The main critique I have of the Obama Administration thus far is one that has been noted by many but which I believe has led him to embrace some seriously flawed policy positions: the advisors who most shape his policy are better at winning campaigns than actually governing and that his policies both foreign and domestic have generally reflected self-serving political calculation over advancing the economic, social and strategic goals of the nation as a whole. In my opinion it seems that the short-term political fortunes of a man who is temporarily occupying the Oval Office and his political allies in Congress have trumped the long-term interests of all Americans in living in a country that is defined by personal freedom, economic prosperity and international security. In my opinion, the result of having an Administration whose governance embodies a permanent-campaign weltanschauung is that politically inconvenient facts that can be glossed over when crafting a 90 second sound bite for use in a campaign debate are ignored, to the country's detriment, when charting the course of actual policy, where such realities become crucially important. What is politically popular and possible to implement, say, in a law passed by a partisan Congress must ultimately bow to the costs and benefits of the legislation in reality, and those who ignore that fact do so at their own peril. Nobody likes the sad fact that some fraction of society has always lived in poverty, but in retrospect you would be hard pressed to find someone who would not foresee the failure of LBJ's Great Society with the benefit of hindsight.

In his speech tonight where he pledged, albeit with some small hedges, to increase troop strength in Afghanistan to take the fight to the Taliban and Al Qaeda and strengthen our alliances both with the barely nominally legitimate government in Kabul as well as the much more geopolitically important regime in Islamabad. By committing more troops to "the good war" in Afghanistan at long last he finally seemed to embrace a policy that comes with no obvious political benefit, and which embodies the fact that sometimes there is no guarantee that a problem that faces our nation is soluble, let alone easily soluble. Presidents must sometimes stake themselves to positions that are fraught with risk of failure, are politically unpopular, and yet represent the best, most viable policy option to take. Until tonight I had not seen Obama tread this obviously much more perilous road, even though both domestically and politically he has had opportunities to tackle problems head on and instead has deferred to politically easy "solutions" that will create problems for the country down the road.

I do not believe that this steely resolve to deal with the facts, no matter how unpleasant they may be has been present much, if at all, previously on the signature domestic and foreign policy challenges his Administration has tackled. Briefly consider, for example, how he has handled his signature domestic issue: reforming health-care policy. It has long been a dream of those in his political base to implement some form of nationalized health-care, or something functional identical, that guarantees health-care as part of the safety net offered to all American citizens--or all American residents, to some. It would seem obvious to anybody in the "reality based community" that extending care to millions of new people who don't get it now regardless of their ability to pay for it must necessarily come at some large societal cost, and that a frank discussion of what that cost will be and how we will pay it would be necessary to responsibly implement such a reform. Be it by decreasing the quality or nature of care generally, increasing the cost that most middle class people pay for that care either directly through higher premiums or indirectly through lower take-home wages or higher taxes, rationing non-emergent care, or some combination of all of the above, a realistic appraisal of the situation would admit that some cost will be borne. Instead, Obama took a hands off approach towards creating what he hoped would be a defining achievement by promising what a man as intelligent as he must have known could not realistically be possible: anybody who had care they liked would be able to keep it, we'd pay for the millions of new people whose health-care would be subsidized solely from cutting out inefficiencies in the current system, and that we'd do all this without increasing the deficit. Basically, we'd get something for nothing in a way no other country does--other countries pay doctors less, have rationing of all sorts of elective procedures, sometimes do not have the latest and most expensive treatments for certain afflictions available for all patients. When you're on the campaign trail promising a painless increase in health-care access to those who currently fall through the cracks is popular and can be relatively harmless if you don't tie yourself to a specific policy; actually promising to implement a policy that is essentially a free lunch--we'll expand health-care access but in a way that doesn't change anything if you like your current set-up and is deficit neutral--is reckless negligence since there is obviously some promise that will not be kept.

Similarly on foreign policy Obama has translated campaign slogans into an incoherent set of policies that are guided by domestic political impulses, seemingly, rather than a cogent geopolitical strategy to advance American interests. Presidential visits to foreign countries have largely come to be an opportunity for highly public, self-flagellating contrition, a belated apologia for George Bush's foreign policy decisions whose diplomatic purpose is unclear at best: no powerful country's history is pretty, and Obama is both not responsible for Bush's decisions and his election represents the fact that the American people had come to reject Bush and his approach to foreign policy. This has meant that he has given speeches whose intended audiences might have thought portended policy changes that were not actually forthcoming. These were political apologies for domestic consumption, a fact that might have been lost, for instance, on Arabs who were initially wowed by the debonair, young, worldly President but who have now become impatient as his initially contrite words have not been mirrored by substantive changes in U.S. policy on Israel. Contrition towards Latin America for Yanqui imperialism, from Monroe to Bush II, apparently, might have pleased the MoveOn.org crowd but it has also emboldened Hugo Chavez and his disciples to no clear benefit to the U.S. Campaign promise rhetoric to support human rights here and abroad has resulted in spite-your-face domestic policies like very publicly rehashing America's unsavory interrogation methods like waterboarding, which again serve no clear purpose in advancing America's interests, while the two most clear cases of human rights violations in Obama's Administration ran afoul of political and pragmatic needs of the Administration. In China there was the need not to alienate our biggest creditor and most disturbingly the political need not to commit a Bush era taboo by demonizing Iran meant the President sat mute even while the Ayatollah's goons cracked skulls to rig an election.

So it was refreshing, after Obama's months-long deliberation over Afghanistan, for him to finally take a policy stance that will not be politically popular that seems basically motivated by embracing the best policy after weighing, realistically, the costs, benefits and interests that our nation prioritizes. Finally, here, is a break with his governing-as-campaign school of decision making. Committing to any policy decision in either direction in Afghanistan would seem to mean running aground his administration on some politically unfavorable island, but he made the correct decision nonetheless, even though it was the more politically toxic policy in the short-term as it angers his anti-war base and puts young Americans in harm's way in what could be a failed campaign.

Going forward with the recommendations from his military advisors and his centrist campaign rhetoric that the Afghan war was "the good war" and that additional troops should be deployed there will anger his progressive supporters--especially since President Obama faces a much more dire and deadly situation for American troops in Afghanistan than Candidate Obama. Taking the suggestions of people frankly less familiar with the situation on the ground than others like Generals McChrystal and Patraeus giving counsel to double down, exemplified by Joe Biden who suggested we might remove our ground troops and fight the Taliban and Al Qaeda essentially remotely, e.g. with drones and cruise missiles, seems like it would have been a completely unworkable strategy. While it might have been temporarily popular for bringing the troops home and certainly would have been sweet nectar to the anti-war left, it almost certainly would have failed so utterly in advancing American strategic interests that all but the most doctrinaire pacifists would eventually have been horrified: think of the ineffectiveness of the Clinton era campaign in the Balkans, except where the target was not Slobodan Milosevic but Osama bin Laden.

Finally, it seems, even though it came with some hedging in the form of a tentative timeline for withdrawal and a politically motivated statement that our troops would very likely start coming home in less than two years, Obama made a decision in the foreign policy realm that is unlike those he has taken on domestic policy. The key difference is that he has stepped up to the plate when none of the options were obviously or immediately good, a situation that the Administration seems to believe exists distressingly little of the time. At home he has not only passed up making hard decisions that would address problems that existed before he took office (wrangling with burgeoning Federal debt) but supported policies that would create new problems that will be kicked down the line to be addressed by some future President who will "inherit" an untenable imbalance of insufficient revenue to fund new growth in entitlement obligations and market distortions (ObamaCare and increased power for unions.) As I outlined above I believe that thus far his foreign policy has been similarly averse to tackling real, difficult problems that offer limited political benefit but has rather been limited to ineffective and largely rhetorical gestures that seem to function mainly as counterpoints to the Bush Administration as opposed to decisions that genuinely advance the U.S.'s interests.

Here, though, as Obama himself said, the status quo on the ground in Afghanistan is not tenable--not just politically, but in fact, regarding American strategic interests to beat back Islamic extremism in those places where it might take a safe haven to attack the U.S. again or to undermine a critical, hugely populous, nuclear-armed ally that faces a radical fringe that threatens to undermine its democratic government, such as it is. Obama's outlining of what our interests are, what the costs will be, and what is reasonably attainable with the military resources we have and can dedicate to this conflict was a perfectly rational way to arrive at the conclusion that the status quo of piecemeal deterioration of our counter-insurgency mission in Afghanistan was fine, and frankly I have been astounded that this sort of frank, empirically guided decision making has been so utterly lacking in other spheres, where decisions have been taken for doctrinaire and partisan reasons.

The War on Terror is more important than health-care reform, and I am glad that President Obama has taken a rational approach to Afghanistan that was not guided by what will appease his base. That said, the current health-care reform bills could be hugely destructive and why such a frank accounting of unsustainable consequences, and a reasonable counterbalancing of costs and benefits is not so forthcoming. I think it's too late to hope for Obama to change course on health-care (although it's not too late to reasonably hope that a bill will not pass) and while I still think that drastically reducing Congressional Democrats power would be a very good thing for the country, as 9 painful years of experience have shown that political monopolization of the executive and legislative branches by either party is awful, Obama's Afghanistan policy is, essentially, the correct one.

Labels: obama, politics, war