Obama and history: it depends on what the meaning of “always” is

The New Neo Posted on by

A lot of attention was paid recently to Obama’s display of pique at interviewer Brad Watson, who had the temerity to ask the president a couple of slightly challenging questions on Monday.

But far more interesting to me was another statement Obama made during that same interview, when in response to the reporter’s query as to why Obama is so unpopular in Texas, the president answered, “Well, look, Texas has always been a pretty Republican state, you know, for historic reasons.”

A more ignorant comment is hard to imagine. Texas always Republican state? Au contraire. It was only around Reagan’s time that Republicans started winning in Texas. Till then it was reliably Democratic in its presidential choices, with just a few exceptions.

You might think Obama is historically ignorant and unaware of these facts, and if true that would be bad enough. And perhaps that really is the whole explanation for his extraordinary comment.

But I’m not convinced it’s the case. One of Obama’s fields of expertise is the history of the civil rights movement, and he must know that the South was solidly Democratic for a long time.

But if he does know the truth, why would he lie about such a thing? Does he think his answers are irrelevant, and that he just needs to give a response, any response? Is it just a way to deflect a question he’s not interested in actually trying to answer?

Or—and I’ve come to think this may be the most likely explanation—perhaps it depends on what the meaning of “always” is. As a notorious narcissist, Obama’s frame of reference would be himself. Texas became Republican in the 80s, but Obama’s political career didn’t begin until the late 90s, so perhaps as far as he’s concerned the only relevant history starts with his own entry into political life.

Birthers of a different kind

The New Neo Posted on by

Andrew Sullivan used to be the leader of the pack of those obsessed with the question of whether Sarah Palin actually gave birth to her son Trig, and under what circumstances. But now there appear to be other contenders. I refer not only to the author of the linked piece, but to many of the commenters there.

And they call Obama-birthers strange.

[NOTE: In the comments section you can also find this excellent example of the general thought process of many liberal women who just hate, hate, hate Sarah Palin:

I was furious as a woman and a mother when she outed her pregnant daughter to the world and when she bragged about endangering her baby by not getting herself to an ER. Her winking, flirtatious performance at the vice presidential debate reminds me of the type of woman who sleeps her way to the top in business. Other women have remarked to me that it reminded them of the woman who steals your husband all the while pretending to be your best friend. These are the negative female stereotypes that those of us who have careers fought so hard to overcome. And she dishes it right back to us, claming that she is breaking a glass ceiling for women everywhere. In actuality, she is pressing hard on top of that glass, smothering the women underneath it, and sneering and winking at the Republican, patriarchal and sexist machine cheering behind her as she looks for approval. If I had been interviewing her for a job I would have tossed her resume into the trash can if she answered my interview questions like she answered Ifill and Couric. And if she had winked at me during an interview, I would have shown her the door faster than it could have hit her in her shiny designer skirt. Her entire continued act is insulting to all of our intelligence, and demeaning to every woman that has had to make it in educational settings and in the workplace on the strength of her abilities, not on her looks and not on her sexuality. So yes, women have worked long and hard not to be silent when we see a woman like this promoted simply because of her uterus.]

So, if scientists couldn’t even foresee…

The New Neo Posted on by

…the effects of the oil spill on the Gulf, how are they going to figure out what’s going on with climate change?

[ADDENDUM: Actually, there were a few lonely voices saying fairly early on that the spill would naturally repair itself. One of them, interestingly enough, was that of none other than Rush Limbaugh (not a scientist, nor does he play one on radio). Another was British geologist Michael Welland, who even managed to specifically mention the oil-eating bacteria in a post that bears full reading, entitled “Alcanivorax borkumensis – oil-eating bacteria, where are you?”

Welland is careful to differentiate himself from the hated Limbaugh, lest he be tarred with the same brush. He writes in a disclaimer [emphasis mine]:

Given that there are hundreds of natural oil seeps in the northern Gulf, spewing out an estimated 70,000 tonnes (roughly equivalent to 20 million US gallons) of oil every year, why do we not see a more oil-polluted Gulf in normal circumstances? One big reason is the natural activity of bacteria like Alcanivorax borkumensis. No, I’m not supporting Rush Limbaugh and his demented and twisted interpretation of facts, but one fact is that natural processes can help in the kind of catastrophe we are facing. But those natural processes don’t have the critical mass to deal with events on this scale – they need help.

Apparently, although Welland was one of the few who was correct about the oil-eating bacteria, he was wrong about that last point—it turns out they didn’t need help.]

Who was Obama’s mother?

The New Neo Posted on by

The NY Times features an article by Janny Scott, who’s written a book about Obama’s mother Stanley Ann Dunham. The article focuses on her sojourn with her son in Indonesia, occurring when Obama was 6 to 10 years old, and it paints a very curious although incomplete picture.

Many of the facts were previously known, but there were several details of this rather long article that struck me as odd and/or of possible psychological significance. It seems the very young Obama had to learn more equanimity and emotional stoicism than most kids of his age, because in Indonesia he was somewhat of a social pariah, incessantly taunted for his race. That stoicism would come in handy when he was sent to Hawaii by himself at the age of 10 in order to further his education, knowing he wouldn’t be seeing much of his beloved mother again.

To me, this is one of the most telling quotes from Obama, from a recent interview with Scott:

“I think that [the return to Hawaii] was harder on a 10-year-old boy than he’d care to admit at the time,” Obama said, sitting in a chair in the Oval Of­fice and speaking about his mother with a mix of affection and critical distance. “When we were separated again during high school, at that point I was old enough to say, ”˜This is my choice, my decision.’ But being a parent now and looking back at that, I could see ”” you know what? ”” that would be hard on a kid.”

Note in particular the pronouns Obama uses. When he speaks of the pain of the separation, he—who usually has no trouble using the word “I” in almost any context—cannot even bring himself to use the first person to describe this event. He distances himself in the first sentence (“harder on a 10-year-old boy than he’d care to admit at the time”); comes back to the first person to describe the later high school years, when he was older and less emotionally vulnerable; and then returns to the third person again to look back and say “that would be hard on a kid.”

A kid. A 10-year-old boy. Not this particular 10-year-old boy, Barack Obama, the one who was also told by his mother that he was brilliant and could be president some day. The mother who also taught him a great many other things, including “to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often character­ized Americans abroad.”

Dunham’s biggest lesson for her son may have been stoicism and putting a good face on things despite his pain and anger. Here is a reminiscence of that time from an acquaintance of the family in Indonesia, Elizabeth Bryant:

After lunch, the group took a walk, with Barry running ahead. A flock of Indonesian children began lobbing rocks in his direction. They ducked behind a wall and shouted racial epithets. He seemed unfazed, dancing around as though playing dodge ball “with unseen players,” Bryant said. Ann did not react. Assuming she must not have understood the words, Bryant offered to intervene. “No, he’s O.K.,” Ann said. “He’s used to it.”

“We were floored that she’d bring a half-black child to Indonesia, knowing the disrespect they have for blacks,” Bryant said. At the same time, she admired Ann for teaching her boy to be fearless.

Those who perceive Obama as an outwardly calm but inwardly angry man with a chip on his shoulder about race would do well to ponder these formative years and the lessons they taught. If he appears emotionally cold, it helped him to survive at an age when some very volatile emotions must have been roiling within him.

Obama’s mother was certainly neither a conventional person nor a conventional mother. But the truth about her remains elusive, despite tantalizing psychological glimpses. Towards the beginning of the Times article, Scott describes some supposed misconceptions about her:

…[I]in the fevered imaginings of supermarket tabloids and the Internet, she is the atheist, the Marx­ist, the flower child, the mother who abandoned her son or duped the newspapers of Hawaii into printing a birth announcement for her Kenyan-born baby, on the off chance that he might want to be president someday.

Scott goes on to say that Obama’s mother “did not fit any of those [descriptions], as I learned over the course of two and a half years of research, travel and nearly 200 interviews.” But, despite this disclaimer, the 6000-plus-word article never even addresses whether Dunham was an atheist or a Marxist. And other information the article contains most definitely substantiates the idea that she abandoned her son—and even the fact that she thought he could be president one day.

Slow news days

The New Neo Posted on by

Have you noticed the news has been relatively slow lately?

What is conventionally thought of as “news,” that is. There’ve been no significant rumblings of revolution in still another Middle East country and calls to war. No oil spills. No earthquakes or tsunamis. No legislators caught with their pants down (literally).

But sometimes the news that ends up making a difference slips in under the radar of most people. We just don’t know what it will be. For example, will the current story that Standard & Poors has said that the US could lose its AAA rating end up being exceedingly significant? James Saft at India’s Economic Times certainly thinks it may:

Firstly, if the U.S. loses its AAA rating it could prove to be the turning point in a loss of confidence that starts a debilitating move out of not only Treasuries but dollar assets. After all, the U.S. won’t default on debts which it can erase with the flick of the switch on the printing press, but it may well inflate its way to making dollar holdings very bad investments.

Secondly, the lack of alternatives means that a move out of Treasuries, if it ever came, would be hugely distorting for the rest of the world’s debt ecosystem. There simply aren’t enough “safe” alternatives.

But others think the story’s so ridiculous it’s to be laughed at. Here’s James Fallows at the Atlantic, among others:

What I’d really like to know is who S&P likes in the Hornets-Lakers series, or this season of American Idol. Their views would carry just as much weight.

Har de har har har. Fallows also describes James K. Galbraith’s response as a “derisive guffaw.”

This derision is based at least in part on their very correct observation that S&P hasn’t exactly covered itself with glory in its predictions and ratings in recent years. Then again, as Haft points out, S&P’s problem was not jumping the gun, it was the opposite:

One argument advanced for why we shouldn’t care about the threatened downgrade is S&P’s (and other ratings agencies’) track record of being spectacularly wrong, first in various emerging market sovereign crises and then during the housing bubble.

I’d argue the opposite; ratings agencies have a reputation of being timid and late, and are also beholden to government-granted status as Nationally Recognized Statistical Ratings Organizations for much of their business. That one of them steps up and threatens the U.S.’s rating is a sign that cannot be ignored.

A worrisome and highly related issue that been on many minds for quite some time is the deficit. But it’s only a biggish story when something new happens: Paul Ryan’s plan comes out, Obama makes a speech, Congress tackles the budget. But we can always speculate on how big it will become in the future, and what we might need to do about it:

..[T]he best back-of-envelope estimate is that meeting this unfunded portion of our Social Security and Medicare commitments would require roughly an immediate 80 percent increase in federal income taxes, sustained forever.

That is one end of a spectrum. The other is to cut out $100 trillion of present value of anticipated entitlement spending.

I was at a dinner last year with about 15 well-known Washington think-tankers, academics, journalists, bloggers and budget experts, entirely focused on the question of where on this spectrum we will end up. What was striking to me was that as we went around the table, the majority of these people asserted confidently what would be politically feasible or infeasible positions. Many of these equally confident-sounding assertions were contradictory and, not shockingly, tended to line up roughly with each speaker’s political inclinations.

It would be simple for me as an economic conservative to dismiss the idea of a tax increase equal to an 80 percent increase in income taxes as politically unrealistic, but I’m not so sure about that. In the event of a crisis, I could easily imagine “emergency” income taxes on the “most fortunate among us” plus some increases in middle-class tax rates, plus the introduction of a VAT, amounting to something like that.

If you had asked me at a New Year’s Eve party in 2006 what I thought the odds were of the U.S. government taking a controlling interest in the largest bank, the largest car company, and the largest insurance company in America, I would probably have laughed at you. Yet within 36 months, this is exactly what had happened.

My friends who are more liberal than I probably should not make the analogous mistake of imagining that benefit reductions that seem absurd politically right now might come to seem less absurd, and surprisingly quickly.

If you think about it, any real solution to the federal deficit problem is currently politically impossible; yet we know mathematically that, barring a productivity miracle, the situation cannot persist indefinitely. Therefore, we know that some change that currently seems politically impossible is all-but-certain to happen sooner or later.

Prognostications have a funny way of not panning out. Yes, a few people always manage to have been right, or nearly right, about a future event. But are they consistently and reliably right? Those would be the people to listen to. But who are they?

Moiseyev Partisans

The New Neo Posted on by

I recall a performance of the Moiseyev Dance Company’s “Partisans” as the single most exciting theatrical experience of my life. It occurred back when I was a little kid and the company was on its very first visit here.

A couple of years ago when I searched YouTube for a video of the dance, which is the venerable Moiseyev’s signature piece, it was—alas!—nowhere to be found. So imagine my thrill recently when I discovered it had subsequently appeared.

However, as I watched, I would have thrown something at the screen had it not been my own computer I’d be damaging. A mere shadow of what it should be, too much of the time it’s either shot from too far away or too close. The fabulous ending, where each couple in turn goes from casual trot to full speed ahead in an instant (you’ll see what I mean if you watch), is ruined by focusing on closeups of the wrong couples at the wrong time, missing the moment of transition for most of them.

And yet, and yet…enough remains of the magic for me to post this video for those of you who’ve never seen it. Yes, it’s very hokey and corny and gimmicky. Yes, it’s about the USSR’s WWII partisans, celebrating the glory of the brave Russians and all that jazz. But what a fabulous illusion it presented (especially as a child)—an illusion far more magical in the theater than in this video. It seemed impossible that dancers could glide across the stage and look as though they were on conveyor belts or roller skates, and yet be creating the effect with nothing but their bodies and their own two feet.

Oh, and as a child, it was altogether thrilling when one of the dancers was suddenly revealed—as her hat fell off, seemingly accidentally, at a well-timed moment, as in this video—to be a woman! I seem to recall in the olden days the dancer had long flowing red hair, which was far more effective. But no matter.

Take a look:

I’ve been having…

The New Neo Posted on by

…connectivity problems. This is the first time I’ve been online today. So here are a few links; better late than never:

—Bookworm has some reflections for the first night of Passover, which is this evening.

—Paul Krugman says hey, let’s not be civil any more. Actually, I wasn’t aware he’d been civil for a long, long, time.

Krugman first came to my attention even before I was a blogger, back when I was smack in the middle of my political change. It was this 2003 incident involving Krugman and Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad that made me realize how deeply duplicitous and self-serving Krugman had become.

There, is that uncivil enough? Hope so. But maybe not.

—Today was Patriot’s Day and marathon day in Boston. The weather was ideal, and winner Geoffrey Mutai of Kenya set a world record, except that he didn’t, because the Boston course doesn’t qualify.

I don’t know about you, but I simply cannot fathom how any human being can run 26 miles in 2 hours 3 minutes and 2 seconds. Or even in double that time. Or run it at all. What’s more, 53-year-old former champ Joan Benoit Samuelson (how time flies) came in a very respectable 45th in the women’s field. Now there’s a woman with persistence and grit.

Libya: the decline of NATO

The New Neo Posted on by

Steven Metz wonders whether Libya marks the end of NATO’s effectiveness. What he describes is a military action by committee, which doesn’t make sense as a way to fight even a limited war.

But what he fails to address is the fact that Libya was an ill-thought-out venture from the start. To enter a war knowing hardly anything about the forces you are supporting seems, to put it bluntly, mad. And yet that appears to be what NATO has done.

When the war began, one of the first question I asked was, “who are the rebels?” This was hardly a mark of some special brilliance of mine, but merely an obvious question—much like “but why is the emperor not wearing clothes?” I have yet to see an answer that reflects well on NATO, or really much of an answer at all.

That a situation such as this one could exist this late in the game is disgraceful:

Too little is known about Libya’s rebels and they remain too fragmented for the United States to get seriously involved in organizing or training them, let alone arming them, U.S. and European officials say…But the more the intelligence agencies learn about rebel forces, the more they appear to be hopelessly disorganized and incapable of coalescing in the foreseeable future…The realistic outlook, U.S. and European officials said, is for an indefinite stalemate between the rebels — supported by NATO air power — and Gaddafi’s forces…Other U.S. officials said the rebels have no sense of a unifying identity or any critical mass beyond Benghazi, lacking an effective structure that would be a prerequisite for providing training, money or sophisticated weapons.

Washington also has been reluctant to side with the rebels due to concerns that Islamic extremists might be among them, although there is debate here about the extent of the militant involvement in the Libyan uprising.

The head of U.S. Africa Command said it was the stated intent of al Qaeda’s affiliate in the area, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), to aid Libya’s opposition.

Harebrained.

It’s even possible that it’s best, in the end, that NATO isn’t being so effective in Libya, with “rebels” like these.

The suprise is not that Obama’s popularity is so low…

The New Neo Posted on by

…it’s that it’s still so high.

But the latest poll shows further erosion among a group he must win in order to have a second term: independents. His support among them is only 35%.

The only problem for Republicans is a fairly large one, I’m afraid: they need to find a strong candidate. A strong candidate will defeat Obama and a weak one will fail—that much seems fairly obvious and fairly certain, at least barring unforeseen reversals.

All the strong horses have decided not to enter the race, however. So far. And that may be the tragedy of the election of 2012. Who has the respect of the American people? Obama? Not really. The sorry field of Republican contenders, including the almost-comic Trump? Hardly. Congress? Don’t make me laugh.

I’m not one to think we should idealize and glorify our leaders. Au contraire. But a little bit of respect would be nice. Trouble is they’ve got to earn it, and very few have.

If the GOP was really surprised by the tone of Obama’s attack…

The New Neo Posted on by

…then they’re even stupider than I thought.

This report indicates that Paul Ryan and the other Republicans who were specifically invited to the president’s speech and given seats of honor at their own verbal excoriation were surprised by its harsh partisan tone. If true, this indicates to me that they have no idea who they’re dealing with. They’re bringing a feather to a knife fight.