The Economy of Empire: Cut "Entitlements," Increase Defense Speanding

Paul Krugman critiques Obama's approach to economic reform:

I ended Tuesday less confident about the direction of economic policy than I was in the morning.

Just to be clear, there wasn’t anything glaringly wrong with the address — although for those still hoping that Mr. Obama will lead the way to universal health care, it was disappointing that he spoke only of health care’s excessive cost, never once mentioning the plight of the uninsured and underinsured.

Also, one wishes that the speechwriters had come up with something more inspiring than a call for an “era of responsibility” — which, not to put too fine a point on it, was the same thing former President George W. Bush called for eight years ago.

But my real problem with the speech, on matters economic, was its conventionality. In response to an unprecedented economic crisis — or, more accurately, a crisis whose only real precedent is the Great Depression — Mr. Obama did what people in Washington do when they want to sound serious: he spoke, more or less in the abstract, of the need to make hard choices and stand up to special interests.

No Negotiations with Hamas?

Many of the most insightful Middle East observers are skeptical of the Obama administration's approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

For Robert Fisk, Obama's speech failed to break with the War on Terror frame to the issue:

But however much distance the new President put between himself and the vicious regime he was replacing, 9/11 still hung like a cloud over New York. We had to remember "the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke". Indeed, for Arabs, the "our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred" was pure Bush; the one reference to "terror", the old Bush and Israeli fear word, was a worrying sign that the new White House still hasn't got the message. Hence we had Obama, apparently talking about Islamist groups such as the Taliban who were "slaughtering innocents" but who "cannot outlast us". As for those in the speech who are corrupt and who "silence dissent", presumably intended to be the Iranian government, most Arabs would associate this habit with President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt (who also, of course, received a phone call from Obama yesterday), King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and a host of other autocrats and head-choppers who are supposed to be America's friends in the Middle East.

Tony Karon at TomDispatch warns:

any peace process that seeks to marginalize, not integrate, Hamas is doomed to fail - and with catastrophic consequences. That's why the position outlined by Obama's Secretary of State-designate is dysfunctional at birth, because it repeats the mistake of trying to marginalize Hamas. For its part, Hamas officials have sent a number of signals in recent years indicating the organization's willingness to move in a pragmatic direction. Its leaders wouldn't bother to regularly explain their views in the op-ed pages of American newspapers if they did not believe a different relationship with the U.S. - and so Israel - was possible.
...
Had Barack Obama taken office in a moment of relative tranquility in the fraught Israeli-Palestinian relationship, he might have had the luxury of putting it on the backburner. Indeed, any move to change the Bush approach might have been challenged as unnecessarily risky and disruptive.

In Gaza in the last few weeks, however, the Bush approach imploded, leaving Obama no choice but to initiate a new policy of his own. Hopefully, it will be one rooted in the pragmatism for which the new President is renowned.

And indeed, this collection of pro-Israel statements by prominent Democrats gives cause for skepticism.

Reuters draws on As'ad Abu Khalil to analyze Middle East reactions to Obama's approach to the region:

CAIRO - President Barack Obama has taken the Middle East by surprise with the speed of his diplomacy but his first statement on the conflict between Arabs and Israelis was strikingly similar to old U.S. policies...

The conservative Arab governments saw the calls as an affirmation of their privileged status -- another sign that Obama is sticking to traditional approaches.

"It took two long days before Obama dispelled any notions of a change in U.S. Middle East policy," said As'ad Abu Khalil, Lebanese-born and pro-Palestinian professor of political science at California State University.

"Obama's speech was quite something. It was like sprinkling sulphuric acid on the wounds of the children in Gaza," he added.

We will not Apologize

Obama's inaugural address has been received with near universal acclaim. It was indeed very well conceived, well-written, and of course brilliantly executed. But I fear that there are monsters lurking in its rhetorical shadows. In some senses, it reads as a "not guilty plea" at a time when we need to be praying for atonement, seeking redemption.

Tom Engelhardt, has a similar read. Before the inaugural he wrote a column on the history of inaugural addresses, and outlining what he would like to see. He explains that in the early days of the Republic - when Empire was only a twinkle in the eyes of the Founders - it was traditional to call attention to the limits of American power, and the limits to the capacity of the state's Chief Executive. But as America's power grew, its humility and modesty shrank. The election of JFK marks an important symbolic turning point - a moment in which the US grew Mad with Power. The pomp and ceremony of the contemporary spectacle are accouterments of what he describes as a "victory culture."

He explains:

They [contemporary inaugurals] must, in fact, sing hymns to our strength, as well as to our unquestioned "mission" or "calling" in the world. In the first moments of a presidency, they must summon Americans to do great things, as befits a great power, not just on the national, but on the planetary stage.

By the time John F. Kennedy came along, there was no more talk of shrinking from contemplation. "In the long history of the world," he said in his inaugural address, "only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility -- I welcome it." He then sounded a "trumpet" to call on Americans to engage in "a long twilight struggle… against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself," not to speak of Soviet Communism.

The one exception to this trajectory was Jimmy Carter. Only Jimmy Carter had the moral strength to speak honestly about the kind of world we live in. No self-aggrandizing fictions, no "necessary lies" (as Chomsky might call them) - a call to reckon honestly with our past and present, which do not always conform neatly to the post-Enlightenment discourse of progress.

Again, Engelhardt:

Jimmy Carter's 1976 inaugural address, coming in the wake of Watergate, the Nixon presidency, and the disaster of defeat in Vietnam, called Americans to "a new spirit," a new way of thinking about the country, which was to include a recognition of "our recent mistakes" and a realization that "even our great Nation has its recognized limits, and that we can neither answer all questions nor solve all problems."

This would be a theme of his presidency, most famously in his "malaise" address to the nation in July 1979 in which he called on Americans to face their "intolerable dependence on foreign oil" and to recognize the limits of their "worship" of "self-indulgence and consumption."

The "malaise" address (actually entitled "Crisis of Confidence") was prophetic, a searing soul search for sources of our modern afflictions. The Carter revision is only now beginning to take shape. The documents have only just begun to be released. History will look kindly on Carter. (For a preview of what that revision will look like see the first chapter of Andrew Bacevich's recent The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.)

But unfortunately, this kind of honest self-examination, has no place in a modern politics so deeply rooted in deceit. As we all know, Carter was annihilated in 1980 by, as Engelhardt explains, "a candidate who imagined a very different kind of "morning in America," involving a nation without global limits."

With all this in mind, Engelhardt sat down before the inaugural to think about what he would like to hear from our 44th president. Engelhardt's voice of reason offers an insightful lens for interpreting what Obama ended up saying. Engelhardt admits that what he would like to hear "may be an address which no American president would care to give, centering as it does on an apology." Indeed, as Obama made clear in his address: "We will not apologize for our way of life; we will not waiver in its defense." But as Engelhardt explains it is an apology which we need more than anything else:

I remain convinced that the Vietnam War has dogged this country for endless decades largely because most Americans and their leaders were never willing to come to grips with what we had done, and so never offered a word of apology or any restitution for the damage caused. What is not reckoned with, not acknowledged, not atoned for, haunts us.

This last line bears repeating and emphasizing: "What is not reckoned with, not acknowledged, not atoned for, haunts us." This gets to the heart of what frustrates so many radicals and progressives, who are not yet ready to turn the page on what Obama calls the "stale arguments of the past." As an historian, I can't help but take exception to the notion that a nation can move forward without an honest assessment of its past. As Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1967, "The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit." If the US continued to "ignore this sobering reality," Dr. King predicted that the US would be condemned to repeat its experience in Vietnam with every new generation. How did we get from Vietnam to Iraq- to so many other places? How did we get from the Gulf of Tonkin to WMD? Answering such questions, in the words of Dr. King, "demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people."

In this sense, Obama's address, while marking some important discontinuities with the Bush years, remains an exercise in evasion. Our problems are much deeper than George W. Bush. The universal castigation that that dark soul receives serves only to scapegoat what is in truth a malady of our collective soul. Bush is not the problem. Bush has never been the problem.

Norman Soloman on the dark art of triangulation:

Now, looking at Obama's choices for key posts, many progressive activists who went all-out for months to get him elected are disappointed. The foreign-policy team, dominated by strong backers of the Iraq invasion, hardly seems oriented toward implementing Obama's 2008 campaign pledge to "end the mindset that got us into war." On the domestic side, big-business ties and Wall Street sensibilities are most of the baseline. Overall, it's hard to argue that the glass is half full when so much is missing.

The progressives who remain eager to project their worldviews onto Obama are at high risk for hazy credulity. Such projection is a chronic hazard of Obamania. Biographer David Mendell aptly describes Obama as "an exceptionally gifted politician who, throughout his life, has been able to make people of wildly divergent vantage points see in him exactly what they want to see."

But in the long run, an unduly lofty pedestal sets the stage for a fall from grace. Illusions make disillusionment possible.

There's little point in progressives faulting Obama because so much of their vital work remains undone at the grassroots. A longtime Chicago-based activist on the left, Carl Davidson, made the point well when he wrote after the November election that "one is not likely to win at the top what one has not consolidated and won at the base."

By the same token, we should recognize that Obama's campaign victories (beginning with the Iowa caucuses) were possible only because of the painstaking work by antiwar activists and other progressive advocates in prior years. To make further progress possible, in electoral arenas and in national policies, the country must be moved anew - from the bottom up.

A Revolution of Rising Expectations

(Artwork: Ben Heine)

My friend and neighbor Dan Hamburg points out the immense challenges facing the new president, and warns:

He must produce. If Clinton faced deficits, Obama faces chasms. Military quagmires. A broken health care system. Public education in shambles. Unprecedented income inequality, and an economy on life-support.

If in two years Obama voters feel cheated, their high hopes unfulfilled, there will be hell to pay--for the Democrats, but more importantly, for the country.

Here is an interesting blast from the past that offers some insight on the present:

"What was Barack Obama like in 1990?" (a story from February 1990 on Obama becoming the editor of the Harvard Law Review)