"Always aim high, work hard, and care deeply about what you believe in. When you stumble, keep faith. When you're knocked down, get right back up. And NEVER listen to anyone who says you can't or shouldn't go on." - Hillary Clinton -
Edward Luce's fearless analysis in the Financial Times of what's wrong in the Obama White house isn't even a week old yet, and it's getting quiet nods from people who should know. Luce's take is that the Obama White House remains in campaign mode 15 months after the election, and Obama increasingly relies on four old campaign hands for strategy on all matters great and small - Rahm Emmanuel, Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod, and Robert Gibbs.
The interesting thing is that the people who are saying this analysis is spot on are Democrats who want the Obama administration to succeed. Steve Clemons of the Washington Note has a piece up on his own blog and also HuffPo with a take on the undercurrent beneath the minimal public reaction to Luce's piece.
But this Luce piece is unavoidably, accurately hard-hitting, and while many of the nation's top news anchors and editors are sending emails back and forth (I have been sent three such emails in confidence) on what a spot-on piece Luce wrought on the administration, they fear that the "four horsepersons of the Obama White House" will shut down and cut off access to those who give the essay 'legs.'
So let's take a look at the analysis that Rahm Emmanuel doesn't want people to read.
The closed-door session with Democratic Senators after the President's cheerleading on health care reform got testy. My man Al Franken got in David Axlerod's face and asked an embarrassing question. Politico has some details:
Five sources who were in the room tell POLITICO that Franken criticized Axelrod for the administration's failure to provide clarity or direction on health care and the other big bills it wants Congress to enact.
The sources said Franken was the most outspoken senator in the meeting, which followed President Barack Obama's question-and-answer session with Senate Democrats at the Newseum on Wednesday. But they also said the Minnesotan wasn't the only angry Democrat in the room.
"There was a lot of frustration in there," said a Democratic senator who declined to be identified.
"People were hot," another Democratic senator said.
Sens. Al Franken (D-Minn.) put pointed health-care-related questions to senior adviser David Axelrod following Obama's speech, multiple sources tell the Huffington Post. He was echoed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-V.T.) The gist of their concern was that the administration has not shown enough leadership to get legislation passed through Congress in the wake of the party's defeat in the Massachusetts Senate election. Franken insisted that "he really needed to know if the White House was going to lead," according to one Democratic aide.
More from Sam today: Sherrod Brown says Obama's engagement on health care has "dried up".
As the chances for health care reform slip away, the White House seems to be more concerned with positioning itself to avoid blame than with getting the bill passed. Right now, Obama could use a little LBJ, and he's channeling Calvin Coolidge. It was probably a telling sign of Obama's lack of skill in legislative matters that the Subcommittee on European Affairs he chaired in the Foreign Relations Committee never actually, you know, met.
With the game on the line, instead of being down under the basket, throwing elbows, he's on the bench, thinking about his multi-year contract.
Obama grows the drug war, with enforcement a clear priority
...according to 2011 funding "highlights" released by the ONDCP, the Obama administration is growing the drug war and tilting its funds heavily toward law enforcement over treatment.
What happened to the enlightened, treatment-oriented approach promised by President Barack Obama's new drug czar, former Seattle police chief Gil Kerlikowske? Remember how the drug war was over, blah blah blah?
The president's National Drug Control Budget also continues the Bush administration's public relations tactic of obscuring the costs of prosecuting and imprisoning drug offenders. "Enron style accounting," is how drug policy reform advocate Kevin Zeese described it, writing for Alternet in 2002.
The budget places America's drug war spending at $15.5 billion for fiscal year 2011; an increase of 3.5 percent over FY 2010. That figure reflects a 5.2 percent increase in overall enforcement funding, growing from $9.7 billion in FY 2010 to $9.9 billion in FY 2011. Addiction treatment and preventative measures, however, are budgeted at $5.6 billion for FY 2011, an increase from $5.2 billion in FY 2010.
In short, the Obama administration's appropriations for treating drug addiction are just short of half that dedicated to prosecuting the war.
One more case of the 2008 rhetoric not matching the 2009-2012 implementation. Those kids were positive Obama was their buddy, and was going to come over and hang out at their house and play Guitar Hero with them. I guess they'll just have to get over it ;-)
UPDATE:
Now, I have to give Obama credit for discontinuing the Javert-style Federal persecution of medical marijuana growers in states which allow it. He quietly dropped this Draconian use of Federal drug laws, which had to be the worst case of an ideologically driven selective application of drug laws since Timothy Leary went to prison for years for one joint. However, the main reason he dropped it was that court challenges were moving forward, and he would soon be in a position where he had to defend it in court. So it's all about looking good, not about doing the right thing. Let's give him half credit on that one.
The Obama administration is seeking a record $708 billion for the Defense Department in fiscal 2011, as the U.S. military continues to wrestle with a mounting bill for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan while trying to better equip itself for small-scale conflicts.
In his role as Nation media critic, Alterman makes a few good points. Baby steps:
Phenomena such as Game Change's publication are often more instructive for what they show about the community that prizes them than for the actual information they contain. Its most revealing passages, as Hendrik Hertzberg noted in The New Yorker, "are based on what may be fairly called gossip." It is packed with score-settling, back-stabbing, virtuoso displays of profanity by its principals and some awfully impressive feats of mind reading by its authors. As Charles Pierce pointed out in his "Slacker Friday" appearance on my "Altercation" blog, what there isn't is any discussion of, say, healthcare, Afghanistan or Al Qaeda. But surely this is an accurate reflection of the meaning of "news" to the MSM Powers That Be.
A second unintentional revelation of Game Change is the actual degree to which political journalists and operatives cooperate to create campaign narratives that undermine the commonly understood notions of just what journalism is supposed to be. If there is any value in learning the dispiriting details of the dysfunctional marriage between the frightfully smarmy John Edwards and the not-so-saintly-after-all Elizabeth Edwards, it is that everything we were sold during the campaign about this couple was a lie. It doesn't really matter much in terms of whether he would have made a good president, but given how much ink is spilled on the "character" issues of candidates and their spouses, it is significant that virtually everything written about the Edwardses when it mattered belied reality. Can this really be news to everyone who covered the 2004 and 2008 campaigns?
They describe how Geffen and Dowd, "a mischievous dyad," conspired to produce a bombshell attack on the Clintons' character from their former close friend and sometime adviser. Dowd interviewed Geffen for fifteen minutes. She then "left and wrote her column, then called Geffen and read it to him." The next night, after the fundraiser, Dowd came to dinner with the Obamas and a few Hollywood types, and Geffen read the column to Barack Obama, who presumably was amused.
More significant, the episode demonstrates just how little a role the rules of professional journalism play in allegedly top-flight political reporting. Real reporters do not read their columns to their subjects in advance. And Penn and Wolfson knew damn well that Obama had no control over what Geffen said or did, but almost everyone covering the story treated it as if it were a sensible demand, because the phony food-fight story line was so much fun to pursue. Finally, at the end of the story, Heilemann and Halperin inform us, in the voice of God, that "Soon after, when Geffen visited New York, people in cars on Madison Avenue beeped their horns and gave the thumbs-up as he walked down the street."
There was a lot of approving chatter about Obama dueling with the Republicans at their retreat. Good for him. It's nice to remember that the GOP's ideas can't compete.
But as to what we need in terms of leadership, making the GOP look bad with their own ideas is just one small part. A leader needs to have a comprehensive sense of where the organization needs to go, the vision of how to get there, and the ability to revise plans in real time to keep up with events. Obama's recent performance is about 2% of what a competent corporate manager does on a daily basis - (s)he needs to be able be a rock star in a boardroom showdown before breakfast, plan new products before lunch, and make sure the operation runs like a well oiled machine that afternoon. Someone who pats him/herself on the back for saving the division at one key meeting and coasts for the rest of the week will fail.
Since Hillary told Tavis she is only going to be SOS 1 term and O appears to be content with serving 1 term if he is not popular, this new Hillary 2012 group on Facebook has grown. The group right now is just trying to connect with all Hillary supporters old and new so that if she does announce she will run, the grassroots is ready on day 1. I am on the committee
http://www.facebook.com/group....
It's safe to say Joe Galloway has done more to inform and enlighten the nation than any number of SOTU speeches (I didn't watch tonight, but just spent the last few minutes chuckling at my Twitter stream, something I highly recommend as a substitute for TV).
Galloway was part of McClatchy, the outfit that got it right on Iraq (there wasn't a reason) and WMDs (none, of course). He has deep mutual respect with members of the military, but was one of the most effective advocates of keeping them from using their weapons. He was on the ground in some Vietnam's pivotal battles, and was the only civilian from that conflict to be awarded a Bronze Star with a Combat V for Valor, for his life saving efforts at Ia Drang, which was partially depicted in the Mel Gibson movie, We Were Soldiers Once, and Young - based on the book Galloway co-authored with another giant, Hal Moore.
The spending freeze - about which the best thing you can say in its favor is that it's a transparently cynical PR stunt - has, for many, been the final straw: rhetorically, it's a complete concession to Reaganism.
But why should we be surprised? Here's one from the vault. Two years ago, I was deeply frustrated with Obama's apparent endorsement of the Reagan myth.
There was a lot of delusion among progressives who convinced themselves, in the face of clear evidence to the contrary, that Obama was a strong champion of their values. He wasn't and isn't.
It's that "evidence" stuff and two year old posts stating the obvious that makes him so unserious. You have to have been breathtakingly wrong or experience a de-conversion to be taken seriously.
According to cables from US Ambassador Eikenberry, our strategy is fundamentally flawed. The Afghan and Pakistani governments have no interest in protecting US gains, or protecting the Afghan people. Michael Cohen says,
The Afghan government is fundamentally uninterested in governing and believes the US will stay forever; sending troops will only increase their dependence on US forces; there is no corresponding civilian surge, either by the US or the Afghan government to hold and build [...]
A spending freeze? That's the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback?
It's appalling on every level.
It's bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. [...] Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with "the rotting corpse of [Hoover Secretary] Andrew Mellon"
It's bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead.
And it's a betrayal of everything Obama's supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view - and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, "I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy."
[...] Right now, this looks like pure disaster.
Fiscal austerity during high unemployment is the sort of boneheaded Republicanism that even I didn't predict of Obama, although most serious Clintonistas accurately predicted the administration's other domestic policy moves. You didn't have to be a genius to see what Harry and Louise meant.
We knew that Obama was an inside guy for corporate America two years ago this week. The inside, backroom deals through the summer were completely expected, but overt economic conservatism with a cap or real cut to government is more than the cynics expected - it's not that we didn't expect something this bad, we just it with slicker marketing that would continue to dupe the people who fell for the original deception.
