POTUS and the Subtext of Tragedy

by Joshua H. Liberatore

Interrupting his prepared remarks for the closing session of the American Indian Tribal Nations Conference last week Thursday, POTUS spoke up on the breaking news that was blazing like an untamed wildfire across wire reports and Internet headlines by late afternoon:

My immediate thoughts and prayers are with the wounded and with the families of the fallen, and with those who live and serve at Fort Hood. And these are men and women who have made the selfless and courageous decision to risk and at times give their lives to protect the rest of us on a daily basis. It’s difficult enough when we lose these brave Americans in battles overseas. It is horrifying that they should come under fire at an Army base on American soil. (November 5, 2009)

POTUS chose his words carefully, measuring sadness and regret, gratitude and admiration, but wisely avoiding the anger and belligerence that were already surfacing in many media reactions from both sides of the political spectrum. The shooter, an American citizen from Roanoke, VA, was a Muslim. Murmurs of “terrorism” and “suicide mission” were already lurking on the lips of even NPR’s commentators. For his part, POTUS sought solace in general themes and trusted rituals, ordering flags to fly at half-mast through Veterans Day.

And it’s also recognition of the men and women who put their lives on the line every day to protect our safety and uphold our values. We honor their service, we stand in awe of their sacrifice, and we pray for the safety of those who fight and for the families of those who have fallen. (November 6, 2009)

What transpired at the Fort Hood Army base was surely a tragedy, a massacre of most ugly proportions (13 dead, 30 wounded). What makes it worse is the saddening alacrity with which justified alarm spills over into unthinking panic and brazen speculation. In the reduction process, crucial subtexts inevitably get ignored. If suspect Nidal Malik Hasan had been a Christian white man from Omaha, would we know within hours of the shooting what church he worshipped at? Would reporters already have interviewed his pastor? Would his family’s citizenship and ethnic heritage have come under immediate scrutiny? Thankfully, POTUS has been delicate. In his Saturday morning video address, he chose not to name Hassan, nor did he mention either the 39-year-old doctor’s self-proclaimed Palestinian identity or his Muslim faith.

This past Thursday, on a clear Texas afternoon, an Army psychiatrist walked into the Soldier Readiness Processing Center and began shooting his fellow soldiers. It is an act of violence that would have been heartbreaking had it occurred anyplace in America. It is a crime that would have horrified us had its victims been Americans of any background. But it’s all the more heartbreaking and all the more despicable because of the place where it occurred and the patriots who were its victims. (November 7, 2009)

The subtext of the incident is more complicated and painful than the mainstream media prefer to countenance, although the Washington Post did have the guts to run a fairly lengthy story on Hasan’s unhappiness in the Army, his intensive efforts to be relieved from service, his immigrant family’s secular and patriotic background. Hasan’s job both at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and at Fort Hood was to counsel wounded soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, many of whom suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder, what in Freud’s day was more candidly titled “shell shock.” Hasan routinely complained of the harassment and ridicule he often received for being a Muslim after September 11. He argued with colleagues about the injustice of the wars that were breaking his patients’ nerves. According to relatives, he did everything he could to be discharged from the military, even offering to repay his medical school expenses.

The SRP is where our men and women in uniform go before getting deployed. It’s where they get their teeth checked and their medical records updated and make sure everything is in order before getting shipped out. It was in this place, on a base where our soldiers ought to feel most safe, where those brave Americans who are preparing to risk their lives in defense of our Nation, lost their lives in a crime against our Nation. Soldiers stationed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world called and emailed loved ones at Ft. Hood, all expressing the same stunned reaction: I’m supposed to be the one in harm’s way, not you. (November 7, 2009)

One of those soldiers about to be deployed was Hasan himself, a prospect that deeply upset him, and in the words of his aunt “he must have snapped.” Apparently, Hasan is not alone in his despair. In October alone, 16 U.S. soldiers committed suicide; the suicide rate among Army personnel is up 37% from 2008 and is now well above the rate for civilian Americans.

Thursday’s shooting was one of the most devastating ever committed on an American military base. And yet even as we saw the worst of human nature on full display, we also saw the best of America. We saw soldiers and civilians alike rushing to the aid of fallen comrades, tearing off bullet-riddled clothes to treat the injured, using blouses as tourniquets, taking down the shooter even as they bore wounds themselves. (November 7, 2009)

Though it received very little media attention, and only a brief, perfunctory statement from the White House, an eerily similar shooting took place last May at a psychiatric clinic at the dubiously named “Camp Victory” in Baghdad, in which Sgt. John M. Russell opened fire and killed five other soldiers. This bloody episode, all but ignored by the Iraq-weary American media, was nevertheless duly noted by the military, which commissioned a wider-ranging report that concluded: “There is no clear procedure or established training guidelines in any of the references for managing soldiers identified as ‘at risk’ for suicide or the proper way to conduct suicide watch.” A journalist who has looked into the conditions and procedures for psychiatric cases in the military discovered that soldiers who suffer from PTSD are often marginalized and punished; in some cases a profoundly bizarre and paradoxical bribe is offered: a troubled soldier lobbying for release from duty can purchase his freedom by agreeing to deploy to Afghanistan or Iraq.

We saw soldiers bringing to bear on our own soil the skills they had been trained to use abroad, skills that had been honed through years of determined effort for one purpose and one purpose only: to protect and defend the United States of America. We saw the valor, selflessness, and unity of purpose that makes our service men and women the finest fighting force on Earth, that make the United States military the best the world has ever known, and that make all of us proud to be Americans. (November 7, 2009)

Despite these bleak reminders of the deteriorating mental health of our military personnel, it’s no surprise that incidents like that of Fort Hood engender renewed praise for the heroism and dedication of our soldiers. Base commander Lt. Gen. Robert Cone summed up his assessment of the tragedy by applauding the first responders who shot Hasan and rushed to attend the wounded: “Suffice it to say . . . the American Soldier did a great job.” POTUS cautiously emphasized that comforting narrative as well, reminding us of the debt of gratitude we owe those whose job it is “to protect and defend the United States of America.” Is anyone asking whether that job has become altogether too onerous?

POTUS in a Pickle

by Joshua H. Liberatore

Watching POTUS express his surprise this morning at the Nobel Committee’s decision to award him with this year’s high honor for peace, one could almost sense the acute discomfort. As we are continually reminded in the phrases of politicians – varied in tone and style, but unanimous in theme – we are “a nation at war.” His personal decency and tolerant language aside, POTUS formally leads the armies of that nation, and thus, is directly associated with their actions, good and bad. And POTUS knows it. But now he has to trot to Oslo next month to accept the biggest – though not necessarily the most respected – peace prize in the world, whose last sitting U.S. president recipient was Woodrow Wilson, celebrated architect of the Allied victory in World War I and creator of the League of Nations, the failed but generative prototype of the United Nations. Big shoes to fill, POTUS’s star power notwithstanding?

And even as we strive to seek a world in which conflicts are resolved peacefully and prosperity is widely shared, we have to confront the world as we know it today. I am the Commander in Chief of a country that’s responsible for ending a war and working in another theater to confront a ruthless adversary that directly threatens the American people and our allies. I’m also aware that we are dealing with the impact of a global economic crisis that has left millions of Americans looking for work. These are concerns that I confront every day on behalf of the American people. (October 9, 2009)

Much noise has already been made today about the appropriateness of POTUS’s receiving the award, whether or not his achievements warrant it, whether or not he deserves such a formal accolade this early in his presidency, and I’m loath to add more than a few simple reactions. One particularly silly op-ed in Time claimed that “many Americans are longing for a President who is more bully, less pulpit.” On the contrary, from the results of recent polls, concerning America’s continued entanglement in Afghanistan, for example, many Americans – 60-plus percent of them – appear to be longing for an America that is less bully. Period. The status of the pulpit is beside the point.

Though the war in Iraq is all but absent from our daily headlines and talking points, its stepsister in the craggy nooks of Central Asia, officially eight years old this week, is bristling anew with every fresh attack from “insurgents” (insurgents in their own country?) and every new response from the U.S.-led NATO coalition. POTUS has spent the last two weeks bunkering down with his top advisers in the Situation Room in a series of three-hour closed-press jam sessions riffing on the theme betokened by Lenin’s old propaganda tract “What is to be Done?” The much-awaited answer may be anything from a new “surge” of troops dispatched to Afghanistan (the top U.S. commander on the ground, Stanley McChrystal, wants as many as 40,000) or a graduated repositioning of resources away from conventional search-and-destroy sorties toward a more multidisciplinary counterterrorism strategy. Peace, however, does not appear imminent.

Lucky for POTUS, candor and humility guide him to interpret the award in context, as a clear indicator (and not-so-subtle injunction) from the civilized nations of what is expected of his leadership in the broad strokes. POTUS articulated the symbolism thus:

To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honored by this prize, men and women who’ve inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace. But I also know that this prize reflects the kind of world that those men and women, and all Americans, want to build, a world that gives life to the promise of our founding documents. And I know that throughout history, the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement, it’s also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes. And that is why I will accept this award as a call to action, a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st century. (October 9, 2009)

If peace is interpreted as a vague aspiration and not a measurable fact, we’re in for a continued rough ride in Afghanistan. Good intentions go out the window, quite literally, when American-made bombs are dropping from the skies. And they don’t even have to be bombs. In late June, a girl in Helmand province was killed by a defective canister distributing NATO-effort propaganda routinely dropped by helicopter into dangerous regions. How safe must Americans feel to justify this long and deadly adventure?

We went into Afghanistan not because we were interested in entering that country or positioning ourselves regionally, but because Al Qaida killed 3,000-plus Americans and vowed to continue trying to kill Americans. And so my overriding goal is to dismantle the Al Qaida network, to destroy their capacity to inflict harm, not just on us, but people of all faiths and all nationalities all around the world, and that is our overriding focus. (September 25, 2009).

Reputedly, POTUS’s top advisers are pretty well divided on how best to meet that noble goal. Our chief diplomat, the warlike Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, agrees with McChrystal and is happy to surge the number of American boots on the ground, even if that means increased casualties. Vice President Joe Biden advocates for less troop involvement, more reliance on the Predator drones that target militants in rugged borderlands and often kill civilians in the process. Looking toward his second quick trip to Scandinavia this fall, POTUS must consider all his options in Afghanistan and hope against hope that whatever strategy he arrives at doesn’t make a mockery out of the award he will receive (in fairness, one that Henry Kissinger also received) on December 10th. And perhaps he should donate the one-million-dollar prize money to Doctors without Borders (1999 recipient), or Amnesty International (1977), or better yet, the International Committee of the Red Cross (1917, 1944, 1963), and channel some of those good intentions and hopeful rhetoric about the world that “all Americans want to build” directly to the people and places suffering under the weight of American idealism.

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POTUS in a Pickle. Watching POTUS express his surprise this morning at the Nobel Committee’s decision to award him with this year’s high honor for peace, one could almost sense the acute discomfort. As we are continually reminded in the phrases of politicians – varied in tone and style, but unanimous in theme – we are “a nation at war.” His personal decency and tolerant language aside, POTUS formally leads the armies of that nation, and thus, is directly associated with their actions, good and bad. And POTUS knows it. But now he has to trot to Oslo next month to accept the biggest – though not necessarily the most respected – peace prize in the world, whose last sitting U.S. president recipient was Woodrow Wilson, celebrated architect of the Allied victory in World War I and creator of the League of Nations, the failed but generative prototype of the United Nations. Big shoes to fill, POTUS’s star power notwithstanding?

And even as we strive to seek a world in which conflicts are resolved peacefully and prosperity is widely shared, we have to confront the world as we know it today. I am the Commander in Chief of a country that’s responsible for ending a war and working in another theater to confront a ruthless adversary that directly threatens the American people and our allies. I’m also aware that we are dealing with the impact of a global economic crisis that has left millions of Americans looking for work. These are concerns that I confront every day on behalf of the American people. (October 9, 2009)

Much noise has already been made today about the appropriateness of POTUS’s receiving the award, whether or not his achievements warrant it, whether or not he deserves such a formal accolade this early in his presidency, and I’m loathe to add more than a few simple reactions. One particularly silly op-ed in Time claimed that “many Americans are longing for a President who is more bully, less pulpit.” On the contrary, from the results of recent polls, concerning America’s continued entanglement in Afghanistan, for example, many Americans – 60-plus percent of them – appear to be longing for an America that is less bully. Period. The status of the pulpit is beside the point.

Though the war in Iraq is all but absent from our daily headlines and talking points, its stepsister in the craggy nooks of Central Asia, officially eight years old this week, is bristling anew with every fresh attack from “insurgents” (insurgents in their own country?) and every new response from the U.S.-led NATO coalition. POTUS has spent the last two weeks bunkering down with his top advisers in the Situation Room in a series of three-hour closed-press jam sessions riffing on the theme betokened by Lenin’s old propaganda tract “What is to be Done?” The much-awaited answer may be anything from a new “surge” of troops dispatched to Afghanistan (the top U.S. commander on the ground, Stanley McChrystal, wants as many as 40,000) or a graduated repositioning of resources away from conventional search-and-destroy sorties toward a more multidisciplinary counterterrorism strategy. Peace, however, does not appear imminent.

Lucky for POTUS, candor and humility guide him to interpret the award in context, as a clear indicator (and not-so-subtle injunction) from the civilized nations of what is expected of his leadership in the broad strokes. POTUS articulated the symbolism thus:

To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honored by this prize, men and women who’ve inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.

But I also know that this prize reflects the kind of world that those men and women, and all Americans, want to build, a world that gives life to the promise of our founding documents. And I know that throughout history, the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement, it’s also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes. And that is why I will accept this award as a call to action, a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st century. (October 9, 2009)

If peace is interpreted as a vague aspiration and not a measurable fact, we’re in for a continued rough ride in Afghanistan. Good intentions go out the window, quite literally, when American-made bombs are dropping from the skies. And they don’t even have to be bombs. In late June, a girl in Helmand province was killed by a defective canister distributing NATO-effort propaganda routinely dropped by helicopter into dangerous regions. How safe must Americans feel to justify this long and deadly adventure?

We went into Afghanistan not because we were interested in entering that country or positioning ourselves regionally, but because Al Qaida killed 3,000-plus Americans and vowed to continue trying to kill Americans. And so my overriding goal is to dismantle the Al Qaida network, to destroy their capacity to inflict harm, not just on us, but people of all faiths and all nationalities all around the world, and that is our overriding focus. (September 25, 2009).

Reputedly, POTUS’s top advisers are pretty well divided on how best to meet that noble goal. Our chief diplomat, the warlike Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, agrees with McChrystal and is happy to surge the number of American boots on the ground, even if that means increased casualties. Vice President Joe Biden advocates for less troop involvement, more reliance on the Predator drones that target militants in rugged borderlands and often kill civilians in the process. Looking toward his second quick trip to Scandinavia this fall, POTUS must consider all his options in Afghanistan and hope against hope that whatever strategy he arrives at doesn’t make a mockery out of the award he will receive (in fairness, one that Henry Kissinger also received) on December 10th. And perhaps he should donate the one-million-dollar prize money to Doctors without Borders (1999 recipient), or Amnesty International (1977), or better yet, the International Committee of the Red Cross (1917, 1944, 1963), and channel some of those good intentions and hopeful rhetoric about the world that “all Americans want to build” directly to the people and places suffering under the weight of American idealism.

POTUS and the Pulpit

by Joshua H. Liberatore

In the old days, when they still taught rhetoric in the schools, people learned to be sensitive to the variety of modes of discourse available in our language. Any public speaker worth his salt should be able to manipulate syntax, word choice, tone, pace, and inflection to get the most out of a particular occasion, context, and audience. Apparently, POTUS’s time at Columbia—one of the few universities in the land still insisting on a core liberal arts curriculum—was not squandered. He’s a regular Aristotelian when it comes to tailoring his delivery to the situation and topic at hand. Refreshed from nearly two weeks of reprieve at Martha’s Vineyard and Camp David, POTUS has been busy working a full range of modes this week. It began with a rowdy Labor Day commemoration hosted by the AFL-CIO in Cincinnati:

Now, on Friday, we learned that the economy lost another 216,000 jobs in August. And whenever Americans are losing jobs, that’s simply unacceptable. But for the second straight month, we lost fewer jobs than the month before, and it was the fewest jobs that we had lost in a year. So make no mistake, we’re moving in the right direction. We’re on the road to recovery, Ohio. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.

Audience members. Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can!

The President. Yes we will. Yes we are.

Audience members. Yes we will! Yes we will! Yes we will!

The President. But, my friends, we still have got a long way to go. We’re not going to rest; we’re not going to let up. Not until workers looking for jobs can find them—good jobs that sustain families and sustain dreams. Not until responsible mortgage owners can stay in their homes. Not until we’ve got a full economic recovery and all Americans have their shot at the American Dream. (September 7, 2009)

Call-and-response aside, anytime POTUS begins speaking directly to an entire state personified, in the standard campaign rally format, we know we’re in for a rambunctious affair, editorially and otherwise. And on Monday, POTUS was clearly enjoying himself, respinning old campaign yarns, raising his voice a little, working the very heartbeat of the unionist crowd, not exactly the Brookings Institution set.

But let me just say a few things about this health care issue. We’ve been fighting for quality, affordable health care for every American for nearly a century, since Teddy Roosevelt. Think about that.

Audience member. Long time.

The President. Long time. [Laughter] The Congress and the country have now been vigorously debating the issue for many months. The debate’s been good, and that’s important because we’ve got to get this right. But every debate at some point comes to an end. At some point, it’s time to decide. At some point, it’s time to act. Ohio, it’s time to act and get this thing done.

The following day, using a different mode, POTUS addressed America’s schoolchildren, an event that caused heaps of reckless speculation and paranoid worry from the usual amnesiacs, ignoring the historical propriety of a platform that both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush used to convey their respective schoolmarmish exhortations (only the technology differed). Sadly, our current Oval Officer thoroughly disappointed both his critics and their hyperactive disciples; POTUS’s message was distinctly uncontroversial and simple: school is important, school is sometimes hard, but school is important, even necessary.

And no matter what you want to do with your life, I guarantee that you’ll need an education to do it. You want to be a doctor or a teacher or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those careers. You cannot drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to train for it and work for it and learn for it. And this isn’t just important for your own life and your own future. What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. The future of America depends on you. What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future. (September 8, 2009)

For the thousands of fearful parents who yanked their children from classrooms that day, wary of the ripe opportunity POTUS might take to channel liberal propaganda into our nations’ very shrines of critical thinking, there was little to react to in the end. A few Arlington, VA, demonstrators even carried signs reminding POTUS that: “Our children serve God, not the President.” In fact, POTUS wasn’t asking his audience at Wakefield High School, or any other school for that matter, to serve either him or God; he was asking them to serve their country.

We need every single one of you to develop your talents and your skills and your intellect so you can help us old folks solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that, if you quit on school, you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.

Education as a patriotic duty is an oddly abstract message of a different sort, comprehensible perhaps to already educated adults, but persuasive to scarcely few teenagers or elementary-school age pupils, I’m afraid. But POTUS persisted with his theme:

And even when you’re struggling, even when you’re discouraged and you feel like other people have given up on you, don’t ever give up on yourself, because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country. The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.

In an age when people and especially the youth have become arguably more self-centered and self-gratifying, since the passing of Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation” anyway, an easier message to sell would have been: Education will help you get more money and security. Or even: Education will help fulfill you, make you happier. None of these promises is necessarily true, of course, but rhetorically, they are more likely to find sympathy among the iPod and Twitter generation. POTUS, alas, does not go in for the easy sell.

Now, your families, your teachers, and I are doing everything we can to make sure you have the education you need to answer these questions. I’m working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books and the equipment and the computers you need to learn. But you’ve got to do your part too. So I expect all of you to get serious this year. I expect you to put your best effort into everything you do. I expect great things from each of you. So don’t let us down. Don’t let your family down or your country down. Most of all, don’t let yourself down. Make us all proud.

POTUS himself got serious the following night, when he changed modes again in order to address a joint session of Congress. By necessity, his remarks involved a little colorful scolding:

But what we’ve also seen in these last months is the same partisan spectacle that only hardens the disdain many Americans have towards their own government. Instead of honest debate, we’ve seen scare tactics. Some have dug into unyielding ideological camps that offer no hope of compromise. Too many have used this as an opportunity to score short-term political points, even if it robs the country of our opportunity to solve a long-term challenge. And out of this blizzard of charges and countercharges, confusion has reigned. (September 9, 2009)

Frequent use of parallelism:

Well, the time for bickering is over. The time for games has passed. Now is the season for action. Now is when we must bring the best ideas of both parties together and show the American people that we can still do what we were sent here to do. Now is the time to deliver on health care. Now is the time to deliver on health care.

An invitation for continued input and collaboration:

Now, this is the plan I’m proposing. It’s a plan that incorporates ideas from many of the people in this room tonight, Democrats and Republicans. And I will continue to seek common ground in the weeks ahead. If you come to me with a serious set of proposals, I will be there to listen. My door is always open.

Some more scolding:

But know this: I will not waste time with those who have made the calculation that it’s better politics to kill this plan than to improve it. I won’t stand by while the special interests use the same old tactics to keep things exactly the way they are. If you misrepresent what’s in this plan, we will call you out. And I will not accept the status quo as a solution. Not this time. Not now.

An emotional appeal:

And [Ted Kennedy] expressed confidence that this would be the year that health care reform, “that great unfinished business of our society,” he called it, would finally pass. He repeated the truth that health care is decisive for our future prosperity, but he also reminded me that “it concerns more than material things.” “What we face,” he wrote, “is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country.” I’ve thought about that phrase quite a bit in recent days: the character of our country. One of the unique and wonderful things about America has always been our self-reliance, our rugged individualism, our fierce defense of freedom, and our healthy skepticism of government. And figuring out the appropriate size and role of government has always been a source of rigorous and, yes, sometimes angry debate. That’s our history.

And, finally, a healthy dose of moral philosophy:

You see, our predecessors understood that government could not, and should not, solve every problem. They understood that there are instances when the gains in security from government action are not worth the added constraints on our freedom. But they also understood that the danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little, that without the leavening hand of wise policy, markets can crash, monopolies can stifle competition, the vulnerable can be exploited. And they knew that when any government measure, no matter how carefully crafted or beneficial, is subject to scorn, when any efforts to help people in need are attacked as un-American, when facts and reason are thrown overboard and only timidity passes for wisdom, and we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter, that at that point we don’t merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges. We lose something essential about ourselves.

Much has been made of the uncivil behavior POTUS’s message provoked in the House Chamber that night: the occasional murmurs and boos ( “the plan I’m proposing will cost around $900 billion over 10 years, less than we have spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars” ); the cynical laughter ( “And while there remain some significant details to be ironed out . . .” ); Rep. Joe Wilson’s now infamous shout of “You Lie!” ( “The reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.” ); and at times the raucous applause ( “many in this Chamber, particularly on the Republican side of the aisle, have long insisted that reforming our medical malpractice laws . . .” ). Confronting all the boisterous noise and embarrassing breaches of decorum, POTUS was characteristically sober and unruffled. Still, one is moved to reflect that the hormone-addled suburban adolescents at Wakefield High comprised an altogether better comported and more civilized audience than a massive theater full of elected leaders. But it wasn’t all mindless deference in Arlington either:

Q. Hi, my name is Sean. And my question is, currently 36 countries have universal health coverage, including Iraq and Afghanistan, which have it paid for by the United States. Why can’t the United States have universal health coverage?

The President. Well, I think that’s the question I’ve been asking Congress, because I think we need it. I think we can do it. And I’m going to be making a speech tomorrow night talking about my plan to make sure that everybody has access to affordable health care. Part of what happened is that back in the 1940s and ’50s . . . (September 8, 2009)

It was perhaps the single best, most pointed and frank question POTUS has received on health care all summer, and though the sweeping narrative response was less direct than what young Sean likely wanted, the spark of appreciation in POTUS’s reception was not lost on anyone in the room. POTUS grinned and knew he was back to work.

POTUS and the Politics of Timelines

by Joshua H. Liberatore

A slow week at the Office of the Federal Register gives me the opportunity to work through our considerable backlog of Bush-era speeches and documents in review for forthcoming editions of the Public Papers. As our current POTUS is busy working town halls and closed-door sessions to promote health care reform, I find myself simultaneously ensconced in the issues of July 2008 and July 2009. And as Congress approaches its August recess (in both settings), a rare confluence of partisan frenzy emerges. Just recall for a moment the hot topic of July 2008. Have you forgotten? Gas prices were climbing north of $4.50 for most Americans (somehow states like Indiana always manage to beat the competition), and our then POTUS was working the bully pulpit in a serious way.

I know Democratic leaders have opposed some of these policies in the past. Now that their opposition has helped drive gas prices to record levels, I ask them to reconsider their positions. If congressional leaders leave for the Fourth of July recess without taking action, they will need to explain why $4 a gallon gasoline is not enough incentive for them to act. (June 21, 2009)

Our sitting POTUS is also facing a tight timeline of his own creation, and rising prices are again the persuasive thrust of the rhetoric.

Whenever I hear people say that it’s happening too soon, I think that’s a little odd. We’ve been talking about health care reform since the days of Harry Truman. [Laughter] How could it be too soon? I don’t think it’s too soon for the families who’ve seen their premiums rise faster than wages year after year. It’s not too soon for the businesses forced to drop coverage or shed workers because of mounting health care expenses. It’s not too soon for taxpayers asked to close widening deficits that stem from rising health care costs, costs that threaten to leave our children with a mountain of debt. Reform may be coming too soon for some in Washington, but it’s not soon enough for the American people. We can get this done. We don’t shirk from a challenge. We can get this done. (July 23, 2009)

In Washington, of course, a time crunch is a ripe occasion for political point-scoring. It was only a year ago that expanded domestic drilling became not only an ugly campaign slogan but also a regular refrain in POTUS’s weekly radio addresses and South Lawn statements (and don’t miss the subtle figurative language):

Last month, I asked Congress to lift this legislative ban and allow the exploration and development of offshore oil resources. I committed to lift an executive prohibition on this exploration if Congress did so, tailoring my executive action to match what Congress passed. It’s been almost a month since I urged Congress to act, and they’ve done nothing; they’ve not moved any legislation. And as the Democratically controlled Congress has sat idle, gas prices have continued to increase. (July 14, 2008)

Our present POTUS has tried his best to keep the health care reform debate lofty and principled, above politics. But the partisan landscape, believe it or not, is often more complicated when the White House and Congress are controlled by the same party. Any hint of controversy becomes a forum for factions within both parties to distinguish themselves and make individual sallies designed to further more particular or regional interests. And POTUS gets it. Legislative deadlines, meanwhile, do not wait.

I want the bill to get out of the committees, and then I want that bill to go to the floor, and then I want that bill to be reconciled between the House and the Senate, and then I want to sign a bill. And I want it done by the end of this year. I want it done by the fall. . . . My attitude is, I want to get it right, but I also want to get it done promptly. And so as long as I see folks working diligently and consistently, then I am comfortable with moving a process forward that builds as much consensus as possible. What I don’t want is what I referred to in my speech: delay for the sake of delay. Delay because people are worried about making tough decisions or casting tough votes, that’s what I don’t want to see. (July 23, 2009)

In simpler times, the people’s POTUS had an easier target for blame: those lazy, self-serving Washington elites, long immune to the concerns of everyday Americans:

Experts believe that these areas of the OCS [Outer Continental Shelf] could eventually produce nearly 10 years worth of America’s current annual oil production. So on Monday, I lifted an executive branch prohibition on exploration in these areas. Unfortunately, a full month has passed since I called on Congress to lift a similar legislative ban, and Congress has done nothing. This means that the only thing now standing between the American people and the vast oil resources of the OCS is action from the United States Congress. (July 19, 2008)

That executive ban on offshore drilling, it’s worth mentioning, had been in place for nearly 30 years, surviving administrations from both parties without interference. Suddenly, though, it was Congress who was stalling responsible energy policy. The politics of timelines, as always, demanded a pariah. POTUS had now given them at least three weeks to get their act together. Overhauling a generation’s worth of regulatory inertia takes time, however. In deference to a similar difficulty, our new time-pressed POTUS fancies historical precedent, rather than the vagaries of current bickering, as a source of hope.

I know it’s not easy. I know there are folks who will oppose any kind of reform because they profit from the way the system is right now. They’ll run all sorts of ads that will make people scared. This is nothing that we haven’t heard before. Back when President Kennedy and then President Johnson were trying to pass Medicare, opponents claimed it was “socialized medicine.” They said it was too much government involvement in health care, that it would cost too much, that it would undermine health care as we know it. But the American people and Members of Congress understood better. They ultimately did the right thing. And more than four decades later, Medicare is still giving our senior citizens the care and security they need and deserve. (July 28, 2009)

In pickles of this ilk, the formulaic appeal is to commonsense. 2008: High gas prices result from increasing demand pressures outstripping world supplies. More oil relieves the pressure. Hence, Drill, baby, drill. 2009: Medicare is slowly but surely breaking the Federal bank. Medical bills are a leading cause of personal bankruptcy. The employer-based health coverage model is straining the budgets of countless businesses, small and large. Commonsense, like its stepbrother the holy pocketbook, is the ultimate bipartisan platform. Only the particulars change. Compare:

The time for action is now. This is a difficult period for millions of American families. Every extra dollar they have to spend because of high gas prices is one less dollar they can use to put food on the table, or to pay the rent, or meet their mortgages. The American people are rightly frustrated by the failure of Democratic leaders in Congress to enact commonsense solutions, like the development of the oil resources on the Outer Continental Shelf. (July 30, 2008)

I want everybody to understand this: If we do nothing, I can almost guarantee you your premiums will double over the next 10 years, because that’s what they did over the last 10 years. It will go up three times faster than your wages, so a bigger and bigger chunk of your paycheck will be going into health insurance. It will eat into the possibility of you getting a raise on your job, because your employer is going to be looking and saying, “I can’t afford to give you a raise because my health care costs just went up 10, 20, 30 percent.” And Medicare, which seniors rely on, is going to become more and more vulnerable. On current projections, Medicare will be in the red in less than 10 years. (July 29, 2009)

A year, almost to the day. Meanwhile, for this civil servant with 13 days of annual vacation, the whole idea of an August recess sounds really dreamy and vaguely European, a little like the health care provisions enjoyed by the rest of civilized world. I could be wrong, but the inner child in all of us probably waxes nostalgic just to hear the word recess bandied about, although chafing a bit to hear it uttered with such indignation and panic. I’m not angry at Congress, I’m jealous. But POTUS has to keep his eye on the ball.

We’ve been debating this for 40 years now. So some of the folks . . . sincerely want to get it right, and we want to give them enough time to get it right. We don’t want to just do it quickly; we want to do it right. But some folks who specifically said on the other side, the more we can delay, the better chance we have of killing the bill, because what happens in Washington is the longer it takes, the more the special interests can start getting in there and trying to knock it down. When we come back in September, I will be available to answer any question that Members of Congress have. If they want to come over to the White House and go over line by line what’s going on, I will be happy to do that. We are not trying to hide the ball here. We’re trying to get this done. But the American people can’t wait any longer. They want action this year. I want action this year. (July 29, 2009)

POTUS is still waiting for action, and so are we. Luckily, our national memory tends to be short, not least for the perennial skirmishes on Capitol Hill and Pennsylvania Avenue. The lobbyists and consultants of K Street, key players always, are another matter. In their efforts to protect powerful industries – whether oil companies or insurance conglomerates – they work efficiently and aggressively behind the scenes, with a cunning and guile that often escape our attention, and most importantly, they labor without recess.

POTUS Under Pressure

by Joshua H. Liberatore

Wednesday’s news conference faced POTUS off with a very feisty press, whose members are apparently fatigued of the wide apprehension that he cradles the adoring media in the palm of his hand. All manner of aggressive tactics hitherto unknown – save a few tough questions overseas from foreign journalists – came into play: flagrant interruptions, tag-teamed questions, topical non sequitur, ad hominem inquiries about POTUS’s smoking habits, direct insinuations of subterfuge, even some outright griping. POTUS held his own, but snapped back when he needed to and laughed away awkwardness when it was expedient to do so. He displayed his world-class talent for maintaining an affable sort of cool, even as he managed the conversation carefully, setting limits, issuing subtle rewards and punishments as required. As POTUS ended the 55-minute news conference and made his way out of the briefing room, a journalist asked:

May I ask a question about Afghanistan? No questions about Iraq or Afghanistan, sir?

Although POTUS turned his back on this effort to extend the Q&A, any impression that he was ignoring the subject of our misguided wars is unfair. Blame for any topical omissions, I’m afraid, has to rest on the questioners not the questioned. The preferred issue was, of course, Iran, specifically, the violent suppression of political demonstrations (30 dead, 200 wounded) following what appears to be a stolen election and a patchy attempt to preserve the status quo. Surely, POTUS was prepared for a lot of nervous handwringing over the issue, with many Republican critics urging him to take a much harder line since the June 12 election.

I’ve made it clear that the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran and is not interfering with Iran’s affairs. But we must also bear witness to the courage and the dignity of the Iranian people and to a remarkable opening within Iranian society. And we deplore the violence against innocent civilians anywhere that it takes place.

Long bored by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, John McCain and those of the imperialist mindset in both houses of Congress would love nothing more than to see the U.S. invade Iran or at least drop some bombs. Thankfully, however, POTUS has read his history books. Though he wasn’t even born, POTUS recalls that previous U.S. “activism” in Iran has turned out badly. In 1953, the CIA engineered the assassination of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, facilitated the overthrow of his democratically elected, moderate government, and arranged for the subsequent installation of Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, who in turn presided over an authoritarian regime so repressive and draconian – locking up thousands of detractors, wreaking havoc on Iran’s civil society and educated middle class – that the 1979 theocratic revolution that unseated him and elevated his rival Ayatollah Khomenei became all but inevitable.

Ignoring this unpleasant history completely, reporters took shot after shot concerning POTUS’s supposed silence, timidity, and restraint regarding interference with the internal politics of sovereign Iran:

Jennifer Loven, Associated Press: Is there any redline that your administration won’t cross, where that offer [to engage in direct talks] will be shut off?

Nico Pitney, Huffington Post: Under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad?

Major Garrett, FOX News: You said about Iran that you were appalled and outraged. What took you so long to say those words?

Chip Reid, CBS News: Were you influenced at all by John McCain and Lindsey Graham accusing you of being timid and weak?

POTUS, for his part, remained stalwart in his articulation of a few core themes, none of them sufficiently newsworthy to satisfy either the overcaffeinated media or the rabid warmongers in Congress. First and foremost, respecting the sovereignty of nations, a novel approach to foreign policy:

We have provided a path whereby Iran can reach out to the international community, engage, and become a part of international norms. It is up to them to make a decision as to whether they choose that path. . . . But just to reiterate, there is a path available to Iran in which their sovereignty is respected, their traditions, their culture, their faith is respected, but one in which they are part of a larger community that has responsibilities and operates according to norms and international rules that are universal.

The protests and demonstrations are an internal matter, not fomented by Western meddlers:

And the Iranian Government should understand that how they handle the dissent within their own country, generated indigenously, internally, from the Iranian people, will help shape the tone not only for Iran’s future but also its relationship to other countries. . . . And so, ultimately, the most important thing for the Iranian Government to consider is legitimacy in the eyes of its own people, not in the eyes of the United States. And that’s why I’ve been very clear: Ultimately, this is up to the Iranian people to decide who their leadership is going to be and the structure of their Government.

POTUS exercised savvy caution, well aware that any overstepping in his rhetoric would be readily exploited by Ahmadinejad’s propaganda machine:

My role has been to say, the United States is not going to be a foil for the Iranian Government to try to blame what’s happening on the streets of Tehran on the CIA or on the White House, that this is an issue that is led by and given voice to the frustrations of the Iranian people. . . . This is not an issue about the United States; this is about an issue of the Iranian people.

The White House even went to the admirable effort of providing Farsi and Arabic transcripts of POTUS’s opening remarks on its website. The message was clear: we witness your suffering, we acknowledge your efforts, but this is not our business. Still, POTUS could not satisfy the media’s voracity for something new, something breaking, and journalists, impatient and under pressure, often dig for it when it’s just not there.

Jennifer Loven, Associated Press: So should there be consequences for what’s happened so far?

Major Garrett, FOX News: Are Iranian diplomats still welcome at the Embassy on Fourth of July, sir?

Chip Reid, CBS News: So there’s no news in your statement today?

Chuck Todd, NBC News: But shouldn’t the Iranian regime know that there are consequences?

Consequences? What exactly do these heavy-breathing scribes have in mind? What indeed do McCain and Graham expect in practical terms? Did George H.W. Bush bluster about consequences for the far more horrific repression exhibited in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre (at least 200 dead, thousands wounded)? Did the Soviet Union threaten consequences for the U.S. National Guard’s firing on unarmed students at Kent State University in 1970 (4 dead, 9 wounded)? Although sober observers around the world discern the wisdom in POTUS’s approach toward Iran, his delicate word choices are apparently making the reactionary set very anxious. Let’s recall that the Mighty McCain had attacked POTUS on the campaign trail for advocating “restraint from both sides” in the August conflagration that broke out between Georgia and Russia. In the mythology of American exceptionalism, only the Other Side must show restraint.

The second hot topic was health care reform and POTUS’s insistence that new legislation include some sort of “public option” that would extend and improve health care coverage for those 50 million Americans currently uninsured or underinsured. Though poll data consistently show that the overwhelming majority of Americans support expanded government-subsidized health care, some are nervous that private insurers would be priced out of the market:

David Jackson, USA Today. Won’t that drive private insurers out of business?

The President. Well, why would it drive private insurers out of business? If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality health care, if they tell us that they’re offering a good deal, then why is it that the Government, which they say can’t run anything, suddenly is going to drive them out of business? That’s not logical.

ABC’s Jake Tapper later characterized POTUS’s appeal to logic as “Spock-like” but pressed him to assert whether or not provision for the “public option” was “nonnegotiable,” again groping for conflict. After a joke about the “Spock reference [being] a crack on my ears,” POTUS didn’t give up on logic, however, which in any case, he has in his favor in this debate.

I think that there is a legitimate concern if the public plan was simply eating off the taxpayer trough that it would be hard for private insurers to compete. If, on the other hand, the public plan is structured in such a way where they’ve got to collect premiums and they’ve got to provide good services, then if what the insurance companies are saying is true, that they’re doing their best to serve their customers, that they’re in the business of keeping people well and giving them security when they get sick, they should be able to compete.

Certainly, we can take POTUS’s word about “healthy debates” to heart here. Is health care a right (and therefore, the government’s responsibility to protect) or merely a privilege (and therefore, a private concern)? What’s interesting to me is that education, a public service difficult to separate theoretically from health care in my mind, does not appear to raise the same controversy. In fact, the inverse situation obtains. Private schools (in existence since colonial days) and now charter schools are said to put salutary market pressure on public schools to perform better and compete for students. The school voucher system, lauded by free-market devotees on both sides of the political spectrum, in fact, is very similar to POTUS’s proposed health care exchange. This analogy argues that context and legacy matter more than pragmatism and common sense in dividing our loyalties. A largely private health care system threatened by public competition meets a largely public education system threatened by private competition. Even Spock would see the profound irony of our insistence on framing these positions as adversarial.

I take those advocates of the free market to heart when they say that the free market is innovative and is going to compete on service and is going to compete on their ability to deliver good care to families. And if that’s the case, then this just becomes one more option. If it’s not the case, then I think that that’s something that the American people should know.

On the flip side, it might be worth having another healthy debate about why health care organizations (insurers, providers, billing agencies, etc.) should be run as for-profit enterprises in the first place. Pursuing the above analogy, most private schools and universities are still operating on non-profit guidelines even within a capitalistic superstructure. They compete for customers, sources of funding, and prestige, but they don’t turn a profit in the way other businesses do. That is to say, the so-called free market is not necessarily predicated on financial gain alone. The principle of competitive self-interest readily applies to other forms of “currency”: customer satisfaction, industry reputation, community relations, mission fulfillment, etc. But we’ll leave POTUS to address that question on another day. For the moment, he’s got his hands full battling the 24-hour news cycle, which has no time for antiquarian relics such as logic.

POTUS Among the Pharaohs

by Joshua H. Liberatore

As we prepared for POTUS’s reception in the Middle East this week, I for one found it salutary to take a good square look at where we’ve come from. When our former POTUS spoke about language training initiatives in Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu at the State Department in 2006, he relied on his own rich linguistic heritage to drive home his message:

You see, freedom is the ideology that wins. We got to have confidence in that as we go out. But you can’t win in the long run for democracy unless you’ve got the capacity to help spread democracy. You see, we got to convince people of the benefits of a free society. I believe everybody desires to be free. . . . And you can’t convince people unless you can talk to them. And I’m not talking to them right now directly; I’m talking through an interpreter on some of these Arabic TV stations. . . . And the best way to do that is to have those of us who understand freedom be able to communicate in the language of the people we’re trying to help.

Regrettably, learning Arabic or Farsi wasn’t enough to ensure the success of those 20 military linguists who were discharged between 1998 and 2004 for violating the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in force for gay soldiers, apparently not among those “who understand freedom.” But the former POTUS continued:

In order to convince people we care about them, we’ve got to understand their culture and show them we care about their culture. When somebody comes to me and speaks Texan, I know they appreciate the Texas culture. (Laughter.) I mean, somebody takes time to figure out how to speak Arabic, it means they’re interested in somebody else’s culture. . . . It’s a gesture of interest. It really is a fundamental way to reach out to somebody and say, “I care about you. I want you to know that I’m interested in not only how you talk but how you live.” (January 5, 2006)

Two and a half years later, we still don’t have an Arabic-speaking President, or even a properly multilingual one. Although some speculated that POTUS might have picked up some Bahasa Indonesia when he lived overseas as a young boy, he admitted from the campaign trail that he doesn’t speak another language, and that he’s embarrassed about it. (And his feeble, if well-intentioned, attempts during his first trip to Europe in April provided ample proof of this confession. At least he speaks English passably well.) So, as POTUS toured the Arab world this week, making key stops in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, both putative U.S. allies, he relied on gestures other than language as he renewed his offer to extend an “open hand” to the Muslim community. And even without Arabic, he found a way, it seems, to speak as directly as he could, as candidly any American president could be expected to. In his Monday morning NPR interview, POTUS offered some frank hints at the themes of his upcoming speech:

Now, in every country I deal with, whether it’s China, Russia, ultimately Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, allies as well as non-allies, there are going to be some differences. And what I want to do is just maintain consistency in affirming what those values that I believe in are, understanding that we’re not going to get countries to embrace various of our values simply by lecturing or through military means. We can’t force these approaches. What we can do is stand up for human rights. We can stand up for democracy. But I think it’s a mistake for us to somehow suggest that we’re not going to deal with countries around the world in the absence of their meeting all our criteria for democracy. (June 1, 2009)

On what criteria will said Muslim community be grading POTUS? As a recent Brookings Institution poll revealed, next to Iraq, the primary issue of concern in the Middle East is nothing new: the plight of the Palestinians. Many Muslims look to POTUS to set a new course in solving a conflict that all too commonly is shelved by American presidents or put off until late second-term (both Clinton and Bush the Younger are guilty of the latter). POTUS claims to understand that both sides need to make concessions, but after his meeting last week with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas he reminded us of the inherent complexities of the process and also issued a subtle signal toward a meaningful reversal of the prevailing Bush doctrine:

We are a stalwart ally of Israel, and it is in our interests to assure that Israel is safe and secure. It is our belief that the best way to achieve that is to create the conditions on the ground and set the stage for a Palestinian state as well. And so what I told Prime Minister Netanyahu was, is that each party has obligations under the roadmap. On the Israeli side, those obligations include stopping settlements; they include making sure that there is a viable potential Palestinian state. On the Palestinian side, it’s going to be important and necessary to continue to take the security steps on the West Bank that President Abbas has already begun to take, working with General Dayton. We’ve seen great progress in terms of security in the West Bank. Those security steps need to continue because Israel has to have some confidence that security in the West Bank is in place in order for us to advance this process. (May 28, 2009)

The Second Coming of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has caused many to fear not just a perpetuation of the status quo of the past 16 years (since the Oslo talks broke down) but indeed a dramatic roll-back of the modest gains made under his right-wing predecessors Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, namely, concerning the graduated withdrawal of Jewish settlements in land recognized by the international community and multiple U.N. documents as Palestinian, settlements that continue to be subsidized, protected, and in some cases, armed by the Israeli government, settlements that all but negate the physical plausibility of the so-called “two-state solution.” Will POTUS be able to persuade the warlike Bibi to rein in these defeatist policies?

Well, I think it’s important not to assume the worst, but to assume the best. And in my conversations with Prime Minister Netanyahu, I was very clear about the need to stop settlements; to make sure that we are stopping the building of outposts; to work with the Palestinian Authority in order to alleviate some of the pressures that the Palestinian people are under in terms of travel and commerce, so that we can initiate some of the economic development plans that Prime Minister Netanyahu himself has said are so important on the ground. (May 28, 2009)

POTUS told NPR that being a “stalwart” friend to Israel means being more honest with it about what’s good and bad for its long-term viability. Israel, as a self-proclaimed Jewish state, faces a huge demographic dilemma in the shape of its 20 percent-and-growing Arab-Muslim and Arab-Christian population. Thus, for a two-state solution – easy to say, difficult to do – to materialize, what we’d be looking at is a Jewish state with a sizable Palestinian minority and a Palestinian state with a smaller, but not insignificant, Jewish minority of 280,000 settlers, many of them from the United States and the former Soviet Union. The first is not only plausible; it’s simply the existential reality of modern Israel. The second requires Jewish settlers on land conquered in the 1967 war to recognize themselves as Palestinian Jews, a duality that Israeli Arabs have had to accommodate since 1948 even though it means a sort of second-class citizenship. As for the settlements beyond Israel’s official borders, POTUS has had to choose his words carefully, using variously, “freeze, including natural growth,” “stop settlements”, “progress on settlements” – while the Palestinians and the rest of the world tend to favor the verb “withdraw.” In his meeting with Netanyahu, POTUS was markedly gentler but did not eschew the topic entirely:

Now, Israel is going to have to take some difficult steps as well. And I shared with the Prime Minister the fact that under the roadmap and under Annapolis that there’s a clear understanding that we have to make progress on settlements, that settlements have to be stopped in order for us to move forward. That’s a difficult issue. I recognize that, but it’s an important one, and it has to be addressed. I think the humanitarian situation in Gaza has to be addressed. Now, I was along the border in Sderot and saw the evidence of weapons that had been raining down on the heads of innocents in those Israeli cities, and that’s unacceptable. And so we’ve got to work with the Egyptians to deal with the smuggling of weapons, and it has to be meaningful, because no prime minister of any country is going to tolerate missiles raining down on their citizens’ heads. (May 18, 2009)

What does all this have to do with Egypt? Besides being the most populous Arab country, Egypt also has the longest-standing peace agreement with its neighbor Israel. As such, POTUS used his Cairo speech to renew his commitment to the region and attempted a most difficult balancing act in the country where he and his country are probably least popular according to Brookings (in media-maligned Iran, by the way, both POTUS and the U.S. are viewed rather favorably on the street). By virtue of its location, Egypt is also a key partner in resolving the perennial flare-ups of violence in Gaza that have left its poor residents living half-starved in a veritable cage. In short, POTUS needed to hit a home run in Cairo. Given the heavy attention his speech has received elsewhere, I’ll restrain myself from extended analysis and simply end with this key passage:

I know there’s been a lot of publicity about this speech, but no single speech can eradicate years of mistrust, nor can I answer in the time that I have this afternoon all the complex questions that brought us to this point. But I am convinced that in order to move forward, we must say openly to each other the things we hold in our hearts and that too often are said only behind closed doors. There must be a sustained effort to listen to each other, to learn from each other, to respect one another, and to seek common ground. As the Holy Koran tells us, “Be conscious of God and speak always the truth.” (Applause.) That is what I will try to do today: to speak the truth as best I can, humbled by the task before us, and firm in my belief that the interests we share as human beings are far more powerful than the forces that drive us apart. (June 4, 2009)

POTUS went on to quote other salient passages from the Koran, the Gospels, and the Talmud that demonstrated his well-founded belief in common ground: the shared desired for peace, prosperity, and fellowship. Small gestures such as tagging his mention of Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, with the Muslim phrase “peace be upon them” received enthusiastic applause. His bold use of the P-word, Palestine, though it may not strike American ears as semantically different from “Palestinian state,” resounded in Arab audiences, and the entire umma Muslima, as an unprecedented illustration of support. POTUS also reminded us that while Europeans were busy bashing one other about with maces and halberds in the middle ages, Muslim scholars in Baghdad and Damascus were preserving the literary and philosophical traditions of ancient Greece, making substantial advances in mathematics, astronomy, and medicine, and in general, presiding over a bright courtly civilization even as the lights were out for centuries in the West.

Now, surely many of the Rudy Giuliani school of nuanced rhetoric will vilify these overtures as pandering, but POTUS seemed sincere, galvanizing sharp and welcome deviations from eight years of Bushwhacking in the wilderness and labeling it freedom. If these promising words are matched with concrete actions, we might well find ourselves four years from now in a better position relative to the 1.5 billion people around the world who identify themselves as Muslims, a full 20 percent of humanity. Not a waste of time or effort, by any standard.

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?