Michael Jackson, Nostalgia, and the 1980s

Journalists are not usually in the habit of looking back. They are charged to deliver "breaking news" to us. Novelty is the coinage of the newsroom, not history. Yet this week, the media's preponderant coverage of the life and death of Michael Jackson has been stridently nostalgic. It reveals a culture needing and ready to sing an ode to the 1980s.

We cannot turn back time, but we can mark its passing. Up till last week, popular culture hadn't had the chance to address the passing of an 80s superstar and with that, the 1980s. We were given occasion to mourn and contemplate the passing of the 1950s with Elvis Presley's untimely death, and the passing of the 1960s with John Lennon's death. So we have sung an ode to the post-war consensus, as we have sung an ode to the cultural revolution.

But enough of the 80s has remained with us - MTV, Nintendo, Reaganomics - not defunct but writhing for relevance, that we have not dared sing its eulogy. Michael Jackson's and Farrah Fawcett's death has served us a dramatic notice that it may be time.

After all, it is unlikely that we will see another Michael Jackson. In our era where songs are downloaded one at a time, no one is likely to sell a 100 million records (of "Thriller" or any other album) again. The 80s are over, but it has taken us three decades to find a moment to collectively mark and mourn its passage.

Tragic deaths are compelling not only for human interest reasons, but for the decisive statement about our mortality they make. For if even iconic characters who once defined their age can be so suddenly ejected from the remorseless flow of history, then there is surely no stopping the march of time.

It is no surprise that Michael Jackson is more beloved post-humously than he was all of this decade. Elvis Presley too, had become more and more of a has-been as the 60s progressed. Time is never forgiving - our only feeble antidote is nostalgia. So wrote Joseph Conrad, "Only a moment; a moment of strength, of romance, of glamour--of youth! ... A flick of sunshine upon a strange shore, the time to remember, the time for a sigh, and--good-bye!--Night--Good-bye...!"

If the 1980s and whatever the decade repesented are indeed over, then businessmen, journalists, and especially politicians - take note! Nostalgia can only occur when the past has been rendered past.

Why Obama Must Treat DOMA with Care

Presidents array themselves along a continuum with two extremes: either they are crusaders for their cause or merely defenders of the faith. Either they attempt to transform the landscape of America politics, or they attempt to modify it in incremental steps. To cite the titles of the autobiographies of the current and last presidents: either presidents declare the "audacity of hope" or they affirm a "charge to keep." If President Obama is the liberal crusader, President George Bush was the conservative defender.

The strategies of presidential leadershp differ for the crusader and the defender, but President Obama appears to be misreading the nature of his mandate. Conciliation works for the defender; it can be ruinous to the would-be crusader.

The crusader must have his base with him, all fired up and ready to go. For to go to places unseen, the crusader must have the visionaries, even the crazy ones, on his side. The defender, conversely, must pay homage to partisans on the other side of the aisle because incremental change requires assistance from people, including political rivals, invested in the status quo. Moderate politics require moderate friends.

The irony is that President George Bush, a self-proclaimed defender - spent too much time pandering to his right-wing base, and Barack Obama - a self-proclaimed crusader, is spending a lot of time appeasing his political rivals. Their political strategies were out of sync, and perhaps even inconsistent with their political goals.

Take the issue of gay rights for President Obama. The President is trying so hard to prove to his socially conservative political rivals that he is no liberal wacko that he has reversed his previous support for a full repeal of The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). What he may not have realized is that it may be politically efficacious for a defender to ignore his base, but the costs to the crusader for alienating his base are far graver. Bipartisanship is not symmetrically rewarding in all leadership contexts.

Consider the example of President Bill Clinton, a "third-way" Democrat. He ended welfare as we knew it, and on affirmative action he said "mend it, don't end it." Much to Labor's chagrin, he even passed NAFTA. Bill Clinton was no crusader. And if the Democratic base wanted a deal-making, favor-swapping politico, they would have nominated a second Clinton last year.

The crusader rides on a cloud of ideological purity. Without the zealotry and idolatry of the base, the crusader is nothing; his magic extinguished. And this is happening right now to Barack Obama. The people who gave the man his luster are also uniquely enpowered to take it away. (It is a mistake to think that Sean Hannity or Michael Steele have this power.) Obama campaigned on changing the world, and his base can and will crush him for failing to deliver on his audacity. The Justice Department's clumsy defense of DOMA via the case law recourse of incest and pedophilia may be a small matter in the administration's scheme of things, but it is a big and repugnant deal to the base - the people who matter for a crusading president.

This is a pattern in the Obama administration: for the promise to pull troops out of Iraq there was the concomitant promise of more in Afghanistan, for the release of the OLC "torture memos," operatives of harsh interrogation techniques were also offered immunity, in return for the administration's defense of DOMA, Obama promised to extend benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees. This is incremental, transactional, and defensive leadership. Defenders balance; but crusaders are mandated to press on. Incremental leadership works for presidents mandated to keep a charge, but not for one who flaunted his audacity. There are distinct and higher expectations for a crusader-to-be; and if President Obama is to live up to his hype, then bear the crusader's cross he must.

Was the Iranian "Election" Rigged or Not?

Let me be the first to admit that I don't know if the recent Iranian "election" was fraudulent, but the faith some pundits have placed on the "evidence" for their conviction that it was gives me pause. If electoral upsets - unpredictable wins - can happen in US elections, they can happen anywhere.

The Iranian elections certainly weren't free and fair, not least because the regime had hand-picked the slate of candidates, but we are unlikely to ever know that straight-up fraud was involved or if voting irregularities were of a higher frequency than those we have routinely taken for granted even in this country. Our failure to contemplate even the possibility that many a dictator has been democratically elected is a dangerous democratic hubris that has shaped and sometimes thwarted our foreign policy.

I am not asserting that the Iranian election was definitely legitimate, only that it is at least remotely possible that it was. At least two independent pollsters agree, and have offered the illuminating factoid from their poll that the only demographic group that found Hossein Mousavi leading Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were graduates and the highly-incomed. (That is to say, they are people most likely to resemble western spectators still staring at the final vote tally in disbelief.) And it is worth noting that Ahmadinejad’s 62.6 percent of the vote in this year’s election is essentially the same as the 61.69 percent he received in 2005. Indeed the burden of proof should be on those who have argued that this year's result was a surprise.

Yet Christopher Hitchens would have none of it and Steve Clemons has decided that there will be blood. But is the blood that Clemons not implausibly predicts will ensue the result of the subversion of democracy in the Iranian electoral process or its success?

Shutting down the media may be egregiously non-democratic, but it is different than creating ballots out of thin air. The reason why this distincton matters is that we must learn to contemplate why millions of people around the world would want to rally behind fanatical leaders who hold such spectacularly repugnant positions as denying the holocaust. This has happened so many times before that it makes our failure to accept its possibility even more revealing of the depth and scope of our mind-block: consider the cases of Gamal Nasser (Egypt), Hugo Chavez (Venezuela), Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe), Jerry Rawlings (Ghana), Slobodan Milošević (Serbia), and now, possibly, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Democracy is messy, and it is not naturally or dialectically inclined towards human rights, western liberal ideals, or the best candidate according to our standards. Neo-conservatives in America positing that the Iraqi people would welcome our troops as liberators back in 2003 have had to learn the hard way the costs of believing what they wanted to believe. In an analagous way, today's pundits have been so quick to assert that the Iranian people in their post-election riots have exposed the charade of their recent "elections," but maybe it is democracy itself that has outwitted the pundits. To understand the unpredictable and poigant path of democracy and democratization in the world, those of us who believe in democracy must urgently and honestly contemplate the number of times we have been hoisted by our own petard.

Health-care Reform: A Litmus Test for a President and his Proposed Epoch

Everything President Barack Obama has achieved legislatively up to this moment - even the much touted $800 billion economic stimulus bill - has been relatively easy; mostly expedited and achieved in the name of economic emergency. And the president has been upfront all along that these early accomplishments were but prologue to the health-care battle to come. Pundits have been saying for a long time that this president chooses his battles and knows well the importance of preserving his political capital. Well, the moment Obama has been saving up for is here, and the stakes are as high as the president is ambitious.

To put things more starkly - if President Obama's proposed health-care reform fails, then his presidential honeymoon is decidedly over. For all the euphoric talk of the era of Obama, if he fails to deliver on health-care, then he would have proven himself to be just another Bill Clinton. Obama would not be a reconstructive leader in the mold of Franklin Roosevelt, and the era of big government will still be over.

Conversely, successful health-care reform will be legacy-making. Generations of Americans will remember Barack Obama for what he did for them, and they will remain as loyal Democratic party constituents for decades to come. Successful health-care reform will be tangible proof that the era of ("better") government is back, and it would have been Obama (like FDR 80 years ago) who took us there.

The stakes then, could not be higher, and the task no more enormous. Overhauling our health-care system runs up against almost every institutional and structural pathology of American democracy: multifarious and over-zealous interest group politics, power struggles between Congress and the presidency, and the ideological chasm between the two major parties about the role of government. Health-care policy is one of those policies in which the public and indeed pundits know relatively little about. Very few people are going to peruse the hundreds of pages of bill(s) under consideration. So watch for it - this means reform will invariably be sold and criticized with generalizing slogans. The Obama administration will have to play a delicate balancing act of negotiating details with the experts on Capitol Hill and captains of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries (who are probably going to be the only groups who will be incentivized to keep track of the facts and figures), persuading lay persons with a clear and yet truthful account of what is at stake, while also deflecting the simplistic slogans dissenting organized interests will disseminate in media blitzkriegs.

Elections are just regularized signposts on the American calendar. The media focusses on it because viewers and voters like to keep up with a horse-race. But history is marked not by these regularly scheduled events, but by the passage of landmark legislation that durably alters the relationship (for better or for worse) between government and its wards. How historians will remember our era will turn on what happens in the next crucial months. As President Obama's audacity is about to be tested, so is America at the precipice of an epochal test.

Supreme Court Politics for the Sake of Politics

That the selection of Supreme Court Justices has become a deeply politicized process was one of the most invidious legacies of Franklin Roosevelt, who once tried to "pack" the Court with liberal justices sympathetic to the New Deal.

In trying to extricate himself from this legacy, President Obama has gone out of his way to nominate (what he deems to be) one of the least controversial candidates out there. It is in his interest to, because it would be unwise for him to squander political capital when the potential gain is limited. The most he can achieve in the present nomination iteration is to maintain, rather than alter, the ideological balance of the Court.

That the president has partly suceeded in preempting controversy can be seen in the fact that conservatives have not yet decided if Sonia Sotomayor is worth opposing. Moderate Republicans are especially afraid that a concerted attack on Sotomayor will alienate their party from hispanic voters. The debate is about whether or not to have a debate; the controversy is whether or not Sotomayor is controversial. Barring a startling new revelation about Sotomayor's past, this is about as good as it gets for any modern Supreme Court nominee.

Yet the fact that there is nevertheless a controversy about whether or not Sotomayor is controversial is poignant enough, a reflection of our thirst for politics and our confusion of politics as the end rather than the means for achieving nobler ends.

What is often missed is that the more intense our debate about the suitability of a particular nominee for the Court, the more we imply that Justices are incorrigibly nepotistc, and all we can do is to select someone on our side. If Justice Sandra Day O'Connor once marveled at the majesty of the law, our nomination wranglings reflect our burlesquing of the Court. Here is the paradox: even if partisans and lobbyists succeed in sending their favorite to the Court, they would aso have deprived the new justice of a measure of legitimacy s/he would have had if s/he had been admitted to the bench without their advocacy.

Perhaps the stakes are too high, as fans and enemies of every new nominee contend. But piecemeal and short-term gains can come at a great institutional and long-term costs. Supreme Court justices are no longer perceived to be women and men capable of setting aside their personal opinions or transcending their ideological biases. In politicizing the Court, we are disrupting the constitutional balance of respect, and contributing to the tyranny of the elected branches and in particular the president, who, let the record reflect, doesn't only execute the law (as the commensurate expectation ought to be if we insist judges should not make law) but also makes it in the form of executive orders and in the veto power (which is a legislative power, enumerated with Congress's powers in Article 1 of the Constitution).

So it should come as no surprise that the first president who seriously tried to politicize the court, Franklin Roosevelt, was also one intent on his particular interpretation of the constitution and having his legislative way. Kudos to any president and any citizen with the foresight and restraint to treat a co-equal branch of government as a bulwark of our constitution and not another political playpen.

Obama, Notre Dame, Abortion

The pro-lifers single-mindedly protesting President Barack Obama's receipt of an honorary degree from Notre Dame University have reduced the Catholic Catechism to a single issue. And it is precisely in the single-mindedness of such pro-life proponents that it can be showed that their concern is not, ultimately, about life.

The president is on the right side of Catholicism on immigration and the environment, just as previous presidents Notre Dame has honored have been on the wrong side of the Church on issues like capital punishment and support for nuclear weapons. To pick on the current president is to pick one particular issue as the litmus test of a person's contribution to advancing human excellence (the qualification for a honorary degree).

That is myopic, but worse still, many pro-lifers proffer their arguments in bad faith, or so Professor Sonu Bedi at Dartmouth argues (28:15 onwards).



If opponents of abortion want to make the State compel women to carry their foetuses to term, Sonu Bedi compellingly asks: why don't pro-lifers also demand that the State compels citizens who are uniquely situated to save a particular life to do so?

The latter are what Bedi calls "forced samaritan laws." As Judith Jarvis Thomson made clear decades ago, a law prohibiting abortion is a forced samaritan law, because a woman considering abortion would be told by the State that she must perform her duty of preserving a life.

Fair enough. Perhaps we should legislate such a world, but the truth is we have not, and are not even trying. In the Common Law of the US, there is, in general, no duty to rescue. That is to say, no person can be held liable for doing nothing while another person's life is in peril. In Vermont, one can be slapped with a $100 fine if one is uniquely positioned to save a life but fails to do so. Consider the glaring asymmetry of the law: $100 versus $2000-5000 in Texas if a woman is found to have undergone an illegal abortion.

Ah, but as the rejoinder goes, perhaps a woman has consented to sex and perhaps that is why she has a special duty to the child she helped create, and not so for the random passer-by who chooses not to save a drowning child. OK, (assuming consenting to sex is the same as consenting to procreation) why don't we talk about laws alongside abortion laws that will also exact commensurate obligations on the father who also consented to the sexual intercourse that begot the child? Why are we so quick to pin consent and duty squarely on the woman seeking an abortion? Pro-lifers who seek laws against abortion but not laws for forced samaritanism are too quick to dismiss the immense physical and emotional costs of child-bearing that women have silently borne for millenia. And if they care only about protecting one type of life (and burdening only one group of people), then surely they are not, paradoxically, truly concerned about life but about something else, such as the preservation of traditional roles in the family.

If we value life, then we should dedicate our lobbying energy to saving any life writ large that is in imminent peril, and not merely the life in the womb. The burden of being pro-life should be equally born by all. Not only by women. If we are to be pro-life, then let us be pro-all-life, not just those lives that only women are uniquely privileged/burdened to save.

Swine Flu or H1N1?

"Swine flu" or a strand of influenza A subtype "H1N1?" Try as federal officials might, the media continues to resist their call to term the "swine flu" the new strain of "H1N1" virus.

At a press conference last Tuesday, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack was at pains to say, "This really isn’t swine [flu], it’s H1N1 virus." He also explained why: "and it is significant because there are a lot of hard-working families whose livelihood depends on us conveying this message.” (At least ten countries have placed bans on the import of pork even though the World Health Organization has attested that H1N1 is an air-borne and not a food-borne virus.)

The hegemony of "swine flu" over "H1N1" is even more peculiar given that the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) reports that the particular strand of H1N1 virus (which typically infect pigs) that is causing the current epidemic has not previously been reported in pigs and actually contains avian and human components. It was only on May 2, long after "swine flu" had gained rhetorical currency that the strain was found in pigs at a farm in Alberta, Canada. Even there the story has a twist - the pigs had gotten infected because of their contact with a farm worker who had recently returned from Mexico, and not the other way around - prompting some to suggest that the proper nomenclature ought to be "human flu" or "Mexican flu."

But the media's job is to transmit the news in the best way that rolls of one's tongue, not deal with the fallout of their infelicitous use of words. To be fair, administration officials were slow to catch on. As late as April 26, two days before Vilsack's press conference, the White House and Richard Besser of the Center for Disease Control (CDC) were still referring to the "swine flu." Clearly, the pork lobbyists aren't going to win this battle and the malapropistic epidemic will continue. Administration officials should know that if they really wanted a working alternative to "swine flu," they would have to do a lot better than a robotic scientific abbreviation.

Our current malopropism has an ancient pedigree. The 1918-1920 H1N1 pandemic called the "Spanish Flu" didn't start in Spain (and probably started in Kansas). This is ironic, because the "Spanish Flu" acquired its name only because Spain was a neutral country in WW1 and with no state censorship of news of the disease, was offering the most reliable information about it. This ended up generating the impression that the disease originated and was particularly widespread in Spain. Even when the media is not trying, it defines and shapes our reality.

Why does any of this matter? Because words characterize an issue in such a way as to insinuate a cause and to frame our reactions. Sometimes, words can even drive mass hysteria. Consider the "swine flu" outbreak in 1976, which claimed a single life at Fort Dix, NJ. Because this particular strain of virus looked a lot like the one that caused the "Spanish Flu" of 1918-1920 (also misleadingly named), public health officials convinced President Gerald Ford to commence a mass immunization program for all Americans. The use of a sledgehammer to crack a nut was not without consequences. Of the 40 million Americans immunized, about 500 developed Guillain-Barré syndrome, a paralyzing neuromuscular disorder.

So let us pick our words carefully, lest our slovenly words presage our slovenly deeds.

Walking the Tightrope: Barack Obama on the Choice between our Safety and our Ideals

On April 16, President Barack Obama ordered the release of Bush-era Office of Legal Council memos on counter-terror tactics, and in a statement, declared that "A democracy as resilient as ours must reject the false choice between our security and our ideals," echoing his inaugural position that "we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals."

This is a perfect example of political equivocation, a rhetorical gesture that means one thing to liberals and another to conservative. For liberals, they heard the president say that we will not allow alleged threats to our safety to become the excuse for an assault to our ideals. For conservatives, they heard that just because the president must do whatever he must to keep Americans safe does not mean that we must compromise our ideals. And so everybody applauded Obama's lyrical line on inauguration day.

In his April 16 statement, President Obama proceeded to explain his rationale for releasing the memos: "In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution."

The President is balancing on a precarious tightrope. In releasing the memos he is trying to appease a liberal base looking for transparency and some say vengeance, and in guaranteeing those who used harsh interrogation tactics immunity from prosecution, he is trying to assure conservatives that he is serious about maintaining the morale of those who serve our country. Ironic, because though the president was trying to seal a can of worms, he may have re-opened it.

This is the acrobatics of modern politics. A gesture to one side, and a wink to another is Obama's only way out. The release of these memos was a gesture of good faith to Obama's liberal base who want justice, and yet a show of solidarity with conservatives who do not want to see a witchhunt. Consider that the real action of deciding who will be prosecuted has been conveniently delegated to Attorney General Eric Holder. Decisive action will force even the most talented acrobat to fall off the tightrope - for it requires a consequential choice. But Obama can remain suspended in mid-air - in his presidential honeymoon - as long as the American people are content with mere gestures. This may not be the case this time, because liberals are outraged at what the memos detail and this will put immense pressure on Holder to initiate some high-level prosecutions, just as this has mobilized the conservative base to preempt an impending witchhunt.

For several decades now, we have been too tolerant of presidents who have exceled in rhetorical shape-shifting in order to appear all things to all people. This has occured in part because the American people have come to believe that presidential words amount to presidential deeds. Words easily permit ambiguity; actions do not. We have bought an artificial consensus at a high cost: politics has become a spectacle of acrobatic tomfoolery. The American people appear unenthralled by Obama's performance this time though, and while democracy will benefit from this, it is not good news for the president.

100 Days

What can the first 100 days tell us about a president's remaining days in office? Not much about the president, but a little about the expectations we have of him.

President Bush tried and achieved little of significance in his first 100 days in office. His major accomplishment in his first year, signing into law a $1.35 trillion tax cut, would occur only in his fifth month in office. No one foresaw September 11, and Bush's aggressive expansion of the National Security State as a result.

Or consider the president who preceded him. Bill Clinton tried to do a lot in his first 100 days - too many, say conventional accounts - and consequently also achieved little of significance in his first 100 days. Clinton did end up doing quite a lot in his 8 years in office, but not because he overloaded his agenda but because he learnt, after his first two years in offce, to work with congress. 100 days predicted little in both these cases.

Or how about President John Kennedy, who presided over probably the biggest fumble ever in the first 100 days of any administration - the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Kennedy was able to recover from the debacle though, unlike Jimmy Carter who seemed to suffer one mishap after another even though the first he suffered during his first hundred days was quite innocuous. Carter had tried to create one of FDR's famous fireside chats, complete with blazing fire in the background in order to communicate his energy policy to the country. Carter wore a cardigan sweater rather than a suit, for which he later earned the epithet, "Jimmy Cardigan." The fact was the speech had gone down quite well at the time. The Boston Globe found it a "powerful presidential event, moving in its simplicity and significant in its reiteration of his goals." It came across, to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, like "a cup-of-coffee conversation at the corner drugstore, instead of a discussion at the club." Carter's first 100 days was retrospectively slammed because he failed to make good on the promises he made; while Kennedy's early gaffe has been quickly forgotten because history never offered him a chance to deliver on his promises - suspended as he is in political martyrdom. In neither case was the first hundred days either a predictor or a path-dependent lock on what these presidents who do later on in office.

So our fascination with the first 100 days of a presidency is a statement not about our ability to assess presidencies, but a mirror unto our expectations of them. The fact is few presidents are judged by what they achieved in their first 100 days in office. Only those on whom are laid great expectations become the object of great scrutiny. Few, if anybody, asked what President George W. Bush achieved in his first 100 days. A report card this early in a presidency is only required when the American people give a mandate to their president for swift and decisive action. And George W Bush had no mandate, having won less than half of the nation's popular vote. While most presidents spent the two months before Inauguration preparing their transition teams, George Bush spent much of this time contesting Al Gore's claim to the presidency.

Our fascination with scoring the achievements and failures of President Obama's first 100 days is a reflection of the expectations we have of him. The scorecard says more about the scorer than anything specific about the future of the Obama presidency. All we can observe is that with great expectations come opportunities for great success or failure. Very few people expect Barack Obama to be a middling president, and that's all we know right now.

The President's Church

Americans do impose a religious litmus test on our presidents, and there is a tradition that proves it. President Obama and his family attended Easter service at St John's Episcopal Church. Just across from the White House, it is known as the "Church of the Presidents," the unofficial White House Chapel. Almost every president since James Madison has found occasion to worship in this church and in particular at pew 54, the presidential pew.

The selective presidential need to prove a religious point proves my point. Consider the case of President Eisenhower, who was raised a Jehovah's Witness and whose home served as the local meeting hall for Witnesses for 19 years. Twelve days after inauguration his first inauguration, Eisenhower was baptized, confirmed, and became a communicant in the Presbyterian Church. No president before or after him has ever had to perform such rites while in office. The religious litmus test was so powerful in this case that it was voluntarily taken by a president who had already been endorsed by the people and sworn to protect and defend the Constitution.

Contrast Eisenhower to President Reagan or Bush, neither of whom belonged to a congregation or attended church regularly (or even sporadically) while in Washington, justifying their decision on the basis that the security requirements would be too onerous and disruptive to the congregations they joined. Faith is a personal thing only if the public aleady believes that a president possesses it. If not, no security arrangement is too onerous to trump the need to publicize it. This is true of President Clinton when he attended Foundry United Methodist Church while in Washington (one of the candidates for the Obamas' new home church by the way), and it is also true of presidential candidate John Kerry when he made much public display of his Sunday church attendances.

The speculation about which church the Obamas will ultimately settle on as a home church in DC has been fuelled, in part, by his past association with the controversial Jeremiah Wright and his membership in the Trinity United Church of Christ. The speculation about where the Obamas will end up has taken on more than normal political significance because there is a greater need for this president, unless others who didn't even have to attend church, to demonstrate that his religious views are squarely in the mainstream.

So on this Easter weekend, to those who bemoan the secularization of America, take heart, because presidents who appear godless know that they will be judged on earth before they are judged in heaven; to those who believe the separation of church and state is not yet complete, take stock, because where and whether or not President Obama ends up worshipping every Sunday has become a topic of paramount political importance to the administration. So much so that White House aides reportedly considered over a dozen churches before deciding on St John's as the safest place for a president to go to observe Easter Sunday.

President Obama's Latent Realism

If there was one message President Obama wanted to send to allies in his trip to the G-20 Summit in Europe, it was to say that he is not George Bush, and the era of arrogant American unilateralism is over. In Strasbourg, France, the President said, "We exercise our leadership best when we are listening ... when we show some element of humility."

Does humility engender respect or does it evidence weakness? This week in Europe, President Obama was applauded and cheered, but this soft power didn’t seem to translate to much. The score is 0-1 in Round One of Liberalism versus Realism. I think the President knows this, and is merely waiting to cash in the store of goodwill he banked this week. As the major decisions of the presidency are made quietly behind the desk at the Oval Office, not in international summits, we should not mistake Obama's courtesies as the prologue of things to come.

The President could not have missed the setbacks he encountered in this trip. Sure, he successfully mediated the disagreement between Chinese President Hu Jintao and French President Nicolas Sarkozy so that the G-20 would "take note" rather than fully endorse a list of rogue offshore tax havens. But the American president's newfound respect for the world did not engender newfound cooperation or an increased willingness to take America’s lead. (And we should not have expected otherwise, for courtesies are exchanged only up to the point when conflicting interests are at stake.) Europe was not malleable to the president’s call for a larger global stimulus package, and far from enthusiastic at his call to welcome Turkey into the European Union. NATO allies only agreed to sending 5,000 more non-combat troops to aid the US war effort in Afghanistan. And of course, the President stood before a crowd of 20,000 people in Prague painting a utopian portrait of a nuclear-free world just hours after North Korea successfully tested a long-range missile launch.

President Obama’s European trip was a very well orchestrated and executed photo-op. There is no doubt that Europe is feeling the love, but it is unclear if she is returning it in real ways that matter. The dance of diplomatic and royal protocols may have thrilled the public and the media, but on things that matter, the president squarely confronted the limits of symbolism and gesture.

After all, the president did let slip in the same speech in which he was extolling humility that “when we recognize we may not always have the best answer but we can always encourage the best answer.” In the end, (even ) the Liberal Way is still the American Way. And I expect, as Theodore Roosevelt once counselled, the president's soft voice will soon be amplified by a big stick.

To Regulate or Not to Regulate, that is American Exceptionalism

Government regulation of the market in American has always been either too invasive or too superficial, never just right. This tells us more about ourselves than the day-by-day report card of Obama's fledgling administration.

The Obama adminstration's firing of GM CEO Rick Wagoner seem to some to have been a power grab and an overkill; yet others feel that the administration's plan to help to buy up some of the toxic assets owned by banks will be too easy on the banks.

We swing between the extremes of excessive regulation and unfettered laissez faire - indeed we have majority factions within both major parties staunchly defending both extremes - because our country has never properly worked out the tension between the two.

Consider the last time an economic crisis of even greater proportions rocked the country. The New Deal and in particular the National Industrial Recovery Act (NRA) represented an even greater power grab by the Roosevelt administration than the one Obama is being accused of today, including the right by the president to approve of a set of "codes of fair competition" for every industry regulating minimum wages and maximum weekly hours. The Supreme Court unanimously declared the NRA unconstitutional in 1936.

As a country born without the feudal baggage of the old world and one which has constructed the self-fulfilling myth of the American Dream, we have never had to fully confront the crisis of capitalism that industrialization provoked elsewhere. Even having experienced the Great Depression, we still have not found, and no politician has successfully articulated, a sustained national consensus about the relationship between the state and the economy. Our love-hate relationship with the federal government explains American exceptionalism, but it also the source of our current woes.

Because ours is a capitalist economy which concedes the value of government intervention and regulation, we must live with mixed (and hence often botched) solutions to our current economic crisis. We can neither nationalize the banks - and hence control how they are run including how executive compensation is structured, nor can we leave the banks alone - no politician would dare risk a depression on the heels of his/her inaction. In trying to find a compromise between market liberalism and political control of the market, we often end up achieving neither. So the Obama administration will alternately be accused of sleeping with Wall Street or witch-hunting it; decades after we have weathered the current crisis, we will still be debating whether or not what Obama did helped or worsened the problem. This is America, where we have a right, nay, a duty, to earnestly debate - as our Founders did - the necessity even of having a federal government at all.

Outrage in Washington

On the news that AIG paid out bonuses to its executives, our politicians in Washinton were outraged. Nay, "stunned," was our president on the Jay Leno Show. Shock, awe, disbelief are the attendant and contiguous emotions.

The only thing politicians prefer to do more than mutual congratulation is to register their outrage. Unbelievable they say, that AIG had the temerity to have done what they did. Goodness gracious, it was so outside the boundaries of civil decorum that we could not possibly have foreseen the loophole that permitted such behavior. Executives rewarding themselves - completely beyond comprehension, surely. The politicians doth protest too much.

Poor AIG chief Executive Edward Liddy - he shall get a whipping when he testifies before Congress on Wednesday. Worse still, he will have to sit through the public grandstanding of politicians who probably would have done the exact same thing had they been in his position. (Technically, they wrote a law that permitted him to do so.)

On trial would not only be Liddy, but the ugliness that Washington has become. Our elected representives excel in mimicking the anger of their constituents, parodying this anger in hyperbolic proportions in order to cover up their complicity in the mess that is AIG. This is reverse psychology 101; we all tried our hand at it at one point or another when we were young and our parents caught us red-handed stealing the cookie from the cookie jar. Goodness gracious, I can't believe you would think I would stand by and allow all of this, say aggrieved Senators and members of Congress. (For they know full well how quickly voters' anger can spill over.) Except that they actually did.

Some Senators have suggested that if the AIG executives had any integrity, they would return the $165 million in bonus money. Well Senators, this is capitalism. Voluntary acts of benevolence and self-abnegation aren't exactly the ingredients of the invisible hand.

The truth is our politicians are crying foul and not doing much more beyond crying because we have so thoroughly bought the virtues of capitalism that we do not have the resources to correct its slip-ups other than howl. The executives should have known better, Washington sighs. That is what Washington's outrage amounts to - an impotent vent that belies a lack of will to do something to correct the situation.

Even though the American taxpayer now owns 80 percent of AIG, the truth is Washington cannot tell a private company what to do. That would be socialism, some say. Well then we cannot have our cake and eat it. Either we embrace capitalism and the predictable instinct for executives to look out for themselves, or we say, when 80 percent of a company is owned by the public, we should call things what they are and acknowledge that this company has become a public trust to whom an obligation and an accounting is owed to taxpayers for the manner in which the company is run. Mere outrage - an invitation for voluntary self-correction seldom gets us anywhere. Washington should either get its act together or stop bloviating.

Dick Cheney's Interview with John King

In his first interview since leaving the White House, former VP Dick Cheney declared in no uncertain terms that the Obama administration's reversal of some of the Bush administration's foreign policies has left America less safe than before.

The substantive claim may well be true. And it doesn't even matter that Cheney has no credibility having been wrong about the WMDs and the prediction that the Iraqis would greet American troops as liberators. But he makes such bad arguments with so much conviction that he gives us clues as to how we were all hoodwinked by an administration drunk on its own hubris and desire to save us from Evil.

Here, I think, is his central argument against Obama's attitude towards waterboarding, wiretapping and all the other "legal," "constitutional" programs his administration pursued:

"Those programs were absolutely essential to the success we enjoyed of being able to collect the intelligence that let us defeat all further attempts to launch attacks against the United States since 9/11."

So the argument goes:

A. We have had no terrorist attack on American soil since September 11, 2001.
B. Everything the Bush administration did was therefore instrumental to this positive outcome.

This argument has no difference in form to this other one:

C. We had not had a terrorist attack on American soil until September 11, 2001.
D. Everything the Clinton and Bush administrations did until September 10, 2001 were instrumental to delivering this positive outcome.

If this sounds like a crackpot argument, it is because it asserts a premise and leaps (across galaxies) to a conclusion with utter indifference to the need for counterfactual reasoning. Too often, we allow our politicians to substitute assertion for argument. We have allowed conviction to substitute for reason, and we have paid a heavy price for it.

All the slick moves Cheney made while in office he made again in his interview with CNN's John King. Here is another telling paragraph in response to King's probe that Cheney had gone back on his fiscally-conservative principles, in which Cheney displayed his dark rhetorical genius:

1. Always start off with a casual reference to September 11.

"Eight months after we arrived, we had 9/11. We had 3,000 Americans killed one morning by al Qaeda terrorists here in the United States."

2. Deny all agency (and with that culpability) by characterizing every decision as an inevitable bow to necessity.

"We immediately had to go into the wartime mode. We ended up with two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of that is still very active. We had major problems with respect to things like Katrina, for example."

3. When all logic has been cast aside and one's sympathetic partisan audience suitably hypnotized, declare an ideological about-face and expect to get away with it with grim determination.

"All of these things required us to spend money that we had not originally planned to spend, or weren't originally part of the budget."

Topsy-turvy, Right becomes Left, Wrong becomes Right, spell-binding shenanigans. But, I concede, it's Cheney's and every politician's job and instinct to rewrite history in their favor. In this precise instance, I blame John King for buckling under Cheney's intimidating sneer and delivering a slew of softball questions with no follow-up. Cheney may be the original Tricky Dick, but our journalist from "the most trusted name in news" completely failed to pin him down. This is the democracy in which we live, where the mere facade of a free exchange of ideas between rational interlocutors belies us that it is reason and not rhetorical brow-beating that dictates the direction of policy.

Does Rush Limbaugh Lead the Republican Party?

To answer this question, one must first ask: what is the Republican party and who leads it?

There are three possible answers to these questions. Here is a helpful distinction political scientists invented a while ago. There is the party in the electorate consisting of rank-and-file Republican identifiers, there is the party as organization instantiated in the DNC,and there is the party in government, which is the sum of elected Republican officals in government. So here are the potential leaders of the Republican party:

Leader of the party in the electorate - Rush Limbaugh, or so he hopes.
Leader of the party as organization - Michael Steele, or so he tries.
Leader of the party in government - future nominee, or so s/he plots.

Rush Limbaugh's recent elevation in the political limelight was a result of the fact that the Republican party in government is in shambles after a stinging defeat in the 2008 elections. (It wasn't just because President Obama mentioned him in a speech.) John McCain has been sidelined, and no one (not even Bobby Jindal, especially after his much derided reponse to the president's message to a joint session of Congress) has emerged to fill the political vacuum on the Right. The party in the electorate are yearning for a shepherd and since they are not finding it in government, they are looking to a talk-show host.

The recent tussle between Limbaugh and Michael Steele was only to be expected in the light of this threefold characterization of the Republican party. They were merely jostling for power as the party in government is regrouping. But it also tells us how weak parties have become as personalities (in the media and in politics) have trumped organizations in the running of American democracy.

None of this is good for the Republican party (as organization). When the party in the electorate has to turn to a talk how host for a potential leader, it spells disenchantment at their elected representatives in DC. The organization - its fundraising and voter turnout machine - was what gave the Republicans the electoral edge up till 2006. But now the party appears to be left only with personalities - like Joe the Plumber (still around), Aaron Schock (the youngest member of Congress), and Limbaugh. Personalities flit in and out of political life, and at best can only temporarily bring together a a diverse coalition of interests. They are not the way back to a competitive two-party system.