by David Bromwich

Like many days, March 3rd saw the delivery of a stern opinion by President Obama. To judge by recent developments in Ukraine, he said, Russia wasputting itself “on the wrong side of history.” This might seem a surprising [...]]]> How Obama Became a Publicist for His Presidency (Rather Than the President)

by David Bromwich

Like many days, March 3rd saw the delivery of a stern opinion by President Obama. To judge by recent developments in Ukraine, he said, Russia wasputting itself “on the wrong side of history.” This might seem a surprising thing for an American president to say. The fate of Soviet Communism taught many people to be wary of invoking History as if it were one’s special friend or teammate. But Obama doubtless felt comfortable because he was quoting himself. “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent,” he said in his 2009 inaugural address, “know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” In January 2009 and again in March 2014, Obama was speaking to the world as its uncrowned leader.

For some time now, observers – a surprisingly wide range of them — have been saying that Barack Obama seems more like a king than a president. Leave aside the fanatics who think he is a “tyrant” of unparalleled powers and malignant purpose. Notions of that sort come easily to those who look for them; they are predigested and can safely be dismissed. But the germ of a similar conclusion may be found in a perception shared by many others. Obama, it is said, takes himself to be something like a benevolent monarch — a king in a mixed constitutional system, where the duties of the crown are largely ceremonial. He sees himself, in short, as the holder of a dignified office to whom Americans and others may feel naturally attuned.

A large portion of his experience of the presidency should have discouraged that idea. Obama’s approval ratings for several months have been hovering just above 40%. But whatever people may actually think of him, the evidence suggests that this has indeed been his vision of the presidential office — or rather, his idea of his function as a holder of that office. It is a subtle and powerful fantasy, and it has evidently driven his demeanor and actions, as far as reality permitted, for most of his five years in office.

What could have given Obama such a strange perspective on how the American political system was meant to work? Let us not ignore one obvious and pertinent fact. He came to the race for president in 2007 with less practice in governing than any previous candidate. At Harvard Law School, Obama had been admired by his professors and liked by his fellow students with one reservation: in an institution notorious for displays of youthful pomposity, Obama stood out for the self-importance of his “interventions” in class. His singularity showed in a different light when he was elected editor of theHarvard Law Review – the first law student ever to hold that position without having published an article in a law journal. He kept his editorial colleagues happy by insisting that the stance of the Review need not be marked by bias or partisanship. It did not have to be liberal or conservative, libertarian or statist. It could be “all of the above.”

This pattern — the ascent to become presider-in-chief over large projects without any encumbering record of commitments — followed Obama into a short and uneventful legal career, from which no remarkable brief has ever been cited. In an adjacent career as a professor of constitutional law, he was well liked again, though his views on the most important constitutional questions were never clear to his students. The same was true of his service as a four-term Illinois state senator, during which he cast a remarkable number of votes in the noncommittal category of “present” rather than “yea” or “nay.” Finally, the same pattern held during his service in the U.S. Senate, where, from his first days on the floor, he was observed to be restless for a kind of distinction and power normally denied to a junior senator.

Extreme caution marked all of Obama’s early actions in public life. Rare departures from this progress-without-a-trail — such as his pledge to filibuster granting immunity to the giants of the telecommunications industry in order to expose them to possible prosecution for warrantless surveillance — appear in retrospect wholly tactical. The law journal editor without a published article, the lawyer without a well-known case to his credit, the law professor whose learning was agreeably presented without a distinctive sense of his position on the large issues, the state senator with a minimal record of yes or no votes, and the U.S. senator who between 2005 and 2008 refrained from committing himself as the author of a single piece of significant legislation: this was the candidate who became president in January 2009.

The Man Without a Record

Many of these facts were rehearsed in the 2008 primaries by Hillary Clinton. More was said by the Republicans in the general election. Yet the accusations were thrown onto a combustible pile of so much rubbish — so much that was violent, racist, and untrue, and spoken by persons manifestly compromised or unbalanced — that the likely inference was tempting to ignore. One could hope that, whatever the gaps in his record, they would not matter greatly once Obama reached the presidency.

His performance in the campaign indicated that he had a coherent mind, did not appeal to the baser passions, and was a fluent synthesizer of other people’s facts and opinions. He commanded a mellow baritone whose effects he enjoyed watching only a little too much, and he addressed Americans in just the way a dignified and yet passionate president might address us. The contrast with George W. Bush could not have been sharper. And the decisiveness of that contrast was the largest false clue to the political character of Obama.

He was elected to govern when little was known about his approach to the practical business of leading people. The unexplored possibility was, of course, that little was known because there was not much to know. Of the Chicago organizers trained in Saul Alinsky’s methods of community agitation, he had been considered among the most averse to conflict. Incongruously, as Jeffrey Stout has pointed out in Blessed Are the Organized, Obama shunned “polarization” as a valuable weapon of the weak. His tendency, instead, was to begin a protest by depolarizing.  His goal was always to bring the most powerful interests to the table. This should not be dismissed as a temperamental anomaly, for temperament may matter far more in politics than the promulgation of sound opinions. The significance of his theoretical expertise and practical distaste for confrontation would emerge in the salient event of his career as an organizer.

As Obama acknowledged in a revealing chapter of his memoir, Dreams from My Father, the event in question had begun as a protest with the warmest of hopes. He was aiming to draw the attention of the Chicago housing authority to the dangers of asbestos at Altgeld Gardens, the housing project where he worked. After a false start and the usual set of evasions by a city agency, a public meeting was finally arranged at a local gymnasium. Obama gave instructions to two female tenants, charged with running the meeting, not to let the big man from the city do too much of the talking. He then retired to the back of the gym.

The women, as it turned out, lacked the necessary skill. They taunted and teased the city official. One of them dangled the microphone in front of him, snatched it away, and then repeated the trick. He walked out insulted and the meeting ended in chaos. And where was Obama? By his own account, he remained at the back of the room, waving his arms — too far away for anyone to read his signals. In recounting the incident, he says compassionately that the women blamed themselves even though the blame was not all theirs. He does not say that another kind of organizer, seeing things go so wrong, would have stepped forward and taken charge.

“I Can’t Hear You”

“Leading from behind” was a motto coined by the Obama White House to describe the president’s posture of cooperation with NATO, when, after a long and characteristic hesitation, he took the advice of Hillary Clinton’s State Department against Robert Gates’s Defense Department and ordered the bombing of Libya. Something like that description had been formulated earlier by reporters covering his distant and self-protective negotiations with Congress in the progress of his health-care law. When the phrase got picked up and used in unexpected ways, his handlers tried to withdraw it. Leading from behind, they insisted, did not reflect the president’s real attitude or the intensity of his engagement.

In Libya, all the world knew that the planning for the intervention was largely done by Americans, and that the missiles and air cover were supplied by the United States. Obama was the leader of the nation that was bringing down yet another government in the Greater Middle East. After Afghanistan and Iraq, this marked the third such American act of leadership since 2001. Obama, however, played down his own importance at the time; his energies went into avoiding congressional demands that he explain what sort of enterprise he was leading.

By the terms of the 1973 War Powers Resolution, a president needs congressional approval before he can legally commit American armed forces in “hostilities” abroad. But according to the argument offered by Obama’s lawyers, hostilities were only hostilities if an American was killed; mere wars, on the other hand, the president can fight as he pleases — without the approval of Congress. No American soldier having been killed in Libya, it followed that Obama could lead the country from behind without congressional approval. This delicate legal sophistry served its temporary purpose and the bombing went forward. Yet the awkward description, “leading from behind,” would not go away. These days, the phrase is mostly used as a taunt by war-brokers whose idea of a true leader runs a remarkably narrow gamut from former president George W. Bush to Senator John McCain. These people would have no trouble with Obama if only he gave us more wars.

The curious fact remains that, in Obama’s conception of the presidency, leading from behind had a concrete meaning long before the Libyan intervention. When approached before the 2008 election by labor leaders, community organizers, foreign policy dissenters, and groups concerned with minority rights and environmental protection, each of which sought assurance that he intended to assist their cause, Obama would invariably cup his ear and say, “I can’t hear you.”

The I-can’t-hear-you anecdote has been conveyed both in print and informally; and it is plain that the gesture and the phrase had been rehearsed. Obama was, in fact, alluding to a gesture President Franklin Roosevelt is said to have made when the great civil rights organizer A. Philip Randolph put a similar request to him around 1940. Roosevelt, in effect, was saying to Randolph: You command a movement with influence, and there are other movements you can call on. Raise a cry so loud it can’t be mistaken. Make me do what you want me to do; I’m sympathetic to your cause, but the initiative can’t come from me.

It was clever of Obama to quote the gesture. At the same time, it was oddly irresponsible. After all, in the post-New Deal years, the union and civil rights movements had tremendous clout in America. They could make real noise. No such combination of movements existed in 2008.

And yet, in 2008 there had been a swell of popular opinion and a convergence of smaller movements around a cause. That cause was the candidacy of Barack Obama. The problem was that “Obama for America” drank up and swept away the energy of all those other causes, just as Obama’s chief strategist David Plouffe had designed it to do. Even in 2009, with the election long past, “Obama for America” (renamed “Organizing for America”) was being kept alive under the fantastical conceit that a sitting president could remain a movement leader-from-behind, even while he governed as the ecumenical voice of all Americans. If any cause could have pulled the various movements back together and incited them to action after a year of electioneering activity on Obama’s behalf, that cause would have been a massive jobs-creation program and a set of policy moves to rouse the environmental movement and address the catastrophe of climate change.

Civil Dissociation

By the middle of 2009, Barack Obama was no longer listening. He had alreadypicked an economic team from among the Wall Street protégés of the Goldman Sachs executive and former economic adviser to the Clinton administration, Robert Rubin. For such a team, job creation and environmental regulation were scarcely attractive ideas. When the new president chose health care as the first “big thing” he looked to achieve, and announced that, for the sake of bipartisan consensus, he was leaving the details of the legislation to five committees of Congress, his “I can’t hear you” had become a transparent absurdity.

The movements had never been consulted. Yet Obama presumed an intimacy with their concerns and a reliance on their loyalty — as if a telepathic link with them persisted. There was a ludicrous moment in the late summer of 2009 when the president, in a message to followers of “Obama for America,” told us to be ready to knock on doors and light a fire under the campaign for health-care reform. But what exactly were we to say when those doors opened? The law — still being hammered out in congressional committees in consultation with insurance lobbyists — had not yet reached his desk. In the end, Obama did ask for help from the movements, but it was too late. He had left them hanging while he himself waited for the single Republican vote that would make his “signature law” bipartisan. That vote never came.

The proposal, the handoff to Congress, and the final synthesis of the Affordable Care Act took up an astounding proportion of Obama’s first year in office. If one looks back at the rest of those early months, they contained large promises — the closing of Guantanamo being the earliest and the soonest to be shelved. The most seductive promise went by the generic name “transparency.” But Obama’s has turned out to be the most secretive administration since that of Richard Nixon; and in its discouragement of press freedom by the prosecution of whistleblowers, it has surpassed all of its predecessors combined.

In the absence of a performance to match his promises, how did Obama seek to define his presidency? The compensation for “I can’t hear you” turned out to be that all Americans would now have plenty of chances to hear him. His first months in office were staged as a relaxed but careful exercise in, as was said at the time, “letting the country get to know him.” To what end? The hope seemed to be that if people could see how truly earnest, temperate, patient, thoughtful, and bipartisan Obama was, they would come to accept policies that sheer ideology or ignorance might otherwise have led them to doubt or reject.

It was magical thinking of course — that Americans would follow if only we heard him often enough; that people of the most divergent tempers and ideas would gradually come to approve of him so visibly that he could afford to show the country that he heard the call for reform. But one can see why his presidency was infused with such magical thinking from the start. His ascent to the Oval Office had itself been magical.

To be known as the voice of the country, Obama believed, meant that he should be heard to speak on all subjects. This misconception, evident early, has never lost its hold on the Obama White House. The CBS reporter Mark Knoller crunched the first-term numbers, and some of them are staggering. Between January 2009 and January 2013 Obama visited 44 states, led 58 town hall meetings, granted 591 media interviews (including 104 on the major networks), and delivered 1,852 separate speeches, comments, or scheduled public remarks. From all those planned interactions with the American public, remarkably few conversions ever materialized.

By following the compulsion (which he mistook for a strategy) of coming to be recognized as the tribune of all the people, Obama squandered indefinite energies in pursuit of a finite opportunity. For there is an economy of gesture in politics, just as there is in sports. Show all your moves too early and there will be no surprise when the pressure is on. Talk steadily on all subjects and a necessary intensity will desert you when you need it.

In Confidence Men, the most valuable study so far of the character and performance of Obama as president, the journalist Ron Suskind noticed the tenacity of the new president’s belief that he enjoyed a special connection to the American people. When his poll numbers were going down in late 2009, or when his “pivot to jobs” had become a topic of humor because he repeated the phrase so often without ever seeming to pivot, Obama would always ask his handlers to send him out on the road.  He was convinced: the people would hear him and he would make them understand.

He sustained this free-floating confidence even though he knew that his town halls, from their arranged format to their pre-screened audiences, were as thoroughly stage-managed as any other politician’s. But Obama told Suskind in early 2011 that he had come to believe “symbols and gestures… are at least as important as the policies we put forward.”

The road trips have proved never-ending.  In 2014, a run of three or four days typically included stops at a supermarket outlet, a small factory, and a steel mill, as the president comforted the unemployed with sayings such as “America needs a raise” and repeated phrases from his State of the Union address such as “Let’s make this a year of action” and “Opportunity is who we are.”

In discussions about Obama, one occasionally hears it said — in a mood between bewilderment and forbearance — that we have not yet known the man. After all, he has been up against the enormous obstacle of racism, an insensate Republican party, and a legacy of bad wars. It is true that he has faced enormous obstacles. It is no less true that by postponement and indecision, by silence and by speaking on both sides, he has allowed the obstacles to grow larger. Consider his “all of the above” energy policy, which impartially embraces deep-sea drilling, wind farms, solar panels, Arctic drilling, nuclear plants, fracking for natural gas, and “clean coal.”

Obama’s practice of recessive management to the point of neglect has also thrown up obstacles entirely of his devising. He chose to entrust the execution and “rollout” of his health-care policy to the Department of Health and Human Services. That was an elective plan which he himself picked from all the alternatives. The extreme paucity of his meetings with his secretary of health and human services, Kathleen Sebelius, in the three years that elapsed between his signing of the law and the rollout of the policy makes a fair epitome of negligence. Indeed, the revelation of his lack of contact with Sebelius left an impression — which the recent provocative actions of the State Department in Ukraine have reinforced — that the president is not much interested in what the officials in his departments and agencies are up to.

The Preferential President

Obama entered the presidency at 47 — an age at which people as a rule are pretty much what they are going to be.  It is a piece of mystification to suppose that we have been denied a rescue that this man, under happier circumstances, would have been well equipped to perform. There have been a few genuine shocks: on domestic issues he has proven a more complacent technocrat than anyone could have imagined — a facet of his character that has emerged in his support for the foundation-driven testing regimen “Race to the Top,” with its reliance on outsourcing education to private firms and charter schools.  But the truth is that Obama’s convictions were never strong. He did not find this out until his convictions were tested, and they were not tested until he became president.

Perhaps the thin connection between Obama’s words and his actions does not support the use of the word “conviction” at all. Let us say instead that he mistook his preferences for convictions — and he can still be trusted to tell us what he would prefer to do. Review the record and it will show that his first statement on a given issue generally lays out what he would prefer. Later on, he resigns himself to supporting a lesser evil, which he tells us is temporary and necessary. The creation of a category of permanent prisoners in “this war we’re in” (which he declines to call “the war on terror”) was an early and characteristic instance. Such is Obama’s belief in the power and significance of his own words that, as he judges his own case, saying the right thing is a decent second-best to doing the right thing.

More than most people, Obama has been a creature of his successive environments. He talked like Hyde Park when in Hyde Park. He talks like Citigroup when at the table with Citigroup. And in either milieu, he likes the company well enough and enjoys blending in. He has a horror of unsuccess. Hence, in part, his extraordinary aversion to the name, presence, or precedent of former president Jimmy Carter: the one politician of obvious distinction whom he has declined to consult on any matter. At some level, Obama must realize that Carter actually earned his Nobel Prize and was a hard-working leader of the country. Yet of all the living presidents, Carter is the one whom the political establishment wrote off long ago; and so it is Carter whom he must not touch.

As an adapter to the thinking of men of power, Obama was a quick study. It took him less than half a year as president to subscribe to Dick Cheney’s view on the need for the constant surveillance of all Americans. This had to be done for the sake of our own safety in a war without a visible end. The leading consideration here is that Obama, quite as much as George W. Bush, wants to be seen as having done everything possible to avoid the “next 9/11.” He cares far less about doing everything possible to uphold the Constitution (a word that seldom occurs in his speeches or writings). Nevertheless, if you ask him, he will be happy to declare his preference for a return to the state of civil liberties we enjoyed in the pre-2001 era. In the same way, he will order drone killings in secret and then give a speech in which he informs us that eventually this kind of killing must stop.

What, then, of Obama’s commitment in 2008 to make the fight against global warming a primary concern of his presidency? He has come to think American global dominance — helped by American capital investment in foreign countries, “democracy promotion,” secret missions by Special Operations forces, and the control of cyberspace and outer space — as the best state of things for the United States and for the world. We are, as he has told us often, the exceptional country. And time that is spent helping America to dominate the world is time that cannot be given to a cooperative venture like the fight against global warming. The Keystone XL pipeline, if it is built, will bring carbon-dense tar sands from Canada to the Gulf Coast, and probably Obama would prefer not to see the pipeline built. Yet it would be entirely in character for him to approve and justify its construction, whether in the name of temporary jobs, oil industry profits, trade relations with Canada, or all of the above.

He has already softened the appearance of surrender by a device that is in equal parts real and rhetorical. It is called the Climate Resilience Fund: a euphemism with all the Obama markings, since resilience is just another name for disaster relief. The hard judgment of posterity may be that in addressing the greatest threat of the age, Barack Obama taught America dimly, worked part time at half-measures, was silent for years at a stretch, and never tried to lead. His hope must be that his reiterated preference will count more heavily than his positive acts.

David Bromwich has written on civil liberties and America’s wars for the New York Review of Books and the Huffington Post. A collection of his essays,Moral Imagination, will be published this spring by Princeton University Press.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook and Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return From America’s Wars — The Untold Story.

Copyright 2014 David Bromwich

*This article was first published on Tom Dispatch

The Saved and the Sacked

By David Bromwich

Is it too soon to speak of the Bush-Obama presidency?

The record shows impressive continuities between the two administrations, and nowhere more than in the policy of “force projection” in the Arab world. With one war half-ended [...]]]> Reposted by arrangement with Tom Dispatch

The Saved and the Sacked

By David Bromwich

Is it too soon to speak of the Bush-Obama presidency?

The record shows impressive continuities between the two administrations, and nowhere more than in the policy of “force projection” in the Arab world. With one war half-ended in Iraq, but another doubled in size and stretching across borders in Afghanistan; with an expanded program of drone killings and black-ops assassinations, the latter glorified in special ceremonies of thanksgiving (as they never were under Bush); with the number of prisoners at Guantanamo having decreased, but some now slated for permanent detention; with the repeated invocation of “state secrets” to protect the government from charges of war crimes; with the Patriot Act renewed and its most dubious provisions left intact — the Bush-Obama presidency has sufficient self-coherence to be considered a historical entity with a life of its own.

The significance of this development has been veiled in recent mainstream coverage of the national security state and our larger and smaller wars. Back in 2005-2006, when the Iraqi insurgency refused to die down and what had been presented as “sectarian feuding” began to look like a war of national liberation against an occupying power, the American press exhibited an uncommon critical acuteness. But Washington’s embrace of “the surge” in Iraq in 2007 took that war off the front page, and it — along with the Afghan War — has returned only occasionally in the four years since.

This disappearance suited the purposes of the long double-presidency. Keep the wars going but normalize them; make them normal by not talking about them much; by not talking about them imply that, while “victory” is not in sight, there is something else, an achievement more realistic and perhaps more grown-up, still available to the United States in the Greater Middle East. This other thing is never defined but has lately been given a name. They call it “success.”

Meanwhile, back at home…

The usual turn from unsatisfying wars abroad to happier domestic conditions, however, no longer seems tenable. In these August days, Americans are rubbing their eyes, still wondering what has befallen us with the president’s “debt deal” — a shifting of tectonic plates beneath the economy of a sort Dick Cheney might have dreamed of, but which Barack Obama and the House Republicans together brought to fruition. A redistribution of wealth and power more than three decades in the making has now been carved into the system and given the stamp of permanence.

Only a Democratic president, and only one associated in the public mind (however wrongly) with the fortunes of the poor, could have accomplished such a reversal with such sickening completeness.

One of the last good times that President Obama enjoyed before the frenzy of debt negotiations began was a chuckle he shared with Jeff Immelt, the CEO of General Electric and now head of the president’s outside panel of economic advisers.  At a June 13th meeting of the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, a questioner said he assumed that President Obama knew about the difficulties caused by the drawn-out process of securing permits for construction jobs. Obama leaned into the microphone and offered a breezy ad-lib: “Shovel ready wasn’t as, uh, shovel-ready as we expected” — and Immelt got off a hearty laugh. An unguarded moment: the president of “hope and change” signifying his solidarity with the big managers whose worldly irony he had adopted.

A certain mystery surrounds Obama’s perpetuation of Bush’s economic policies, in the absence of the reactionary class loyalty that accompanied them, and his expansion of Bush’s war policies in the absence of the crude idea of the enemy and the spirited love of war that drove Bush. But the puzzle has grown tiresome, and the effects of the continuity matter more than its sources.

Bush we knew the meaning of, and the need for resistance was clear. Obama makes resistance harder. During a deep crisis, such a nominal leader, by his contradictory words and conduct and the force of his example (or rather the lack of force in his example), becomes a subtle disaster for all whose hopes once rested with him.

The philosopher William James took as a motto for practical morality: “By their fruits shall ye know them, not by their roots.”

Suppose we test the last two and a half years by the same sensible criterion. Translated into the language of presidential power — the power of a president whose method was to field a “team of rivals” and “lead from behind” — the motto must mean: by their appointments shall ye know them.

Let us examine Obama, then, by the standard of his cabinet members, advisers, and favored influences, and group them by the answers to two questions: Whom has he wanted to stay on longest, in order to profit from their solidity and bask in their influence? Which of them has he discarded fastest or been most eager to shed his association with? Think of them as the saved and the sacked.  Obama’s taste in associates at these extremes may tell us something about the moral and political personality in the middle.

The Saved

Advisers whom the president entrusted with power beyond expectation, and sought to keep in his administration for as long as he could prevail on them to stay:

1. Lawrence Summers: Obama’s chief economic adviser, 2009-2010. As Bill Clinton’s secretary of the treasury, 1999-2001, Summers arranged the repeal of the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act, which had separated the commercial banks — holders of the savings of ordinary people — from the speculative action of the brokerage houses and money firms. The aim of Glass-Steagall was to protect citizens and the economy from a financial bubble and collapse.  Demolition of that wall between savings and finance was a large cause of the 2008 meltdown. In the late 1990s, Summers had also pressed for the deregulation of complex derivatives — a dream fully realized under Bush. In the first months of the Obama era, given a free hand by the president, he commandeered the bank bailouts and advised against major programs for job creation. He won, and we are living with the results.

In 2009-2010, the critical accessory to Summers’s power was Timothy Geithner, Obama’s treasury secretary.  Most likely, Geithner was picked for his position by the combined recommendations of Summers and Bush’s treasury secretary Hank Paulson. The latter once described Geithner as “a very unusually talented young man,” and worked with him closely in 2008 when he was still president of the New York Fed.  At that time, he concurred with Paulson on the wisdom of bailing out the insurance giant AIG and not rescuing Lehman Brothers. Obama for his part initiated several phone consultations with Paulson during the 2008 campaign — often holding his plane on the tarmac to talk and listen. This chain is unbroken. Any tremors in the president’s closed world caused by Summers’s early departure from the administration have probably been offset by Geithner’s recent reassurance that he will stay at the Treasury beyond 2011.

Postscript: In 2011, Summers has become more reformist than Obama. On The Charlie Rose Show on July 13th, he criticized the president’s dilatoriness in mounting a program to create jobs. Thus he urged the partial abandonment of his own policy, which Obama continues to defend.

2. Robert Gates: A member of the permanent establishment in Washington, Gates raised to the third power the distinction of massive continuity: First as CIA director under George H.W. Bush, second as secretary of defense under George W. Bush, and third as Obama’s secretary of defense.  He remained for 28 months and departed against the wishes of the president. Gates sided with General David Petraeus and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen in 2009 to promote a major (called “moderate”) escalation of the Afghan War; yet he did so without rancor or posturing — a style Obama trusted and in the company of which he did not mind losing. In the Bush years, Gates was certainly a moderate in relation to the extravagant war aims of Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and their neoconservative circle. He worked to strengthen U.S. militarism through an ethic of bureaucratic normalization.

His approach has been endorsed and will be continued — though probably with less canniness — by his successor Leon Panetta. Without a career in security to fortify his confidence, Panetta is really a member of a different species: the adaptable choice for “running things” without regard to the nature of the thing or the competence required. Best known as the chief of staff who reduced to a semblance of order the confusion of the Clinton White House, he is associated in the public mind with no set of views or policies.

3. Rahm Emanuel: As Obama’s White House chief of staff, Emanuel performed much of the hands-on work of legislative bargaining that President Obama himself preferred not to engage in. (Vice President Joe Biden also regularly took on this role.) He thereby incurred a cheerless gratitude, but he is a man willing to be disliked. Obama seems to have held Emanuel’s ability in awe; and such was his power that nothing but the chance of becoming mayor of Chicago would have plucked him from the White House. Emanuel is credited, rightly or not, with the Democratic congressional victory of 2006, and one fact about that success, which was never hidden, has been too quickly forgotten. Rahm Emanuel took pains to weed out anti-war candidates.

Obama would have known this, and admired the man who carried it off. Whether Emanuel pursued a similar strategy in the 2010 midterm elections has never been seriously discussed. The fact that the category “anti-war Democrat” hardly exists in 2011 is, however, an achievement jointly creditable to Emanuel and the president.

4. Cass Sunstein: Widely thought to be the president’s most powerful legal adviser. Sunstein defended and may have advised Obama on his breach of his 2008 promise (as senator) to filibuster any new law awarding amnesty to the telecoms that illegally spied on Americans. This was Obama’s first major reversal in the 2008 presidential campaign: he had previously defended the integrity of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) against the secret encroachment of the National Security Agency (NSA).

At that moment, Obama changed from an accuser to a conditional apologist for the surveillance of Americans: the secret policy advocated by Dick Cheney, approved by President Bush, executed by NSA Director Michael Hayden, and supplied with a rationale by Cheney’s legal counsel David Addington. In his awkward public defense of the switch, Obama suggested that scrutiny of telecom records and their uses by the inspectors general in the relevant agencies and departments should be enough to restore the rule of law.

When it comes to national security policy, Sunstein is a particularly strong example of Bush-Obama continuity. Though sometimes identified as a liberal, from early on he defended the expansion of the national security state under Cheney’s Office of the Vice President, and he praised the firm restraint with which the Ashcroft Justice Department shouldered its responsibilities. “By historical standards,” he wrote in the fall of 2004, “the Bush administration has acted with considerable restraint and with commendable respect for political liberty. It has not attempted to restrict speech or the democratic process in any way. The much-reviled and poorly understood Patriot Act, at least as administered, has done little to restrict civil liberty as it stood before its enactment.” This seems to have become Obama’s view.

Charity toward the framers of the Patriot Act has, in the Obama administration, been accompanied by a consistent refusal to initiate or support legal action against the “torture lawyers.”  Sunstein described the Bush Justice Department memos by John Yoo and Jay Bybee, which defended the use of the water torture and other extreme methods, in words that stopped short of legal condemnation: “It’s egregiously bad. It’s very low level, it’s very weak, embarrassingly weak, just short of reckless.” Bad lawyering: a professional fault but not an actionable offense.

The Obama policy of declining to hold any high official or even CIA interrogators accountable for violations of the law by the preceding administration would likely not have survived opposition by Sunstein. A promise not to prosecute, however, has been implicit in the findings by the Obama Justice Department — a promise that was made explicit by Leon Panetta in February 2009 when he had just been named President Obama’s new director of the CIA.

As head of the president’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, with an office in the White House, Sunstein adjudicates government policy on issues of worker and consumer safety; yet his title suggests a claim of authority on issues such as the data-mining of information about American citizens and the government’s deployment of a state secrets privilege. He deserves wider attention, too, for his 2008 proposal that the government “cognitively infiltrate” discussion groups on-line and in neighborhoods, paying covert agents to monitor and, if possible, discredit lines of argument which the government judges to be extreme or misleading.

5. Eric Holder: Holder once said that the trial of suspected 9/11 “mastermind” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a New York City courtroom would be “the defining event of my time as attorney general.”  The decision to make KSM’s a civilian trial was, however, scuttled, thanks to incompetent management at the White House: neither the first nor last failure of its kind. The policy of trying suspected terrorists in civilian courts seems to have suffered from never being wholeheartedly embraced by the administration’s inside actors. Local resistance by the New York authorities was the ostensible reason for the failure and the change of venue back to a military tribunal at Guantanamo. No member of the administration besides Holder has been observed to show much regret.

During his 30-month tenure, in keeping with Obama’s willingness to overlook the unpleasant history of CIA renditions and “extreme interrogations,” Holder has made no move to prosecute any upper-level official of any of the big banks and money firms responsible for the financial collapse of 2008.  His silence on the subject has been taken as a signal that such prosecutions will never occur. To judge by public statements, the energies of the attorney general, in an administration that arrived under the banner of bringing “sunshine” and “transparency” to Washington, have mainly been dedicated to the prosecution of government whistle-blowers through a uniquely rigorous application of the Espionage Act of 1917. More people have been accused under that law by this attorney general than in the entire preceding 93 years of the law’s existence.

Again, this is a focus that Bush-era attorneys general John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, and Michael Mukasey might have relished, but on which none would have dared to act so boldly. Extraordinary delays in grand jury proceedings on Army Private Bradley Manning, suspected of providing government secrets to WikiLeaks, and Julian Assange, who ran that website, are said to have come from a protracted attempt to secure a legal hold against one or both potential defendants within the limits of a barbarous and almost dormant law.

6. Dennis Ross: Earlier in his career, Obama seems to have cherished an interest in the creation of an independent Palestinian state. In Chicago, he was a friend of the dissident Middle East scholar Rashid Khalidi; during his 2007 primary campaign, he sought and received advice from Robert Malley, former special assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli affairs, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter.  Both were “realist” opponents of the expansionist policy of Israel’s right-wing coalition government, which subsidizes and affords military protection to Jewish settlements on the occupied West Bank.

Under pressure from the Israel lobby, however, Obama dissociated himself from all three chosen advisers.

Ross, as surely as Gates, is a member of Washington’s permanent establishment. Recruited for the Carter Defense Department by Paul Wolfowitz, he started out as a Soviet specialist, but his expertise migrated with a commission to undertake a Limited Contingency Study on the need for American defense of the Persian Gulf.  An American negotiator at the 2000 Camp David summit, Ross was accused of being an unfair broker, having always “started from the Israeli bottom line.”

He entered the Obama administration as a special adviser to Hillary Clinton on the Persian Gulf, but was moved into the White House on June 25, 2009, and outfitted with an elaborate title and comprehensive duties: Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for the Central Region, including all of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, Pakistan and South Asia. Ross has cautioned Obama to be “sensitive” to domestic Israeli concerns.

In retrospect, his installation in the White House looks like the first step in a pattern of concessions to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that undid Obama’s hopes for an agreement in the region. Here, caution precluded all inventiveness. It could have been predicted that the ascendancy of Ross would render void the two-state solution Obama anticipated in his carefully prepared and broadly advertised speech to the Arab world from Cairo University in June 2009.

7. Peter Orszag: Director of the Office of Management and Budget from January 2009 to August 2010, Orszag was charged with bringing in the big health insurers to lay out what it would take for them to support the president’s health-care law.  In this way, Orszag — along with the companies — exerted a decisive influence on the final shape of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. In January 2011, he left the administration to become vice chairman of global banking at Citigroup.  A few days out of the White House, he published an op-ed in the New York Times advising the president to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for the top 2% of Americans — adding that Obama should indicate that the cuts would continue in force only through 2012. Obama took the advice.

8. Thomas Donilon: National Security Adviser and (after the departure of Gates) Obama’s closest consultant on foreign policy. Donilon supported the 34,000 troop-escalation order that followed the president’s inconclusive 2009 Afghanistan War review.  He encouraged and warmly applauded Obama’s non-binding “final orders” on Afghanistan, which all the participants in the 2009 review were asked formally to approve.  (The final orders speak of “a prioritized comprehensive approach” by which the U.S. will “work with [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai when we can” to set “the conditions for an accelerated transition,” to bring about “effective sub-national governance,” and to “transfer” the responsibility for fighting the war while continuing to “degrade” enemy forces.)

Donilon comes from the worlds of business, the law, and government in about equal measure: a versatile career spanning many orthodoxies. His open and unreserved admiration for President Obama seems to have counted more heavily in his appointment than the low opinion of his qualifications apparently held by several associates.  As Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs during the Clinton administration, he helped arrange the eastward expansion of NATO after the Cold War: perhaps the most pointless and destructive bipartisan project of the epoch. He was Executive Vice President for Law and Policy at Fannie Mae, 1999-2005.

The Sacked

Advisers and nominees with views that were in line with Obama’s 2008 election campaign or his professed goals in 2009, but who have since been fired, asked to resign or step down, or seen their nominations dropped:

1. General James Jones: Former Marine Corps Commandant and a skeptic of the Afghanistan escalation, Jones became the president’s first National Security Adviser.  He was, however, often denied meetings with Obama, who seems to have looked on Gates as a superior technocrat, Petraeus as a more prestigious officer, and Donilon as a more fervent believer in the split-the-difference war and diplomatic policies Obama elected to pursue.  Jones resigned in October 2010, under pressure.

A curious point:  Obama had spoken to Jones only twice before appointing him to so high a post and seems hardly to have come to know him by the time he resigned.

2. Karl Eikenberry: Commander of Combined Forces in Afghanistan before he was made ambassador, Eikenberry, a retired Lieutenant General, had seniority over both Petraeus and then war commander General Stanley McChrystal when it came to experience in that country and theater of war. He was the author of cables to the State Department in late 2009, which carried a stinging rebuke to the conduct of the war and unconcealed hostility toward any new policy of escalation.  The Eikenberry cables were drafted in order to influence the White House review that fall; they advised that the Afghan war was in the process of being lost, that it could never be won, and that nothing good would come from an increased commitment of U.S. troops.

Petraeus, then Centcom commander, and McChrystal were both disturbed by the cables — startled when they arrived unbidden and intimidated by their authority. Obama, astonishingly, chose to ignore them. This may be the single most baffling occasion of the many when fate dealt a winning card to the president and yet he folded. Among other such occasions: the 2008-2009 bank bailouts and the opening for financial regulation; the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the opportunity for a revised environmental policy; the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdowns and a revised policy toward nuclear energy; the Goldstone Report and the chance for an end to the Gaza blockade.  But of all these as well as other cases that might be mentioned, the Eikenberry cables offer the clearest instance of persisting in a discredited policy against the weight of impressive evidence.

Ambassador Eikenberry retired in 2011, and Obama replaced him with Ryan Crocker — the Foreign Service officer brought into Iraq by Bush to help General Petraeus manage the details and publicity around the Iraq surge of 2007-2008.

3. Paul Volcker: Head of the Federal Reserve under Presidents Carter and Reagan, Volker had a record (not necessarily common among upper-echelon workers in finance) entirely free of the reproach of venality. A steady adviser to the 2008 Obama campaign, he lent gravity to the young candidate’s professions of competence in financial matters.  He also counseled Obama against the one-sidedness of a recovery policy founded on repayment guarantees to financial outfits such as Citigroup and Bank of America: the policy, that is, favored by Summers and Geithner in preference to massive job creation and a major investment in infrastructure. “If you want to be a bank,” he said, “follow the bank rules. If Goldman Sachs and the others want to do proprietary trading, then they shouldn’t be banks.”  His advice — to tighten regulation in order to curb speculative trading — was adopted late and in diluted form. In January 2010, Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric, which paid no federal taxes that year, replaced him.

4. Dennis Blair: As Director of National Intelligence, Blair sought to limit the expansion of covert operations by the CIA.  In this quest he was defeated by CIA Director Leon Panetta — a seasoned infighter, though without any experience in intelligence, who successfully enlarged the Agency’s prerogatives and limited oversight of its activities during his tenure. Blair refused to resign when Obama asked him to, and demanded to be fired. He finally stepped down on May 21, 2010.

Doubtless Blair hurt his prospects irreparably by making clear to the president his skepticism regarding the usefulness of drone warfare: a form of killing Obama favors as the most politic and antiseptic available to the U.S.  Since being sacked, Blair has come out publicly against the broad use of drones in Pakistan and elsewhere.

On his way out, he was retrospectively made a scapegoat for the November 2009 Fort Hood, Texas, killing spree by Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan; for the “underwear” bomber’s attempt to blow up a plane on its way to Detroit on Christmas day 2009; and for the failed Times Square car bombing of May 2010 — all attacks (it was implied) that Blair should have found the missing key to avert, even though the Army, the FBI, and the CIA were unable to do so.

5. James Cartwright: As vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Cartwright passed on to Obama, and interpreted for him, a good deal of information that proved useful in the Afghanistan War review. Their friendship outlasted the process and he came to be known as Obama’s “favorite general,” but Cartwright stirred the resentment of both Petraeus and Mullen for establishing a separate channel of influence with the president. Like Eikenberry, he had been a skeptic on the question of further escalation in Afghanistan.  His name was floated by the White House as the front-runner to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs after the retirement of Mullen.  Informed of the military opposition to the appointment, Obama reversed field and chose Army Chief of Staff General Martin Dempsey, a figure more agreeable to Petraeus and Mullen.

6. Dawn Johnsen: Obama’s first choice to head the Office of Legal Counsel — a choice generally praised and closely watched by constitutional lawyers and civil libertarians.  Her name was withdrawn after a 14-month wait, and she was denied a confirmation process. The cause: Republican objections to her writings and her public statements against the practice of torture and legal justifications for torture.

This reversal falls in with a larger pattern: the putting forward of candidates for government positions whose views are straightforward, publicly available, and consistent with the pre-2009 principles of Barack Obama — followed by Obama’s withdrawal of support for the same candidates. A more recent instance was the naming (after considerable delay) of Elizabeth Warren as a special advisor to organize the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, followed by the decision in July not to nominate her as the first director of the bureau.

Avoidance of a drag-out fight in confirmation hearings seems to be the recurrent motive here. Of course, the advantage of such a fight, given an articulate and willing nominee, is the education of public opinion. But in every possible instance, President Obama has been averse to any public engagement in the clash of ideas.  “Bottom line is that it was going to be close,” a Senate Democratic source told the ABC reporter Jake Tapper when Johnsen’s name was withdrawn. “If they wanted to, the White House could have pushed for a vote. But they didn’t want to ’cause they didn’t have the stomach for the debate.”

Where the nomination of an “extreme” candidate has hardened a wrong impression of Obama as an extremist, might not a public hearing help to eradicate the very preconception that every tactical withdrawal tends to confirm? This question is not asked.

7. Greg Craig: For two years special counsel in the Clinton White House, he led the team defending the president in the impeachment proceedings in Congress. Craig’s declaration of support for Obama in March 2007 was vital to the insurgent candidate, because of his well-known loyalty to the Clintons.  Obama made him White House Counsel, and his initial task was to draw up plans for the closing of Guantanamo: a promise made by the president on his first day in the Oval Office. But once the paper was signed, Obama showed little interest in the developing plans. Others were more passionate. Dick Cheney worked on a susceptible populace to resurrect old fears.  The forces against closure rallied and spread panic, while the president said nothing.  Craig was defeated inside the White House by the “realist” Rahm Emanuel, and sacked.

8. Carol Browner: A leading environmentalist in the Clinton administration, Browner was given a second shot by Obama as director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy.  She found her efforts thwarted within the administration as well as in Congress: in mid-2010 Obama decided that — as a way to deal with global warming — cap-and-trade legislation was a loser for the midterm elections. Pressure on Obama from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to heed business interests served as a strong incitement in forcing Browner’s resignation after the democratic “shellacking” in midterm elections: a result that his abandonment of cap-and-trade had failed to prevent. The White House had no backup plan for addressing the disaster of global warming.  After Browner’s resignation in March 2011, her position was abolished. Since then, Obama has seldom spoken of global warming or climate change.

Moral and Political Limbo

The Obama presidency has been characterized by a refined sense of impossibility. A kind of suffocation sets in when a man of power floats carefully clear of all unorthodox stimuli and resorts to official comforters of the sort exemplified by Panetta. As the above partial list of the saved and the sacked shows, the president lives now in a world in which he is certain never to be told he is wrong when he happens to be on the wrong track.  It is a world where the unconventionality of an opinion, or the existence of a possible majority opposed to it somewhere, counts as prima facie evidence against its soundness.

So alternative ideas vanish — along with the people who represent them. What, then, does President Obama imagine he is doing as he backs into one weak appointment after another, and purges all signs of thought and independence around him? We have a few dim clues.

A popular book on Abraham Lincoln, Team of Rivals, seems to have prompted Obama to suppose that Lincoln himself “led from behind” and was committed to bipartisanship not only as a tactic but as an always necessary means to the highest good of democracy.  A more wishful conceit was never conceived; but Obama has talked of the book easily and often to support a “pragmatic” instinct for constant compromise that he believes himself to share with the American people and with Lincoln.

A larger hint may come from Obama’s recently released National Strategy for Counterterrorism, where a sentence in the president’s own voice asserts: “We face the world as it is, but we will also pursue a strategy for the world we seek.” If the words “I face the world as it is” have a familiar sound, the reason is that they received a trial run in Obama’s 2009 Nobel Prize speech. Those words were the bridge across which an ambivalent peacemaker walked to confront the heritage of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King with the realities of power as experienced by the leader of the only superpower in the world.

Indeed, Obama’s understanding of international morality seems to be largely expressed by the proposition that “there’s serious  evil in the world” — a truth he confided in 2007 to the New York Times columnist David Brooks, and attributed to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr — combined with the assertion that he is ready to “face the world as it is.” The world we seek is, of course, the better world of high morality. But morality, properly understood, is nothing but a framework of ideals.  Once you have discharged your duty, by saying the right words for the right policies, you have to accommodate the world.

This has become the ethic of the Bush-Obama administration in a new phase.  It explains, as nothing else does, Obama’s enormous appetite for compromise, the growing conventionality of his choices of policy and person, and the legitimacy he has conferred on many radical innovations of the early Bush years by assenting to their logic and often widening their scope. They are, after all, the world as it is.

Obama’s pragmatism comes down to a series of maxims that can be relied on to ratify the existing order — any order, however recent its advent and however repulsive its effects. You must stay in power in order to go on “seeking.” Therefore, in “the world as it is,” you must requite evil with lesser evil. You do so to prevent your replacement by fanatics: people, for example, like those who invented the means you began by deploring but ended by adopting. Their difference from you is that they lack the vision of the seeker. Finally, in the world as it is, to retain your hold on power you must keep in place the sort of people who are normally found in places of power.

David Bromwich writes on civil liberties and America’s wars for the Huffington Post. A TomDispatch regular, as well as contributor to the New York Review of Books, his latest essay, “How Lincoln Explained Democracy,” appeared recently in the Yale Review.