POTUS and the Good War

by Joshua H. Liberatore

While most Americans are fretting over their 401(k) statements and debating the merits of POTUS’s stimulus package, our two dubious inherited wars “on terror” rage on unabated in theater, and oddly, given their exhorbitant price tags, remain unconnected to our economic woes in our conversations about how we as a nation will Recover and Reinvest. We often hear it remarked that November’s election functioned as a referendum on the war in Iraq (which was said that about the 2006 mid-terms as well), and our new POTUS has promised orderly withdrawal from that country by August of 2010, three months later than pledged and leaving a residual force of at least 50,000, but nevertheless a fulfillment of the “referendum” in a manner.

But what about the “good war,” which is to say the other one, in Afghanistan? In the refined genre of campaign rhetoric, especially for liberals, it has become fashionable to make the distinction between one’s “support” for the war in Iraq (bad) and one’s “support” for the equally dismal and profligate war in Afghanistan (good). How many times have we heard Democrats tagging a blunt criticism of the Iraq invasion with, ” . . . but I did support the invasion of Afghanistan,” which is to say, “We can be tough on terror too”? This is par for the course in contemporary politics, in which even liberals have to appear warlike in order to get elected. Let’s take a look at what POTUS has been saying about the “good war” since taking office.

The American people and the international community must understand that the situation is perilous and progress will take time. Violence is up dramatically in Afghanistan. A deadly insurgency has taken deep root. The opium trade is far and away the largest in the world. The Afghan Government has been unable to deliver basic services. Al Qaida and the Taliban strike from bases embedded in rugged, tribal terrain along the Pakistani border. And while we have yet to see another attack on our soil since 9/11, Al Qaida terrorists remain at large and remain plotting. (January 22, 2009)

The war in Afghanistan is considered “good” for many, albeit suspicious, reasons. Although the September 11th hijackers hailed from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Egypt, and United Arab Emirates (all nominally U.S. allies), they had apparently trained in Afghanistan and received funding and methodology from Osama bin Laden’s organization, which had set up shop in the desolated no-man’s land wrought by the Taliban. By October of 2001, Americans, it seemed, were ready to support some sort of plausible revenge scenario, even one as slippery and vague as rooting out a diffuse band of criminals, overthrowing the regime that harbored them, and cleansing the dreaded “safe haven”:

What we can do is make sure that Afghanistan is not a safe haven for Al Qaida. What we can do is make sure that it is not destabilizing neighboring Pakistan, which has nuclear weapons. And that’s going to require not only military efforts, but also diplomatic efforts. It’s also going to require development efforts in a coordinated fashion. And that’s why I’ve asked the Joint Chiefs that have produced a review. David Petraeus is reviewing the situation there. We assigned Richard Holbrooke as a special envoy to the region. They are all working together. They will be presenting to me a plan. (February 1, 2009)

Although we are still waiting to hear the details of this proffered “plan,” most certainly it will involve increasing the number of American troops in Afghanistan, and perhaps a graduated, direct shift of said troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. POTUS has already notified us that an additional Marine expeditionary brigade will deploy come spring and an Army Stryker brigade by summer, totaling 12,000 troops between them plus 5,000 “enabler forces.” According to the U.S. Army’s website, there are currently 38,000 American troops and about 19,000 troops from other NATO partners in Afghanistan. Given the current numbers, an increase of 17,000 troops represents an escalation of nearly 45 percent in the U.S. burden and 30 percent in the overall coalition, not a paltry increase by any standard. Most of these reinforcements will go to the opium-trading areas of the rugged southern and eastern regions bordering Pakistan, where elements of the deposed Taliban are said to be hiding, and where unpiloted Predator drones continue to make regular cross-boarder sorties into sovereign Pakistan, despite local cries of cease and desist in the wake of civilian casualties, not to mention international law. Messy, messy business, and definitely not the change we need.

In terms of length, how long we might be there, obviously, that’s going to be contingent on the strategy we develop out of this review. And I’m not prejudging that as well. (February 19, 2009)

At POTUS’s first news conference, most journalists wanted to talk about the economy, but Ed Henry of CNN took the opportunity to ask about a “clear timetable of withdrawal” from Afghanistan. On the campaign trail, POTUS had taken some hits for advocating a scheduled withdrawal from Iraq (viewed by the many on the Right as a sign of weakness, inexperience, naiveté), but the presumed moral justification for ramping up the war in Afghanistan had allowed him, like John Kerry before him, to engage in some safe tough talk and burnish his foreign policy “credentials” by issuing stern warnings, at which one cringed. Now, as POTUS, he must resume that narrative:

The bottom line, though . . . is this is a situation in which a region served as the base to launch an attack that killed 3,000 Americans. And this past week, I met with families of those who were lost in 9/11, a reminder of the costs of allowing those safe havens to exist. My bottom line is that we cannot allow Al Qaida to operate. We cannot have those safe havens in that region. And we’re going to have to work both smartly and effectively, but with consistency, in order to make sure that those safe havens don’t exist. I do not have yet a timetable for how long that’s going to take. What I know is . . . I’m not going to allow Al Qaida or bin Laden to operate with impunity, planning attacks on the U.S. homeland. (February 9, 2009)

Thankfully, POTUS has also made sure to remind his listeners that military power alone will not solve Afghanistan’s problems, from poppy agriculture to poor education and health care to crumbling infrastructure to a nonexistent economy. Indeed, many experts have argued that Afghanistan’s security will not greatly profit from additional foreign troops; what is wanted, rather, is economic aid, military training support, and general development. Complicating the military escalation is Kyrgyzstan’s recent decision to join Uzbekistan’s position in disallowing the transfer of military troops, equipment, and provisions through its military bases and airspace; that means that Central Asia is rapidly closing itself off to aiding the U.S. effort in Afghanistan. To Peter Mansbridge, of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, POTUS described a broader approach:

But I am absolutely convinced that you cannot solve the problem of Afghanistan, the Taliban, the spread of extremism in that region solely through military means. We’re going to have to use diplomacy; we’re going to have to use development. And my hope is that in conversations that I have with Prime Minister [Stephen] Harper, that he and I end up seeing the importance of a comprehensive strategy and one that ultimately the people of Canada can support, as well as the people of the United States can support, because obviously, here as well, there are a lot of concerns about a conflict that has lasted quite a long time now and actually appears to be deteriorating at this point.

On the eve of POTUS’s exclusive CBC interview and first foreign trip, Canada had just announced it would not be renewing its commitment of troops to NATO’s forces in Afghanistan, effecting a total withdrawal by 2011. POTUS remained reticent on the subject, however, merely noting that 2011 was still a full three years away (and a full – count them – ten years after the U.S.-led NATO invasion) and that he would be “continuing to ask other countries to help think through how do we approach this very difficult problem”:

Mr. Mansbridge. Is Afghanistan still winnable?

The President. Well, I think Afghanistan is still winnable in the sense of our ability to ensure that it is not a launching pad for attacks against North America. I think it’s still possible for us to stamp out Al Qaida to make sure that extremism is not expanding but rather is contracting. I think all those goals are still possible, but I think that as a consequence of the war on Iraq, we took our eye off the ball. We have not been as focused as we need to be on all the various steps that are needed in order to deal with Afghanistan. If you’ve got narcotrafficking that is funding the Taliban, if there is a perception that there’s no rule of law in Afghanistan, if we don’t solve the issue of the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, then we’re probably not going to solve the problem. (February 17, 2009)

One country POTUS might ask advice from is Russia, who fought a bloody, protracted war in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989 that ended in painful stalemate. This war, too, was premised on political hegemony in the region (installing socialism) and protecting Soviet interests (oil and gas), and it was a dismal failure, a source of considerable shame to Russians who refer to it as “our Vietnam” and were still complaining bitterly about it in 1999 when I was as student in Moscow, where amputee-veterans begged for spare rubles in the subway stations, a daily sight that I’ve never forgotten. The initial invasion employed a staggering 80,000 troops, and though later deployments swelled above 100,000, a vast numerical advantage and obvious technological superiority were not enough to subdue the anti-communist Mujahideen, who with covert American funds, arms, and CIA-training, brought the Soviet colossus to its knees, and sent 14,000 young Russians home in body bags and many more wounded, maimed, diseased, and addicted to drugs. Afghanistan’s casualty figures, as might be expected, were measured in millions.

In his last overseas trip to Iraq and Afghanistan, the former POTUS – whose understanding of Afghanistan seemed to be shaped more by The Kite Runner than daily intelligence briefings – participated in a final press availability with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Both presidents fielded a question similar to the one Ed Henry asked our current POTUS two weeks ago. Karzai’s answer was instructive:

Well, sir, Afghanistan is in a cooperative arrangement with the United States and the rest of the international community. The decision in Afghanistan is to continue our cooperation with the international community until we have defeated terrorism and extremism and the threat that emanates from them to us, to our neighbors, and to the rest of the world. And Afghanistan will not allow the international community to leave it before we are fully on our feet, before we are strong enough to defend our country, before we are powerful enough to have a good economy, and before we have taken from President Bush and the next administration billions and billions of more dollars – [laughter] – no way that they can let you go. (December 15, 2008)

Undoubtedly, this ranks as one of those “serious jokes” that only a supremely educated, polyglot, political survivor like Karzai could pull off without controversy, but its potential for veracity bears our attention. Karzai, whose popularity is waning, is up for reelection in August, and the supplemental U.S. troops are said to be purposed with securing a modicum of stability in preparation for those elections. At any rate, the announcement of a Canadian withdrawal is an early (if ten years into the conflict can be called “early”) but telling sign of what this “good” war might become in short order: a political and economic (not to mention humanitarian) catastrophe, a quagmire of historic proportions. Even if POTUS can’t be expected to remember and learn from the misadventures of superpowers past in Afghanistan, at least the CIA – who possess the unique benefit of having worked on both sides of bin Laden and other proto-Al Qaida militants – can. Let us hope they advise POTUS well.

“Wars, Guns, and Votes” by Paul Collier

by Joshua H. Liberatore

The subtitle of Oxford economist Paul Collier’s new book, Wars, Guns, and Votes, reveals its principal appeal of timeliness: “Democracy in Dangerous Places.” (In fact, if I’d been his editor at HarperCollins, I would have made that the title and scrapped the gimmicky triad, which in any case has already been used in Jared Diamond’s bestselling Guns, Germs, and Steel.) As we continue to confront the foreign policy disasters presented by the twin wars “on terror” in Afghanistan and Iraq, failed experiments in forced nation-building and democratization cannot be far from our minds, nor should they be, since, like it or not, we are responsible for the actions of our government, however misguided, and must own up to their consequences. But Collier focuses his analysis on the broader trends of democracy’s varied potential in the countries comprising what he calls “the bottom billion,” the one billion poorest, most oppressed people in the world. For his argument, sub-Saharan African countries – rather than neoconservative playgrounds in the Middle East – provide illustrative examples of the specific ways in which a rush to democracy in poor, unsafe, and recently decolonized places can often lead to results that are not only disappointing to liberal ideologues and conservative universalists in the West but also functionally pernicious, yielding conditions and precedents often far worse than those fostered under the unsavory but pragmatic dictatorships or oligarchies we reactively distrust. We in the United States don’t much like to admit some of those unpleasant realities, but the more we turn a blind eye to the inherent vulnerabilities of the democratic principles so cherished in our national discourse – elections, power-sharing, diversity, plurality – the more we will damage the potential for the world’s poorest and most insecure societies to raise themselves out of their despondent and perilous patterns of self-government.

    It would be tedious to rehearse all of Collier’s conclusions, which range from the self-evident to the truly provocative, but a brief sample will suffice as a prelude to a direct encounter with the book. First, democracy and its trappings often make insecure societies – Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana are illustrative here – fundamentally less secure and prosperous. Elections are messy affairs, and the necessity of garnering votes and popularity can encourage bad behavior among unscrupulous politicians. In fact, career dictators who crave the legitimacy of a democratic platform may resort to the worst kind of corruption (vote buying, patronage, and nepotism), extortion (voter intimidation), and outright fraud (ballot manipulation) in the process of making the transition. As an example of the full suite of such nefarious practices in action, witness Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

    Second, democracy without accountability is worse than functional dictatorship, partly because disaffected populations often choose to arm themselves in rebellion or support enterprising partisans who do so on their behalf, leading to greater violence and, potentially, civil war. Armed rebellion can occur under harsh authoritarian rule too, it will be argued, but there’s not question that a disappointing outcome on election day, after the intense rivalries necessary for proper democratic competition, may often devolve into the ugly factionalism normally suppressed by despots. The utter breakdown of order in Nigeria and Kenya leading up to and following elections are cases in point.

    Third, diversity in small places is often dangerous and destabilizing. Collier describes public goods such as security as “economies of scale,” and as such, small countries – not in population but in economic girth – have a hard time managing the necessary pluralities of democratic rule. When diverse ethnic groups compete for scarce resources, under straightened circumstances (famine, drought, price-wars), competitive politics may organize along (and capitalize on the emotions of) tribal loyalties. Genocide and civil war in Rwanda and Congo, respectively, are brutal examples of what can happen when small societies fail to achieve public goods like security.

    Finally, democracy is quite likely to make already poor countries more vulnerable and fragile. The institutions that make healthy, mature democracies function smoothly and equitably take time and, it turns out, extensive resources to achieve. Neither of these elements has been successfully substituted by international aid, to the dismay of rich donor nations. In fact, one of Collier’s most interesting findings is the specific link between stable democracy and economic development; statistics and modeling reveal that democracy is dangerous and unstable in countries with a GDP per capita of $2,600 or less. In other words, only after GDP per capita reaches $2,700 does democracy become a viable and stabilizing regime. China, of course, is a notable exception to this paradigm, and Collier does well to recognize it as such. As China continues to develop at impressive rates of growth and income is shared more broadly, more and more pressure may be exacted on the socialist oligarchy to yield democratic advances. If Collier is right, China’s failure to do so could be explosive.

    It must be said that although Wars, Guns, and Votes proves itself an accessible and readable work intended for a general audience, Collier’s methods are statistical and mathematical, based on extensive case studies, massive international data bases, and firsthand field research. He works with a dazzling array of talented, young political scientists and economists from around the world, and unlike many scholars of his stature, is happy to give them their share of the credit for every insight his book furnishes. His book is, on the whole, a very humble account of ideas in discovery, theories in development, self-consciously untainted by Ivory Tower arrogance or abstruse jargon. Peppering his discussions with tangential notes on the competitive, merciless atmosphere of academic scholarship, Collier seems almost at pains to remind us that what he’s offering us is as tentative and refutable as the electoral exercises of the bottom billion. Moreover, his writing style is a quirky mixture of tender familiarity and detached candor that may put off some readers; at times, stylistic idiosyncrasies such as his loose paragraphing, too liberal use of colons, and penchant for anecdotal asides puzzled me, but in the end I found them charming. On the whole, the book provides a wide-ranging and instructive examination of contemporary political economy in the world’s toughest places and gives us a much-needed antidote to discredited rhetoric about the “blessings of liberty” and our deleterious attempts to export them abroad.

POTUS and the Road Show

by Joshua H. Liberatore

In order to build pressure on both houses of Congress to pass the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, POTUS took his show on the road last week, making his case directly to the American people, a White House overture always fraught with that predictable array of small-town glory, logistical excess, and some private shame so particular to our goofy nation, which columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr., has presciently labeled “the United States of the Aggrieved.” In this endeavor, POTUS clearly draws on his experience as a former community organizer, not to mention two full years on the campaign trail, and seems gladly to put himself in the presence of what my father-in-law lovingly calls “the heartbeat.” That said, the national heartbeat, though it throbs in evidence of life, is sometimes very difficult to interpret in the finer points. In Elkhart, Indiana, POTUS did his level best:

Q. So I would hope in your philosophy of trying to kick-start the economy that the money gets directly to the people who are – have homes that are foreclosed, the people that have lost jobs. To try to give to a bank and give a low interest rate, and the person whose home has been foreclosed on don’t have a job, don’t help anybody. It’s a sale that nobody can take advantage of because you ain’t got no money. So I would hope and I pray that you would support the people who got you into the office – we, the people, not the fat cat – [laughter] – we, the people – to where that the money gets directly into the hands of the people who are hurting, to where that we don’t have to worry about going to the State, going to the Federal Government, standing in line somewhere. Send that check to our mailbox. [Applause] Amen, amen.

The President. Let me respond . . .

Q. So we can take it to the bank and pay that mortgage. Thank you.

The President. Let me – can everybody hear me? Hold on a second. Testing, testing. How’s that? All right. Well, let me respond in a couple of ways. Number one, when it comes to tax cuts, you are exactly right that instead of providing tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, what I’ve been pushing in this plan is to make sure that the tax cuts goes to working families. That is not only good for those families, it’s actually good for the economy, because when you give a tax break to working families who are struggling, they will spend it on buying a new coat for the kids, or making sure that they get that car repaired that they use to get to work. When you give it to the wealthier families, they just put it away somewhere, and so it doesn’t circulate in the economy. So, tax cuts targeted to working families are the most effective means of stimulus that we can provide to the economy. (February 9, 2009)

Listening to POTUS finesse his pointed answers, often in reply to a perplexing mush of half-formed notions and generalities, I was gently reminded of my first, nervous year teaching high school, when it seemed that with so many good questions to be asked, fruitful topics to discuss, one merely fielded comments, comments from which one had to fashion in turn some kind of constructive discourse, something, well, teachable. This is a frightening proposition at times, but for his part, POTUS has proved himself a most worthy and patient Socratic, finding in even the most awkward and confused utterances some kernel of rational concern.

At other times, POTUS faced veiled hostility, and parried it with accomplished grace and admirable good humor:

Q. Thank you. My question is, you have – my name is Tara. You have come to our county and asked us to trust you, but those that you have appointed to your Cabinet are not trustworthy and can’t handle their own budget and taxes.

Audience members. Boo!

The President. No, no, no, this is a legitimate – this is a legitimate question.

Q. So I’m one of those that thinks you need to have a beer with Sean Hannity. So tell me why, from my side, we can understand . . .

Audience members. Boo!

The President. No, that’s okay. That’s okay. No, no, look, I think it was a perfectly legitimate question. First of all, I appoint – I’ve appointed hundreds of people, all of whom are outstanding Americans who are doing a great job. There are a couple who had problems before they came into my administration in terms of their taxes. Look – and I think this is a legitimate criticism that people have made, because you can’t expect one set of folks to not pay their taxes when everybody else is paying theirs. So I think that’s a legitimate concern.

I will tell you that the individuals at issue here, I know them personally, and I think these were honest mistakes. And I made sure they were honest mistakes beforehand. And one of the things I’ve discovered is, if you’re not going to appoint anybody whose ever made a mistake in your life, then you’re not going to have anybody taking your jobs. So . . . [applause]. But having said that, what I did acknowledge, and I said it publicly on just about every TV station, is something that you probably sometimes don’t hear from politicians, which is: I made a mistake. And that, because I don’t want to send the signal that they’re two sets of rules. (February 9, 2009)

In this exchange, we couldn’t help but notice a fascinating novelty: POTUS lightly scolded his audience. When the previous POTUS lost grip on his crowd – whether troops chanting “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” or shouting “Hooah” at every mention of one’s specific battalion or feisty whistle-stop faithfuls hissing at references to John Kerry’s swift-boat patriotism – he seemed almost to encourage the interruptions, even feeding them at times, all with a sinister grimace, like the C-student fanning the flames of conflagration, while his perspiring pedagogue struggles to get control of the classroom.

But to return to Elkart, and the insightful suggestion that POTUS pour libations with Sean Hannity, POTUS almost seemed to welcome the challenge, and he quickly and nimbly silenced the heckling and proceeded with his business, apparently unfazed by the spirited current of discontent betrayed by the very murmurs he did not hide from. Facing the plebs can be a messy affair, as his former rival, John McCain, learned on the campaign trail when he dismissed a confused woman who worried that the Democrats had nominated “an Arab” (she meant “Muslim,” but in either case she was wrong) by telling her, “No, ma’am, he’s a decent man, he’s a family man,” thus implying that neither Arabs nor Muslims could aspire to either category. At a similar moment of unscripted and unholy tension, our now sitting POTUS simply told his audience to behave and confronted the issue directly. And having reassumed his command of the discourse, POTUS brought levity back into the auditorium.

Now, with respect to Sean Hannity, I didn’t know that he had invited me for a beer. [Laughter] But I will take that under advisement. [Laughter] Generally, his opinion of me does not seem to be very high, but I’m always good for a beer, so . . . [laughter].

The next stop, in Fort Myers, Florida, POTUS comforted an emotional, elderly woman who confessed that she was homeless and pleaded for help.

Q. Thank you very much. I first want to say I respect you, and I am so grateful for you.

The President. Thank you.

Q. I’ve been praying for you.

The President. I believe in prayer, so I appreciate that.

Q. I have an urgent need on unemployment and homelessness, a very small vehicle for my family and I to live in. We need urgent – and the housing authority has 2-year waiting lists. And we need something more than a vehicle and the parks to go to. We need our own kitchen and our own bathroom. Please help.

The President. Well, I – listen, I – what’s your name? What’s your name?

Q. It’s Henrietta Hughes.

The President. Okay, Ms. Hughes. Well, we’re going to do everything we can to help you. But there are a lot of people like you. And we’re going to do everything we can, all right? But the – I’ll have my staff talk to you after this, after the town hall, all right? (February 10, 2009)

Ms. Hughes, it turns out, didn’t really have a question, and POTUS had the good instincts not to offer a politician’s contrivance where none was appropriate. He merely hugged her, and offered to solicit a proper follow-up. Later in the road show, when hugs wouldn’t do, though, POTUS maintained his poise as a hyperactive youth praised God and wondered if POTUS could persuade his employer, McDonald’s, to start offering health benefits.

Q. All right, Mr. President, my name is Julio Osegueda. I’m currently a student at Edison State College in my second semester. And, okay, I’ve been at the same job, which is McDonald’s, for 4 ½ years because of the fact that I can’t find another job. Now, with the fact that I’ve been there for as long as I’ve been there, do you have any plan or any idea of making one that has been there for a long time receive any better benefits than what they’ve already received?

The President. Well, I tell you what. First of all, a couple things I’d like to say. Number one, the fact that you are working as hard as you’re working at a job that I know doesn’t always pay as well as some other jobs, I think that’s a source of pride for you that shows that you’re doing the right thing. Now, the second thing is, is that you will actually benefit from the tax breaks that we’re talking about, so you’ll be able to keep a little bit of extra money because we’re going to offset your payroll tax. That’s going to help. I don’t – I assume that you’re not getting health care through your job, and so one of the things that we want to do is reform the health care system so that you all have access to health care in your job. But the thing that I’m really interested in is, you say you’re going to school, what are you studying?

Q. I’m looking to study and majoring in communications. Hopefully, being a broadcaster or a disc jockey.

The President. Well, you sound like you’ve got good communications skills.

Q. Thank you so much.

The President. So part of what we want to do is we want to make it easier for you to afford going to college by giving you this refundable tax credit for your tuition. Because young people like Julio, who have that much enthusiasm and that much energy, we’ve got to make sure that we are giving them a pathway so that they can educate themselves and go as far as their dreams take them.

In fact, young Julio’s enthusiasm was so palpable and apparently genuine that it earned him brief, if dubious, fame as a YouTube sensation, not to mention a one-day gig as an announcer for a local sporting event. Though Osegueda still lacks health insurance, and for the near future anyway, will continue to lack it, POTUS crafted his wrap-up to the forum on a high note of optimism.

Meanwhile, at the Federal Register, contrasts with the former POTUS were not far from our lips or minds as we approached the prodigious task of editing two, hour-long, “town hall” gatherings, a prime time press conference, and policy pitches at Caterpillar, Inc., in East Peoria, IL, and a highway construction site in Springfield, VA. In the midst of our labors, what we noticed was a POTUS anxious to build a little grassroots enthusiasm for a politically divisive – and stupefyingly expensive – piece of legislation, his first major “test” as President. What we noticed was the practiced comfort he displayed in front of some uncommonly rowdy audiences. What we noticed was his studied, if not native, confidence in responding to all registers of the human comedy: the inarticulate and the vulgar, the sincere and the spastic. If that’s not the mark of a uniquely gifted POTUS, I don’t know what is.

POTUS Controls the Narrative

by Joshua H. Liberatore

Like it or not, when you’re in a position as singular and scrutinized as POTUS is, relations with the Media are a big part of your daily labors. The relationship is often collegial and symbiotic, at times jocular, at others contentious, and sometimes openly hostile. In any case, the newspapers and network broadcasters that once proudly called themselves “the government’s watchdog” – as we learned in high school government class, a concept that always confused me, since a watchdog’s job is to protect and guard – do achieve a kind of unprecedented access to POTUS, traveling with him around the country and world, waiting in the wings at each public appearance, and chomping at the bit for the occasional press conference. The skill with which POTUS and his communications team “handle” this relationship can make or break a reputation, sully or halo an entire administration. Let’s take a brief look at how our current POTUS is managing so far.POTUS made his prime time debut on the networks during none other than Super Bowl Sunday, for which he granted an exclusive interview with Matt Lauer of NBC’s “Today”. What did Mr. Lauer make of such a golden opportunity? It’s difficult to say. The raw numbers tell one story. The full transcript of their conversation, released by the White House Press Office after the interview aired, reveals a lengthy, wide-ranging dialogue, lasting a full 40 minutes. The version that NBC viewers received on their magical screens was just under 14 minutes, split into two, tightly edited segments. In the spirit of modernism, I offer you a sample of just some of the more salient “deleted scenes”.

When asked about his then apparent failure to achieve bipartisan support for the economic recovery and stimulus package, POTUS said:

Oh, listen, it’s only been 10 days. People have to recognize that it’s going to take some time for trust to be built not only between Democrats and Republicans, but between Congress and the White House, between the House and the Senate. You know, we’ve had a dysfunctional political system for a while now.

To NBC viewers, this might have sounded like a defensive posture, a disclaimer that lofty campaign rhetoric was falling flat amid the cold realities of Congressional negotiations. But in the unaired version that we published, POTUS offered a broader explanation, going on to say:

And the fact that we have been able to move what is by all accounts a historic piece of legislation through this quickly, and that the Senate is having a serious debate about it, and we still expect it to be on my desk for signature before President’s Day, is quite an achievement. But it’s going to take time for people to start getting used to the fact that we don’t have to score political points on every issue. Once in a while, we can take the politics out of it and just focus on getting the job done for the American people. (February 1, 2009)

Most of which, some two weeks later, turns out to be true. Another example on the same subject, which NBC’s editors gave pride of place, came in response to Mr. Lauer’s question about whether POTUS had an “exit strategy” for the government’s massive injections of capital into the private economy:

Look, I’m at the start of my administration. One nice thing about the situation I find myself in is that I will be held accountable.

But POTUS said a lot more than that. Before stressing his accountability with such terse confidence (as the aired version suggested), POTUS provided some policy details that are apparently too technical for television audiences – especially, on Super Bowl Sunday – to be trusted with:

Well, if we are doing things properly, then what you’ll start seeing is slowly trust get rebuilt, banks’ balance sheets will start to strengthen; they’ll start lending to each other; they’ll start lending to companies; they’ll start lending to small businesses. There will be some institutions that continue to be weak, and we’re going to have to do something with them. Over time, as the market confidence is restored, then what we can do is start getting rid of some of these assets, some of the stock the taxpayers now have in some of these companies start being worth more. We sell them off to private parties, and taxpayers can recoup that money. So, you know, it’s going to have to happen in stages. The key thing, I think, for the public right now is they have to know that I’m going to be spending all my time making sure that their money is not wasted, because I’m going to be, ultimately, accountable. (February 1, 2009)

A final egregious example involved the closure of Guantánamo Bay’s detention facilities, a subject whose details did not suggest riveting content to NBC’s editors. In the aired version, POTUS simply said, with admirable economy:

It’s the right thing to do. Ultimately, it will make us safer. You’ve already seen in the reaction around the world a different sense of America by us taking this action.

In the transcript, POTUS flanked the above sentences with the following meaty nourishment:

Let me say this. We had a long campaign between myself and John McCain. One thing we did not disagree on-in fact, something that John McCain was as adamant as I was, was that we needed to close Guantánamo.
[. . . .]
Now, is it going to be easy? No, because we’ve got a couple of hundred of hardcore militants that, unfortunately, because of some problems that we had previously in gathering evidence, we may not be able to try in ordinary courts, but we don’t want to release. How we structure that is something that I’m going to do carefully. Our lawyers are reviewing it. I have absolute confidence that, ultimately, we’re going to be able to find a mechanism, with the cooperation of the international community, with the cooperation of some very smart Republicans, like Lindsey Graham, a former JAG [Navy lawyer] who knows this stuff well. I have confidence that we’re going to be able to find a solution to this problem. (February 1, 2009)

Lighten up, Mr. Editor, right? After all, television viewers – and I am not one, so forgive my naiveté – are used to this kind of production. What we see is always a mash-up of what actually got taped. So what’s the big deal? Well, besides modifying the tone and nuance of what POTUS actually said, NBC’s chopped-down-and-rebuilt version, which sometimes broke POTUS off mid-sentence and patched in a later (or earlier) utterance, necessitated a strict limitation of content, narrowing the range of subjects considerably. From a conversation that surveyed Afghanistan and Iraq policy to the urgency of bipartisanship and economic stabilization to POTUS’s impressive knowledge of football (even this got cut!), television viewers were treated to a human-interest montage that dealt with the comparative advantages of living with one’s mother-in-law, Sasha’s peanut butter sandwiches, POTUS’s cherished BlackBerry, and the cover of US Weekly on which a husky Jessica Simpson replaces the cropped-out POTUS in the photo of the First Family. There’s a reason, it seems, that the White House released its own transcript, unusual in the case of network interviews.

On a final note, one of the subjects scrapped on NBC’s cutting room floor was the former “war on terror,” a designation that POTUS rightly eschews. Later that week, CNN’s Anderson Cooper – whom my coevals and I fondly remember from his pre-gray, early days at ChannelOne, the educational news network that began pumping into high school classrooms all over Freedom’s Land in the early 1990s – drew POTUS out on this notable change of diction.

Cooper: I’ve noticed you don’t use the term “war on terror.” I think I read an article that you’ve only used it once since inauguration. Is that conscious? Is there something about that term you find objectionable or not useful?

The President: Well, you know, I think it is very important for us to recognize that we have a battle or a war against some terrorist organizations, but that those organizations aren’t representative of a broader Arab community, Muslim community. I think we have to – you know, words matter in this situation, because one of the ways we’re going to win this struggle is through the battle of hearts and minds.

Cooper: So that’s not a term you’re going to be using much in the future?

The President: You know, what I want to do is make sure that I’m constantly talking about al Qaida and other affiliated organizations because we, I believe, can win over moderate Muslims to recognize that that kind of destruction and nihilism ultimately leads to a dead end and that we should be working together to make sure that everybody has got a better life. (February 3, 2009)

Even though CNN’s transcript was not an official White House release (and thus, we did not publish it), we dutifully took special notice of this colloquy. For the past eight years, our outfit has used, per obligation, “war on terror” in headings and indexes as a convenient (if inaccurate) shorthand for what the former POTUS was always struggling to describe with clarity. In deference to the subtler tones of the new POTUS, we have now forked the old lump designation into two separate categories: “global terrorism” and “military operations”. POTUS has given us license to pursue greater specificity, and we are grateful for the privilege. What’s in a name, you ask? As fair Verona’s “star-crossed lovers” learned the hard way, and as POTUS himself appears to understand, names can mean the difference between a plausible romantic adventure and a painful “plague on both [our] houses,” but only if you are in control of the narrative.

POTUS Speaks Dickensian

by Joshua H. Liberatore

We at the Federal Register are all but enraptured with the rich prose that has been issuing forth, with such apparent ease and confidence, from the mouth of our new Explainer in Chief. At times in fact, editorially speaking, we feel superfluous, punctuationally feckless, as all our fears of bureaucratic redundancy, having emerged during the campaign season and reached full bloom post-election, come to fruition with every fresh utterance. In short, POTUS’s oratory seems positively inspired. Recall that initially daunting but absolutely elegant opening paragraph of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

I will never forget reading those charming lines in my sophomore year of high school and thinking some combination of Isn’t that a run-on sentence? and Will I be able to read this whole book? But even in that superficial and inexperienced first reading, I came to realize that great prose need not always be readily diagrammable, as our erstwhile pedant would have us believe. And, in fact, on closer inspection, Dickens’s structure reveals itself to be perfectly lucid, its constituent parts flowing from breath to breath with practiced grace.

In his first Weekly Address (historically a radio broadcast, but now enhanced with a Youtube-friendly video component), POTUS evoked a most Dickensian flourish, a measured confidence in the long phrase. We were caught unawares.

No one policy or program will solve the challenges we face right now, nor will this crisis recede in a short period of time. But if we act now and act boldly, if we start rewarding hard work and responsibility once more, if we act as citizens and not partisans and begin again the work of remaking America, then I have faith that we will emerge from this trying time even stronger and more prosperous than we were before. (January 24, 2009)

Long used to the stutter-laden, fragmentary, and disjointed syntax of the former POTUS, we are confronting our own transition in process, as our hard-earned habits – the liberal deployment of semicolons, the reluctant if necessary application of em-dashes, the dreaded acquiescence to subjectless declaratives, the painful acceptance of subject-verb disagreement – nag from the corners of recent memory and give way to a more light-handed protocol. A protocol, it must be said, that bends against everything we’ve come to know about editing oral remarks from the White House. A few examples will suffice as illustrations. The economic crisis, that late-tenure albatross that rendered our previous Oval Officer nearly speechless, if not utterly discombobulated, does not cripple the speech of our current POTUS:

When Alexander Hamilton was sworn in as our first Treasury Secretary, his task was to weave together the disparate debts and economies of various States into one American system of credit and capital markets. More than two centuries later, that system is now in serious jeopardy. It has been badly weakened by an era of irresponsibility, a series of imprudent and dangerous decisions on Wall Street, and an unrelenting quest for profit with too little regard for risk, too little regulatory scrutiny, and too little accountability. The result’s been a devastating loss of trust and confidence in our economy, our financial markets, and our Government. And that era must end right now, and I believe it can. (January 26, 2009)

And more recently:

The economic crisis we face is unlike any we’ve seen in our lifetime. It’s a crisis of falling confidence and rising debt, of widely distributed risk and narrowly concentrated reward, a crisis written in the fine print of subprime mortgages, on the ledger lines of once mighty financial institutions, and on the pink slips that have upended the lives of so many people across this country and cost the economy 2.6 million jobs last year alone. (February 4, 2009)

Clearly, we aren’t the only ones making this transition. The White House stenographers, who follow POTUS around and transcribe his speeches with such admirable fidelity, are not political appointees. Like other highly-skilled, technically-trained professionals (the kitchen staff, the IT folks, the grounds and maintenance crew) on the Executive payroll, stenographers get to stick around from administration to administration, making stylistic adjustments to their craft to suit the official dictates and personal proclivities of the new POTUS. They too are used to a different regime. They too are acclimatizing to new demands.

We can witness the transition faced by these faithful scribes – whose job is simply to record, not to edit – in the following example, which was full of extraneous dashes and other punctuation when it arrived in rough transcript form. Rather than adding punctuation to create sense, our task was to remove it where sense was already deliberately structured and paced. Our task, in other words, was to let POTUS be POTUS.

The businesses that are shedding jobs to stay afloat, they can’t afford inaction or delay. The workers who are returning home to tell their husbands and wives and children that they no longer have a job, and all those who live in fear that their job will be next on the cutting blocks, they need help now. They are looking to Washington for action, bold and swift. And that is why I hope to sign an American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan into law in the next few weeks. (January 28, 2009)

In the first two sentences, POTUS employs a few rhetorical sleights of hand worthy of our attention. First, front-loaded relative clauses delay the action of the main verbs, building interest in the agency and weight of “businesses” and “workers”. Second, an emphatic repetition of his grammatical subject in three separate independent clauses, unified by the single pronoun “they,” organizes a complex relationship while giving the impression that each distinct stakeholder’s needs cannot be isolated from the web of responsibility that joins them in a single system. And finally, a tidy parallelism gives the entire passage its overall fluency and rhythm. Strunk and White are smiling proudly from their happy perches in linguistic Paradise.

One point I want to make is that all of us are going to have responsibilities to get this economy moving again. And when I saw an article today indicating that Wall Street bankers had given themselves $20 billion worth of bonuses, the same amount of bonuses as they gave themselves in 2004, at a time when most of these institutions were teetering on collapse and they are asking for taxpayers to help sustain them, and when taxpayers find themselves in the difficult position that if they don’t provide help that the entire system could come down on top of our heads, that is the height of irresponsibility. It is shameful. (January 29, 2009)

Again, when the raw transcript for the above remarks arrived, it was full of dashes marking off the sudden and lengthy parenthetical substructures of POTUS’s hefty sentence. Like the transcribers, we’ve grown so accustomed to using dashes for their less laudable purpose – to indicate a self-interruption, extended false start, or grammatical fragment – that we hardly recognized the syntactical firmness of this passage, relying only on a few simple commas. Our first instinct – again, merely out of habit – was to retain the dashes and add semicolons to simplify the structure and shorten the sentence for the sake of the reader, when all we needed to do was let the Dickensian prose spill forth and trust the clarity of the embedded design. How’s that for the “superlative degree of comparison” in this our humble function!

The Prospects of Renewable Energy in Michigan

by Slawomir Gyrga

Michigan lags behind state leadership in deployment of wind energy. The state currently has nearly 130 megawatts (MW) of installed wind energy, but is ranked 22nd in existing capacity. Michigan has the potential to install 7,460 MW, which would place it 14th in this category. Governor Jennifer Granholm has been publically supportive of renewable energy in general, but the state missed an opportunity to stimulate growth in this sector by passing a weak renewable energy mandate in 2008.The Michigan legislature conceded to utility concerns rather than thinking creatively about how to jumpstart a failing auto industry and the infrastructure that supports it. (Michigan, believe it or not, actually has a decent manufacturing base for the solar energy industry.) Michigan can still have an impact, but a lot of the wind energy industry’s manufacturing plants have already been sited in other states, a missed opportunity for a state that is facing factory closures and a rapidly shrinking economy.

    Until we have stricter term limits for elected officials I don’t think we’ll see the change we need. Career politicians have been reluctant, historically, to support tough new laws, especially when it requires their constituents to foot the bill. National efforts to mandate or encourage renewable energy investment have fallen victim to this practice, most notably in the southeast and in states with abundant stocks of fossil fuels. Despite this trend, and an even more troublesome “protectionism” in the oil and gas industries, 28 states have pioneered mandates that require utilities to include renewable energy sources in their generation portfolio. The fossil fuel industry has been getting away with ecological murder for decades by not having to pay for externalities, costs that, if added to the price of basic utilities, would reveal the true cost of present consumption habits. This omission, which amounts to a price distortion, combined with government support in the form of Federal subsidies and tax incentives, creates an unfair competitive advantage for the fossil fuel industry. It is amazing that a mature industry – harmful to human health to boot – continues to receive subsidies from the U.S. government, tantamount, in fact, to providing coupons for the purchase of cigarettes or fast food. Anyone who has a few minutes to look at the research budget for different energy sources supplied by the U.S. government will immediately discover a fundamental imbalance in its energy priorities.

    Yes, currently, the deployment of renewable energy is expensive. It also requires cost-intensive upgrades to our nation’s transmission and grid systems. However, strip the fossil fuel industry of government tax breaks and force energy providers to pay for externalities and all of a sudden a level playing field obtains. The price of energy is going to increase regardless of whether the energy generation is coming from renewable or fossil fuel sources. Everyone needs to understand that. The general public may look at fossil fuels and think they are inexpensive, but the true costs are being paid for with our tax dollars, via subsidies, personal health insurance, environmental remediation, and other vehicles. Similar to shopping at Wal-Mart, clinging to traditional fossil fuels allows you to see savings on your receipts, but who is really paying for the lower prices?

    Moving to a “green” economy is going to hurt only in the sense that it will force uncomfortable behavioral changes. People will have to reevaluate their lifestyles, which eventually will put pressure on manufacturers. We saw this briefly in 2008 when gasoline prices spiked. Statistics revealed that consumers avoided SUVs and car manufacturers scrambled for more efficient models and began to advertise economy cars heavily. Examples such as these will trickle through our economy and change our lifestyles. Is it a bad thing? I really don’t think so. On the contrary, this pressure will spur greater investment in public transportation, a renewed interest in urban living, and more energy efficient appliances and technology, for example. Will hundreds of truck drivers lose their jobs? Probably. Instead, maybe they’ll work on trains or install solar panels for a living. Truck drivers aren’t entitled to drive trucks, in my opinion. We shouldn’t avoid necessary policy changes because of a fear of job losses. Find a new job, partner.

    To return to the case of Michigan, yes, Michigan can participate in the green energy economy. It is feasible, for example, to locate offshore wind turbines in the Great Lakes, which would be a logical manufacturing niche for the state. Offshore wind energy has tremendous potential precisely because it harvests strong and unimpeded wind resources and at the same time can potentially avoid complicated permitting processes and NIMBY resistance. Right now such installment isn’t very economic, though; especially, since the onshore market is fairly unsaturated. Not until after the good onshore sites have been developed and our country levies a carbon tax should anyone expect to see a significant investment in the Great Lakes offshore market. Right now, the renewable energy industry expects offshore wind to be two to three years away, with the first projects coming on line off the northeast coastline. Since it takes years to develop a project and a long lead time to successfully ramp up manufacturing lines, however, it does make sense for the Great Lakes states to continue to study the potential for it.

    It was reported in this week’s news that the United States installed and generated over 8300 MW of wind energy in 2008. This is no doubt a terrific accomplishment, but I’m nearly certain that my excitement will be attenuated at best after seeing this growth graphed next to overall demand. New global energy demand continues to outpace renewable energy deployment, and that is a problem. The renewable energy industry needs strong policy signals from Federal and state authorities in order to invest the necessary capital and reverse our dependence on fossil fuels. It won’t be easy, it won’t be comfortable, but it is necessary.