As a matter of principle, I try to pay as little attention as possible to polls and the ESPN-style analysis that invariably follows. Still, it’s hard not to notice that Barack Obama’s approval rating has been trending mostly downward. This is because a lot has gone wrong.

On the issues, Obama’s highest approval ratings are for education, but he’s accomplished little there. He gets decent marks for foreign policy, but due mainly to the inertia he’s accumulated by reversing his predecessor’s policies. His own efforts (as much as they can be considered his), especially in the Middle East, have been stymied by events. The Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are at a standstill and don’t look to be going anywhere. Violence in Iraq is up and the only bright spot is looming withdrawal. Afghanistan gets worse every day.

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The domestic front is no better. The economy continues to sputter. It seems that for the next year, the best-case scenarios are a decline in the rate of decline or (fingers crossed) anemic growth. Obama’s biggest problem is his foundering Healthcare reform. The Republican Party has used the issue to exhume itself. That much of their opposition is based on demagoguery (the “socialist” label) and sophistry (the “death panel” spectre) is immaterial. They’ve mobilized their base, allied themselves with conservative Democrats and accomplished a lot. A government-run alternative, once considered mandatory by the Obama Administration, looks to be bargained away for the sake of passing a bill, any bill. If that happens, the President will take a lot of heat from the liberal wing of his party. Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, in a much discussed quote, put it succinctly:

…ultimately, if the president decides that he’s going to go with a reform effort that doesn’t include a public option, what he will have done is spent a ton of political capital, riled up an incredibly angry right wing base who’s been told that this is a plot to kill grandma…and he will have achieved something that doesn’t change health care very much and that doesn’t save us very much money and won’t do very much for the American people. It’s not a very good thing to spend a lot of political capital on.

If we assume, as is increasingly likely, that a watered-down healthcare bill is passed, Obama will still be unpopular with the right (no surprise there) and possibly with the left as well. He’ll be boxed into the center and his bargaining power will diminish. Worse, midterm elections are barely a year away and Obama must be on his best political behavior, since his party will probably loose seats next November. The race for the White House will start right after and further circumscribe the new President. So Barack Obama might not accomplish much of anything in his first term, and we must face the possibility that a crucial period in our nation’s history will be one of dithering and stagnation, another way-station on the road to decline.

-Greg Waldmann

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“After Barack Obama’s victory in the presidential election last November,” Michael Tomasky writes in The New York Review of Books, “the question arose whether the result should be seen as a realignment—a fundamental shift in party dominance that would continue for a good many years.” He credits Obama and his team with holding their political coalition together, but

now we enter a new phase. Passing trillion-dollar legislation on, for example, health care reform, in which, by law, revenues have to equal outlays, is considerably harder than passing a stimulus bill on which no such demands were made (and even passing that legislation, as we saw, wasn’t easy). Big legislation makes walking the tightrope far more difficult, because “in legislation,” as one person told me, “there are winners and losers.” So now opposition will come not only from Republicans, but also from some Democrats. The next six months—especially with regard to health care, climate change, and the disposition of the Guantánamo issue—may go a long way toward determining the President’s fate.

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Tomasky’s article is an excellent primer on the difficulties and implications of passing these bills (some of which are winding their way through Congressional committees right now). And what if they make it to the President’s desk?

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Passing bills on health care and climate change and nailing down a deal to close Guantánamo would surely make for an impressive rookie year. But, to go back to where we started, would they herald Democratic dominance? No. The reforms, once passed, have to work.

And what then? Even if Obama’s (to the extent that they’re his; any bill ready for his signature will be a compromise) reforms work, will that usher in an age of Democratic Party dominance?

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I don’t think so, at least not for any amount of time you could call an “age.” Suppose America adopts a reasonably successful system of universal healthcare. Suppose Obama and the Democrats get the credit for it. Entitlements are the “third rail” of American politics. If the system is popular, Republicans will be forces to adapt, as they were forced to do with Social Security.

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If Obama’s reforms work, there probably wouldn’t be any long-term political realignment. But there would be an evolution. Party positions change but party names do not. In America, popular reforms drag Republicans and Democrats along with them. Demographics, on the other hand, are another story. Republicans are growing older and whiter, and that should scare them.

-Greg Waldmann

Leon Wieseltier writes this in The New Republic:

‘The thing I fear most is fear.” This was Montaigne, in an early essay, many centuries before Roosevelt. “It exceeds all other disorders in intensity.” He was endorsing an ancient fear of fear, according to which it is a disgrace, and the most formidable enemy of reason, and therefore an impediment to self-control, and to thoughtful action. The mastery of fear, in this tradition, is one of the signs of the attainment of wisdom.

“I am being a little bookish,” he says, “but I heard echoes of this deligitimation of fear in Barack Obama’s speech on national security at the National Archives.” This is in fact the least bookish paragraph in the piece. Wieseltier is a smart and well-read man, and his prose screams it at you like a little child demanding attention. (Incidentally, the sentence he quotes from the early essay “Of Fear” was from a revised section written much later in Montaigne’s life.)

Wieseltier continues:

[Obama] always referred to fear derisively–”all too often our government made decisions based on fear rather than foresight”; “we will be ill-served by … fear-mongering” and by words that “are calculated to scare people rather than educate them,” and so on. He warned against “fodder for 30-second commercials” and “direct mail pieces … designed to frighten the population.”

These quotes are devoid of context, and basically serve as fodder for the argument that since the days of FDR, fear has gotten a bad rap. Sometimes fear is good; it describes our attachments and it can be motivating. All well and good and perfectly fair, except that the quotes are devoid of context. Take the first snippet, originally lodged in this paragraph:

Unfortunately, faced with an uncertain threat, our government made a series of hasty decisions. I believe that many of these decisions were motivated by a sincere desire to protect the American people. But I also believe that all too often our government made decisions based on fear rather than foresight; that all too often our government trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions.

Obama wasn’t saying (or implying, as Wieseltier implies) that fear is bad. He was saying that allowing fear to cloud your judgement and using it to manipulate people is bad. Hardly controversial.

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Snippet number two belonged to this argument about detention policy:

And we will be ill-served by some of the fear-mongering that emerges whenever we discuss this issue. Listening to the recent debate, I’ve heard words that, frankly, are calculated to scare people rather than educate them; words that have more to do with politics than protecting our country.

If you’ve been looking for the argument that fear is bad, you won’t find it. Again, the President is saying (a bit more stiltedly than usual) that using fear to manipulate people is bad. Indeed he was far too polite about it. He could have said that challenging someone’s patriotism and gravely intoning the threat of a mushroom cloud or a terrorist attack for the sake of one’s own political gain is a base and and selfish and cowardly thing to do. In any case, what that paragraph is asking for is informed deliberation, as the word “educate” makes perfectly clear.

Near the end of his essay, high on his horse, Wieseltier proclaims gravely that “It is cruel to shame people for their fears, because their fears are measures of their attachments. A life with nothing to lose is a serene and hollow life.” Deep stuff, but apropos of nothing except the author’s own musings. The moral debate over detention policy, and anti-terrorism policy in general, is a question of protecting life while adhering to our values. It’s a debate motivated entirely by fear – fear of doing one and not the other. This seems obvious. Nevertheless, while the rest of us run around trying to digest the issue in all its complexity, Wieseltier stands solemnly still, staring at a tree.

-Greg Waldmann

Barack Obama may have disavowed torture, but George Bush still retains his ability to sully the presidency and the country. The latest episode concerns another group of photos that depict abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. The President agreed to release the photos last month, after the ACLU won a victory in the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. But after a review, Obama has reversed course and decided not to release the photos, lest they “further inflame anti-American opinion” and endanger American troops in the field. Another court fight is inevitable.

During his campaign, Obama stated repeatedly that Bush’s torture policy was a boon to terrorist recruitment – in other words, American soldiers were killed because of it (you can’t state things so blunty on national television). He promised not only an end to torture but transparency as well. Now he finds himself caught between the logic of national security and the imperatives of moral government. In order to insulate himself, Obama may have the Justice Department appeal the Second Circuit decision. His alternative is unpalatable. Obama could use the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act to classify the photos as a danger to national security, something he doesn’t want to do because it will cost him with his own party, and the photos might be released by the Supreme Court anyway. There’ll be a court fight in either case, but if Obama hews strictly to legal proceedings – which are carried out by subordinates – he can save some face whatever the outcome.

The bureaucratized torture of our recent past Lady and the Tramp II: Scamp’s Adventure hd is hurting us in other ways, not least of which is (perhaps ironically) knowledge of the past itself. Remember the 9/11 Commission Report, the product of a distinguished panel of old Washington hands, the one that sold hundreds of thousands of copies and graces the classrooms of colleges around the country? Fully one quarter of its footnotes refer to prisoners who underwent “enhanced interrogation.”

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And it appears that torture played its part in bringing us to Iraq as well. Lawrence Wilkerson reports

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What I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002–well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion–its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa’ida.

So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney’s office that their detainee “was compliant” (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP’s office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods.

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The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa’ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, “revealed” such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.

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There in fact were no such contacts. (Incidentally, al-Libi just “committed suicide” in Libya. Interestingly, several U.S. lawyers working with tortured detainees were attempting to get the Libyan government to allow them to interview al-Libi….)

Your tax dollars at work. So our current President is tying himself in knots working at cross purposes – trying to keep American soldiers safe and trying to bring America out of the cloud of opprobrium it’s been in for the last eight years. Our supposedly definitive investigation of the 9/11 terrorist attacks is partly based on an official atrocity. Likewise our casus belli for invading Iraq. Meanwhile, not one official responsible for torture policy has been taken to court, and torture-rationalizer extraordinaire John Yoo writes a column for the Philadelphia Inquirer, a decision the Inquirer’s idiot publisher defends by citing the happenstance of geography: “What I liked about John Yoo is he’s a Philadelphian. He went to Episcopal Academy, where I went to school.” Different strokes, I suppose.

-Greg Waldmann

Plunkett & Macleane trailer President Obama has just released four memos Men in Black hd from George Bush’s Office of Legal Council, a division of the Justice Department responsible for determining the legality of anything the President does. The ACLU sued the government for release of the documents, and yesterday was the deadline. According to news reports, there was a bitter debate within Obama’s administration about releasing the memos, which the CIA felt might demoralize their ranks and expose their staff to prosecution. So it seems that Obama has erred on the side of transparency; the documents have been released and there are few redactions. (On the whole issue of torture, as I’ve noted before, Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side is the best introduction to the subject, and my review is here.)

But the question of who can be held responsible for torture is still ambiguous, and so is the nature of Obama’s detention regime; the President was quick to soothe the intelligence community and retain his prerogatives as Commander in Chief. From his statement, released with the memos:

While I believe strongly in transparency and accountability, I also believe that in a dangerous world, the United States must sometimes carry out intelligence operations and protect information that is classified for purposes of national security…In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution…Going forward, it is my strong belief that the United States has a solemn duty to vigorously maintain the classified nature of certain activities and information related to national security…This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke. We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history.

Obama’s reassurances to the intelligence community, the “good faith” clause, still leave the door open to prosecution for anyone who went beyond anything the memos authorized, and apparently for Bush Administration officials as well (The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder has a good analysis of this on his blog: here

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Wild Seven movies , here, here and here). But the President, judging from his statements, seems content to leave that in the hands of others. It’s nothing if not smart politics.

-Greg Waldmann

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Jane Mayer’s reportage on the Bush administration’s detention policies has won her praise in many quarters. Greg Waldmann reviewed The Dark Side The Leon (Professional) download The Magdalene Sisters movie download

, her disturbing book on the subject, back in our December 2008 issue. Her coverage continues into the Obama Administration in the New Yorker Dolls psp .

Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri has been held at the U.S. Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, South Carolina since June of 2003, when he was on the brink of standing trial for “credit-card fraud, bank fraud, identity theft, and lying to a federal agent.” The charges stemmed from al-Marri’s 2001 arrest as a material witness in an investigation of the September 11th attacks. Al-Marri intended to plead innocent, and the F.B.I couldn’t coax any information out of him, so the Bush Administration put him in the care of the Department of Defense, hoping they would have more luck. Before agreeing to release him to the government,

the presiding judge in the case ruled that the White House would be barred from charging Marri again with the same crimes. In legal jargon, the original charges were “dismissed with prejudice,” to protect Marri’s right not to be place in “double jeopardy.” As a result, if the Obama Administration decides to charge him in the criminal system now, it has to bring a different set of charges, unless Marri’s lawyers offer a deal.

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Years of wrangling later, Al-Marri’s lawyers, hoping to secure a trial, have brought the issue all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Obama Administration must file a response by March 23rd. This response will have to address the folly of eight years of George Bush’s detention policy as much as it does the particulars of the case. Aside from wasting what federal prosecutors thought would be an easy conviction, Bush held Al-Marri without trial partly on the basis of statements made by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – statements made under torture. And al-Marri seems to have been abused during his stay there:

For the first six months, Marri was kept in an eight-foot-by-ten-foot cell with one blacked-out window, no social interaction, and nothing to do or to read…the Department of Defense ordered the removal of the mattress, pillow, and Koran…He was denied hot food, and consistently felt cold…At other points, Marri started feeling “tingles” all over, and began hallucinating…

After months of non-compliance, interrogators “chained [him] in a fetal position… [wrapped] duct tape around his mouth…tried to gag him. But as they started to tape a sock in his mouth he began to choke, causing the agents to panic and stop.” These facts are not in dispute; all of this is on tape somewhere. After a few years, the efforts of al-Marri’s lawyers secured him better treatment.

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Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrel told Mayer that “The Department of Defense treats all detainees humanely, and this is particularly true in the case of al-Marri, for whom we have taken extraordinary measures to insure his physical and mental well-being.” The first assertion is a blatant lie, the second a probable one, but what’s important is that it’s the first instance of such duplicity under Barack Obama’s Presidency. The incongruity in Morrel’s statement pertained to the policies of the last President. The upcoming Supreme Court case will show what the current President plans to do with them.

With the election over and inauguration imminent, The Atlantic serves up its “State of the Union” issue. While George Bush has been the President for the last eight years, Garrett Epps thinks the Founding Fathers deserve some of the blame for the sad shape the country is in today. The Constitution they produced “created a presidential office that is ill-considered, vaguely defined, and ripe for abuse.” Jeffrey Eaton reviewed the Library of America’s two-volume Debate on the Constitution back in our November issue, so stop off there first for some background.

Marc Ambinder has an excellent piece on the Obama campaign’s dexterous handling of race. “It had to make those pilsners of the Democratic electorate – true independents, Reagan Democrats, and working-class whites – culturally comfortable with Obama while simultaneously increasing African American participation.” A senior Obama aid explains to the author that “you could get intensity in the African American community by giving them a candidate they could see as being able to win. You didn’t have to speak to them in a way that would make white people nervous.”

In the same issue Hua Hsu writes about the end of White America and Ta-Nehisi Coates profiles Michelle Obama. Finally, Christopher Hitchens reviews the President-elect’s autobiographies, assessing the pros and cons of Obama’s rhetorical agility. For more on Barack Obama’s rhetoric and his views on race, among other things, be sure to check out Greg Waldmann’s in-depth look at the man and his books, from our October issue.

“I am quite seriously discussing the propriety of omitting it,” James Garfield wrote of his inaugural address, just two months before he had to give it. Well, he didn’t really have to give it. There’s no provision for it in the Constitution, but George Washington thought he ought to give a speech after he was sworn in and every President since has done the same. So we learn in Jill Lepore’s wonderful New Yorker piece on the evolution (or devolution) of the quadrennial speech.

Washington started it but addressed only the Congress; Jefferson addressed the American people, but only in the presence of Congress. James Monroe moved it outdoors but didn’t specifically address anyone. Finally, Andrew “The Lion” Jackson addressed the American people while outdoors. And that’s been the paradigm.

Garfield was plagued by his impending address, and he studied up by reading his predecessors. Most of what he found was uninspiring, and Lepore argues convincingly that they’ve actually gotten worse. Of course Lincoln’s addresses loom over the others. Jefferson had the most elegant zinger: “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” John Adams had the longest sentence (700 words). Harding beat all comers for sheer monotony. And “George H. W. Bush compared freedom to a kite.”

Nineteenth-century Presidents pledged themselves to the Constitution; twentieth-century Presidents courted the American people. We now not only accept that our Presidents will speak to us, directly, and ask for our support…we expect it, even though the founders not only didn’t expect it, they feared it.

Lepore traces the recent pandering, anti-intellectual trend to Richard Nixon, who established the Writing and Research Department, an office of official speechwriters. Words got smaller and rhetoric became more supplicating. Prior to that, when President’s had help they usually got it from friends or advisors. Ted Sorenson was Kennedy’s primary speechwriter, but he also did much more than that.

With all this in mind, and with Barack Obama’s inaugural looming in the near future, Lepore hones in on the moment

The problem doesn’t lie in the length of their sentences or the number of their syllables. It lies in the absence of precision, the paucity of ideas, and the evasion of every species of argument. Presidential rhetoric is worth keeping an eye on. But the anti-intellectual Presidency is fast expiring. And a rhetorical Presidency begins to look a lot better, after some years of a dumbfounded one.

She also reminds us that these inaugurals have traditionally been meant to be read as much as they were meant to be heard. Penguin, even in the age of YouTube, is already betting on it: they’ll be publishing Obama’s speech in Februrary – coupled with Lincoln’s two inaugurals, his Gettysburg address, and Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” Obama is a gifted orator, among other things, but stay tuned to Open Letters to see if he can keep pace with this sort of company.

Politics galore in the latest New Yorker. Elizabeth Drew has a very saavy piece about Barack Obama’s style of governance (deliberative and pragmatic) and the potential meaning of his victory. Obama will certainly be free to make fewer sops to interest groups. Drew notes that

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On election night, the most perceptive of the television analysts this year, Chuck Todd, NBC’s political director, said that Obama owed his victory to no particular segment of the population, that “no one group put him over the top.” Todd added that Obama could have won without a single vote of young people, Hispanics, or blacks.

And he ran a cleaner campaign, to boot. Does this mean the end of the so-called Rove era? Drew thinks so, and she goes even further:

The 2008 election may mark the end of Rovian politics, the strategy of dividing the country over cultural issues, such as abortion; of trying to scare voters into fearing for their security if the opposition candidate won. It may also mark the end of the culture wars that had been with us since the Sixties. Obama, the first post-baby-boomer presidential candidate, made those issues irrelevant.

A bit too hopeful perhaps, though the very thought must make bipartisanship fetishists like Ronald Brownstein salivate. In the same issue Michael Tomasky, one of the more astute political observers, is more cautious:

We must consider the question of realignment in light of the current financial crisis and the structural economic problems with which the new president must grapple….Whether Democrats will still be running successfully against George W. Bush in 2028 will depend very directly, it seems to me, on how Obama and the Democrats in Congress respond to the moment. With the current world situation fraught on so many fronts, certainly President Obama will have a singular opportunity to move his party beyond its post-Vietnam image of soft incoherence and show that a less bellicose foreign policy than Bush’s…But the economy will clearly occupy the center of the stage.

And we here in the literary corner can certainly second Joan Didion, celebrating the fact that

For the first time in the memory of most of us a major political party was moving in the direction of nominating a demonstrably superior candidate – a genuinely literate man in a culture that does not prize literacy, an actually cosmopolitan man in an arena that deems tolerance of the world suspect by definition.

We make no endorsements (though turn here for an OLM primer on Obama), but we heartily second the idea of a President that reads for pleasure.

Barack Obama has been elected the 44^th President of the United States. Open Letters offers warm congratulations.

Though we make no political endorsements, it would be blindness to survey the debris of the last eight years and not forthrightly conclude the Presidency of George W. Bush has been a disaster and a tragedy for our country. The editors acknowledge the tumult ahead – an accumulation of crises greater than any in the last half century. But last night’s election has left us exulted and relieved, and not just because Obama is a fine prose stylist (though that certainly helps around here); not just because he is a learned man familiar with history and philosophy and literature, though we’d make that a prerequisite for the office. It is not even because we have finally and decisively rejected the dark path we’ve been traveling and begun to cut a new one. These are worthy reasons, but there is another, one that undergirds the others and adds a visceral charge to the events of November 4; one that made this an election victory unlike any in our national memory. It could be seen in the celebrations at Grant Park in Chicago, in the spontaneous eruptions of joy in front of the White House, and in the teary eyes of students at Spellman College.

In his acceptance speech before a jubilant crowd of hundreds of thousands, Obama said “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.” It is tempting to call this hubris, but we must remember history.

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Three hundred and eighty nine years ago the Dutch ship White Lion landed at Old Point Comfort, the site of Fort Monroe in present-day Virginia. Damaged from storm and from battle, they sold the labor-starved colonists twenty human beings in exchange for food and repairs. These were America’s first slaves. Slaves were finishing the walls and ceilings of the White House when John Adams moved in. Black Americans were no longer slaves when Lee surrendered his army at Appomattox in 1865, but it would be a hundred years of suffering and protest before the law granted equality. More than forty years later the legacy of slavery and segregation is alive in our inner cities and in the stark whiteness of our college campuses. But today a black American has been elected President. Whatever your politics, that fact alone is occasion enough for joy and – to pilfer a phrase worn weary by two years of campaigning – a cause for hope.

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