SUNDAY, AUGUST 22, 2010 DAVID S. BRODER
Those shots from ‘the professional left’
sional left” for prematurely finding fault with President Obama — an act for which he later sought to make amends — he did not, as far as I can recall, name names.
A
If he had, he might well have men- tioned John B. Judis, the opinion jour- nalist who wrote the cover story in the latest issue of the New Republic, “The Unnecessary Fall: A Counter-History of the Obama Presidency.” Gibbs’s target was the left wing of the Democratic Party, which, rather than cel- ebrating Obama’s victories on health care and financial regulation, has piled up complaints about his failings at home and abroad. Judis, a man of the left, decided to an-
ticipate the voters’ November verdict and rush his explanation of the Democrats’ defeat into print without waiting for the election to be held. Referring to the off-year setbacks in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, he wrote: “What doomed Obama politi- cally was the way he dealt with the finan- cial crisis in the first six months of his presidency. In an atmosphere primed for a populist backlash, he allowed the right wing to define the terms.” The problem, as Judis sees it, is that when “the public was up in arms,” Obama did not do enough bashing of the banks. Instead, the president argued that excesses had been committed by every- one in “a perfect storm of irresponsibili- ty” that implicated Wall Street, Pennsyl- vania Avenue and Main Street. Judis quoted Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-
N.D.) as saying that because Obama “hired people from the culture of Wall Street” for top jobs in his administration and “failed to push Congress to immedi- ately enact new financial regulations or even to set up a commission to investi- gate fraud,” he “sparked a right-wing populist revolt in the country.” If Obama was not going to mount the barricades, then, in this version of his- tory, the Tea Party movement, Glenn Beck and Fox News would. No matter that their targets were different; to popu-
THE PLUM LINE
Excerpts from Greg Sargent’s blog on domestic politics and debate on the Hill:
voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line
What’s behind
Obama-as-Muslim How to explain the rising number of Americans who say that President Oba- ma is Muslim? Some have suggested that more people are describing him this way to express general disapproval or anger over his performance. The Post’s polling director, Jon Cohen, did a deep dive into the numbers on Fri- day and came up with more evidence supporting this case. Cohen points out that two polls re- leased Thursday found very different an- swers to the “Muslim” question. The poll from Time magazine found that 24 per- cent falsely think the president is Mus- lim, while Pew Research Center polling found that “only” 18 percent believe this. Why? It’s all in the question’s wording: “Time pollsters asked, ‘Do you person- ally believe that Barack Obama is a Mus- lim or a Christian,’ dangling red meat in front of the president’s opponents,” Co- hen wrote. “The Pew question presented respondents with a more extensive list: ‘Now, thinking about Barack Obama’s re- ligious beliefs . . . Do you happen to know what Barack Obama’s religion is? Is he Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, agnostic, or something else?’ ”
When given a stark choice between
Muslim and Christian (the Time poll), more said Obama is Muslim. When given
KATHLEEN PARKER
Cut Dr. Laura some slack I
confess to having a residual soft spot for Laura Schlessinger, who is retiring from radio for finally going too far. When an African American caller asked
her for help in dealing with what she con- sidered racist remarks by friends and family of her white husband, Schlessinger mocked her as being hypersensitive and repeated the offending N-word several times. Outrage ensued, and Schlessinger soon
after announced her retirement. Amer- ica’s self-appointed superego said that she was wrong but, characteristically feisty, also said that she is leaving radio not in shame but to reclaim her First Amend- ment rights. In other words, she wants to be able to
say what she pleases without fear of of- fending certain groups. Don’t we all? But sometimes people are offended for good reason. My soft spot for “Dr. Laura” corre- sponds to a period 15 years or so ago when she and I were often on the same page. I was writing a family-oriented column and listened to her on the radio while carpool- ing. Sometimes she would read my col- umn on air.
Our shared anthem was “stop whining
a broader menu of religious options (the Pew poll), respondents presumably were forced to focus harder on the question of what religion Obama really practices. This may be why fewer were willing to slap the false religious label on him. Also supporting this view: A larger percentage of those who disapprove of Obama overall (44 percent) called him Muslim in the Time poll, where they were given a stark choice, than in the Pew poll (30 percent), where they were forced to concentrate harder on the question.
So there you have it: The more people
dislike Obama, it seems, the more in- clined they are to pin the “Muslim” label on him — as an epithet. It also seems fair to speculate that call- ing Obama Muslim is a way of giving ex- pression to the belief that he’s not legiti- mately our president, that he has falsely represented himself to the American people in some way. As disapproval of Obama’s policies rises — and as Obama sets about trying to transform America’s relationship with the rest of the world in a manner that some find unsettling — it’s apparently becoming too painful for a growing number of people to admit that Americans legitimately chose an African American with a Muslim-sounding name as leader of the free world. Perhaps it’s easier for these people to accept the notion that the president got elected by misleading the American peo- ple about his identity in a very funda- mental way.
couple of weeks ago, when White House press secretary Robert Gibbs was criticizing “the profes-
lists the anger always is believed to oblit- erate any substantive differences, let alone ideology. I have witnessed this blurring before. When George McGovern was running for president, his pollster, Pat Caddell, ar- gued that emphasizing his prairie popu- lism would make McGovern an appeal- ing candidate to millions of George Wal- lace’s followers. It didn’t matter, he thought, that they were mad about differ- ent things. After many paragraphs lamenting “Obama’s reluctance to rail against Wall Street,” Judis does get around to ac- knowledging that reality, and not just rhetoric, does have some influence on the voters. “There is no doubt that, if the economy were growing faster, and if un- employment were dropping below 9 per- cent, Obama and the Democrats would be more popular and not fearing a No- vember rout.” But even after acknowledging that
fact, Judis quickly argues that rhetorical timidity bred equal cravenness in eco- nomic policy. So “the principal culprit is clearly Barack Obama. He has a strange aversion to confrontational politics.” In other words, he outgrew the tactics of Saul Alinsky and never emulated those of Jesse Jackson. How odd. What’s worse, Judis says, Obama does not seem to realize that “populism has been an indelible part of the American political psyche, and those who are un- comfortable making populist appeals . . . suffer the consequences at the polls.” He cites three cautionary examples for
what awaits Obama: Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter and John Kerry. Mr. Gibbs, he’s your witness. K
Three good men, Ted Stevens, the for- mer senator from Alaska; Dan Rosten- kowski, the former congressman from Chicago; and James Jackson Kilpatrick, the former columnist from Richmond and Washington, have departed this earth in recent days. All cultivated reputations for being tough, combative so-and-sos, but all three were boon companions for a lot of us.
davidbroder@washpost.com
KLMNO
R
A15 DAVID IGNATIUS
Obama needs a spark
rather be a really good one-term presi- dent than a mediocre two-term presi- dent.”
L TSAFRIR ABAYOV/ASSOCIATED PRESS Israeli soldiers unpack Hezbollah-bound rockets seized last November. GEORGE F. WILL
The ‘two-state’ delusion ’T
jerusalem
was a famous victory for di- plomacy when, in 1991 in Ma- drid, Israelis and Palestin-
ians, orchestrated by the United States, at last engaged in direct nego- tiations. Almost a generation later, U.S. policy has succeeded in prodding the Palestinians away from their re- cent insistence on “proximity talks” — in which they have talked to the Is- raelis through American intermedi- aries — and to direct negotiations. But negotiations about what? Idle talk about a “binational state” has long since died. Even disregarding the recent fates of multinational states — e.g., the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, the former Czechoslovakia — binationalism is impossible if Israel is to be a Jewish state for the Jewish people. No signifi- cant Israeli constituency disagrees with Prime Minister Binyamin Netan- yahu: “The Palestinian refugee prob- lem will be resolved outside Israel’s borders.” Rhetoric about a “two-state solu-
tion” is de rigueur. It also is delusion- al, given two recent, searing experi- ences. The only place for a Palestinian
state is the West Bank, which Israel has occupied — legally under interna- tional law — since repelling the 1967 aggression launched from there. The West Bank remains an unallocated portion of the Palestine Mandate, the disposition of which is to be settled by negotiations. Michael Oren, now Is- rael’s ambassador to the United States, said several years before be- coming ambassador: “There is no Israeli leadership that appears either willing or capable of removing 100,000 Israelis from their West Bank homes. . . . The evacuation of a mere 8,100 Israelis from Gaza in 2005 required 55,000 IDF [Israel De- fense Forces] troops — the largest Is- raeli military operation since the 1973 Yom Kippur War — and was pro- foundly traumatic.” Twenty-one Israeli settlements were dismantled; even the bodies of Israelis buried in Gaza were removed. After a deeply flawed 2006 election encouraged by the United States, there was in 2007 essentially a coup in Gaza by the terrorist organization Ha- mas. So now Israel has on its western border, 44 miles from Tel Aviv, an enti- ty dedicated to Israel’s destruction, collaborative with Iran and posses- sing a huge arsenal of rockets. Rocket attacks from Gaza increased
dramatically after Israel withdrew. The number of U.N. resolutions de- ploring this? Zero.
Obama was talking to Sawyer about
his pet project of health-care legisla- tion, which already was politically dic- ey. He explained his approach to gov- erning in the most idealistic terms: “You know, there’s a tendency in Wash- ington to think that our job description of elected officials is to get reelected. That’s not our job description. Our job description is to solve problems and to help people.”
I heard Obama make a similar disa- vowal of politics at a White House lunch for columnists in December, when he defended his politically risky (but generally correct) decisions to bail out Wall Street and the auto industry: “If I were basing my decisions on
The closest precedent for that bom- bardment was the Nazi rocket attacks on London, which were answered by the destruction of Hamburg, Dresden and other German cities. When Israel struck back at Hamas, the “interna- tional community” was theatrically appalled.
A senior cabinet member — Moshe
Yaalon, strategic affairs minister and possible future prime minister — says “our withdrawals strengthened jiha- dist Islam,” adding, “We have the sec- ond Islamic republic in the Middle East — the first in Iran, the second in Gaza: Hamastan.” Israel’s withdrawals include the one
that strengthened the Iranian client on Israel’s northern border, in south- ern Lebanon. Since the 2006 war pro- voked by Hezbollah’s incessant rock- eting of northern Israel, Hezbollah has rearmed and possesses as many as 60,000 rockets. Today, Netanyahu says, Israel’s problem is less the Israel- Lebanon border than it is the Leba- non-Syria border: Hezbollah has re- ceived from Syria — which gets them from Iran — Scud missiles capable of striking Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. A leader of Hezbollah says, “If all the Jews gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them world- wide.”
Because upward of a million im-
migrants have come from the former Soviet Union, today one-sixth of Is- raelis speak Russian. Israel has Rus- sian-language newspapers and televi- sion. Russian Israelis are largely re- sponsible for Avigdor Lieberman being foreign minister. Yoram Peri, professor of Israel studies at the Uni- versity of Maryland, says these im- migrants “don’t understand how a state that can be crossed in half an hour by car would be willing to even talk about relinquishing territories to its seemingly perpetual enemies.” These immigrants know that Russia’s strategic depth — space — defeated Napoleon and Hitler. Netanyahu, who is not the most
conservative member of the coalition government he heads, endorses a two- state solution but says that any West Bank Palestinian state must be demil- itarized and prevented from making agreements with the likes of Hez- bollah and Iran. To prevent the impor- tation of missiles and other arms, Is- rael would need, Netanyahu says, a military presence on the West Bank’s eastern border with Jordan. Other- wise, there will be a third Islamic re- public, and a second one contiguous to Israel.
So, again: Negotiations about what?
georgewill@washpost.com
polls,” he said, “then the banking sys- tem might have collapsed, and we probably wouldn’t have GM or Chrys- ler, and it’s not clear that the economy would be growing right now.” I turn back to these comments be- cause the country is still struggling with Obama’s views on the right of Muslims to build a mosque near Ground Zero. Intervening on this issue was a classic dumb move, politically. Hillary Clinton, say, would have known instantly that the correct answer is to leave this complex issue to the elected officials of New York City. The White House had taken this position until Obama decided, on principle, that he must speak out for tolerance. I think the president is right on the mosque issue (as on health care and his economic rescue efforts). But the larger point is that we truly have a leader who keeps doing the wise thing on policy (assuming you agree with him) but the dumb thing on politics. Politicians often like to brag about how they aren’t really political animals but public servants. It’s almost a politi- cal cliche, to accompany a craven deci-
This president truly doesn’t seem to relish politics, in the raw, mix-it-up sense.
sion with the statement: “I’m not doing this to win votes, but because it’s the right thing to do.” But Obama is different. He truly
doesn’t seem to relish politics, in the raw, mix-it-up sense. Most of all, he isn’t needy for public attention in the way our most neurotic and gifted poli- ticians have been — walking outpa- tients such as Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson or Bill Clinton. He doesn’t like red-hot; he likes cool and deliberative. Obama’s tidy, button-down style is clear when you look at those who have prospered in his administration and those who haven’t. Let’s examine first the people who
got bounced. Adm. Dennis Blair’s big- gest crime as director of national intel- ligence, near as I can tell, was that he talked too much in briefings, inserting what the president thought were per- sonal opinions. Greg Craig’s demise as White House counsel is still a puzzle, given his legal talent, but critics argued that the expansive Craig ran an untidy shop.
An interesting example of the ad-
ministration’s ability to shrink large political personalities is Richard Hol- brooke, the special coordinator for Af- ghanistan and Pakistan. Holbrooke’s garrulous style is utterly different from Obama’s, and the White House ap- peared to be on the verge of dumping him early this year when the secretary of state is said to have intervened. Hol- brooke has been on a short leash — not making trouble, but not as effective as he might be. Now look at the people who have
and take responsibility.” This is hardly a revolutionary concept today, but the idea had been gathering dust for some time following America’s cultural marriage of victimhood and narcissism. Coincident with widespread family dissolution — when extended-family safety nets had largely disintegrated — Schlessinger emerged to fill the role of a tough-love parent. Notoriously rapier-tongued, she always
cut close to the bone. Invariably, the tougher she was with callers, the more they clamored for her. Voluntary public flagellation became a drawing card for an audience of 9 million listeners who appar- ently felt the need for a stern lecture. Another reason for her popularity: Dr.
Laura was usually right. Every now and then, she got it flat wrong, as when she said homosexuality was a “biological er- ror.” That mistake cost her a TV show in 2000. Worse than being wrong, which is a hazard of thinking aloud, she was guilty at times of not listening and leaping to con- clusions before a caller had time to finish. Even so, to my frequent surprise, she got to the nugget and managed to reach ex- actly the right conclusion. Perhaps after
decades of listening to the same 10 prob- lems most humans suffer, she figured she could skip the chase altogether. At other times, as now, her failure to lis- ten is disastrous. The African American caller never was able to fully explain the context or content of the remarks that made her uncomfort- able. Instead, Dr. Laura repeatedly in- terrupted, even suggesting that the wom- an shouldn’t have married outside her race if she was going to be so thin- skinned. We now have a new definition for “way over the top.” Dr. Laura’s stated point was that since blacks frequently use the N-word, whites should be able to as well. She was correct that the word gets lots of exercise — and her use of it was in the prosecution of that point. Even so, the N-word stands alone as too injurious for whites to use, period. Everyone knows this. When blacks use it, they are reclaiming the word, robbing it of its power to intimi- date by making it their own. The same spirit was behind Eve Ensler’s “Re- claiming C---” in “The Vagina Mono- logues.” Used by a man against a woman, the word is vile and threatening. Used by women among women, it becomes some-
thing else. Silly, if you ask me, but benign. In any case, context is key, and we never learned from Dr. Laura’s caller how the N- word was used in her situation. The wom- an may well have been justified in feeling hurt, and Dr. Laura might have helped. In- stead, she made matters worse. Even so, Dr. Laura deserves a little
slack. The good she has done during her 30-year run, helping people see their own flawed thinking, should be balanced against her insensitivity in this case. She was unfeeling and callous, true. She also missed an opportunity to discuss why some words carry more freight than others.
But silencing people for expressing opinions or using certain words that grate on our public sensibilities carries its own risks. Even though Dr. Laura is retiring of her own volition, she is correct in noting that the overt hostilities waged in today’s world against any who speak “incorrectly” have become a threat to our ability to speak freely. No matter how unpleasant, an honest discussion is healthier for the nation than censoring thoughts that ulti- mately may find less appealing avenues of expression.
kathleenparker@washpost.com
Obama’s ear: Defense Secretary Bob Gates, Treasury Secretary Tim Geith- ner, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. They’re low-key, low-maintenance per- sonalities who could fit in a moderate Republican administration as easily as this one. If national security adviser Jim Jones (another disciplined, button-down guy) retires at the end of this year, there’s talk he may be replaced by Gen. James Cartwright, the current vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs. His pre- cise, laser-sharp briefing style has im- pressed Obama. And Obama has ended up embracing Gen. David Petraeus, perhaps the greatest briefer in modern times, who could rival Obama in a Mr. Cool contest. Maybe Obama, the anti-politician, really doesn’t care if he gets reelected, so long as he’s doing what he thinks is right. Somehow, I can’t imagine this breakthrough president stepping aside to write law-review articles. But to stand a chance in 2012, he’s going to need someone to light a fire under him, someone who can play politics fiercely — and also can bring in some new vot- ers.
Surely it’s obvious that I am describ- ing Obama’s second-term master- stroke: Vice President Hillary Rodham Clinton.
davidignatius@washpost.com
ast January, President Obama made a tellingly unpolitical com- ment to ABC’s Diane Sawyer: “I’d
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