Michael Tomasky's Blog, page 12

Tomasky Talk: On Obama and Libya, and more - video | Michael Tomasky

Michael Tomasky reviews the week when Obama intervened in Libya – from South America – and more candidates started to show their hand in the Republican 2012 race

Michael Tomasky

Obama's maddening silence | Michael Tomasky

I said this yesterday, but I'd accidentally left the comments off, and I want to see what you people think about this. I am absolutely ready to punch the wall over the fact that Obama hasn't spoken to the American people about the Libya exercise.

You're a president. You launch a war. Granted it's not much of a war. But you are sending Americans into a position where they might die. And you don't go on television and explain to the American people why you've made this decision?

One more time: you don't go on television and explain to the American people why you've made this decision?

I find this incomprehensible. Reagan sent troops into Grenada on October 25, 1983. Two nights later, he was on television explaining why. Bush Sr. ordered strikes on Panama that began on December 19, 1990. The next night, he was on TV explaining why.

This is really, truly unbelievable to me, and the worst thing Obama has done as president (previous winner: his extremely ill-considered comment about the "stupid" Cambridge police).

This Libya action is already not very popular. Well, uh...maybe people would be helped if their president went on television and told them what we're doing there. Sheesh.

God forbid a handful of soldiers die when their copter is shot down or something. Then, he'll go on TV. Then, it will be too late.

I admire aspects of the way Obama has handled this situation. Waiting for the Arab League's assent and making the US part of a genuine multilateral force is a step forward in historical terms. Enforcing "responsibility to protect" is a good thing.

But when you send soldiers off to fight, you have to tell the American people why. I'm just flabbergasted.

Barack ObamaLibyaMichael Tomasky
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The old fake-an-attack-on-yourself trick | Michael Tomasky

Have you heard this one, about the prosecutor in Indiana who wrote an email to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker during the protests suggesting that Walker arrange a fake attack on himself and blame it on the unions? He resigned. From Wisconsinwatch.org, linked to above:

Carlos F. Lam submitted his resignation shortly before the Center published a story quoting his Feb. 19 email, which praised Walker for standing up to unions but went on to say that the chaos in Wisconsin presented "a good opportunity for what's called a 'false flag' operation."

"If you could employ an associate who pretends to be sympathetic to the unions' cause to physically attack you (or even use a firearm against you), you could discredit the unions," the email said.

"Currently, the media is painting the union protest as a democratic uprising and failing to mention the role of the DNC and umbrella union organizations in the protest. Employing a false flag operation would assist in undercutting any support that the media may be creating in favor of the unions. God bless, Carlos F. Lam."

At 5 a.m. Thursday, expecting the story to come out that day, Lam called his boss, Johnson County, Ind., Prosecutor Brad Cooper, and told him he had been up all night thinking about it.

"He wanted to come clean, I guess, and said he is the one who sent that email," Cooper said.

This sort of thing has a long history in America. On a reporting trip to Chicago many years back, I was told that locally, this practice even had a name. To set up a fake attack on oneself was to pull a Pooch, so called after an alderman, Roman Pucinski, who was alleged to have been the master of the genre, hiring marksmen to drive by his campaign office and spray some bullets in the windows at nighttime, the better to impress upon his constituents what a noble and courageous battle he was waging on their behalf.

In New York City in 1969, Mario Procaccino was the white-backlash candidate for mayor, and Herman Badillo the first Puerto Rican with a serious shot at winning the mayoralty (some of you may know that Herman is still on the scene, and fairly conservative these days). I was once told that the Procaccino campaign hired flatbed truckloads of blacks and Puerto Ricans to go around white ethnic areas of the city pounding on various percussive instruments and shouting things like "Vote Badillo, it's our time!", which served as a more graphic warning to those voters of what was at stake than anything Procaccino could say himself.

This is the second Indiana law enforcement official to have to resign because of outre emails sent to Walker. The other guy, actually a deputy attorney general, suggested the use of live ammunition against protesters. What is the Indiana-Wisconsin right-wing connection here, can any of you shed any light on this? It's bizarre and appalling.

At the same time, this talk of Chicago and New York machine politics does make me a bit wistful. I didn't have time to make a quiz today, but here's a little bonus question for you. Who was the Chicago mayor who died in Miami in 1933 taking a bullet that was apparently intended for Franklin Roosevelt, with whom he was appearing at that moment? The mayor's last words were allegedly: "I'm glad it was me instead of you."

US politicsWisconsinMichael Tomasky
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The real test for the west | Michael Tomasky

To the surprise of many, not least Bashar al-Assad, protests mount in Syria. New York Times:

The government of President Bashar al-Assad, unaccustomed to concessions, rapidly announced a series of reforms, including a salary increase for public workers, greater freedom for the news media and political parties, and a reconsideration of the emergency rule that has clamped down the nation for 48 years.

Mr. Assad also ordered prisoners taken during the crackdown this week to be freed. An adviser said publicly that Mr. Assad had ordered troops not to fire live rounds at protesters in Dara'a and that "there were, maybe, some mistakes."

The concessions did not appear to satisfy the protesters, who were expected to gather in even larger numbers on Friday, the Muslim day of prayer. Fridays have become a central forum during the recent weeks of tumult around the Middle East.

"We totally refuse" the concessions, said one man in a crowd of thousands marching toward the central Omari mosque in Dara'a, according to a witness who was interviewed by telephone.

A raise for public workers - make that man the governor of Wisconsin!

You can also read Guardian-style live-blog updates on the Syrian situation on the website NOW Lebanon, a site whose work I have recommended to you previously.

The other day, I wrote a post about how Ronald Reagan was our last pacifist president. I meant humanitarian crises happened back then and he didn't lift a finger, even when 243 Americans were killed in Beirut. I didn't mean this as praise; just noting the irony.

I failed to mention the biggest thing of all, though, which was the Hama massacre of 1982, in which the Syrian government (then in the hands of the incumbent's father, Hafez) slaughtered maybe 20,000 of its own people to quell a Muslim Brotherhood uprising. It's generally thought to be the largest massacre of its own people by an Arab government in modern times.

Why do I mention it? Merely to say that if things start heading down that kind of road in Syria - is it like father like son, or has fils maybe learned a respectable lesson or two from that? - then the US and the west will have some really, really, really tough choices to make.

In '82, Reagan, true to form, didn't lift a finger in response to Hama. The Syrians were thick with the Russkies back in those days, so piddling around with Syria meant risking Soviet...curiosity, shall we say, which would have made things a whole a new game.

Now, of course, Russia has been replaced by Iran. So air strikes against Syria, the kind we're undertaking in Libya now, could well lead to war with Iran. What would we do if things really heated up there, and Assad vowed to hunt protestors down house by house, and it seemed probably that a civilian slaughter loomed? On the basis of what we're doing now in Libya, we'd have to go in, no? But...

Mind you I've persuaded myself to be for this Libya business, but with qualifiers, the main one being: no moralistic chest thumping by pundits on either side of the sort that was so toxic back in 2002 and 2003 (most of it was done by the hawks, but both sides went thumpety thump). It's too complicated a situation for that, and the only thing to distrust in a situation like this is moral certainty.

US foreign policySyriaMichael Tomasky
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Obama and North Carolina | Michael Tomasky

When Democrats and liberals think about the next presidential election and the electoral map, they begin by conceding a number of states that Obama won in 2008, states that never go Democratic and probably did last time only because Bush was in the crapper, the economy was even worse, and the Republican candidate's choice of vice-president was even worse still. Indiana, for example. Hadn't gone Democratic since 1964.

Most people include North Carolina in that list. Obama won it by just .4 percent, or 49.9 to 49.5. And the liberal and black votes were really pumped up. So next time, under normal circumstances, it just isn't happening, right?

But here's a poll today of North Carolinians with these numbers:

National

2012 President
47% Obama (D), 42% Gingrich (R)
45% Obama (D), 45% Huckabee (R)
51% Obama (D), 40% Palin (R)
44% Obama (D), 42% Romney (R)

Job Approval / Disapproval
Pres. Obama: 48 / 46
Sen. Burr: 38 / 31
Sen. Hagan: 35 / 42

Favorable / Unfavorable
Newt Gingrich: 29 / 48
Mike Huckabee: 42 / 39
Sarah Palin: 37 / 57
Mitt Romney: 32 / 41

I'd say that still looks pretty good for the guy. If he's holding at 48% in the state right now, he's only lost 4% of his support (that is, he's gone from 50 to 48, a decrease of two raw points but 4%), and that's not really bad at all. It's not as if I have roamed far and wide across the great Tarheel plateaux, but I do have a firm sense of central NC as being nearly as perfect an embodiment as we have in the US of the Judis/Teixeira Ideopolis. a concept with which you should become acquainted between now and 2012.

I would bet today on Obama carrying North Carolina again, maybe even against the Demon Barbour of Dixie (can one make Sondheim jokes about southern governors?). Not Indiana. And maybe not Florida, and maybe not Ohio either. But North Carolina and Virginia, yes. And Colorado. These are on their way to becoming Democratic states under normal circumstances. Maybe we can trade North Carolina for Maine.

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America the admired | Michael Tomasky

Here's some nice news for me and my fellow Americans:

The rest of the world thinks U.S. leaders are doing a better job than those in half a dozen other world powers, including Germany, the United Kingdom, Russia and China, an analysis released Wednesday suggests.

Forty-seven percent of the people surveyed by Gallup in more than 100 countries during 2010 said they approved of the job performance of leaders in the United States, while 25 percent said they disapproved. Another 21 percent didn't know or refused to answer...

...In second place was Germany, with a 40 percent job approval rating for its leaders, a 17 percent disapproval rating and 38 percent having no opinion or refusing to answer. Coming in close at third place was France, with a 39 percent approval rating, 22 percent disapproval rating and 39 percent with no answer.

The countries that did the worst in the survey were China – with a 31 percent approval rating and 27 percent disapproval rating – and Russia. Russia's leadership got a 27 percent job approval rating and a 31 percent disapproval rating.

The U.S. rise to the top of the approval index is only a recent development since Barack Obama became president. In 2007 and 2008, approval for American leaders ranked second from last, leading only Russia. In 2008, the U.S. rating was 34 percent. In 2009, it jumped to 49 percent.

Obviously, there will be a percentage of Americans for whom this will merely confirm what a Manchurian Candidate the president is, and they will rant and rave about it, as I'm sure they already are.

For most of us, it actually feel pretty good, and it confirms my idea that there are millions of Americans out there who don't listen to those fulminations and are in fact pretty level-headed people.

Great Britain, by the way, came out flat in this survey, dropping maybe a percentage point in the last three years, from 35 to 34%.

The important and encouraging thing here is China's low number. One could have thought that would be higher, because China surely seems like (and in terms of growth undeniably is) a very dynamic society right now, so it's good to see that it's not lost on the world's population that there are important ways in which China is undynamic, shall we say.

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If Gaddafi stays, well, he stays | Michael Tomasky

Typically sharp piece by Fareed Zakaria in Time, headlined "How Will Libya End?" He starts by noting that this is a truly multilateral operation, unlike all the others that are called multilateral by are really American:

But more than anything else, what appears to have infuriated many American politicians is Obama's unwillingness to put the U.S. in the driver's seat. "We have a Spectator in Chief instead of a Commander in Chief," fumed Newt Gingrich. Senator Lindsey Graham criticized Obama for acting as if "leading the free world is an inconvenience." And Rick Santorum levied the ultimate insult, noting that the French — the French! — had been leading the charge.

They are right, in part: Obama does not want to be seen as the ringmaster. The diplomacy of the past few weeks has broken a tradition born in the Cold War. For decades, U.S. Presidents unilaterally identified crises, articulated responses, determined actions and then persuaded, bribed and threatened countries to join in the "collective action." The U.S. ran the show with little interference from others but paid all the prices and bore all the burdens. Countries that would benefit from a military intervention rarely stood up to request it. They didn't need to. America would act, and they could free-ride.

These same people would of course be hammering at Obama if he had taken a more aggressive lead for committing the crime of entangling the United States in a nation-building exercise in a far-off land where we have no compelling interest etc etc. So on the one hand they're just opportunists, although it does genuinely grate their cheese that Obama didn't act like the typical US president-bully. Obama does want America to retreat a bit on the world stage, and quite sensibly so, say I and many millions of other Americans who aren't big fans of the Cheney way.

But here's an upcoming problem for Obama:

In the final analysis, however, the most significant challenge for Barack Obama is to keep America's military involvement limited. If Gaddafi does not fall immediately, it will take just a few days for people in Washington to start claiming that Obama lost, Gaddafi won, and America has been humiliated. The response should not be to escalate. The U.S. used its military in Libya for a specific, limited mission: to destroy Gaddafi's air defenses. That goal will be achieved; others might not.

This is a very important point, and it's one I think Obama really really needs to be making to the American people, like yesterday. He needs to say: this mission is not and was never about overthrowing Colonel Gaddafi from the US point of view. I don't like him. I want him to go. I've made that clear. But ultimately this is a matter for the Libyan people. The US went in there to prevent a massacre and to level the playing field for the rebels. The first has been accomplished. When the second is accomplished, we're done. We'll stay alert to the possibility of future Benghazis, and we may be compelled to act quickly again. But we are not fighting their civil war for them. That's their business.

I think that's a policy the majority of US public opinion will happily accept. Prevent slaughters, give some assistance to people fighting dictators, but get out of the picture as quickly as is prudently possible. Call it humanitarian protection. The Beltway crowd is more likely to fall for it if it has a grand-sounding name.

But the point is, the president has to SAY it. As with the budget, he is not telling Americans where he stands. We were told when Rahm and Axe left and Plouffe and Daley came in, this lack of communication issue was going to be resovled. It's still just as bad. What is going on? Alas, Occam's Razor instructs us that the staff may be different, but the president is still the same.

Obama administrationUS foreign policyLibyaMichael Tomasky
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Maine governor moving state south | Michael Tomasky

Well, if this sort of thing keeps up - this happened in Maine yesterday - I really can start dumping on the north as much as the south:

Gov. Paul LePage has ordered the removal of a 36-foot mural depicting Maine's labor history from the lobby of the Department of Labor.

Acting labor chief Laura Boyett emailed staff Tuesday about the mural's pending removal, as well as another administration directive to rename several department conference rooms that carry the names of pro-labor icons such as Cesar Chavez.

According to LePage spokesman Dan Demeritt, the administration felt the mural and the conference room monikers showed "one-sided decor" not in keeping with the department's pro-business goals.

"The message from state agencies needs to be balanced," said Demeritt, adding that the mural had sparked complaints from "some business owners" who complained it was hostile to business.

Yes, balance. I bet there's a Martin Luther King statue or avenue or something somewhere in Maine. Shouldn't there be a nearby Bull Connor Boulevard? In fact they should intersect. Think of p.r. and tourism possibilities, governor!

All right, "business" is not of course Bull Connor. But is it really so odd for the Department of Labor to celebrate...labor? I'm sure Maine has business-friendly state agencies that celebrate its rich traditions of commerce.

LePage, a tea partier whose elections has terrified the likes of Senator Olympia Snowe because it showed how strongly the movement has overtaken the state's GOP (Snowe is up in 2012), has been going after unions on a range of fronts, as you can read in the article linked to above.

A poll came out last week showing LePage's ratings, just two months into office, at 43% approval and 48% disapproval. Of course times are tough so governors of both parties are bound to have difficult ratings, but the fact is that several states elected hard-right governors and voters are now wondering, what the hell did we do here? It's simple: liberals didn't vote in 2010, and conservatives did. That's what happens.

If it takes hard-shell ideologues like LePage making idiotic moves like this for people to grasp what happened, so be it then. Maine is an old Republican state, but moderate Republican, not this kind of Republican, and it is also an old textile state with a union history where lots of people would presumably still know that grandpa worked in the mills and was in a union. And here's LePage trying to wedge it in between the Carolinas.

United StatesMaineMichael Tomasky
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Robert Gates and the two Libyas | Michael Tomasky

The more I think about Robert Gates, the more impressed I am lately. He was strongly against this Libya business, as we know. But once the decision was made, he sucked it up. An actual constitutionalist who understands that the president is the commander in chief and believes in civilian control of the military; when the CinC said "end don't ask don't tell," he went out and did it, regardless of what he actually thought privately. Plus, he happily gives no voice to amusing but dangerous and completely wrongheaded theories that cost American lives (shock and awe) as did his predecessor Herr Rummy.

In today's WashPost he speaks to David Ignatius, sharing some honest and interesting reflections, among which:

Gates says the unrest has highlighted "ethnic, sectarian and tribal differences that have been suppressed for years" in the region, and that as America encourages leaders to accept democratic change, there's a question "whether more democratic governance can hold . . . countries together in light of these pressures." The implication: There's a risk that the political map of the modern Middle East may begin to unravel too, with, say, the breakup of Libya.

Now there are good reasons not to want Libya to split up, I guess. It creates an unknown. Why add one more poor and possibly autocratic state to the world map. And so on.

But any quick study of the history of Libya or any number of developing-world countries shows that the borders are kind of false anyway. In Libya's case, not that I'm an expert, but the borders appear to be an artifact of some British and French decisions taken after the war, after they got it back from the Italian fascists, who in turn took it from the Ottomans, which just underscores the point that loads of us have been mucking about there for ages. The line "to the shores of Tripoli" in the Marine Corps hymn refers to a battle back in 1805 during the Barbary wars, the first US ground engagement on foreign soil, evidently.

Maybe Libya really ought to be two countries. Yemen basically ought to be, it seems. As I noted last week, the nation-state has been shrinking these last 20 years, and I'd bet it will keep doing so.

And no, we may not want, say, 15 more Arab nations with a vote at the UN in 30 years' time. On the other hand, maybe they'll actually be small democracies, and the process of dissolution will somehow abet the democratic process, if intra-state ethnic rivlaries are eliminated and there's more societal trust.

In either case, we the west created these conditions over the course of many many decades, and now might be the time when the process starts to work in reverse, so maybe we've had this coming for a while.

Today is a travel day, so this will be it for today. Bon voyage to me.

US foreign policyLibyaMichael Tomasky
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Tim Pawlenty's announcement | Michael Tomasky

So we finally have an official, or semi-official, Republican candidate, as former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty opens his exploratory committee. The conventional wisdom, via Politico, is already pretty unforgiving about what he needs to do to be taken "seriously":

For the former governor, early success in Iowa, which neighbors his home state, will be critical to his hopes of sustaining his candidacy through next February. Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, is the favorite to win the following week in New Hampshire.

Former Republican National Committee political director Mike DuHaime, who ran New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign in 2008, said Pawlenty will be in a position to win Iowa's first-in-the-nation caucuses.

"A win in Iowa would allow him to compete in the rest of the early states and then in the second round," said DuHaime, who has not committed to any candidate for 2012. "If you're Tim Pawlenty, you don't need to win every one of the early states. If he were to win Iowa, then he has the potential to be one of the two or three people who come out of the early states."

This reminds me of one of those aspects of horse-race presidential journalism that I like least, which is the way the Charlie Cooks and other expert handicappers say if so-and-so doesn't win Iowa, stick a fork in him/her. It actually makes me feel sorry for politicians, even once modestly sensible but now absurdly pandering pols like Pawlenty. He's out there busting his tuchus for eight, nine months, and in one night, he's finished. It's as if an NFL playoff game lasted about four minutes.

Chait thinks Pawlenty is going to be the nominee, for reasons we've roughly discussed:

The elites want to find a candidate who is electable and committed to their policy agenda. The elites are the prime driver of the process; they can communicate, via organs like Fox News and The Weekly Standard, which candidates may be undeserving of serious consideration despite their emotional appeal to base voters. That's how the elites have disqualified insurgent candidates like Pat Buchanan (too right-wing) and John McCain (too left-wing); they are now doing the same to Sarah Palin (too unelectable).

But elites don't always control the process. Sometimes they can get together and virtually determine the winner in advance (i.e., George W. Bush in 1999-2000), but, often, they can't pick candidates without the assent of the base, which is capable of winnowing out elite-approved candidates. Think John Connally, Phil Gramm, or others for examples of candidates who made it through the elite primary but were nixed by the voters.

So, if you want to find the next Republican nominee, you need to find a candidate who's acceptable to both elites and the base.

He then argues why he thinks Pawlenty is that guy. It's possible. He's certainly in possession of the kind of record on spending Republicans like:

In the past two years, Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota twice vetoed legislation to raise the state's gas tax to pay for transportation needs.

Now, with at least five people dead in the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge here, Mr. Pawlenty, a Republican, appears to have had a change of heart.

The other thing about him, which I think one of you pointed out earlier, is that while he did win two gubernatorial elections, he never got 50% of the vote either time. If I were Haley Barbour, that would be the focus of my whispering campaign.

There seems to be nothing inherently interesting about Tim Pawlenty. That's the problem. He's a bland midwestern guy. That's not a regional knock. Lots of Minnesotans aren't bland. Al Franken. Not bland. Bob Dylan, Winona Ryder. Not bland at all. Pawlenty just seems like a deeply boring man. That of course is often a plus in politics.

US elections 2012RepublicansMichael Tomasky
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