Obama's Liberal Internationalists

Salon's interview with Samantha Power fleshes out a bit the perspective of the liberal internationalists who didn't support the war in Iraq and seem to have gravitated to the Obama campaign. When asked how we should get out of there, she replies:

We have to put Iraqis at the center of our planning and our thinking, which is not something we've done naturally at all -- from the '80s when we supported Saddam Hussein, when he was using chemical weapons against his own people, to the '90s, when we had sanctions against the regime and paid very little attention to the toll of those sanctions on Iraqi civilians. And then, in the decision to go to war and the way we went to war -- which was so not about Iraqis, as shown by our refusal to protect civilians and our failure to do adequate postwar planning.

We need to be incredibly sensitive as we leave Iraq to the welfare of Iraqis who are going to be left in our wake. That potentially entails the idea of sectarian or ethnic relocation if people are in a mixed neighborhood and feel that they'd be safer in a more homogenous neighborhood. Also, [it entails] massive support for neighboring countries that have taken in 2 million refugees, and some very systematic effort between now and the time we begin leaving to build funding and resource streams to internally displaced people.

We have shown again and again that we care about Iraq only insofar as it serves our interests. But I think it's time to show not only Iraqis but the rest of the world that at least as we leave, we're leaving with a very vigilant eye on how to mitigate the consequences of our actions.

It's funny how much credibility matters here. If someone who had supported this war said something like it, it'd seem like a pretext for maintaining the occupation. Or something. But coming from Powers, who's been against it, you just can't help but hope that she's serious, because it would be good if we tried to clean up this mess as much as we can. That she grants that we're leaving reflects some humility and recognition of how limited the military is in influencing events there.

Obama hopefully will think like this. It would be nice to trust that the president will do the right thing and be realistic and not reckless and arrogant and stubborn and using humanitarianism as a smokescreen for nasty ambitions. Having people like Powers around restores some credibility to the office. That's another one of the intangible assets that Clinton cannot bring to the table but is dearly needed right now.

Will the Election Be About Obama Or McCain?

This is a good point from a Harper's interview with a GOP political operative:

I watched Obama during the debates. Just like everyone else, I said, ‘This guy is good,’ but he also brings serious problems to the table. If you want to reduce political campaigns to marketing, Obama is a great new product with great packaging and people are anxious to try it, but they don’t yet know whether it’s a product they want to use over and over again. People know McCain. He is Coca-Cola. You might not always want a Coke, but you always know what it’s going to taste like and that it’s good when you’re thirsty. These are turbulent times and the safe pick might be the best pick. The race will be about Obama, not McCain, and we still don’t know a lot about Obama. At some point, he is going to have to defend a pretty liberal record in both the U.S. Senate and especially the Illinois Senate. He hasn’t had to do that in the Democratic primaries, but in a general election, his record could cause alarm to those in the middle. He has not gone through the rigors of a general election campaign, which is very different from a primary. He can say in a Democratic primary that he wants to sit down and talk to leaders in Iran, but Republicans and some in the middle hear that and cringe –are we just going to roll over for countries like Iran and let them build a nuclear bomb? I don’t want to diminish the fact that he is a different kind of candidate, but it’s too early to know whether Americans will see him as the right candidate at the right time.

Obama is showing he clearly knows how to run a campaign, and I kinda doubt that he'll fall into the trap of defending himself too much. After all, this election should mostly be about ending the 8 years of Republican misrule, of which John McCain was a part and which he supported. McCain of course has his own image and reputation...but it's as conservative. The conservative brand is severely damaged and Obama and his campaign advisors will have to be idiots not to try to put McCain on the defensive constantly.

That said, fear is a hell of a thing, and McCain could try to scare the living shit out of all of us and win. I campaigned in Virginia and had a couple of good conversations with people still on the fence. One guy echoed this operative's point about knowing what you're getting with McCain, and not really knowing with Obama, and being worried about Iraq "coming back to bite us." Obama will have to deal with this problem and somehow either get everyone to calm down or believe that he's our great defender. I bet he's better at getting us all to calm down and appeal to the "angels of our better nature" and all that.

And we all know how Clinton would respond to fear-mongering- she'd do them one better, says she's better at defending the homeland, like she's done on the Iraq war authorization and the deeming the Iranians terrorists vote. It's this capitulation to fearmongering that got us into this war, and it's my worry that this reflexive response would keep us in it far longer in a Clinton administration than in an Obama one.

Unreconstructed Liberal Hawks

There are lots of them out there. People who identify as liberals but support wars for humanitarian reasons. The Iraq war drew their support in legions because Saddam Hussein was a bad man and he gassed the kurds, don't you know. Plus democracy might bloom throughout the middle east, and all the authoritarian human rights-violators would be forced from power by publics marveling at the flourishing Iraqi democracy and demanding it for themselves. Anyone who opposed the war was insensitive and a hypocrite and probably a rascist.

The rest is history. I confess I kinda bought this line. Especially once the war began, when it seemed like we had an obligation to be good managers of the society we had turned upside down. But what have the last 5 years accomplished? Has any progress been made that wouldn't have been made had we left the country promptly after we found that there weren't any weapons? Has anyone seriously examined this question? I'd genuinely like to know.

Anyway, guys like George Packer still cling to the fantasy of Good Wars. This Matt Yglesias post gets close to this point. Packer still demonizes people who opposed the war. There's little firm ground to stand on for people who don't believe much in humanitarian war, people who think there's a very high bar to meet if you're going to make the choice to risk young people's lives for an elusive goal. Plus, it all would have gone well if Bush and co. messed it up so bad.

The unreconstructed hawks haven't changed their worldviews. They may be a little more cautious with who they entrust with their tasks, but they still believe in the righteousness of their task and that it's achievable. You have to be a liberal ideologue or an asshole to disagree with them. And they still occupy high offices in the media and political establishment.

Co-opting the Interest Groups

It feels increasingly like the Democrats aren't taking risks to end the war in Iraq and repair the damage to the safety net and our great equalizing institutions. The interest groups are largely quiet. Why aren't they pushing more to end the war?

Matt Taibbi's article today gives voice to this feeling.

This supposedly grass-roots "anti-war coalition" met regularly on K Street, the very capital of top-down Beltway politics. At the forefront of the groups are Thomas Matzzie and Brad Woodhouse of Americans Against the Escalation in Iraq, the leader of the anti-war lobby. Along with other K Street crusaders, the two have received iconic treatment from The Washington Post and The New York Times, both of which depicted the anti-war warriors as young idealist-progressives in shirtsleeves, riding a mirthful spirit into political combat — changing the world is fun!

But what exactly are these young idealists campaigning for? At its most recent meeting, the group eerily echoed the Reid-Pelosi "squeezed for time" mantra: Retreat from any attempt to end the war and focus on electing Democrats. "There was a lot of agreement that we can draw distinctions between anti-war Democrats and pro-war Republicans," a spokeswoman for Americans Against the Escalation in Iraq announced.

...One thing he didn't really address is how compatible the goals of policy accomplishments and electoral victories are. There's definitely an argument to be made there. There just aren't enough votes to do anything significant now. The people in the article are mad that they didn't make more political hay.

Rep. Lynn Woolsey, a fellow caucus member, says Democrats should have refused from the beginning to approve any funding that wasn't tied to a withdrawal. "If we'd been bold the minute we got control of the House — and that's why we got the majority, because the people of this country wanted us out of Iraq — if we'd been bold, even if we lost the votes, we would have gained our voice."

But do the Democrats need that? Seems like there's lots of enthusiasm for Democrats in the primary.

And there's this:

"Can you imagine Tom DeLay and Denny Hastert taking no for an answer the way Reid and Pelosi did on Iraq?" asks the House aide in the expletive-filled office. "They'd find a way to get the votes. They'd get it done somehow."

How? I guess, maybe. But they couldn't get the votes for a lot of things. Think Social Security.

I don't know how you'd do this. Actually ending the war responsibly- i.e. not just pulling the plug on it- would take more power. The Democratic coalition is on board for ending the war (though maybe not everybody agrees exactly how to do that). The overwhelming challenge is to put more Democrats in power. And then they need to be pressured to end the war whose goals will never be achieved and is costing more blood and money than is conscionable. This interview with George Packer is worth a read. He's a former war supporter "liberal hawk" who supporteed it on humanitarian grounds.

What do you think has to happen to stop the downward spiral in Iraq and what do you think will happen? I don’t think there’s much we can do to stop it. The things that have arrested it are mainly Iraqi things, like the so-called Sunni awakening with Sunni groups forming a tactical alliance with the U.S. against Al-Qaeda. That’s a factor. The Muqtada al-Sadr organization has stopped its violent activities for the past six months or so. These, together with a better strategy on the part of Petraeus are the reasons, but the forces of disintegration are so large now that certainly the 30,000 American troops used in the surge can’t stop it.

Though technically in this interview he doesn't support a timetable or withdrawal date. Weird. Maybe one way to channel this frustration is to get politicians to all take concrete stands. Like "I want to end the war, and I think it should be done by doing XYZ."

Also in case anyone actually reads this thing, i heavily edited the original version of this post, which I thought wasn't appropriate.

Conservatives Think They've Found Obama's Weakness

Conservative pundits are nothing if not repetitive. For example, I feel like I've now heard this line of attack on Obama about five times. The gist is that Obama's actually liberal.

It's probably something to worry about. I wonder how the Obama campaign will respond. Hopefully they will not go out of their way to show that he's not a "conventional liberal." You have to support a lot of conservative policy prescriptions to not be a conventional liberal (but wouldn't that just make you a conservative?).

Of course, this isn't about supporting policies that actually work as much as it's about showing your "independence" from "special-interest groups."

I see absolutely no need for doing something like this. Ever once hear a voter express this concern? The election won't be about what's wrong with the Democrats- it'll most likely be about how terrible Republicans are. Democrats don't have nearly as much to prove as Republicans do.

Sometimes these conservative pundits sound like they've said the same things about liberals since the 80s. Times have changed. I just can't imagine these charges resonating, but I could be wrong.

Plus it won't be about ideology, if the primaries are a reliable indication. Obama does not make liberal ideology his image. He's run a campaign where policy and ideology have taken a backseat to personality and his message about hope and unity. Conservatives will have to work extra hard to make ideology an issue, and that could backfire because of conservatism's pretty lousy recent track record.

And finally, Obama isn't that conventional. If you look at his stances on poverty, education, and a host of other things, he has embraced the most innovative and I'd say least ideological approaches. He's not perfect, and some of the conventional solutions have more merit than he thinks.

Also, this column shows just how the weird the conservative relationship with the Clintons is. At first he's like "thank god another Clinton might not be elected, because conservatives hate them" and then at the end Bill Clinton is held up as a model liberal because of all the conservative positions he took!

It's Done: Obama's Our Man

The MoveOn and SEIU endorsements, following the nod from the Kennedy family, mean that Obama is now the candidate of the left. Anyone arguing otherwise has a difficult case to make.

Why has it taken so long for liberals to recognize Obama as one of their own? Edwards dropping out is an obvious explanation. So are the marginal policy differences between him and Clinton. And his Republicans-are-people-too routine.

But I think the main reason is that it's just hard to categorize him. Edwards and Clinton are political types we all know, but Obama isn't. Walter Shapiro saw this in Iowa.

Still, as I listen with a bit of wonder to Obama's rhetoric, I worry as a political reporter if I am missing something. I understand the cautious establishmentarian campaign that Clinton is waging. I grasp that Edwards is following the standard insurgent's playbook by running as an outsider who will shake up the system. But Obama is following his own compass -- setting out on a path different from those of former Democratic presidential contenders, even new-politics crusaders like Gary Hart (1984) and Bill Bradley (2000).

Since then, lots of thoughtful people have helped the left understand who Obama is. See earlier posts for some good links (this blog is less than 1 month old).