On Monday, a congressional panel released a draft report confirming extensive contact between disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and the White House.
When the Abramoff scandal exploded, President Bush's spokespeople said there had been only very limited contact between Abramoff and the White House. New documents from the White House and other federal agencies show 70 previously undisclosed contacts between Abramoff or his associates and White House officials, according to the draft report, which was produced by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Those documents confirm an additional 84 contacts the committee had already figured out by combing through Abramoff's billing records back in 2006. Those billing records had showed yet 401 more White House contacts that this new report does not corroborate (or rule out).
The committee didn't uncover any evidence that Abramoff lobbied Bush personally. Bush said in early 2006 that he didn't know the man. The committee uncovered six photographs of Bush and Abramoff together: at a meeting in the Executive Office Building, at three political receptions, at one political dinner and at a White House Chanukah party.
Two pages from the draft report's executive summary follow. The full text of the report can be read here.
In the long view, how the economy is doing might matter more in shaping public opinion -- and hence, elections -- than everything else put together. Unsurprisingly, conservatives have been nattering for a while about how President Obama ought to shoulder the blame for the economy’s performance on his watch. But Republicans seem to be getting nowhere with that argument, according to a new survey from an unlikely source.
According to a Fox News poll out today, 58 percent of registered voters think President Bush is more responsible for the state of the economy; only 18 percent say President Obama is more responsible. Even Republicans only blame Obama over Bush by a feeble six-point margin, 35 to 29.
Obviously, the economy has taken a toll on the president’s popularity. Unemployment, which typically lingers even after economic growth has begun again, is likely to stick around and continue to inflict some political pain on the president and his party. But this news, along with related recent items suggests that the Obama administration might still have more room to maneuver than pundits have been saying.
Yesterday we found out that the economy was growing again, with GDP up by 3.5 percent in the third quarter after having been on the downswing for months. Clearly, it would have been hard to ride out that decline politically, and reach the beginning of a turnaround, without the public opinion latitude that today’s poll implies. Now the president is nicely positioned to scoop up the credit for a recovery while the public continues to blame his predecessor for the original problem.
While the economic crisis continues to overshadow other topics, world politics is undergoing rapid and dramatic changes. In areas from national security policy to trade, the Obama administration has repudiated Bush-era precedents significantly, if not rapidly enough for some critics on the left. The pressures on the administration to continue in the path followed by U.S. administrations since the fall of the Berlin Wall are intense, particularly in light of the victory of the hard-liners in Iran and new revelations about Iran's nuclear program. Even so, President Obama in partnership with other world leaders has a genuine opportunity to bring the post-Cold War era to a definitive end and to preside over the greatest reorganization of global politics since the end of World War II.
During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt hoped that the postwar world could be policed by a great power concert or alliance, made up initially of the U.S., Britain and the Soviet Union, along with Nationalist China. Corresponding to FDR's concert-of-power security system would be new global economic institutions that would go beyond setting rules to promoting Keynesian demand management on a global scale in the interest of sustained and shared global growth.
During the Cold War, the U.S. abandoned those plans and improvised a strategy of U.S. hegemony or primacy. America's Cold War hegemony strategy rested on two pillars: dual containment and unilateral free trade. Dual containment meant that the U.S. contained both the Soviet Union and communist China and its conquered, demilitarized allies West Germany and Japan, which could not be allowed to reemerge as independent military powers rather than U.S. satellites. To keep West Germany and Japan as satisfied client-states, the U.S. promised not only to protect their vital security interests but also to practice unilateral free trade, opening its markets to their exports. Throughout the Cold War and beyond, the U.S. turned a blind eye to the aggressive trade policies of its allies, particularly Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and other Asian client-states. They were allowed to protect their domestic markets and subsidize their industries, while enjoying access to American consumers. For half a century the strategic elite in both parties has been willing to sacrifice U.S. industries in order to bribe the other major industrial countries into staying within the U.S. alliance system.
When the Cold War ended, the U.S. could have promoted a version of the FDR-Keynes world order: a great-power concert and international macroeconomic coordination in the interest of sustainable growth. Instead, more out of inertia than by design, the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations sought to keep a version of the Cold War system going indefinitely. Germany, now reunited, and Japan were still U.S. client-states, while Russia and China, though no longer Marxist-Leninist, were still treated as actual or potential threats. The collapse of Soviet power allowed the U.S. to add the Middle East to Europe and East Asia as one of its hegemonic spheres of influence.
Like America's security strategy, America's post-Cold War economic strategy recycled the Cold War policy of unilateral market access. Just as Japan and West Germany had been told to make cars, not Zeros and Panzers, so China was invited to put its energies into producing for the U.S. market instead of building up a rival military machine.
In his 2002 West Point address, George W. Bush made the bargain explicit: "Competition between great nations is inevitable, but armed conflict in our world is not ... America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge ... making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace."
Defenders of U.S. hegemony, a group that includes most of the members of the Democratic as well as Republican foreign policy elites, argue that American primacy is necessary to avert what I think of as the Two Spirals -- the spiral of arms races and the spiral of protectionism. According to what is called "hegemonic stability theory," both world peace and world trade depend on a single overwhelmingly powerful country that provides other nations with the public goods of security, market access and a global reserve currency. If the U.S. were unwilling to sacrifice its soldiers and treasure on behalf of the interests of other nations as well as its own, then the other great powers -- in particular, Germany and Russia in Europe and Japan and China in Asia -- would arm themselves to defend their interests, and mutual suspicion might lead to arms races and regional or global war. And if the U.S. were not willing to sacrifice its own industries to export-oriented countries, other nations might abandon the idea of a global economy and the scramble to lock up markets and raw materials might also lead to regional or global war. The geopolitical parade of horribles invoked by America's foreign-policy establishment always leads back to the same grand marshal -- the next world war, Dubyah Dubyah Three.
Needless to say, this is an extremely pessimistic, if self-serving, view of the world -- only American might and intervention everywhere keep the world from going to hell again the way it did in the 1930s. The hegemonic stability theory suggests that in the interests of global peace and prosperity the U.S. must permanently contain all other great powers, directly or indirectly. By means of bases in Germany, the U.S. prevents Germany from reemerging as a hostile power, even as it contains Russia. By means of bases in Japan, the U.S. prevents Japan from reemerging as a hostile power, even as it contains China. And now by means of bases in Iraq, the U.S. prevents Iraq from reemerging as a hostile power, even as it contains Iran.
The Pax Americana strategy requires its supporters to exaggerate the power and malevolence of the designated enemies of the Pax Americana: Russia, China and Iran. The exaggeration of threats is accomplished in two ways. First, defensive military measures that these nations undertake to deter U.S. attack -- Russia's attempt to intimidate Georgia, China's development of "anti-access" capabilities to reduce the ability of the U.S. to defeat it in a war over Taiwan, and Iran's not-so-disguised attempt to obtain nuclear weapons to deter conventional U.S. or Israeli attacks -- are portrayed by American policymakers and pundits as aggressive. According to this Orwellian double standard, U.S./NATO encirclement of post-Soviet Russia on its borders is alleged to be "defensive," while feeble protest gestures like Russian military flights to Cuba or the bullying of Ukraine are defined as "aggressive" actions that threaten a new Cold War. The knight with the best sword naturally wants to ban the use of shields and armor.
In addition to defining the defensive reactions of Russia, China and Iran to U.S. provocations in their own neighborhoods as diabolical schemes for regional or global conquest, some champions of the Pax Americana have pretended to identify a new global ideological struggle against an "axis of autocracy" or "authoritarian capitalism." In reality, of course, three countries could hardly be less similar to one another than Russia, China and Iran, which seek to benefit from the existing world system on their own terms rather than overthrow it.
In my experience, most members of the U.S. foreign policy elite sincerely believe that the alternative to perpetual U.S. world domination is chaos and war. The benefit to members of the elite is not so much economic as psychic -- it's nice to be a top dog in the top-dog pack. But even though our leaders tend to be persuaded that American hegemony averts the twin spirals of great-power conflict and trade war, they find it challenging to explain the strategy to the public. Consider the following imaginary dialogue about U.S. national security:
Citizen: "Why did our young men and women have to die in Iraq?"
Statesman: "Saddam's Iraq was not a threat to the U.S. itself, but it threatened U.S. hegemony in the Persian Gulf, which makes possible the American provision of energy security to Japan and Germany, which absent that American security guarantee might rearm and trigger regional and global arms races that could lead to World War III."
Citizen: "Huh?"
Consider, as well, this imaginary dialogue about U.S. trade policy:
Citizen: "When other countries try to wipe out our industries by cheating, why can't we retaliate?"
Statesman: "U.S. retaliation against foreign mercantilism, even if it were justified on the merits, might lead the cheating countries to cheat even more, thereby triggering a spiral of economic warfare that might cause a new Depression, which in turn might lead to World War III."
Citizen: "Huh?"
As the hypothetical citizen's response suggests, an honest explanation of the real rationale for U.S. grand strategy -- sacrificing American soldiers and American industries in order to persuade Germany, Japan and now China to specialize as non-threatening civilian powers -- would be met with incredulity and anger by many if not most Americans. Our bipartisan foreign policy establishment therefore finds it necessary to come up with false answers to the questions of the American people.
Citizen: "Why did our young men and women have to die in Iraq?"
Statesman: "To prevent a mad dictator from bombing you and your family at home, either by giving bombs to terrorists or sending them on missiles across the oceans."
Citizen: "When other countries try to wipe out our industries by cheating, why can't we retaliate?"
Statesman: "Because all economists agree that free trade always benefits both sides and that protectionism would lead to unemployment and poverty for you and your family. If you question those assertions, you are an ignorant Neanderthal."
Even supporters of the hegemony strategy admit that it can't be described candidly to the public, for fear of a public backlash. In his book "The Case for Goliath," Michael Mandelbaum concedes that Americans "have never been asked to ratify their country's status as the principal supplier of international public goods, and if they were asked explicitly to do so, they would undoubtedly ask in turn whether the United States ought to contribute as much to providing them, and other countries as little, as was the case in the first decade of the 21st century." Mandelbaum concludes with the condescending statement that "the American role in the world may depend in part on Americans not scrutinizing it too closely."
It is too early to tell whether there is a real chance in Washington for an alternative to the Cold War Plus strategy of perpetually containing Russia and Germany, China and Japan, and Iran and Iraq that Democrats and Republicans alike have pursued since the Berlin Wall fell. But there are some encouraging signs.
The G-20 looks very much like a nascent concert of power. Its inclusive membership and flexibility might make it a de facto replacement for the rigid, outdated U.N. Security Council in the security realm. The coordination of their stimulus packages by the G-20 nations in the past year was a remarkable exercise in Keynesianism on a global scale. And the Obama administration, unlike its predecessor, has made it clear that the U.S. can no longer be the market of first resort for China and other export-oriented countries. The administration's tariffs on Chinese tires are a signal that the offer of unilateral market access is being reconsidered by the U.S.
While the brutality and militancy of the Iranian regime may foreclose a rapprochement, the Obama administration has backed away somewhat from the policy of encircling Russia by canceling NATO missile defense systems in Poland, whose purpose was to intimidate Russia, not Iran. And following a period of low-key military rivalries among the U.S. and China, Obama seems more interested in partnering with the world's most populous country than in provoking it into a needless arms race.
But there was a chance to move from confrontation to concert back in the early 1990s, as well. Let's hope that President Obama, unlike Presidents Clinton and Bush, will push for a genuine new world order rather than perpetual containment and perpetual cold war.
What's the first lesson to be learned from Matt Latimer's amazing account in GQ of the Bush White House during the height of the financial crisis?
Never trust a speechwriter not to spill the dirt. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, and writers gotta write. You'd think that a man who says that he had always "dreamed of heading to Washington to work for a conservative president and help usher in another Reagan Revolution," would be loyal to the cause. But with the kind of material Latimer was sitting on, who can blame him for grabbing a book deal and telling all?
My colleague Alex Koppelman cherry-picked some of the more politically explosive quotes grabbed by the New York Daily News yesterday. But the GQ excerpts are even more revealing for the picture drawn of a White House that had no clue what to do about the economy, and did not even remotely understand what its own treasury secretary was proposing to do to fix the mess.
We wrote speeches nearly every time the stock market flipped. Meanwhile, the White House seemed to have ceded all of its authority on economic matters to the secretive secretary of the treasury. The president was clearly frustrated with this. I was told that at one Oval Office meeting, he got very animated and exclaimed to Paulson, "You've got to tell me what you're doing!" (In the weeks that followed, Paulson changed his spending priorities two or three times. Incredibly, he'd been given the power to do with that money virtually anything he pleased. All thanks to a president who didn't understand his proposal and a Congress that didn't stop to think.)
OK, much as it pains me, I can forgive the president for not understanding what Paulson was doing. No one understood what Paulson was doing, including the secretary himself, as was clear from his testimony to Congress. But at least Paulson was doing something. The global economy was crashing and he felt a responsibility to act. But the White House, in general, was helpless: An imminent depression simply did not fit into the ideological parameters of an administration that had hitherto determined economic policy according to Karl Rove's political calculations. The brutal fact is that an administration that prided itself on not being reality-based had no idea what to do when reality could not be ignored.
At one point, Bush, faced with congressional resistance to the TARP bailout plan, cries out in rage to his assembled aides, "Then why the hell did I support it if I didn't believe it would pass?" But no one had an answer for the president, because there was no good answer.
Perhaps Matt Latimer's most astounding achievement is to make one feel a little sorry for Bush. The poor man was so clearly in the wrong place at the wrong time -- and history will never let him or us forget it.
Finally, this might be one self-serving tell-all account that is actually worth buying, if only because Latimer displays a cutting dry humor that one does not expect from your typical Republican apparatchik.
We were chatting casually when the president's favorite speechwriter came in. Chris Michel was in his midtwenties, with sandy blond hair. He was usually chipper, though at the moment his face was so pale he must have been the whitest man in the Bush White House. And that was no small accomplishment.
Andy Card, who served as White House chief of staff during President George W. Bush’s first term, has worked as a garbage collector, and at a McDonald’s. Even when he was ostensibly the manager of the Bush administration, he thought of himself as a service worker; in one infamous story, the president once supposedly sent him for a cheeseburger. A former colleague anonymously told the Washington Post, "[T]he president can walk on Andy a little bit. The president talks to him like he's hired help more than he would someone like Cheney or Rumsfeld.”
But that’s okay, Card would reply. He expects the work. That’s why he signed up for the job, he'd say. “The president has every right to be selfish with my time. That means there are sacrifices I need to make for the president to have what he needs. And those sacrifices usually impact my wife or my kids or my grandkids, or my siblings or my friends. And that is a burden I carry.”
This guy, he lives to take one for the team. Which is, perhaps, why he’s considering a run for the late Sen. Ted Kennedy's open Senate seat. Card was, decades ago, a Massachusetts state legislator and acandidate for governor. Now that there’s an open seat in the state for the first time in forever, he may take a stab at it. “I would very much like to run,” he said recently.
Card would bring one strength to the table -- he can raise a lot of money thanks to his connections in Washington. But frankly, it’s hard to imagine a supposedly viable, mainstream candidate as downright unelectable as Card would be in this race. He’d be seeking federal, rather than state office, so he’d have to run on his record and stances on national, partisan issues, rather than his technocratic abilities. (Because his record there is excellent.) And who would be easier to link the unpopularity and excesses of the Bush administration -- especially the pre-2006, totally unreconstructed Bush administration -- than the man who was literally in charge of it?
“I'm not George W. Bush. I respect him. I respect how he made his tough decisions. I was greatly honored to serve at the White House," he says. "But if I run, I would be running as Andy Card."
He can repeat that all he wants, but this would all be happening, in case you’ve forgotten, in the most Democratic state in the country, in the long shadow of one of the most iconic liberals of the past 50 years. Imagine if Rahm Emanuel decided to run for Sarah Palin’s old job and you get close to grasping the odds of Card's victory.
The president has changed, and so has the vacation spot, but Cindy Sheehan hasn't. Little wonder, then, that the veteran Bush protester isn't giving up her practice of following the president on his summer vacation.
Sheehan showed up Thursday at Martha’s Vineyard, where the Obama family is currently staying.
“Even though the facade has changed in Washington, D.C., the policies are still the same,” Sheehan said. Objecting to the slow pace of the Iraq withdrawal and the escalation in Afghanistan, she added, “We have to realize it is not the president who is power, it is not the party that is in power, it is the system that stays the same, no matter who is in charge.”
Sheehan's not likely to get nearly as much coverage this time around; indeed, the whole antiwar movement has stalled since President Obama was inaugurated. It's true that much of the country's posture overseas appears the same now as it was under President Bush, but the difference in tone and thrust -- not to mention the presence of an anti-Iraq war Democrat in the White House and the economic crisis -- has dimmed the fervor of the opposition to the war. And Sheehan's actions over the years have caused her to slip further from the mainstream.
So yet another Bush administration Cabinet-level official has petitioned to get his conscience and reputation back. This time, it's Tom Ridge, former secretary of Homeland Security. The one-time Pennsylvania governor admits in a new book that he felt political pressure from the White House to issue bogus terror alerts before the 2004 presidential election.
Big surprise, right? By 2004, anybody who didn't grasp that crying wolf was the Bush/Cheney administration's basic game plan was probably also astonished last January when the "Texas cowboy" who's never been seen on a horse chose a Dallas mansion over his beloved ranch. Golly, who's doing all that brush-cutting?
Indeed, the most fascinating aspect of the Ridge revelations has been a flame war that's broken out between establishment Washington pundits and less-reverent bloggers. The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder started it by observing in smug inside-the-Beltway fashion that he and like-minded colleagues were actually right to be wrong about fake terror warnings.
People who smelled a rat, see, "based their assumption on gut hatred for President Bush, and not on any evaluation of the raw intelligence." Whereas, sober-sided thinkers like him credited the Bush administration's good intentions.
Confronted with ample contemporaneous evidence of Bush administration flimflams by Salon's Glenn Greenwald and the scholarly Marcy Wheeler of Firedoglake.com, Ambinder apologized for the "gut hatred" part. But he alibied: "Information asymmetry is always going to exist, and, living as we do in a democratic system, most journalists are going to give the government the benefit of some doubt, even having learned lessons about giving the government that benefit."
Yeah, sure. Purely with regard to terrorism and national security, by 2004, Bush/Cheney had already gotten caught deceiving the public about having "no warning" before the 9/11 attacks, not to mention about Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. If skepticism was still inappropriate, would it ever be warranted?
Yet people who found the timing of terror alerts suspect, such as then-Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, were dismissed as crackpots.
It was much the same after former Secretary of State Colin Powell confessed misgivings about his 2003 U.N. speech that stampeded the United States into an ill-advised war in Iraq. How could any serious American journalist possibly have seen that coming? Or, as your humble, obedient servant here wrote at the time, "War fever, catch it."
This column summarized "mainstream" opinion on Feb. 12, 2003: "The allegedly 'liberal' Washington Post responded editorially with a one-word headline, 'Irrefutable.' Columnist Mary McGrory announced that despite being almost a pacifist ... 'I'm Persuaded,' mostly by what she described as Powell's unimpeachable integrity. Joining the stampede was New York Times columnist Bill Keller, who noted that 'The I-Can't-Believe-I'm-a-Hawk Club includes op-ed regulars at this newspaper and the Washington Post, the editors of the New Yorker, the New Republic and Slate, columnists in Time and Newsweek."
And yet it was all rubbish, exactly as some of us raised on intelligence hoaxes suspected. Evidence of what I called "chicanery and fraud" in the U.S. case against Iraq was obvious to anybody unafraid to see it.
But here's the big thing about "mainstream" journalism and what Ambinder calls "information asymmetry." Upton Sinclair said it best: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Furthermore, the safest place during a stampede is the middle of the herd. Establishment journalists with mortgages, car payments and children in private schools saw what happened to the Dixie Chicks. Why couldn't it happen to them? (The job I got fired from that month wasn't paying my bills.) The United States had been attacked. Feelings ran high, especially in New York and Washington.
What did it matter if we killed the wrong Arabs, so long as Arabs were being killed? In Thomas Friedman's immortal words, "We hit Iraq because we could. That's the real truth."
Under oath to a Senate committee, Condi Rice told a barefaced whopper about the Aug. 6, 2001, CIA terrorism briefing that Bush blew off. Media insiders pretended not to notice. Bush made a slapstick skit of searching under his Oval Office desk for Iraqi WMDs. The press laughed on cue. He claimed that Saddam Hussein forced him to invade Iraq by expelling U.N. arms inspectors. (In reality, Bush made them leave.) Pundits praised his charm.
Long under siege for "liberal bias," media careerists now find themselves confronted with people they see as passionate amateurs. True, fearless scrappers like my friend Joe Conason have always been around, and somebody like Paul Krugman -- a world-class economist who doesn't care what, say, MSNBC's Chris Matthews thinks of him -- can be very annoying.
But what's really driving these jokers up the wall is economic and intellectual competition from the Internet: people with first-class minds and a passion for truth that some of them can barely remember.
© 2009 Gene Lyons. Distributed by Newspaper Enterprise Association
Breast panels
The Obamas, the Date Night, & the Public Purse
Andy Rooney and Other American Foreign Policy Gurus
Scary Stuff that Happened on Halloween
Obama lifts HIV Travel and Immigration Ban