US Politics

The Tea Party movement just held its inaugural national convention with Sarah Palin as the keynote speaker. Throughout the United States, a grassroots surge of anger against President Obama has been gaining ground.

Separated from the formal Republican Party for the moment, the Tea Party movement appears to be a real political force to be reckoned with in America.

Part of the anger of the movement is against the intellectualism of the President. “We don’t need a university lecturer as our leader,” is one of their popular appeals. Populism in this sense is not just anti-socialism or thinly veiled racism; it is an appeal to anti-intellectual forces.

The United States witnessed the Know Nothing Party in the 1840’s and 1850’s, and Dwight Eisenhower’s campaigns of 1952 and 1956 against Adlai Stevenson certainly had a touch of this brand of populism.

The frustration of the Tea Party followers points to a disconnect between the President and certain citizens. Barack the Yuppie and Editor of the Harvard Law Review is vilified, not Obama the community organizer in the streets of Chicago.

What is President Obama to do? Is he to play down his intellectual capacities and change his vocabulary as did President George W. Bush, a graduate of Yale and Harvard Business School? I would suggest the advisors around President Obama screen the movie “Bobby”.

In it, there is a wonderful scene of Robert Kennedy listening to a poor coal miner in West Virginia. Bobby Kennedy, graduate of the University of Virginia Law School, son of a multimillionaire and former Ambassador to the court of St. James, is totally connected to the miner.

One knows that the miner feels he is talking to someone empathetic with his plight.

The Tea Party movement feeds on the frustration of those who feel they are not being listened to. The same can be said of similar movements throughout Europe and in Switzerland.

Politicians in democratic countries must be able to connect to the population. Anti-intellectualism is a manifestation of this disconnect and shows serious polarization not just between the right and left, but between government leaders and the population.

Lawrence Summers may have been the brightest economist at Harvard, but he has never been unemployed or elected to an office. His debacle as President of Harvard confirms the problem

Those around President Obama would also do well to read David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, the chilling condemnation of the intellectuals around John F. Kennedy who led the U.S. into the disastrous war in Vietnam.

For those who have forgotten or not read the book, Halberstam’s description of those around Kennedy was a searing indictment of arrogance and hubris. The Tea Party movement’s success is partially a reaction to the best and the brightest around Obama and his professorial style.

Wednesday evening President Obama gave a measured State of the Union that tried to appeal to Americans suffering from the economic downturn. He was honest in pointing to employment problems, but optimistic about the future, as any President must be.

As Republicans watched grimly during the 71 minute presentation, he devoted only nine minutes to foreign policy, mostly through the prism of national security.

Most interestingly, he said: …”China is not waiting to revamp its economy. Germany is not waiting.  India is not waiting.  These nations - they’re not standing still. These nations aren’t playing for second place. They’re putting more emphasis on math and science. They’re rebuilding their infrastructure. They’re making serious investments in clean energy because they want those jobs. Well, I do not accept second place for the United States of America.”

At the same time he was speaking, Serena Williams was playing Li Na of China in one of the semi-finals of the Australian Open tennis tournament, the first time a Chinese player had reached that stage of a Grand Slam tournament.

Li Na had beaten Serena’s sister Venus in the quarter finals. Her compatriot, Jie Zheng, also reached the semis for the first time, setting a record for Chinese players.
What is the relation between President Obama’s reference to America’s remaining number one and the tennis results? The great American historian Henry Steele Commager taught me that sports can often be an indicator of political transformations.

Specifically, in 1968, he was referring to baseball and the rise of Latin American stars in the major leagues as an indicator of upward mobility in the U.S. following the Irish, Italians and African Americans.

The Chinese breakthrough in tennis could be an indicator of an upward mobility of Asia in general and China in particular. Fareed Zakaria recently wrote about the rise of the Brics – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa without assuming U.S. decline. He said these countries were merely going upward in terms of the United States.

Serena Williams barely won the match in two tie breakers and went on to win the tournament. The United States is still hanging on.

Gonzo journalism began with Hunter Thompson and his ability to report on events while being part of them, if not creating them. By definition, it tends to favor style over accuracy and often uses personal experiences and emotions to provide context for the topic or event being covered.

The news coverage of the earthquake in Haiti has many of these elements. While the coverage has focused world attention on the catastrophe and hopefully will lead to massive assistance and eventually reconstruction, there are sequences wherein the reporters themselves have become the story.

For example, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the CNN medical correspondent who is also a neurosurgeon, found himself operating on a patient while in Haiti, involving his news team in helping victims while at the same time reporting his news team’s helping the victims. Reporters interviewing reporters is the zenith of Gonzo journalism.

If this seems too harsh, I would like to follow through with several questions: Given the devastation of the infrastructure in Haiti, where are all the journalists staying? Given the lack of water and food in Haiti, what are the journalists eating? Given problems with landing at the airport, how was the journalists’ material delivered?

The arrival of the journalists in Haiti reminds me of the pictures of the American soldiers landing in Kuwait. From the time of the landing to the American flags being waved by children on shore, all was prepared and packaged.

In Haiti, are we witnessing not only Gonzo journalism, but information warriors working not for a government – embedded as it were – but working for their version of humanity?

Covering catastrophes is certainly big business for the news media. But decisions about where to go and whom to interview may be decided by the emotions of the reporters.

I question Jonathan Mann of CNN standing vigil while workers try to remove someone from under rubble while thousands are roaming the streets hungry. The newscasters are following their own emotional script.

There is no question that the reporters in Haiti have become part of the story. Gonzo journalism has found a new forum.

By electing Scott Brown to be Ted Kennedy’s replacement as U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, the voters have given President Obama a wake up call on the one year anniversary of his inauguration. Pundits may write their perception of what is going on in the political sphere, and pollsters may help us to understand and predict where the voters stand, but the election of Scott Brown is a crystal clear statement that the people of Massachusetts are frustrated and angry with the current administration.

There is no margin for error here; the Republicans had not had a Senator from Massachusetts since 1978. After having lost the Governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia, the Democrats stand 0-3 in important campaigns since Obama’s taking office and have lost their filibuster-proof 60 seats in the Senate.

Explanations abound for the Boston Massacre. The Democratic candidate was wooden and ran a lacklustre campaign; Obama waited until the last minute to help; the issues were mostly local and the election was not a referendum on national health care; the party in power always suffers when the economy is bad and the Democrats inherited the errors of the Bush policies…

Three things are obvious: 1) Health reform is in trouble. Brown ran against health reform and the loss of the magic 60th seat places any bill in trouble. 2) Democrats are properly worried that the November 2010 elections will be catastrophic. The President is already weakened, and the Democrats chances of keeping control of both houses have diminished. 3) President Obama will have to focus on domestic issues between now and November.

Afghanistan, Haiti, Yemen, nuclear disarmament and anything dealing with foreign policy will have to take a back seat since he must consolidate his base while overcoming a serious enthusiasm gap. If he doesn’t, he will be a lame duck President after only one year.

The people of Massachusetts have spoken. I am sure President Obama’s political advisors are working overtime on new strategies. I wonder how political advisors in Moscow, Beijing and around the world are calculating their strategies based on the Massachusetts results.

As I am sure you have noticed, citizens and several government leaders have been upset, to put it mildly, at the recent proposals for large bonuses to be paid to executives in the financial sector. President Obama has now joined Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy in calling for some form of taxation on windfall checks to banking heads. Besides obvious populist appeals, what is the problem here? I thought that in a free market system merit should be rewarded. If the banks are making huge profits, those responsible for the profits should also profit.

Actually, there are three different reasons for the outcry. First, the very banks which are now making huge profits recently benefitted from taxpayer bailouts. Although most of the banks have already paid back their debts, there is something downright uncomfortable about the banks being bailed out by taxpayers, and then hauling in gross fortunes or even enormous stock options because we allowed them to stay in business.

Second, and this somewhat follows from the previous comment, there is the populist feeling that the bankers have made considerable money in spite of the fact that they made mistakes. In other words, we bailed them out when they failed on big risks. Now that they are making money, they will be encouraged to take risks in the future knowing they are too big to fail. The new head of the Swiss National Bank, Philippe Hildebrand, has made this point several times, but the bankers seem to be in another world.

Finally, what I think fundamentally galls the public is the growing disparity between the superrich and the average citizen. Statistics only confirm that the growing disparity between the top 1 per cent earnings and the middle class continues. With 10 per cent of the U.S. workforce officially unemployed, it is outrageous to see top executives receiving billions of dollars in bonuses.

The wealth of the wealthy has not trickled down to Main Street. And the hubris of the captains of industry before the Financial Inquiry Commission in their eternal denial of responsibility for the crisis further maddens the average citizen. President Obama knows that something must be done here, if only for political reasons. 

The people of the United States continually reject discussions of any form of socialism. But, their sense of social justice is clearly behind some form of taxation to equalize pay in the private sector. Let the bankers beware, this could get nasty.

2010 is a year of mid-term elections in the United States. During the mid-term of President Obama’s four year mandate, 2009-2013, all 435 members of the House of Representatives will be selected as well as 1/3 of the 100 Senators and several state governors.

Traditionally the party in power, in this case the Democrats, have lost seats in the Congress in a mid-year election. The 2010 campaign should be no exception, with particular attention to two factors this November.

First, the stock market has climbed over 10,000 from a low of 6,000 during the crash, but well below its high of 14,000. Wall Street seems to have bounced back, bonuses and all. If the stock market continues to rise, the financial sector will be more than stabilized and brokers and bankers can thank the interventions by Summers and Geithner by voting Democratic in the fall.

However, and this is the last of our three 10’s, the official unemployment rate continues to hover at around 10 per cent. Thus, even though the stock market has climbed, money has not trickled down from Wall Street to Main Street. And, there are more voters on Main Street than Wall Street. The unemployed, non-officially estimated at 17 per cent, as well as those afraid of losing their jobs will certainly not vote for the party in power.

The Democratic Party has traditionally been the party of the unions and workers with the Republicans looking after the financial sector. As of now, the Democrats risk losing much of their base if the 10 per cent unemployment rate does not significantly drop before the summer.

President Obama has said that unemployment and fiscal responsibility are high on his agenda for 2010. If he becomes distracted by security issues following the Christmas bombing attempt as he has been distracted by Afghanistan, then he and the Democratic Party will lose more than the usual mid-term losses in November.

And, that will mean a very rough last two years of the mandate and perhaps even a one-term President.

January 13, 2010

As the New Year begins and President Obama prepares for his State of the Union address, this is an appropriate moment to make some observations about his first twelve months in office.

1) The euphoria of the election and inauguration of the first African-American President has not been sustained. That level of energy and euphoria is inherently limited. Nevertheless, the brilliance of candidate Obama and the enthusiasm of his supporters were far from the performance of the President and his followers as well as the Democratic Party. Candidate Obama was far superior to President Obama.

2) The strategy of moving on many fronts – climate change, health care, finances, Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan – was difficult if not impossible to fulfil. The drawn out decision to send additional troops to Afghanistan seems a simple continuation of George Bush’s War on Terror, while the health reform bill in whatever form it passes will be an important step forward for millions of Americans, although less than many expected.

3) More credit should be given the Administration for stabilizing the economic crisis, but the high unemployment rate, long-term debt problems and greed of the financial community have taken the gloss away from a considerable success. While the President would like to focus on unemployment and fiscal responsibility in the second year, the security problem arising out of the Christmas bombing attempt might keep the attention of the Administration away from domestic considerations. Fierce Republican opposition in Congress has shown that the Administration has not been able to be inclusive. Continuing politicization could be fatal for future legislation.

4) The standing of the United States in the world has certainly improved post George Bush, but the decision to send troops to Afghanistan, the Chinese refusal to cooperate on climate change, and the lack of forceful leadership from President Obama domestically and internationally - such as in the Middle East - has seen the continued fragmentation of global authority and diminishing U.S. power. Obama may be the world’s biggest rock star, but he is far from the world’s leader, and we are far from the excitement of the Cairo speech.

President Obama gave himself a B+ rating for his overall performance in the first year. His popularity numbers are down, with progressives and conservatives alike expressing disappointment. Too much was promised, too much was expected. Barack Obama must accept that he represents and became the representative of a generation of hope. If he cannot live up to those expectations, if he doesn’t give himself a straight A, then he has only himself to blame. As many expected, he did not ace his first-year exam.

The recent Swiss vote on banning minarets has caused more consternation outside of Switzerland than most Swiss would care to admit. While there have been endless debates about the role of direct democracy and the limits of popular sovereignty, not enough attention has focused on the perception of Switzerland from outside except for crass calculations of potential financial losses and Oskar Freysinger on Al Jazeera.

A New York Times editorial began with the one word sentence “Disgraceful”. The Financial Times highlighted the tarnishing of Switzerland’s reputation, something much deeper than image or that which can be polished by public relations firms. Indeed, the moral authority of a country that prides itself on its tolerance through multiculturalism, third party arbitration and the rule of law, has taken an enormous hit. But, the minaret issue is not an isolated phenomenon; the last ten years have seen the scandal of Nazi gold, Swissair’s decline, UBS’ implosion and the lifting of the veil of banking secrecy, the Libya fiasco and the Polanski arrest. Yes, they are not all similar. But in terms of image and reputation, they have a great deal in common.

Perhaps the nadir of this tarnishing was the Jon Stewart Comedy Central broadcast of December 3, 2009. The show is immensely popular in the United States for its political satire. This particular airing began with a devastating review of the advertisements and public comments by those in favor of the minaret ban. Intermingled with the current controversy were analogies to Hitler and Switzerland’s actions during World War II. But then it got even worse. Reporter Jon Oliver did an interview with the Swiss Ambassador to the United Nations in New York, Peter Mauer, one of the most respected Swiss representatives. Oliver made fun of neutrality, pushing Mauer to take sides on a number of issues. With references to Hitler and the Swiss position during World War II, Oliver left the speechless Ambassador with little room to explain the subtleties of legal neutrality for a small country surrounded by large neighbors. Perhaps the Ambassador should have declined the invitation, for what remains from the broadcast is the impression of a hypocritical country that prides itself on a superficial public morality that hides its true nature - somewhat similar to a sovereign Tiger Woods.

Image and reputation are not exactly the same. But, both the image and reputation of Switzerland have been constructed over centuries. Those concerned with the last ten years have their work cut out for them to deal with their reconstruction. Freysinger is having his 15 minutes of glory, totally unaware of what he has started and the ugliness it has unleashed for those who care about Switzerland and what it has stands for.

President Obama has just finished his first trip as President to Asia. While meetings in Japan and Korea were important on issues such as army bases and North Korean nuclear proliferation, most attention was focused on his visit to China. Would he be able to convince the Chinese to revalue their currency? Would there be increased cooperation on halting Iran’s nuclear development? Would he press the Chinese on human rights? Would there be a new era of U.S.- Chinese cooperation through a G2?

At roughly the same time as President Obama’s trip, former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin was making the media rounds with her new book. While she has resigned as Governor of Alaska and made no commitment to run for any office in 2012, Ms. Palin has been able to elicit considerable buzz across America.

Is there any relationship between the two events?

It is obvious that the President’s trip was not the success he envisioned. During the President’s first overseas trip to Europe, he was welcomed as a new hero with rock star celebrity. Finish the era of George Bush and the ugly American; Barack Obama represented enormous hope for a new way forward for the United States and the world. This time in Asia, he was welcomed as an American President of interest, but one who could not dictate his wishes as the unique superpower leader.

It would be obvious and banal to say that the Asians treated him as a weak President. Certainly they are watching his agonizing decision-making process over Afghanistan. Certainly they are watching his difficulty in convincing the Congress to pass major health care reform. And certainly they are aware of the increasing debt of the United States as well as the shockingly high unemployment figures. He went to China as a borrower visiting his most important lender.

The Asians may also be watching the Palin phenomenon. For behind the vacuous statements of the rogue politician is the growing feeling that the American population is tiring of lofty rhetoric and the good feeling of electing the first African-American to high office. The latest polls show Obama’s approval rating under 50% for the first time. Palin touches a populist chord in the U.S. – as the MCG does in Geneva – that bears careful attention. And the Asians’ perception of President Obama’s limitations may have a cascading effect on U.S positioning around the world.

President George W. Bush considered himself The Decider. In the famous press conference of April 2006, he declared “I am the decider and I decide what’s best,” referring to his support of Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense as well his role in decision-making for the government. President Bush made it clear that he was in charge, that he was responsible for all major decisions.

President Obama has recently made decisions, and the process and results of the decision-making process are certainly much different from his predecessor. He has agonized for months over sending more troops to Afghanistan. The process of decision-making has been played out with a wide range of voices and numerous meetings leaked to the press. Even the top military commander, General McChrystal, went public with details of his confidential report.

The lack of clear decision-making is evident in two major conferences. The attendance of the President at the Copenhagen UN Climate Change Conference and the U.S. position on climate change were not clear until just before the Conference. Similar indecision concerned the Second Review Conference of the Ottawa Treaty on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and the Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and Their Destruction in Cartagena. The U.S. finally decided to attend, but will not sign the Treaty nor stop their production of mines. In the cases of Copenhagen and Cartagena, the Obama Administration teases with its last minute presence, but has taken no leadership in making firm commitments to real change. The U.S. will be at both conferences, but will not commit.

Finally, President Obama had his first official State Dinner for Indian Prime Minister Singh just having returned from his first Asian trip. Having tried to enlist the Chinese in a sort of G2 global governance, President Obama tried to assuage the Indians with pomp and circumstance at the White House, but again no concrete change or results as he tries to play both sides.

When George Bush was President we complained that he was an emotional decider who did not fully appreciate all sides of an issue. Is President Obama the intellectual and emotional opposite, one who understands too many of the possible consequences of his actions and becomes paralyzed by all the possibilities? Is he The Undecider?