WASHINGTON – Last November, Assistant Army Secretary Sara Lister was forced to resign after her description of U.S. Marines as “extremists” raised howls of protest in the Pentagon and Congress. “Wherever you’ve got extremists, you get some risk of total disconnection with society, and that’s a little dangerous,” she said at an Oct. 26 seminar sponsored by Harvard University’s John T. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies in Baltimore.
For Thomas E. Ricks, defense correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, Lister’s comments were not all that wide off the mark. In his just-published book, “Making the Corps” (Scribner), Ricks takes a long, hard look at today’s military and comes up with some disturbing conclusions. While the U.S. military still produces highly trained fighters, it also turns out often slovenly, undisciplined support troops. For Ricks, the current spate of military sex scandals comes as no surprise. He quotes one soldier writing to his recruiter in New York, saying: “Sir: You told me there would be no sex at Fort Jackson (South Carolina). BOY, WERE YOU WRONG!”
Most disturbing, however, is Ricks’ conclusion that the theoretically nonpartisan U.S. military has become a bastion of right-wing Republicanism. Ricks, a member of Harvard University’s Senior Advisory Council on the Project on U.S. Civil-Military relations, finds that the politicization of the armed forces goes far beyond the military’s contempt for its current commander in chief. It extends to the way the military sees itself standing in opposition to an increasingly degenerate civilian society. And in that gap, Ricks warns, lies the threat of American-style militarism that is not going to disappear with the next election.
Salon spoke with Ricks about the rightward drift in America’s first line of defense.
You say that the military is becoming politicized across the board. But where is it most apparent?
I find it especially intense among the junior officers, which is to say lieutenants, captains and majors, and especially among white male junior officers.
Politicized in what way?
It’s an expressly partisan politicization, where the identification is expressly with conservative Republicanism, where there is a disdain for the Democratic president, even though he is the commander in chief. But more broadly, it is a cultural conservatism that believes that American society is going to hell in a handbasket, that this is a degenerate society, that this is society in collapse.
Do you agree with former Assistant Army Secretary Sara Lister’s comment that the Marines are full of “extremists”?
Certainly, there are Marines who carry these views to extremes. So you get the statement that I read in the Marine Corps Gazette a couple of years ago: “The next war we fight will be on American soil.”
Has this politicization affected how the military does its job?
There is now less of a willingness, when the military loses the policy debate, to salute smartly, move out and follow that order. You saw that in Bosnia a lot, where the military dragged its feet and actively sought to undermine national policy.
In what way?
The military never bought into the administration’s policy, which held that the Bosnian Muslims were the victims of aggression. The military constantly argued that all sides were equally guilty of aggression, that there were no good guys. Well, when you look at the indictments handed down by the International War Crimes Tribunal, that’s not the case.
What are the roots of this politicization?
They go back to the Vietnam War, which resulted in the end of conscription. We got instead an all-volunteer force that self-selects among people who want to be in the military. You no longer have the leavening influence of the draftee who becomes an officer — or the guy who becomes an officer to avoid the draft. Our last chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. John Shalikashvili, was a draftee. The guy before him, Gen. Colin Powell, was an ROTC kid, who came out of the very unmilitary City College of New York.
The second thing the Vietnam War did was to destroy the pro-defense wing of the Democratic Party. Under Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party showered so many goodies on the military that it made the military feel really wanted and relieved after going though a very bleak couple of decades. So there was a natural identification with Reagan Republicanism.
And a hatred of Clinton because he was seen as a classic draft dodger.
Not just that.
There is also contempt for his character, the belief that he is an
adulterous liar. He doesn’t uphold the values that the military really admires.
Clinton is the guy who’s able to talk himself out of anything, the guy who
doesn’t have any absolute standards. What the military really admires are
absolute standards, which is why you’ll find military people admiring a
conscientious objector, the guy who is willing to go to jail for what he
believes. What they can’t admire is the guy who
sidesteps the draft through quibbling, through letters, through playing
footsie with the ROTC and then withdrawing, as Clinton did. His attempt to have
it both ways to preserve his political viability just turned the stomachs
of military people. And after one week in office, he pushes for gays in the military.
Actually, he brought it up earlier, when he met with Gen. Powell at
Blair House before the inauguration. And had Clinton said at that point, “Gen.
Powell, I know you disagree with this, but I’m giving you an order here.
Figure out a way to get this done and move out smartly,” Powell would have
done it. But Clinton wanted
the military to go along without making him push them. So they pushed back hard, and had allies in Congress. And that set the stage for a military
that went off the reservation.
Haven’t soldiers always been to the right of center, politically?
Some interesting numbers have come out in the last couple months on this.
Ole Holsti, a professor at Duke University, has been polling
military officers on their political views as part of a larger poll of
members of American elites for the past 20 years. In 1976, the senior military officers he polled were one-third Republican. Today, it’s two-thirds. Liberals have all but evaporated. You go from a
conservative-to-liberal ratio among senior ranks of 4-to-1 in 1976 to a
ratio of 23-to-1 in 1996. That’s even with the injection of females and
minorities into the senior ranks. That tells me that the white male officer
corps is about 95 percent Republican. Apart from gays in the military, what effect has the issue of women in the military had on this politicization?
It’s made for considerable confusion about what the culture of the military should be. There was an Army colonel heading up the leadership department at West Point who
was fired, among other reasons, because he talked about combat too much.
The charge was that this was exclusionary against women since women are not
allowed in combat, and therefore it amounted to sexual harassment.
I’m beginning to understand why the military has drifted over to the
Republicans.
Absolutely. The gender issue really is splitting the U.S. military — far more than gays in the military ever will. It’s the dividing line, much more
than rank or race. I remember I was looking at Charlie Company, 10th
Forward Support Battalion in the 10th Mountain Division, a unit that
deploys frequently overseas, and the issue was women who became pregnant.
One officer who was complaining to me about the number of pregnancies said
there had to be an agreement with the women that if they came into this
unit, they couldn’t become pregnant. Now that kind of rule produces all
kinds of lawsuits — a woman’s right to chose, to become pregnant and so
on. These women get to say they can’t deploy, so goodbye. So what you have
is somebody who went through all the rehearsals, but on game day, they were
busy. And that really antagonized a lot of males in the unit.
What are some of the other gender issues that are aggravating the
military’s rightward drift?
The feeling that women are held to less rigorous physical standards
than men are. And the belief that, ultimately, this is going to result in
people getting killed. Recently, the Army instituted “equal effort”
physical testing, which stipulates, for example, that if a man of a certain
age and physical size can carry 100 pounds, his female counterpart should
be able to lift only 65 pounds. And that 65 pounds amounts to an effort
equal to the guy who lifts 100. Well, on the battlefield, “equal effort”
doesn’t matter. If, in the heat of battle, a woman is needed to carry a
.50-caliber machine gun and she can’t, all of her “equal effort” isn’t going
to stop the enemy. Ultimately, combat effectiveness should be the test of a
military, and it really upsets people when the test isn’t combat
effectiveness but some politically correct formula.
What about sex?
When you
put men and women together in units, they are going to have sex. And when
that happens, the cohesion of units declines. Those soldiers who
haven’t hooked up with a woman are resentful and bring charges against
those who have. These guys then get busted, and often the unit loses an
effective leader because of a regulation involving women, and then there’s
more resentment. And the tendency of the men is to seek comfort in right-wing
politics. They feel right wingers like Rush Limbaugh are the only ones out
there who sympathize with them on these issues.
Is there a racial element to this politicization?
Not really. You have to acknowledge that
the military has done better than civilian society in addressing the issues
of race. At the same time, I have to say that a hard-right
military is not a comfortable place for many black and female officers.
Are there any other issues looming that could further this politicization?
I’ve heard people speculate that the next great
battle will be the right of the disabled to serve. I can easily see that
argument being made. Indeed, in a high-tech military with a lot of
computerization, a guy in a wheelchair can be the pilot of an unmanned
aerial vehicle just as well as somebody whose legs work. And everybody
expects that the combat skies of the 21st century are going to be dominated
by these unmanned aerial vehicles. In short, this stuff is not going to go
away.
Do you see the military becoming more actively engaged in politics?
Yes, if the military begins to take a different view of
what its job is. There are some people in the Marine
Corps who believe that domestic peacekeeping is a growth industry, that
they are going to be deploying to American cities just as they have been to
Mogadishu and to Port-au-Prince. They look back at the L.A. riots of 1992
as a preamble for future missions. Down at Marine headquarters
at Quantico, Va., there’s been a lot of debate and a lot of papers
written over the past two years by officers at the Command and Staff
College about the subject of domestic peacekeeping. Those who believe the
military should get involved in such operations are arguing for the U.S.
military’s right to arrest people and to conduct warrantless searches. We’re not thinking in coup terms, are we?
I don’t think anybody is talking about a coup. I think you just get an
alienated, isolated military that grows increasingly contemptuous of the
society it protects. You get the military saying its values are the values
the country needs. That’s basic militarism, and that’s not good for a
democracy. The role of a military in a society is not to define it; it’s to
defend it. Overseas, you end up sending conflicting signals to your
adversaries. Ultimately, the country ends up weaker.
In the meantime, if you want to get ahead in today’s military, you’d better register as a Republican.
I think so. I think there is a political consensus developing that basically says, “We in the officer club assume that we all agree with Rush Limbaugh; that we
all have contempt for this president; that we all feel misunderstood and
misused by the cultural, political and economical elites of this country;
that we all feel that we’re being used for hazy missions in Bosnia, Somalia
and Haiti that aren’t really appropriate for who we are and what we’re
about.” A female colonel named Dana Isakoff was teaching at West
Point and retired earlier than she had planned. When I asked her why, she
said, “Because I’m sick of being the only damned Democrat in the room.” I
was out in California recently, and a Marine told me that the commanding
officer of his unit would play Rush Limbaugh’s show over the unit’s loudspeakers so everybody could listen to it while they worked. This is
unprofessional. I don’t care if you like Rush Limbaugh or not. Militarily,
it’s unprofessional. Is the military’s gripe about civilian elites
at all justified?
I believe the military is indeed picking up on signals from the people
who run the country. They’re aware that these folks — the people in the
White House, Congress, Wall Street, academia, the media and Hollywood –
tend to see them as stupid, inflexible and prone to violent and aggressive
solutions. That is not true of today’s military. Even the enlisted ranks of
this military are more educated than their civilian peers. A
19-year-old in the U.S. military is more likely to have a high school
diploma than the general population. That’s because you can’t get into the
military these days without a high school diploma. Moreover, the majority
of officers in U.S. military today have advanced degrees. You don’t become
a general officer without having at least a master’s degree. I ran into an
Army sergeant in Leavenworth recently who had a Ph.D. in history.
I also think the
military suspects, rightly, that when the elites talk about using military
force, no image comes up in their minds of the face of a loved one, a
brother, son, sister or daughter; that when Madeleine
Albright talks about using military force, she’s not talking about anybody
she knows. And neither is anybody on the Sunday talk shows. They don’t know
military people, and they don’t have any sense of the genuine sacrifice
that is made when you send troops off for six months somewhere. Is anyone — civilian or military — addressing these issues?
Not among civilian elites. I think they find the military
not worthy of their discussion or interest. Just a small personal example:
I’ve been told that the New York Times refuses to review my book in its
Sunday Book Review section because it is not of legitimate interest to the
larger society. In the military, however, there is a growing number of
officers discussing this. One three-star general called me up and told me
that this issue — the politicization of the military, its alienation from
the larger society and the growing gap between the military and American
elites — is the single most dangerous problem facing the U.S. military
today. And it’s going to get worse when the military wakes up one
day and realizes that the new conservatives of America are not pro-military
either. You’re going to get a bitterly antagonized military when, say,
somebody like (Ohio representative and GOP presidential hopeful) John
Kasich decides as president to cut the defense budget by $20 billion
annually.
Any solutions?
A few things that
might be done: No. 1, I would love to see the ROTC restored to elite
universities. It would have an enormous effect if kids at Yale actually
knew somebody who was in the U.S. military, if kids from Yale were actually
going to Somalia, Bosnia and Haiti, if the parents of kids at Yale could
say, “Hey, that’s my son’s roommate going overseas.” The presence of such
kids from elite universities would also have a leavening effect on the U.S.
military itself. Not everybody would be from schools like Southern
Methodist University, where the kids are pretty conservative to begin
with.
Secondly, the U.S. military has a pretty large professional
military educational establishment. My suggestion
would be that whenever education is needed for military personnel, send
them to a civilian institution. The reason is that while military people
generally are not going to be serving in Congress 20 years from now, they
should at least know the people who are going to be serving in Congress.
And they will meet them by going to civilian universities.
Thirdly, I would love to see the concerns of elites reconnected to
the society that they’re part of. It seems to me that elites by and large
have withdrawn from these greater concerns. Many have moved to communities
where they send their kids to private schools and only see people like
themselves. They have pulled up the drawbridge. When I was researching my book
and went out with Marine recruiters in Boston, it amazed me when they told me
they were not allowed to wear their uniforms into the public high school in
Cambridge, Mass. So they refused to recruit there because they refused to
take off the uniform. They said if this uniform is good enough to die in,
it’s good enough to recruit in. Moreover, this happened after a controversy
in Cambridge in which the right of public high school teachers to be openly
gay had been reaffirmed. The recruiters said there’s something wrong when
you can be openly gay but can’t be openly Marine. Should we bring back the draft?
I think so. We could have a system
like that in Germany, where the majority of people subject to conscription
do not wind up in the military, but they perform alternative service. They
bring meals to shut-ins, which permits those shut-ins to remain in their
own homes and not have to move into nursing homes. They do things for the
society that are not being done anywhere else. There are a lot of jobs in
society that can be done without aggravating the unions, like city
clean-up, turning vacant lots into parks, cleaning up trash,
the rivers, the environment. This invests these young people in their own
country. They mix with people who are not in
their own narrow little segment of society. One of the beauties of the
draft was that Norman Mailer rubbed shoulders with coal miners from
Pennsylvania and farmboys from the South and loggers from the Northwest.
We’ve lost that, that sense of mixing everyone up together, despite their
class, race and region.
Desperate Mitt Romney is not only taking credit for the auto bailout he opposed, and pretending to be a “job creator” rather than a Bain Capital job destroyer. Now he’s regularly praising former President Bill Clinton as a centrist whose legacy has been betrayed by the “liberal” President Obama. Actual liberals laugh, but can Romney’s gambit work?
Of course not, but Mitt’s not giving up.
In Lansing, Mich., last week, Romney derided Obama as an “old school liberal” compared to Clinton, whom he called a “new Democrat.” Where Clinton “said the era of big government was over, President Obama brought it back with a vengeance,” Romney told a crowd of college students. A campaign official told CNN that Obama “really turned his back” on Clinton’s policies, including welfare reform and middle-class tax cuts.
Huh? Of course Obama cut taxes for the middle class in the 2009 Recovery Act, which Republicans consistently lie about, and Clinton controversially raised taxes on high earners (Romney would lower them) to cut the deficit in 1993. Meanwhile, Obama has left President Clinton’s welfare reform alone, despite rising rates of poverty and unemployment in the recession.
On Tuesday Romney took his attack up a notch, suggesting that “a personal beef” between the two men accounts for Obama allegedly rejecting Clinton’s centrism.
According to Romney, Clinton understood that “Democrats should no longer try to govern by proposing a new program for every problem. President Obama tucked away the Clinton doctrine in his large drawer of discarded ideas, along with transparency and bipartisanship. It’s enough to make you wonder if maybe it was a personal beef with the Clintons … but really it runs much deeper.”
There he is again, mean ol’ Mitt, trying to hype reports of personal tension between the last two Democratic presidents. It’s silly. Nobody denies there was trouble on the 2008 campaign trail during the Democratic primary, when the former president smarted at Obama camp charges that his overenthusiastic support for his wife’s candidacy, and diminishing of Obama’s, smacked of racism. And today, nobody suggests that the two guys are sneaking off to basketball games together or planning their next joint family trips. But whatever personal strain may persist, they put their problems behind them a long time ago.
Clinton stumped enthusiastically for Obama in 2008, and on behalf of the president and beleaguered Democrats in the 2010 midterms. Who can forget the current president calling on the past president to help him sell the idea of a compromise on the Bush tax cuts (to liberals, by the way) in December 2010 – and then walking away and leaving Clinton by himself at the lectern happily holding forth with the White House press corps (as Obama reportedly went off and did some Christmas shopping)? Currently Clinton is, of course, working hard to help Obama beat Romney. He recently attacked the presumptive Republican nominee for backing failed Bush policies “on steroids.”
As to the notion that Clinton was a centrist and Obama is a liberal: I think they’re both politicians with liberal hearts and centrist political instincts, working to make life better for the non-wealthy in an age when Republicans have become strident, extremist servants of the super-rich. President Clinton raised taxes on the rich. He signed the Family and Medical Leave Act, belatedly letting parents take time off after the birth of a child or when needed by a sick family member. He let Newt Gingrich’s GOP shut down the government rather than agree to Medicare cuts; on that point, he might be more traditionally liberal than Obama, who entertained the idea of Medicare cuts while trying to get a “grand bargain” on the deficit last summer. (Since then, though, Clinton himself has come out in support of Simpson-Bowles, which would trim Medicare.)
Clinton vastly expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is one main reason why low-income people don’t pay any federal withholding taxes – a scandal (according to all the GOP presidential contenders) that Romney’s tax plan would remedy by imposing taxes on low-wage earners. The EITC is the absolute best proof that it’s Romney who’s moved away from the appealing mainstream ideas of his party’s past, not Obama. The low-wage tax credit Clinton and Obama expanded was originally a Republican notion (inspired by Milton Friedman) to make poorly paying jobs an alternative to welfare. Signed into law by President Gerald R. Ford, it was expanded by George H.W. Bush, and also supported by George W. Bush.
It’s true that Clinton tried to pioneer a “Third Way” attempt at Democratic centrism, balancing the budget and ending “welfare as we know it.” He thought if he met increasingly radical Republicans halfway, the country might make progress. He thought wrong. Instead Romney’s party attacked the man Romney now purports to admire; attacked him viciously, from Day One, culminating in a nihilistic effort at impeachment for sexual indiscretions that are common in Washington, D.C.
What Romney is really trying to do now, of course, is cause trouble with the segment of the electorate that admired Hillary Clinton but took a while to warm up to Barack Obama in 2008, particularly the white working class, as well as white female Democrats and independents. I don’t see it working. I’m on record saying repeatedly that dismissing Clinton’s support with working-class whites as merely racism was mistaken and divisive when Democrats did it four years ago. Working-class voters had valid reasons to doubt the charismatic newcomer whose economic platform was marginally less progressive than Clinton’s, and who talked riskily – and naively, as it turned out – of a post-partisan rapprochement with Republicans.
But that doesn’t make those voters easy targets for Romney. His record as Bain Capital job destroyer combined with his enduring prep-school entitlement should make him less simpatico than Obama to those voters. Romney lacks Bill Clinton’s “I feel your pain” empathy for working-class folks; he comes across as the guy who’s more likely to cause them pain.
Oh, and Romney, by the way, wasn’t always such a Clinton admirer. In his book “Turnaround,” he tells the story of visiting the White House in 1999, while Clinton was president (h/t Andrew Kaczynski):
When we got through the Secret Service checkpoint for clearance at the West Wing, the agent handed each of us a badge to wear around our necks. Mine had a big, red A. I turned to Cindy and, in front of the agents, said, “Why do I have to wear this?” Thinking I was confused, she tried to explain that all visitors to the White House had to wear a badge. “I know that,” I responded, “I’m asking why I have to wear the red A around my neck. I’m not the one that cheated on my wife. He should be wearing the scarlet A- not me.” I grumbled all the way up the drive and into the West Wing lobby. The look on Cindy’s face was priceless.
President Obama, surrounded by members of the Secret Service, upon his arrival in San Diego, Sept. 26, 2011. (Credit: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
It’s hard to work up much outrage about the Secret Service prostitution scandal, in which 11 members of the president’s elite protective service and various military personnel were found to have picked up escorts in Colombia, where they were doing advance work for the president’s visit. I guess it is probably not a good idea for the people in charge of protecting the president to leave themselves vulnerable to sexual blackmail, but on the other hand we do not live in a John Le Carré novel or “24″ episode, and I don’t think the threat of a honey-trap assassination conspiracy plot is very credible. If members of the Secret Service want to get drunk and hire escorts after work, that is their business. (As Melissa Gira Grant says, the only actual scandal here — and the reason this became an international incident — is that all these guys tried to bilk one of the women out of the money she was owed.)
But the predictable Washington mixture of prurient interest and moral posturing has turned this incident into grist for the scandals-and-investigations mill. And now we have the attempts at somehow making this a winning partisan issue for Republicans. Chuck Grassley, the senator from Iowa who triumphed over adversity and became the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee despite being functionally illiterate, would like to know whether any White House staff also slept with escorts that evening. No one has made the claim, but Grassley’s asking just in case. (For a live peek at a future paranoid right-wing myth in its embryonic stage, read the comments on that Washington Times story: “I can just hear those paper shredders going a mile a minute in the white house, and the document forgers are being called in, you know the same ones that did the birth certificate.”) Grassley was on Fox last night to make sure viewers repeatedly heard baseless speculation as to the involvement of White House staff.
Rep. Pete King, Long Island Republican and stalwart publicity monger, has sent Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan a list of 50 questions about the scandal in order to make it appear that he is very seriously investigating this very serious incident.
For those outside Congress, for whom insinuating escort patronage by unnamed White House staff seems a bit of a reach, the game is to attempt to use the scandal to prove some point the fecklessness of Obama as a leader and his shameful failure to make everyone in Washington stop being so awful and wasteful all the time.
NRO’s Mark Steyn, after praising the fiscal discipline of the agent who attempted to bilk his escort (ugh), suggests that the moral of the story is that we pay too much for presidential security, and that all those agents and fancy bullet-proof Suburbans are wastes of taxpayer funds and evidence of broke post-Imperial America’s profligacy. Sarah Palin, who had every right to be personally aggrieved for once, after it was reported that the agent at the center of the scandal wrote gross sexist things about her on Facebook, was among the first to declare that the problem was with the “culture” Obama has created at the White House. (Karl Rove, smarter than most of these people, suggested that politicizing a Secret Service scandal was dumb and counterproductive. Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan, coincidentally, was elevated to his position under George W. Bush.)
The makeup of the Secret Service, obviously, has very little connection to the political party of the person occupying the White House. Like most American law enforcement agencies, it’s primarily white and overwhelmingly male, and, historically, the culture of the agency has had more than a whiff of machismo. These are not exactly the sort of public sector employees right-wingers get off on demonizing.
In fact, the right has had for years a sort of Clint Eastwood-inspired fantasy of the Secret Service agent as folk hero. Decent, hard-working men putting their lives on the line to protect a bunch of elitist ingrates. That ingratiating phony Bill Clinton and his frigid, hectoring monster of a wife weren’t deserving of such stolid, unflinching loyalty and service.
The fullest expression of this fantasy is in this classic chain email that made its way to every inbox in the nation during the second president Bush’s first term. According to this email, attributed to the unnamed author’s former neighbor, the president’s security detail was constantly disrespected by those awful Clintons and their terrible staff. Hillary Clinton was “arrogant and orally abusive.” “She forbade her daughter, Chelsea, from exchanging pleasantries with” agents. “Al Gore resented Bill Clinton and thought he was to centrist. He despised all republicans.” Agents prayed for Bush to win the election, and their reward was the joy they all felt in the presence of President Bush and his amazing, wonderful wife.
This nonsense has its roots in fake anti-Hillary attacks, attributed to imaginary Secret Service members, that Republican operatives spread to sympathetic media voices starting more or less the day Bill took office. Former Secret Service agents do plenty of gossiping and bitching, most frequently to Ronald Kessler, but their complaints don’t tend to track quite so directly to right-wing fantasy narratives.
But a popular trope is of the upstanding agents blanching at being asked to look the other way as libidinous Democratic presidents — Kennedy, Johnson, and Clinton — womanized. (Clinton was said to have threatened to fire agents who stymied his attempts to have trysts with Monica Lewinsky, though the agent who made the claim admitted to having invented it.) The pat moralism of the conservative Secret Service fantasy makes the agency’s lurid misadventure a bit funnier. It also explains why various people have to somehow convince themselves that the Obama administration somehow degraded the agency, through a lack of “management skills” or the widespread embrace of sexual deviance that is the logical end result of repealing the military’s ban on out gays and lesbians.
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene
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Bill Clinton sat down for an long interview with Bill O’Reilly last night on Fox News, where the two discussed everything from economic and immigration policy, to the horse-race politics of the 2012 election. Clinton issued a favorable forecast for Barack Obama’s re-election — saying his prospects were better than 50/50 — and commented that the president’s current, tougher political posture would help him in the long run.
“[Obama's] out there running against himself now,” Clinton said. “Soon as he gets an opponent, it will be about the next four years — who do you think is going to take us in the right direction.”
Clinton also weighed in a few of the Republican candidates, saying of one-time nemesis Newt Gingrich that he respected the man’s ability to “think and do.” The former president was, however, momentarily lost for words when O’Reilly followed up by asking if he respected Gingrich “as a man.” Clinton tip-toed around the answer, then spent the next few moments criticizng the former speaker’s “scorched-earth” political approach.
When questioned about Mitt Romney, Clinton damned the former Massachusetts governor with praise for his Massachusetts health reform legislation. He stopped short, however, of issuing any endorsements for the Republican primary, saying only that he would vote for Barack Obama regardless in the general election. In fact, the closest he would get to voicing support for any of the candidates was when he mentioned that he liked Jon Huntsman — though he then quickly poked fun at the Utahan’s meager support in the polls.
I got to debate Jonathan Chait about his much-discussed New York magazine piece, “When Did Liberals Become So Unreasonable?” on “Hardball” Tuesday night. He’s aiming at President Obama’s liberal critics, but in fact his article proves that criticism is nothing new. Apparently, we’ve always been unreasonable, because Chait’s survey of Democratic presidents going back to FDR finds that the left has always found a reason to squawk. But he seems to think we’re particularly unreasonable when it comes to Obama. With Thanksgiving ahead, I found myself wondering whether liberals should be more grateful to the president.
First, let’s take in the list of Obama’s accomplishments as Chait describes them. They’re considerable:
His single largest policy accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, combines two sweeping goals—providing coverage to the uninsured and taming runaway medical-cost inflation—that Democrats have tried and failed to achieve for decades. Likewise, the Recovery Act contained both short-term stimulative measures and increased public investment in infrastructure, green energy, and the like. The Dodd-Frank financial reform, while failing to end the financial industry as we know it, is certainly far from toothless, as measured by the almost fanatical determination of Wall Street and Republicans in Congress to roll it back.
Beneath these headline measures is a second tier of accomplishments carrying considerable historic weight. A bailout and deep restructuring of the auto industry that is rapidly being repaid, leaving behind a reinvigorated sector in the place of a devastated Midwest. Race to the Top, which leveraged a small amount of federal seed money into a sweeping national wave of education experiments, arguably the most significant reform of public schooling in the history of the United States. A reform of college loans, saving hundreds of billions of dollars by cutting out private middlemen and redirecting some of the savings toward expanded Pell Grants. Historically large new investments in green energy and the beginning of regulation of greenhouse gases. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act for women. Elimination of several wasteful defense programs, equality for gays in the military, and consumer-friendly regulation of food safety, tobacco, and credit cards.
We could, and I do, quibble about details in each of Chait’s examples, but his overall point is important: Even if every measure he lists has its flaws, the list itself is impressive. That President Obama took office in the middle of the worst crisis since the Great Depression, and with a nominal Democratic majority in both houses, helps explain why some people still expected more, but we should still stop more often and acknowledge what’s been accomplished in the last three years.
Having conceded that, I think Chait’s piece suffers from big definitional problems. First, how do we define liberals? Polls show self-described liberal Democrats are happy with Obama – in Gallup’s weekly tracking polls upward of 75 percent approve of the job he’s doing (and the same was true for Clinton), and that’s been true since he took office. There’s no crisis of liberal support for the president.
Also, Chait’s roster of unreasonable “liberals” includes MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. That’s silly: Schultz, cited along with New York Times centrist Thomas Friedman, rails against politicians who refuse to cut the deficit by trimming so-called entitlements and raising taxes. But that’s exactly what Obama tried to do with his proposed debt-ceiling “grand bargain”; Republicans wouldn’t cooperate. Those guys aren’t liberals; Friedman is a formerly liberal, formerly smart writer who got rich and stopped paying attention. (You’d think he could at least pay someone to pay attention for him, so he’d stop asking Obama to do what Obama has already done.)
What about actual liberals, people to the left of Schultz and Friedman – people like Rachel Maddow and, OK, sure, me. Yes, some of us have demanded more from Obama – on the economy, on Wall Street regulation, on gay rights, on civil liberties. But you know what? That’s our job. And when Chait goes down the list of the ways liberals have been disappointed with Democratic presidents going all the way back to FDR, I found myself thinking, Good job, liberals! Because we were usually right, and the country’s a better place for our pushing.
While liberals lionize JFK today, Chait notes, during his presidency (cut short 48 years ago Tuesday) they criticized him for not moving faster on civil rights. Yes, they did. Kennedy was trying to find a way to hold his party together and postpone the departure of the Dixiecrats, and he needed pushing. Should Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. have said, “OK, Mr. President, we’ll skip the March on Washington, we know you’re doing what you can.” Liberals were right to push Kennedy. (I am not trying to say that Obama is compromising on anything equivalent to the basic human rights of African Americans, just that on the social justice issues of their day, presidents need pushing.)
Similarly, while FDR gets more historic veneration from liberals (mainly because there’s almost no one here with us who actually lived through his presidency as an adult), his New Deal only came about because of left-wing agitation (and corporate desperation) in the first place. And liberals were right to criticize some of Roosevelt’s compromises: leaving most African-Americans out of the Social Security program (again to mollify Dixiecrats) and easing up on government spending in 1937 (to mollify conservatives and business leaders), which reversed some of the progress he’d made getting us beyond the Great Depression. Japanese internment was a shame that more liberals should have criticized.
In my adulthood, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton got elected with liberal support but wound up disappointing the left, particularly on the economy. Sadly, both men accepted the Republican premise that the economic problems and social disorder of the late ’60s and early ’70s required that Democrats trim back on government and make nice with business. Chait himself admits that while we all love the outspoken human rights defending, “Habitat for Humanity” supporting ex-president we know today, we didn’t love Carter during his term, and for good reason:
The truth is that Carter’s domestic agenda carried only small bits of liberalism, and those small bits (a consumer-protection agency, tax reform) met with total failure in the Democratic Congress. Carter’s policy accomplishments tilted right of center—he deregulated the airline and trucking industries and cut the capital-gains tax. Most infuriatingly to liberals, Carter refused to push for comprehensive health-care reform. A Carter adviser later recalled that the president “did not see health care as every citizen’s right, nor did he think the government has an obligation to provide it.”
When it comes to Clinton, I think many liberals are frustrated with Obama not because of some supposed great contrast with his supposedly liberal predecessor, but because of similarities between the two. Both of these liberal presidents spent considerable political capital trying to compromise with Republicans, and they failed. That’s been a particular problem for Obama because he didn’t have the strong economy that made Clinton’s inability to wrest concessions from the GOP less painful.
It was precisely because Clinton failed to neutralize the critique of Democrats as the “big government” party that I objected to Obama’s effort to do the same thing in a time of economic crisis. Before it all fell apart, the president defended the idea of his deficit-cutting grand bargain to progressives. “Get this problem off the table,” he argued, “and then with some firm footing, with a solid fiscal situation, we will then be in a position to make the kind of investments that I think are going to be necessary to win the future.” But Clinton already tried that, balancing the budget and endorsing a welfare reform plan largely crafted by Republicans. He believed that getting the issue of bloated government “off the table” would set the table for a progressive agenda. Of course, it didn’t work.
Before writing his New York magazine piece, Chait got a lot of attention for a scathing retort to Drew Westen’s left-wing critique of Obama that ran in the New York Times in August. Chait made a lot of good points; some of the things the left blames on Obama either didn’t happen, or couldn’t have happened otherwise given the Blue Dog Democrats in Congress. But he made one point I wanted to answer at the time, and didn’t. He accused Westen and other lefty Obama critics of romanticizing the power of the bully pulpit and the presidential speech:
Westen’s op-ed rests upon a model of American politics in which the president in the not only the most important figure, but his most powerful weapon is rhetoric. The argument appears calculated to infuriate anybody with a passing familiarity with the basics of political science. In Westen’s telling, every known impediment to legislative progress — special interest lobbying, the filibuster, macroeconomic conditions, not to mention certain settled beliefs of public opinion — are but tiny stick huts trembling in the face of the atomic bomb of the presidential speech. The impediment to an era of total an uncompromising liberal success is Obama’s failure to properly deploy this awesome weapon.
I think that’s a caricature of liberals’ criticism. I have an actual model of what I wish the president had done, and it doesn’t come from Bill Clinton or JFK or FDR, it comes from Barack Obama. Look at the way he tried to sell the deficit-cutting grand bargain, to settle the 2011 debt-ceiling stalemate, even though in the end, the GOP didn’t bite — and probably, predictably, never was going to. That let the president tell voters he was the one who really wanted to cut the deficit, but Republicans wouldn’t let him. He railed, he ranted, he ordered both parties’ leaders to work night and day on a deal. He told the American public to call their congressional leaders and demand compromise — and sure enough, they tied up the phone lines in Congress for a while. In the process, he accepted the Republican premise that deficit-reduction was more important than job creation, a hallmark of the Clintonian “third way” politics he’d supposedly rejected, but even critics had to admit it was a bold political move, and he worked hard and risked a lot for it.
Now, imagine the new president had told a comparably bold story about the recession in early 2009: that he was the one who knew how to use government to fix the economy — but Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats wouldn’t let him do all that was needed, so he was probably going to have to compromise to do what was possible. Obama failed to give voters a vision of the kind of government role that would be required to fix the economy — his advisors were telling him it would take at least $1.2 trillion in stimulus — even if he had to compromise and settle for less. And let’s be clear: He did have to settle for less. Since the Senate barely passed the $787 billion stimulus bill, even though 40 percent of it went to tax cuts, it’s hard to imagine the president getting more than that.
But what if the president laid out bigger, bolder plans for the Recovery Act? What if he’d gone on television every few days, as he did during the debt-ceiling crisis, and demanded the American people lobby Congress? Then, when the compromise stimulus worked as well as it did — and it did work, keeping the country out of a Depression and reversing the steep trend of job losses that began under Bush — but its effects trailed off, he’d have been in a much stronger position to push Congress to do more. But Obama never made that case. That was a missed opportunity that wound up hurting the president politically, and hurting the country.
One last thing about the debt-ceiling debacle: Obama’s approval numbers fell as he pushed for compromise with the GOP, and they have climbed since he’s begun pushing for a jobs bill he knows has no chance of getting Republican support. I think Obama’s liberal critics weren’t just right morally, they were right politically. But I’ll also give the president credit for what now looks like shrewd bargaining: He got the debt ceiling raised without cutting Social Security or Medicare, reckoning he could offer whatever he felt like knowing the GOP would never agree to raise taxes.
I think Chait’s right that liberals are less inclined than conservatives to close ranks around their president, right or wrong. Conservatives tend to defer to authority, by definition; our side, not so much. I think he’s right to remind liberals how much Obama has done. I’m grateful to Obama for a lot of those things, but mostly, I’m grateful to be a member of a party that fights openly about what’s right. When the president got heckled by some Occupy Wall Street protesters Tuesday in New Hampshire, he modeled that tolerance, listening to them; he didn’t have them pepper-sprayed. I guess I’m grateful for that too — but I wish I didn’t have to be.
Here’s our “Hardball” debate. Have a great Thanksgiving.
As Democrats survey the political wreckage of the last three years, the temptation to imagine more pleasant alternate realities is irresistible. What if Hillary Clinton had been elected president instead of Obama? Would events have played out any differently? Or, even more tantalizingly (albeit technically impossible), what if the Big Dog himself, Bill Clinton, had been in charge the last three years? Would he have done a better job fixing the economy? Been more effective knocking heads with the Tea Party? Established himself as a better bet to win a second term?
These are questions that obviously can’t be answered with any certainty. We’ll never know how a Clinton (or a McCain, for that matter) would have tackled the recession or jousted with John Boehner, just as we’ll never know what would have transpired if there had been no stimulus at all, or if Obama had taken a more confrontational stance against his Republican opposition from the get-go, rather than pursue a doomed strategy of bipartisan cooperation. We’re stuck with the world we’ve got.
But in the wake of the publication of Bill Clinton’s new book, “Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy,” there is simply no choice but to plunge into these hypothetical waters, however impracticable they might be. Because even though, when you boil it down, the agenda set forth by Clinton is not substantivally different from what Obama has attempted to execute, the implicit theme of “Back to Work” is that there’s a better way to go about the business of government than what we’ve witnessed in the last three years. As TalkingPointsMemo’s Josh Marshall joked in a tweet, the real title of “Back to Work” should be “If I Were Still President I’d Be Ownin’ These Bitches.” Clinton periodically offers lukewarm support to Obama, but he’d much rather be recounting the successes of his 1990s glory days. Just put him back in the Oval Office, and we’d get this mess fixed, stat!
Dream on, Bill. One could reasonably argue that Clinton would have done a much better job facing down McConnell, Boehner and Cantor on the debt ceiling and government shutdown showdowns. But his program for smart governmental intervention in the economy would have constituted exactly the same kind of anathema to a Republican Party determined to prevent him from accomplishing anything as everything hitherto proposed by Obama. Clinton would also have discovered that when you come into office on the heels of a fiscal quarter in which the economy contracted by almost 10 percent, while facing a Senate opposition determined to filibuster your every move at a historically unprecedented rate from Day One, recovery would be slow and painful and politically costly. Furthermoe, any notion that Bill Clinton might have been tougher than Obama on the banks or Wall Street, while fighting for his beloved middle class, seems especially dubious. Let’s not forget, Obama’s economic team was largely staffed by veterans of the Clinton administration, and some of the key deregulatory measures that contributed to the financial crisis were passed during Clinton’s administration with the enthusiastic support of those very same men.
“Back to Work” includes a cogent analysis of where the U.S. has gone astray, is full of sensible ideas to encourage job creation and economic growth, and makes a robust defense of the notion that strong government is a good thing. But so what? The people who will buy and read this book not only already agree with just about everything that’s in it, but they also already know it all. There’s almost nothing here that hasn’t been proposed by the Obama administration, or that isn’t already a stock part of the mainstream Democratic agenda. Which makes it all completely meaningless in the context of current political gridlock. Clinton wants us to get back to a government based on doing things that work — but as has become abundantly evident in the past few years, congressional Republicans are content with a system that doesn’t work. And neither Obama nor Clinton has any leverage to change that reality, unless Democrats enjoy a surprising victory in the 2012 election.
Any imaginary history that plucks Bill Clinton out of 1992 and time-travels him into 2008 has to grapple with some mighty big historical transformations. For most of his two terms, Bill Clinton enjoyed a huge wind at his back — a stunning period of economic growth that was in large part fueled by two things he can take zero credit for: the end of the Cold War and the massive tech boom. And even without the black hole of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression sucking at his presidency from the moment he moved into the White House, Clinton still managed to make a pretty big mess of things in his first two years. His efforts to push through the first priority on his political agenda — healthcare reform — failed miserably and contributed heavily to one of the worst midterm election defeats faced by a sitting Democratic president in a century. The Obama midterm debacle was even bigger, but in some ways less embarrassing. Until Clinton came along, Democrats had held a majority in the House of Representatives for 40 years.
Today, there is a rosy glow associated with the Clinton years. We tend to forget such things as the tawdry impeachment scandal, for a simple reason: The economy grew quickly and millions of jobs were created. If you couldn’t find a job in Northern California in the late ’90s, you weren’t breathing. The warm tint of the rearview mirror imbues Clinton with the authority to lecture us all now on how we should be doing a better job getting people back to work. But what about the responsibility that Clinton should shoulder for sowing the seeds of the financial crisis in the first place?
Clinton rightly dismisses the notion that his aggressive support of the Community Reinvestment Act was the root cause of the housing bust. We’ll give him points for that. But what are we to make of the one area in which he does acknowledge making a mistake?
I do think I can be fairly criticized for not making a bigger public issue out of the need to regulate financial derivatives. I couldn’t have done anything about it, because the Republican Congress was hostile to all regulations … But I should have spoken out more, especially after Congress included a measure barring financial derivatives from being regulated as securities or commodities in an appropriations bill that passed by a veto-proof majority.
Clinton then has the gall to approvingly mention Commodity Future Trading Commission director Brooksley Born’s strongly voiced opinion at the time that “financial derivatives should be subject to the same kinds of capital and transparency requirements as agricultural derivatives.” He somehow fails to mention the fact that Born’s push to regulate financial derivatives was cut off at the knees by Clinton’s own senior economic officials, including, notably, Larry Summers and Robert Rubin. The heads of the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and SEC released a joint statement that left no doubt as to administration policy: “We have grave concerns about this action and its possible consequences. We seriously question the scope of the CFTC’s jurisdiction in this area.”
For Clinton to suggest that he would have made a bigger public issue “out of the need to regulate financial derivatives” implies that he agreed with Born — but there is very little evidence to be found for this revisionism in the historical record. The opposite is much more true. Clinton’s administration was extraordinarily accommodative of Wall Street’s desires; their priorities were his priorities. One can assume that the health of the financial sector would have been just as high a priority for a Clinton administration in 2008 as it was in 1999. The banks would certainly have been bailed out, fueling popular resentment and creating identical political problems for the incumbent party.
Before Bill Clinton decided to write a book arguing the merits for smart government, he should have fessed up to how his own dumb government played a role in creating the financial crisis that put so many Americans out of work and has made it so difficult to restart economic growth.
That having been said, however, anyone looking for a smart to-do list of what government can do to spur economic growth would not be ill-served by reading Chapter 6: “How We Can Get Back in the Future Business.” Clinton is a bit more supportive of the debt-reduction proposals that came out of Obama’s Erskine-Bowles commission than most serious liberals will feel comfortable with, but aside from that, most Democrats will find themselves nodding their heads at his proposal to spur green job creation through investment in renewable energy, his call for a big infrastructure buildup, and his plan to fix the housing sector. Clinton’s always been a wonk’s wonk — he clearly enjoys wallowing in the nitty-gritty details of policy. There’s meat in “Back to Work.”
But he gives away the game on Page 111:
If there are any militant antitax folks still reading this book, I can hear the counterattack forming in your minds: “Clinton wants European-style social democracy! He wants to tax us to death. He’s for too much government! He doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism! He doesn’t even love America anymore, or he wouldn’t be telling us all this bad stuff!
“That’s all nonsense,” he writes.
Well yeah, sure, except for the annoying little fact that it’s nonsense that represents the expressed views of most of the Republicans currently elected to Congress. And indeed, it’s mild nonsense that doesn’t even come close to the intemperate nastiness of the rhetoric routinely hurled at President Obama.
It’s cute for Clinton to pretend that any “militant antitax” folk would even purchase “Back to Work,” much less be reading it as far as Page 111 without their heads exploding. The sad truth — and this is something that Clinton is surely aware of — is that all the well-meaning and pragmatically effective job creation tools in the world are worth nothing when matched up against the scorched earth tactics and extreme calcified ideology of the current Republican Party. Clinton’s great 1990s nemesis, Newt Gingrich, is a moderate when compared to the GOP’s Tea Party backbone — something Gingrich learned to his shock when he had the temerity to criticize Paul Ryan’s budget as “right-wing social engineering.”
It is in the context of current political reality that all of Clinton’s suggestions must be evaluated, and this is where “Back to Work” is most lacking. It doesn’t matter how compellingly Clinton makes the case for smart government (and higher taxes) in an era when the opposition party has never been more antitax or more resolutely opposed to government action. It doesn’t matter how bad we look when compared to other rich countries, when we are considered by definition incomparable. It doesn’t matter how much sense Clinton makes — in Washington in 2011, sense is irrelevant.
If you’re in the market for an alternate reality, pick up “Back to Work,” mix yourself a strong drink, and pretend to your heart’s delight that if we just had the right wonk in office, pushing the right kind of policy proposals, unemployment would be falling while the economy boomed. But if you want to change reality, just make sure you go vote.
(Credit: Reuters/Jim Young) 
President Obama, surrounded by members of the Secret Service, upon his arrival in San Diego, Sept. 26, 2011. (Credit: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) 
(Credit: Fox News) 
(Credit: AP/iStockphoto/sjlocke/Salon) 
Bill Clinton (Credit: Reuters/Lucas Jackson) 
