Two speeches

Alas, another long hiatus between posts. Why? Well, again, I've either been "busy" or "lazy", two of the most fungible words in the English language (perhaps, probably, mutatis mutandis with the vocabulary, in every language). But I just had to comment on the Obama Administration's speechmaking of late in foreign policy. Had to.

The President gave a major, architectural speech in Moscow on July 7 at the New Economics School graduation. At least it was supposed to be an architectural speech. It had five major elements, pillars or points, and it was very far-reaching in its language (wait just a minute and I'll come back to that). So this, I and others thought, was THE speech, the one given near the beginning of an administration that tells the world what the purposes of American power are. Usually THE speech, the architectural blueprint, is given by the Secretary of State, but since, by nearly all accounts, this President is acting as his own Secretary of State with the help of the Vice-President, this did not come as such a surprise.

But then, just eight days later, the Secretary of State gave a speech at the Washington offices of CFR that--you could have knocked me over with a feather--looked, smelled, quacked and read like THE speech, an architectural blueprint for U.S. foreign policy. This was a surprise. At the beginning of the Bush Administration, for various reasons I know but don't want to spend time explaining here, we got no such speech. This time we got two.

It would not have been so surprising if Secretary Clinton's speech had tracked along with the President's. It too featured five elements or pillars or main points, after all. And as these things are properly done, for a Secretary of State to echo and elaborate on the President's policy would have been a good idea, and it would have been proper and standard practice. But it didn't track with the President's speech.

Here are President Obama's five pillars from July 7: anti-WMD proliferation; isolating and defeating violent extremism; global prosperity; democracy; and international system that advances cooperation while respecting sovereignty. Here are Secretary Clinton's five pillars from July 15: build stronger mechanisms for cooperation; lead with diplomacy; make development as a core priority; coordinate civil-military efforts in conflict zones; and shore up the traditional sources of American influence, notably the international economy.

There is some overlap here. Obama's #3 matches, sort of, Clinton's #5. Obama's #5 could be read as akin to Clinton's #3. Clinton mentions democracy and human rights, Obama's #4, but does not call them a pillar. Basically, however, these are two separate speeches saying different things in different tones and with different emphases. Obama's five pillars are goals or aspirations, living at a high level of abstraction, if one had to describe them; Clinton's are less goals than operational principles, living at a high--but not as high--level of abstraction. I can see some clever White House type, if asked, claiming that the speeches are complementary on this basis--the President lays out what we want to do and the Secretary lays out how we're going to do it. But no one has done so because the press, so far anyway, has been too stupid, or too fawning, to notice the disconnect and ask any questions about it. And it would be cleverness without substance, because in fact these are what they appear to be: two uncoordinated speeches.

How did this happen? I don't know the lead time on the President's speech, but I do know, or can surmise, that the lead time on Clinton's was more than eight days. That means that the speech was being prepared before Obama spoke in Moscow. I don't know how these folks operate, but I do know that when I was writing Colin Powell's major speeches, and the first two that Condoleezza Rice gave before I left her service, it would not have occurred to us to keep the White House uninformed as to what we were doing; in short, we would have cleared a mature draft at some point. Even more important, it would never have occurred to Powell, and certainly not to Rice, to essentially ignore what the President had said or was about to say on the same subject. They would have made it their business to know and align their language. They would have told me or the chief-of-staff or somebody to call over to the White House and talk to the speechwriters and find out what was going down. Powell used to insist that there never be any publicly perceivable "blue sky" between himself and President Bush, because that would just reduce his leverage, such as it was, on the President in private. What was Clinton thinking when she stood up there at the CFR podium, just days after the President's Moscow speech, knowing she was about to give a speech of parallel purpose to the President's but not of parallel content? Beats me.

Now, as to the speeches themselves, both are pretty bad as expressions of the "black arts" of speechwriting, to invoke Peggy Noonan's wonderful old phrase. Neither one is memorable, and neither sticks conceptually to the wall, as it were. But Obama's is worse. Good thing, I suppose, that no one noticed it since Michael Jackson died..... Clinton's at least has a theme that transcends pure banality, something the Building can understand and be lifted by, and the pieces fit together logically, sort of. Obama's, meanwhile, is all over the place; there is no logical thread connecting the parts, no theme one can remember as a take-away, no deliverables, no proposals or plans revealed. And there is way too much sentimental eyewash toward the end, and this in front of an extremely cynical Russian audience. Bad audience read.

But again, the real problem is that the President and the Secretary of State don't seem to be in the same huddle. I don't know this crowd--don't know the staffers who know the principals. But from the looks of this spate of speechmaking, I'd have to suppose that these teams are simply not speaking to one another on any level that matters. Maybe there's another explanation, but if so I can't see what it might be. So I'd have to conclude that this episode confirms my original view that Obama was on balance wrong to offer Hillary Clinton this job, and she was wrong to have accepted it.

It has been a long time since I wrote here.  Been busy, I guess.  But I just had to make a small remark for posterity's sake:  I heard Robert McNamara is finally dead. I know it is considered in poor taste to express happiness over the death of a fellow human being, but the only thing that would have made me happier is if the son-of-a-bitch had died a long time ago.  I hope he suffered.  What a horrible man, not just as Secretary of Defense, but also as World Bank president and then as semi-retired moron for many, many years.  Oh, I am so glad he's finally dead.  I want to know where his grave is.  I won't go out of my way to visit, but if I find myself nearby I hope to have my dancing shoes handy.

I needed this, too.  It has not been a great morning.  Squirrels in the plum trees this morning, and I missed, as usual, the one shot I managed to squeeze off. Just got back from attending a wedding in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin; cost me $1,700 and I can't honestly say I had any fun doing it. Gained a few pounds, too. Was late to work despite being awake early; more slowness on the Red Line....  Great weather for July, nice and cool. Otherwise, have not played my instruments for weeks, longest break I can ever remember, and don't have much taste even for listening to music.  Don't know what's the matter with me. So thanks, McNamara, for cheering me up at least a little.

I finally read it, the June 4 Cairo speech, and read it carefully. I’ve also seen lots of comments on it.

I could either have a lot, a whole lot, or a lot less to say about it, depending on how much time you have, oh dear reader. But basically, I think the speech was pretty good, and may well have accomplished what the President wanted to accomplish by it. That’s the right measure, not whether he said some things that were not strictly true. Which he did. 

That said, I have lots of criticisms, many of them small, some of them a little larger.

First, addressing “the Muslim world” and equating it to America is unfortunate. That sets up the ummah as a political actor and diminishes the authority of the state. It speaks al-Qaeda language and cedes the vocabulary to the bad guys. This is not a very smart thing to do, and would worry me a lot more if I worried a lot more about the power of this enemy.

Second, some of what he said was culturally clueless. Like speaking out loud what you know to be so in private being a virtue. This is not how Middle Easterners see the world. They will see a statement like that not as noble but naïve.

Third, he was a little too much fawning. Using the word “revealed” for Islam and quoted Quran 4 times. That’s fawning.

Fourth, relatedly, he missed the subtle difference between being modest (which is good) and being humble (which isn’t good). You never apologize.

Fifth, related to the first comment, there is something a little awkward about conflating a sermonesque delivery to the Muslims with a point-by-point policy review (Afghanistan, Iraq, Arab-Israeli, etc) because you’re bound to leave something out, (Lebanon,eg) giving the impression that you don’t really care about it. That also accounts for the seemingly pathetic “deliverable” part, about the programs we’ll run and the money we’ll spend. It mixes tones, and it gives the whole a disrupted, rocky feel. The “deliverable” sounded like a box-checking exercise, but it need not have had the front of the speech not been so abstract.

Sixth, at one point early on he referred to the speech (anticipation of it) in the speech. You never do that. It’s not Presidential and it breaks frame.

Seventh, at one point he referred proudly to the democratically elected government of Iraq, but given his criticism of Iraq as a (wrong) war of choice, it was a little too obvious that had Sen. Obama’s views prevailed, there would be no democratically-elected government of Iraq.

All that said, it was a strong speech and in many ways brave. As I said, I think it did in the region what he meant it to do --- hit a kind of re-set button, not be preachy or threatening, and especially not be so self-referential and self-possessed. That’s not “manly” in Arab culture, and Bush did way too much of it — it was all about us. I think Obama was wise not to use the “T” word. He was explicit that we did not seek permanent bases in Iraq or a lock on Iraqi oil, something Bush could have said on umpteen occasions, should have, and foolishly never did. He mentioned justice twice and dignity four times, and those are the right vocab buttons to push. 

I also reject the accusations that he equated the Holocaust and Palestinian displacement; he did not.He merely pointed out that both peoples carry historical baggage that affects their perceptions. Anyone who denies that has to be some kind of imbecile. Really, too, from a Jewish point of view, anyone who had trouble with this speech was looking for ways to have trouble with it. I reject the accusation that POTUS made the U.S. “neutral” in the Arab-Israeli conflict; most of what he said on that score could have been cribbed from any number of speeches given by former Presidents and SectStates.

So what am I really saying? That it could have been a lot worse, and that I could have written it better.  Sure as hell I could have, too.  But not bad; pretty good; in some places brave; in a very few really masterful. 

Yesterday's New York Times Magazine carried David Leonhardt's interview of President Obama on the economy and, I am glad to say, in at least one respect (if not also others) it was very heartening. I refer specifically to the fact the POTUS clearly gets the analytical problems involved in the health care cost acceleration, especially the problem of spending on terminal care.  He exaggerated the estimated percentage this might come to -- as much as 80%, he said -- but that's not important. What's important is that he takes the subject seriously enough to have learned something about it.  And, of course, his understanding thus tracks perfectly with my own, as discussed in an earlier post on this blog. You could look it up. 

I was amused too by Obama's remarks about his economic advisers -- the ones in government service and a few not.  He mentioned by name Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Paul Volcker, Peter Orszag, Robert Reich, Paul Krugman, Joe Steiglitz and Christine Romer. He noted that Summers is now sounding more like Reich sounded inside the Clinton Administration ten years ago--i.e., more structural and radical in terms of analysis.  What he did not mention is that all of these advisors except, I think, Romer, are Jewish. Is Obama trying to get the economy moving or to make a minyan?

Of course there is an explanation for this.  It's not (just) funny. It's in my new book: Jewcentricity: Why the Jews Get Praised, Blamed and Used to Explain Nearly Everything.  Out in September. Buy it please, because I don't make a dime from this blog.

More, on Bulgaria and Savoie Libre, later.

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.