Northbound

Thomas L. Friedman, in the New York Times today:

More and more lately, I find people asking me: What do you think President Obama really believes about this or that issue? I find that odd. How is it that a president who has taken on so many big issues, with very specific policies — and has even been awarded a Nobel Prize for all the hopes he has kindled — still has so many people asking what he really believes?

Well, it’s not that difficult to understand.  A big portion of what Obama says is (everyone recognizes this) fluffy rhetoric or windbag puffery.  Part of what he says is soft-soap, stuff he thinks his audience wants to hear – the line about health care reform not adding a dime to the deficit, for example.  (Anyone who ever heard Bob Dole trying to talk like a conservative is familiar with this.)  And part of what he says, of course, is what he wants to do and how he wants to do it.  But it’s difficult – certainly Friedman struggles with this – to pull out what you would call a consistent philosophy.  (This is why some liberals think Obama is a squish and why some conservatives think he’s a neo-Bolshevik.)

I don’t think that President Obama has a communications problem, per se. He has given many speeches and interviews broadly explaining his policies and justifying their necessity. Rather, he has a “narrative” problem.

Obama has more of a “content” problem than a “narrative” problem, if you ask me.  (What Friedman is trying to do is present the old “framing” argument – liberal ideas are better than conservative ideas but less well presented; if they were presented better, more people might agree with them.)

He has not tied all his programs into a single narrative that shows the links between his health care, banking, economic, climate, energy, education and foreign policies.

This is untrue.  Obama has done this, but the narrative is “it’s all George W. Bush’s fault, you can’t blame me.”  Having said that, I would like to hear how Obama’s banking policy (what do you mean, you’re spending bailout money on staff bonuses?) with his Iran policy (can I get you anything, Revered Mullah?  Coffee?  A nice muffin?).  But that’s me.

Such a narrative would enable each issue and each constituency to reinforce the other and evoke the kind of popular excitement that got him elected.

It would?  How?  I don’t see anything what will bring back that level of popularity, short of Obama doing something awesome like rescuing a kitten or capturing bin Laden or developing an effective spam filter.

Without it, though, the president’s eloquence, his unique ability to inspire people to get out of their seats and work for him, has been muted or lost in a thicket of technocratic details. His daring but discrete policies are starting to feel like a work plan that we have to slog through, and endlessly compromise over, just to finish for finishing’s sake — not because they are all building blocks of a great national project.

Keep in mind here, what Friedman (a self-confessed neo-authoritarian) is basically complaining about here is the democratic process itself.  What he is basically saying here is that if Obama were to tie health care (which is what’s bogged down into the thicket) into some big “national greatness” narrative, suddenly the scales would fall from the eyes of the Capitol Hill dealmakers.  Oh!  My God!  This health care bill is…. a building block of a great national project!  Of course, I will drop my opposition to it!  Let us pass this far-reaching vision into law immediately!  What was I thinking, calling for a trigger before the public option could be implemented?  Let’s get this sucker into conference committee and come out tomorrow with a Canadian-style system, because such a thing is necessary for the Great National Project to move forward.  Yeah, right, as if.

And let’s not forget – the slogging and endless compromise is due, largely, to Democratic opposition to the more extreme elements of the various Congressional plans.  And let’s also not forget that Obama has offered no plans – zero, none, nada – to Congress as it works to put this, the most important building block in the liberal Ziggurat of Awesomeness, in place.  (And you show me one “daring” Obama policy.  One.)

What is that project? What is that narrative? Quite simply it is nation-building at home. It is nation-building in America.

This is ludicrous.  This is a base of sweet, creamy idiocy topped off with a dark, thick topping of stupidity, covered with a white, fluffy layer of dumb, with a round, red candied ball of ridiculousness on top.  America isn’t Germany 1946 or Somalia 1993 or Afghanistan 2002 or Haiti whenever.  It’s America, and the idea that America needs the kind of nation-building that destroyed or badly-damaged states have needed from time to time is simply too thick-headed for words.  (If Friedman were talking about Detroit or New Orleans or the St. Louis Rams, he might – might – have a point, but the woes of individual cities are not the stuff of nation-building.)

I’ve always believed that Mr. Obama was elected because a majority of Americans fear that we’re becoming a declining great power.

Mr. Obama was elected because of superior GOTV, a unified party behind him, a deeply unpopular incumbent, a flailing McCain/Palin campaign, and a financial crisis of historic proportions, not because people agree with Tom Friedman.

Everything from our schools to our energy and transportation systems are falling apart and in need of reinvention and reinvigoration.

Really?  Is this so?

• Schools:  If schools aren’t better than what they were during the “Why Johnny Can’t Read” 70′s, despite billions of dollars pumped into them, despite every technological advance there is, despite serious upgrades in teacher pay, I don’t know what sort of reinvention or reintegration you could do.
• Energy:  I grew up in the oil crisis.  Tell me energy isn’t in better shape now than it was then.  Tell me.
• Transportation:  You want to tell me how much money we’ve put into repairing roads and bridges and all that over the years?  Where did all that money go?  And what, specifically, is needed to “reinvent” transportation?  More light rail?  The Segway?

And what people want most from Washington today is nation-building at home.

What people want most from Washington is a big chunk of bailout money that they don’t have to pay back.  Tell me I’m wrong.

Many people, including conservatives, voted for Barack Obama because in their hearts they felt he could pull us all together for that project better than any other candidate. Many are what I’d call “Warren Buffett centrists.” They are not billionaires, but they are people who believe in Mr. Buffett’s saying that whatever he achieved in life was due primarily to the fact that he was born in this country — America — at this time, with all of its advantages and opportunities.

I believe that. And I believe that without a strong America — which, at its best, can deliver more goods and goodness to its own citizens and to the world than any other nation — our kids and many others around the world will not have those opportunities.

Wait a second.  Is Friedman here saying that Barack Obama was the candidate for a strong America?  Because it doesn’t look that way to me.  Obama was the candidate for weak America – sycophantic with Euro elites, submissive to the Iranians and North Koreans.  Obama is the candidate of the apology tour.  Friedman is right when he says that Obama is about delivering the “goods and goodness” – the goodies, but what else is he about?

I am convinced that this kind of nation-building at home is exactly what Mr. Obama is trying to deliver, and should be his unifying call: We need universal health care because it would strengthen our social fabric and enable our businesses to better compete globally. We need to upgrade our schools because no child in 21st-century America should be left behind and because we cannot compete for the best new jobs without doing so. We need a greener economy, not just to mitigate climate change, but because a world growing from 6.7 billion people to 9.2 billion by 2050 is going to demand more and more clean energy and water, and the country that develops the most clean technologies is going to have the most energy security, national security, economic security, innovative companies and global respect.

Here you get into policy differences, of course, but I am uncomfortable with all the “need” language.  I am uncomfortable with the politics of diktats – we must spend X billion dollars on schools because we need to compete with Y over Z. 

But to deliver this agenda requires a motivated public and a spirit of shared sacrifice.

That is to say, high taxes.

That’s where narrative becomes vital.

To explain to people, this is why I am raising your taxes.

People have to have a gut feel for why this nation-building project, with all its varied strands, is so important — why it’s worth the sacrifice. One of the reasons that independents and conservatives who voted for Mr. Obama have been so easily swayed against him by Fox News and people labeling him a “socialist” is because he has not given voice to the truly patriotic nation-building endeavor in which he is engaged.

Or it’s because he’s a socialist.  You never know.  (Hey, Friedman said he didn’t know what Obama believes, and considering he’s already nationalized the auto industry and would like to nationalize a big part of health care, “socialist” isn’t that unreasonable of an epithet.)

that means you have a liberal bias.

Mr. Marcus said the editors took pains to exclude ideologues on the right and the left, although a liberal perspective can be detected in several essays, including one about Ronald Reagan’s speech “A Time for Choosing” on behalf of Barry Goldwater.

Although a handful of negative references to George W. Bush remain, including one in Mr. Sollors and Mr. Marcus’s joint essay on New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Marcus said he deleted others that were not an integral part of an argument.

Well, that’s nice. But then there’s this:

President Obama’s election came near the tail end of the process. The editors wanted to note it, but felt, as Mr. Sollors said, that “absolutely the wrong way to do this was some essay on what it all means.”

They “thought and thought,” Mr. Marcus continued, and contacted Kara Walker, an artist and a recipient of a so-called genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation. “We didn’t know what she would make,” he said.

She created not an essay but a series of nine collages that feature her characteristic hand-cut black-paper silhouettes. Four of them feature a scrawl of text, one has a few sentences from President Obama’s autobiography “Dreams From My Father” pasted around the edges, and the rest, which make up the coda to this new literary history, have no words at all.

Because no human words can possibly do justice to the greatness that is the Blessed Redeemer, don’t you know.

One of my least favorite rhetorical styles is when people throw out suggestive-but-idiotic questions out there instead of, you know, making arguments.  You hear this all the time, say, in JFK assassination talk.  What about all the people who mysteriously died, huh?  As though a) that proves anything and b) Gerald Posner hadn’t already debunked the hell out of that and c) people do die and stuff.  Well, how come LBJ increased troops in Vietnam like the military-industrial complex wanted, huh, d’ja think about that?  And that proves what again?  Other than you don’t get post hoc?

Pat Buchanan uses just this device in his column explaining how (ahem) Hitler never wanted to go to war with the West, and it stinks so much that it’s worthy of condemnation and snark.  Here are his rhetorical questions, and my answers.

What cause could justify such sacrifices [from the Allies in WWII]?

Well, geez, Pat, I don’t know, maybe liberating Europe from Nazi tyranny, shutting down the death camps, bringing the war criminals to justice.  I don’t know, but I feel pretty good about that.

Why did Warsaw not negotiate with Berlin, which was hinting at an offer of compensatory territory in Slovakia?

Why doesn’t the mouse negotiate with the cat?

But why would Britain hand an unsolicited war guarantee to a junta of Polish colonels, giving them the power to drag Britain into a second war with the most powerful nation in Europe?

Because of Munich, that’s why.  Once  Hitler swallowed Czechoslovakia whole after Munich, Britain was resolved not to appease the tyrant any longer.  Poland was the next obvious target, so Poland got the war guarantee.  (And if Britain had gone to war over Czechoslovakia, you would then expect Buchanan to say, why did Britain hand over a war guarantee to a nation that didn’t exist pre-Versailles?)

Was Danzig worth a war?

Well, you know, on V-E day, all those people in Times Square were saying, wow, I am sure glad Danzig is back in Polish hands.  Yeah.  Because that was the thing.  The whole war, people were worried about what was going on in Danzig.  Pearl Harbor?  Yeah, that was totally related to Danzig, too.  I bet Pat Buchanan thinks that the Civil War was fought because the Yankees hanged John Brown instead of just giving him community service.

But where is the evidence that Adolf Hitler, whose victims as of March 1939 were a fraction of Gen. Pinochet’s, or Fidel Castro’s, was out to conquer the world?

The world? Well, um, let’s think about this. I don’t think anyone (outside of Pinky and the Brain) has ever decided to conquer the whole world, at least not seriously. I mean, that’s a big job. I have no evidence to prove that Hitler wanted to conquer China, or India, or Suriname, or Easter Island, because there ain’t none. But there was a ton of evidence, in 1939, that Hitler wanted to conquer Poland and Eastern Europe and to defeat the Soviets. Mein Kampf, just for starters. Buchanan’s insistence on saying that Hitler didn’t want to conquer the whole world rings hollow – and it isn’t an argument but a straw man, if it’s that.

Now one may despise what was done, but how did this partition of Czechoslovakia manifest a Hitlerian drive for world conquest?

Essentially the same question; one doesn’t have to prove that Hitler wanted to conquer the world to oppose his threatened conquest of Poland.  The “one may despise what was done” bit is risible – if what Hitler did to the Czechs was despicable, isn’t that a reason for war?  (Churchill thought so.)

But if Hitler was out to conquer the world — Britain, Africa, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, South America, India, Asia, Australia — why did he spend three years building that hugely expensive Siegfried Line to protect Germany from France?

Because Hitler was a veteran of the WWI trenches, that’s why, and he assumed that’s how and where the war would be fought.  Remember that the big test of blitzkrieg was yet to come.

Why did he start the war with no surface fleet, no troop transports and only 29 oceangoing submarines?

Well, a) Versailles (although Hitler flouted a lot of the treaty’s arms limits, it was harder to hide shipbuilding than aircraft and armor) and b) Hitler didn’t need troop transports to invade Poland.  (I am too lazy to look up whether the “no surface fleet” thingy is an exaggeration, but I bet it is.)

How do you conquer the world with a navy that can’t get out of the Baltic Sea?

Yeah, because the Battle of the Atlantic, that never happened.  Forget about it.  Clearly, Germany had the naval might it needed to fight at sea by the time naval fighting became relevant.

If Hitler wanted the world, why did he not build strategic bombers, instead of two-engine Dorniers and Heinkels that could not even reach Britain from Germany?

The Battle of Britain, yeah, that never happened either.  I think Pat Buchanan needs to watch Luftwaffe Week on the History Channel some more.

Why did he let the British army go at Dunkirk?

A good question, finally.  The answer is somewhere between “because troops with their backs to the wall fight ferociously, to the death, and it might be easier to let them starve,” and “Yeah, well, it’s not like there’s going to be a huge civilian flotilla out of nowhere to rescue them or anything.’  But it seems odd to say that Hitler didn’t want conquest, and use a strategic mistake to justify that, in a campaign where Hitler had already conquered a good part of Western Europe.

Why did he offer the British peace, twice, after Poland fell, and again after France fell?

I am not sure what Buchanan is referring to here, but I imagine it’s Rudolf Hess, and if so, pfft.

Why, when Paris fell, did Hitler not demand the French fleet, as the Allies demanded and got the Kaiser’s fleet? Why did he not demand bases in French-controlled Syria to attack Suez?

Because, um, the war wasn’t over.  And the Allies would have said “no.”

Why did he beg Benito Mussolini not to attack Greece?

Because Hitler wanted to attack Greece, and he did. 

But the last question… hee.  I mean, seriously.

As of March 1939, Hitler did not even have a border with Russia. How then could he invade Russia?

Well.  Let me think.  It’s March 1939.  I am the leader of Germany.  I want to invade Russia.  Let me think.  Hmmm.  I wonder if there is some way I can get a border with Russia, because I don’t have one.  Hmmm.  I wonder if there is some big, flat country out there I can invade that has a border with Russia.  Hmmm.  It would have to border my country, so that leaves out Turkey.  Hmmm.  Let’s look at the map.  There seems to be… am I reading this right?  Po-land.  Poland.  Hmmm.  You know, maybe I could just invade that first, and then invade Russia later.  Is that doable?  Hmmm.  You know, maybe I could sign a deal with the Russians that will let both of us invade Poland, which will lull them into a false sense of security.  That would be even better.  Yeah!  Let’s do that.  Invading Poland.  Sure.

MoDo:

President Obama was right the first time, that the encounter had a stupid ending, and the second time, that both Gates and Crowley overreacted.

And if he had said something else, he would have been right a third time!  And a fourth!  Because President Obama is always right.  By the end of Obama’s second term, I expect all MoDo columns to be just long strings of “two legs bad, four legs good.”

I am still not a fan of the Blessed Redeemer, but if he’s still willing to push the button on Predator strikes that take out terrorists named bin Laden, I think a lot more of him now than I did during the campaign.  Let’s have more stories like this.

UPDATE:  Heh.

The WSJ engages in some statistical sophistry:

For-profit schools also generally do a better job. In Ohio, Columbus State Community College has a 6% graduation rate while Kaplan College Columbus graduates 51%. In New Jersey, Passaic Community College has a 6% graduation rate, while at the nearby for-profit Berkeley College in West Paterson 40% of the students graduate.

I mean, I don’t know what it was like where you went to school, but where I went to school, it was common for Baylor students to avoid tough-grading professors by concurrently enrolling in McLennan Community College, taking the course there, and transferring it back to Baylor for credit.   And none of those people ever “graduated” from MCC, but they would have counted against the school in determining the graduation rate.  There are lots of metrics you can look at to determine whether community colleges are doing a good job or not; I don’t think that the graduation rate is one of them.

I don’t think the Blessed Redeemer knows squat about country music, but he couldn’t have picked much better ambassadors than Alison Krauss, Brad Paisley and Charley Pride.  Sa-lute.

Note to Hugo Chavez:  If you’ve lost the enthusiastic support of NPR on your land reform issue, you’ve lost way more than you think.

Oh, this is rich (not Frank Rich, but Thomas Frank in the WSJ).

To become a symbol of this stature Ms. Palin has had to do the opposite of most public figures. Where others learn to take hostility in stride, she and her fans have developed the thinnest of skins. They find offense in the most harmless remarks and diabolical calculation in the inflections of the anchorman’s voice. They take insults out of context to make them seem even more insulting. They pay close attention to voices that are ordinarily ignored, relishing every blogger’s sneer, every celebrity’s slight, every crazy Internet rumor.

Oh, please.   You show me anybody on the left who takes hostility in stride.  These are the people who said that making note of the Blessed Redeemer’s middle name was a hate crime.  These are the people who thought that the idjits who told HRC to iron their shirts were thought criminals.  Having anyone on the left accuse anyone on the right of being thin-skinned is like being called ugly by a bullfrog.

You want to know who is thick-skinned?  GWB.

The NYT discovers supply-side economics… in France.

The drop in taxes is expected to cost the French budget about $3.3 billion. But that, in turn, is supposed to create 40,000 new restaurant jobs, half of them for younger people, by 2011.