No book contributed to America’s popular image of political greatness more than John F. Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage.” Kennedy, as his choice of title suggests, lauded the classical virtue of courage, something he would have in common with William Bennett, whose “Book of Virtues” celebrated Homeric bravery more than it did Christian virtues such as compassion. Emblematic of Kennedy’s pantheon of political heroes was Missouri Sen. Thomas Hart Benton who, under fire from his Southern colleagues for his opposition to slavery, which also made him increasingly unpopular at home, refused to modify his strong support for the Union. “I despise the bubble popularity that is won without merit and lost without crime,” he wrote after the legislature of his state elected someone else in his place. “I sometimes had to act against the preconceived opinions and first impressions of my constituents, and I have never been disappointed.”
The Kennedy-inspired appreciation for courage lives on; later this month, Hyperion books will publish “Profiles in Courage for Our Time,” a collection of essays edited by Caroline Kennedy. Although the original book included only senators, this time one president is included: Gerald R. Ford, for his unpopular pardon of Richard Nixon. Otherwise, whether the praise goes to former New Jersey Gov. James Florio for his support of gun control, or Sens. John McCain and Russ Feingold for their diligence on behalf of campaign finance, the lesson Caroline Kennedy’s father taught is reinforced: Great leaders are those who buck the tides.
It is not too early in the Bush presidency to speculate about how he will be judged by the standards we have traditionally used to evaluate our political leadership. Both popular mythology and academic analysis have had a lot to say about who our great leaders have been — and why they have been great. And by the “Profiles” standard, one ought to immediately begin to include George W. Bush among the elect. Politics is a notoriously unpredictable business, but if Bush serves two full terms, the future is likely to include not only a significant shift to the right with consequences that will be felt for years, but a return to the days, seemingly gone forever during the Vietnam years, when an “imperial presidency” dominates the political landscape, rendering all other institutions of government to secondary roles.
And Bush, like a character out of Thoreau, has done all this by walking to the beat of his own drummer. Consider his proposed tax cuts. There has never existed strong public backing for the cuts President Bush has made the centerpiece of his domestic policy. Expert opinion is close to unanimous that current conditions require steps to bring deficits under control rather than to expand them for the foreseeable future. Yet nothing seems capable of deterring him from pursuit of a policy he is convinced is the right thing to do. Whether you admire or detest him — everyone in America seems to be in one camp or another — you have to conclude that vacillation is not in his political genes. Like every other president, Bush follows the polls, but while support for tax cuts can go up and down, his position never changes. Even his harshest critics ought to find something admirable in a man so intent on sticking to his convictions.
Bush’s consistency on domestic policy pales in comparison to the determination he demonstrated over Iraq. Unlike Bill Clinton, who never could seem to make up his mind whether U.S. power should be used to stop genocide in Rwanda or Bosnia, Bush had no hesitation in confronting Saddam Hussein. Polls showed that Americans clearly wanted the president to win the support of the U.N., as well as that of our allies, before going to war in Iraq; he went ahead without the former and with only a few of the latter and, lo and behold, public opinion followed him. World opinion — or so we once believed — matters in foreign policy, yet the president was perfectly willing to make enemies in Europe to defeat his enemy in Baghdad. And, at least until now, he has been rewarded for showing the courage of his convictions. By standing firm, he has made everyone else look weak. Gamblers tend to win big — when they win. Bush took genuine risks and has not been shy about claiming the pot.
And yet Kennedy’s choice of Thomas Hart Benton suggests what, besides courage, goes into the definition of great leadership: Benton was not only firm, he also happened to have been right. There were other politicians whose convictions in favor of slavery were as strong as Benton’s feelings toward the Union, yet we do not include Sen. Henry Foote of Mississippi — who at one point in a heated debate with Benton on the Senate floor pulled a pistol and threatened to use it — among our great leaders. Kennedy’s book deliberately included politicians to celebrate whose decisions turned out to be good for their country. (This does not mean that all of them were liberals; “Profiles in Courage” includes a portrait of Mr. Republican, Sen. Robert A. Taft of Ohio, who was celebrated for his fidelity to strict constitutionalism, even as his position led him to be quite critical of the Nuremberg trials.) Published one year after the U. S. Senate censured Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, “Profiles in Courage” wanted to leave the impression that the best leaders were builders of a strong society, not those whose shortsightedness threatened to tear it down. Can anyone, at this moment, make that claim about the Bush administration?
When they discuss great leadership, academics often pick up where “Profiles in Courage” left off. For fields riven by political and methodological dispute, political science and history hold a strikingly consensual view of presidential greatness: Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt are nearly always in, while John Adams, Ulysses S. Grant and a host of others more likely to appear in trivia contests than textbooks make up the worst. (Not even David McCullough’s hero-worshipping biography of Adams persuaded this reader of his presidential greatness.)
Not only is there surprising agreement among academics on who was great, there is something of a consensus on what made them great. Washington’s decision to step down created a two-term tradition that has helped the country avoid monarchical temptations. Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana paved the way for the nation to become a continent. Jackson was responsible for modern democracy as we understand it. Lincoln put defense of the Union ahead of everything else, even civil liberty. Roosevelt’s New Deal as well as his World War II leadership saved the country from depression and fascism. We live in revisionist times when yesterday’s truths are continuously reexamined; Andrew Jackson, for example, is unfashionable these days for his cruelty toward Native Americans, indeed his cruelty toward everyone. Yet no one has tried to make the case that Lincoln should have been more willing to compromise with Jefferson Davis, or Roosevelt more believing of the professed intentions of Adolf Hitler. Their judgment has stood the test of time.
Making the right decisions, however, is not enough. As political scientists Marc Landy and Sidney M. Milkis argue in their fascinating book “Presidential Greatness,” our great leaders have been tutors; as Felix Frankfurter said of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, they take “the country to school.” One way they do so is through their eloquence. Kennedy himself did not live long enough to influence American policy, but his words were sufficient to include him among the presidents who will always be remembered. Ronald Reagan shared little with Kennedy, but he too spoke words that are unlikely ever to be forgotten.
Eloquence may well be the most misunderstood characteristic of leadership. It is not, as many believe, a talent that can be mastered by good coaching, nor is it something that comes naturally to some people while resisting the best efforts of others. Eloquent presidents, rather, are those who perceive a need the public does not even know it has and find the right words to address it. Eloquence is the opposite of both manipulation and demagoguery. The manipulative leader perceives correctly what people really need and then tries to persuade them that they need something else. And the demagogue takes the needs people are persuaded they have and reinforces them, even when people’s perceptions of their own needs are incorrect; demagoguery flatters, while eloquence elevates. Presidents who manifest eloquence intuitively understand what people would choose when they are guided by what our most eloquent (and without doubt our greatest) president, Abraham Lincoln, called the “better angels of our nature.”
Leaders educate not only by the words they speak; they also understand how much time it takes for their lessons to sink in. Franklin Roosevelt knew that Hitler would have to be defeated militarily with America’s help. He also knew how powerful isolationist sentiment could be in the United States. Like any great teacher, Roosevelt handed out his lessons in doses, watching to see how prepared Americans were to accept the new responsibilities being placed upon them before placing even more.
Characteristic of his approach was the way he handled the Lend Lease Act of 1941, a program of military support to Great Britain. The administration went to great lengths to show that Britain was unable to pay for its own defense (to the consternation of Churchill) and that we would help them by lending rather than granting them money, all the while realizing, without ever saying so, that once we were in this far, it was only a matter of time before the American public accepted the need to enter the war on the British side. Roosevelt realized that one of his predecessors who came close to greatness, Woodrow Wilson, eventually failed the test because he lacked the patience to explain why his policies, even when they were right, should be accepted by ordinary people.
So if courage is the defining quality of leadership as Kennedy understood it, wisdom is the quality most often emphasized by political scientists and historians. When Lyndon Johnson, not one of our greatest presidents, found himself in that quandary called Vietnam, he turned for advice to a group of foreign policy advisors dubbed “the wise men.” That might not have proven an apt description. But his instincts, at least, were right; at crucial turning points in our nation’s history, presidents ought to try to do what is neither popular nor principled but what is wise.
Is George W. Bush, for all his steadfastness, either wise himself or capable of relying upon others who are? There is considerable reason to doubt it. Of course he made the right call on Iraq. Or did he? It does not take wisdom to win military battles; ammunition usually does that. But it does take wisdom to achieve Bush’s larger goal of creating post-Cold War global stability. Is it wise for America to be taking on the drawing of a new global map without the support of the United Nations and against the wishes of most people in the world? Would a wise president, moreover, begin such a huge undertaking without any effort to prepare the American people for the costs his ambitions will impose? Does generous magnanimity better serve the president’s goals at this time than churlish resentment? The very determination that led Bush to neglect his critics and to accomplish so quickly his military victory in Iraq is the enemy of the wisdom he will need to repair the political damage that will follow if no weapons of mass destruction are found there or if religious fundamentalism replaces democratic dreams once American forces leave.
With respect to the military victory in Iraq, the president got something right. But when it comes to his domestic agenda, his programs are as unwise as any can be. Missing from the way in which Bush argues on behalf of his tax cut is any sense that the prospects of future generations will be severely crippled by the fantastic sums the government will have to expend in interest payments to cover the deficits his policy seems designed to produce. No tale of fiscal woe from governors, even those of his own party, moves him. No knowledge of what has happened in history when governments have acted with fiscal irresponsibility matters to him. It is as if the actual country, its families and their lives, are secondary to his inward determination never to back down on a promise that only the extreme right wing ever recalls him making. His policies are those of a man more concerned with the strength of his political base than the strength of his country.
Under this administration, in other words, the president does not tutor the public; on the contrary, from economists to newspaper editorialists to even a couple of Republican senators, the entire country has united behind an effort to instruct the president. This is not the first time in American history that one element of the political system has patiently tried to educate the other about the rules of public finance; Alexander Hamilton relied on “The Federalist Papers” to do just that. But it surely is the first time that the tutorial originates with the taxpayers rather than the tax collectors.
President Bush’s neglect of the tutorial function of the presidency helps explain his much-noted lack of eloquence. Mispronunciations and Texas speech patterns have nothing to do with Bush’s failings in the realm of words. The president cannot speak to a deeper need unrecognized by his fellow Americans because the only need recognized by his political philosophy is self-interest narrowly understood. Fully cognizant of how ignoble his objectives would appear if stated in truthful terms, he therefore has little choice but to obfuscate, and obfuscation can never be transformed into eloquence. If the president’s speeches so often fail to move, it is because he has not offered anything worth moving for; you simply do not rise to the heights of greatness by calling for the elimination of taxes on dividends. The wealthy he wishes to reward are too interested in lining their pockets to care whether angels, better or otherwise, are watching what they do.
This president’s lack of responsibility is revealed not only by the policies he pursues, but by the way he pursues them. FDR was famous for soliciting conflicting opinions from those surrounding him so that he could choose from among them. It was not that he possessed the training in economics they lacked; on the contrary, they were the experts and he was the politician. But he did possess the wisdom that experts often lack. And he relied upon that wisdom for his famous flexibility; Roosevelt was quite capable of shifting his positions as new advice came in without ever paying a price at the polls.
Although Bush receives conflicting advice on foreign policy — the disagreements between the departments of State and Defense in this administration are as public as any disagreements among FDR’s advisors — no such squabbles are permitted on domestic policy. By surrounding himself only with people who share the same point of view, Bush all but acknowledges that in this area he has no instincts — and thus, no wisdom — of his own to offer. If the country ever needed evidence that deep tax cuts are fiscally untenable, the unbending convictions offered to justify them are evidence enough. Economies are governed by real-world actions, not principles drawn from textbooks. Any administration that meets all criticism with citations from the latter and a blind eye toward the former lacks not only wisdom, but the intelligence needed to know where to find it.
The experience of Bush suggests that we need to be careful in selecting the virtues that make for great presidential leadership. Setting a course requires courage and determination, the virtues so admired by Kennedy, and Bush surely has the one and has shown the other. But ensuring that the course is a good one demands virtues of another sort. There is the virtue of discernment, the ability to weigh competing policies and select the ones that best correspond with America’s values and long-term goals. There is the virtue of humility, manifested in a willingness to admit mistakes and redraw plans. And there is the virtue of confidence, the ability to treat those who disagree with you with respect.
Without those qualities, firmness becomes intransigence, initiative morphs into arrogance, and conviction is transformed into dogma. Bush’s ability to stay on message, so vital to getting him where he is, is the major obstacle in his path of going any further. Should he persist in the methods of governance he has chosen — and there is no reason to believe that he will not — Millard Fillmore beckons, not Abraham Lincoln.
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
George W. Bush and Barack Obama (Credit: Reuters/Larry Downing) 
(Credit: Reuters/Win McNamee) 
(Credit: Reuters/Jim Young) 
