Three weeks is a a long time to take off for a blogger, and so I apologize--to myself as well as to anyone else accustomed to reading this space. But I needed a vacation.  My wife and I went to France, Switzerland (briefly) and Bulgaria. There was work of a sort interspersed in the trip, but mainly it was a vacation, our first in almost three years. While in France we were not only in Paris but also Haute Savoie.  Or what in English used to be called Savoy. Savoy was an independent polity for longer than the United States has been organized territorially, from around 1516 to 1860. But unless you know a little European history, this will come as news to most Americans. One sees signs here and there while driving around the mountains (these are the French Alps, of course) that read "Savoie libre."  The white-on-red Savoy cross is everywhere, too. Ah, European regionalism raising its head under the high blue sky of the European Union umbrella. A phenomenon with a future--noting Catalonia, Lombardy, Scotland and many other examples? I think so. 

But that has nothing to do with Barack Obama. So let me only say that I will write more about my trip later, particularly about my first time in Bulgaria. For now, however, just a short comment about the President. 

Last thing I heard the President say was that he "can't just push a button and have the banks do what he wants them to do", or "flip a switch" and make Congress obey his desires. Of course, the President-as-pedagogue explains to the American people, there are counterpoised centers of power in the United States. The President is not a king or a dictator.  All of this is true, certainly, but that is not the point I wish to make. The point I wish to make coalesces around a question: It is wise to say things that are true, just because they are true?

Short answer: no.  I do not see how it helps the President or his program to admit his weaknesses. I do not see either why it helps the President get what he wants, as opposed to keeping his popularity ratings high, to go on the Jay Leno Show and otherwise indulge in forms of postmodern populism.  The American people are nervous right now, and have every right to be. There is a sharp deficit in anonymous trust in our institutions--not just the financial ones, all of them (except maybe the U.S. Army). The American people, if they can be distracted from their bread-and-circus entertainments, do not need a pal; they need a leader. They do not need commiseration from the Oval Office; they need confidence-building. They do not need a rock star, but a rock.

President Obama really has his hands full. He's in not a classical double-bind, but a triple bind. He wants to change the country, invest in human capital and social trust, but he cannot afford to do those things (assuming he knows how, which I don't assume except maybe in the energy area) until the economy rights itself. He doesn't know when that will happen or really know how to make it happen faster, but the way he has chosen to try will make his desire to invest that much harder a goal to reach. He knows that once (if?) the economy starts to rebound, he needs to throw on the spending brakes lest we end up with devastating inflation, and he seems honestly to be a sincere fiscal conservative. But he'll never get a grip on spending with this Congress in his face; they simply won't let him. He can't even roll Senator Conrad on farm subsidies, for heaven's sake. And thanks to the Congress, too, his underlying goal that he sees as a the key to making American democracy work again--to change the K Street transactional culture--recedes in the face of the other sides of the bind. 

In the end, of course, being stuck in this bind--economic straits, the investment limits they impose, and the impossibility of structural reform as a result of his being beholden to the Congress to deal with the first two parts of the bind--will ultimately hurt his popularity, and here timing, as usual, is everything.  He needs to avoid the Democrats getting pasted in the 2010 midterm elections if he is to rack up enough of a second-term victory to get real leverage over the Congress. He also needs to try again at bipartisanship, even though it is distasteful to him for good reason. But if he acts weak, even and especially if he is weak, he won't get the GOP help he could use.

He is still smiling; he is still popular; he is charmed in Europe and elsewhere. But he is not being effective yet in turning the great wheels of the ship of state. He doesn't have a lot of troops, a lot of "his" guys (think, by comparison, for example, how many chits Lyndon Johnson could call in by the time he got to the White House). He is dependent on others, and their interests are not the same as his. In this light to call attention publicly to what he can't do is not very wise.  He needs to cut that stuff out.

President Obama’s speech to the Turkish parliament yesterday was, to my way of thinking, an anti-climactic event. For months now we have been tantalized by the promise that Obama would go to a majority-Muslim country and tell it like it is. And this is what we get? This was a box-checking speech, full of duck-billed platitudes and not a single deliverable. The only things noteworthy about it were that: a) it happened; b) there was no quid pro quo protocol equilibration to Greece; and c) the speech abjured the old language that Turkey is a “moderate Muslim nation.” Turkey, we learn, is a secular democracy, just as Ataturk and his secular fundamentalist followers have insisted it is ever since 1924. This at a time when Turkey has a government, and a fairly popular one, that makes that description less resonant politically than ever. Why go talk to a Muslim-majority society only to pretend, sort of, at the same time that you’re not?

As for the “key” line—that we are not at war with Islam—well, Obama buried his lead four-fifths the way down the text, and of course that statement is nothing Bush Administration principals, including the President, did not say dozens of times. If it suits your interests not to believe that statement, it’s not going to matter much which U.S. president says it. If it suits your interests now to stop saying you don’t believe it, then any President who is not George W. will do. If some Muslims have now heard this statement for the first time, just because it was delivered in Turkey by Barack Obama, fine: better eventually than not at all. But no, that statement in and of itself is not a game-changer, not with more U.S. soldiers headed to Afghanistan, more missiles fired into Pakistan’s border areas, more violence inevitable in Iraq over the next two years. Those of the conspiratorial persuasion seeking evidence that Obama is a liar will be able to find it just as easily as those who were sure George W. was a liar.

As for the speech itself as a form of the “black arts”, as Peggy Noonan once put it about speechwriting, it’s the worst major presentation the President has given (or delivered) so far. Judging from the official transcript pulled off of whitehouse.gov, I counted at least two dozen mild infelicities, bonafied clunkers and grammatical errors that never should have made it past a second draft. One of these days people will stop comparing Obama to the hopeless George W. Marblemouth and recognize how mediocre this stuff really is.

Am I saying I could have done better as a speechwriter for this occasion? Yes, I actually believe that. There were oh so many missed opportunities in that speech--so many ways to have better concretized U.S.-Turkish friendship, and so many ways to have recognized that tolerance, hospitality, rule of law and other virtues (not to exclude democracy) that apply to Turkey, historically and at present, do not have to be expressed in an American idiom to be real and worthy of sincere admiration.

Maybe the lack of a unifying theme and anything remotely resembling a deliverable is the good news here. Some people have been hoping that Obama would use this occasion to launch a Presidential initiative on Israel/Palestine, stating U.S. parameters for a settlement, inviting the world to sign up to them, and implying muscular suasion on all engaged sides to make it happen. That we did not hear. Though I am skeptical that such a policy is wise, I’m almost sad it didn’t happen: that, at least, would have made the speech memorable.

Since my last post--and yes, I know, it's been a while--I've been for the first time to Las Vegas, Nevada. I went with my wife, just for a weekend. The occasion was a history teachers' conference on the nuclear age, held at the Desert Research Institute, which houses the Museum of Nuclear Testing. Yes, there really is such a thing, and it's where it is, of course, because the testing site for lots of U.S. tests was in the nearby Nevada desert. Pretty good conference: Jeremy Bernstein, a eminent senior scientist who personally witnessed the 1946 test, was there and told some great stories. He told us Leibling's Gambler's Prayer, for example: "Oh Lord, let me at least break even....because I really need the money." Ambassadors Avis Bohlen and Jim Goodby were there, also Hans Mark, former Secretary of the Air Force and an MIT physics PhD, and several other not-too-shabby presenters. And, of course me. But that's not what I want to talk about. 

Las Vegas is just weird, and since most of Nevada's two million people live there, Nevada is weird. We're told that these days Las Vegas is a normal town, and that less than half its economic activity depends on The Strip of hotel-casinos and associated activities. Well, maybe, but it doesn't matter: If hadn't been for the gambling and the booze and the whores in the first place, none of the rest of that stuff would ever have developed. The whole place is built on what amounts to once-removed theft. It's not outright theft, but it's a systematic taking advantage of people who, for one reason or another, think that probability and statistics apply to everyone on the planet except them. 

In every other American town I've ever been in, and I've seen a few, the freebie newspaper kiosk things are full of real estate brochures, restaurant coupons and stuff like that.  In Las Vegas, they're full of dial-up naked women. There are hordes of Mexicans on the street, lined up in gaggles of six, eight, twelve -- some of them older women -- handing out little cards, just slightly smaller than a baseball card, with pictures of mostly naked women on them, and the members of the advertising gaggle are all wearing the same orange t-shirts emblazoned with black letters reading "Girls, in 20 minutes" and some other gibberish and a phone number.  And yet this is a city of family entertainment, you bet; and absolutely there are huge number of people there with their little kids, infants, toddlers, elementary school kids, junior high school kids.  Are these people out of their minds?!

And you never saw such gaudy, ugly footwear in your life. I always wondered what kind of woman would buy high heels that looked like they've been dunked in birthday cake glitter. Now I know.

There are some elegant things to see and experience, it is true.  I liked the Bellagio best, all of it, but especially the fountain water ballet, and that especially at night. We took in a  Cirque de Soliel show, which was magnificent. But my basic inner feeling was one that drove me to a long, hot shower as soon as I could avail myself of one, just to wash off all the inner filth I felt from being there. 

We did not gamble. Not one penny. No reason to.  I did not understand some of the card games, and I've been playing poker since I was eight years old. Long enough ago to have since learned that playing against the house is not my idea of a fair fight. As for the machines, there not slot machines anymore like the old ones my parents took me to out route 301 in the old days around Waldorf, Maryland.  No arm to pull down; no obvious randomizer at work. The new machines are not electro-mechanical but digital. They can be programmed to a zillion sequences, and while they will pay a win now and then, it has nothing to do with the player, or with counting the odds seeing how the machine patterns out. You cannot reason that there even is a randomizer at work, except by inference that if there weren't, the credibility of the whole thing would suffer and people wouldn't come so much. But it just did not seem right to me, did not feel right, and I didn't play. It's not even the money I cared about; it's the extremely unpleasant feeling of being had.  I'd rather lose $1,000 at a fair game than 30 cents at a fixed one. 

The city was crowded; shows were sold out; if there's a recession in this country, you can't readily tell it from walking around Las Vegas. The local news show had a story while we were there talking about how many more girls -- I think they mean young women -- are going in for stripping and more besides. The experts opined that the common explanation for this--hard times so they need the money--seems right, but probably isn't. They said it just provides a pretext for women who are looking to do this anyway. Well, I don't know. No way for me to know. All I know is, if I had a ten year-old, I wouldn't take him, and especially her, there. 

Oh, and what about President Obama? Well, there's been the Geithner bank plan playing out and getting hammered by experts left and right. 

There's been the revelation of the new Afpak strategy, and attacks on it. 

There's been the vaunted return of U.S.-Russian strategic arms control, a useful activity in its own right, but something easy to do only when one doesn't really need it. 

And a NATO and G-20 Summit is going on right now. It won't end so well, but it won't matter so much either.  It's an initiation ritual. The sides will get serious later. 

There's been the revisitation of the lunatic North Korean regime with its missile test, and the Secretary of Defense pronouncing in public how we were not going to knock it down on the launch pad, and how the Pyongyang crowd seems uninterested in diplomacy--not, in my view, the sorts of things it is wise to say out loud. 

Our Secretary of State actually told the truth, out loud, about Mexican drug-gang warfare actually being our fault, in this case I think a wise thing to say out loud. But then there was that handing of some letters from Ambassador Holbrooke to an Iranian, and the the State Department had the audacity to say it was a chance, unanticipated encounter. Folks, you don't prepare diplomatic correspondence in the hopes of a chance encounter. Lies are fine if they serve a purpose in this sort of game. But when they are transparently false, obviously false, it is embarrassing even to try to lie.  Maybe the State Department should hire some unemployed types from Wall Street.  They're experts.

A lot has happened lately, in fact.....but it'll have to wait for comment later. Too much other work to do.