AFF's Doublethink

We’re snowed in here in Washington DC. The government will shut down tomorrow for a second consecutive day. Tomorrow night, we’re expecting another storm.

One of the nice things about being shut in is the chance to read, and I’ve finally started on Dreams From My Father. In a word, it’s superb. It would be a great book if Barack Obama were still just a lawyer in Chicago.

Of course, it’s really not unusual for a Republican to praise the book. Three years ago, at the beginning of campaign season, the Weekly Standard gave the book a glowing review (while dismissing The Audacity of Hope as a trite and disappointing follow-on, from an author who can clearly write much more candidly and compellingly).

Right now, I’m 250 pages into Dreams, with another 150 to go. One comment that really sticks out in my mind is actually from the preface to the 2004 edition, written after Obama won the Democratic nomination for Senate in Illinois. He recalls that his mother passed away shortly after the first edition of the book was published in 1995.

I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her illness, I might have written a different book–less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life. (Page xii)

It really is striking how Obama’s mother remains present but undeciphered, while Obama searches desperately to understand the father he never knew. Even Obama’s Indonesian step-father, with whom he lived with briefly as a child, comes across much more vividly than his mother.

As Obama explains, understanding his father was so important because he believed that through his father he could understand what it means to be a black man. Even when his father isn’t the subject, the book focuses intently on Obama’s struggle to understand — and become comfortable with — being black in America.

Very few words in the book are spent on figuring out what it means to be white in a racially-conscious America. Nor does Obama explore his mother’s extraordinary decision to marry a black man in the 1960s. Perhaps this is because Obama never seemed to struggle in white surroundings. He thrived in his first years at one of Hawaii’s elite prep schools. He barely mentions his time as a student at Columbia. In his brief career as a financial analyst, he was well-liked and rapidly promoted.

Why was Obama so determined to think of himself as black rather than both white and black? In a telling passage, he describes his dismissive attitude (at the time) toward a friend from college who described herself as multiracial:

They, they, they. That was the problem with people like Joyce. They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people…

Why should we get lumped in with the losers if we don’t have to? We become only so grateful to lose ourselves in the crowd, America’s happy, faceless marketplace; and we’re never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because we’re bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every single day of their lives — although that’s what we tell ourselves — but because we’re wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and speak impeccable English and yet have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger. (Pages. 99-100)

Obama wrote his memoir before launching his career as a politician. Did he expect that, someday, his natural bond with white voters would be as important, or more important, this his bond with black ones? It’s hard to say. But it certainly seems his mother played a crucial role in helping him become truly multiracial.

Not completely evil. I dialed in to a two-hour conference call from home, which meant I could visit the refrigerator at lunchtime instead of waiting until the call ended to go down the cafeteria. But according to Matt Yglesias, it costs the taxpayers $100 million when the federal government has to shut down because of snowfall. (I’ve heard it costs the taxpayers $200 million when the federal government stays open.)

Seriously, why doesn’t the federal government help DC get ready for the snow if each day lost is so expensive? Matt writes,

It seems like it would make a great deal of sense for the federal government to pay for some investments—do something to make [the] Metro [subway system] more robust to snowstorms, for example. The way the system works now even two days after an enormous snowfall all of the above-ground stations are closed and even the below-ground stations in the core are running on massive delays.

I wonder if the problem is that the costs of a shutdown are spread across too many agencies. Matt doesn’t provide a link, so I’m not sure where his $100 million estimate comes from. But I’d be curious to know how much of that is actually a cash loss, versus how much is simply the cost of paying salaries for workers who have to stay at home. If the latter, it would explain why the government doesn’t do much. After a snow day, people catch up on their work. Sure, there’s some inefficiency, but no one really feels the loss.

If the feds actually transferred tens of millions of dollars a year to the DC government to handle the snow, that would involve an actual loss of funds that could be allocated for something else. In contrast, the money for salaries is already committed and can’t be spent on anything else.

In an old-fashioned war, you don’t tell the enemy where and when you’re going to attack. Counterinsurgency is different. The WaPo reports:

For the upcoming Battle of Marja, the element of surprise has already gone by the wayside.

NATO ministers and commanders, gathering Thursday and Friday in Istanbul, could barely contain themselves about a major military offensive set to launch 2,000 miles away in southern Afghanistan. Ignoring the usual dictums about keeping battle preparations secret, officials were keen to talk about what they touted as their biggest joint operation since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

The Post’s opening grafs make NATO officials sound like incompetent clowns. But exactly the opposite is true (at least this time around). Gen. McChrystal has explained exactly why he’s going public with his battle plans:

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and allied commander in Afghanistan, said the offensive would start “relatively soon.” When asked why he and other commanders were being so open about their plans, he said it was partly to try to persuade as many Afghans as possible in Marja to throw down their arms and side against the Taliban.

Individual insurgents often fight for pay or for other personal interests. If they know they’ll be facing a major offensive, the odds of getting hurt or killed may keep them on the sidelines.

In addition, ample warning gives civilians a chance to protect themselves or leave the vicinity. As McChrystal rightly decided, reducing civilian casualties is imperative.

The Post also makes the following point:

The conventional wisdom among U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan is that killing large numbers of enemy fighters leads to more blood feuds, more violence and a longer war. “The best victories are those you win without firing a shot,” a senior military official said.

Exactly. Counterinsurgency is not about fighting the enemy. It’s about securing the population. Killing is inevitable, but it’s not an objective.

The real test of the coming offensive will be whether the Coalition and the Afghan government can hold onto Marja after it’s over. The publicity around the offensive is turning it into a key test of McChrystal’s strategy, at least in the public eye.

Marja’s neighbor, Nawa, has been a poster-child for McChrystal’s strategy. The Marines liberated the town, which McChyrstal and President Hamid Karzai visited just recently:

“President Karzai, with no body armor or anything, walked through the bazaar, talked to people, had tea,” McChrystal said. “He told me he had not been in a bazaar like that — he was there about 40 minutes — that long since he’s been in power, or at least for several years.”

Keep your eye on Marja.

That’s the question in big, bold letters on the cover the new New Republic. What TNR’s editors mean by that is what a lot of liberal writers have been saying since the morning after Scott Brown became the 41st Republican in the Senate. Does Barack Obama have the guts to get health care passed, or is he just another Democrat who gets scared and runs to the center when the GOP scores an occasional victory?

What’s unusual about the editorial in TNR is that it’s thoroughly contradicted by an article several pages further back in the magazine. Predictably, Republicans have described the Brown-Coakley election as a referendum on healthcare, whereas Democrats have disagreed. Yet this time around, the very liberal John Judis marshals an extensive amount of polling data to show that Massachusetts were, in fact, saying ‘no’ to ObamaCare. Judis never says so explicitly — perhaps anticipating a ferocious reaction from fellow pundits on the left — but his message is clearly that going forward on healthcare as if nothing happened would be political suicide.

While the party loyalists can blame Martha Coakley’s defeat on her ignorance of Red Sox baseball, it was clearly a message to the president and his party… 

In fact, the percent of 2008 Obama voters who were backing Brown almost perfectly matched the percentage who were dissatisfied with Obama’s health care plan, which Brown himself singled out for criticism in his campaign. According to the Rasmussen exit sample, 52 percent of Brown voters rated health care as their top issue–a clear indication that they were viewing the election in national and not merely state terms…

The Suffolk University poll in Massachusetts, which like the PPP poll, was pretty much on target in the final result, singled out two white working-class towns, Gardner and Fitchburg, as bellwethers. Obama won Gardner, where Democrats hold a three-to-one registrations edge, by 59 percent to 31 percent in 2008. Brown won it by 56 percent to 42 percent. Obama won Fitchburg, with a similar Democratic edge, by 60 percent to 38 percent in 2008. Brown won it by 59 percent to 40 percent. That suggests a fairly dramatic shift among white working class voters.

There is no similar city or county gauge for how seniors voted in the final result, but there were prior polls. The Suffolk poll taken January 14 has some clues. The age group that most strongly favored Brown was sixty-five to seventy-four-year-olds by 58 to 38 percent. The same group opposed national health insurance by 48 percent to 28 percent and thought the federal government couldn’t afford such a plan by 66 percent to 33 percent. This age group also included the highest percentage of voters–41 percent–who said they “strongly opposed” Obama’s plan. And they were the one group (albeit narrowly) who disapproved of the job Obama was doing as president–by 45 percent to 44 percent.

If you look at national polls, Obama has suffered the greatest loss of approval among exactly the same groups. In the Pew polls, Obama suffered a drastic drop in support in the $30,000-$75,000 income group, from 63 percent to 17 percent approval in February 2009, to 53 percent to 35 percent disapproval in the January 14 poll. Among respondents over sixty-five years old, he went from 60 percent to 17 percent approval to 54 percent to 31 percent disapproval. In its January 2010 poll, Pew has a breakdown by race that is even more disturbing. Whites with some or no college–a rough designation for working-class whites–disapprove of Obama’s presidency by 54 percent to 36 percent.

The President and the Democrats in Congress probably didn’t know all those numbers when they began their flight from healthcare the morning after Brown’s election. But they seem to have gotten the message.

Nate Silver reviews the nuts and bolts of how Question Time for the President might actually work. If you think it makes sense (I do) then go sign the petition.

In a great follow on to President Obama’s engagement with the House GOP, a coalition of writers who span the political spectrum are calling for Question Time with the President to become an American institution. Politico reports:

A politically diverse group of bloggers, commentators, techies and politicos on Wednesday will launch an online campaign, Demand Question Time, urging President Barack Obama and GOP congressional leaders to hold regular, televised conversations like the extraordinary exchange in Baltimore on Friday.

Original endorsers include Grover Norquist and Eli Pariser, Joe Trippi and Mark McKinnon, Markos Moulitsas and Ed Morrissey, and many more, including Ari Melber, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Ana Marie Cox and Nate Silver. The steering committee is made up of Micah Sifry, David Corn, Mike Moffo, Mindy Finn, Jon Henke and Glenn Reynolds.

The initial White House response is to pour cold water on the idea, making the same argument I did a couple of days ago:

“The thing that made Friday interesting was the spontaneity,” Axelrod said. “If you slip into a kind of convention, then conventionality will overtake the freshness of that.”

True enough, but just like presidential debates or Sunday morning talk shows, these things have lasting value, even if the romance wears off. Anticipating this point, Demand Question Time writes:

“None of us are naive and believe that implementing question time will cure what ails our country and our political process. We do realize that if QT does become a Washington routine, politicians and their aides will do what they can to game it to their advantage. But even though there are problems with the presidential debates — which have been taken over by the political parties and a corporate-sponsored commission — those events still have value. If you want more question time — even if only for its entertainment value — you can saddle up with dozens (and maybe it will turn into hundreds, thousands and millions) of your fellow Americans in calling on our elected representatives to show us their best stuff on a regular basis.”

Hear, hear. Naturally, any president would be reluctant to take on this kind of responsibility, since it means exposing oneself to hostile fire. But I could see this president deciding that he’s eager for precisely this kind of showdown.

The Daily Kos has made a splash with its poll of 2003 self-identified Republicans. A fifth think the 2008 election was rigged. A third refuse to believe Barack Obama was born in the United States. Sixty percent think he’s a socialist.

Naturally, this is a good moment for certain liberals to heap scorn upon us Republicans. Either we’re pathetically ignorant or just easily misled. Kevin Drum writes,

I used to talk about the Texification of the Republican Party, but that’s now obsolete. We’re officially seeing the Foxification of the Republican Party. It’s Roger Ailes’ world now, we just live in it.

I thought Kevin might be a little more skeptical. I certainly am, and so is Dennis. But unless you have evidence that something is actually wrong with the poll, what can you possibly say? You can be suspicious of Kos, but that’s not an argument.

I think the one way to attack this problem is to find other polls that have asked similar questions. For example, the Kos poll reports that only 26% of Republicans think gays should be allowed to serve in the military, while 55% oppose and 19% are not sure.

While reading a Max Boot post about gays in the military, I noticed his link to a couple of Gallup polls on the subject.

In November 2004, 52% of Republicans supported gays serving openly in the military. In May 2009, the number was up to 58%. Overall support for allowing gays to serve was 63% in the first poll, 69% in the second. Those overall numbers are consistent with a large amount of data available frompollingreport.com. Regrettably, the pollingreport.com data isn’t broken down by party. However, you can’t have 60-70% support for gays in the military if a majority of Republicans are against it.

So, is there any way to explain a 30% difference in the results between Kos and Gallup? It’s not the wording of the questions; they’re almost identical. If a few more examples like this turn up, I think the credibility of the Kos poll will be in trouble.

But for the moment, we’ll have to wonder if 23% of Republicans want their home state to secede from the Union.

Dan Drezner notes that Libya’s weirdo-in-chief is not happy about being deposed as head of the African Union. I just have to ask, what kind of continent chooses Muammar Qaddafi as its spokesman anyhow?

Probably a continent with so many problems that are so much worse it doesn’t care if Qaddafi is its nominal representative. If Hugo Chavez is ever chosen as Supreme Guru of the Western Hemisphere, it will only be because things are already so awful we just stopped caring.

(Btw, Dan, you spelled Qaddafi’s name three different ways in a single post.)

There is a thread I’d like to pick up on in the commentary on President Obama’s civil debate with the House GOP last Friday. You can see it in the round-ups from both Joe and Kathy.

Like a British Prime Minister, Obama took questions directly from the opposition, which is unheard of in American politics. Obama’s Q&A session was all the more remarkable because it was voluntary, which question time certainly isn’t for the British Prime Minister.

Descriptions of the British Prime Minister’s ritual have been positive, or even glowing. For years, Democrats fantasized about the opportunity to cross-examine President Bush. Many Republicans secretly wished they had a president who could defend himself from all comers. Now, the Democrats have that instead. Even John McCain likes the idea, which he first raised during his campaign back in 2008.

Yet as a former resident of the UK, I can report that Britains hardly share the veneration of this ritual that has become so infectious on this side of the Atlantic. Why, you say? Because it has become formulaic and partisan. Once both sides expect to put on show, that’s exactly what they do. It is not a fierce but civil exchange of ideas.

A few years back, I made a habit of listening to the weekly podcast of Tony Blair taking questions. At first, it was extremely impressive. Blair commanded an encyclopedic knowledge of the facts. He was also quick on his feet and often very, very funny. So were many of his opponents. But after a while, I began to feel like I wasn’t learning very much about British politics. The questions that politicians ask each other are often not the questions we want to ask them. Don’t say you heard this from me, but journalists questions are often a lot more relevant.

Now, back to Obama and the House GOP. There was a remarkably collegial tone to their exchange that isn’t there in Parliament. It seemed like there was a real desire to establish a certain rapport, even if the next morning it would be back to politics as usual. I think this is because the kind of engagement was saw last Friday was unique. If it becomes institutionalized, it begins to take on the character of its British equivalent.

Even so, I think a President’s Question Time would be an extremely valuable addition to our public debate. Just don’t think it would suddenly usher in a new era of elevated civil discourse. It will become part of the landscape and people will soon be dismissing it as more of the same. Which is perhaps a reminder not to take for granted the better venues for public debate we already have, while still demanding more.

Game Change, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, stole the spotlight by informing us that Harry Reid thought of Barack Obama as a “light-skinned”, um, “Negro”. That quote was quite accurate, since the source was none other than Harry Reid. Yet the more people look at the book, on both the left and right, the more it emerges as the worst possible example of unverifiable gossip journalism, which gives anonymous sources the opportunity to claim whatever they want without any sort of accountability.

Clark Hoyt, the public editor of the NY Times, devoted his most recent column to describing just how little the contents of Game Change seem to match up to reality. The unlikely heroine of Hoyt’s tale? Maureen Dowd. According to Hoyt,

I was curious about one incident involving Maureen Dowd, the star Times Op-Ed columnist, who in early 2007 quoted David Geffen, the Hollywood mogul, disowning Bill and Hillary Clinton. Geffen, who raised millions for Bill Clinton and then became disenchanted, said of both Clintons, “Everybody in politics lies, but they do it with such ease, it’s troubling.” The column had an enormous impact at the time.

According to “Game Change,” Dowd persuaded Geffen to give her an interview by telling him that, when it was over, if he did not want her to use it, she would not. She read the finished column to Geffen, the book said, warned him it would be explosive and asked if he wanted to take back anything. If true, Dowd would, in effect, have surrendered editorial control to her source, an unacceptable situation.

The book also implied that Dowd attended a private $2,300-per-person Obama fund-raiser the following night. Afterward, it said, she was among a small group of 35 who “repaired to Geffen’s mansion” for a dinner for the Obamas.

Dowd said it didn’t happen that way. “I never gave David Geffen veto power over the column,” she said. She said she did not read the column to him, warn him that it would be explosive or ask if he wanted to take back his words, and she did not attend the Hollywood fund-raising event at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. She was a guest at the dinner later, she said, although the candidate’s camp sought to have her barred.

Dowd said that, as is often her practice, she told Geffen which quotes she was using and checked them for accuracy and context. He had been unsure whether he wanted to say some of the things he told her but agreed to all of it, she said.

Geffen, who did not want to get embroiled in a controversy among journalists, would only say: “I don’t think anyone imagines Maureen would allow anyone to edit her column. I certainly didn’t.”

Dowd said the authors did not interview her for the book but that Halperin called at some point to “check a few — but not all — of the details.”

So, what is a person to believe: someone speaking on the record, or the word of — whom? And what does it say about other parts of “Game Change?”

Halperin and Heilemann would not answer specific questions about the discrepancies in the accounts. “We stand by everything that’s in the book,” Halperin said.

Which isn’t all that hard, since there are no actual sources to defend.