Sometimes the past really is a foreign country
POWERLINE
August 31, 2010 Posted by Paul at 4:55 PM
Many people view Republicans and especially their leaders as being fixated on the past, and that perception is not entirely unjustified. Just last week, at the Lincoln Memorial, Sarah Palin spoke of the need to restore America rather than to transform it. And not that long ago, as some of us measure time, Bob Dole ran for president promising to be "a bridge to the past."
These days, however, it is President Obama who seems to thirst for the past, albeit the recent past when he was a bright new thing, and popular to boot.
I've already commented on Obama's decision "wallow" in Hurricane Katrina. I took that to be, in part, a reflection of his yearning for the happy days when Republicans were the ones having their competence questioned and feeling the ire of the public. Certainly, it was reflection of his yearning to remind the public of those days.
Tonight, Obama will address the nation on Iraq. This is a topic that also is far from the minds of most Americans, and thus an odd one to which to devote a would-be major presidential speech.
But Obama has reason to believe that a speech on Iraq might serve his purposes. Like Katrina, this is a subject that once was a major source of American discontent with Republicans. And it's a subject on which, at the height of that discontent, Obama was viewed as having the correct line. Moreover, it is an issue about which he can claim to have kept his campaign promise. And it's an area where a significant portion of his political base might still be fairly happy with his performance.
Yet there are complications for Obama, the most important of which is that he opposed the policy that turned the situation in Iraq around, namely the surge. How to deal with this inconvenient truth?
It actually shouldn't be very difficult. Obama could simply give credit to President Bush for launching the surge. A gracious word about his predecessor would improve Obama's image. After all, he won office in part by promising to transcend partisan finger-pointing. And by exhibiting a little grace for a change, Obama would make it seem churlish for anyone to point the finger at him over his misguided thinking about the surge.
Perhaps Obama will rise above his perpetual pettiness and turn his speech into a bi-partisan feel-good event. Obama reportedly called former president Bush this morning. That might be a good sign.
On the other hand, Obama's spokesman, Robert Gibbs, is dancing around the question of whether and to what extent the surge is responsible for the turnaround in Iraq. When asked point blank, "Why not give President Bush credit for ordering the surge?" the best Gibbs could do was to respond, "Again...I'd be happy to circulate the president's comments that go back to 2007 and go back to 2008 on this."
If Gibbs does circulate comments by Obama from that period, he had better be selective. For, as Peter Wehner shows, Gibbs is not being truthful about Obama's position on the surge.
According to Gibbs, "President Obama, then-candidate Obama, said that adding those 20,000 troops into Iraq would, indeed, improve the security situation, and it did." But on the night of President Bush's "surge" announcement, then-Senator Obama proclaimed: "I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq are going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse" (emphasis added).
If Obama goes down the same dishonest path as his press secretary, his address will, if anything, be a political negative for him. If he takes the high road, it might well be a plus. But so far in his presidency, this prospect has not provided Obama with sufficient incentive to take the high road.
UPDATE: In his speech, Obama was his slippery self when it came to President Bush. He acknowledged that Bush is patriotic and cares about the troops -- how big of Obama -- but gave him no credit for the surge or for liberating Iraq and the region from Saddam Hussein (who went unmentioned).
Obama pointed out that it was from the very desk in the oval office where he was sitting that Bush sent troops into Iraq. Thus, he tried to rub in Bush's unpopular decision -- and contrast it to his more popular one -- without mentioning the decision Bush made that turned the situation around and made it possible (or perhaps I should say conceivable) for Obama to exit Iraq honorably.
Obama eventually mentioned the Iraq surge, but only in connection with Afghanistan and by way of patting himself on the back for using the same approach in that theater. But he didn't acknowledge the fact that the Bush administration crafted and successfully implemented that approach in Iraq.
In sum, Obama tried to give the appearance of graciousness without actually being gracious. Among his many other faults, the man has no class.
I'll probably say a bit more about other aspects of Obama's nothing-ish speech later tonight.
Dead Heat
By John
We have been reporting on the Minnesota gubernatorial race among Tom Emmer, a solid conservative; Mark Dayton, a deeply flawed and wackily liberal Democrat; and tax-raiser Tom Horner playing the traditional spoiler's role as the representative of the Independence Party. Republicans have been dispirited by an early poll showing Dayton with a substantial lead, but today's NPR/Humphrey Institute survey has the race tied among likely voters, 34-34, with Horner at 13 percent.
The poll also suggests a lot of volatility, with quite a few voters whose minds aren't made up; also, of course, the third-party candidate injects volatility because it is hard to predict how many who say they support him in polls will change their minds in the voting booth and pull the lever for someone who can win.
All of which means that we have a hot race that should stay interesting until November 2. If you want to help save Minnesota from the embarrassing prospect of a Mark Dayton administration--Dayton makes Jesse Ventura look like a model of stability and good judgment--go here, read about Emmer and donate to his campaign.
They're Missing Him In Ohio
By John
This poll finding is not just stunning, but important: if you run a presidential race between Barack Obama and George W. Bush in Ohio, it's Bush by 50-42:
We'll start rolling out our Ohio poll results tomorrow but there's one finding on the poll that pretty much sums it up: by a 50-42 margin voters there say they'd rather have George W. Bush in the White House right now than Barack Obama.
Independents hold that view by a 44-37 margin and there are more Democrats who would take Bush back (11%) than there are Republicans who think Obama's preferable (3%.)
A couple months ago I thought the Pennsylvanias and Missouris and Ohios of the world were the biggest battlegrounds for 2010 but when you see numbers like this it makes you think it's probably actually the Californias and the Wisconsins and the Washingtons.
It's been apparent for a while that the Obama administration's "blame Bush" strategy has been a failure, but data like this suggest that it is counterproductive.
PAUL adds: There is no better political bellwether state than Ohio. If the Democrats weren't panicking before, they should be now.
Predicting the future is difficult; telling the truth about the past should not be
By Paul
I expect November 2, 2010 to be a very good night for Republicans. But for me, it won't be a fully satisfactory night unless Sen. Barbara Boxer goes down to defeat.
To understand why, consider Sen. Boxer's exchange with then-Secretary of State Rice regarding the troop surge in Iraq, which had just been announced. Boxer made it clear that she didn't expect the surge to work. She was confident that more troops would not help because the Iraqis already relied on us too much.
Boxer was also incensed (not too strong a word, if you watch the video) that Rice had not anticipated the large uptick in violence that occurred in 2006. She even had someone hold up a poster with a statement Rice made in 2005 that was overly optimistic. Boxer later misrepresented what was on her own poster.
But Boxer's main point was to inform Rice that the cost of the Iraq war was being paid by American military families, not by members of Boxer's or Rice's immediate family (Rice is unmarried and has never had children). As you can see below, Boxer was at her arrogant and obnoxious best throughout her harangue.
Recently, Debra Saunders of the San Francisco Chronicle asked Boxer about the exchange. A much more subdued Boxer responded by claiming that, far from attacking Rice, she was trying to "bring us together" by pointing out that neither she nor the Secretary had immediate family members in harm's way.
Boxer conceded, however, that she did criticize Rice because she "did not know how many people died in Iraq."
But Boxer never asked Rice how many people had died in Iraq. Instead, she asked Rice how many Americans would die in the future as a result of the surge.
The question is an absurd one, of course, and I haven't heard Boxer ask the corresponding one to anyone in the Obama administration with respect to the surge in Afghanistan. As Rice pointed out, with far less derision than would have been appropriate, no one can say how many people will die under a military strategy that has not yet been implemented.
Clearly, then, Boxer is being dishonest about her exchange with Rice. But the exchange itself reveals Boxer's unfitness for serious office. Boxer expects Rice to know how many people will die in an extended military campaign that has not commenced. And she castigates Rice for not anticipating in 2005 the large increase in violence that occurred in 2006 after the bombing of the Golden Mosque.
Meanwhile, Boxer dismisses the idea that the surge will succeed. She therefore fails to meet the standard of prophesy to which she holds the Bush administration.
Either her attack was a disgrace or her failure to predict the outcome of the surge was.
You can help bring an end to Boxer's Senate career by contributing to Carly Fiorina's campaign here.
Our shrinking president
By Paul
I didn't watch any of the TV commentary on President Obama's speech last night. But J.E. Dyer at Contentions informs us that the "TV commentariat rose up to advance the narrative that Obama had no obligation to acknowledge Bush's surge decision, because there was never a valid justification for regime-changing Iraq to begin with."
This is the kind of non sequitur that, I suppose, keeps me away from post-speech TV commentary. Let's note first that premise here -- that there was no valid justification for our action in Iraq -- is controversial and, in my view, false. A better premise (more apt and less controversial) would have been that Bush doesn't deserve credit for the surge decision because he should have formulated the correct strategy for preventing, or dealing with, the insurgency in the first place.
But the "commentariat's" conclusion doesn't follow from its premise, or even from the better one. Unless President Obama believes that the war in Iraq is so unjust and dishonorable that it would be better to lose the war than win it, he must acknowledge that decisions that help us avoid defeat in that war are good and worthwhile decisions. Similarly, unless he believes that an Iraq in which the large-scale massacre of civilians is better than one in which there is far less violence, he must acknowledge that decisions that help significantly reduce violence are also good and worthwhile.
Because President Bush's decisions in connection with the surge helped avoid a U.S. defeat and save Iraqi lives, they are praiseworthy, and Obama should give Bush credit for the surge whatever he thinks of the original mission. And he certainly should so in a speech that (a) lauds the current situation in Iraq and (b) purports to turn the page on Iraq and put domestic acrimony behind us.
Fallability on big questions (assuming now that Bush erred in invading Iraq) should not forever preclude one from being praised. Obama himself was wrong about the surge. If his prescription had been followed in 2007, Iraq would probably have suffered a monumental bloodbath, and al Qaeda might well control Anbar province. But that shouldn't bar Obama from receiving praise if he helps navigate Iraq through its current (much less severe) difficulties. So too if, after a year-and-a-half of stumbling, Obama finally finds the correct recipe for helping get our economy back on course.
Obama has developed a specialty of telling us, in balanced-sounding terms, what major players have done right and what they done wrong. The players he has pontificated about in these terms include the Arabs, the Israelis, the Africans, and the United States itself. I would argue that, assuming this is worth doing, it is possibly the only thing Obama does well as president.
But when the best Obama can say of George W. Bush, in a speech delivering the "summation" on Iraq, is that he is patriotic and supports the troops, Obama isn't even performing his "philosopher king" role well.
I'm no longer bothered by this sort of thing, having resigned myself long ago to the fact that Obama lacks the grace we all should hope for in a U.S. president. At this point, he is only hurting himself, as he looks smaller and smaller with each appearance. powerlineblog.com |
