THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2010 E.J. DIONNE JR.


The president joins the fray P


resident Obama decided this week to raise the stakes in this fall’s election by making the choice about something in- stead of nothing but anger. In the process, he will confront a deeply em- bedded media narrative that sees a Republican triumph as all but inevitable. Paradoxically, such extravagant expectations may be the GOP’s biggest problem — by raising the bar for what will constitute success and by discourag- ing necessary strategic adjustments if our new- ly combative president begins to alter the po- litical battlefield. Until Obama’s Labor Day speech in Mil-


waukee and his statement of principles Wednesday near Cleveland, it was not clear how much heart he had in the fight or whether he would ever offer a comprehensive argu- ment for the advantage of his party’s approach. In the absence of a coherent case, Repub- licans were winning by default on a wave of protest votes. Without this new effort at self- definition, Obama was a blur: a socialist to conservatives, a sellout to some progressives, and a disappointment to younger Americans who wondered what happened to the ebul- lient, hopeful guy they voted for. That’s why the Milwaukee-Cleveland one-


two punch mattered. The first speech showed Obama could fight and enjoy himself in the process. The second speech spelled out why he has chosen to do battle. The news headline was Obama’s decision to


draw the line on George W. Bush’s tax cuts. He would continue the most economically stim- ulative cuts for families earning less than $250,000 a year but say no to extending the rest of the tax cuts that, as Obama noted, “would have us borrow $700 billion over the next 10 years to give a tax cut of about $100,000 to folks who are already million- aires.” What do Democrats stand for if they are not willing to take on this cause? But even more, Wednesday’s speech in Par- ma, Ohio, showed Obama speaking openly about the philosophical underpinnings of his presidency by way of explaining where he would lead the country. “I’ve never believed that government has all the answers to our problems,” Obama said. “But in the words of the first Republican presi- dent, Abraham Lincoln, I also believe that gov- ernment should do for the people what they cannot do better for themselves.” Then he of- fered examples of what that meant, highlight-


KLMNO


R


A21 GEORGE F. WILL


ing programs Americans believe in, as an anti- dote to empty and abstract anti-government rhetoric.


Suddenly, there’s a point to this election. Obama is late to this game, but at least he’s fi- nally playing it. The New Obama (or, rather, the resurrected Old Obama) will be up against a media story line whose self-sustaining quality was brought home by the treatment of Gallup poll findings over the past two months. The media largely ignored a mid-July survey giving Democrats a six-point lead, then devot- ed huge blocks of print and airtime to last week’s Gallup survey dramatizing convention- al wisdom by showing Republicans ahead by a whopping 10 points — only to have Gallup come out this week with a poll showing Re- publicans and Democrats tied. All this raises the question of whether the only polls that matter are ones that reinforce preconceptions. Even Democrats concede that a Republican sweep may be in the cards. But there is another possibility: that we are now at the Republican peak and that Democrats are in a position to claw back enough support to hang on to both houses of Congress. Republican voters can’t get more enthusi- astic without violating the law by casting multiple ballots. Democrats, on the other hand, have a large swath of yet-to-be motivated sympathizers. For Republicans, the costs of Tea Party extremism are beginning to balance the benefits of the movement’s energy. Republican pollster David Winston thinks the economy has given his party “an enormous opening,” but he cautions against seeing the contest as over and done with. As a technical matter, he argues that likely-voter screens ap- plied by pollsters too early exclude a dis- proportionate number of voters in key Demo- cratic constituencies. And the economic debate Obama tried to re-


frame this week, Winston said, “is going to have an impact. It’s not enough for Obama to be wrong. If Republicans want to get to a ma- jority, they have to lay out where they want to go.” Yes, Republicans had better start defining themselves. If they don’t, Obama, who labeled them the party of “stagnant growth, eroding competitiveness and a shrinking middle class,” is happy to do it for them. That’s what changed in Milwaukee and Cleveland. ejdionne@washpost.com


POST PARTISAN


Excerpts from The Post’s opinion blog, updated daily at washingtonpost.com/postpartisan


RUTH MARCUS


Obama and the familiarity factor


It was a jarring moment from an ordinarily smooth pol. Haley Barbour, governor of Mis- sissippi, chairman of the Republican Gover- nors Association and a 2012 presidential pros- pect — which helped explain the big turnout at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor — was asked why so many seem to be- lieve President Obama is Muslim. “I don’t know why people think what they


think,” Barbour said Wednesday. Fair enough. But then came this odd statement: “This is a president that we know less about than any other president in history.” Really? Less than Benjamin Harrison?


Franklin Pierce? By the time he launched his candidacy, Obama had written an autobiogra- phy and a second, more policy-oriented book full of personal examples — though Barbour said he hasn’t read these. What is it that we don’t know about Obama? “There is not much known about his time in


college or growing up,” Barbour said. Actually, Governor, Obama has revealed a lot more than George W. Bush was willing to say about what he did when he was young and irresponsible. In “Dreams From My Father,” Obama dis- cussed his drug use in high school and college — “Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it” — and his friendships with Marxist professors. Barbour continued: “We don’t know if he chopped down a cherry tree.” Uh, you might want to double-check on that tree thing. “We don’t know any of the childhood things we know about Ronald Reagan. I don’t say it as an insult or as anything other than an ob-


DAVID IGNATIUS


efense Secretary Bob Gates repeated the same phrase every time he stopped to meet with troops in Iraq and Afghanistan last week: I want to get you what you need to be successful, regard- less of the bureaucratic obstacles, and come home safely. When he said it, he of- ten seemed to get choked up. That’s the essential Gates: independent,


ornery, sentimental. A small, tidy man, wearing a baseball cap over his white hair, the 66-year-old occasionally looked weary as he shook hands with hundreds of sol- diers in the scorching heat. One of his trademark wisecracks, aides say, is: “I’m too old for this [expletive].” But he insists on the troop visits, saying that they ener- gize him for the budget and policy battles at the Pentagon. When I asked Gates in an interview on


the way home how he wanted to be re- membered as secretary of defense, he an- swered: “I would like to have the troops think of me as somebody who really looked out for them.” Some Cabinet officials avoid picking


fights, but Gates seems to like telling peo- ple off if they get in the way of his basic mission. This includes challenging gener-


The Pentagon’s blunt edge D


als and admirals who want to protect their perks, defying members of Congress who want more pork-barrel military spending, and pushing the system for faster delivery of armored vehicles, surveillance drones and medevac helicopters to protect soldiers. The Gates era at the Pentagon, which has lasted four years and stretched through two presidents, will probably end next year. He has said that he plans to re- tire in 2011, and aides say that this time he really means it. Though he was initially a Republican appointee, he is probably the Cabinet member with the most influence on Obama, who shares Gates’s low-key, an- alytical style.


“One of the benefits of being secretary of


defense is that you never have to elbow your way to the table,” Gates said in the in- terview. Rather than battling the secretary of state, the national security adviser or the CIA director, as did so many of his pred- ecessors, Gates has helped bring the na- tional security team together. This has pro- vided unity, but liberals could argue that having a Bush holdover in such a key posi- tion has blunted Obama’s ability to make a sharp break with past policies.


servation. . . .We just don’t know him.” Barbour made clear that he did not sub- scribe to the wackadoodle view of Obama as a Muslim. “I accept just totally at face value that he is a Christian,” Barbour said. “He’s said so throughout the time he has been in public life. That’s good enough for me.” But was Barbour trying, none too subtly, to fan the flames of Obama-as-Muslim- Manchurian-candidate conspiracy theorists? I doubt it. A big piece of Barbour’s message was that the best way to run against Obama and the Democrats is head-on — on the economy, taxes and debt. Social issues and closet Mus- lims are distracting noise, as Barbour sees it. I suspect there is something significant in Barbour’s characterization of Obama as an un- known quantity. The discomfort, among a seg- ment of Americans, is not that Obama is un- known as much as that he is unfamiliar. It’s not that, as Barbour put it, those who question Obama’s religion “just don’t know him” — it’s that they don’t know anyone like him. Barbour pointed to Obama’s brief tenure in public life, but this cannot be the real explana- tion. At another point in the session, Barbour was describing the potential advantages of non-career politicians such as his nominee for governor of California, former eBay chairman Meg Whitman. She’s not exactly a household name, but no one’s whispering that Whitman has a secret religion. This unfamiliarity mattered less to people when Obama was the anti-Bush than it does now that he is president. It may help explain why the number of people who believe he is Muslim has grown since the election. Anxiety is the mother of conspiracy theories, and there is more than enough of that to go around right now. As for Barbour — maybe he could try read- ing one of the books by the man he might run against?


South Carolina rising


J.D. POOLEY/GETTY IMAGES


President Obama delivers a speech on the economy at Cuyahoga Community College in Parma, Ohio, Wednesday.


DAVID S. BRODER


The Obama era, Phase Two


presidency, but in some re- spects, the turn to the right that will mark his tenure became vis- ible in this first week in Septem- ber. The signs were there in the polls signaling the likelihood of large Republican gains in the midterm election, in the word that the White House may have to find a new chief of staff, and in the policy announcements about Obama’s new economic fixes.


N


All the major media complet- ed their first rounds of post- Labor Day reporting and polling this week and pronounced, with one voice, that voters are ready to strip the Democrats of one, if not both, of their congressional majorities. The failure of the economy to generate any mo- mentum for significant growth during the summer months has deepened national pessimism. And little is likely to jolt it into a climb before November. Voters have pocketed the for- mal ending of combat in Iraq without rewarding the com- mander in chief. Now, congres- sional Democrats are scattering in search of individual salvation, rather than forming a solid pha- lanx to defend their leader. That Chicago Mayor Richard


Daley chose this particular mo- ment to announce his plans to retire next year is pure coinci- dence, but it signaled to every- one that Rahm Emanuel, Oba- ma’s chief of staff, may leave af- ter the election to seek the hometown job he always has wanted.


Emanuel is not the hard-liner


partisan he was reckoned to be by those who remember him best by the tactics he used as the architect of the drive that broke the GOP grip on the House half- way through George W. Bush’s second term. He has often been a voice for moderation within the administration, and he was personally responsible for re- cruiting a Republican colleague, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, for the Cabinet. Nonetheless, with Emanuel


likely to lead the procession of post-election exits from the


ov. 2 is likely to be marked as the official start of Phase Two of the Obama


White House, Obama will have the freedom he needs to recast the administration for the last half of the term. As he prepares to deal with a more Republican Congress and begin his own race for reelection, the changeover will become more important. You can begin to see the out- lines of the president’s new ap- proach in the pair of speeches he gave this week in Milwaukee and near Cleveland. His settings were traditional — the urban centers that anchor Democratic hopes in two of the classic Mid- west battlegrounds.


But the economic message had changed from Phase One of the Obama presidency, when the instinct was to turn to govern- ment for the answer to whatever ailed the economy. In Phase One, it was stimulate demand by ex- panding government spending, directly by the feds and indirect- ly through subsidies to states and local communities. Then rescue the auto industry by mak- ing it a ward of government. Obama’s economists, and those at the neutral Congres- sional Budget Office, can show evidence that Phase One suc- ceeded at least in saving a sig- nificant number of jobs. But that game has been ended by public reaction to mushrooming def- icits, and Obama is not going to fight the voters. What he said this week is that he is prepared to adopt busi- ness’s own favorite remedy, and subsidize private firms in hopes they will invest and hire more rapidly. The centerpiece is a classic bit of pro-business tax manipula- tion, allowing immediate ex- pensing of equipment purchases and making permanent the re- search and development tax credit. This is the kind of tax reform Republicans can love, and it’s now been placed on offer by a Democratic president, even be- fore the election results are weighed.


All this suggests that Phase


Two may not be as painful a transition for Obama himself as it is for liberals in his party. And Rahm Emanuel won’t have to ex- plain it to Nancy Pelosi. davidbroder@washpost.com


he libretto of this operatic elec- tion season, understandably pro- moted by Democrats and un- surprisingly sung by many in the me- dia, is that Republicans have sown the seeds of November disappointments by nominating candidates other than those the party’s supposedly wiser es- tablishment prefers. This theory is in- convenienced by two facts: South Carolina’s Nikki Haley and Tim Scott. “I am a policy girl,” Haley, 38, says demurely. But she is a savvy politician who in 2004 won a state legislature seat by defeating the longest-serving incumbent. Although the state’s Re- publican establishment opposed her nomination for governor, she won be- cause for two years she has been trav- eling around the state asking this question: Does anyone think it odd that in 2007 only 8 percent of the deci- sions by the state House, and only 1 percent of the state Senate’s decisions, were made by recorded votes? The political class and its parasitic lobbyists preferred government con- ducted in private. Haley, whose early campaign strategy was exuberantly in- discriminate (“go anywhere and talk to anybody”) won the gubernatorial nomination by defeating the state’s lieutenant governor, its attorney gen- eral and a congressman. She and her state have come a long


T


way since, at about age 5, in her home town of Bamberg, she and her sister entered the Little Miss Bamberg pag- eant. It usually crowned a white and a black queen. The flummoxed judges disqualified both Randhawa girls. If elected, Haley will be the second


Indian American Republican governor in Dixie, joining Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal. She, unlike him, does not look like someone from the subcontinent; her faintly olive complexion could be Mediterranean. Tunku Varadarajan of Stanford’s Hoover Institution and New York University’s Stern School of Busi- ness suggests why they have risen in the Republican Party while no Indian American has comparably risen in the Democratic Party: “Could it be that because Democrats put more of an emphasis on identity politics, an Indian American Demo- crat would have to contend with other ethnic constituencies that might think that it’s ‘their turn’ first? And once you go down the ‘identity’ route, your suc- cess as a politician tends to rest more on the weight of numbers — the size of your ethnic constituency, or your ra- cial voting bloc — than on the weight of your ideas.”


Because of his ideas, Tim Scott, 44, an African American Republican, will be elected the new congressman from the heavily Republican — and 72.8 per- cent white — 1st District. It includes Charleston, the cradle of secession, in whose harbor sits Fort Sumter. Scott won the nomination by handily defeat- ing (68 percent to 32 percent) Paul Thurmond — son of Strom, the former governor, Dixiecrat presidential candi- date in 1948 and eight-term U.S. sena- tor.


Gates’s departure is only one of a series of changes that are likely for the Obama team next year: Gen. Jim Jones will prob- ably leave his post as national security ad- viser. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will complete his term in October 2011, and several of the service chiefs are also due to retire. The defense secretary said he hopes to


have a “dialogue” with Obama about filling “senior military positions where succes- sors will need to be identified.” He also plans to push Congress and the Pentagon brass for more cuts in overhead and unnec- essary weapons programs — and sounds almost eager to “take the heat” for chal- lenging the military-industrial status quo. Gates has been orbiting the National Se-


curity Council, one way or another, for more than 30 years. He said his model for national security adviser was Gen. Brent Scowcroft, whom he served as deputy dur- ing the administration of George H.W. Bush. A successful adviser “doesn’t play the instruments, but conducts the orchestra,” Gates said. He has been publicly support- ive of Jones, who sought to play the Scow- croft “honest broker” role, despite some obvious bumps in the road.


Gates made his bones as a CIA analyst


and later served as the agency’s director, and I asked him how his old shop was far- ing. He gave a blunt answer: The agency would always be an “anomaly,” as a secret organization in a democratic government. “The truth is, across the political spectrum, it has had relatively few supporters” other than presidents who find they like its clan- destine powers. “It’s just an itch in our sys- tem that’s hard to scratch,” he said. As he was departing for the war zones last week, Gates made a speech to an American Legion convention in Milwau- kee. When he read a section citing the number of Americans killed and wounded in Iraq, he seemed on the verge of tears. Many American political figures get emo- tional about war, but few seem to feel it as personally as Gates. He gets angry — in a way we don’t see often enough in Washing- ton — when he encounters political or bu- reaucratic resistance that puts these sol- diers at greater risk. If people in Gates’s Pentagon don’t do their jobs, he fires them. That sense of ac- countability may be his biggest achieve- ment.


davidignatius@washpost.com


Scott aspired to a football career un- til a religious experience changed his direction. At a 1983 meeting of the Fel- lowship of Christian Athletes, he had an epiphany. He had already come un- der the guidance of a white owner of a local Chick-fil-A franchise. Scott ac- quired many of his ideas by reading Thomas Sowell and other conserva- tives. In 1995, he became the first black Republican elected to any South Caro- lina office (Charleston County Coun- cil) since Reconstruction, and in 2008 he became the first black Republican since Reconstruction elected to the state House of Representatives. His Web site stresses economics: “Tim has never voted for a tax increase” and “Tim was heavily involved in bringing Boeing to the Charleston area.” This state, like most, practices “en- trepreneurial federalism,” offering in- centives — tax exemptions, low- interest loans, etc. — to lure invest- ment. So a gigantic $750 million as- sembly plant is rising where Boeing will create 3,800 new jobs to build its 787. Unlike in Everett, Wash., where most Boeing aircraft have been built, the South Carolina workforce will be non-union.


When the Democrats’ 2004 presi- dential nomination contest reached this state, the eventual winner, John Kerry, was excoriating “Benedict Ar- nold CEOs” — those who locate some operations overseas. This must have seemed quaint and parochial in a state that is benefiting from the German, Japanese and French CEOs who gave South Carolina BMW, Fujifilm and Mi- chelin plants. Scott’s and Haley’s candidacies, both


focusing on economic issues, are peb- bles in an avalanche of evidence that the identity politics of race and eth- nicity has become a crashing bore. That, in turn, is evidence of this: If the question is which state has


changed most in the last half-century, the answer might be California. But if the question is which state has changed most for the better, the an- swer might be South Carolina. georgewill@washpost.com


kiawah island, s.c.


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