Category: Barack Obama

Chinese Universities Tied to Google Hack, Chinese Military

This really shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s paying attention, but the New York Times is reporting that the attacks on Google, other American tech and defense companies, and activists working for human rights in China and Tibet have been tied to universities in China that maintain close working relationships with the Chinese military and government.

It’d be great if Chinese acts of cyber espionage and industrial espionage had the power to influence the course of talks between the US and Chinese governments in the same way as, say, President Obama’s decision to hold a brief meeting with the Dalai Lama. For now, that does not to seem to be the case.

Weak Sauce

Apparently Dick Blumenthal thinks chickenshittery will save us all. Blumenthal is in line to be the Democratic Senate nominee in Connecticut, in a bid to replace the retiring Senator Chris Dodd. Despite being Connecticut’s Attorney General, Blumenthal has repeatedly made a big deal out of the fact that he thinks all terrorists should be tried in military tribunals and that the federal court system, which has convicted hundreds of terrorists already, is not the place to mete out justice.

Blumenthal is positioning himself to be the next Joe Lieberman. He is campaigning on his “independence” from the President and the Democratic Party. And he doesn’t think he’ll even want President Obama to campaign with him. Right – because cowering from your party and the people who believe the same things as you is a real sign of strength that will appeal to voters.

Perhaps most sickening is that Blumie thinks the lesson of Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts is that people think “Washington is broken” and as a result, he needs to run against it. If Blumenthal believes that, I have a Democratic Senate majority for him to join in 2010. Naturally, a college junior has better sense than a Democratic Senate  candidate, ““The lessons of Massachusetts are that people are looking for real leadership,” [Brian] Bills contended.” Bingo.

Democrats are in trouble, not because Obama is unpopular (he is popular) and not because Republicans are popular (they are as unpopular as ever). No, Democrats are in trouble because they internalize Republican talking points about them while college studnets are able to distinguish between GOP spin and existing political dynamics. Blumenthal’s stated campaign plan involves running away from his history as a Democrat, running away from the majority party, and running straight towards the Republican position on most issues we’ve seen him talk about so far. Republican Lite doesn’t sell. And the only benefit of Dick Blumenthal not getting this simple fact of American politics is that we won’t be stuck with Dick Blumenthal as a senator from Connecticut.

Obama’s Small Circle

I think Steve Clemons is right about how President Obama should respond to the critique by Edward Luce in the Financial Times of his tight inner circle of Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett and Robert Gibbs. Clemons recommends Obama take Luce’s piece seriously and evaluate how the White House decision making structure is failing, particularly in replicating the best parts of his campaign.

Governing is not the same as running a political campaign. In this case it means that Obama can’t rely on a tiny inner circle to make all decisions and dominate access to him. He has to open up to expert and advisers with a range of opinions. On the other side, though, Obama has to make his White House more like the campaign, wherein there was a broad acceptance of challenging Conventional Wisdom and listening to new ideas. This was facilitated by a campaign rule of “no assholes,”  which opened lines of communication and fostered creativity.

It’d be one thing if Obama’s small inner circle had helped him achieve great things in his first year, but they haven’t. Instead the administration has floundered, failing to pass health care reform, climate policy reform, immigration reform, labor reform, or banking regulation. Even if the President loves his inner circle and wants them to be the ones running the show, he has to at least recognize that this team hasn’t gotten the job done.

President Bush was rightly criticized for living in a news bubble and maintaining a tiny inner circle – Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Gonzalez and a few other interchangeable figures over the years.  He was cut off from reality and voices that cast doubt on what the inner circle was advising him were pushed aside. While no one is suggesting that President Obama is operating in a bubble, the critique of maintaining a tiny group of core advisers is a serious one that should be listened to attentively by the President.

Fifty-nine

It’s remarkable: one year ago, when the Obama administration started, Democrats had fifty-nine votes in the Senate (though two were in the hospital (Kennedy & Byrd) and one, Al Franken, would not be seated because of frivolous Republican lawsuits). At the time, we were at an historic moment where big ideas were not only necessary, but possible. As such, the administration and Congress charged forward with plans for economic stimulus, labor reform, and health care reform.

A year later the economic stimulus has begun to work, labor reform has been moved to a back-burner about 900 miles from the President’s kitchen, and health care reform is perceived as a legislative impossibility…because Democrats have a mere fifty-nine votes in the Senate.

Fifty-nine votes is not a hurdle today any more than fifty-nine votes, which really meant fifty-six votes, was a hurdle in January, 2009. Fifty-nine votes, when used as a stated or implicit excuse for not accomplishing Democratic goals, is pure bunk. Not getting things done is solely going to be attributable to failures of leadership by the White House and the Democratic Senate leadership team. What is leadership? Partly it’s making an effective public case for a policy issue. Partly it is making clear to your caucus that they are safe to support the agenda you want them to support. Partly it is whipping votes through horse-trading, cajoling, and threatening senators to vote the right way. As far as I can tell, none of these things have been happening, particularly since the loss of the special election.

To wit, see this article in today’s New York Times. While it has an optimistic title, “Obama Maps a Way Forward for a Health Overhaul,” the title actual is belied by the text of the article, which includes this line: “Mr. Obama still did not chart a specific legislative strategy for moving a bill through Congress.” I’d hazard that it’s hard to “map a way forward” without “chart[ing] a specific legislative strategy”. I suppose Obama’s map for health care legislation since the Massachusetts loss look something like this:

  1. Have a real debate on the issues
  2. ????
  3. Sign the bill into law!

This isn’t leadership. Fleshing out #2 would be leadership. And let’s be clear: Harry Reid could do a whole lot to fill in the details here, but he isn’t either. The blame isn’t all Obama’s, but a preponderance of it, at this point in time, certainly is. After all, he was one of the loudest voices for saying that when Democrats had fifty-six functional votes in the Senate that this was the moment in history to pass health care reform. That he cannot muster the same confidence when he has three more voting Senators in the Democratic caucus is a disaster of, to borrow his word, historic consequences.

Democrats are looking for excuses to fail, but I for one do not buy it and I’m tired of it being sold to me by people who I and millions of people like me in the Democratic base have spent years working for, donating to, and voting for. Forget explaining to me why forty-one is greater than fifty-nine – this bit of idiocy is so solidified in Democratic conventional wisdom that nothing can dislodge it now. Explain to me why fifty-six is greater than fifty-nine.  Maybe then I’ll understand why this President and this Party have effectively abdicated their responsibility to get done the things they promised us they would get done.

Question Time

While I certainly think having a regular dialogue between President Obama and the opposition would be a good thing, I hope that if he’s going to give time to the GOP, he also gives time to Democrats, particularly progressive Democrats, for public questioning and debate. This can’t be just about engaging his conservative opponents. He has progressive ones too, progressive Democrats whose legislative agenda he has repeatedly undercut or opposed.

I enjoyed watching Obama swat down dumb Republican talking points last week in Baltimore, but hearing a centrist Democrat tell me why positions slightly to his right are wrong is not interesting to me. Hearing him justify why he is not fighting for health care reform nor labor reform nor immigration reform, on the other hand, would be educational.

Privatizing Space Flight

Ending NASA’s control of manned American space flight and moving these responsibilities to private contractors sounds like as bad idea as is possible in the early twenty-first century. NASA has been successfully putting Americans into space for research and exploration for over half a century. Why would companies who are just beginning to experiment with manned orbital flight do a better job than the scientists, researchers, and engineers who’ve put men on the moon?

Speaking at a news conference in Israel on Wednesday, Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., the NASA administrator, gave hints of the new direction. “What NASA will focus on is facilitating the success of — I like to use the term ‘entrepreneurial interests,’ ” General Bolden said.

Turning NASA into a pass-through organization responsible for cutting checks to Boeing & LockheedMartin is an embarrassing idea, better suited for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney than the Obama administration. This is the worst kind of American corporatism.

Shorter Obama Administration: Privatized manned space flight: Because, hey, Blackwater has worked out pretty well.

State of the Union

I wasn’t particularly impressed with President Obama’s speech last night. I thought it was lacking in big ideas and failed to push hard for Congress (and the Senate in particular) to get things done. It was an opportunity for Obama to really chastise Democratic leaders for failing to get legislation done and highlight the role Nelson, Lieberman, Lincoln and Landrieu have played in slowing reform. Not like that was very likely.

My guess is his speech will give him a solid bump. He retreated to a lot of familiar turns of phrase that served him well in the campaign and I’m sure the public will reward him for that in increasingly his already high approval numbers. But I highly doubt Obama’s speech will move the needle up one inch for Democrats in Congress who are up for re-election this year. His speech did nothing to help Democrats maintain their majorities the House and Senate. And I think he and his advisors will live to regret that in hindsight.

Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times, an entertainment reporter with a horrible history of covering political events, has a passable story today that includes a very apt line:

The adage says that in a democracy, people get the government they deserve. Mr. Obama used his time before Congress to posit that, actually, the American people deserve a better legislative branch.

This is undeniably true. While Obama has not displayed the leadership I had hoped he would on key issues like health care reform and labor reform, the fecklessness of Democrats in the Senate (and to a lesser extent, leaders in the House) has been a massive shortcoming during the first year of this administration. I believe President Obama could have done a great deal to change the outcomes in Congress, but at the end of the day, Congress has to do the work too…and they haven’t.

How Frozen Is It?

Jed Lewison:

Based on what Bernstein said about the freeze proposal, it appears the destructive policy impact of the plan may not be as great as many, including yours truly, initially feared. Seven-eighths of Federal spending won’t be impacted by the freeze, and within the one-eighth that will be impacted by the freeze, only the total level of spending will be frozen. Individual programs can grow as long as that growth is offset by cuts in other programs. Moreover, the freeze won’t apply to the stimulus plan and if a second stimulus is required, it would be considered outside the freeze.

So the good news is that it doesn’t sound like the proposal will really be a calamitous disaster for the economy. The bad news is that not being a calamitous disaster is probably the best thing you can say about this. And for this economy to recover, we need more than not a disaster.

In a way, Bernstein’s argument is that the freeze isn’t really that much of a freeze. But if that’s the case, why do it all? It runs the risk of looking like a political gimmick, and even if it is a narrowly crafted as Bernstein argues, isn’t it hard to square the spending freeze proposal with the need to pass the health care bill? And isn’t the administration making it harder than ever to request the kind of funding that we’ll need to invest in rebuilding our energy economy? Perhaps more than anything else, this is intended to be a signal that with the stimulus under its belt and health care almost on its way, the administration is done thinking big.

OK, then. Aren’t we marching towards a situation that looks something like Poor Americans Thunder Dome, where decision makers pit one group of poor, working people against another to determine what sort of program survives and what programs are cut?

As Jed says, we need big thinking and this is most definitely not it. Even as a gimmick, it makes good Democratic policy ideas in other areas even harder to implement.  It undermines the abilities of Democrats to tell a persuasive story about what they believe and why they should become reality.

Obama’s Bizarre Moves to the Right

Earlier this morning, I tweeted: “Someone needs to tell Obama that he’s allowed to break McCain’s campaign promises.”

John McCain proposed an excise tax on health care benefits as a means of paying for health care reform legislation. Obama campaigned against this. And yet, the current health care legislation in the Senate and the version supported by the President include taxes on health care benefits. In some cases, this tax may hit CEOs’ plans that include coverage for plastic surgery. But most of the time, the excise tax will hurt working, middle class Americans who have collectively bargained for health care benefits in lieu of wages. Coincidentally, Obama also pledged no tax increases on the American middle class.

To put this a different way, Obama is going to look a lot like George H.W. Bush who campaigned on a pledge of no new taxes (if you read his lips), but did increase taxes anyway.

John McCain also campaigned on a federal spending freeze in response to the economic crisis. Obama, wisely, opposed McCain’s proposed spending freeze.  And now we see Obama proposing a three year spending freeze on discretionary spending. Naturally it will be more limited in scope than what McCain proposed, but that doesn’t make the idea any better.

Stopping federal spending growth during an economic crisis is a tried and true recipe for prolonged economic crisis. The most natural comparison and the one that Obama will most likely seen his move drawn to is Herbert Hoover. But Jed Lewison points out that FDR made the same mistake — and it is universally regarded as a mistake — of cutting federal stimulus programs and thus crashing the US economy again.

I don’t know why Obama thinks pulling out John McCain’s playbook is a good idea. Nor do I get why Obama and his administration think replaying the moves of George H.W. Bush and Herbert Hoover, two one-term Republican presidents, is a good idea. Because from where I sit, these moves make zero sense from either a policy sense or a political sense. And if I look really closely, it looks like Obama is triangulating against the Democratic base in an effort to prove that liberal ideas, Democratic ideas are bad during times of crisis. And thus a three year spending freeze doesn’t look that different from a three year freeze on the Obama administration identifying itself as Democratic.

The Absence of Leadership

Frank Rich:

Obama has blundered, not by positioning himself too far to the left but by landing nowhere — frittering away his political capital by being too vague, too slow and too deferential to Congress. The smartest thing said as the Massachusetts returns came in Tuesday night was by Howard Fineman on MSNBC: “Obama took all his winnings and turned them over to Max Baucus.”

Worse, the master communicator in the White House has still not delivered a coherent message on his signature policy. He not only refused to signal his health care imperatives early on but even now he, like Congressional Democrats, has failed to explain clearly why and how reform relates to economic recovery — or, for that matter, what he wants the final bill to contain. Sure, a president needs political wiggle room as legislative sausage is made, but Scott Brown could and did drive his truck through the wide, wobbly parameters set by Obama.

Ask yourself this: All these months later, do you yet know what the health care plan means for your family’s bottom line, your taxes, your insurance? It’s this nebulousness, magnified by endless Senate versus House squabbling, that has allowed reform to be caricatured by its foes as an impenetrable Rube Goldberg monstrosity, a parody of deficit-ridden big government. Since most voters are understandably confused about what the bills contain, the opponents have been able to attribute any evil they want to Obamacare, from death panels to the death of Medicare, without fear of contradiction.

This is as good an explanation of the consequences of President Obama taking a back seat during the last year’s debate on health care.  His leadership could have prevented the public from being vulnerable to rightwing lies about reform. But in his absence, the legislation became a cipher for every fear Republicans wanted their base to project onto it. Clearly this has not gotten us to a place that makes passage of a comprehensive, powerful reform bill likely. And Obama remains culpable for that.