POTUS Gets Angry

by Joshua H. Liberatore

Not famous to date for losing his cool, our POTUS nevertheless knows how to bring the hammer once in a while, when the occasion permits it. And when his motorcade landed him at the National Archives and Records Administration (different office, we were not invited) last Friday morn to talk about Guantanamo and other failures, POTUS seemed pissed. Understandably so! His own Senate – now nearly filibuster-proof for the Donkeys thanks to the probable ascension of Minnesota’s Al Franken – had just rejected (by a vote of 90 to 6) the White House plan to shut down the controversial detention camp in Cuba and distribute its prisoners among domestic Federal “super-max” lockups. Just imagine the nerve. Neither as popular nor as handsome as their Presidential capo and de facto leader of the Party, Democratic Senators wilted under constituent pressure voicing worry over the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to facilities on American soil. First, the philosophical underpinnings of POTUS’s righteous indignation, visibly aglow in the dim Rotunda, America’s founding documents in the background:

I’ve studied the Constitution as a student; I’ve taught it as a teacher; I’ve been bound by it as a lawyer and a legislator. I took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution as Commander in Chief. And as a citizen, I know that we must never, ever, turn our back on its enduring principles for expedience sake. I make this claim not simply as a matter of idealism. We uphold our most cherished values not only because doing so is right, but because it strengthens our country and it keeps us safe. Time and again, our values have been our best national security asset in war and peace, in times of ease and in eras of upheaval. (May 22, 2009)

Constitutional idealism aside, apparently “see no evil hear no evil” is a more compelling doctrine for those voters who wrote or called their Senators in nervous palpitations over the prospect of Saudi, Yemeni, or Afghani Islamists sharing cell space with serial rapists and murderers, the dregs of our own homegrown criminal set. The sad truth seems to be that more people feel safe sequestering these captured combatants, many of them scarcely adults, on a dubious naval base abutting a Caribbean nation with which we don’t even have diplomatic relations, where they can be held without cease and interrogated in the peace and quiet that media isolation and geographic distance provide. And though his predecessor apparently didn’t lose any sleep over that arrangement, POTUS is not pleased with the model:

From Europe to the Pacific, we’ve been the nation that has shut down torture chambers and replaced tyranny with the rule of law. That is who we are. And where terrorists offer only the injustice of disorder and destruction, America must demonstrate that our values and our institutions are more resilient than a hateful ideology. After 9/11, we knew that we had entered a new era; that enemies who did not abide by any law of war would present new challenges to our application of the law; that our Government would need new tools to protect the American people, and that these tools would have to allow us to prevent attacks instead of simply prosecuting those who tried to carry them out. (May 22, 2009)

POTUS is no fool, however. He knows that September 11th created (or roused from slumber) many monsters in our national character, not all of them easily voted out of office, many of them stubborn vestiges in his benighted inheritance. Terrorism, after all, has proven extremely effective in most historical contexts. It begets a cycle of revenge, motivated by at first by shock and then sustained fear, both of which feed back into all sorts of Machiavellian rationales that privilege ends over means, euphemistically termed “new tools.” These in turn serve to justify the hatred borne by the Enemy, useful for generating fresh acts of violence. And archivists of all people, as cataloguers of the nation’s dirty secrets past and present, should recognize the pattern. Still, POTUS was kind enough to blame big-G Government:

Unfortunately, faced with an uncertain threat, our Government made a series of hasty decisions. I believe that many of these decisions were motivated by a sincere desire to protect the American people. But I also believe that all too often, our Government made decisions based on fear rather than foresight; that all too often, our Government trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions. Instead of strategically applying our power and our principles, too often we set those principles aside as luxuries that we could no longer afford. And during this season of fear, too many of us – Democrats and Republicans, politicians, journalists, and citizens – fell silent. (May 22, 2009)

We’ve heard it all before, have we? The victor writes the narrative, establishes the nomenclature. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Or even: “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” FDR feared it, we should fear it, and POTUS fears it too.

First, I banned the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques by the United States of America. Now, I know some have argued that brutal methods like waterboarding were necessary to keep us safe. I could not disagree more. As Commander in Chief, I see the intelligence; I bear the responsibility for keeping this country safe. And I categorically reject the assertion that these are the most effective means of interrogation. What’s more, they undermine the rule of law. They alienate us in the world. They serve as a recruitment tool for terrorists and increase the will of our enemies to fight us, while decreasing the will of others to work with America. They risk the lives of our troops by making it less likely that others will surrender to them in battle and more likely that Americans will be mistreated if they are captured. In short, they did not advance our war and counterterrorism efforts; they undermined them. And that is why I ended them once and for all. (May 22, 2009)

Meanwhile, in Dick Cheney’s parallel speech at the American Enterprise Institute, scheduled as a quasi-official response to POTUS’s address from one of the chief architects of the policies under critique, such “tough interrogations” were roundly defended as “legal, essential, justified, successful, and the right thing to do,” of which their executors could be “proud.” The abuses at Abu Ghraib were summarily dismissed in familiar mythical terms as the isolated actions of “a few sadistic prison guards,” creative, overzealous underlings. From documentaries like Taxi to the Dark Side, on the strength of extensive interviews with these underlings, however, a very different picture emerges, one in which techniques inaugurated at Guantanamo made a sinister journey to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, onto Abu Ghraib in Iraq, and back to Guantanamo, in an ugly cycle of revision and augmentation that self-propagated until those damning pictures came out in 2004 and Congress got embarrassed.

There is also no question that Guantanamo set back the moral authority that is America’s strongest currency in the world. Instead of building a durable framework for the struggle against Al Qaida that drew upon our deeply held values and traditions, our Government was defending positions that undermined the rule of law. In fact, part of the rationale for establishing Guantanamo in the first place was the misplaced notion that a prison there would be beyond the law, a proposition that the Supreme Court soundly rejected. Meanwhile, instead of serving as a tool to counter terrorism, Guantanamo became a symbol that helped Al Qaida recruit terrorists to its cause. Indeed, the existence of Guantanamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained. (May 22, 2009)

Cheney disparaged these “liberal” sentiments as “recklessness cloaked in righteousness” and reminded us that it was the tough stuff that helped prevent a major terrorist attack on American soil in the 7 ½ years following September 11th. Am I the only one weary, unimpressed, by this routine boast? After all, there weren’t any major terrorist attacks on our soil between the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and September 11th either, unless of course we count the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, and we must, even though it was planned by a white Christian man from New York. Instead of terrorist attacks, we got two bloated wars that have killed more than double the number of Americans killed on Black Tuesday and a mounting bill that is breaking the bank.

The Supreme Court that invalidated the system of prosecution at Guantanamo in 2006 was overwhelmingly appointed by Republican Presidents, not wild-eyed liberals. In other words, the problem of what to do with Guantanamo detainees was not caused by my decision to close the facility; the problem exists because of the decision to open Guantanamo in the first place. . . . There are no neat or easy answers here. I wish there were. But I can tell you that the wrong answer is to pretend like this problem will go away if we maintain an unsustainable status quo. As President, I refuse to allow this problem to fester; I refuse to pass it on to somebody else. It is my responsibility to solve the problem. Our security interests will not permit us to delay. Our courts won’t allow it, and neither should our conscience. (May 22, 2009)

As for the acceptability of trying terrorist suspects in U.S. courts and relocating prisoners to domestic facilities, I’m afraid I can’t see the basis for fuss or worry. Judging by our incarceration rates – above 3% of the adult population, higher than that of any country in the world, and much, much higher than the rates of other advanced industrial societies – locking people up is one of our true national talents. And though the vast majority of inmates are serving time for minor drug offenses and petty theft (nonviolent crimes), we’ve got plenty of places for the toughest, greasiest, most dangerous characters – including several pre- and post-9/11 terrorists – whom no sane person would tolerate roaming the neighborhood. Will the distribution of 250 captured fanatics to prisons already holding two million-plus convicted criminals even register as more than a drop in the bucket? Certainly, without arms and without the structure and discipline that their cause provided them in the dusty crags of Afghanistan and Babylon, these chaps won’t pose any greater danger than that supplied by your average child molester or gang banger, and probably a lot less. A Federal prison in Terra Haute, IN was good enough for Tim McVeigh, wasn’t it?

Now, as our efforts to close Guantanamo move forward, I know that the politics in Congress will be difficult. These are issues that are fodder for 30-second commercials. You can almost picture the direct mail pieces that emerge from any vote on this issue, designed to frighten the population. I get it. But if we continue to make decisions within a climate of fear, we will make more mistakes. And if we refuse to deal with these issues today, then I guarantee you that they will be an albatross around our efforts to combat terrorism in the future. (May 22, 2009)

But Cheney’s worries about the country going soft balls on the liberals’ watch are misdirected. On the contrary, POTUS has turned up the heat on the Taliban in Afghanistan (and now Pakistan) in a way that might have old Cheney faithfuls like John Yoo and Paul Wolfowitz (now both safely harbored in academia) blushing with envy. POTUS’s new top commander in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal is a hard-piping Special Ops veteran who ran Cheney’s own Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) out of the Pentagon and is reputedly no stranger to “enhanced interrogation techniques.” As for Guantanamo’s remaining prisoners, the course is not yet clear. What’s certain is that if POTUS insists on exorcizing the demons of Guantanamo within this first year in office, as promised, he’ll have to do more than shake his fist at a room full of librarians, records analysts, and historians.

POTUS at Commencement

by Joshua H. Liberatore

POTUS’s first of what will surely be many commencement addresses during his tenure did not come without controversy and plenty of media disgorgement, but he took both opportunities to embrace the hard path that we’ve come to associate with his almost missionary zeal for self-improvement and open acknowledgement of challenge and strife. In the process, POTUS welcomed the rhetorical tensions his appearances seemed to invite and held forth on topics close to his heart. His journey began at Arizona State University, whose regents declined to offer POTUS the customary honorary degree based on the relative skimp – in their judgment – of his resume. But POTUS did more than make light of any potential awkwardness:

Now, in all seriousness, I come here not to dispute the suggestion that I haven’t yet achieved enough in my life. [Laughter] First of all, Michelle concurs with that assessment. [Laughter] She has a long list of things that I have not yet done waiting for me when I get home. But more than that, I come to embrace the notion that I haven’t done enough in my life; I heartily concur. I come to affirm that one’s title, even a title like President of the United States, says very little about how well one’s life has been led; that no matter how much you’ve done or how successful you’ve been, there’s always more to do, always more to learn, and always more to achieve. (May 13, 2009)

In fact, any close study of POTUS’s public remarks in the past few weeks bear out this humble message in more than just outline. More and more, audiences – at events ranging from DNC fundraisers to meetings with foreign heads of state – can hear POTUS offer some version of “pleased but not satisfied, confident but not content.” POTUS is no perfectionist, of course (urging us not “to make the perfect the enemy of the essential” is one of his favorite turns of phrase), but he certainly doesn’t shy from constructive self-laceration either, especially if a larger lesson can be strained from the exhales of criticism. But neither is this mere presidential self-pity, which Clinton long ago turned into a national charade:

And this is not just true for individuals; it’s also true for this Nation. In recent years, in many ways, we’ve become enamored with our own past success, lulled into complacency by the glitter of our own achievements. We’ve become accustomed to the title of “military superpower,” forgetting the qualities that got us there, not just the power of our weapons, but the discipline and valor and the code of conduct of our men and women in uniform. The Marshall Plan and the Peace Corps and all those initiatives that show our commitment to working with other nations to pursue the ideals of opportunity and equality and freedom that have made us who we are, that’s what made us a superpower. (May 13, 2009)

Confronting head-on the very theme of his hosts’ rebuff, as POTUS gradually built his point to the graduates of ASU, he continually returned to the powerful recognition that one’s “body of work” is never complete. Rather than allowing ourselves to wallow under the burden that candid introspection – I am the President and yet haven’t achieved my goals, we are a great power but not the shining beacon we often believe ourselves to be – seems to convey onto our shoulders, we must, as POTUS argued, use certain challenge and apparent defeat to find a new center, a new point of analysis.

So class of 2009, that’s what building a body of work is all about. It’s about the daily labor, the many individual acts, the choices large and small that add up over time, over a lifetime, to a lasting legacy. That’s what you want on your tombstone. It’s about not being satisfied with the latest achievement, the latest gold star, because the one thing I know about a body of work is that it’s never finished. It’s cumulative; it deepens and expands with each day that you give your best, each day that you give back and contribute to the life of your community and your nation. You may have setbacks, and you may have failures, but you’re not done; you’re not even getting started, not by a long shot. (May 13, 2009)

At Notre Dame, where the controversy was not only more acute but the political stakes a lot higher, POTUS employed a similar approach. A virtual storm of hand-wringing and worry had gathered over the past few months since the moment POTUS’s invitation to the country’s most prestigious Catholic university was made public. POTUS’s policies and views concerning abortion and stem cell research made his appearance, many contended, at best inappropriate, at worst sacrilegious. All Catholics, the logic went, would and should take offense, despite the fact that 54 percent of American Catholics voted for POTUS, knowing his positions well in advance. Notre Dame’s own president, Rev. John I Jenkins, did not skirt the issue in his thoughtful introduction:

Most of the debate has centered on Notre Dame’s decision to invite and honor the President; less attention had been focused on the President’s decision to accept. President Obama has come to Notre Dame though we he knows full well that we fully support the Church’s teaching on the sanctity of human life and that we oppose his policies on abortion and embryonic stem cell research. Others might have avoided this venue for that reason. But President Obama is not one who stops talking to those who differ with him. Mr. President, this is a principle we share. (May 17, 2009)

POTUS’s later joked that Father Jenkins “stole all my best lines,” but was visibly gratified that he’d been credited with the good-faith courage to come to an institution formally opposed to a significant (but certainly not defining) part of his platform. Clearly, Jenkins wasn’t hiding from the controversy or the disagreement at its core either. He was, in fact, reiterating the essential discord in a very public way, but positioning it within just the kind of intellectual and moral context POTUS prefers. And POTUS ran with it:

Unfortunately, finding that common ground, recognizing that our fates are tied up, as Dr. King said, in a “single garment of destiny,” is not easy. And part of the problem, of course, lies in the imperfections of man: our selfishness, our pride, our stubbornness, our acquisitiveness, our insecurities, our egos, all the cruelties large and small that those of us in the Christian tradition understand to be rooted in original sin. We too often seek advantage over others. We cling to outworn prejudice and fear those who are unfamiliar. Too many of us view life only through the lens of immediate self-interest and crass materialism, in which the world is necessarily a zero-sum game. The strong too often dominate the weak, and too many of those with wealth and with power find all manner of justification for their own privilege in the face of poverty and injustice. And so, for all our technological and scientific advances, we see here in this country and around the globe violence and want and strife that would seem sadly familiar to those in ancient times. (May 17, 2009)

The principal “outworn prejudice” POTUS had in mind that day, as occasional shouting and some rude heckling in the audience was overwhelmed by cheers and chants of embarrassed but triumphant support, was the notion that just because we disagree doesn’t mean we can’t be civil, just because our ideas clash doesn’t mean we can’t share a space, just because the debate is tough and perhaps irreconcilable doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have it. On the contrary, those are the very debates we must always engage in most vigorously, both in the privacy of our hearts and what Al Gore called in Assault on Reason “the public square”:

The soldier and the lawyer may both love this country with equal passion, and yet reach very different conclusions on the specific steps needed to protect us from harm. The gay activist and the evangelical pastor may both deplore the ravages of HIV/AIDS, but find themselves unable to bridge the cultural divide that might unite their efforts. Those who speak out against stem cell research may be rooted in an admirable conviction about the sacredness of life, but so are the parents of a child with juvenile diabetes who are convinced that their son’s or daughter’s hardships might be relieved. (May 17, 2009)

Some will call this passive naiveté, or the hedging of an Ivory Tower intellectual; some will accuse POTUS of avoiding the issue or playing both sides; some will (and indeed did) not listen or read to his whole speech and contend that he shirked from using the word “abortion” (in fact, he used it seven times). Some will see in POTUS’s words the youthful idealism of the inexperienced community organizer at work, blind to the political realities of his rhetoric. On the contrary, POTUS’s main thrust was notably pragmatic:

That’s when we begin to say, maybe we won’t agree on abortion, but we can still agree that this heart-wrenching decision for any woman is not made casually, that it has both moral and spiritual dimensions. So let us work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions; let’s reduce unintended pregnancies. Let’s make adoption more available. Let’s provide care and support for women who do carry their children to term. Let’s honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion, and draft a sensible conscience clause, and make sure that all of our health care policies are grounded not only in sound science, but also in clear ethics, as well as respect for the equality of women. Those are things we can do. (May 17, 2009)

What do we do when we can’t agree? We must dig deeper. We must shed the masks of ideology and find common ground in specific actions. We must flee the protection of comforting labels – Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative, pro-life and pro-choice. After all, nobody’s calling himself “pro-abortion” or “anti-choice” – the debate would be so much simpler! Otherwise, “the truth eludes us,” as Catholic thinker Thomas Merton warned. POTUS’s broad-minded plea to the class of 2009, at both ASU and Notre Dame, recalls a passage from New Seeds of Contemplation:

Trees and animals have no problem. God makes them what they are without consulting them, and they are perfectly satisfied. With us it is different. God leaves us free to be whatever we like. We can be ourselves or not, as we please. We are at liberty to be real, or to be unreal. We may be true or false, the choice is ours. We may wear now one mask and now another, and never, if we so desire, appear with our own true face. But we cannot make these choices with impunity. Causes have effects, and if we lie to ourselves and to others, then we cannot expect to find truth and reality whenever we happen to want them. If we have chosen the way of falsity we must not be surprised that truth eludes us when we finally come to need it.

Given the tenor of POTUS’s two commencement speeches, and the trying moments that form their thematic backdrop, “we [have] finally come to need it.” The bigger question is: Do we have the guts to use it constructively? For our work is not done.

POTUS the Recruiter

by Joshua H. Liberatore

One of POTUS’s more informal tasks is to provide ad hoc encouragement and motivational support to Us the People. In town hall meetings and other rowdy settings, POTUS often strikes a hortatory tone befitting his community organizer background. He also seeks to draw on his relative youth and his November electoral success among younger voters to engage a new generation of activists and inventors. But POTUS is not advocating that Americans undertake service for its own sake alone. Ever the pragmatist, POTUS is interested in tangible outcomes that will enhance prosperity and well-being all over Freedom’s Land, not just in inner-city youth centers and retirement homes. In his major address on the national economy at Georgetown University, POTUS offered some very specific career advice:

And I’ve asked every American to commit to at least 1 year or more of higher education or career training, and we have provided tax credits to make a college education more affordable for every American, even those who attend Georgetown. And, by the way, one of the changes that I would like to see – and I’m going to be talking about this in weeks to come – is once again seeing our best and our brightest commit themselves to making things: engineers, scientists, innovators. For so long, we have placed at the top of our pinnacle folks who can manipulate numbers and engage in complex financial calculations. And that’s good, we need some of that. [Laughter] But you know what we can really use is some more scientists and some more engineers, who are building and making things that we can export to other countries. (April 13, 2009)

POTUS has a point here, and it’s not just a clever way of assigning more blame for the financial crisis that sent the U.S. economy into a tailspin. His principle concern is the comparatively high proportion of our national income that is based on complex transfers of assets and financial services coupled with the relative dearth in high-tech manufacturing, new product development, and advanced applied research, all areas where the United States once enjoyed a competitive edge. POTUS rightly worries about the broader vulnerabilities inherent in such a distribution of national labor and focus:

It is simply not sustainable to have a 21st century financial system that is governed by 20th century rules and regulations that allowed the recklessness of a few to threaten the entire economy. It is not sustainable to have an economy where in 1 year, 40 percent of our corporate profits came from a financial sector that was based on inflated home prices, maxed-out credit cards, overleveraged banks, and overvalued assets. It’s not sustainable to have an economy where the incomes of the top 1 percent has skyrocketed while the typical working household has seen their incomes decline by nearly $2,000. That’s just not a sustainable model for long-term prosperity. (April 13, 2009)

Most often, however, the tenor of these exhortations is more general and philosophical, emphasizing the moral rewards of a life committed to public service and creative contribution. Even in Europe, POTUS closed his question-and-answer session in Strasbourg, France with a word to civic involvement:

But having said all that, I truly believe that there’s nothing more noble than public service. Now, that doesn’t mean that you have to run for President. . . . You know, you might work for Doctors Without Borders, or you might volunteer for an agency, or you might be somebody working for the United Nations, or you might be the mayor of Strasbourg. [Y]ou might volunteer in your own community. But the point is that what I found at a very young age was that if you only think about yourself – how much money can I make, what can I buy, how nice is my house, what kind of fancy car do I have – that over the long term I think you get bored. . . . I think if you’re only thinking about yourself, your life becomes diminished, and that the way to live a full life is to think about, what can I do for others? How can I be a part of this larger project of making a better world? Now, that could be something as simple as making – as the joy of taking care of your family and watching your children grow and succeed. (April 3, 2009)

The European audience seemed to approve that unusual message coming from the president of a land many on the Continent view with suspicion, on the strength of well-earned stereotypes for tremendous greed and ignorant self-gratification as motivating principles. Thus encouraged, POTUS elaborated his message, which now tilted toward sermonizing:

But I think especially for the young people here, I hope you also consider other ways that you can serve, because the world has so many challenges right now; there’s so many opportunities to make a difference. And it would be a tragedy if all of you who are so talented and energetic, if you let that go to waste, if you just stood back and watched the world pass you by. Better to jump in, get involved. And it does mean that sometimes you’ll get criticized, and sometimes you’ll fail, and sometimes you’ll be disappointed, but you’ll have a great adventure, and at the end of your life, hopefully, you’ll be able to look back and say, I made a difference. (April 3, 2009)

POTUS’s rhetorical outreach isn’t always so pure and high-minded, however. Sometimes his efforts toward recruitment smack – just a whiff perhaps – of the machine politics peculiar to the city he calls home. As his recent appearance at a town hall meeting in Arnold, Missouri demonstrated, you can take POTUS out of Chicago, but you can’t take the Chicago out of POTUS:

Q. My name is Laurel Bonebreak, and I’m a fourth grader. I was curious, how is your administration planning to be more environmentally friendly?

The President. Well, that is just a great question. That is . . . you’re a very poised and articulate fourth grader. Yes, isn’t she impressive? Yes, absolutely. We might have to run you for President some day. (April 29, 2009)

Little Laurel Bonebreak even bears a most suitable name for the old Daley operation, which during reelection years, as I recall from 2003, positions scads of ruddy-faced, leather-jacketed young men with clipboards around the neighborhoods (somewhat ominously termed “precincts”), soliciting signatures of petition to get their man back on the ballot. Signatures! Such a charming conceit really, putting the Daley apparatus on the same level as, say, PETA or Greenpeace. But like the great mayor patriarch, POTUS means business. His army of supporters just keeps on growing and growing. POTUS himself capitalized on the trend for a crucial laugh line at this year’s White House Correspondents Dinner, the annual political roast in which everything seems fair game, both partisans and opponents becoming fat targets:

In the last 100 days, we’ve also grown the Democratic Party by infusing it with new energy and bringing in fresh, young faces like Arlen Specter. [Laughter] Now, Joe Biden rightly deserves a lot of credit for convincing Arlen to make the switch, but Secretary Clinton actually had a lot to do with it too. One day she just pulled him aside, and she said, “Arlen, you know what I always say: ‘If you can’t beat them, join them.’ ” (May 9, 2009)

But like all jokes in which there is a grain of truth – his stinger about Dick Cheney penning a memoir “tentatively titled, ‘How to Shoot Friends and Interrogate People’” is certainly no exception – POTUS’s words carry a serious message of active recruitment to the national and international stages he bestrides like a colossus. Thankfully, we’ve got a few years yet before the clipboards hit the sidewalks in earnest.

POTUS and the Hard Path

by Joshua H. Liberatore

In full recognition of the heaping pile of crises or near-crises on his plate, POTUS has been articulating his philosophy of necessary strife with great clarity of late. In his remarks to employees of the Central Intelligence Agency, where rowdy applause and more than a few “Amens” from the audience presented a somewhat jarring juxtaposition to the Hollywood iconography replete with nerdy analysts and Jack Bauer toughians, POTUS explained that it’s hard, but essential, to keep the balance between ideals and methodologies, especially in these dangerous times:

I understand that it’s hard when you are asked to protect the American people against people who have no scruples and would willingly and gladly kill innocents. Al Qaida is not constrained by a constitution. Many of our adversaries are not constrained by a belief in freedom of speech or representation in court or rule of law. So I’m sure that sometimes it seems as if that means we’re operating with one hand tied behind our back or that those who would argue for a higher standard are naive. I understand that. You know, I watch the cable shows once in a while. (April 20, 2009)

I’d imagine that watching “the cable shows” gives POTUS the feeling of “operating with one had tied behind [his] back,” unable to rebut properly, unwilling to ignore them completely. Even NPR’s “human interest” stories give me that feeling sometimes. But our subject is the maintenance of security amid scruples.

What makes the United States special, and what makes you special, is precisely the fact that we are willing to uphold our values and our ideals even when it’s hard, not just when it’s easy, even when we are afraid and under threat, not just when it’s expedient to do so. That’s what makes us different. So, yes, you’ve got a harder job, and so do I. And that’s okay, because that’s why we can take such extraordinary pride in being Americans. And over the long term, that is why I believe we will defeat our enemies, because we’re on the better side of history. (April 20, 2009)

Given that our statistical record of killing innocent civilians on two fronts is actually far worse than that of the vaguely-defined Enemy, as we are weekly reminded, I’m not sure POTUS’s confidence about America, much less the CIA, being “on the better side of history” is widely shared, even among those who voted for him. But he’s certainly got a point that it is harder to transform, as if by magic, the traditional rage felt in corners of the world with our collective boot on their neck, all the while playing by the rules, at least most of them. Perchance POTUS recognizes that not playing by the rules for so long has only exacerbated or even created that violent, lawless rage. Who knows: adhering to the Geneva Conventions might be worth something after all.

Still, the rigors and virtues of the hard path – his own and the Nation’s – must be on POTUS’s mind a lot lately. Maybe I’m just another amnesiac American, but can anyone remember the trials of George W. Bush’s first 100 days? Bill Clinton’s? I suppose POTUS is wise to ponder his burden a bit in public: the hand dealt him has not been loaded with aces. But we are an impatient people, and our attention span is woefully short for the arc of history. So we need frequent reminders that its being hard is okay. Thus, employees at the FBI were treated to a similar speech:

But after all, that is why America is unique, because of that fundamental belief that we are committed both to our security and to the rule of law, because of that hard-earned truth that we are always stronger when we act in concert with our most deeply held values. I have no illusions that this is simple or easy. Many of you made enormous sacrifices and are incredibly dedicated. Living our values means that we must hold ourselves to higher standard than our enemies. We face a long struggle against a determined adversary. We know that Al Qaida is not constrained by a constitution or by allegiance to anything other than a hateful ideology and a determination to kill as many innocents as possible. But what makes the United States of America so special is precisely the fact that we are willing to uphold our values and our ideals not just when it’s easy, but when it’s hard. We’ve been called to serve in such a time. (April 28, 2009)

As if patching our economic and energy sores weren’t enough, some of POTUS’s best and brightest “called to serve” in the open-ended U.S. war in Afghanistan have undertaken a “hard path” of their own, as some recent footage from Al Jazeera captures in shocking detail. As part of the battle for “hearts and minds” in Muslim Afghanistan, a coterie of Christian soldiers gathered to discuss the most effective ways to distribute Bibles in Pashto and Dari – Afghanistan’s two official languages – to “locals” with whom they have made contact. Westerners attached to the conventional stereotype of Islam as a religion “spread by the sword” and its madrassahs mere weapons arsenals might find themselves appalled at the images of American servicemen, on the taxpayer-funded payroll, planning a proselytizing mission in the field, with machine guns and automatic rifles propped up, boldly visible in the backdrop of this unholy chapel at Bagram Air Force Base. Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has pled ignorance of the case. Meanwhile, the Bibles have apparently been confiscated.

The hard path overseas has been well documented, however, and quite likely we are tired of hearing of it. POTUS has naturally broadened his embrace of difficulty to include domestic concerns as well. Though many of POTUS’s predecessors, from Carter on, have talked about breaking the famous American addiction to fossil fuels, to foreign oil, to automobiles, to all things hydrocarbon, POTUS is taking some concrete steps toward getting us checked into rehab. The intervention begins with simple acknowledgment:

Now, there are those who still cling to the notion that we ought to just continue doing what we do; that . . . Americans like to use a lot of energy, that’s just how we are; that government has neither the responsibility nor the reason to address our dependence on energy sources, even though they undermine our security and threaten our economy and endanger our planet. And then there is this even more dangerous idea, the idea that there’s nothing we can do about it: “Our politics is broken; our people are unwilling to make hard choices.” So politicians decide: “Look, even though we know it’s something that has to be done, we’re just going to put it off.” That’s what happened for the last three, four, five decades. Everybody has known that we had to do something, but nobody wanted to actually go ahead and do it, because it’s hard. (April 22, 2009)

But cracking habits so deeply ingrained, in consumption as well as politics, is hard. How POTUS knows it! He recently had to quit smoking, on orders from FLOTUS, as the negotiated price for putting the family through a two-year presidential campaign and now life in the security bubble. Passing carbon cap-and-trade legislation and expanding tax credits for renewable energy companies may seem easy by comparison. But still hard. What about getting serious about fuel-efficiency and auto-emissions standards? Pretty hard. What about getting Chrysler and GM back on their feet? Really hard.

It’s been a pillar of our industrial economy, but, frankly, a pillar that’s been weakened by papering over tough problems and avoiding hard choices. For too long, Chrysler moved too slowly to adapt to the future, designing and building cars that were less popular, less reliable, and less fuel-efficient than foreign competitors. That’s part of what has brought us to a point where they sought taxpayer assistance. But as I’ve said from the start, we simply cannot keep this company, or any company, afloat on an endless supply of tax dollars. My job as President is to ensure that if tax dollars are being put on the line, they are being invested in a real fix that will make Chrysler more competitive. (April 30, 2009)

Talk about “hard choices.” Even securing a fully populated Cabinet has been rather hard for POTUS, but those labors appear finally to have born fruit. At the joint installation ceremony for former Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius as Secretary of Health and Human Services and former Washington Governor Gary Locke as Secretary of Commerce, POTUS preferred to reflect on the travails to come:

And my Cabinet is now full of energetic innovators like Kathleen and Gary, a team of leaders who push the envelope every day because they know that whether the wind is in our face or at our backs, America does not settle; we always march forward. I am thrilled to have them by my side as we continue the work of turning our economy around and laying a new foundation for growth that delivers on the change the American people asked for and the promise of a new and better day ahead. (May 1, 2009)

But for all you Tom Daschle fans out there, fear not: unless the former South Dakota Senator turned free-lance lobbyist is in the habit of spending his days at a Dupont Circle Starbuck’s in full suit with briefcase – the form in which he appeared as I cruised past him on my bike yesterday – I don’t think he’s collecting unemployment checks just yet. As for POTUS, that hard business is through now, however, and he can turn his attention to the rocky path ahead.

And one of the encouraging things for me is the fact that the American people know this. You know that our progress has to be measured in the results that we achieve over many months and years, not the minute-by-minute talk in the media. And you know that progress comes from hard choices and hard work, not miracles. I’m not a miracle worker. We’ve got a lot of tough choices and hard decisions and hard work ahead of us. The 100th day might be a good time to reflect on where we are, but it’s more important to where we’re going that we focus on the future, because we can’t rest until our economy is growing and we’ve built that new foundation for our prosperity. (April 29, 2009)

Are we up to that noble task?

The Federalist Project 2

“The Road to Philadelphia” and The Federalist 6 – 10

Rakove’s second chapter, “The Road to Philadelphia,” begins to set the stage for the discussions and tensions that led ultimately to the Constitutional Conventions in Philadelphia. A main motivation, as it appeared from letters exchanged among various state leaders, many of them future Presidents, was to strengthen or scrap the Articles of Confederation, with a range of positions on both sides of the debate. What was clear at the time was the pressing confluence of some Articles-era problems, all stemming from deliberate limits set on the central government to effect necessary policy: raising a common source of revenue, coordinating foreign policy, and regulating both interstate and foreign commerce. Rakove notes that the states “had served . . . as the great political laboratory” for republican experiments upon which the Framers could later propose revisions and improvements in 1787. Many were already ready to do so. Furthermore, “it became entirely permissible to ask whether divergent regional interests could sustain the ‘perpetual union’ of the Articles.” With the growing need to craft a new document and forge the basis for a much stronger central authority, personal correspondence and state-level discussions gave way to concrete steps toward a planning summit in Philadelphia.

    In Federalist 6–9, Hamilton continues to air his worries about the dangers presented by “dissensions between the states and from domestic factions and convulsions.” He extends his concern to analogous “rivalships” in commerce between nations and presents several compelling historical examples in which “the attachments, enmities, interests, hopes, and fears” of nations led them either to make war with their neighbors directly or to enter into alliances for the purpose of warmaking and security. Hamilton’s argument is twofold: such competitions, even the benign rivalries of commerce, might apply to interstate conflict, as we have seen in earlier essays, but might also encourage states to form separate partnerships with foreign countries, obligating them to make war or take sides in the event of war. In short, the weak Articles of Confederation compounded domestic vulnerabilities with a vast array of what Washington would later call “foreign entanglements,” the recipe for imminent disaster, in Hamilton’s view. Hamilton reminds us in Federalist 7 that “territorial disputes have at all times been found one of the most fertile sources of hostility.” What became the United States would learn that lesson time and time again as nearly constant post-independence territorial expansion led to a state of what historian Charles Beard called “perpetual war for perpetual peace.”

    Hamilton’s prescience in this thread is perhaps best shown in two quotations that find superb relevance to specific domains of our present discontent: open-ended war in the Middle East and a festering economic crisis at home. (1) “There is perhaps nothing more likely to disturb the tranquility of nations than their being bound to mutual contribution for any object that does not yield an equal and coincident benefit.” The controversy surrounding the TARP bank bailouts and massive stimulus spending and the widespread public frustration at their inefficacy bears out Hamilton’s insight with stunning precision. (2) “Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates . . . to be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.” This last bit sends shivers down our spines as we contemplate the gorgeous mess our costly lifestyle and the wars we fight to preserve it have made of simple liberty and common dignity. In Federalist 10, Madison begins his famous discussion of factions and the dangers they present to healthy domestic policy, echoing notes from Hamilton’s thoroughgoing analysis of interstate rivalries and “jealousies.” Because of the broad scope of Madison’s topic, however, we shall continue our examination of factions, with their obvious parallels to the national political parties that eventually formed, in the next installment.

Presidential Diction

by Joshua H. Liberatore

After eight years of the Bush dyslexicon, which introduced such howlers as “strategery” and “misunderestimate” into the public record, our new POTUS has quietly made his own linguistic imprint, though perhaps with less popular acclaim. In a week when swine flu, news of Arlen Specter’s bolting the Republican Party, and Chrysler’s imminent bankruptcy consume our headlines and conversations, a brief survey of POTUS’s word choices presents both a salutary distraction and an object of continuing fascination for us his anonymous editors. We begin with instances of high diction. In pitching his then just passed-and-signed $787 billion stimulus package to the National Governors Association, POTUS revived an obsolete usage of a very curious word:

So the reason I make that point is, I just want to make sure that we’re having an honest debate and presenting to the American people a fulsome accounting of what is going on in this program. You know, when I hear people say, “Well, there’s a lot of waste in this program,” well, from my perspective at least, keeping teachers in the classroom is not wasteful. From my perspective, tax cuts to 95 percent of working families is not wasteful. From my perspective, providing all of you additional resources to rebuild roads and bridges and levees and dams that will enhance the quality of life of your State, but also make it more economically competitive, that’s not wasteful. (February 23, 2009)

When’s the last time you looked up “fulsome” in your Webster’s? Come on, be honest. It’s one of those Middle English gems that somehow survives today with two very different meanings. Most of us recognize the secondary definition ( “full, ample, abundant” ) in POTUS’s description of the sort of comprehensive and patient treatment required of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which injected unprecedented amounts of capital into government programs, Federal, state, and local. But that definition had been dormant since the 16th century until it reappeared in contemporary parlance. Reflecting a rather different brand of “accounting,” the primary definition reads “disgusting or offensive, esp. because excessive or insincere,” which, if we might judge by the furious response POTUS’s stimulus efforts inspired in his toughest critics, might still enjoy some currency, even at a polite gathering of governors.

Potential double entendre aside, let’s treat another example in subtle word choice, which appeared in POTUS’s closing news conference to the recent Summit of the Americas in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. The question concerned the controversial U.S. nonparticipation in the United Nations’ World Conference against Racism, boycotted by us due to its insistence on calling out the frank racism of Israeli policy toward its Palestinian residents, which though openly recognized around the world as a grave injustice, is a political tinderbox here and thus undiscussed. POTUS hedged, but not without a Latinate reminder that he knows what he is about:

So if we have a clean start, a fresh start, we’re happy to go. If you’re incorporating a previous conference that we weren’t involved with that raised a whole set of objectionable provisions, then we couldn’t participate, or it wouldn’t be worth it for us to participate because we couldn’t get past that particular issue. And unfortunately, even though I think other countries made great efforts to accommodate some of our concerns and assured us that this conference would be more constructive, our participation would have involved putting our imprimatur on something that we just don’t believe. (April 19, 2009)

Now, don’t worry: fortunately, “imprimatur” does not carry the same troubling – to me anyway – ambiguity that the core word in its definition ( “sanction,” approval or punishment ) does, and so POTUS cannot be accused of doublespeak here. Thankfully, it originates from the concrete meaning ( “license or permission” ) it once connoted in the publishing world, as in “an approved imprint” of a particular text. Ever the lawyer, however, POTUS’s usage of “imprimatur” in a delicate response to a tricky question suggests a sophisticated diplomatic intuition that might well have rival-turned-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton searing with jealousy and awe.

At this week’s primetime news conference, POTUS concluded his response to a question targeting the Federal government’s recently acquired majority stake in major corporations with one of my favorite underused words in our language:

But I want to disabuse people of this notion that somehow we enjoy meddling in the private sector. If you could tell me right now that when I walked into this office that the banks were humming, that the autos were selling, and that all you had to worry about was Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, getting health care passed, figuring out how to deal with energy independence, deal with Iran and a pandemic flu, I would take that deal. (April 29, 2009)

Does POTUS share my love of this word “disabuse,” which creatively combines a vivid verb with a negative prefix to illustrate a most precise action – to undeceive someone – whose possible substitutes ( “dissuade,” “demystify,” “dismantle” ) pale in comparison? I shall never know, but that he got a laugh at the end of this utterance gives me a kernel of hope that he does.

But our Columbia and Harvard-educated POTUS is not exclusively big and fancy in his diction. One of his charms, in fact, is that he seems to appreciate the full range of modes at his disposal and indeed skillfully adapts his language to his particular context and venue with consummate ease. And though one sometimes misses the days when the previous POTUS offered useful vocabulary lessons of a simpler order – “Carlos Gutierrez is the Secretary of Commerce. Trade means commerce.” (May 23, 2008) – nobody could accuse our present POTUS of Ivy League snobbery, much less lording his prodigious vocabulary over Us the People:

The Super Bowl is one of the finest American traditions. I want to give a special shout-out to our troops overseas who are going to be watching this, because you allow not just this game to take place, but our liberties to be preserved, and we’re very grateful to you. (February 1, 2009)

Although this first, presidential instance of “shout-out” taxed our editorial protocol somewhat and had us arguing briefly over different treatment options (shout out, shoutout) – are the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary listening? – POTUS’s persuasive use of the vernacular left no one confused. And it hasn’t stopped with hyphens either:

To my outstanding Vice President, Joe Biden; to Dr. Jill Biden; a couple of outstanding public servants in their own right, please, a warm welcome for General Colin Powell and his wonderful wife, Alma; for the outstanding mayor of the New York City, Michael Bloomberg; and I’ve got to give some special props to my fellow Illinoisan, a great friend, Dick Durbin. (April 21, 2009)

We can be quite certain that the august Senator Durbin has never himself used the word “props” (short for “propers,” per Aretha Franklin) outside of the home, but I’m also confident he understood POTUS, who possesses that rare and impressive talent for projecting respect toward his elder statesmen while simultaneously welcoming them into a more youthful, hipper world, whose cachet they no doubt covet without wanting to appear so.

And in what almost appeared to be his own subtle “shout-out” to the much-maligned Sarah Palin, POTUS turned folksy in his defense of the American automobile industry:

I’m not an auto engineer; I don’t know how to create a affordable, well-designed plug-in hybrid. But I know that if the Japanese can design a affordable, well-designed hybrid, then doggone it, the American people should be able to do the same. (April 29, 2009)

A final word about a recurring metaphor, which we have treated elsewhere. In response to Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times, who asked that clever question about what specifically had surprised, troubled, enchanted, and humbled POTUS during his first 100 days in office, POTUS returned to the “ship of state”:

This metaphor has been used before, but the ship of state is an ocean liner, it’s not a speed boat. And so the way we are constantly thinking about this issue of how to bring about the changes that the American people need is to say, if we can move this big battleship a few degrees in a different direction, we may not see all the consequences of that change a week from now or 3 months from now, but 10 years from now or 20 years from now, our kids will be able to look back and say that was when we started getting serious about clean energy; that’s when health care started to become more efficient and affordable; that’s when we became serious about raising our standards in education. (April 29, 2009)

Curious readers may recall the canonical source of this phrase, familiar to high school curricula around the world. In Sophocles’ famous drama, Antigone, King Creon offered this preemptive justification for his hard-nosed governance of Thebes, which had recently suffered horrific civil war and a general spate of bad luck:

Men, after much tossing of our ship of state,

the gods have safely set things right again.

Of all the citizens I’ve summoned you,

because I know how well you showed respect

for the eternal power of the throne,

first with Laius and again with Oedipus,

once he restored our city. (185–191)

Like POTUS, Creon had assumed the throne after a particularly rough dynastic transition, a time of war and brutal division in the body politic, and he openly declared that the restoration of rule of law was, in modern parlance, his top “administrative priority”:

For I know well

our country is a ship which keeps us safe,

and only when it sails its proper course

do we make friends. These are the principles

I’ll use in order to protect our state. (214–218)

Also like POTUS in his decision to close the detention facilities at Guantánamo and ban the use of torture without exception, Creon maintained a faith in that rule of law that was so thoroughgoing and strict that he was willing to endure harsh criticism in the service of keeping the ship aright, a potentially destructive political stubbornness not lost on his son Haemon, who cautioned Creon:

For any man,

even if he’s wise, there’s nothing shameful

in learning many things, staying flexible.

You notice how in winter floods the trees

which bend before the storm preserve their twigs.

The ones who stand against it are destroyed,

root and branch. In the same way, those sailors

who keep their sails stretched tight, never easing off,

make their ship capsize – and from that point on

sail with their rowing benches all submerged.

So end your anger. Permit yourself to change. (804–814)

POTUS said something similar when he was asked about his efforts to achieve a more civil, constructive spirit of bipartisanship in the face of unparalleled need for unity and long-term vision in policymaking:

If I’m taking some of your ideas – and giving you credit for good ideas – the fact that you didn’t get a hundred percent can’t be a reason every single time to oppose my position. And if that is how bipartisanship is defined – a situation in which, basically, wherever there are philosophical differences I have to simply go along with ideas that have been rejected by the American people in a historic election – we’re probably not going to make progress. If, on the other hand, the definition is that we’re open to each other’s ideas, there are going to be some differences, the majority will probably be determinative when it comes to resolving just hard-core differences that we can’t resolve, but there’s a whole host of other areas where we can work together, then I think we can make progress. (April 29, 2009)

For now, let us take POTUS at his word and hope that he can be as flexible and nimble in his governance as he has proven in his colorful diction.