Way back when JUST ABOVE SUNSET was just getting started, many format changes ago, you could find this, from 28 May 2003 –
Do you remember the clear-headed, no-bullshit, let’s-be-fair liberals of yesterday? Bobby Kennedy in that last run just laying it all out - hey, some stuff is wrong here and why don’t we think it through, fix it and make things better? Well, Bobby got shot. Martin Luther King doing the same thing. Well, he got shot a few months earlier than Bobby. Of course, to be fair, George Wallace got shot too. Lots of people got shot.
But the point is that those optimistic “why don’t we fix it and make things better” kinds of guys are nowhere to be found these days. What you’ll see on Bush campaign stickers in the 2004 election? You know - variations on “Just Do It” or “Money Talks, Bullshit Walks” or “Get In, Sit Down, Shut Up, And Hold On” - and of course that quote from Marge Simpson - “We can stand here like the French, or we can do something about it.” The other side, the Democrats, will have bumper stickers asking if we all can’t just get along.
No Democrat will win anything by whining about the smirking frat boy or by fretting about some British essayist hating cheeseburgers and everything American. To win the Democrats would have to field an opponent with a sense of humor, some brains, and a lot of optimism, someone who listens to what is being said, and is willing to say - “Hey, some stuff is wrong here and why don’t we think it through, fix it and make things better?”
It does not seem like that is going to happen. And if it did, he or she would get shot.
How are things different now? Bush was reelected and his successor might well be the smirking frat boy all grown up, the thuggish former mayor of New York, telling us he may have not thought things through, and he may hold views many find offensive, and his personal life may be a mess, what with the divorces and his kids not talking to him, and yes, he did make a crude guy with no education his police commissioner and later get the president to nominate the guy to be the nation’s Director of Homeland Security, and yes this same guy with his Mafia ties is now under federal indictment – but Rudy has the right attitude. He’s tough – no one messes with him, and if elected, no one will mess with America.
His opponent is likely to be that Clinton woman – smart, cold, calculating and careful, using what he husband made famous, the “Clinton Triangulation” strategy – offend the most people the least, and, in her case, never let anyone know exactly where you stand on things. It worked for her husband, but although she may equally as smart, there is a charm deficit – he’d lay out a line of brilliant analysis and make you feel enthusiastic about it, not resentful at all. You may have found him personally repellent, but damn, he was smart, and usually right. She hasn’t mastered that yet. She probably won’t.
So it’s looking a bit dismal. We seem to be a bit short on pragmatic, non-defensive, respectful-of-others, clever but unassuming public figures – the sort of people who just want to fix what’s broken and make things better, without the bullshit of wasting all that time to make someone else out to be the bad guy. Well, maybe such people are always in short supply.
On the other hand, you sometimes find them in the military. Take Admiral William Fallon, head of Central Command, on the challenge of trying to deal effectively with Iran –
None of this is helped by the continuing stories that just keep going around and around and around that any day now there will be another war which is just not where we want to go.
Getting Iranian behavior to change and finding ways to get them to come to their senses and do that is the real objective. Attacking them as a means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice in my book.
Ah, but being practical doesn’t satisfy people’s emotional needs, and that’s where the votes are.
And sometimes to be able to say sensible things you need to be old and retired, so no one can ruin your career or anything like that. David Ignatius in the Washington Post reports that Efraim Halevy, the former head of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, seems to have found that sweet-spot –
Now that he’s out in the sunlight, the 72-year-old retired spy chief has some surprisingly contrarian things to say about Iran and Syria. The gist of his message is that rather than constantly ratcheting up the rhetoric of confrontation, the United States and Israel should be looking for ways to establish a creative dialogue with these adversaries.
… Halevy suggests that Israel should stop its jeremiads that Iran poses an existential threat to the Jewish state. The rhetoric is wrong, he contends, and it gets in the way of finding a peaceful solution to the Iranian nuclear problem.
Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly comments –
This is, though hardly a majority view in Israel, not an uncommon one either. There are plenty of people, both there and in the US, who understand that bellicose rhetoric is a display of weakness, not strength, a fact that that we recognize easily enough when other people engage in it but not so easily when we do it ourselves.
Ratcheting down the “war of civilizations” talk isn’t some magic bullet that will suddenly make the Iranian regime feel secure enough to give up their nuclear program. But it is one step in that direction, and smart foreign policy is all about putting together lots of little steps and pushing on lots of little levers to get what you want. Obviously this isn’t George Bush’s style - or Dick Cheney’s - but they won’t be in office forever. The question is: what are they going to do in the time they have left?
That question answers itself. But the assertion that might catch your eye here is that “there are plenty of people” claim. Anyone with half a brain knows “bellicose rhetoric is a display of weakness, not strength” – that seems to be the basis of most cartoons kids have always watched, and at the foundation of most comedies from the ancient Greeks to Shakespeare to the next teen road movie, whenever it gets here. It’s not a hard concept. Could it be that “plenty of people” just have no use for Rudy – the high-school hallway bully from some teen comedy – or for Hillary, the overly clever girl that sometimes makes you squirm? There is a reason few Americans end up bothering to vote.
Okay – just good folks, those who want things to be better and have no issues with how they appear to others, are hard to find, and the last place you would look would be on the op-ed page of a newspaper. That’s the place for rants, but sometime you get common sense. In the New York Times, Roger Cohen offers some of that in his defense of what we’ve been told is indefensible, Al Jazeera’s English news channel.
No, you haven’t seen it – you can watch it in Toledo, Ohio, through Buckeye Cablesystem, where it reaches 147,000 homes, or in Burlington, Vermont, where one municipal cable service offers it to about a thousand homes, or if you’re served Washington Cable in Montpellier, where maybe five hundred can see it. Otherwise you’re out of luck, or you’re safe – take your pick. Roger Cohen notes that in the gym at the NATO base in Kabul, our soldiers watch it from the treadmills every morning – “When Osama bin Laden makes news, as he did recently with a statement about Iraq, America’s finest work out beneath the solemn gaze of their most wanted enemy.”
Yes, from Donald Rumsfeld scoffed at Al Jazeera as a “mouthpiece of Al Qaeda” and once called the network, which is based in and owned by Qatar, “vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable.” Cohen doesn’t mention the story of how Tony Blair once talked George Bush out of carpet bombing every Al Jazeera studio in the Middle East (discussed here), but does note that the Bush administration has locked up one of the network’s cameramen, Sami al-Hajj, in Guantánamo Bay for more than five years without charging him.
But the argument here – sure to drive Bill O’Reilly through the roof – is that all of us, and not just our front-line soldiers, need to watch Al Jazeera, just to understand how the world has changed, as “any other course amounts to self-destructive blindness.”
You see, as much as we like to be blind, and as much as we’re told being blind is a virtue, we need to get a handle on those changes.
We need to understand America’s diminished ability to influence people – “Global access to information now amounts to an immense à la carte menu. Networks escape control. To hundreds of millions of people accessing information for the first time, from central China to Kenya’s Rift Valley, the United States can easily look exclusive and less relevant to their future.”
And we need to understand the erosion of American power. Here Cohen cites Samantha Power, the author and Harvard professor, claiming this “the core fact of recent years” –
America’s hard power - its military - is compromised by intractable counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Its economy is strained; witness the ever feebler dollar. Its soft power - the resonance of the American idea - has been hurt by a loss of legitimacy (Hajj languishing) and by incompetence (Iraq).
And finally we really do need to face up to “the solidification of anti-Americanism as a political idea.” Jihadist Islamism is the most violent expression of this, “but its agents benefit from swimming in a sea of less murderous resentments.” You cannot pretend it doesn’t exist.
Well, wait. If you’re the president you certainly can –
How do I respond when I see that in some Islamic countries there is vitriolic hatred for America? I’ll tell you how I respond: I’m amazed. I’m amazed that there is such misunderstanding of what our country is about, that people would hate us. I am, I am - like most Americans, I just can’t believe it. Because I know how good we are, and we’ve go to do a better job of making our case.
We’re just misunderstood, you see. Someone like Karen Hughes can fix (but she finally gave up). But admit these three things and watch Al Jazeera? Yeah, you hate the thought of that - admit it.
Cohen just points out it’s your choice –
In response to all this, America can say to heck with an ungrateful world. It can mutter about third, even fourth, world wars. Therein lies a downward spiral. Or it can try to grasp the new, multinetworked world as it is.
To this world Al Jazeera English offers a useful primer. The network can be tendentious — bin Laden’s face up there for several minutes — in stomach-turning ways. But, overall, its striving for balanced reporting from a distinct perspective seems genuine.
Read what he says about that. It could be true. It is widely available in Israel. But no one has the nerve to pout on the schedule here. They don’t need the trouble. Cohen is not happy – “These political winds hurt America. Counterinsurgency has been called armed social science. To win, you must understand the world you’re in.”
But, but, but… What if the network turns people into terrorists? What if they see David Front interview a bad guy? Frost interviewed Nixon! That would mean… something… or something. And what would people think?
Yeah, in short, we cannot let people see this. And anyway, we’re supposed to kill the bad guys, not understand them (see Giuliani, any speech will do).
But what it comes down to is that we cannot trust the American people with this stuff, as they’re so easily swayed.
Hey! One guy running for president disagrees. Check out Senator Biden –
Sen. Joe Biden said in an interview at the New Hampshire Union Leader this afternoon that too many Democrats, including the frontrunners for the presidential nomination, do not have faith in the American people.
“We’ve got to trust the American people more,” Biden said.
“I think they’ve really lost faith in the American people in terms of leveling with them,” he said of his leading rivals.
And then he gets specific –
When he asks groups of Democrats if they think the American people are stupid because they elected George W. Bush twice, most respond that, yes, they do, he said. He said he thinks that attitude is a real problem for the Democrats, who fail to understand how smart and pragmatic the American people really are.
Biden was generally critical of the far left wing of his party and of the strategies the frontrunners are using to win the nomination.
Asked if he thinks, as he suggested recently in another interview, that the other candidates tend to think the American people are stupid or easily fooled, he said, “Well, I do.”
“It’s not even so much they don’t trust, which is a piece of it,” he said. It’s that they think that “the way to win is the Bill Clinton triangulation and the Karl Rove angering.”
“It’s the thesis that you go to your base because people don’t vote. Well, why don’t they vote?” he asked. He said he thinks people don’t vote because they’re tired of the way politicians treat them.
Then he gets outrageous –
He said Democrats would do better if they stopped dividing the electorate by playing to their base and instead brought people together. He criticized the left wing of his party for demonizing the rich and Republicans.
“Rich folks are as patriotic as poor folks, but we don’t talk that way,” he said.
You have to love it!
And then there’s that other fellow running for president, who back in 2005 at the time of the Roberts confirmation was saying such things –
From traveling throughout Illinois and more recently around the country, I can tell you that Americans are suspicious of labels and suspicious of jargon. They don’t think George Bush is mean-spirited or prejudiced, but have become aware that his administration is irresponsible and often incompetent. They don’t think that corporations are inherently evil (a lot of them work in corporations), but they recognize that big business, unchecked, can fix the game to the detriment of working people and small entrepreneurs. They don’t think America is an imperialist brute, but are angry that the case to invade Iraq was exaggerated, are worried that we have unnecessarily alienated existing and potential allies around the world, and are ashamed by events like those at Abu Ghraib which violate our ideals as a country.
And there’s this –
My colleague from Illinois, Dick Durbin, spoke out forcefully - and voted against - the Iraqi invasion. He isn’t somehow transformed into a “war supporter” - as I’ve heard some anti-war activists suggest - just because he hasn’t called for an immediate withdrawal of American troops. He may be simply trying to figure out, as I am, how to ensure that U.S. troop withdrawals occur in such a way that we avoid all-out Iraqi civil war, chaos in the Middle East, and much more costly and deadly interventions down the road. A pro-choice Democrat doesn’t become anti-choice because he or she isn’t absolutely convinced that a twelve-year-old girl should be able to get an operation without a parent being notified. A pro-civil rights Democrat doesn’t become complicit in an anti-civil rights agenda because he or she questions the efficacy of certain affirmative action programs. And a pro-union Democrat doesn’t become anti-union if he or she makes a determination that on balance, CAFTA will help American workers more than it will harm them.
And this –
The bottom line is that our job is harder than the conservatives’ job. After all, it’s easy to articulate a belligerent foreign policy based solely on unilateral military action, a policy that sounds tough and acts dumb; it’s harder to craft a foreign policy that’s tough and smart. It’s easy to dismantle government safety nets; it’s harder to transform those safety nets so that they work for people and can be paid for. It’s easy to embrace a theological absolutism; it’s harder to find the right balance between the legitimate role of faith in our lives and the demands of our civic religion. But that’s our job. And I firmly believe that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, or oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. A polarized electorate that is turned off of politics, and easily dismisses both parties because of the nasty, dishonest tone of the debate, works perfectly well for those who seek to chip away at the very idea of government because, in the end, a cynical electorate is a selfish electorate.
And this –
Our goal should be to stick to our guns on those core values that make this country great, show a spirit of flexibility and sustained attention that can achieve those goals, and try to create the sort of serious, adult, consensus around our problems that can admit Democrats, Republicans and Independents of good will. This is more than just a matter of “framing,” although clarity of language, thought, and heart are required. It’s a matter of actually having faith in the American people’s ability to hear a real and authentic debate about the issues that matter.
Maybe there is hope. Maybe this time the real grownups could be in charge. That seems unlikely, but it could happen. You never know.
