Category Archives: The Party Line

The Party Line – July 8, 2011: A Broadside? That’s Rich

Posted on by

By now, many of you have probably read Frank Rich’s inaugural piece for New York Magazine. Freed from the bean counters and word counters of the New York Times, Rich pours forth pages (and pages) on what he calls “Obama’s Original Sin.”

That sin, as the story explains, is that the Obama administration’s failure to properly investigate the causes of the financial crisis, its failure to hold anyone accountable, and its embrace of some of the very people that helped push the US economy into the, uh, ditch have left the president’s reelection prospects on shaky ground.

Matt Taibbi (who is quoted in the Rich piece) has called the NY Mag article “Rich’s broadside,” and cites it as one of a growing list of “not quite mainstream media” stories on the epic failure that is the president’s approach to Wall Street. Taibbi sees Rich and raises him, but both are playing roughly the same hand: Frank Rich is being tough on Barack Obama.

I am not going to say that Rich is not being tough, per se, just that he isn’t as tough as he thinks.

I am sure that Frank thinks he is being tough now because he was once much less so. As Matt notes in his post, Rich was once one of Obama’s biggest cheerleaders. In fact, if I may add a personal note, I had always enjoyed reading Rich during the Bush years, but as the November 2008 election drew near, even I started to blush from the Times columnist’s overt man-crush on the Democratic nominee.

In other words, Frank Rich’s opinion of Obama has fallen a long way because Rich’s opinion had a long way to fall.

To be fair, Rich does point out that Obama has a truly dreadful record on jobs creation. Rich also bemoans how many Robert Rubin acolytes the president appointed to his economic team. And, the article rightfully chastises Obama’s embrace of the deficit peacocks and their TEA-infused austerity framing.

But Rich spends a good chunk of his piece trashing GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney. Now, Romney deserves trashing—he is an even bigger jerk than he is a phony—but focusing on the big, bad Republican that waits in the wings plays into the Obama team’s own defense strategy—things might be bad, but they would be worse under President Jerkoff. And that not only lets the current president off the hook a bit, it hampers those that want to organize to push Obama leftward (as in, at least somewhere back near the center).

What Rich misses is that the birth of the Tea Party (or the TEA-colored parties that we lump under that one rubric) owes something to the very positions Obama has taken with regard to the economic crisis. The Tea Party that Obama and his defenders blame for his difficulties in governing, that O & Co. warn us about as the hellish alternative to “four more years”—though in many ways incubated and manipulated by rightwing corporate interests—found fertile ground in a scared and angry population that saw a president who promised change and delivered more of the same.

That Obama ran with the Bush bailout of the banks, demanding nothing in return, while shorting his own stimulus package and marginalizing the voices that clamored for pump-priming and accountability—failing to a) produce enough jobs, while b) trying to sell the “how much worse it would have been” argument, and c) holding no one accountable—sent a message that if Obama was on a sinking ship with too few life boats, it would be Wall Street first, not women and children. . . or any of the other inhabitants of Main Street. Obama may have started as a poor kid from Hawaii, but he has cemented himself in many Americans’ minds as just another eastern elite.

I know Rich thinks he is being rough on the president—partly because, a few months back, I overheard Frank telling a table of bold-faced dinner companions sitting near me at a midtown restaurant how tough one of his columns (one of the last he’d write for the New York Times) was going to be on Obama. . . only to read the column that Sunday and find it not so tough at all. I also know Rich thinks he is being tough because he ends with a warning that no one but Obama can save Obama (and so, save America from Mitt). But only four paragraphs before that, Rich writes that “There’s not much Obama can do about the economy by 2012 given the debt ceiling fight. . . and nihilistic Capitol Hill antagonists opposed to any government spending that might create jobs. . . .”

Granted, this was written before the Thursday bombshell about Social Security being put on the table by a president eager to make a deal—any deal—on the debt ceiling, but anyone paying attention saw that (along with hits to Medicare and Medicaid) coming weeks if not months or years ago. But even so, even if Rich, like so much of the liberal establishment, has been willfully ignorant to that, the declaration that the President of the United States is fated to just sit on his hands and watch Americans suffer for the next 17 months because the big banker elites and the tea-party rabble won’t let him help America and so help himself—well, so help me, how is that being tough on Obama?

Let me be a little tougher: I never expected a hero or a real progressive when I voted for Obama in 2008, but I expected some kind of leader. I hoped that, though not my idea of a liberal, Obama was smart, would see what the great crisis of our time demanded, and would rise—at least in part—to the occasion.

Obama might think he has done that. Obama might think he is a leader, or if not quite that, at least a transcendent, post-partisan facilitator, but, if I may borrow from Apocalypse Now, Obama is neither. He is an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks—in this case, Wall Street and the corporate elite—to collect a bill.

What’s on that bill? Yes, there is real money—in the trillions. Perhaps Obama’s own downfall, too. (How ironic.) Quite possibly, the bill also demands the destruction of the Democratic Party, and even more likely, the destruction of the social safety net that Democrats have built and defended for over two generations. That’s what Team Obama has put on the table.

That’s my humble take on being “tough on Obama.” But, be it Rich or me, no matter—what Obama has delivered will be tough on all of us.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqjQG-Tw9FY

(A version of this post has been crossposted to Firedoglake.)

The Party Line – July 1, 2011: Dick Move

Posted on by

I feel like adapting a joke from Thom Lehrer, who once remarked that a debate over the MLF (look it up) happened during the baseball season, so readers of the Chronicle might not have heard about it. The incident I want to talk about happened during MSNBC’s Morning Joe, so if you have no stomach for that show (or morning television in general)—like me—or if you only watched MSNBC the rest of the day, you might have missed it. . . but plenty of others are talking about it: MSNBC’s “senior political analyst” Mark Halperin was suspended indefinitely on Thursday after calling President Obama “Kind of a dick” on Morning Joe. (You want a laugh—another laugh? Check out how the Washington Post wrote this up: “kind of a [vulgarism for male organ].”)

If you want, take a look at an unedited version of the exchange, it is really pathetic for about a dozen reasons, but let me focus on what might be (as it usually is) the most pathetic part, which is the sizzle becomes the story, and not the steak—the real meaty part being what is actually going on in Washington.

Mark Halperin (whose father, Morton, yes, did defend US bombing during the Vietnam War, but later went on to champion civil liberties and open government, and has always been articulate and exhibited a real gravitas—so who knows what happened with his son?) said the president was all genital-like because Obama, in his Wednesday presser, dared to get the slightest bit snarky about corporate jet-users and their GOP guardians. . . and that, in my considered opinion, was wrong. It was wrong because getting annoyed (or, more likely, “acting” annoyed) with the greedy and their handmaidens is the very least we should demand in this ravaged economy, and it was wrong because, even if that behavior was somehow beyond the pale, it wouldn’t make Obama a dick, and certainly wouldn’t make it intelligent commentary to have some lightweight “analyst” call him one.

One of the first rules of civil debate (and child-rearing—perhaps that is where Mort went wrong) is that you criticize the action, and not the actor. Ad hominem attacks do nothing to advance an argument, and they are certainly not analysis.

The president is not a dick—but, that said, the president did make a dick move. No, not the one that got Halperin to put in for a few extra weeks of summer vacation—that, as I said, was sub-minimal—the dick move was cutting the legs out from under congressional Democrats in an effort to prove his worth to whomever it is Obama looks to for approval (still trying to sort that one out), and improve his standing for his 2012 run.

Obama’s dick move actually comes in two thrusts (did I just write that?): First, the White House undermined the negotiating posture of Democratic members of Congress by a) continuing to move to the right on budget cuts in an effort to forge something the president can call a “compromise,” and b) offering up some sort of “trade” of cuts to what, for lack of a better word, are called “entitlements” in exchange for what (and not for lack of a better word but for lack of a spine) are called “revenue enhancements.” And, second, Obama kneecapped congressional Dems’ election strategy by setting in motion a process that will likely tie Democrats to a vote that will inoculate Republicans from the charge that only the GOP wants to cut Medicare.

Democratic leadership in Congress wants to send a clear message that they are the protectors of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security—and increasingly, as Sen. Chuck Schumer (NY) indicated this week, Democrats also want voters to know that Republicans are looking to benefit politically from an economic crisis and so, are not negotiating in good faith. The White House muddied that message with the specifics outlined above, and with the general posture that it is in some sort of negotiation with GOP leaders.

Will anybody be talking about any of that heading into the holiday weekend? (Present company excluded, of course.) Doubtful. But will tongues be wagging about Lil’ Mark and, perhaps, how his “analysis” was stifled by the “librul media?” Yeah, that feels like it has legs. . . maybe three of them.

The Party Line – June 17, 2011: Noble Savages

Posted on by

This week, I am at Netroots Nation #6 in Minneapolis, and I had planned to bring you a video all about one of the themes I saw running through the first day of panels, speeches and briefings. . . I had planned to bring you video, but I am only here through Sunday and that is probably not enough time to upload my usual eight-or-so minutes because the speed of the internet connection here is pre-millennial. . . again.

This is actually another common theme, one that runs through pretty much every one of the NetNats I have attended. The internet is either not free, not fast, or both. I can remember running down to a lobby to get a connection one year, balancing my computer on the mini fridge near the door of my room another. And always, the waiting—the spinning, gray-barred, “sorry, you are not connected to the internet” waiting.

Now, obviously, the conference organizers cannot really be held responsible for the internet in the hotels—and the wifi in the convention center is certainly an improvement over last year—but damn! Every year I come to the largest concentration of netizens on the planet, and it is like we are suddenly the cast of some cyber version of “Survivor.”

It’s, like, practically “Lord of the Flies.”

OK, perhaps I exaggerate just a tad, but it is a constant—every year a consistent struggle to break through to the super tubular interwebs we remember from home.

Which is also kind of serendipitous because the theme from this year that I wanted to note was that everyone seems to be expressing a frustration with the inability of progressive ideas to break through—break through to the legacy media, break through the establishment-policed, corporate-driven narrative, break out of our bright, shiny ghetto of liberal thought. It seems that, after being quite obviously on the outside during the infancy of the blogosphere, progressives expected a nurturing embrace after the presidential election of 2008—or at least expected not to be punched—and now, not feeling the love, the natives are restless.

I hear the frustration—hell, I feel it, too—but I am not sure if I have yet heard the answer to it. A popular (dare I say) “mantra” is that we have to break out of our silos. The idea is that the left is fractured—fractured over strategy, over tactics, over goals, over issues. It is the belief that, so far, we have not done enough to find commonality among theoretically different movements inside the broader progressive one.

There is probably some, or plenty, of that sort of problem, but it just doesn’t feel, to me, like it is the problem. Fracturing is actually pretty much the way of all revolutions—from 1848 to the present—and heaven knows the right, whose narrative we are trying to crash, has plenty of fissures, from hairline cracks to continental divides.

Another “answer” I heard was that the left needs to be more daring. (“Bold” is one mighty over-used word these days.) And it needn’t be a big production—glitter bombing Newt Gingrich (and, just yesterday, Tim Pawlenty) broke though for one shining moment—it just needs to be original and, ideally, telegenic (think: singing to the president about Bradley Manning). Dan Choi, speaking on a Thursday panel, said we have to be willing to get crazy, “And crazy is not a limited resource among activists.”

I am not against that, but I see three problems. First, the brevity of the breakthrough, second, the need to continually ratchet up the “crazy” to get attention, and third, the fact that crazy often plays right into the establishment stereotypes of lefties. You might get them to cover your action, but being daring does not prevent the legacy media from marginalizing your position.

I also heard several mentions of the need for the left to build its own media complex to compete with the corporate behemoths that now have an iron grip on the narrative. This “tactic,” I’m afraid, seems to be idle dreaming—as far off as say, my ability to stream video at this hotel.

Better, I think, would be a search for the next social organizing tool. The twitter or what-have-you of 2013. Something relatively cheap to use and so new that it has not yet been commandeered by right wing activists or co-opted by capitalists. I am thinking this is possible, but, of course, I am thinking about something I cannot really describe, except to say it will be the next big thing.

And finally, only touched on today, the idea that we need to think beyond silos on the left and attempt to find alliances across traditional boundaries. Looking for what the establishment might think of as “strange bedfellow” pairings to flummox the forces that find it easy to wall-off and marginalize issues embraced solely by the familiar left. That is, real, results-oriented “bipartisanship,” as opposed to the process-driven kind. (Jane has called this “transpartisanship.”)

Yes, I would have talked about all of that in my video—but I cannot upload anything even remotely that long. Once again, progressive ideas marginalized and shut out by the media. . . or, maybe in this case, the medium.

The Party Line – June 10, 2011: Hope Floats

Posted on by

The Obama administration has a problem. As much Republican good will or corporate campaign cash as they expect to gain from their reinforcing of the deficit hysteria meme (which, let’s face it, will not be very much at all), even the most cynical of the president’s economic team realizes that all this budget cutting isn’t going to do squat for the current economy. Without something directly stimulative, the recovery likely stalls. Without some sort of jobs program, the unemployment picture continues to look grim. There is no “car” to worry about putting in reverse—it has been spinning its wheels for some time now, and, as most Americans see it, it never did drive out of that ditch.

Yes, with 2012 shaping up to be another “it’s the economy, stupid” election year, O & Co. has a problem—but with the same deficit hawks and scorched-earth partisans controlling Congress, what is a president obsessed with bipartisan-like process to do?

A natural place to look would be the deal the White House cut last December with House Republicans—and indeed, Obama went to that well earlier this week. During an appearance with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the president floated the idea of extending a central part of that deal, the two-percent payroll tax cut for employees, for another year. Then, never failing to miss an opportunity to negotiate with itself, the White House later posited an employer-side payroll tax break (instead of the employee-side cut? in addition to? hard to say, but it is fairly easy to guess which would be favored by the GOP) as an incentive to business for some sort of job creation.

Payroll taxes, however, are not some sort of rainy-day fund the government puts aside when it can, there to use if it needs a new washing machine. . . or the economy is in a ditch. These payroll taxes—the ones Obama is offering to cut—go to fund Social Security and disability. The 2010 deal cost roughly $112 billion, and it figures extending the cut another year will cost the same. If the employer-side cut is comparable, and it is paired with an extension of the employee-side holiday, Social Security could be out close to $400 billion by the end of next year.

The Obama administration has assured us that the Social Security shortfall will be made up from the general revenue, but if the White House does not think it has the political capital to push through a more straightforward (and almost certainly more effective) money-for-jobs stimulus plan, why are we to grant that they can engineer a repayment of the Social Security fund? And even if that transfer were politically possible, what $400 billion cut in the federal budget will have to be made to appease the deficit peacocks?

All of this—or any of this—puts additional pressure on Social Security, or, more accurately, lends ammunition to those already taking pot shots at the long-term viability of the program. If there are already “serious” people trying to shock-doctrine in changes to the retirement plan, how much more shocking could they make things seem after taking a two-, three-, or four-hundred billion-dollar bite out of its reserves?

None of these cold calculations likely come as a big surprise to the White House. In fact, this is all possibly part of the political calculation—that one of the reasons Hill Republicans might go along with an Obama-proffered plan of any sort is the resulting dent it puts in the Social Security trust fund.

That might seem like a successful trade to administration insiders, buying themselves some small bit of help for an economy on the skids and sure to suffer from any “deficit reduction,” but it comes at a heck of a price. Not only does the economic upside of this bargain look relatively small, the political downside is potentially huge. As both the recent Medicare scare and the 2005 Social Security privatization push have taught us, American voters hate it when you threaten their “entitlements.” If Republicans can muddy the waters, or actually drag the White House into the mud with them, on Social Security “reform” (read: benefit cuts), they will have taken away one of the Democrats’ most effective salvos for the coming campaign.

And that will come in addition to a litany of “wins” for the corporatists, deficit hawks, party hacks, and TEA-totaling ideologues—more tax breaks, less federal spending, a dead-weight economy, and a damaged social safety net. To counter all of that, the Obama administration offers its float of payroll tax cuts and the hope that this and a little economic luck will change things for the better. . . or at least keep enough voters from noticing how they have gotten worse.

(A version of this post appears today at Firedoglake.)

The Party Line – June 3, 2011: A Tale of Two Countries

Posted on by

It isn’t the best of times; how can we keep it from being the worst of times?

In one country, a government that campaigned on a move to green energy reacts to the nuclear crisis in Japan by reaffirming its commitment to nuclear power. In another country, a government that, only nine months ago, endorsed a plan to expand its reliance on nuclear power reacts to the Fukushima disaster by vowing to shut down all domestic nuclear reactors by 2022, and invest in conservation and alternative energy.

The latter of the two examples is, at present, actually the one more dependent on nuclear power for its domestic electricity production, so what can explain its more populist response to current events?

The first country is, of course, the USA, where the federal government is the product of a “first past the post,” two-party electoral system. The second country is Germany, which chooses its national government by a multi-party, mixed member proportional representation system.

In Germany, the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel is reacting as much—or more—to domestic political pressure as it is to the disaster in Japan. . . and that is not at all a bad thing. Because, in Germany, not only is the government showing a reasonable reaction to a global catastrophe, not only is it changing policy to more accurately reflect the desires of the German people, the government has made a move that looks like it will boost the German economy.

The value of German alternative energy companies instantly shot up after Chancellor Merkel moved early in the week to shift her country away from nuclear power and toward renewable resources. Whereas, in the US, once-promised government investment in a green energy revolution has fallen victim to Beltway deficit hysteria.

This contrast threatens to leave he United States off the leading edge of a technological revolution for the second time this century.

Because of the anti-science policies and hot-button politics of the George W. Bush administration, the US has, to a large extent, missed out on the economic benefits of the genetic engineering revolution. Other countries have made themselves much more hospitable to the research and investment necessary to capitalize on those breakthroughs. And now, the pro-nuclear, pro-coal, Big-Oil-coddling posture of the current Congress and the Obama administration—combined with the cuts to alternative energy programs—threaten to again leave America behind.

A green energy revolution could provide more than “green shoots,” it could be an economic engine equal to, or even greater than, the information revolution that propelled growth in the 1990s. At a time when the US is mired in the worst economic slump since the Great Depression, this is an opportunity it cannot afford to miss. And yet, without an effective group or mechanism available to pressure the people in power, a miss is looking more and more likely.

As it now stands, Germany has a chance to capitalize on a disaster, while the United States looks likely to lose another decade. For Germany, a shot at wisdom. For the US, continued foolishness.

The Party Line – May 27, 2011: Gates of Wrath

Posted on by

So, Bob Gates, still the Secretary of Defense for about another month, has been talking a lot about fruit of late:

When it comes to our military modernization accounts, the proverbial ‘low-hanging fruit’ — those weapons and other programs considered most questionable — have not only been plucked, they have been stomped on and crushed.

Gates has been vocally working the fields, trampling out his vintage whine, to let it be known that he has cut and cut, and he is done cutting. . . well, at least when it comes to military hardware.

“Understanding” the need to further trim the Pentagon budget, however, Gates does say there is a field that is now quite ripe for harvest. . . and stomping. . . and this would be so-called personnel costs—military pay, pensions, and health care.

To reiterate: big, expensive, new weapons systems–forbidden fruit. The people that pilot those weapons and fight our wars—crush ‘em.

Because when the government bestows its largess on a defense contractor, it is so much easier to harvest the return, be it in the form of campaign contributions or future pay for revolving-door jobs. When federal dollars are spread out over hundreds of thousands of service members, it might help a greater number of people, but it doesn’t help the guys who run the orchard—at least not as obviously or nearly as much.

And Sec. Gates–who does have his future to think about, after all–wants to make sure his successors (or at least his future employers) understand. No more defense contractors need get tossed into the terrible winepress of budget austerity–there are plenty of fighting folks, ready for trampling.

(A version of this post previously appeared on Firedoglake.)

The Party Line – May 6, 2011: Spoiler Alert

Posted on by

Seriously, spoiler alert.

If you have not read 1984 and don’t want to hear about the ending. . . or if you don’t want to feel anything but elated over the killing of Osama bin Laden. . . then maybe you want to skip this one.

[As always, to view video in a separate window, click “YouTube” on the title bar or follow this link.]

The Party Line – April 29, 2011: And the Band Played On

Posted on by

After pausing for a day to placate another bleating billionaire, President Obama stepped to the first microphone Thursday to announce that Leon Panetta would soon sit where Bob Gates now sits, and that David Patraeus would sit in Panetta’s old chair, and that John Allen would grab King David’s throne, and so on and so forth until someone pulled the needle off the record. At which point we were told that the president had re-tooled his national security team for the challenges that lie ahead.

But if that sounds less like re-tooling and more like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, well, that’s because it should.

At a place in history where the administration’s much ballyhooed Afghanistan strategy has proven another stutter-step in a long, bloody line of failed tactics, at a time when the entire US intelligence establishment seems to have been caught flat-footed by the uprisings of this Arab Spring, bringing us to a moment where being militarily overextended and signally under-informed has quickly left the US knee-deep in a Libyan quagmire, one might think that Obama would use the force of history as the perfect excuse to really change course. One might think that, but Obama did not do that.

Instead, the architect of our misfortune in Afghanistan is given control of the Central Intelligence Agency, and the guy who forsook the CIA’s intelligence gathering responsibilities to further strengthen covert ops will now run the whole shebang (emphasis on “bang”) at the Pentagon.

While “failing upward” seems to be the 21st Century way America tries to win the future, perhaps the even more disturbing theme is the further blurring of the distinction between the US military and national intelligence. Marcy, David, and Jim have all touched on aspects of this, but, in short, what were once the independent and sometimes competitive interests of the intelligence community, the diplomatic corps and the military have, in the interest of post-9/11 “coordination” or post-imperial expedience, been mixed into the what now looks like the world’s largest paramilitary.

Which is actually a pretty dangerous place to steer the ship of state. While America’s giant military industrial complex, its ability to reach across the globe and “hit ‘em there” (and often do so with only the push of a button) may give us the sense that we are insulated from the conflicts abroad, we are, in fact, staying a course rife with icebergs.

To use a more recent (if you consider 30 years ago “recent”) analogy, the US is not unlike the space ship in a game of Asteroids. It has enough torpedoes to whip around and fire at will at the interplanetary rocks heading its way, but each hit breaks an asteroid into dozens of smaller ones, and eventually there are just too many to dodge.

OK, where was I? Oh, yes. Darting back in time again, I often talk about a theory I call “The Sick Man of the Americas.” It is a play on “The Sick Man of Europe,” a term used to describe a declining and dangerous Ottoman Empire at the turn of the last century. At that point, the Ottomans had been on the downward slope of history for a long time, but what they lacked in political influence, they tried to make up for with military might.

The American Empire stands at a similar precipice. Feeling its diplomatic might on the wane, its industrial prowess now being outstripped by several regional powers, its economy stagnant, its technological edge blunted by a decade of anti-science leadership, and even its cultural significance questioned, the US still has one thing it knows it can do better than any other place in the world, and that is blow things up.

The problem is, lots of other countries find that tiresome. It might suffice for now, given expectations, trade deals, and pre-existing commitments, but eventually all this bounderism gets in the way of things like commerce, and when you screw with other people’s money, they get touchy.

There may not be some great army ready to advance on our shores, not yet, but there will come a point where doing things the American way becomes more trouble than its worth. And in an interconnected world, that will make it very hard to even play in the future, forget about, uh, winning.

The sad part is it doesn’t have to be this way. Though the establishment that just played musical chairs is entrenched, it is not immortal. There are actually people well on their way to being part of the establishment who also worry about an overly militarized American century. Note, for example, Mr. Y.

Mr. Y, in reality two senior members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the pseudonym is a play on a 64-year old essay by George Kennan), released a paper titled “A National Strategic Narrative” (PDF), and in it they spell out a part-primer, part-warning on the choices America is now making.

The paper is long, and I am still digesting it, but the takeaway relevant to this week’s events is the insistence that America needs to transition away, as they say, from a policy of “containment to sustainment,” and that the US needs to see that its security lies in its prosperity, as opposed to the other way around. The idea (and I am seriously shorthanding here) is that rather than using military might to keep perceived threats at arms’ length (pun intended), a focus on strong domestic institutions will serve American security much better.

It is not a surprising position from a generation of military leaders that have been put through the meat grinders of Iraq and Afghanistan. And it is a position that might seem consistent with what was promised by candidate Barack Obama back in 2008.

Yes, it is true that Obama did signal an escalation in Afghanistan during the campaign, but otherwise, the junior Senator from Illinois spoke of reclaiming America’s role in the world by investing in domestic industry and innovation, and leading by example rather than by ordinance.

Contrary to the Obama of April 2011, that future still seems winnable. The Mr. Ys of this world, bred of a professional military, tired of playing Pinky to the intel black-baggers’ Brain, provide a ready and powerful force on the inside. The Democratic base—the young new voters and the liberals of all ages that surged to the polls to give Obama his first term as president—would provide all the support Obama would need on the outside. But those dual constituencies, seemingly so perfectly primed to help the ’08 vintage Obama bring forth the change he once promised, find themselves alternately ignored or punched by the present president.

It is the macro-theme that played out in microcosm on Thursday. Obama, the captain on the bridge, promoted an intelligence director who turned a deaf ear to a global chorus of discontent, and a leader of military escalations—almost by definition a guy that shoots first and asks questions later—was given the responsibility of doing the required listening that lies ahead.

The band will play on, but will anyone on the promenade deck be able to recognize the tune?