And in case you were wondering, there is no question who among us are the best, most lawful, moral, ethical, considerate, and judicious people: the officials of our national security state.  Trust them implicitly.  They will never give you a bum steer.

You may be paying a fortune to maintain their world — the 30,000 people hired to listen in on conversations and other communications in this country, the 230,000 employees of the Department of Homeland Security, the 854,000 people with top-secret clearances, the 4.2 million with security clearances of one sort or another, the $2 billion, one-million-square-foot data center that the National Security Agency is constructing in Utah, the gigantic $1.8 billion headquarters the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency recently built for its 16,000 employees in the Washington area — but there’s a good reason.  That’s what’s needed to make truly elevated, surgically precise decisions about life and death in the service of protecting American interests on this dangerous globe of ours.

And in case you wondered just how we know all this, we have it on the best authority: the people who are doing it — the only ones, given the obvious need for secrecy, capable of judging just how moral, elevated, and remarkable their own work is.  They deserve our congratulations, but if we’re too distracted to give it to them, they are quite capable of high-fiving themselves.

We’re talking, in particular, about the use by the Obama administration (and the Bush administration before it) of a growing armada of remotely piloted planes, a.k.a. drones, grimly labeled Predators and Reapers, to fight a nameless, almost planet-wide war (formerly known as the Global War on Terror).  Its purpose: to destroy al-Qaeda-in-wherever and all its wannabes and look-alikes, the Taliban, and anyone affiliated or associated with any of the above, or just about anyone else we believe might imminently endanger our “interests.”

In the service of this war, in the midst of a perpetual state of war and of wartime, every act committed by these leaders is, it turns out, absolutely, totally, and completely legal.  We have their say-so for that, and they have the documents to prove it, largely because the best and most elevated legal minds among them have produced that documentation in secret. (Of course, they dare not show it to the rest of us, lest lives be endangered.)

By their own account, they have, in fact, been covertly exceptional, moral, and legal for more than a decade (minus, of course, the odd black site and torture chamber) — so covertly exceptional, in fact, that they haven’t quite gotten the credit they deserve.  Now, they would like to make the latest version of their exceptional mission to the world known to the rest of us.  It is finally in our interest, it seems, to be a good deal better informed about America’s covert wars in a year in which the widely announced “covert” killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan is a major selling point in the president’s reelection campaign.

No one should be surprised.  There was always an “overt” lurking in the “covert” of what now passes for “covert war.”  The CIA’s global drone assassination campaign has long been a bragging point in Washington, even if it couldn’t officially be discussed directly before, say, Congress.  The covertness of our drone wars in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere really turns out to have less to do with secrecy – just about every covert drone strike is reported, sooner or later, in the media — than assuring two administrations that they could pursue their drone wars without accountability to anyone.

A Classic of Self-Congratulation

Recently, top administration officials seem to be fanning out to offer rare peeks into what’s truly on-target and exceptional about America’s drone wars. In many ways, these days, American exceptionalism is about as unexceptional as apple pie.  It has, for one thing, become the everyday language of the presidential campaign trail.  And that shouldn’t surprise us either.  After all, great powers and their leaders tend to think well of themselves.  The French had their “mission civilisatrice,” the Chinese had the “mandate of heaven,” and like all imperial powers they inevitably thought they were doing the best for themselves and others, sadly benighted, in this best of all possible worlds.

Sometimes, though, the American version of this does seem… I hate to use the word, but exceptional.  If you want to get a taste of just what this means, consider as Exhibit One a recent speech by the president’s counterterrorism “tsar,” John Brennan, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.  According to his own account, he was dispatched to the center by President Obama to provide greater openness when it comes to the administration’s secret drone wars, to respond to critics of the drones and their legality, and undoubtedly to put a smiley face on drone operations generally.

Ever since the Puritan minister John Winthrop first used the phrase in a sermon on shipboard on the way to North America, “a city upon a hill” has caught something of at least one American-style dream — a sense that this country’s fate was to be a blessed paragon for the rest of the world, an exception to every norm.  In the last century, it became “a shining city upon a hill” and was regularly cited in presidential addresses.

Whatever that “city,” that dream, was once imagined to be, it has undergone a largely unnoticed metamorphosis in the twenty-first century.  It has become — even in our dreams — an up-armored garrison encampment, just as Washington itself has become the heavily fortified bureaucratic heartland of a war state.  So when Brennan spoke, what he offered was a new version of American exceptionalism: the first “shining drone upon a hill” speech, which also qualifies as an instant classic of self-congratulation.

Never, according to him, has a country with such an advanced weapon system as the drone used it quite so judiciously, quite so — if not peacefully — at least with the sagacity and skill usually reserved for the gods.  American drone strikes, he assured his listeners, are “ethical and just,” “wise,” and “surgically precise” — exactly what you’d expect from a country he refers to, quoting the president, as the preeminent “standard bearer in the conduct of war.”

Those drone strikes, he assured his listeners, are based on staggeringly “rigorous standards” involving the individual identification of human targets. Even when visited on American citizens outside declared war zones, they are invariably “within the bounds of the law,” as you would expect of the preeminent “nation of laws.”

The strikes are never motivated by vengeance, always target someone known to us as the worst of the worst, and almost invariably avoid anyone who is even the most mediocre of the mediocre.  (Forget the fact that, as Greg Miller of the Washington Post reported, the CIA has recently received permission from the president to launch drone strikes in Yemen based only on the observed “patterns of suspicious behavior” of groups of unidentified individuals, as was already true in the Pakistani tribal borderlands.)

Yes, in such circumstances innocents do unfortunately die, even if unbelievably rarely — and for that we couldn’t be more regretful.  Such deaths, however, are in some sense salutary, since they lead to the most rigorous reviews and reassessments of, and so improvements in, our actions. “This too,” Brennan assured his audience, “is a reflection of our values as Americans.”

“I would note,” he added, “that these standards, for identifying a target and avoiding… the loss of lives of innocent civilians, exceed what is required as a matter of international law on a typical battlefield.  That’s another example of the high standards to which we hold ourselves.”

And that’s just a taste of the tone and substance of the speech given by the president’s leading counterterrorism expert, and in it he’s no outlier.  It catches something about an American sense of self at this moment.  Yes, Americans may be ever more down on the Afghan war, but like their leaders, they are high on drones.  In a FebruaryWashington Post/ABC News poll, 83 percent of respondents supported the administration’s use of drones.  Perhaps that’s not surprising either, since the drones are generally presented here as the coolest of machines, as well as cheap alternatives (in money and lives) to sending more armies onto the Eurasian mainland.

Predator Nation

In these last years, this country has pioneered the development of the most advanced killing machines on the planet for which the national security state has plans decades into the future.  Conceptually speaking, our leaders have also established their “right” to send these robot assassins into any airspace, no matter the local claims of national sovereignty, to take out those we define as evil or simply to protect American interests.  On this, Brennan couldn’t be clearer.  In the process, we have turned much of the rest of the planet into what can only be considered an American free-fire zone.

We have, in short, established a remarkably expansive set of drone-war rules for the global future.  Naturally, we trust ourselves with such rules, but there is a fly in the ointment, even as the droniacs see it.  Others far less sagacious, kindly, lawful, and good than we are do exist on this planet and they may soon have their own fleets of drones.  About 50 countries are today buying or developing such robotic aircraft, including Russia, China, and Iran, not to speak of Hezbollah in Lebanon.  And who knows what terror groups are looking into suicide drones?

As the Washington Post’s David Ignatius put it in a column about Brennan’s speech: “What if the Chinese deployed drones to protect their workers in southern Sudan against rebels who have killed them in past attacks? What if Iran used them against Kurdish separatists they regard as terrorists? What if Russia used them over Chechnya? What position would the United States take, and wouldn’t it be hypocritical if it opposed drone attacks by other nations that face ‘imminent’ or ‘significant’ threats?”

This is Washington’s global drone conundrum as seen from inside the Beltway.  These are the nightmarish scenarios even our leaders can imagine others producing with their own drones and our rules.  A deeply embedded sense of American exceptionalism, a powerful belief in their own special, self-evident goodness, however, conveniently blinds them to what they are doing right now.  Looking in the mirror, they are incapable of seeing a mask of death.  And yet our proudest export at present, other than Hollywood superhero films, may be a stone-cold robotic killer with a name straight out of a horror movie.

Consider this as well: those “shining drones” launched on campaigns of assassination and slaughter are increasingly the “face” that we choose to present to the world.  And yet it’s beyond us why it might not shine for others.

In reality, it’s not so hard to imagine what we increasingly look like to those others: a Predator nation.  And not just to the parents and relatives of the more than 160 children the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has documented as having died in U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan.  After all, war is now the only game in town.  Peace?  For the managers of our national security state, it’s neither a word worth mentioning, nor an imaginable condition.

In truth, our leaders should be in mourning for whatever peaceful dreams we ever had.  But mention drones and they light up.  They’re having a love affair with those machines.  They just can’t get enough of them or imagine their world or ours without them.

What they can’t see in the haze of exceptional self-congratulation is this: they are transforming the promise of America into a promise of death. And death, visited from the skies, isn’t precise. It isn’t glorious. It isn’t judicious. It certainly isn’t a shining vision.  It’s hell.  And it’s a global future for which, someday, no one will thank us.

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.

I don’t mean to downplay the importance of having the president support marriage equality. It’s a decisive blow in the culture war. For years, the National Organization for Marriage, which opposes same-sex marriage, has been able to deflect criticism by pointing out that Obama shared its views.

“Four years ago in California, Prop. 8 supporters had a flyer that they passed out saying Obama opposed same-sex marriage,” says John Lewis, legal director for Equality USA, a gay-rights group. “They used his equivocation quite effectively against us. They can’t do that anymore.”

But there are key ways in which Obama can pay this forward. A few weeks ago, the president angered many in the gay-rights community by refusing to sign an executive order banning government contractors from discriminating against gay people. In most of the country, your employer can still fire you because of your sexual orientation. The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) continues to prevent the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages performed in the states, which among other things means same-sex partners who aren’t U.S. citizens face deportation. The president’s announcement yesterday, while a step forward, is hardly the end of the road.

Most immediately, say gay-rights advocates, the president should use his platform to oppose proposed bans on same-sex marriage in Minnesota, Maryland and Washington state, as well as support a ballot initiative in Maine that would grant same-sex couples marriage rights (last year, the state’s gay-marriage law was overridden by a referendum).

“I hope he speaks out on the ballot measures,” says Marc Solomon, national campaign director for Freedom to Marry. “We want the president to speak out forcefully on each of [these pieces of legislation], and I think he will.”

The president can also champion other important pieces of legislation, among them the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would make discrimination against gay people in employment and housing illegal, and the DOMA repeal currently struggling in the House of Representatives.

“The repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ did not affirmatively put into law protections against discrimination,” Lewis says.

In the same way Obama could sign an executive order preventing government contractors from discriminating against gay people, he could amend federal policy to protect gay and lesbian service members from discrimination.

Perhaps the most significant way the Obama administration can make things better for gay people is to stop enforcing DOMA. It has plenty of cover to do so. Last year, the Department of Justice said it would no longer defend the law against the numerous challenges it faced in court, which has already been ruled as unconstitutional by two separate federal courts. It can take a similar position when it comes to putting it in place. Earlier this year, and after a lot of legal wrangling, the administration finally allowed Karen Golinsky, a federal lawyer, to add her wife to her Blue Cross/Blue Shield health plan. But the decision was a one-off, and doesn’t allow other federal employees the same benefits. While the Obama administration would need legislative approval for other things — like recognizing same-sex couples for tax purposes — extending health benefits to all federal workers is one concrete way it can show its support for gay people.

This election, social issues will take a backseat to concerns over the economy, which might be a good thing for gay-rights supporters. It allows the president to make to make inroads on gay rights without the maelstrom of controversy that might erupt were conservatives not busy trying to put us back on the gold standard or firing federal workers. In other words, Obama has plenty of room left to evolve.

It’s no accident that the president’s change of heart happened to make for a perfect sound bite. Nearly as fast as Barack Obama, leader of the free world, could utter the words “Same-sex couples should be able to get married,” to ABC News correspondent Robin Roberts, @barackobama — the president’s not-nearly-as-popular-as@JustinBieber Twitter account — was announcing “Same-sex couples should be able to get married.” As of Thursday morning, it had been retweeted over 56,000 times and counting.

And just like that, what had been a fuzzy campaign issue for Obama just a week ago became a defiant stance – and an easily forwarded post. The president’s Twitter and Facebook accounts wasted no time issuing a photo of Obama with his statement, under the heading, “history.” The campaign’s main page itself immediately splashed up the quote, along with the ABC News clip and the invitation to “stand up with the president.” And the campaign’s colorful, friendly-looking poster stating that “Every single American/Gay Straight Lesbian Bisexual Transgender/Deserves to be treated equally in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of our society/It’s a pretty simple proposition” popped into a place of honor on the Obama Pinterest and Instagram pages.

Elections can turn on a few provocative words – from “Read my lips” to “It’s the economy, stupid” to, simply, “Hope.” But there’s never been a time when a single sentiment could be parroted across so many different platforms. The Obama campaign knows this, and has shrewdly seized upon the immediate, visceral reaction that one sentence can inspire with impressive immediacy. Watch and learn, Romney. Though we’ve yet to see how the president’s “evolved” stance will shake out into real votes in November, for now, it sure makes for a whole lot of likes and pins. Whatever happens next, Obama’s won Twitter.

That does not mean that all of the North Carolinians, for example, who voted Tuesday for an amendment outlawing same-sex marriages are homophobes. Many of them simply believe that marriage should be restricted to heterosexual couples because that’s the way marriage has traditionally been defined, and they believe that defending tradition as important. But their personal views have become irrelevant. The fact is that same-sex marriage has become a national civil rights issue, and as such, it has enormous symbolic importance. To simply stand on the sidelines and not take a position on it, as Obama tried to do until Wednesday, is to tacitly accept that gay people are second-class citizens. This narrow, legalistic approach to gay marriage only encourages bigotry and stands in the way of needed progress. It was necessary for Obama to take a risk – and take a stand.

I did not think he would do it. But he did.

Obama dislikes conflict, and he dislikes risk even more. Some of that is both understandable and justifiable. Politics is the art of the possible. You have to get elected to get anything done. And to get elected, or reelected, you have to make compromises. That is why Obama hid behind the transparently false excuse that his views on same-sex marriage were “evolving.” He wanted to avoid a hot-button issue that could potentially cost him the election.

To be sure, that was a questionable political tactic. Advocates argued that Obama faced little political risk in endorsing same-sex marriage because the social conservatives for whom this issue is crucial were not going to vote for him anyway. Moreover, they argued that the number of swing and independent voters the president would lose would be more than made up for increased turnout among his supporters.

Those arguments may be correct – but they may not be. We just don’t know. North Carolina is a swing state. It just voted to ban same-sex marriage. It is indeed possible that Obama will lose the election because he took the opposite position.

It is no secret that Obama has sorely disappointed his most ardent supporters. Throughout his first term, he has consistently refused to do anything truly politically risky. He spoke of fundamentally changing the rules and culture of Wall Street – then stood by as the same looters who destroyed the economy gamed the system. He talked up a progressive reform of healthcare – and ended up with a watered-down version of a Republican idea. He announced a bold stimulus package – then made it too small to be fully effective. He gave the best speech about the Israeli-Palestinian crisis ever given by an American president – then caved in to the Israel lobby. And so on.

But there are times when pragmatism must take a back seat to principle. And to his undying credit, Obama decided that this was one of them. He decided that it was more important for him, the leader of the United States, to stand up and defend the rights of an abused minority group, than to accept the unacceptable status quo.

We don’t know why he decided to take the risk. A cynic – or perhaps a realist – might simply say that he decided there was no risk, that most Americans would stand with him on this issue. But I prefer to think of his decision as being at least in part shaped by the two most crucial, and inseparable, parts of his identity: his blackness, and his profoundly inclusive ideals. As president, Obama has never played the race card, never asserted his racial identity in any significant way. This reticence is both politically astute and deeply grounded in Obama’s own sense of what race means – and does not mean. For Obama, race matters – but paradoxically, it matters precisely because it offers all of us, black or white or brown or yellow or red, an opportunity to transcend it. In that regard, Obama is a true child of the civil rights movement. The men and women who struggled and died at Selma and Birmingham and Little Rock and Neshoba County are his heroes, and he was not going to betray their memory. That’s bedrock for him.

What happened yesterday is that Barack Obama, as flawed and brave and human as the rest of us, just struck his own bedrock. And the sound of that pick hitting stone brought tears to my eyes.

He did not have to do it. History is filled with crucial decisions that did not have to be taken. Gandhi could have decided the Salt March was too divisive. John Fitzgerald Kennedy could have decided that extending the hand of friendship to the USSR at the height of the Cold War, in his famous American University speech, was too politically risky. Lyndon Baines Johnson could have decided the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not worth spending so much political capital on. Martin Luther King could have decided that white America was not ready for a campaign of civil disobedience. The hundreds of thousands of Arab men and women who risked their lives to demand justice, opportunity and freedom could have turned back when the club-wielding thugs appeared. The Occupy protesters who came out in the rain to demand that America live up to its ideals could have stayed home.

But they did not. Those people – leaders and ordinary citizens alike — took the risk. They did the right thing. And history will remember them, and honor them, when the pragmatists and calculators have long been forgotten.

The night before he was shot, Martin Luther King Jr. seemed to prophesy his own death. “But it doesn’t really matter with me now,” he said. “Because I’ve been to the mountaintop … And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

Obama could lose the presidency because he stood up for the rights of gay Americans. But if he does, for the rest of his life he can look back and know that when it counted most, he did the right thing. That is something no one can ever take away from him. Or from the American people.