What's Wrong With The Democrats?

Ben and I talk about the "enthusiasm gap" among Democratic voters in our Scripps Howard column this week. My take:

You almost can't blame President Obama for being frustrated. He's gotten more big things done -- a health care bill, the stimulus, financial reform -- than any Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson, and he's done it in only two years. So why all the complaining from his liberal base? Because it hasn't been enough. And what has been done hasn't been done well.

Yes, the longtime progressive dream of a universal health care bill passed -- but in a messy form that, with its mandate on American citizens to buy their own health insurance or face penalties, seems designed to alienate as many voters as it serves. The stimulus probably averted a Depression-like disaster for the American economy, but liberals believe it probably needed to be bigger in order to lower a still-horrendous unemployment rate. Financial reform took too long to pass and was watered down by the very institutions that must be regulated.

That doesn't even include the president's actions in the War on Terror, where his moves have been barely distinguishable from President Bush. Sure Obama ordered an end to torture. But Gitmo is still open, there are still troops fighting in Iraq and the Afghanistan War appears to be a deepening quagmire. Civil libertarians and gay rights advocates, meanwhile, also have a long list of reasons to be frustrated with the president.

Is all this letting the perfect be the enemy of the good? Maybe.

Certainly, it is difficult to believe many liberals would be happier if John McCain had been president the last two years. But President Obama and his surrogates don't generate enthusiasm when they criticize and mock their most fervent supporters. It's time they stopped complaining and started persuading their liberal critics -- and the rest of the nation -- that the actions they've taken are the right ones.

Barack Obama, Tyrant?

I am profoundly disappointed by the Obama Administration's decision that it can order the killing of an American citizen without due process -- and that it can furthermore evade any accountability for that order by invoking "state secrets" to shut down any court challenges. (Adam Serwer describes the administration's position here.)I'm also disappointed by its effort to require tech providers to build their systems to enable the government to spy on its citizens -- which seems to me somewhat akin to requiring homebuilders to add a secret room in every home where your government watcher can monitor you.

Before Barack Obama's election, I wrote an essay suggesting these kinds of problems might be on the horizon. I think it's worth quoting myself at length:

What do we know about Barack Obama and the presidency that makes me fearful for him?

• He’s made compromises already. If our nation’s decision to torture terror suspects ranks as the Bush Administration’s chief betrayal of American values during the last eight years, then the “warrantless wiretapping” program ranks second. The administration decided to ignore existing wiretapping law — scratch that, broke the law — so that it could listen into private telephone conversations involving Americans. And one of the reasons it did so is because it wanted to prove it could, that there was no check or balance provided by Congress and the courts that presidential power couldn’t override.

When it came time to let participants be punished, or give them retroactive immunity and the power to continue the program — well, Barack Obama voted for the second option. It’s easy to understand why: He didn’t want a “soft on terror” vote (which would’ve been a bogus charge) following him around this campaign.

And let’s not forget that Barack Obama promised to take public financing for his campaign, only to back down when it became less advantageous for him to do so. This makes him a smart politician probably, but it also means that Obama is not a being of pure light. Which leads us to point No. 2.

• Presidential power doesn’t contract itself. The last eight years have seen the Bush Administration repeatedly assert its authority to act as it pleases, without limits from Congress and the courts. The courts have been more effective than Congress in pushing back, but the presidency holds more unilateral power in governmental decision-making than it did when Bill Clinton left office.

And here’s something fundamental about human nature: Presidents don’t tend to give power away. Somebody has to take it away. Congress did a lot of this in the post-Vietnam era, and a lot of those safeguards stood (though they eroded a bit) until the current presidency. Barack Obama has promised to live by the older, less dictatorial limits, but he would be an extraordinary president if he didn’t claim some of the authority the Bush Administration has grabbed for itself. Seems unlikely to me.

And, well, it's kind of worked out that way, hasn't it?

Radley Balko at Reason calls Obama's position "tyranny," and I'm not sure I disagree:

If there’s more tyrannical power a president could possibly claim than the power to execute the citizens of his country at his sole discretion, with no oversight, no due process, and no ability for anyone to question the execution even after the fact . . . I can’t think of it. This is horrifying.

The biggest reason I voted for Barack Obama in 2008 was my deep frustration and anger with a Bush Administration that believed in untrammeled, undemocratic assertions of executive authority. And when Obama took office, he gave me hope -- immediately signing a prohibition on torture. I was optimistic, despite my pre-election warnings.

But in court filings since then, it has become clear that the Obama Administration may think that torture is bad -- but it is also willing to defend the president's prerogative to order torture. It's not defending the actions of the Bush Administration, necessarily, but it is defending the (again, undemocratic) underlying theory that made those actions possible.

Tyranny? Not quite. But we may be on the road.

To be clear, though, I'm not about to join the Tea Party. I don't believe that returning to Clinton-era tax rates is tyranny. (Or else Dwight Eisenhower was history's worst monster.) I don't think making sure that many more Americans have health coverage is tyranny -- though the current method of forcing people to buy insurance instead of providing it through a single-payer system will, I think, feel intrusive to people. As I've said before: It embarrasses me for Tea Party folks that they can see tyranny in such actions but remain silent on a president's ability to imprison people without due process.

But just because the Tea Partiers are wrong about why Barack Obama is a danger to our rights doesn't mean they're wrong about the conclusion, I guess. But he represents a bipartisan danger; it's clear now that both Democratic and Republican presidents will defend the idea of unlimited executive power.

And this leaves me wondering about 2012. I think John McCain would've been a much worse president for this country; for all the problems we have now, I do believe that the Obama Administration has actually mitigated them to a great extent. So the question is: Do I vote for the lesser evil in 2012? Or do I decide the whole system is so rotten that neither major party deserves my vote? And if that's the case, what effective action can I take to rein in a runaway government?

Mr. Mom Chronicles: Working At Home

I'm in the middle of typing out an e-mail to a source on a story when my two-year-old boy climbs up into my lap with a book, "Put Me in the Zoo."

"Booky?" he asks.

This is slightly annoying -- I've got work to do. But the boy is part of my work, too. If I'm going to be a stay-at-home-dad-slash-freelance-writer, then I can't neglect the dad part of the equation. Even if doing so would make the writing part of that equation much easier.

So I read the book. Tobias climbs down, retrieves another tome and brings it to me. "Booky?"

"No, son. I've read you one, and I've got to get this done. Can you read it to yourself?"

Tobias doesn't like the idea. He raises the book high over his head, then slams it down to the ground. Then he toddles off.

We're one week into this experiment -- ok, we're a week into my new way of living life -- and it's clear that this is the battle I'm going to have to fight every day. I've got to write enough to bring in my (desperately needed) share of the family income. But I've also got to give the boy attention and nurturing.

When I'm writing, he wants to play with me. When I'm making a phone call he wants to play with his sound-making toys -- or he wants to play with my phone. This would all be much easier if he would just take a goddamned nap, but that's only happened once this week.(Which I deserve: I drove my mom insane by never once taking a nap after 18 months.)

I've tried putting him in his room behind a baby gate. Sometimes he'll take it. Sometimes he won't. I've had to dump him in his crib for 10 minutes at one point just so I could finish writing a piece with a clear head. I feel bad about this. I'm home with him! I'm the parent! I don't really want to shuttle him off to day care -- and I couldn't afford it now, even if I did.

But always, the work is calling. I don't think I'm going to solve this problem. I think that's simply the way it is.

John Yoo and the Tea Party

John Yoo believes that during wartime there's virtually no limit -- legal, constitutional, treaty or otherwise -- on a president's power. He can suspend the First Amendment. He can order the testicles of a small child crushed. It was his legal advice that helped pave the way for the American torture regime.

So, of course: John Yoo is a featured speaker at Tea Party events.

Now: There are undoubtedly many fine and sincere Tea Party participants who legitimately want to see government restrained and fitted for a Constitutional straightjacket. That's fine. But even now, it's easy for me to believe that there's also a sizable chunk of people who didn't mind expanding deficits and tyrannical government overreach as long as a Republican is president. Tea Partiers who turn out for a John Yoo speech? Almost certainly in the latter group.

Deborah Solomon Versus: Phil Collins

Rest assured, Deborah Solomon will
always ask personal questions
about money.

Rather than repeat my litany of gripes against Deborah Solomon's stewardship of the Q&A section of the New York Times Magazine, I'm going to start a (almost assuredly) weekly feature: A look at how she focuses relentlessly on money -- without it being at all enlightening about the interview subject. This week's money gotcha: Phill Collins:

Did I read somewhere that your divorce settlement was $50 million and, at the time, the largest paid by an entertainer in British history?
I think Paul McCartney’s was the largest.

I read that he paid $49 million to Heather Mills.
It’s only money. Of course, only people with money will say, “It’s only money.”

Nice line by Phil, but it tells us something we already knew: He's rich.

That's Deborah Solomon for you: Asking questions that are rude for no real purpose. She's gaucheriffic!

Letter to a Christian Friend

As some readers may know, I grew up Christian, mostly among Mennonites in the Midwest. I even attended a Mennonite Bretheren college, and count many of my friends from that time as dear friends still. But I no longer share their faith.

Some friends still gently nudge me toward faith. And I understand the good intent of their efforts, even if it makes me somewhat uncomfortable. I received one of those nudges today -- and I responded thus. The letter is lightly modified to omit unnecessary details:

Hi Friend:

It's true that I'm not too enamored of how many, perhaps most, Christians choose to live their faith. It seems at odds -- to me -- with the ethic of Jesus that I find in the Bible. But that's not the fundamental reason I'm in my current rather faithless state.

I think the best way to describe me now is "apathetic agnostic." That is: I simply don't know whether there is a God or not. And it seems to me that if there is a God, that God has chosen to reveal himself (I'll skip gender-neutral language here for the sake of simplicity) at something of a distance from my own 2010 existence. Because of that, it seems to me that time spent trying to deduce the details of God and God's wishes is akin to debating the number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin. (The answer is 19, by the way.) I feel -- at this point in my life -- that my time is better served facing the solid facts of the real life that I live.

And I've made something of a reverse Pascal's Wager along these lines. Pascal decided to go with Christianity because if it was right, he guaranteed himself an afterlife and if it was wrong, well, no harm done. My wager: If there IS a God -- as big and amazing as all the religions would have us believe -- then that God probably isn't going to be particularly concerned with the particulars of my belief system and wouldn't punish me anyway.

And if there is a God, and that God decided to punish me because I didn't love HIM, or because I didn't have precisely the correct way of understanding him or obeying him -- even though our last overtly direct communication with him came over 2,000 years ago -- perhaps that God isn't worth worshipping. Powerful abusers are still abusers.

Now: I know you'll disagree with the details of this. A couple of thoughts:

* My current way of thinking isn't the result of not having a good understanding of the Bible or the church. I spent 30 years of my life immersed in both. I understand the arguments that might be made against the scenario I just presented -- at one time, I made those arguments.

* I don't explain myself here in an attempt to persuade you. I still feel a keen responsibility not to cause my brother to stumble; I have no interest in undermining anybody's faith -- though I will challenge them if I feel their faith is used for sinister ends. But I do want to explain to you my thinking.

Now, all of this might be temporary. I've gone from being a fervent Christian to an agnostic in the span of 20 years, and I cannot discount the possibility of a return trip. I know there are many people who pray for just such an event -- and I appreciate the spirit of their intent, even if the action causes me some discomfort.

But: This is who I am right now.

With respect and affection,
Joel

Barack Obama, Bob Woodward, and the War in Afghanistan

Our Scripps Howard column this week is about Bob Woodward's new book, "Obama's Wars." My take:

Bob Woodward's new book reminds us of an important proposition: American democracy and long-term war are a bad mix.

It's certainly bad for democracy. One of the most disturbing revelations is the lengths that President Obama went to in order to ensure the military obeyed his orders in Afghanistan -- dictating a six-page single-spaced document dictating the terms of 2009's surge of 40,000 troops to that country. Why the detail? Because the president felt sure his generals and admirals would find "wiggle room" to violate the spirit of the order setting a 2011 deadline to begin drawing down troops there.

The American Constitution is clear: The president is the commander-in-chief. He makes the country's big decisions about how we fight war. Generals and admirals give their best military advice, and then execute the decisions the president has made. But top military officials clearly see themselves as political players in the process, lobbying the president and circumventing his orders. Woodward reports Gen. David Petraeus told his staff Obama was "(messing) with the wrong man." Such reports should concern anybody concerned with Constitutional order.

But if war is bad for democracy, democracy can also be bad for war. If it goes on too long, the politicians in charge can take their eyes off the bottom line -- what can be done to enhance American security -- and start factoring partisan politics into the mix. Obama tells Woodward in the book that he set the 2011 withdrawal deadline because "I can't lose the whole Democratic Party." That is, even from a liberal viewpoint, a chilling admission.

"Obama's War" affirms that at this point, there's little America can gain -- and a whole lot it can lose -- from continued large-scale fighting in Afghanistan. We can't fix that country. The longer we stay there, though, the more we might find our own democracy in need of repair.