Obama’s legacy: the audacity of audacity

The New Neo Posted on by

For the past five years or so I’ve been musing on Obama as man, as politician, as president. But now I want to look again and say a few words about Obama as precedent.

Like everyone, Obama is a unique individual, and it stands to reason that his particular combination of traits and abilities will not come again in exactly the same package. Whether or not his work will live on depends on how the American people react and whom they elect next time and for the foreseeable future, and that of course includes any changes in the makeup of the voting public that might be voted into place by this Congress (i.e. immigration “reform”).

But it strikes me that one of Obama’s most pernicious influences—and there are so many to choose from—has been that he has let future politicians know what is possible in America. And, unlike his supporters, I don’t mean that in a good way.

There used to be certain assumptions on the part of politicians who would be president. As president, you needed to keep a lofty tone and leave the more vicious and divisive attacks to your Vice President; it wouldn’t be “presidential” otherwise. You had to make sure you tended to a faltering economy or you’d be blamed. You had to support our allies and be tough with those countries who were working against us. You had to propose legislation on issues the American people cared about and supported, not just your pet projects, and that had some bipartisan support, especially if the changes were sweeping. You had to answer to the press or they would turn on you. And you had to respect Congress and the Constitution enough to go through Congress in order to do what you thought should be done if it was a power Congress usually had, not go around it through executive order

Some of this could be violated, of course, and has been, particularly the last one, because power is one of the things for which presidents strive. But if you went against too many of these rules the American people (and perhaps Congress, perhaps even your own party in some cases) was very likely to turn against you and not re-elect you. Or if it were a second term you’d lose your “mandate” and political capital and become a lame duck immediately. At least, that was the fear. So the idea that there would be consequences for such things helped hold previous presidents in check to a large extent, although of course there were some who violated this tenet or that and survived.

But generally there was a certain respect for the unwritten law of natural consequences: the belief was that the American people had its limits. You could con all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, and all that. But enough of the people would be onto your game to stop you.

Obama has proven all of that is bunk for the right person at the right time. What’s more, his entire career has proven that he is that person. He has managed somehow to be one of the trickiest and dirtiest of politicians (from the start of his rise in local Chicago politics, as I’ve described many times before), one of the most double-crossing and double-dealing and just plain doubling, presenting himself as one thing and acting like another while simultaneously presenting one of the smoothest and most above-it-all facades ever exhibited by a politician. He has talked his way out of every jam, or stonewalled his way out, with nearly complete impunity and lack of consequences. He had accomplished very little in his path leading to the presidency—except, of course, having won election to his previous positions—and still had no trouble convincing people he should receive the highest office in the land at a fairly young age. And most importantly, in his first term he egregiously violated every one of the rules I listed above and was re-elected. His popularity had fallen but not enough to matter in any way in terms of consequences.

How he has managed to accomplish this is something I (and many many others) have described in literally hundreds of post. So that’s not the point of this one. The point of this one is to say that he has shown future presidents that these previous assumptions are false, and that the rules that held presidents in check can be violated with impunity if you know what you’re doing and do it with enough audacity.

If that stands, it may be one of his worst legacies: the knowledge that you can fool enough of the people enough of the time and get away with it.

On patience: the West vs. Islamicist totalitarianism

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a re-post of an piece I wrote in 2008. I found it yesterday while doing a search for some information I wanted for a comment, and I thought that, in light of recent news in Syria and elsewhere, it could bear repeating.]

Our post-9/11 unity was fleeting, if not totally illusory. We are now bitterly divided on how to fight the war against Islamicist totalitarianism.

We are divided on whether there is such a war. We are divided on who our most important enemies in that war might be. We are even divided on whether we truly have what we might call enemies, or whether a nice friendly dialogue might not be enough to make us all get along better.

But on reading this article by Clfford D. May in National Review entitled “100 Years of War?”—a reference to Barack Obama’s distortion of John McCain’s remark that we might need to keep troops in Iraq for that long a time, similar to what we’re already doing in Germany and South Korea—it occurred to me that there is another division, and that this division might actually be the heart of the matter.

This split may have begun to occur as early as 9/11 itself, shortly after the towers fell. It has to do with the perception of how long we should expect this fight to take. The division is between those who always assumed it would be long and arduous, and those who did not. Continue reading →

Obama’s Arab Spring,…

The New Neo Posted on by

…making the world safe* for Islamicists.

I called it Obama’s Arab Spring, but that’s a bit unfair, because although he has a big role I’m not at all sure that anyone could have prevented this. The Arab world is what it is, and the aftermath of the Iraq War (not the war itself) showed us that we lack the will to put in the resources, blood, and time that might have a chance (it was only ever a chance) of changing things around.

Fanatics, on the other hand, don’t lack for will:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

That poem, “The Second Coming” by Yeats (written in 1919 after WWI), kept rising to my mind after 9/11. If you’re familiar with it, you may know how it ends:

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[*The first sentence of this post refers to this slogan from WWI.]

Disapproval of Obama is growing—but what does it mean?

The New Neo Posted on by

Much is being made of the recent drop in Obama’s approval rating, particularly among his usual strong supporters, the young (see also this):

Barack Obama’s job approval rating is down to 45 percent in the lastest CNN/ORC poll, conducted June 11-13, with 54 percent disapproval. The approval number is down from 53 percent in CNN/ORC’s May 17-18 poll. Most interesting result: Obama is getting only 48-percent approval from those age 18 to 34, only 3 percent above his national average.

By way of comparison, Obama’s 66 percent of the vote among 18-29s in November 2008 was 13 percent above his 53-percent nationwide percentage, and his 60 percent of the vote among 18-29s in November 2012 was 9 percent above his 51-percent nationwide percentage. Yes, the two age groups aren’t quite commensurate, but the numbers still suggest that the gap between young voters and their elders is shrinking.

Before we go any further, let’s ask whether it will end up mattering. If the immigration bill is passed, it may not, because one of the main goals of the bill is to swell the ranks of reliably Democratic voters. Obama is well aware of that, and it was always part of his plan.

Bryan Preston writes:

…[N]ow that [Obama’s] re-elected, how much does he really care about his approval rating at all? Even amidst the scandals he is poised for a major victory on immigration, which will permanently change the electorate in his favor. He has likely calculated that not much matters outside that bill, and if he gets a win there, any weakness in the polls is temporary and will take care of itself. As long as Democrats hang onto the Senate in 2014, Obama is invulnerable to public opinion.

I came to the realization some time ago that in his second term Obama might not care about the public’s approval. I wasn’t specifically basing it on an immigration bill, although it was already clear that Obama wanted to tackle that task some day, and that it would be to his—and the Democratic Party’s—great advantage if it was passed.

Back in November of 2010 I wrote this post, composed right after the Republicans’ victorious midterm election, when things seemed a lot brighter and it looked as though the American people might reject Obama in 2012. I speculated, though, that Obama might do a few small things to make the American people continue to like him well enough to enable him to pull out a victory in November of 2012 and a second term:

And then, and then””voila! Four more years! Four years in which he won’t have to answer to the electorate at all. He will be unleashed to do whatever it is he really wants. And does anyone think that would look moderate at all?

Note also, comments like this one from Preston’s recent piece:

[Obama’s] popularity doesn’t matter because he’s never running for office again. What matters is he got his Obamacare monstrosity passed and he’s on the five yard line with his immigration bill. His mission to “fundamentally transform America” is almost complete. That being the case I doubt he gives a frog’s fat a$$ what anyone in America thinks of him.

But let’s examine that poll anyway, because it shows some interesting trends nevertheless, if we’re interested in what the American public thinks (whether Obama cares or not). It was taken June 11-13, 2013, just after the Snowden story first broke but before all of its details had emerged.

Young people have always been among Obama’s strongest supporters, along with blacks (the strongest of all) and to a lesser extent Hispanics. One of the most interesting things about the new poll, as mentioned, is that the youngest of young voters, those 18-34, are less happy with him at present than those in the 34-49 age range, which seems odd. Speculation that it has to do with the 18-34 group’s special sensitivity to issues of online privacy—which I thought might explain it—don’t really seem to, if you look at the poll results more carefully.

If you go to page 20, for example, you’ll see that the figures for the answer to the question “Do you approve or disapprove of the way Barack Obama is handling government surveillance of U.S. citizens?,” the answers for young people are almost the same as for all other age groups, which are remarkably similar to each other. The range among all the age groups is only between 60-62% disapproval and between 33-39% approval, surprisingly uniform results that don’t seem to indicate any special susceptibility to fears on that score on the part of the youngest demographic. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any earlier, pre-Snowden polls on the same question, so I couldn’t do a before-and-after, and it’s possible that young people’s views have changed the most on that question.

To make it even more odd, all the age groups responded very similarly to each other on another dimension that seems at first glance to contradict that first one (see page 25), the answer to the question, “Do you think the Obama administration has gone too far, has been about right, or has not gone far enough in restricting people’s civil liberties in order to fight terrorism?” The majority of people in all the age groups either said “just right” or “not far enough,” with a substantial and extremely stable minority of all age groups saying “too far” (the range for that answer was only 42-45% across all age groups, another exceedingly uniform response). So most people in all age groups think our civil liberties are not being encroached on too much, although most people in all age groups don’t approve of the way Obama is handling surveillance of US citizens. The only possible way I can find to reconcile the answers to the two questions is that many of those who responded to the first question by saying that they disapprove of the way Obama is handling government surveillance of U.S. citizens is that they disapprove because he’s not surveilling us enough, rather than that he’s snooping too much. “Disapprove,” after all, doesn’t really tell us in what direction and for what reason a person disapproves.

The biggest area of increased disapproval of Obama among young people, however, seems to be that they have come to distrust him and think him less honest and trustworthy than they once did. Again, we don’t know what they distrust about him or why. It’s possible they think he’s not leftist enough, or not spying on us enough. But whatever the reason, the poll figures show that among all the age groups it’s only the 34-49-year-olds who still trust Obama more than they distrust him. I have no theory as to why this particular group stands out as being more pro-Obama than all the others, but it does on quite a few of the questions.

The entire poll has so much interesting stuff in it that you might want to take a closer look at it; I can only touch on a few things here. But it indicates that no one’s been happy for a long time with Obama’s handling of economics (see pages 2, 4, and 5), particularly the deficit. And young people are no exception there; if you look at page 17, you’ll note that the 18-34 group has the highest disapproval rating of all age groups for Obama on the federal deficit question, which makes sense as they are the ones most likely to be left holding the bag.

On certain topics the public is very united—and some of those topics are rather surprising ones (IMHO), such as that the government has gotten so big it is threatening our rights. Majorities in all demographic groups (including non-whites!) and all ages answer “yes” to that question. That points to something the Republican Party could capitalize on—if, and only if, it is seen as defending these rights. But one wonders, because in the 2012 election it was the Democrats who successfully painted the Republicans as jeopardizing rights to abortion and birth control, and as wanting to put black people back in chains. So it depends what rights people care most about.

An unpleasant truth about 10-year-old Sarah Murnaghan’s lung transplant…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is that her getting it means that someone else won’t get one right now.

Another unpleasant truth about lung transplants (and transplants in general) is that, until we can grow new organs in labs, there will be a finite number available at any time, and that finite number is likely to be fewer than the number of people who need the organs and are waiting for them. So whether you like it or not (and I doubt you like it, and I certainly don’t like it), someone’s going to have to pick and choose among potential recipients to see who will get each available organ. And when one person gets the transplant and, hopefully, lives, another person might just happen to die waiting (nineteen people a day die in the US waiting for transplant organs). And all of this picking and choosing is going on right now and is independent of Obamacare and whatever panels it might establish to further deal with (and interfere with?) the process.

So how should we decide who goes to the front of the line? Well, first of all, it’s not really a line, not exactly:

Specifics of waiting list rules, which can be seen at OPTN website, vary by organ. General principles, such as a patient’s medical urgency, blood, tissue and size match with the donor, time on the waiting list and proximity to the donor, guide the distribution of organs. Under certain circumstance, special allowances are made for children. For example, children under age 11 who need kidneys are automatically assigned additional points. Factors such as a patient’s income, celebrity status, and race or ethnic background play no role in determining allocation of organs.

Contrary to popular belief, waiting on the list for a transplant is not like taking a number at the deli counter and waiting for your turn to order. In some respects, even the word “list” is misleading; the list is really a giant pool of patients. There is no ranking or patient order until there is a donor, because each donor’s blood type, size and genetic characteristics are different. Therefore, when a donor is entered into the national computer system, the patients that match that donor, and therefore the “list,” is different each time.

The other major guiding principal in organ allocation is: local patients first. The country is divided into 11 geographic regions, each served by a federally-designated organ procurement organization (OPO), which is responsible for coordinating all organ donations. With the exception of perfectly matched kidneys and the most urgent liver patients, first priority goes to patients at transplant hospitals located in the region served by the OPO. Next in priority are patients in areas served by nearby OPOs; and finally, only if no patients in these communities can use the organ, it is offered to patients elsewhere in the U.S.

Such locally oriented allocation makes medical sense because less time between donor and recipient usually means more chance of a successful transplant as well as fewer logistical complications that could threaten the viability of the organ. Experience has shown, furthermore, that people are more likely to donate organs if they know that other people in their own community will benefit…

Of course, debates about organ allocation will continue as long as there is such a large gap between patients who need transplants and the number of organs donated. Who, for example, should get priority, people who are the sickest or those who have the greatest chance of surviving and achieving a long life? And what is the significance, if any, of someone’s personal behavior? Should a much-needed heart go to a person who was a heavy smoker or a liver to someone who has suffered from alcoholism? These are difficult questions for which there are no easy answers.

Indeed.

There are protocols in place that thoughtful people have devised to deal with these questions, and there is a good possibility that the rule the Murnaghan family was fighting—that children under 12 qualify only for pediatric lungs, although they could do okay with adult lungs instead—had a logical reason for being. I haven’t been able to find that reason, but it makes sense that it would probably be because, although a small child can benefit from adult lungs, an adult can’t benefit from child lungs. So adult lungs would be limited to adult (or teenage) recipients because adults have no other options, whereas children are the only ones who can receive child lungs (not because of the rules, but because pediatric lungs just would not work in larger people).

You may not agree with those protocols, or think they’re unfair or stupid. But then attack the protocols on the merits. It is disturbing to think that organ transplantation decisions might turn into popularity contests, a kind of “American Idol” where the person who can stir up the most publicity wins the grand prize.

I want to make it crystal clear that I am not faulting Sarah Murnaghan’s family or Sarah herself, or even the people whose hearts went out to the little girl and her plight and raised a hue and cry to help her get the lungs that we all hope result in her living a long and healthy life. But aside from the adult vs. child conundrum, was she the only child on the list, or the sickest or most in need, or the best match for these particular lungs, or just the one whose parents were able to garner the most publicity for her?

Marc Siegel’s article, the one from National Review that I linked to at the beginning of this post, seems to ignore these complex issues, as do so many of the other pieces I’ve read on the subject except this one of Ace’s. And although yes, I agree with Siegel that Obamacare would mean that the government will be involved more and more in all sorts of health care decisions about how to allocate scarce resources, and that worries me a lot, I also believe that some entity would have been making more of those decisions as time went on and health care became more and more expensive. That’s been happening anyway, with health insurance companies often being the decision-makers.

I don’t know whom I trust less—the government or the health insurance companies. No, actually I do: it’s the government, sadly enough.

Dueling Carmens

The New Neo Posted on by

Compare and contrast.

And enjoy.

Both of these dancers are Russian, and both are excellent. The first is Svetlana Zakharova, and although the clip doesn’t have a date it looks relatively recent (the dancer only turned 34 a few days ago). The second is of Maya Plisetskaya, a dancer I’ve written about several times before. It was taken in 1967 when she was 42, probably not at the absolute peak of her powers as Zakharova is in her clip, but not all that far off either.

As I said, both are excellent. They emphasize different things and have different qualities, and Zakharova demonstrates the more extreme extension and flexibility that has become the hallmark of ballet today. But to me, one of them is Carmen and the other is not.

I’ve cued the first video to begin at the proper time (2:41) for this particular “Habanera” variation, which finishes at about 5:54. The second video is complete in itself and contains only that variation. See what you think:

Note that Plisetskaya is not the least bit afraid of looking awkward in certain poses, because gracefulness is not her paramount aim. Note also that Zakharova’s partner looks a bit like Putin, doesn’t he? And you might want to compare the difference between the way Zakharova falls backwards towards her partner at minute 4:59 and again a few seconds later with the way Plisetskaya does the same thing at minute 2:14 and again a few seconds later. Surprising, isn’t it, since Plisetskaya’s version was probably over forty years earlier?

Today’s NSA hearing

The New Neo Posted on by

So far what I’ve heard at the NSA hearing today is pretty straightforward and pretty interesting. The testimony makes the programs sound reasonable. Nor is this information new, although some of the detail is. But we’ve known the general outlines for years, whether people have paid attention or not.

Libertarians, of course, usually have objections to a program like this on general principles even if there are no abuses. The rest of us are more inclined to a cost-benefit analysis: we’ll give up a little to get something we consider worth it. Is this worth it? Well, it depends on whether you believe the testimony or not and how much you trust the methods described to be safe from abuse, and it depends whether you think there are alternative ways to combat terrorism that would be better.

It is somewhat ironic that it may have been the very success of the NSA program that has lulled Americans into a false sense of security that it’s not needed. Do you believe that (as has been testified to today) over 50 terrorist attacks have been thwarted as a result of this program? I do, actually, and although they probably all were not serious some probably were. For the most part, the terrorist attacks we hear about are the ones the government has failed to intercept and prevent, so it’s easy to forget that there may be serious plots that are thwarted by these programs. We have noticed that most of these successful plots seem to be more homegrown or “rogue”; it’s possible that’s no accident, because the NSA program is focused on communications with foreign nationals. So if no foreign national is involved, it is a plot that’s less likely to be discovered this way.

The larger problem with this program and so many others is, of course, trust. People who hated and distrusted Bush and Cheney assumed they were doing nefarious things with the data. But we have learned that under the Obama administration IRS data actually has been grossly misused against Obama’s political enemies, and members of the press have been investigated under the auspices of national security considerations (by the Obama Justice Department in that case, rather than the NSA) with very weak justification. So the distrust is justified, and it infects all programs and all government bureaucracies.

And then there’s Snowden, speaking of trust. We’ve seen only a fraction of the information he dumped on the Guardian, but so far the actual files (or slides, or whatever they are called) that have been published don’t really reveal all that much that was not already known. His most inflammatory and alarming remarks, that make assertions that are new, have been undocumented by anything else, and include explosive statements that he had the authority to wiretap anyone’s phone. Snowden was implying that he could do that if he merely judged it necessary, but the testimony today emphatically contradicts any such assertion, as well as several others he made about his own authority at NSA.

Ever since the Snowden story broke, one of the things I’ve been worried about is one that, for want of a better term, I’ll call the hacker issue. I have doubted whether Snowden really had the authority to do what he said he could do, and wondered whether it is possible for a determined and adept computer geek (Snowden, for example?) to hack the system and get information he/she is not cleared to get. The fact that Snowden was somehow able to get this information off his computer and to take it out of the building on a thumb drive is very, very disconcerting. By that evidence alone, we can conclude that security at the National Security Agency is not all it should be.

Iran and that “reform” candidate

The New Neo Posted on by

I hate to be so pessimistic, but…

Prediction: “reform candidate” Hasan Rowhani, who won big in Iran, will not actually be able to pull off any reforms of import.

Here’s Barry Rubin on the subject:

Did the Tehran regime put in a seemingly moderate but actually helpless or compliant front so it could claim moderation and thus stall for time to build nuclear weapons? Or did he masses simply overwhelmed the regime so that his victory was undeniable? Perhaps the regime figured that a second straight election stolen by the regime from the reformists–the previous one was in 2009–would set off a revolt.

New York Times correspondent Thomas Erdbrink reported that Tehran has turned into a massive street celebration…

No matter what the regime’s intentions or acceptance, the outcome will be this:

1. Rowhani will have little power. Remember that a moderate already served eight years as president and accomplished nothing. Rowhani is clearly loyal to the regime or he wouldn’t have been the only reformist candidate who was approved for the election by the regime.

2. A lot of Iranians will be very happy. One big thing they will hope for is better management of the economy.

3. There will be many analysts and politicians and government officials saying that since Iran has now turned in a moderate direction, it must be given a chance to show whether this is true. Rowhani is a very articulate and glib man. He will know how to make things look good in Washington especially compared to Ahmadinejad’s outrageously radical style.

4. Therefore, the Obama Administration will spend the rest of 2013 in exploratory negotiations as Iran moves forward toward nuclear weapons. People will talk about gestures toward Iran like reducing sanctions and certainly not increasing them. Russia, Turkey, and China will continue to get waivers on sanctions.

Please read the whole thing. It seems rather sensible to me.

[ADDENDUM: And in somewhat related news, more on the Syrian “rebels.”]