Thousands of torches rise and fall in unison as a chorus of voices roars, “We are with you, Bashar.” The throng of young people heaves toward Umayyad Square in downtown Damascus, in a strictly choreographed ritual meant to show the world how much they love Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. Behind them, a water fountain flashes with the green, red and white of the Syrian flag, while a sultry female voice sings from a loud speaker: “We love you. We want you.” The scene is intended to look like Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, or neighboring Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution. But with the eerily synchronized torches, martial music and coordinated rows of young people — all sporting identical white T-shirts bearing a smiling portrait of Assad — it seems more like North Korea.
This should not be a good time for Assad, who has just overwhelmingly “won” reelection. The soft-spoken, 42-year-old ophthalmologist — who has ruled Syria since his father’s death in 2000 — has been rebuked by a U.N. investigation into the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005, which implicated top members of the Syrian regime. And Syria remains under sanctions and largely isolated by the West, its economy in trouble.
But Assad’s power has been growing for an ever more apparent reason: Iraq. A few years ago, his regime was reluctantly talking about economic and political reforms. Today, its dominant message is about security and stability, which resonates powerfully with a population that has witnessed bloody chaos to the east and watched more than a million Iraqi refugees flee across Syria’s borders. Syrians who might once have wanted regime change themselves now fear ending up like Iraq; the promise of democracy isn’t worth the cost. The Baathist dictatorship offers security — even as it cracks down on democracy activists and stifles the few small freedoms Syrians gained since Assad rose to power. By getting rid of one dictator, Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration has strengthened another one right next door.
“What happened in Iraq makes the entire region afraid,” says Haitham Maleh, 75, a prominent dissident lawyer, former judge and former president of the Committee for Human Rights in Syria. “People don’t want to risk foreign occupation, chaos and sectarian bloodshed. And the Syrian regime is playing on those fears. It was natural for the regime to be strengthened by the catastrophe in Iraq.”
And what better way for a dictator to prove his strength than by organizing two weeks of mass rallies that culminate in an uncontested election? The May 27 referendum to grant Assad another seven years as president, in Baathist style, featured only his name on the ballot, with the choices yes or no. He garnered 97 percent of the vote. In the weeks prior to the referendum, the regime sentenced six dissident lawyers, writers and human rights activists to multiyear prison terms for speaking out against the government.
One young human rights activist, whom I’ve met frequently during my visits to Syria over the past three years, was the most dejected and depressed I’ve ever seen him. His civil society group has been suspended, he has been interrogated a half dozen times, he’s barred from leaving Syria, and, like many others, he spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of more persecution. “You can no longer engage average people about democracy and human rights. They see what’s happening in Iraq and they panic,” he says, sipping an espresso at a Damascus cafe where he spends a lot of his time these days. “They don’t want to hear about democracy.”
Since Saddam Hussein’s ouster, the Bush administration has accused Syria of sheltering Iraqi Baathist leaders and allowing Islamic militants to slip into Iraq to fight U.S. forces. But despite its harsh rhetoric, by now the administration understands that it needs Assad’s help to stabilize Iraq. On May 3, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem during a regional conference on Iraq in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, the highest-level meeting between the U.S. and Syria in two years. Even though nothing substantive was accomplished, Assad’s regime is using the half-hour meeting as proof that it can force Washington to negotiate. “The Americans are calling now, begging Syria to help in Iraq. This is how the regime sees it,” says Marwan Kabalan, a political science professor at Damascus University. The meeting “has been used in Syria as a sign of huge success,” says another political writer, speaking on condition of anonymity. “It points to a change in Bush administration policy toward Syria.”
But after being ostracized by Washington and shunned by some European nations, Assad’s regime renewed its partnership with Iran, which helped prop up the Syrian economy with cheap oil. Syria also strengthened its ties with militants like Hezbollah, Hamas and the renegade Iraqi Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The Syrian regime has allowed Hamas political leaders to operate out of Damascus for years, and the group’s election victory last year in the Palestinian territories bolstered Assad in his confrontation with the United States. The Syrians were also emboldened after last summer’s war between Israel and Hezbollah: The Shiite militia’s strong military performance against Israel reflected some of the glory back in Assad’s direction, as Syria has long been a conduit for weapons from Iran to Hezbollah.
Assad is increasingly confident he can influence events in the Palestinian territories, Lebanon — and Iraq. “Assad plans to sit tight and wait until the Bush administration is out of office,” says one Syrian political analyst with ties to the regime. “He knows that the U.S. can’t achieve stability in Iraq without his help. But just to be safe, he is holding other cards.”
Because of the Iraq war, Assad today has another powerful card he can play: Iraqi refugees. Syria is now home to the largest population of them, with an estimated 1.2 to 1.5 million. Assad can claim to the wider Arab world that he hasn’t shut the doors on Iraqis (as Jordan and Egypt mostly have) and thereby keep up the pretense that Syria is the “beating heart of Arab nationalism” that doesn’t turn its back on fellow Arabs.
If Assad were to change course, expelling refugees en masse, or denying more of them entry, it could create further problems for the U.S. and the Iraqi governments. “Everyone is begging Syria not to close its border to the Iraqis,” says a European diplomat in Damascus. “If Syria closes the border, we will have people setting up tents and living in refugee camps near the border. We would have an enormous humanitarian and security crisis.”
Syria’s role as a regional spoiler goes back to the 1970s, when Hafez Assad took power in a military coup. The elder Assad perfected the art of shifting alliances, stirring up trouble and keeping his enemies mired in costly battles, as he did with Israel during its occupation of south Lebanon from 1982 to 2000. When the younger Assad first rose to power, many dismissed him as incapable of playing the regional game as well as his father. But over the past seven years Bashar Assad has honed his skills — and withstood international pressure and isolation.
“He showed that he could outlast all the leaders who were trying to bring him down: Blair, Chirac, Bush,” says a Syrian analyst and writer who spent more than 10 years in prison during the elder Assad’s rule. “They did their best to bring him down, but they failed. So he grew more confident and authoritarian.”
When Assad became president in 2000, he promised change. There was a short period of openness, known as the “Damascus Spring.” The freedoms gained were small: modest gatherings in people’s homes to discuss democracy and reform; writings and speeches critical of corruption and government failures (although never directly critical of Assad or his family); gatherings of small civil society groups, not licensed by the government, that focused on human rights and women’s issues. But most of these meager freedoms have been rolled back since 2001.
The crackdown continues, and has included activists, lawyers and writers who once thought that they were safe on account of their high profiles or connections to the West. But the United States and Europe couldn’t — or wouldn’t — protect them. A week after the Rice-Moallem meeting, a Syrian court sentenced Kamal Labwani, a physician and leader of a pro-democracy group, to 12 years in prison for “contacting a foreign country” and “encouraging attacks against Syria.” In November 2005, Labwani was arrested at Damascus Airport after returning from Washington, where he had met with Bush officials. His sentence, handed down on May 10, is the harshest imposed on a dissident since Assad came to power. Labwani’s case was meant to send a message to opposition members: Don’t deal with the United States or Europe.
In recent weeks, five other activists have been convicted and sentenced. On April 24, Anwar al-Bunni, a human rights lawyer who had criticized torture in Syrian prisons, was slapped with a five-year prison sentence on charges of contacting a foreign country and “spreading false news” that could “weaken national morale.” Al-Bunni was among 500 Syrian and Lebanese intellectuals who signed the “Beirut-Damascus Declaration,” which urged Syria to improve its relations with Lebanon. On May 14, Michel Kilo, another signatory and one of Syria’s most prominent writers and democracy campaigners, was sentenced to three years in prison for “spreading false news” and “inciting sectarian sentiments.” Three other activists who had also signed the declaration were sentenced to prison.
The U.S. and several European governments have called on Assad to stop persecuting dissidents and to release political prisoners. But to many in the Syrian opposition, the West’s protestations ring hollow. “Assad’s regime knows the Bush administration doesn’t really care about democracy and civil society in Syria. They are using it as a pressure tactic to further U.S. policy interests,” says the dissident writer imprisoned for more than a decade. “We know this, and the regime knows it.”
Despite the danger, a few Syrians are still willing to speak out openly against the regime. Haitham Maleh, the septuagenarian dissident lawyer, works out of an office in a rundown Ottoman building in downtown Damascus. Despite being lined with flower-print couches, the greeting room is depressing, with fluorescent lights and a ceiling fan that makes a whirring sound like an engine. On one wall hangs a certificate presented to Maleh last year by the Dutch foreign minister: the Geuzen Medal, named after the 16th-century Dutch dissidents who fought against Spanish domination. Maleh couldn’t attend the ceremony — the regime has banned him from traveling — but he hands out reproductions of the certificate on a postcard bearing his motto, “Together for Freedom and Legitimacy.”
When I visited, he was hosting two Egyptian human rights activists who had come to Damascus to monitor the trials of Syrian dissidents. At the end of the meeting, they asked to have a picture taken with Maleh, who obliged happily.
“In our meetings with Syrian colleagues, everyone introduces themselves with their name, where they’re from, and how many years they spent in prison,” joked one of the Egyptian visitors. “We’re beginning to wonder if any of you have not been to prison.” Maleh smiled behind his thick glasses and shook his head: He spent seven years in prison during Hafez Assad’s reign.
“It is not possible for a dictatorship to reform itself. This is a dream,” Maleh told me after the Egyptians left, his hands fluttering as he talked. He knew that his words could be crossing one of the constantly shifting “red lines” of the regime, so he added mischievously, “The worst thing about me is my mouth. I can’t shut up!”
Maleh doesn’t have much hope for the future. “I don’t think we are ready for a change. The opposition is weak, the regime is strong and the regional situation is working in its favor. Most of the potential opposition leaders have been killed or forced into exile,” he said. And along with them, so has hope for democratic reform or progress.
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) 
