity firm may be to sell the real estate and lease it back, load up the company with debt, fire its workers and hire replacements at lower pay, and perhaps even to lower the quality of the company's products in order to save money on materials and production - the lease payments and interest become tax deductions, cash flow improves due to lowered production costs and lower wages, the cash holdings and proceeds from the loans and sale of assets can be pulled out by the private equity firm as fees and profits, and "everybody wins" except perhaps for the company, its workers, and its customers.

Leaving aside some of the tax loopholes that distort that process, yes, private equity firms serve a role in our system of capitalism and they can improve a company's efficiency. But it's not going to help Romney if he not only ignores the downside of his work, but also takes Brooks' lead and suggests that displaced workers represent fat that a company is fortunate to have shed. This isn't a narrative Romney wants to implicitly support:

Note to Ross Douthat

The endless concern trolling by right-wing pundits about how President Obama "should have" avoided healthcare reform, or anything else important, and should have devoted his entire attention to the economy - where there's no evidence that is additional attention would have brought even one Republican vote to the support of his initiatives - was a tired cliché before Thursday's court ruling. Now it's just pathetic.

There's Nothing Magical About the Separation of Powers

In his recent column about political hypocrisy, as is his wont, Douthat does not share his own opinion - whether he believes that Bush was correct and that Obama is correct to have changed his mind, that Bush was wrong and that Obama is also wrong to follow his lead, or something else. Douthat concludes by fabricating a "widespread liberal attempt to explain [Obama's] struggles by casting him as a Gulliver tied down by an antiquated system of government, concluding,

his is why it’s so remarkable that our constitutional order has lasted so long, given the perpetual incentive — common to both parties, and all three branches of government — to abandon its safeguards in order to push a particular agenda....

[The notion of a president tied down by an antiquated system of government] suggests the possibility that some of the ways this president has been baffled, legislatively and perhaps soon in the courts, reflect the genius of our constitutional system rather than its failings. It’s a system that often lacks principled defenders, but that’s designed to defend itself.

I guess Douthat was trying to end on a poetic note? To throw in a few more slams at Obama, an implied comparison to Jimmy Carter, a dismissal of concerns about Republican obstructionism and the stated goal of certain Republican leaders to put the defeat of Obama ahead of the welfare of the nation?

But at heart, Douthat's point is banal. He's simply observing that Congress exists.

Douthat appears to believe that the problem is something more than a congressional dereliction of duties, but any such belief is undermined by his own example of the Guantánamo detention center. That prison is kept open not by the wishes of the President but by an act of Congress. If Congress objects to "almost the entire Bush-era wartime architecture [that] has endured", it can pass a law imposing limits on that power, appropriate checks and balances, judicial review... If Congress objects to an executive order affecting the enforcement of immigration laws, it can pass a law that removes that discretion or that resolves the issues that the President is attempting to address by executive order. There's no mystical emanation from the Constitution that allows it to defend itself - it's the fact that should it choose, Congress can end its dereliction of duties and pass legislation.

No question about it, Presidents are happy to assume the powers that Congress grants to them, whether by action or inaction. No question about it, despite the chest thumping and alligator tears, Congress often prefers that the President act unilaterally on contentious issues such that its members don't have to take a stand or explain their votes to unhappy constituents. The cure for that is for Congress to do its job.

If Only President Obama Were... A Coward?

Have I hinted that I'm not fond of this type of thinking?

This is the original sin of the Obama Administration — the failure to make the economic recovery its one and only priority. Why couldn’t the administration have proposed that until unemployment had fallen for 12 straight months or until it had created 8 million new jobs, it would only propose initiatives that served the goal of job growth? Instead, the president immediately embarked on comprehensive health-care reform, the same reef that had battered and almost sunk Bill Clinton.

Problem #1: The notion that government can only do one thing at a time, and it needs to steer away from anything difficult. There is no reason why a President cannot focus on two, three, four... even dozens of major issues. There are enough days in the week and year.

Problem #2: Magical thinking. What does Eskew imagine would have been changed by the President's saying, "Despite all of my promises during the campaign I'm going to drop healthcare reform until... whenever, maybe never... while I pull a John McCain and pretend that I have magic control over the economy." What more does Eskew imagine that Congress would have approved, above and beyond the stimulus bill that passed? By what magic trick would the Republicans have stopped obstructing job creation initiatives coming out of the White House, or demagoguing about how the President made the recovery his priority over all else and failed?

Problem #3: Leadership is actually a good thing. Whatever benefit Eskew sees in the notion of running away from the nation's hard, pressing problems, a philosophy of "Somebody tried to fix this twenty years ago and suffered political harm, so we should never again try" is outright craven.

Certainly the President underestimated his own party, and its willingness to be either efficient or put aside self-interest when it came to resisting lobbyists and crafting good policy. Certainly he underestimated Republican obstructionism, despite Mitch McConnell's statement that he would put Obama's defeat above all other priorities, making clear through his actions that his lower priorities included the welfare of the nation. But to put on your 20:20 hindsight goggles and complain, "I knew all along that the President should be a coward, but he stuck his neck out trying to accomplish something so don't go expecting me to criticize the guy swinging the axe"... just what sort of country, what sort of democracy do you want us to have?

When DREAMs Become Nightmares....

Charles Pierce capsulizes the Republican reaction to President Obama's new immigration policy, chiding Lindsey Graham for complaining, among other things, that the President did not work "with Congress".

You and your party have demagogued this issue to the point where, in the last presidential campaign, John McCain had to disavow his own immigration bill. Who in the hell is the president supposed to lead?

Pierce also points to the arguments made during GW's tenure, about the near-imperial powers of a President.

But let's not forget, then or now, that we're really dealing both with the unwillingness of Congress to tackle difficult issues, and their preference that the President act unilaterally so that they don't have to take any responsibility for the tough decisions or their outcomes.

Nothing is stopping Congress from, right now, this very moment, passing a law that addresses this issue. It won't, not because of a lack of Presidential leadership or because the issue isn't long overdue for resolution, but because congressional leaders like Lindsey Graham don't want to be held accountable. And yes, the same is true of the Democrats in Congress who mouthed opposition to G.W.'s unilateral action on various "national security" matters, but failed to introduce legislation that would define how those powers should be exercised.

Who Will Run for President in 2016

Assuming that Romney loses the 2012 election, the question becomes "Who will run in 2016", at which time both parties will be looking for a winning candidate.

On one hand, it's impossible to predict what is going to happen in four years. In 2003, President Obama was a state senator. In 1989 there was no buzz about Bill Clinton as the next president. By the same token a candidate who looks appealing today may, four years from now, look like yesterday's news. An up-and-coming candidate, a fresh face and voice, may start to look older, stale, unaccomplished. The dangers of what can happen over four years seem to be particularly pronounced for Republicans, given that there's now a significant part of the Republican base that is offended by political compromise. The Republican Party as a whole has reaped significant reward for being "the Party of 'No'", but that approach is not particularly helpful to a candidate who wants to build a record of accomplishment, or to somebody who has to appeal to a national audience as opposed to the voters of a particular state or district.

The "dream" candidates on the Republican side, the candidates that sat out the present race but are depicted as possible contenders in 2016, include Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal, Marco Rubio, Tim Pawlenty, Rob Portman, Jeb Bush, Nikki Haley, and Bob McDonnell. I think some of those candidates are lightweights whose inclusion in the list serves to highlight only how the media and party can sometimes elevate mediocre people to undeserved heights (no offense, Paul Ryan), but there is something you can draw from that list: Unlike the majority of candidates in the present primary, most of those potential candidates are viewed as having some level of genuine substance, and moderate to strong understanding of the issues facing their states or our nation.

If you are of the opinion that the Republican Party's strongest candidate looked at the 2012 campaign as one the Republicans were destined to lose, it makes sense that the "better" candidates would sit out the race. The problem with that theory is that after the 2010 midterm elections and with the nation's sluggish recovery from recession and the housing bubble, this should have been a great time for a strong Republican candidate to run for the presidency.

The Republicans need to consider the factors that kept what many believe to be their best candidates for winning the White House from joining the 2012 campaign. If it turns out to be that their various litmus and purity tests allow Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann to be taken seriously but exclude Bobby Jindal or Rob Portman, that's something they need to consider. There was room in the 2012 primary season for serious policy discussions between the candidates. It would have been interesting to hear a serious debate between Jon Huntsman, Ron Paul and Mitt Romney, but neither Huntsman nor Paul were deemed sufficiently serious as candidates by their own party. A Romney victory could reinforce that effect in 2020. A Romney loss might bring about a different approach to the primary in 2016, but I'm not holding my breath.

Again assuming President Obama is reelected, the Democratic race for the nomination promises to be an exercise in contrasts with the Republican contest. Possible nominees include Andrew Cuomo, Martin O'Malley, Hillary Clinton, Mark Warner, Kay Hagan... some of whom are anything but household names. And again, let's not forget the "Bill Clinton" effect - the strongest candidate for either party may not be on our present radar - and that some candidates who presently look reasonably strong will no longer look like serious contenders when the primary season begins. But one thing seems clear, the Democratic race will be between candidates who will be addressing actual policy issues. You may recall from four years ago that addressing the issues sometimes brings more heat than light, and is not always done well, but I don't expect that you'll see anything approximating the "bubble candidate of the weak week" show we saw in this year's Republican contest before the party finally, sort of settled on Mitt Romney.

A Does It Make Sense to be Outraged by Presidents' "Illegal Wars"

The Constitution states, "The Congress shall have Power... To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water...." As everybody reading this is aware, the United States has not entered a declared war since WWII. We didn't declare war in Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Iraq (either time), Afghanistan, Panama.... it's simply no longer done. Congress doesn't want that responsibility, so it finds ways to grant broad war-making powers that a President can use to justify starting a war (even if Congress later protests that it didn't intend to authorize an actual war), or chooses to sit on its hands when the President acts unilaterally. The War Powers Resolution is not an impressive piece of legislation - it's an attempt to formalize the delegation of Congress's war-making power to the President, while keeping the President at least modestly accountable. It says something that Congress has never attempted to enforce that law against a President, and has not amended the law in response to past abuses.

So the President involves the U.S. in a war in Libya and comes up with a tortured rationale for why he doesn't have to go before Congress under the War Powers Resolution if he wishes to continue that war? Par for the course (and you know how presidents like golf). The Democrats seem content to let the President take the heat if things go wrong, and fear looking weak if they oppose war, while the Republicans seem to fear looking weak and fearful if things go right. The Republican majority in the House would love to hurt or embarrass the President over a violation of the War Powers Resolution, but... not if it means being depicted as weak on terrorism, pro-dictator, anti-democracy, or any of the other accusations they so recently hurled at anybody who dared question the wisdom of the wars in Iran and Afghanistan.

A worst case scenario for the Republicans is to successfully end the war in Libya and have Gadafi remain in power. Meanwhile the Democrats want to be able to ride Obama's coattails in the event of a victory, but don't want to be accountable if they approve military action and it does not succeed. It looks like I could count on my fingers, perhaps on one hand, the number of Members of Congress who would vote on this war without first checking how the various outcomes might affect their reelection bids. So as it stands neither side will take any meaningful action.

I suspect that when Robert Gates was angrily complaining that Europe wasn't able to do its part in the war in Libya, it was in no small part due to the fact that the war isn't over. I expect that President Obama entered the conflict with the assurance that France and Britain were up to the task, and that the bombing campaign would succeed within a month, two at the outside. Now he has to explain why he's not going before Congress - a Congress that could take action on its own, and which by all appearances doesn't want the President to seek approval for the war - for a war that's supposed to already be over.

Do you expect that Congress will act? That it will defund the war in Libya? That it will amend the War Powers Resolution to impose real consequences if a President ignores its terms - such as automatically defunding the dubious military action? If not, do you truly perceive the war in Libya as inconsistent with the intent and wishes of Congress? Not so much in terms of, "Congress would have voted for the war," but "Congress doesn't want this, or any, responsibility for war"? If you want to be angry at somebody over an "illegal war", it seems that the most suitable target for that anger is Congress.

Update: Ilya Somin observes,

Regardless, for the foreseeable future, the main constraints on unconstitutional presidential activity must come from outside executive branch — that is, from Congress, the courts, and public opinion. These constraints are highly imperfect. But they do impose genuine costs on presidents who cross the line. Ackerman cites the Watergate scandal, Iran-Contra and the “torture memo” as examples of the sorts of abuses of executive power that need to be restricted. True enough. But it’s worth remembering that Nixon was forced to resign over Watergate, Reagan paid a high political price for Iran-Contra, and the torture memo was a public relations disaster for Bush, whose administration eventually ended up withdrawing it (thanks in large part to the efforts of Jack Goldsmith). On the other side of the ledger, Bill Clinton paid little price for waging an illegal war in Kosovo, though he avoided it in part by keeping that conflict short and limited. It remains to be seen whether President Obama will suffer any political damage over Libya.

The greatest damage President Obama could suffer in Libya would be if he were to end the conflict while leaving Gadafi in power. That's not going to happen. If Congress acts, I expect it will be to authorize the President's action (even if he doesn't ask them to do so).

Update II: Digby quotes Matt Taibi and shares some thoughts on the Repubiblican candidates' "sudden change of heart" on war.

As if it Weren't Already Obvious.....

MSNBC today shares the startling story, "Bloomberg rules out 2012 presidential bid". Now, I recognize that Bloomberg has been coy while the nation's media has flattered his ego with the notion that he could run a viable campaign, but the fact that he's not planning to run should go without saying given his investment to date of $0 in building a national name or machine that would get him on state ballots and give him any chance of being elected. Yes, Giuliani's narcissism left him believing that he could ride his service as mayor and the happenstance of his serving in that role on 9/11 into the White House, and I'm not sure that Bloomberg thinks any less of himself. But Bloomberg seems smart enough with his money and ego that he's not going to run a disastrous and doomed presidential campaign that is more likely to result in his being compared to Nader or Perot than even to Giuliani.

Meanwhile, having finally admitted the obvious, Bloomberg reveals a level of tact that simply serves to highlight why he would not be the dream candidate that... a handful of people in the mainstream media imagine. If Bloomberg weren't a billionaire, and if he were instead supporting himself on a mayor's salary, lecturing ordinary folks to "suck it up" in relation to a tax cut that could save him tens of millions of dollars would perhaps not be entirely out of place. But he is a billionaire. (I expect that Bloomberg's income is primarily in the form of capital gains, and that between the lower capital gains tax rate and his bevy of tax lawyers and accountants he already pays a much smaller percentage of his income in taxes than the typical critic of the tax deal.)

International Perspectives on the President

Although this type of claim by David Ignatius smacks of Thomas Friedman's "taxi drivers who happen to echo my exact beliefs", it's worth examining:

What the world sees, I'm afraid, is a weak U.S. president who isn't solving domestic economic problems, let alone global ones. But that's more a symptom than a cause. What's happening at a deeper level is a breakdown of the U.S. political system's ability to find consensus and make decisions. Washington doesn't work, as critics from the Tea Party right to the progressive left keep insisting.

In my younger years when I've lived abroad, and in my subsequent travels, I've heard a lot of discussion of the U.S. political system by those in other countries. As should go without saying, most people from other nations have a significantly worse understanding of how our government works than do the people of our nation - and... um, we (collectively) don't know a whole lot.

Media coverage of U.S. political issues often focuses on the President, and often approaches him as if his power is somewhere between that of a prime minister and a monarch, setting an agenda for his country and largely able to push it through. When the President wants something and it doesn't happen, yes, the international perspective may be that he looks weak - but that may in fact be a more accurate perception than the one Ignatius apparently prefers. Further, if you're from a nation with a parliamentary system, more so if it has a tradition of strong party unity, it's difficult to understand how somebody who you presume to be the actual (as opposed to de facto) leader of his party can't get them to follow his agenda.

Ignatius also appears to make the mistake of overstating the importance of U.S. politics to people of other nations and how much time they spend thinking about the U.S. president, perhaps because during his travels that's all he talks about and thus most of what he hears about. More importantly, he disregards the fact that popular impressions of the President in other nations are largely irrelevant, and can be just as media-driven, event-driven and fickle as political opinions in this nation. Does Ignatius know that the international view of Reagan was largely not flattering - doddering and not very intelligent? That G.W. was widely viewed internationally as an incompetent moron? I doubt that either would have been reelected had the election been held internationally. Does it matter? If so, why?

Masculinity and Temper Tantrums

There's a concept known as sang-froid, the maintenance of composure, level-headedness, and coolness under stressful or difficult circumstances, that is often depicted in movies as the height of masculinity. Think Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now - sure, he may be under live fire in a war zone, but that's not going to stop him from surfing. Think of pretty much any action movie - the hero faces adversity and gets mad, but keeps his cool - there's no point in a tantrum. It doesn't look good on camera and does nothing to even the score. This is anything but a novel or rare interpretation of masculinity.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too; ...

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

When most people are responding emotionally to a situation, a commonly invoked idiom is, "Let cooler heads prevail."

President Obama has sang-froid. In spades. His coolness has resulted in any number of right-wing attacks on him for "not showing enough emotion". As if he would seem more Presidential if he were displaying barely-controlled rage. Me? I got enough of play-acting under G.W. Bush, and I'm perfectly content to have a President who both acts like a grown-up and treats the electorate as if it's comprised of adults.

Parker apparently sees herself less as an analyst, taking facts, creating novel arguments and presenting them to the public in her bi-weekly column, and more as part of an echo chamber:

Many people seemed to have a hankering for one particular emotion: Not the Bill Clinton "I feel your pain" kind but the "Take-BP-Behind-the-Woodshed-and-Make-Them-Pay" kind. They wanted an action figure in the hyper-masculine mode, not George W. Bush but the Terminator.

In fits and starts, Obama had given it to them. He wanted to know "whose ass to kick," he told us. He wanted them to "plug the damn hole." Press secretary Robert Gibbs assured us that in discussions with Obama he, indeed, had "seen rage from him."

Then the president gave his Oval Office speech. And the collective reaction was, "That's it?! Where's the outrage?!?!"

Arnold Schwarzenegger was well-cast as The Terminator because he was big, intimidating, and had not yet learned to convey on-screen emotional range. Earth to Kathleen Sullivan - The Terminator is an android. The Terminator has no emotions. In Terminator II, the android was frozen by liquid nitrogen - you don't get much colder than that - and yet he managed to (dare I say) keep his emotional cool (because he didn't have emotions). You could hardly ask for a better illustration of sang-froid as evidence of masculinity, yet Parker's not sufficiently self-aware to recognize the contradiction. Meanwhile, back in the real world where the real Arnold Schwarzenegger is actually in politics, how often does he engage in public blow-ups or tantrums when things aren't going his way?

With due respect to Kathleen Sullivan's yearning for the "boil" of George W. Bush, it seems that President Obama's ability to keep his cool is more consistent with Presidential tradition. Sure, we have stories of past Presidents who would explode into anger at their aides - behind the scenes - but that wasn't the face they put forth to the public. Which presidents in recent history didn't present a calm public face in response to crisis? Bill Clinton? George H.W. Bush? Ronald Reagan? Gerald Ford? Jimmy Carter? I'm not sure that Parker's either presenting the vindication of G.W. or the condemnation of Obama that she imagines when she, in effect, holds G.W. and Richard Nixon out as paragons of the appropriate display of anger.

If we're honest about perceptions of public displays of anger, as a society we tend to recognize a male form - the inner beast escapes and wants to "break something" - and a female form - "hysteria", "histrionics", the "hissy fit" - etymology, L. hystericus "of the womb". It's sexist, and truth be told the biggest difference often appears to be that men are for the most part more capable of outwardly directed violence. But in the context of Presidential behavior it's all spin.

Had Obama been reacting to things more angrily, you can fully expect that the very same voices that have been demanding "more anger" would be denouncing him as excessively emotional, unbalanced, out-of-control. And you can expect that columnists like Kathleen Parker would pick up on those themes to argue that the conduct she presently contends evidences a "testosterone deficit" would in fact make him more masculine than his "inability to control his anger". Sang-froid would once again be a masculine attribute, while the "boil" of G.W. would be pushed into the background as somehow different or irrelevant to similar behavior by Obama - but I would not be surprised by comparisons to Nixon.

All Cattle and No Hat?

The President has an odd job... One half "leader of the free world," one half "head cheerleader and ribbon cutter."

Perhaps some presidents enjoy the public relations aspect of their job - throwing a pitch to open the baseball season, helicoptering in to the scene of an emergency to give a speech, appearing at celebratory dinners and sharing some jokes, giving commencement speeches and collecting honorary degrees.... But it seems like these "responsibilities" expand with each President, with the creation of "customs" and expectations that are difficult for a successor to break.

Perhaps the P.R. side isn't excessively distracting from the President's official duties. And sometimes the country "needs" the President to appear to be in charge of an event, disaster or catastrophe, even if he has no actual control over the situation or if it's best deferred to others with more time, relevant experience and relevant skill.

But must the media be so shallow? How many pundits need to write a column that amounts to "President Obama is doing as well as anybody can, but he's not performing his cheerleader routine with sufficient aplomb." Take it from the queen of shallowness herself:

“The media may get tired of the story, but we will not,” he told Gulf Coast residents when he visited on Friday. Actually, if it weren’t for the media, the president would probably never have woken up from his torpor and flown down there.

Yeah.... The media can educate the public, explain why it's so difficult to stop the spill, investigate how we got into this situation, analyze the environmental consequences, or yammer that "The President is too Spock-like, so he needs to go to Louisiana to give a speech"... And Dowd's patting herself and her peers on the back for focusing exclusively on that last task, "waking" Obama up to the need to showboat?

Dowd skips over G.W., whose carefully staged and at times excessively dramatic public appearances provided cover for his general incompetence, suggesting that we need the return of President Clinton as a "Feeler in Chief." To somebody like Dowd, and an unfortunate number of her peers, the story will always be whether the President looks good in a jump suit, and how well he stood up to the G-forces of a fighter jet. Form over substance. If the right heartstrings are plucked, who gives a crap if the mission is actually accomplished.