Paul and Sheila Wellstone, along with their only daughter, Marcia, and five others, died Friday on a rainy, snowy fall day on northeast Minnesota’s Iron Range. It is a remote area with a steelworkers’-union culture that goes back generations, and though it is heavily Democratic, it was a far cry from native soil for Paul and Sheila. Still, it was a place where this inseparable team felt at home.
Back in 1989, I’d traveled with Paul Wellstone in his beat-up maroon Chrysler LeBaron as he traveled through rural Minnesota to Duluth and the Iron Range, for exploratory meetings before his first Senate campaign. Paul would lie down in the backseat of the car complaining about his back, and we knew his back wasn’t going to get any better if he ran. But Paul had a different worry — how he’d be accepted during this swing outside the progressive Twin Cities. Even though he was a member of the Democratic National Committee, he had a reputation as a fiery speaker and protest organizer.
But Paul was a skilled organizer whose years of teaching enabled him to read his audience and engage them in conversation. On this trip Paul was cautious. He was the first potential candidate to make the rounds, and he didn’t want to appear too pushy. Former vice president Walter Mondale had been out of politics for five years, since his unsuccessful presidential campaign against incumbent Ronald Reagan, and he had not yet indicated whether he would run for the Senate seat. Paul did not want to put anyone on the spot regarding commitments. He focused his meetings on how this race would help the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, which is what the Democrats are called in Minnesota.
Paul spoke at a gathering in Tower, Minn., in a home that served as the last stop for Central American refugees en route to Canada. St. Louis County Commissioner Herb Lampa said: “Sounds to me like you really want to run. If you want to, you should just do it.”
Paul was pumped as we drove through a light April snowfall to the next stop, the house of Gabe Brisbois, a political operative whose support would spread wide and deep. There aren’t many hotels up on the Iron Range, so candidates need to collect guest-room or couch invitations along with donations and votes. After dinner Gabe gave Paul the key to his house. Paul didn’t know what to say. He began delicately with, “I know Walter hasn’t decided to run and I know you’d be bound to him …” Gabe interrupted and said: “Paul, I’m giving you the key to my house because I’m supporting you.” On our way home that night, I told Paul the race was ours to lose. He thought I was crazy but acknowledged that he had a chance if everything broke his way.
The race was on. Paul managed to lock up the Iron Range endorsements before the ground froze for six months, ensuring that his were the only lawn signs up during the caucus season. As Minnesota political legend goes, if you win the Range, you win the state. The influential steelworkers of the territory that bears their name were the first union to endorse Paul in his 1990 race.
Some have called Paul Wellstone the first 1960s radical elected to the Senate, but that misses the mark. He was the first “justice organizer” elected to the U.S. Senate. Instead of spending the ’60s listening to the Jefferson Airplane and hitchhiking to Woodstock, Paul married his high school sweetheart and attended the University of North Carolina. He quit the UNC wrestling team after winning the Atlantic Coast Conference championship because he had to support Sheila and the first of their three children. Paul was not a ’60s radical, but a person committed to family and justice.
Wellstone projected his sense of justice into the classes he taught as a political science professor at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. He encouraged his students to do active organizing in their communities. Paul and the students helped organize the rural poor people of Rice County who were having trouble finding affordable housing. When the college attempted to deny tenure to Wellstone, saying that he spent more time on organizing and too little time on academia, his students used the skills they’d learned from Paul to protest the decision. They won.
During the 1980s, as their kids got older, he and Sheila were able to devote more of their time to the struggle for justice. Paul helped organize the striking meatpackers at Hormel’s Austin plant and supported the steelworkers on the Range as jobs evaporated in that industry. He stood with rural communities fighting a controversial power line, and he was arrested with farmers protesting bank foreclosures. He protested against U.S. policies in Central America. In all the years I traveled with Paul, there wasn’t a picket line or protest he could ever pass without jumping out of the car to join it.
Wellstone combined his justice work with activism in Democratic Party politics. In 1984, he ran unsuccessfully for state auditor. He crisscrossed the state stumping at local party events and inspiring the party faithful. But Democrats continued to nominate seemingly “safe” candidates who failed to win the Senate seats vacated by Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale. Hubert’s son, Skip, suffered a telling double-digit loss in 1988.
It was in that same year that the seeds of Paul’s Senate race were planted. As co-chair of Jesse Jackson’s second-place finish in Minnesota’s Democratic presidential primary, Wellstone helped bring new blood and experienced community organizers into the party. After Jackson lost, Wellstone moved over to co-chair the state’s presidential campaign of Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, and by doing so helped unify Minnesota Democrats, making it one of the few states won by the Democrats that year.
Anyone who heard Wellstone had to concede he was the best stump speaker the Democrats had. Even at contentious party conventions, his rousing speeches would bring delegates of all stripes to their feet. Paul had told me his cadenced style was developed from hearing civil rights leaders speak during his college days at North Carolina. And he never wrote a speech. About a half hour before an event, he would ask for quiet to prepare for his remarks. With his mind clear and his cadence carefully measured, the speeches were often inspirational.
Paul’s activism brought him the respect of labor unions, farmers, peace and justice activists, pro-choice women, environmentalists, people of color, community organizers and the party faithful. So restless activists at that year’s state DFL convention, looking toward the 1990 Senate race, added up all the disparate groups supporting Paul and formed what seemed to them a logical conclusion. At the convention that year, folks first began greeting Paul Wellstone, not quite jokingly, with the title “Senator.”
By early 1989, Paul and Sheila were seriously considering an exploratory run against the popular Republican incumbent, Sen. Rudy Boschwitz, best known in the state for hokey TV ads pushing his plywood business. The faint-hearted DFL party establishment feared Boschwitz but dreaded a Wellstone candidacy, arguing his liberalism would bring down the whole ticket. Paul’s backers argued that only someone with Paul’s passion and conviction could beat the incumbent.
At one exploratory meeting in Minneapolis, early in 1989, a noted political operative encouraged Paul to run for state party chair instead of the U.S. Senate. He told Paul a loss in the Senate race would finish his political career. Sheila Wellstone responded that she wasn’t giving up her husband for a relatively small state position. After Sheila’s declaration, Paul’s Senate campaign took a giant step forward.
Minnesota’s process for obtaining the party-caucus endorsement gives a grassroots organizing campaign a chance to beat a candidate with money. Paul, who lived on a professor’s salary and took his sabbatical to run, would raise only $100,000 during his first 12 months of campaigning, but he won the endorsement through his grassroots organization.
All three of Paul’s races relied on that same grassroots organizing strategy. Motivated volunteers gave Wellstone’s campaigns a sense of vitality and a feeling of ownership. Paul was in a role he felt most comfortable with, as the lead organizer of a base that shared his passion for justice.
In that first race, Paul still had to prove that justice politics was winning politics. He crushed his opponent in the September 1990 primary, with 70 percent of the vote, but he still trailed Boschwitz, and his trips to Washington for money and support were disasters. No one in Washington took him seriously. But at home in Minnesota, things started to break his way. Paul’s grassroots campaign continued to grow. His volunteers were everywhere. His television ads were risky and groundbreaking. Two weeks out from the election, polls showed Paul to be in a dead heat with Boschwitz. Washington started calling, and money started walking in the door. Finance director Dick Senese was the happiest guy on earth; the day the poll was published he had written checks to TV stations to buy ads, but there hadn’t been enough money in the bank to cover them. By the end of the day there was plenty more to spend.
Paul’s grassroots campaign surged in the final days. He simply was overwhelmed by the commitment of his volunteers. I still remember the look of amazement he flashed me at 10 p.m. on election eve. He had come to send off thousands of supporters armed with a quarter-million get-out-the-vote flyers that they’d put on windshields overnight. He had just come from phone banks where the biggest challenge was finding phones for the hundreds of people who showed up that day. And so when he won the next night, he knew who brought him there. He had seen the grassroots support grow exponentially. He was jubilant but humbled at the same time. “Politics is not left, right or center,” he would often say. “It’s about improving people’s lives.” He said it on election night in 1990 and he lived it throughout his Senate career.
As a senator, Wellstone focused on becoming the parliamentary equal of Robert Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat, and North Carolina Republican Jesse Helms, using Senate procedures to protect and advance his causes. Former Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, the chairman of the Consumer Federation of America, told Paul that the pharmaceutical industry had attached a patent extension for a seniors’ drug to a veterans’ funding bill. Nobody thought a senator would dare to hold up a veterans’ bill, but Wellstone tied it up until the extension was removed, arguing that the sneaky attempt to prevent the money-saving option of generic drugs would cost seniors hundreds of dollars. That was typical: Never in his lifetime would Wellstone’s name appear as the sponsor of a bill that was passed and signed into law, but his record of passing amendments, placing holds, calling for unanimous consent, and using the parliamentary procedures of the Senate to work for justice is unparalleled.
Wellstone’s base expanded during his years as a senator. He hired organizers to join his Senate staff. Paul entrusted these staffers to bring issues to him. He had a hectic schedule and demanded much from his staff, but he always made time for issues of justice. Paul’s days started at 5 a.m., when he would work out and read the papers. If there was any bad press, the staff’s day would start with a wakeup call shortly after 5 a.m. Needless to say, staffers worked hard to limit the bad press.
It was imperative for staffers to have all their facts right and to provide the full political picture on an issue. You never wanted to be the one who ordered a sandwich with onions and mayonnaise. And woe to the staffer who got lost driving to an event. In 1989, I asked a friend from St. Cloud to drive Paul there, but that would be my friend’s last trip with Paul. The car was towed while they ate lunch.
In 1996, a new fundraising staffer named Jim was taking Paul and Sheila to a house party one night in Minnetonka, a suburb known for similar sounding streets and cul-de-sacs. As it became apparent that Jim was hopelessly lost and very late, Paul and Sheila were anything but understanding, and their impatience was compounded by the lack of a cellphone in the car. Poor Jim was so frazzled he drove up in what he thought was a circular driveway but which was, in fact, someone’s lawn. With his lights shining on the house he got out and rang the doorbell; the babysitter who answered refused to let Jim use the phone, no matter how he begged. Paul finally came to the door and persuaded the baby sitter to give him the phone. The host of the house party came to get them.
Minnesota’s veterans were one of the factions that came to Paul’s side later on. Veterans’ groups hadn’t voted for Paul in 1990, but a small group of vets came into the St. Paul office one day with evidence that their exposure to radiation tests in Nevada and Utah during the 1950s had resulted in health problems for them and their families. The vets told stories of being exposed to radiation with no protection and of washing contaminated vehicles with soap and water. Many vets died from cancer at early ages; others had documented a pattern of reproductive problems. Paul organized hearings, brought the group’s leader to Washington to testify before the Senate, and authored an amendment to extend health benefits to families of the “atomic vets,” as they became known.
In 1996, Paul got a rematch against Boschwitz. This time, Boschwitz felt certain he could use Paul’s opposition to welfare reform against him. After all, Wellstone had been the only incumbent up for election to oppose welfare reform, saying it would take food out of the mouths of children and the elderly. When Boschwitz ran a series of ads calling him “Senator Welfare,” Paul responded with TV spots saying his parents had taught him to stand up for what was right. Senator Welfare won a second term.
Paul relished the role of being the lone voice in the Senate on controversial votes. He considered it a sign that he was doing what the people had elected him to do. These votes actually helped him mobilize his base. He did what few other senators have done — he cast principled votes and used them to win.
Paul’s last major vote was to oppose President Bush’s war resolution on Iraq. Once again, he was the only senator up for reelection to oppose the president. The week after his vote, polling numbers showed Paul’s lead increasing. And in those days, individual contributors invested more than a million dollars in his reelection campaign.
After 12 years in office, Wellstone finally passed a bill through the Senate and the House. Cosponsored with Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., the measure provides parity in health insurance coverage for persons with mental illness. It wasn’t hard for Paul to reach across the aisle on this issue. His only brother is mentally ill, as is Domenici’s daughter. They spent nearly 10 years trying to force health insurance providers to cover mental illness and medical illnesses equally, working tirelessly to guide the measure through a closely divided Congress. The bill now sits on the desk of President Bush. Until Friday morning, Paul’s organizing skills had gone as far as they could go. Word had it that the president felt signing the bill would give the Minnesota incumbent a campaign edge against the Republican challenger, former St. Paul mayor Norm Coleman.
But with his death, Paul Wellstone’s final organizing effort may succeed. Expect the president to sign the Wellstone-Domenici Mental Health Parity bill. It will be a tribute to Paul’s lifetime of work supporting those whose voices would not otherwise be heard.
Barack Obama’s presidency was born from nothing so much as his repudiation of George W. Bush’s administration — its policies and politics, its style and tone. One of Obama’s most effective 2008 stump speech refrains was his promise to end the era of “Scooter Libby justice, ‘Brownie’ incompetence and Karl Rove politics.”
But the political dynamics for winning a second presidential term often differ markedly from winning the first. So don’t be surprised by many eerie parallels between Obama’s 2012 reelection bid and Bush’s 2004 campaign. The president may not rely upon “Karl Rove politics” in the strictest sense, and nobody would confuse David Axelrod with Rove. But Obama’s reelection route and rhetoric may bear more than a few Rovian hallmarks.
Now that Mitt Romney has won the Republican nomination, two key features prevail over the 2012 campaign — and both were also plainly evident in 2004. First, the incumbent president’s reelection fortunes are far from certain; and, second, the incumbent faces a decent but nevertheless weak challenger who is further hampered by internal problems within his party’s coalition.
Because incumbents can’t run for reelection promising “change,” and because “hope” during a lingering recession was also off the menu, the Obama campaign’s 2012 theme of “forward” — a word that often follows “plow,” mind you — was the best available alternative. That said, and substituting the economy for terrorism, Obama is implicitly if not explicitly advancing the same theme Bush did in 2004: America suffered a tough blow, but the situation could have been worse and, more to the point, under my stewardship the nation is steadily regaining its footing.
This counterfactual campaign theme — vote for me not because of what happened, but what might have but didn’t — is a common thread for Bush and Obama. It’s not an uplifting message, but it sufficed in 2004 and Obama is counting on it working again in 2012.
Politics 101 further dictates that when an incumbent’s reelection is in doubt, he must go negative against the challenger. Obama political operatives in the White House and at the Democratic National Committee long ago made it abundantly clear they were willing to do just that. Team Obama may not go negative against Romney to the degree the Bush camp did against John Kerry in 2004. (By mid-summer 2004, 75 percent of Bush’s TV ads were negative attacks on Kerry.) But don’t be surprised if attacks on Romney’s record and even character are plentiful, harsh and relentless. In 2008, America saw candidate Obama’s toothy grin; four years later, expect to see President Obama’s fangs.
Expect the Obama camp to emphasize two major critiques of Romney: that he is a flip-flopper willing to say anything or reverse any position to win; and that he is an economic royalist whose personal and public life suggest a person incapable of understanding the lives and struggles of average Americans. Again — note the unusual parallels with 2004.
Although Romney is a Republican former governor and Kerry was at the time his state’s Democratic junior U.S. senator, the two Massachusetts pols make for similar targets. Each man is an extraordinarily rich preppie and Ivy Leaguer. Each represents the liberal wing of his respective party. Each has shown a propensity for ruining an otherwise valid point with sloppy, backfiring language. And each has a reputation for lacking political spine.
The flip-flop frame is candidate character assassination of the first order. Like the lone negative number in a string of multiplied positives, the critique that nobody can trust any statement or claim made by a politician has the potential to negate every accomplishment or promise. If it sticks, it can be fatal, as Kerry learned in 2004.
Obama and the Democratic National Committee know their electoral history and, sure enough, last November — a year before the election and two full months before a single Iowan had caucused — the DNC released a four-minute “Mitt vs. Mitt” ad and its accompanying website with the damning tag line, “the story of two men trapped in one body.” The site is a brilliant homage to the Bush campaign’s 2004 windsurfer attack ad and the devastating, 11-minute ad the Republican National Committee produced chronicling Kerry’s “evolution” on Iraq.
And then there is what might be called “the Willard factor”: Romney as Richy Rich, the Monopoly Guy with the Bain Capital background and the Swiss bank account. His bio would be political gold to Romney’s opponent any election cycle, but it’s gold-plated platinum in the first full presidential campaign following the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression, the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the long overdue national debate over income inequality.
Again, the wealth-personified line of attack mirrors the out-of-touch, Martha’s Vineyard yoke the Bush team put around Kerry’s neck in 2004. Right on cue, in the first public event of his reelection campaign, last week Obama attacked Romney by name and invoked the economic disconnect card with relish. “He sincerely believes that if CEOs and wealthy investors like him make money the rest of us will automatically prosper as well,” said Obama of Romney, adding that “corporations aren’t people – -people are people.” (For the record, Kerry is actually wealthier than Romney, who would become one of the richest men ever to occupy the White House, should he win.)
Obama will also try to shift the national debate toward areas of strength, as Bush did. Historically, this meant the same strategy, but with inverse implications for each party: The so-called mommy party Democrats would encourage voters to focus on more favorable kitchen-table economy issues — healthcare, jobs, education — and away from less favorable “daddy party” Republican issues surrounding foreign wars abroad and culture wars. Because Obama is net-positive in foreign policy approval and net-negative on the economy, rather than mirroring by inversion, Obama will try to duplicate Bush’s shift-in-emphasis in 2004. GOP complaints that Obama is politicizing the killing of Osama bin Laden reveal Republican fears that Obama is going to play the terrorism card in 2012 just like Bush did eight years ago.
The 2004 parallels extend beyond message. Obama will be amply resourced and enjoy a field technology by virtue of his campaign’s state-of-the-art Web, donor, volunteer and social media innovations. Remember the Bush reelection campaign’s vaunted “72-hour” voter turnout model? That seems like an Edsel compared to the Ferrari the Obama team will be sporting this summer and fall. Among the perquisites modern presidential incumbents enjoy is the option to test-drive the best mobilization machines before anyone else.
Finally, what most connects Obama 2012 to Bush 2004 is the stability of the electoral map itself. Only three states — two net to Bush — flipped from one party to the other between 2000 and 2004; only nine states flipped between 2004 and 2008. Split the difference and a good, back-of-the-napkin over-under for number of states likely to flip between 2008 and 2012 is six. And thus, like the lead sailboat during a windless race, Obama doesn’t need or want conditions to change much from 2008: He merely has to replicate the map that swept him into office, with the burden of figuring out how to shake up the Electoral College falling to Romney, just as it did for Kerry against Bush. Even Karl Rove’s mapping of the 2012 election concedes this reality.
The 2008 election was memorable; to borrow the title of one best-selling chronicle, it was a “game changer.” But 2012 will not be. In many respects, it will be a game repeater, with Obama playing Bush to Romney’s Kerry of 2004. The president may be asking Americans to look “forward” in 2012, but the best preview of his reelection campaign can be found by looking backward eight years.
There was good reason for Republicans to cry foul over the Obama campaign’s advertisement highlighting the president’s killing of Osama bin Laden; the GOP has lost its decades-long edge on national security. According to a Washington Post poll, “By a margin of more than 2 to 1, Americans say the president’s handling of terrorism is a major reason to support rather than oppose his bid for reelection.”
Republicans lost their popularity on security issues for one reason: George W. Bush’s foreign policy was a disaster. And yet, the party’s nominee, Mitt Romney, has assembled a foreign-policy team composed almost exclusively of individuals with the same war-always mentality and ideology that served Bush — and the United States — so poorly. In some cases, the exact same men responsible for Bush’s catastrophic national security policies are advising Romney. The former Massachusetts governor could have included some of the pragmatists and realists from the George H.W. Bush administration. Instead, a Romney presidency seems like it would be Bush 43 all over again.
Richard Grenell, who served as United Nations spokesman under Bush, may be gone from the Romney campaign after an uproar over his sexuality, but there are plenty more former Bushies. First off, there are Romney’s “special advisors.” There’s Michael Chertoff, W.’s Homeland Security director. Chertoff oversaw DHS’s failures during Hurricane Katrina, and amassed unprecedented powers of secrecy. Next up is Eliot Cohen, counselor to the State Department for Bush’s last two years and on the Defense Policy Advisory Board for the president’s entire term. Cohen was an adamant supporter of the Iraq War and advised Bush directly on the issue. Or take Cofer Black, the man who infamously said to Bush in September 2011 about al-Qaida that “When we’re through with them they will have flies walking across their eyeballs.” Black went on to become chairman of Blackwater, where he resigned after the company illegally bribed Iraqi officials.
Then there are the 13 “working groups” composed of equally worrisome individuals. The Middle East and North Africa Working Group is co-chaired by Bush’s Assistant Secretary of Defense Mary Beth Long, and Meghan O’Sullivan, Bush’s special assistant and deputy national security advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan. The remaining co-chair is Walid Phares, who never worked for Bush but advised Lebanese warlords in the 1980s. Romney has reportedly promised Phares a top job in his administration, despite his virulently anti-Islamic views.
All told, Romney lists 37 holdovers from the George W. Bush administration — the very same administration he and all other Republican candidates barely referenced during their many debates because it was so discredited and toxic, even to the Republican base.
It didn’t have to be this way. There are, in fact, people in Republican circles who are sensible on international affairs. The Cato Institute, in particular, has experts that could dramatically change the direction of American foreign policy. Men like Justin Logan and Christopher Preble were prescient on Iraq and a host of other issues. Similarly, the Center for the National Interest (formerly the Nixon Center) has a host of solid scholars, including ones like Dimitri Simes and Geoffrey Kemp, who have valuable government experience in the Nixon and Reagan administrations, respectively, and a history of perceptive analysis. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, would have been another good pick.
So why aren’t guys like this being tapped? Why is the GOP sticking with a discredited foreign-policy approach rather that looking to its own past for wiser counsel? “Most of the realists and pragmatists have simply been driven out of the Republican Party,” says Stephen Walt, who writes a blog at Foreign Policy and teaches at Harvard. “The neoconservatives have been driving the agenda since Bush was elected and they remain well-entrenched.”
Another factor is that the Republican Party’s base remains strongly militaristic and reluctant to recognize limits on American power. Jon Huntsman’s failed presidential campaign illustrated that problem. The good news is that nobody seems to be calling for nation-building and occupying foreign countries in the mold of Iraq and Afghanistan. But that’s the only lesson that seems to have been learned from the last decade of foreign-policy debacles.
Finally, it may just be that the United States has too much power to change course. While the Unites States has undoubtedly made disastrous decisions in the last decades, it is so powerful that it is largely insulated from the consequences of them. If Romney’s foreign-policy advisor list is anything to go by, a Romney administration would have to teach the U.S. all over again about the problems with trying to police the world. Prepare for Bush redux.
The Bush administration hasn’t heard the last from Philip Zelikow. After the rediscovery last week of his long lost 2006 anti-torture memo, Zelikow, a former State Department official, has written arguably the most damning article yet about U.S. government’s interrogation policies from 2001 to 2009. The article, called “Codes of Conduct for a Twilight War,” will be released in a forthcoming issue of the Houston Law Journal, and was obtained exclusively by Salon. Says Zelikow in an email: “I’m not aware of other accounts that combine historical, policy and legal approaches to” the subject of the Bush administration’s interrogation methods.
Based on published histories and his firsthand observations, and adapted from a lecture delivered in November, the article calls the administration’s rationale for its use of torture — which he nonetheless insists only on calling “extreme interrogation” and “coercive methods” — “radical,” “an amazing contention,” “untenable and extreme,” “unsustainable,” “an unprecedented program of coolly calculated dehumanizing abuse and physical torment,” and, finally, simply a “mistake.” He concludes: “This was a collective failure of American public leadership, in which a number of officials and members of Congress (and staffers) of both parties played a part, endorsing a CIA program of physical coercion without any precedent in U.S. history.” In fact, “The only defense against criminal prosecution would be that officials acted in good faith reliance on the advice of their government lawyers.”
Part of what makes Zelikow’s analysis so damning and definitive is its judiciousness. The article is deeply empathetic of the uniquely fearful situation under which the Bush administration was initially operating. Zelikow calls the Sept. 11 attacks a “collective trauma” and a “shoc[k] to mass beliefs.” He notes that Bush and others spent time in burn units, morgues and with survivors of the attacks. One traumatic experienced often overlooked — overlooked because it appeared in Stephen Hayes’ stenographic biography of Dick Cheney — was that the vice-president’s daughter was (falsely, it turns out) told that her house with her children in it had tested positive for anthrax. Similarly, Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice were told that they and others had been exposed to an extremely lethal toxin in a particular area of the White House — and might soon die as a result. “The alarms did not stop and they too were not abstract … The pressure on Bush and his senior advisers was so direct because so much of the response had to be invented and improvised,” the article reads.
An additional factor in the power of the article is Zelikow’s credibility and history. Before entering government, he was a civil rights lawyer in Texas battling the Ku Klux Klan and then a highly esteemed Harvard historian specializing in U.S. foreign policy — he co-authored one book with Rice. He then served on the National Security Council under President George H.W. Bush and directed the 9/11 Commission before becoming counselor to Rice at the State Department from 2005 to 2007. He currently volunteers part-time on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board under President Obama.
Such bipartisan, establishment credentials render the breakdown and conclusion of this article all the more damning. He believes that what should have been a political and moral question — should the United States torture captives? — became strictly a legal matter left up to government lawyers, few of whom had any experience with these issues, and who had to take the necessity of extreme measures as a given. “These lawyers then became secular priests, granting absolution to the supplicant policymakers,” Zelikow writes.
The problems began when the Office of the Vice President and the CIA took central roles in policymaking. Cheney felt himself above the rest of the National Security Council, bypassing Rice and other traditional channels of national security policymaking. Ad-hoc decision-making and improvisation became “a habit of thought,” which seemed initially to pay off in the security of the nation, as well as in Bush’s political standing and self-confidence.
With Cheney and CIA head George Tenet “the key entrepreneurs in setting codes of conduct for the War on Terror,” it was essentially left to their obsequious lawyers to decide, in secret, on the interrogation methods America should employ. Bush even told the Senate’s Intelligence Committee chairman that “the vice president should be your point of contact … [He] has the portfolio for intelligence activities.” Decisions were made to jettison international treaties. By December 2001, the CIA was already interested in reverse-engineering methods “heretofore used only to treat Americans to resist enemy torture.” When a senior al-Qaida member was captured in March 2002, the prototype for the administration’s torture policies was already developed. “So, for the first time in American history, leaders of the U.S. government carefully devised ways and means to torment enemy captives.”
Zelikow notes that “None of the policy or moral issues connected with these choices appear to have been analyzed in any noticeable way.” Perhaps worst of all, no serious consideration was given to weighing the costs of benefits of the torture program, with reference to relevant historical precedents and/or examinations of the respective French, British and Israeli experiences in dealing with captured terrorists. “Bush and Rice should have insisted on this,” Zelikow writes.
The 52-page article observes the successes of Obama’s counterterrorism policies after repudiating the use of torture. On the basis of the empirical evidence then, “[t]here is no evident correlations between intelligence success and the available of extreme interrogation methods,” no matter what Bush and Cheney claim. Finally, “The program’s costs — which include the high-level effort expended in order to establish, maintain, and defense the program — appear on the evidence so far to have well outweighed any unique value the program might have had as a method of counterterrorism intelligence collection.” This is apart from the damage to America’s international standing and corrosion of its traditional values.
Zelikow concludes his analysis by arguing that, although the Obama administration has the right to wage war and use extralegal methods to defeat al-Qaida, its claim of that authority to defeat “associated forces” is unwarranted. “The U.S. government should publish and explain any overarching policy and legal documents that guide and confine the conduct of deadly operation against its foreign enemies … the executive branch of the U.S. government has a duty to articulate the scope of its warfare to the Congress and the public.” The Bush administration’s unprecedented elevation of torture to national policy may be history, but the job to get U.S. foreign policy in line with its constitutional and moral obligations is far from over.
News of Thomas Kinkade’s death arrived on the same day I received in the mail a vintage teacup on which I had spent a ridiculous amount of money. It has a cottage painted on it. Kinkade, whose work has long exerted a morbid fascination for me (to the concern of all my friends), specialized in cottages. So some part of me understands the appeal, I guess, but, damn: Those paintings make my corneas hurt. And yet, I could barely stop looking at them.
Kinkade was only 54, and his family told the media that he died of “natural causes.” This comes after years of reports of drunken public misbehavior: cursing at people who tried to save him from falling off bar stools, heckling Siegfried & Roy, grabbing a woman’s breasts at a publicity event and, most memorably, urinating on a Winnie the Pooh statue at the Disneyland Hotel while proclaiming, “This one’s for you, Walt!” There were DUI arrests. Also, his manufacturing company declared bankruptcy two years ago, and former franchisees of the once-ubiquitous Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries won settlements against him for fraud.
That’s quite a fall for a man who frequently spoke of his Christian faith and family values when asked to comment on the mammoth success of his brand in the early 2000s. “When I got saved, God became my art agent,” Kinkade explained in a 2004 video. He went from a childhood in Placerville, Calif. (invariably characterized as “hard-scrabble”) to an apprenticeship selling his work in supermarket parking lots to his apotheosis as the nation’s “most profitable” artist, the Painter of Light™, and multimillionaire. He was profiled in the New Yorker by Susan Orlean.
I first learned about the dark side of the Painter of Light™ — sorry, couldn’t resist that one — when I reviewed “his” novel, “Cape Light,” in 2002. The novel, first in a series, was produced much as his paintings are: by a semi-industrial process in which low-level apprentices embellish a prefab base provided by Kinkade. He wasn’t the only artist to work in this way; he wasn’t even the only novelist. To the best of my knowledge, his novels — heartwarming, fuzzily pious tales of small-town life — have been coming out ever since, one more facet of a lifestyle brand that, at its most ambitious, included an entire Thomas Kinkade-themed housing development.
My review was just a goof intended to amuse Salon’s readers, but after it appeared, I began to receive emails from people who had sunk their life savings in Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries (essentially, mall and shopping-district outlets for his prints) and been fleeced. I didn’t really understand how the financial architecture of Kinkade’s gallery empire worked, and I sure didn’t share their taste in wall art, but these people struck me as decent and sincere. They’d believed in Thomas Kinkade — not just in the man or the company, but in the ethos supposedly represented by his work, one in which (to quote Kinkade’s introduction to “Cape Light”) “people have the time to savor life’s simple pleasures” and lead “deep, satisfying lives.”
My conversations with these victims made me uneasy. Was there some relationship between the franchisees’ naivete, perhaps even their willful self-delusion, and their terrible taste? Was it hopelessly snobby to wonder that? What about Kinkade himself? He seemed to be at best a hypocrite and at worst a crook. Was there a meaningful connection between his bad conscience and his bad art? German thinkers of the 1930s would have said so, and they had plenty of opportunity to observe bad fascist art up close. Hermann Broch maintained that someone who chooses to make kitsch is “ethically depraved, a criminal willing radical evil.” The novelist Milan Kundera believes kitsch to be the natural expression of totalitarianism. That’s a lot of moral weight to place on a bunch of garish cottage paintings, but Kinkade was always the first to present his work as a form of ideology.
I felt compassion for the ripped-off gallery operators, and at the same time I was aware that quite a few of them had probably also fallen for the similarly sanctimonious, bogus folksiness of George W. Bush, thereby subjecting our nation to one of the worst presidents in its history. Kinkade and Bush struck me as of a piece, probably because they had both borrowed from Ronald Reagan in promising that we could get back to a better way of life that never existed in the first place. In nearly every encounter with the press, Kinkade delivered a diatribe against the art-world “establishment” that had shut him out. They were “elites” touting unfathomable, downer junk to hardworking people who needed uplift instead. Art snobs were the aesthetic counterparts of the so-called liberal elites, a group that surely included me.
At the same time, I must admit that I, too, like a cottage. Granted, I like the stylized, art-deco kind painted on bone china, rather than the insanely detailed and phosphorescently lit specimens in Kinkade’s pictures. And I’m in little danger of equating my new teacup with a Brancusi just because it’s cheerier. Nevertheless, I suspect that my idea of what’s pleasing about a cottage isn’t too different from that of Kinkade’s fans: an aura of harmless coziness, of modest domestic beauty and comfort not too cut off from the past. It’s as if we’re speaking the same word, but in different languages.
I suspect this is why Kinkade’s paintings have exerted their weird, hypnotic effect on me. They are so preposterous (especially the stream-side ones; he really needed to sit down with an architect and go over the basics of drainage), so awful. And yet I can still detect — beneath that cacophony of hollyhocks and cobblestones and snapdragons — the whisper of something intelligible. I’m pretty sure I know why the hordes of Kinkade collectors love his work, even if I don’t like it myself. Kinkade’s paintings are irredeemably false, like all kitsch, but through them you can just barely glimpse the honest desires they seek to exploit, sinking under the dreck.
Kundera defined kitsch as “the absolute denial of shit,” meaning it offers an airbrushed, sterilized, sentimentalized view of the world. From that, it doesn’t necessarily follow that art wallows in shit, but art doesn’t exist for the primary purpose of denying it, either. Kitsch is, first and foremost, a lie; its very existence is founded on bad faith.
Kinkade, like Bush, peddled a falsely simplified image of the world — one without mildew or flooded basements, for one thing — which, no surprise, turned out to be plastered over a whole lot of stinky stuff. The true believers, the ones who bought into these men the most during the 2000s, ended up paying some of the highest prices, from the Kinkade acolytes who invested in his gallery Ponzi scheme to the working-class red-staters who sent off their kids to die in a pointless war. Bad taste, harmless as it may seem, can end up costing you a lot.
Further reading
Los Angeles Times obituary for Thomas Kinkade
Susan Orlean’s 2001 profile of Thomas Kinkade for the New Yorker
A 2006 Los Angeles Times story documenting Kinkade’s business problems
Salon’s Janelle Brown visits Hiddenbrooke, a Kinkade-theme housing development in Northern California
Laura Miller reviews “Cape Light,” a novel by Thomas Kinkade and Katherine Spencer
In February of 2006, Philip Zelikow, counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, authored a memo opposing the Bush administration’s torture practices (though he employed the infamous obfuscation of “enhanced interrogation techniques”). The White House tried to collect and destroy all copies of the memo, but one survived in the State Department’s bowels and was declassified yesterday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Security Archive.
The memo argues that the Convention Against Torture, and the Constitution’s prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment, do indeed apply to the CIA’s use of “waterboard[ing], walling, dousing, stress positions, and cramped confinement.” Zelikow further wrote in the memo that “we are unaware of any precedent in World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, or any subsequent conflict for authorized, systematic interrogation practices similar to those in question here, even when the prisoners were presumed to be unlawful combatants.” According to the memo, the techniques are legally prohibited, even if there is a compelling state interest to justify them, since they should be considered cruel and unusual punishment and “shock the conscience.”
Chillingly, the memo notes that “corrective techniques, such as slaps,” may be legally sustained, as might be “[C]ontrol conditions, such as nudity, sleep deprivation, and liquid diets…depending on the circumstances and details of how these techniques are used.” However much distress Zelikow’s memo caused the White House, it was not an ACLU briefing paper.
“I’m pleased the memo is now part of the historical record and available for study,” Zelikow wrote Salon in an email. The White House had determined that the memo — which was not binding since Zelikow’s was a bureaucratic position without legal authority — was too dangerous to exist. “I later heard the memo was not considered appropriate for further discussion and that copies of my memo should be collected and destroyed,” he said in a May 2009 congressional hearing.
At that hearing, before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts, Zelikow said he had “no view on whether former officials should be prosecuted,” a decision he thinks should be left to “institutions.” However, he did call for a thorough inquiry and a public report examining how the U.S. came to employ torture.
Of course, no such inquiry was ever launched. The Obama administration declined to revisit the U.S. employment of torture, with the president saying he didn’t want to “look back.” Zelikow believes this was a mistake. “I still believe an inquiry would be useful, though less so as time passes and more information becomes available, especially after the 9/11 trials conclude, hopefully this year,” he says in an email.
During his congressional testimony, Zelikow declined to say whether Department of Justice lawyers acted improperly or immorally, conceding only that their opinions were “unsound, even unreasonable.” But in a 2007 lecture in Houston, he had no problem saying “the cool, carefully considered, methodical, prolonged, and repeated subjection of captives to physical torment, and the accompanying psychological terror, is immoral.”
The importance of the memo lies in its revelation that there was real, serious debate inside the Bush administration about how to interrogate captured terrorist suspects. The members of the White House declined to enter that debate — indeed, they did their best to squash it. The destruction of Zelikow’s carefully reasoned memo suggests the White House did not want any record of alternative views even existing, lest they be considered reasonable or people get the idea that the torture policies were thought controversial even by members of the administration.
George W. Bush and Barack Obama (Credit: Reuters/Larry Downing) 
(Credit: Reuters/Win McNamee) 
(Credit: Reuters/Jim Young) 
George W. Bush in 2006 (Credit: AP/Ron Edmonds) 
