Why is Barack Obama such a poor self promoter? The question was addressed today in Richard Oldrieve’s “stumped” column in the Washington Post. Oldgrieve can’t understand why Obama and his surrogates rarely mention his tenure as editor of the Harvard Law Review while Sarah Palin’s modest experience in sports journalism is celebrated by her supporters.
Oldrieve thinks the American public values personality over performance. Hence, Obama can’t flaunt his scholarly credentials without distancing himself from the hoi poloi.
This is a sound observation, oft repeated in the more sophisticated backwaters of the mainstream media. But the full truth cuts deeper.
Consider Mr. Obama’s support for the death penalty. Oldrieve fears that Obama is pandering to a conservative electorate because a black candidate can’t come off as soft on crime.
I agree, but is Mr. Obama unique in this regard? Michael Dukakis was severely damaged by his support for the death penalty in 1988, and no one has ever accused Barack Obama of being stupid. Oldrieve notes that Obama worked hard on death penalty issues in Illinois, helping pass laws requiring the taping of confessions so police officers couldn’t bully defendants and potential witnesses. Why doesn’t Obama advertise this accomplishment? Surely undecided voters would be impressed.
Yes they would. So impressed, in fact, that they would flock into the dependable arms of John McCain, a veteran politician who knows how to talk tough.
I was pleased to hear John McCain reinforce his opposition to torture last night. As a victim of brutal interrogation techniques, McCain understands in his gut why no civilized nation can stoop to such barbarism. McCain is as tough as they come, but even he had his breaking point. The statement he signed in the Hanoi Hilton was about as meaningful as the false testimony shrewd interrogatores often wring from mentally and emotionally weak defendants and witnesses.
But McCain isn’t going to extend his opposition to torture to the American criminal justice system. That would be suicidal.
Pundits have castigated both Obama and McCain for refusing to name the pet projects they will jetison in the wake of an historic Wall Street bailout. Do they really believe that Mr. McCain is going to advocate cutbacks in military spending or that Mr. Obama is going to punt on universal health care? Any admission along these lines would have become the stuff of the next day’s headline.
There are a host of obvious truths no presidential candidate can afford to acknowledge publicly.
Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International, writes about the Post-American world. America remains the world’s only military superpoweer, Zakaria admits, but her days of economic hegemony are over. China and India are growing impressively and will one day stand as America’s economic equals. More significantly, America is rapidly becoming a debtor nation, spending much, saving little, and sinking further into penury every day.
Is there a presidential politician bold enough to admit as much to the American public?
No one with a serious intention of occupying the oval office.
Zakaria’s cautionary tale is thin gruel compared to the new book by Andrew Bacevitch, The Limits of Power: the End of American Exceptionalism.
Bacevich, a retired Army colonel who teaches at Boston University, argues that America was once an empire of production but has degenerated into an empire of consumption. Thus we have a president who responds to 9-11 by urging his fellow Americans to shop till they drop.
But Bacevich cuts deeper. At the close of WWII, he argues, Harry Truman had to decide whether to disband the immense military establishment created during wartime or to expand it. Urged on by cold warriors, Truman opted for endless military expansionism and we are living with the consequences.
In order to justify our immense financial investment in the military establishment, Bacevich suggests, we have created a national security state rooted in a rigid and brutally enforced orthodoxy. Bacevich refuses to hold George W. Bush and his advisers responsible for the debacle in Iraq. Bush and company simply extended the logic of the national security state into new territory.
Every candidate for high office, the ex-military man insists, must sign off on the national security state as a matter of course. Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama must rattle the sabre. Any suggestion that our military adventures abroad are bankrupting the nation while destroying American credibility would doom any presidential run.
Bacevich is a traditional conservative in the mold of Reinhold Niebuhr, the most influential American theologian of the first half of the twentieth century. Niebuhr advocated a “Christian realism” that rejected liberal optimism and conservative hubris. Utopian day dreams and authoritarian nightmares were equally unacceptable to the clear-sighted Niebuhr.
Is there any connection between Barack Obama’s call to Jihad in Afganistan and his half-hearted support for the death penalty and the war on drugs?
I think there is.
Politicans like Obama and Clinton understand that if you want to become president of the United States you have to sign off on a national security state embracing a planetary web of military bases and an enormous gulag of state and federal prisons.
The same mentality that finds security in military firepower takes solace in mass incarceration–and for the same reason. In other words, Andrew Bacevich’s “limits of power” thesis can be applied to both the military establishment and the criminal justice system.
For strictly defensive reasons, we need a strong military and we need prisons. When America is threatened from without she must be able to defend herself. When violent criminals roam the streets we must be able to protect the citizenry.
But what happens when both the military and the prison system become two or three times as large as the defense of the American people require? Why are both the American military and the American prison system singularly immense? Why has America, virtually alone among the democracies of the West, revived the death penalty? At what point does more power equal less security?
And finally, how is the bloated size of the military and prison system related to the current market meltdown?
Bacevich argues that countries like China, India and the oil producing titans are financing an American military we can no longer afford.
Will the American economy recover? Or has a dot.com bubble suceeded by a mortgage bubble put off the day of reckoning? Is the big bad wolf at the door? Are we three little pigs huddled in a house of straw? Have we created an immense welfare state for the military, intelligence and criminal justice establishments that we can no longer afford?
One thing is certain; neither John McCain nor Barack Obama can break with national security state dogma any more than a fish can swear off water.
Does this mean that both candidates are intentionally lying to us?
I don’t think so. Necessity is the mother of conviction.
Bacevich doesn’t think the outcome of the 2008 presidential election will be as significant as most pundits imagine. Both candidates will face the same daunting economic and military realities, and both men must confront the self-defeating nature of American desire: we desire free access to services, products, fossil fuel and credit, and will severely punish any president who says the free lunch is over.
True to the Christian realism of Reinhold Niebuhr, Bacevich is looking for the place where the interests of America and the interests of the rest of the world community overlap. It is too much to expect nation states to follow the self-sacrificial way of Jesus, he says (it’s hard enough for individuals to scale those heights). But we can expect the nations of the world to pursue their own self-interest. The “my-way-or-the-highway” rhetoric employed by George W. Bush will get us nowhere; other countries will follow our lead only when they believe it is serves their interests to do so.
Does Christian realism have anything to say about the American criminal justice system?
Yes. We have doubled and tripled the size of our prison system by fighting a “war on crime” and a “war on drugs”. War, Bacevich reminds us, is always an unpredictable and risky enterprise, prone to unforseen consequences. Few military operations in the second half of the twentieth century yielded the results anticipated by presidents and generals.
The same critique applies to the wars we have declared on drugs and criminals. We have told the residents of poor neighborhoods that if they don’t mend their ways we will throw them in prison on a massive scale. Has it worked? It depends. If the goal was to build lots of prisons and cram them to the rafters, our war on crime has been a smashing success. But if we were trying to reduce crime, diminish the drug trade, and improve the viability of poor neighborhoods we have failed miserably.
People resist blunt force. If the surge in Iraq has been successful it is because (a) American soldiers have been instructed to treat Iraqis with respect and dignity and (b) we have found that place where the interests of Sunni insurgents and the American military overlap.
Apply those tactics to the inner cities of America and we may see positive results.
If you are dealing with a violent criminal, prison makes a lot of sense. If the goal is to grow mature, self-reliant citizens, prison is a disaster. When inmates return to the streets they are even less disciplined, focused and responsible than when they went in. The prison environment encourages a survival mentality, slavish conformity and the complete surrender of self-determination. While brief prison stretches can serve as a wake-up call, the point of diminishing returns comes quickly.
Bacevich argues that military force should be employed defensively and only as a last resort. The same line of reasoning could be applied to poverty control (which, in most cases, is what our criminal justice system is all about). For most dysfunctional people, opportunity delivers more bang for the buck than blunt force.
Friends of Justice talks about a common peace–the point at which the interests of affluent Americans overlap with the interests of poor people. Our next president needs to be searching for this precious patch of ground, for only there is even modest progress possible.
But we can’t wait passively for a McCain or an Obama to lead the charge. That’s why Friends of Justice is taking its case to “communities of moral discourse”–beginning with the churches of the greater Dallas area.
Presidents will lead the way when we leave them with no alternative.
Friends of Justice 
As you said prisons are poverty control, so is our “Defense” really nation control. If we spoke these things and other things you said, out loud, it would help us grasp reality a little better. We need the kind of self-interest that says, “Lets have only so much war-making and so much prison size.” Then we can also start considering real human progress.
Well put. One thing I’d suggest, however, is that we hold media pundits in a bit less reverence. They really cannot be taken seriously in a scholarly sense, because they are terribly invested in a culture that glorifies conflict (mainly ideological, but also physical). They make money because of disagreement, and they think (or at least act as if they think) that their role in “keeping candidates honest” is limited to putting them on the spot by asking questions that they know in advance they cannot afford to answer plainly. They are far less interested in honest appraisal of candidates’ historical record with regard to issues and causes. One example that you cite is Sen. McCain’s record with respect to the issue of torture. But the press does not mention (nor do you) that when McCain’s own bill was up for a vote, when his vote mattered, on an ammendment that watered it down substantially, Sen. McCain sat on his campaign plane at Dulles airport instead of coming to the Senate. That is a conscious choice that is part of the historical record that is rarely discussed. Similarly, there is precious little discussion in the national media about Sen. Obama’s record in the Illinois Senate, though there is much there to explore. Such analysis tends to bore most members of the public, and writers prefer not to have their by-line on boring articles.
Good thoughts, Mark. I failed to mention McCain’s failure to support his own torture bill because I was unaware of the incident you mention. Politicians know they are rolling the dice in opposing torture. It’s not as disastrous as supporting capital punishment, but any suggestion that defendants of any kind have rights of any sort is politically risky.