I keep telling you: Barack Obama may be a closet temperamental conservative.  Don't believe it yet? Here is more evidence. 

When one looks again at the inaugural address, carefully this time, one sees the three paragraphs I earlier identified as being of Presidential caliber. They are of such caliber not just because they are well written, but because of what they say. One that I have in mind starts like this: "For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies." That is a statement any temperamental conservative will agree with, and also any pragmatist, which echoes with the inaugural line about the size of government not being the issue, but its effectiveness, some ten paragraphs before. And indeed, my former State Department colleague Phil Zelikow, now teaching history at the University of Virginia, said as much in a post yesterday on the Foreign Policy magazine website. (Not as good a publication as The American Interest, but not so bad.)

The most telling line in the inaugural, however, that gives credence to my hunch, is the one in which the President urged the country to recognize that while our problems may be novel, "those values upon which our success depends--hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism--these things are old." (I wish he hadn't used the words "values" and "things", but never mind.) And then, even better, "These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress through our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths." 

This is Obama as restorationist; this is not a man unmoored from the past; this is no hubris-drenched liberal. And if that were not enough, he told the American people that we all have "duties" and "responsibilities" as well as rights and entitlements. John McCain could have said that, and no doubt would have said something like it had he gotten the chance. We have "duties" to something larger than ourselves; we owe institutions for the quality of our social life-- it's about "we", not "I."  If that's not temperamental conservatism as I have described it, nothing is. 

 

As I pointed out to Phil, and as many others have noted, Obama is also shaped in part by the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, and this is a very good sign. (If you do not know what this means, do not know who Rev. Niebuhr was, you should do something about that as soon as possible.) So there is a theological as well as a philosophical aspect to the foundation of Obama's pragmatism, or temperamental conservatism. You know that he mentioned Scripture in the inaugural and invoked God twice, do you not? Was this just pro forma; was he just checking off a political box? Maybe; but I don't think so.

What about Rick Warren, whose role in the inauguration ritual so pissed off the homosexual lobby (what others may want to call the "gay community", but hey, this is my blog, not theirs, so I will describe what it objectively is)? Obama has pronounced himself opposed to "gay marriage." Is this just expediency, a position that he would fold up and forget if it were to potentially cost him politically at some future point?  A lot of people think yes; I am not so sure.

One more item of evidence, and then I promise I will get off this particular horse, at least for a while. When Obama went up to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to talk about the stimulus package, he apparently had a real heart-to-heart with some GOP Representatives. It was not a political drive-by, just for show, which some expected it would be. Here is what Zach Wamp, a Republican Congressman from Tennessee (and I swear that, as much as I admire The Onion, I am not making up that name) said after the encounter: "He knows that the debt and the deficit are huge long-term problems as well, and he made a compelling case. He sounded, frankly, like a Republican." (New York Times, January 28, 2009, p. A16) If you can't believe a guy named Wamp, who can you believe, eh?

A real temperamental conservative, and a real pragmatist, believes in contingency and in human agency. Believes in fact-based, not faith-based approaches to policy. Is not, in others word, lazy. This is why leaks about the new approach to Afghanistan trouble me. Obama, and General Jones, his very capable NSC Advisor, want to put more U.S. troops in Afghanistan and have them do less nation-building and more combat. This is saying, implicitly at least, that the solution to the problem there is more military, less non-kinetic than the posture adopted by the Bush Administration.  Anyone out there have a taste for irony? Well, open wide, for here it comes. 

This is not so good a sign of things to come. U.S. goals cannot be achieved in Afghanistan by military means short of mass murder, and seconding the nation-building tasks to the EU side of NATO just won't work. Now, it may be that nation-building in a place like Afghanistan is a fool's errand to begin with, for Afghanistan is not and never has been a state in the conventional sense. I'm not sure, but I tend to think that it is indeed a fool's errand. But I am absolutely sure that the country cannot be stabilized by an occupation force. You don't have to know anything about Alexander's travails in what was then called Bactria to reach this conclusion, but it certainty would help. You don't even have to remember what happened there to the Red Army. What you do have to know is that the problem has nothing to do with religion. The "new" Taliban is not the same as al-Qaeda or even the same as the old Taliban, the regime we attacked in October 2001. It is a form of mobilized Pashtun tribalism, and an attempt to preserve the ethos of pashtunwali. (Look that up if you don't know what it means.) I can imagine without much difficulty a situation in which the Pashtun clans have their autonomy from Kabul and from NATO, find a way to balance their interests among one another and with the country's Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazara, and still not pose a threat to the United States by allowing its territory again to be used as a staging ground for mass casualty terrorism. By fighting them on their own territory, we're going to continue to kill innocent people, piss them off, and drive them into the arms of religious crazies. 

The idea of being tougher on Karzai, because he's allowed a lot of corruption, is similarly questionable. Corruption is culturally relative.  When there is no strong state, horsetrading and bending the law are the only ways to get what you want. If areas under government influence can't grow and prosper from growing poppies, then the trade will migrate to areas the government doesn't influence and help fund al-Qaeda. Why on earth would we want to do that? A real pragmatist certainly wouldn't. A real pragmatist would start by doing what I suggested 5 years ago when I worked for government: We ought to buy the damned opium crop ourselves, all of it. 

I like some others fear that Obama's misunderstanding of Afghan history and society will lead him into his own personal Vietnam. It's not either/or: either we escalate militarily or try harder at nation-building. We can't reliably achieve either of these goals; we can't win militarily and we can't develop that country into a unitary state, let alone a modern democracy. What we can do is help to organize political elements inside the country and some around it--including Iran--to make the country off-limits to terrorist plotting and staging. That is the core interest we have there anyway. Dealing with the more serious salafi menace is bound up instead with our policy toward Pakistan, which is a problem connected to but still distinct from Afghanistan. One thing is for sure: More U.S. soldiers shedding more Pashtun blood in Afghanistan is not going to help us in Pakistan.

Talk about path dependency: We might be witnessing the beginning of a trail of tears for the Obama Administration.

Enough blog foreplay: time to get down to the business of specifics, of details, which is where not only the proverbial devil dwells, but much else besides. I have thus far introduced myself a bit, had a word or two to say about the new President, even ruminating on the extent to which he might be a closet temperamental conservative, and had a little fun with names and Semitic languages. I promised, however, that once certain preliminaries were given their due -- you might call it prolegomena if you want to be fancy, or simple throat clearing if you want to be more honest--I'd get down to the day-to-day chronicle and commentary that is, I have been led to believe, the lifeblood of a daily blog.

But first another preliminary!  I actually don't feel all that comfortable with the whole idea of blogs. Essays, which until recently required actual paper and ink, connote some rigor as to logic and presentation, some attention to rules of evidence, and some respect for actual knowledge. There is no such thing as a first-draft ready essay.  Blogs, which require only electrons, connote instead intellectual impressionism rather than rigor, little or no attention to facts or evidence, and no respect for actual knowledge. Blogs are antithetical to the qualities of temperamental conservatism, and there seems to be no such thing as anything but a first-draft ready blog. 

I don't like the whole subculture, and I don't like the premise that seems to lurk below the whole affair--namely, the postmodern nonsense that there is no reality that can be plumbed, no facts, no foundation for any non-relativist epistemology. If it were true that there are no facts, only narratives, then the difference between informed analysis and opinion and analysis and opinion based mainly on anal wind would disappear. 

I say this is nonsense because it plainly is. Not even a postmodernist lit-crit fanatic would take a sick child to just anyone with an opinion about how to save the child's life instead of to a credentialed medical professional. When it matters, science is trump, and romantic gibberish takes a back seat. If it were really true that there are no facts and no way to establish causality, then none of the machines we use could exist. Where did this nutty idea come from? Some say it came from young anthropologists looking for a convenient pretext for not having to do actual fieldwork--that was the late Ernst Gellner's suspicion, in any case. But it probably came from a misunderstanding coupled with the widespread academic malady of wanting to be outrageous in order to be different in order to get noticed in order to maybe get tenure in order to persuade said academic that his or her professional life actually mattered to someone. In any event, what was the misunderstanding?

To simplify some, before Immanuel Kant came along, people used to think that human senses simply discovered reality. What people saw was what was really out there. Our senses simply copied reality, as it were, and conveyed it as such. It then dawned on some people that the human senses shape and filter sensory impressions, and that societies collectively shape reality for people through the assumptions they bring to it. As one man put it (Erving Goffman, an old teacher of mine), "social life takes up and freezes into itself the conceptions we have of it." In other words, human cognitive processes and the social psychology of groups meet reality half way. This means that different cultures will over time construe the world differently--will adopt different symbolic systems and means of categorizing reality, as they clearly do. This is called idealism, in the broadest philosophical sense of the term (not to be confused with that word's more common meaning). Now, it's one thing to say that our brains interpret the objective world and help to constitute it in our heads through language and other symbols, and quite another to say that our brains create the world irrespective of objective reality. This is what postmodernists seem to be actually claiming, or at least that's what it really comes down to despite their occasional protestations otherwise. This is silly, of course. It's a little like imagining a condom working properly with nothing inside of it, something that, as best I can tell, cannot be.

All that said, my blog, this blog, is not an implicit endorsement of postmodernism in any shape or form. It is not an implicit endorsement of the view that logic, rules of evidence and knowledge really don't matter because, hey, what the heck, all opinions are pretty much equally valuable or worthless, depending on one's view of the human species. I don't believe any of that. So why the blog at all? I already told you, in the first post: I need to shed words during the day so that I won't burden my family and friends with my incessant babbling. 

OK, now, a week after President Obama may be said to have gotten down to work, we have something of a track record to examine. People pay excruciatingly close attention to beginnings, searching them solid to find some indication of deeper meanings that might allow prediction and better understanding of things to come. Sometimes people read too much into things; they "fill in" excessively, and that's natural. So for example my friend Fouad Ajami saw (in yesterday's Wall Street Journal)  in a few phrases in Obama's inaugural address the abandonment of democracy promotion in the Arab and Muslim worlds as part of American policy.  I don't doubt that Obama's understanding of this issue differs from that of his predecessor, and thank God for that (I am long on record opposing the Bush-style "forward strategy for freedom" as counterproductive and liable to lead to disaster, as it has in Gaza and arguably elsewhere, but never mind....). But I think Fouad reads too much into the language Obama (and his speechwriter) chose, and he ignored other language that might suggest the opposite, if you're looking to find it. "To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit based on the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history", he said, adding: "But that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist." That can be read as pro-democracy promotion language if you want to read it that way. 

So we do have the Inaugural address to go on. We also have the President's interview with Al-Arabiya, the first he gave as President. And we have the President's comments on Capitol Hill yesterday, and of course the stimulus bill itself. We have, too, some behaviors in foreign policy, like drone attacks on Pakistan's Pashtun region and a willingness to let the U.S. Navy board a ship carrying Iranian weapons to Syria, presumably for re-routing to Gaza for Hamas. Secretary of State Clinton, too, has spoken some of Iran, North Korea and Pakistan. There have been some authoritative leaks about a new approach to Afghanistan and its erstwhile President, Hamid Karzai. There's actually a lot to talk about, a lot to reckon at the beginning of the journey that, like all such journeys, establishes the origins of a path dependency. 

Indeed, so much has happened so fast that one hardly knows where to start. So let me just speak very briefly and telegraphically about a few items that, to me stand out as interesting and potentially important. 

First, the Inaugural was not a particularly good speech. It was mercifully and properly brief, and it did contain by my count three paragraphs (out of more than two dozen) that qualify as Presidential-level stuff. The rest of it was sort of clunky in places, a lot of it was excessively vague, and no overarching and memorable theme can be taken from it. I wrote speeches for Colin Powell and a few for Condoleezza Rice, so I sort of know what this black art, as Peggy Noonan, one of President Reagan's speechwriters once called it, is about. After the campaign, during which Obama could be mesmerizing and electrifying, the Inaugural was a let-down for me.  Of course if you voted for the man and love him to pieces you won't agree. You know the old saw: Love a man, love his wart; hate a man, hate his wart. But as someone who did not vote for him (or McCain) but still very much wants him to succeed, I say it wasn't a very good speech. 

Why? Some say he did it on purpose, so as not to raise expectations too high. But I think that a 27-year old speechwriter who captured Obama very well as a politician and campaigner did not succeed in capturing him as President on day one. Good morning, folks: This is not the same thing! Writing for a President is a fundamentally different kind of task than writing for a candidate, even if the two are the same flesh-and-blood human being. It's not easy to do, and it's not easy to make the switch effortlessly. 

The Al-Arabiya interview, also, I found troubling. His impromptu speech in it was not especially eloquent, which is surprising considering how eloquent that man usually is. As others have also noted, his toss-off phrase that we had good, mutual respectful relations with the Arab and Muslim world "as recently as twenty or thirty years ago" suggests that he doesn't know much about that part of the world. The period between 1979 and 1989 was not exactly calm and lovely for U.S.-Arab relations. He also said that a Palestinian state should be "contiguous." What does that mean--that the West Bank and Gaza should be connected by a slice of Israeli territory, which would (look at a map, and you'll see) make Israel discontinuous, dividing Beersheba off from direct access to Eilat? Evelyn Shuckberg of the British Foreign Office cooked up a truly mad idea back in the 1950s, called "dancing triangles" at the time, to reconcile this problem, but I am reasonably sure Obama has never heard of this this particular piece of archival esoterica. So I have no idea what he means by contiguous in this case. 

Most of the interview was fine, at least in the sense that he did not say anything genuinely gaffe-like. Some of it was pretty tough, too, which is good, since that compensated for a remark toward the beginning in which Obama criticized previous American approaches. That's not presidential. He can believe whatever he likes, but a President cannot just say out loud whatever he believes.

What irked me most, perhaps, is that three or four times he did something George Bush frequently did that drove me crazy: He spoke of himself in the effective third person, speaking about himself as a kind of object. Bush used to start off little impromptu talks by saying things like "I'm here today to tell you that....." instead of just telling them. This dissociation of Presidential authority from the person of the President is always a bad idea. It diminishes Presidential authority. It's a kind of schizophrenia to publicly refer to the purpose of one's own efforts, of one's own job. Obama did it repeatedly: "Now, my job is to communicate the fact that the United States has a stake in the well-being of the Muslim world."  Why not just say, "I believe that the United States has a stake...."? And then he said, "And so what I want to communicate is. . ." and "And my job is to communicate. . ." and so on. He's the President. It's not a job; it's a role. His authority needs to be portrayed as unitary and indivisible. He needs to stop calling attention to what he is doing while he is doing it, as with theatrical asides, because it diminishes the drama, and that in turn diminishes his own power. Someone needs to take him aside and tell him to knock this stuff off.

The stimulus plan, as I said in an earlier post, is disappointing. It doesn't touch the transactional K-Street culture; it feeds it. It's not creative or well thought through. Our civil engineers are deeply disappointed with the infrastructural parts. I like Alice Rivlin's idea that we vote the tax cuts and the simple, immediate stuff now, but wait and and be more careful with the longer-term aspects of the plan. Divide the thing into two, in other words--excellent idea. We will surely waste a lot of money if we don't stop to think through the consequences of what we're doing right now. It's not every day--thank God, again--that the government goes and spends $800 billion.

As for all the rest, just one comment. I think the hard power drone strikes into Pakistan are meant to balance out the impressions created by the "soft" decision in principle to close down Guantanamo. Or at least I hope some thought was given to balancing impressions, to the orchestration of words and deeds which is, whatever else it is, what diplomacy is largely about. One can, after all, hope.

The words conservative and liberal are very slippery words. In different contexts they mean not only different things but sometimes opposite things. As most educated people know, "liberal" arose some centuries ago, mainly in Britain, meaning anti-statist, against the control of central authorities, against mercantilism and against extortionary taxation, military impressment and property expropriation. Liberalism in the American context today means the opposite: more government authority, more taxes, more programs, more de facto if not intentional centralization of political authority.

Conservative used to mean, in its original European context, someone who was pro-monarchical, pro-social hierarchy and pro-established church. That means they were anti-republican (with a small "r"), anti-egalitarian and anti-intellectual in the widest sense of that term. By that definition, there has never really been an American conservatism, because the very founding of America was pro-republican, pro-egalitarian (within certain limits that Madison approved but Andrew Jackson did not) and anti-establishmentarian. (I've always wanted to use that word in an actual sentence, and now I have; what fun!!) In short, our founding was liberal in the original sense of the term. The conservatives among us at the time, the Tories, mostly left for Canada.

Unfortunately, a lot of people who fling the words liberal and conservative around do not appreciate their delicacy, or their etymologies. This matters because one cannot even ask a question like, "Is President Obama--and some "Blue Dog" Democrats, too--in some ways conservative?" without running into a hailstorm of misunderstanding. 

The first common reaction to that question is that, no, it's impossible that Obama could be in any significant way a conservative, because everyone knows that Republicans are conservatives and Democrats are liberals. This is a most unfortunate premise. As noted in an earlier post, President Obama is in some ways inclined to social conservatism because of his own family history. Coming from a broken family, he has built a traditional one for his own family--he has taken them to church (maybe the wrong church, but at least some church), and appears to have insured their capacity for self-discipline and gratitude. (That's actually what prayer at its best is about in any church or house of worship: learning really well how to say please and thank you, not just to God, but to everyone; it's not about asking adult versions of Santa Claus to give you a new car, like maybe you once asked for a new bike.) 

But how conservative might President Obama be? You can't answer that question without a working definition of what a temperamental conservative (and in contradistinction a temperamental liberal) is. And I stress the notion of a temperamental conservative, not an ideological or programmatic one. That's hard to specify anyway, because American conservatism as it has developed over the past century or two really consists of three streams, not all of which meld well with each other: the liberatarian, the "moral majority", and the Burkean streams. 

I think temperamental conservatives have more in common with the Burkean stream than any other, but that, admittedly, is just my view. In any event, here, in very brief form, is my definition of a temperamental conservative. It consists of four parts. 

First, values taken to be intrinsically good in and of themselves do not align in reality, but generally conflict. There are, as Isaiah Berlin used to say, incommensurate with each other--they cannot be measured off and calculated against each other. Creativity and innovation are good, but so is some measure of order and stability. Freedom is good, but so is responsibility toward others in a community. Justice is good, but so is mercy. Music is wonderful, but so sometimes is silence. And so on almost infinitely, with result that the maximization of any one value or set of values will harm others deemed to be equally good. In other words, trade-offs are inevitable. All roads do not lead to the same benign end. There is no end. Temperamental conservatism is above all things anti-utopian in basic disposition. Politics is not about revelation and final victory; it is about learning from cumulative experience and a never-ending need for balance and prudential judgment.

Second, because politics by definition cannot end, there is always the possibility of tragedy. Progress both moral and social-economic is possible but not inevitable. And it is usually slow and difficult: It is harder to build something fine than to destroy something fine. A temperamental conservative will instinctively bristle if he or she hears someone say, "Well, sure why not do that?; things can't get any worse." Things can always get worse, and often do--both because of mistakes people make and because people cannot control all of the influences that impinge on their challenges. 

Third, reason is precious but limited, for there is no denying the passions--the emotional side of human nature. We are not wise enough, individually or in conclave (even within a well-intentioned government!), to find the answers to all our problems, and we are often not able to define or act on them objectively. Science is precious, too, but it cannot resolve moral issues; it can inform us of the consequences of our choices, but it cannot tell us what those choices should be, for those choices cannot be exhausted through the operation of reason alone. (If that were not so you would never have heard the word eugenics, but you have.) Because of this, temperamental conservatives tend to appreciate (at the least) the social value of religion in constraining and directing emotion in society, and tend to be more humble when facing the open-ended moral dilemmas that arise when values equally good clash. 

Fourth, it follows that wisdom, at least when it comes to social life, is cumulative and collective, that it inheres in institutions (properly defined) rather than individuals. Temperamental conservatives believe in metis, a Greek word that, roughly translated, means knowledge that derives from an intimacy with one's own surroundings and experience, that is widely shared within a community, but that is difficult to formalize and transmit to others who are not members of that community. Precisely because wisdom is cumulative and collection, they accept that they owe something both to their forebears and to their progeny. By acknowledging inter-generational responsibility, they become hesitant to overthrow received ways of doing things unless they are certain that news ways really do mark an improvement. They do not oppose change; those who do are better called reactionaries, not conservatives. But they do not assume that all change leads to progress (see premise number two), do not assume they can use reason to know the all consequences of their decisions (see premise three); and do not assume that enhancing some values will have no downside with respect to other values (see premise number one). 

How would a temperamental conservative handle the current economic crisis?  He would understand that there might be a downside to anything he does. He would understand that mistakes can be made, and that bad things can happen despite the best of both intentions and actions. He would understand that there is a limit to how much we can know and predict. And he would understand that it would be bad to overreact, to throw out with what requires change institutional arrangements that do not require overhaul or renovation. 

I think one can make a case, so far at least, that Barack Obama may be something like a temperamental conservative.  I hope he is. In any event, I think we shall see in due course.

First impressions are important, for better and for worse. The Obama presidency is now in the process of making its first impressions, and the record so far is mixed. I say so as someone who did not vote for either major party candidate, as indicated in a prior entry, so I can at least claim objectivity. That is more than most print and electronic journalists can claim, most of whom voted for and are now fawning and otherwise bending over backwards to spin positively what has been going on over most of the past week.  I now better understand Robert Samuelson's decision never to vote for fear that it would distort his capacity for journalistic objectivity. What once struck me as an affectation or a quirk now actually makes sense.

On the one hand, the accumulation of Executive Orders the President has issued overturning a range of Bush policies--on presidential authority regarding counterterrorism, on environmental issues, stem-cell research, on abortion within the domain of U.S. foreign aid practices--has shown two things, both of them positive. First, this Administration experienced a functional transition period, unlike the Democratic administration before it; it knew at least some of the things it wanted to do, which shows that the Presidential team was processing policy flow properly. Second, it shows that the President is in charge, and that he has taken charge in a non-confrontational, matter-of-fact, low-rhetorical fashion. That is very good; it is much better to let one's deed do the talking than to mistake one's talking for deeds. 

On the other hand, the main business at hand--the economic stimulus package--is unimpressive in the extreme. It is, as many commentators have pointed out, a grab-bag of Democratic Party pork-barrel favorites that will not help the economy quickly, that are very expensive and that show no obvious sense of thoughtful intent about how to take advantage of the economic crisis to really shape the future for the better. It is, once again, the "this old house" proclivity at work. Instead of laying 3,000 miles of new wire, for example, why not get smart and start burying the electrical power transmission system underground?  It's more expensive on the front end but saves a lot on the back end; ever wonder why the more advanced European countries do not experience massive power outages when there are storms? Because they don't put their power lines up in the air like a bunch of ninnies.

Obviously, there are complications here. This is a big country; most of them are small so the economics work out a little differently. But what this really has to do with is the capacity to plan and to do so synergistically, comprehensively. One gets the feeling that we've practically lost the ability to do that in this country, except perhaps in the military, where outcomes rather than mere processes actually matter. Where once our town meetings were full of civil engineers, now they're full of lawyers and consultants. Oh, boy.

Even worse, the Congress is still operating as it has for years -- in a culture of transactional patronage. The bill under discussion is all about this transactional culture. It's all about Congressman doing favors for lobbyists who, in return, will help them raise money for re-election -- got to buy those TV ads, you know. If Barack Obama really wants to change American politics and make them functional again, he needs to attack this K-Street mafia, transactional culture head on, and he needs to do it now. He clearly isn't.

From time to time in the campaign Obama gave reason for us to believe that he understood all this. Yes, he voted for the farm bill, that atrocity and paragon of transactional politics, but the Iowa caucasus were afoot and the man wanted to win. But he still seemed to know what the problem was. Does he still? 

It isn't easy to attack this problem, to be sure. He has an uneven relationship so far, let's put it, with the Democratic Congress, and there is an underlying reason why this relationship is liable to get worse:  Obama cares about poor people, people of color, and wants a kind of redistributive justice for them short of formal reparations. This is the one constant in his view of the world of American politics; he seems to have few other specific programmatic convictions. Whatever it says, the Congress acts like it cares about the so-called  middle class squeeze, not about poor people. This disjunction can be finessed for a time, but it cannot be ignored. Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Reid have power, and their priorities, whatever they may claim, are not Obama's. 

So in the face of that difference, how is the President to attack the infrastructure of Congress' political power -- precisely the transactional culture that sells the public trust to special interests with their lobbyists, aggressive "professional" associations and exclusionary public-sector "unions" that bear no resemblance to real unions of laborers who actually make things people can use.  How can he take on the transactional culture, assuming for the sake of argument that he wants to, when any attempt to do so will sour his young working relationshp with Pelosi, Reid at al.?  I honestly don't see how he can, right now; if I knew I'd tell him. And the more's the pity for it.

I promised yesterday that we'd have a little fun, appropriate for a weekend, about names like Barack and Rahm.  Some Obama Administration enthusiasts, who think they know Semitic languages, have put up on the Internet the idea that Obama and his White House Chief-of Staff Rahm Emanuel, are a team of thunder and lightning, or rather, lightning and thunder. The claim is that Rahm means thunder and Barack means lightning. This is wrong, except in the slightly far-fetched sense that half of it is right. 

Huh?  Bear with, please. 

Barack is derived from the Arabic for blessed. The Hebrew equivalent is Baruch. Some people think Barack means lightning because they apparently know that former Israeli Prime Minister and current Defense Minister Ehud Barak's last name means lightning. No, the difference has nothing to do with the letter "c" being present or absent. In Arabic and Hebrew, the names Barack and Baruch are spelled with three key consonants, as nearly all Semitic roots have three consonants, and none of the letters in these alphabets are vowels. These are "b", "r" and a letter that, in one of its two forms, has no equivalent in English, a gutteral "k". (If you put an "m" sound in front of these three letters, which Semitic languages like to do for various purposes, you can get Mubarak, as in Hosni Mubarak, which comes from the same root.) 

Now, Barak meaning lightning in both Hebrew and Arabic is spelled differently: "b", "r" and another sound that English does not have, a glottal-k that is technically transliterated as a "q". This is the same letter that starts the word for "holy" in both Arabic and Hebrew, which is why Arabs refer to Jerusalem as "al-Qods", and the Hebrew word for holy is "qadosh."

So Barack does not mean lightning, except that it does in the innocent ear of native Arabic and Hebrew speakers, because Americans, and the President himself, say the word in a way closer to its being "lightning" than "blessed" in those languages. A lot of Arabic and especially Hebrew speakers get lazy and don't always fully glottalize their "qofs" these days.

As for Rahm, it does not mean thunder. It means something closer to mercy or grace, and is the Hebrew equivalent of the Arabic word "rahman", which is important in Muslim liturgy as "rahaman" and "rahamim" are in Jewish liturgy. It's Hebrew spelling is "r", 'khet" (another, third different lighter gutteral sound that Arabic and Hebrew have but that English does not) and "m". (I wish I could import Arabic and Hebrew letters here to show you exactly what the differences look like, but I don't know how.) The word for thunder is ra-am, spelled "r", "ayin" (a fourth letter not existing in English), "m". More or less the same sound, spelled just "r", "m", means high or lofty. But Rahm Emanuel is neither thunder nor high and lofty.

There, got that? Don't worry, by the way; English has some sounds that Arabic and Hebrew lack.  Like "ch", for example. 

Hussein, by the way, means "handsome", more or less. Emanuel means "God is with us."  I don't know what Biden means.....hardly ever.

Of course, my newly birthed blog really should have begun on inauguration day, or on election day this past November, or when Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination in the summer. But, alas, it didn't, so before I can get to the present, to January 24, 2009, I have to reach back and briefly record my impressions of this man and his candidacy. 

But even before that, some premises. I have thought for quite a while now that American politics were essentially broken.  Not evil, not criminal, just broken. Here are, in short, the four main reasons for this.  

First, television has distorted the political process by making the cost of campaigning so high. The only way to raise the exorbitant sums necessary to pay for the TV ads is to go to concentrations of usually corporate power, which does not "sell" the policy process--that is cynical and literally inaccurate--but sure does rent it. It's not a good thing when members of the staffs of professional business associations actually draft laws for congressional staffers. Money has distorted American politics ever since the Washington Administrations, of course, so this is nothing new. But the scale of it is excessive by any reasonable measure. So busy are politicians raising this money that they rarely even talk to voters anymore. They sit at telephones calling rich people, so we have a greatly diminished national conversation about what matters to us.  This is the fault of not controlling television, which has ruined lots of other aspects of American society in the past half century, and from the list I do not exclude baseball (of which more later). 

Second, there are the consultants and pollsters who tell the political class not to actually think or explain anything to their constituents. Just preen and look at polls, they say, and look good on TV--again, TV.  Joe Klein has covered this problem best; read his stuff.

Third, the quality of press coverage of American politics has tanked. Most Americans depend on electronic media for news these days, and that has been disastrous. Pictures do emotions; print does rational thinking. Electronic media is about entertainment; print media is, or used to be, about thinking and the public welfare. As technology divides our time into every smaller fragments, or bytes, we have imbecilized ourselves as a society, and that has translated into a politics of impressions, of images, of appearances, not of substance or thought.  It is something like the "bread and circus" of degenerate Roman times, I think -- although, to be honest, I was not literally present in late classical times and so do not know for sure.

Fourth, for nearly a century American Federalism has become badly imbalanced, away from the design the Founders intended and sharply toward centralized Federal power.  One could write a whole book on this alone, and some have. But certainly since the 17th amendment in 1913, a bad idea though it seemed wise at the time, our system of government has become too center-heavy, and it is one of the reasons why we suffer so much today from bureaucratic aging and excessively hierarchical government structures in a world that rewards speed, flexibility, agility and creativity.  The U.S. Government today is none of these things, and you cannot implement genuinely new policies with a high-19th century form of government. We need structure and process renovation in the worst way in government, and we need to appreciate the uses of subsidiarity in Federalism much better than we do now. I do hope President Obama understands this. I see no sign yet, however, that he does.

There are other reasons we're "broken", but this is a blog, not a real essay.  So enough of this. 

Anyway, I have an essentially "on the one hand"-"on-the-other-hand" assessment of Barack Obama. I have tried to be objective, like social science Ph.D.s are presumably equipped to be (that's often a laugh.....but not, folks, in this case). Same goes for how I tried to look at all the other candidates, including John McCain.

Obama impressed me as very smart--the guy in the room who always first got the essential point. He also impressed me as a uniter, by which I mean someone able to synthesize and present a view in a compelling way. His personal story lent empathy to the whole business, and his youth and energy impressed younger people who instinctively knew that the old guys just didn't get it anymore. All fine; and as the campaign season proceeded, it was clear that a whole generation of youthful enthusiasts might be permanently alienated from politics should McCain or someone like him win. I also sized up Obama as a special kind of social conservative, despite his being the most leftist Democrat in the Senate. He came from a broken family, and he made sure his own family was whole. I take him at his word when he stresses the importance of self-discipline, manners, hard work and, above all, education. Those are socially conservative values in this society. It is not an anti-nuclear family "it-takes-a-village" approach to social stability. I am altogether fine with that and, as I said before, as a union-household baby, I had and still have no problem with his basic approach to issues of political economy......insofar as I know what his views are, and there is a lot he has left to our imagination on this score (also of which more later.)

Ah, but. But the man has not accomplished anything in the Senate. He wrote more autobiographies than bills.  His ambitions, it seemed to me, exceeded his right to claim them. His campaign consisted, when you went in and read the stuff on offer, of a pastiche of policy fragments that had been out there for years on the Democratic side.  He made no effort to specify them. He made no effort to gather them into a coherent policy theme.  He made no effort to sort out the contradictions among them. He made no effort to see a budget, to tell us how much all this would cost and how to pay for it. And above all, try as a I may (and I did), I could not find one single new policy idea, not one innovation, not a single novel thought, that was Barack Obama's. This man, I thought, might be smart or he might just be glib to a highly skilled degree. But either way, he's an empty suit, or so it has seemed to me. And I have to confess that nothing I've seen yet convinces me otherwise -- this, and his inexperience in national security issues, is why I could not bring myself to vote for him. 

I can already hear the complaint, the standard complaint: "Oh", it will be intoned, "but he has advisers, and good advisers can see to all of that."

People who say that, whether about domestic affairs or foreign policy, are surely well meaning. But they have also surely never been in government at any sort of higher level. Yes, there are advisers, lot of them. And on any issue of significance, anything difficult and open-ended (which nearly all decisions that reach the President's desk are), advisers will disagree. Sometimes their bureaucratic position will define their views, sometimes not. But I have never seen and never heard of any hard call being made because all the President's advisers were unanimous, or even close to unanimous, as to what he should do and how.  Never.  Don't believe me?  Get into government at a high level yourself -- say somewhere near the 7th floor of the State Department -- and you'll see. 

Obama also called for change, but he voted for the farm bill--the mother of all corporate welfare outrages in Washington. He said he would accept public campaign financing and then changed his mine when he saw the money wagons lining up. Obama's campaign got more very large donations--defined as over $25K per pop--than did McCain's:  so much for the MoveOn.com strategy of political financing. He has hired a bunch of Clinton retreads to run his Administration, too. This comforts some people, that the man in not a wild and reckless type. Fine, but......where's the change?  We have an opportunity with this deep, deep economic crisis to skip a generation of technology--in infrastructure, energy, military procurement, in all sorts of things--and Obama sounds like he just wants to rebuild "this old house", as David Brooks put it. The Clinton Administration, in my view, wasted a huge opportunity for genuine zero-based innovation in foreign policy and national security affairs at a molten, malleable time; I fear that this new Administration, in an equally malleable time in domestic policy, will do the same.

And the mainstream press?  It is pointing all this out, yes? No. It is in full frontal fawning posture right now.  There are hundreds of examples. My favorite is the supposed news story about the inaugural address, which informed readers that the speech was not just a bunch of sound bytes pasted together, but was mean to be appreciated from start to finish as a whole. Well, having worked as a speechwriter for two Secretaries of State, and having known several White House speechwriters, I think I am safe in saying that all speeches strive to be integral products, and most manage to be that, more or less skillfully so. People are reading into some of Obama's remarks hopeful and supposedly profound meanings that simply are not there. This is very entertaining, watching an otherwise deeply cynical liberal media embrace a hero. They are positively gushing, and Obama is wise to keep pointing out in the face of all this that "this is not about me." We'll see how long all this lasts.  Maybe a real long time.

As I have said, I did not vote for the man, but I certainly wish him well. I think every true patriot does. Just the fact that he got elected has dumbfounded much of the world; despite our troubles, we still inhabit the imagination of much of the world just because we seem to be able to do what they can't: change. Just the fact that he got elected shows that, whatever the President does or doesn't mean by "change", the American people have shown once again that they have a knack for reinvention, and that is very, very good, so long as they--er, we--don't throw out the Founders' formula for success in a burst of excessive haste or confidence.  That, too, we will see about.  As for what this means in practice, well, observers, foreign and domestic, exaggerated the decline of American power under George W. Bush because they didn't like Bush and wanted to blame him for it. Now the same observers exaggerate the rebirth of American power, for the same self-interested reason -- as if American power can really change that much that quickly.  How silly.

Aside from power there is principle, and here an interesting phenomenon is also at play. With a single exception (I'll tell you what I think it is later), I don't think Barack Obama has any core beliefs about political life or philosophy. He doesn't have any new ideas of his own, as far as I can tell, as I have already said, and it follows that a lack of core principles is responsible at least in part for a lack of new ideas. But that also describes Franklin Roosevelt, a man who came to the White House in hard times not really knowing his own mind on many things. But because he was not tied to some dogma he could be flexible and, though he made lots of mistakes between 1933 and 1937, say, things worked out not all that badly. He was a great President. Events made the man, not the other away around. The same thing, more or less, might happen again. I sure hope it does, except I hope it doesn't take a world war to prove the point.

And I  might point out the obvious -- something so obvious that no one seems to mention it: World recessions and depressions and acute discombobulations like the one we're in do tend to cause or at least contribute a great deal to wars, large ones like World Wars I and II. This is worth pondering, no?

More next time on the crazy "name game" -- all about what Barack and Hussein and Rahm really mean, in Arabic and Hebrew. You'll love it. You'll be amazed. Don't miss it.

My Blog Birth

An announcement to the blogniverous of the world:

I am probably much too old for this sort of thing, but I have decided to birth myself as a blogger. Some of my friends--some even older than me--have done it, so it seemed to me something to consider. I considered it, and decided to go ahead.  

Here is why. 

I am, I have to confess, a congenital blabberer. So I figured that if I blab in a blog, maybe I'll have fewer words left over to hurl at family and friends.  That'll make me a better listener--that, anyway, is my hope. 

More important, with a new administration begun, and me with lots and lots to say about it as it progresses from day to day, month to month, year to year, this blog will double as a sort of open diary, a memoir of the times in the making.  And I hope, I also confess, that after four or eight years, I might have the makings of a book from the blog raw materials I sketch out.

If this is my main reason for blogging, there are lesser ones, as well. As the editor of a well respected magazine situated in downtown Washington, DC, only about a mile or so from the White House, I am hardly isolated intellectually. Some of the most fascinating and stimulating writing around ends up on my desk one way or another. But the wise man, says the Talmud, is the man who knows how to learn from everyone--so the more interaction I can have with thoughtful people, the better. And if they live outside the proverbial beltway, even outside the country, so very much the better.  It can get stuffy inside interstate 495.

But that begs the question of who should, or might wish to, read Obamanation-The Newest Deal, which is what I have ended up naming this, since neither part of the name was available by itself. Obviously, this is a decision others will make, but I owe it to potential readers to describe myself, politically at least, so that those decisions will be more informed. I will try to be brief.

I am a 57-year old male, born in Washington, DC -- the old Columbia Hospital for Women -- grown up in the Commonwealth of Virginia when segregation still existed. An only child (sort of.....it's complicated), I have a wife and three grown children, and have had only one wife ever and intend no others. I have a social science doctorate from an Ivy League university (I can hear the rush to the door even as I type), but have never worked full-time for any university despite teaching here and there at several. Before my editorship at The American Interest magazine I was a State Department speechwriter, mainly for Colin Powell and briefly for Condoleezza Rice. I was not, however, a schedule C political appointment; that could not be since I am not and never have been a Republican.  Before that, I edited another magazine, and before that I was a staff member on a Federal commission (the Hart-Rudman Commission), and before that I worked at a think tank in Philadelphia and for only a short time just after finishing Ph.D. work, barely worth mentioning except that I learned a good bit from it, worked a little as a Senate staffer. 

I used to be a Democrat before around 1990, that day when most Democrats in the U.S. Senate voted against authorizing the use of force to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi aggression. (That was the last straw; I took out my little card and tore it to pieces. I considered mailing the pieces to Sam Nunn, but thought better of it, for he had given Senator Jackson use of the space I had literally sat in. So it would have been too churlish to do that, it seemed to me, besides which I was not angry at him so much as disappointed.) Rather, I was a schedule B appointment at the State Department, an "expert" hire, which, when applied to a speechwriter residing in Policy Planning, tells us all something about the state of the English language in contemporary America.  

As befits a political independent, perhaps, I voted this past November 4 for neither major party candidate. I wrote in instead the person who I thought would do the best job: Colin Powell, my former boss. It was between him and Bob Dylan. Dylan lost out, but I never play any Colin Powell record albums, so call it even. (I will explain later, in a future post, why I could not bring myself to vote for Obama or McCain.)

Labels are dangerous and often misleading as substitutes for thought rather than exemplars of it, but I promised to be brief so I have no choice. I am in the main a realist when it comes to international politics, a reluctant hawk in the sense that although I am in no principled way against the use of force in the national interest, I believe that the United States tries to do too much, with too much arrogance, too much self-absorption, and way too little capacity for either genuine strategic thought or forward planning. In domestic policy I am a cultural conservative for the most part, but more than left of center when it comes to issues of political economy. My father, may he rest in peace, was a Teamster and I grew up in a union household. Just can't help myself, I guess.

I have always been this way (well, since I was more or less an adult--say since the mid- to late 1960s); this is not a recent adoption to suit the times, and it is one of the reasons I never became a Republican. My conservatism--and I am conservative by temperament, not by ideology--is Burkean in character, not libertarian or moral-majority in nature. (If you do not understand these terms, you probably won't like this blog.) That's why my favorite columnist these days is David Brooks. 

Besides that, all you need to know about me is that I own a 1952 Cadillac (Fleetwood) that I wish was in better shape (oh, it drives fine, not to worry); an F-4 Gibson mandolin and a Martin D-35 guitar that I wish I played better; a stamp collection that I wish was more complete; a modest library of Jewish religious texts I wish I studied more; and a photo of Walter Johnson that hangs on the wall of my office. If you don't know who Walter Johnson was you can still read my blog, but you really ought to be ashamed of yourself. You don't have to go out to Rockville Cemetery every December 10 (his yahrzeit), but, well, never mind. So fair warning: at any given random moment, I may spice political commentary with references to automobiles, music, baseball and Lord-knows-what-else. There's just no telling.

That'll do it for now, save to present this little poem I wrote the other day. It's not very good, but I had some fun writing it when sleep escaped me, as it often does. If you don't like it much, I don't blame you. If you do like it, wow -- you can be my friend.  But your taste in poetry might be reckoned questionable.

Here goes:

                                        Madoff Made Off

Madoff made off with fifty billion dollars, 

Uncle Bernie sure burned `em, and that really bothers.

In affinity theft the man was a maven,

Seems he well understood the Cayman safe haven.

But he missed the plain logic of a Ponzi cascade:

To exit stage left before the police raid.

The judge slapped his wrist, which must have stung so

And bade him off, to his penthouse go.

Bernie's victims objected, but feared to shout out;

For the gentiles might twist what this was about.

The city of Shushan, it's written, once was confused;

Now we know why: No one san savvy the Jews.