The third case study is the most unexpected: President Obama's Convening Approach. First, some context: In 1961, John F. Kennedy gave an Inaugural Address that did enormous damage to the country. It defined the modern president as an elevated, heroic leader who issues clarion calls in the manner of Henry V at Agincourt. Ever since that speech, presidents have felt compelled to live up to that grandiose image, and they have done enormous damage to themselves and the nation. That speech gave a generation an unrealistic, immature vision of the power of the presidency.
President Obama has renounced that approach. Far from being a heroic quasi Napoleon who runs the country from the Oval Office, Obama has been a delegator and a convener. He sets the agenda, sketches broad policy outlines and then summons some Congressional chairmen to dominate the substance. This has been the approach with the stimulus package, the health care law, the Waxman-Markey energy bill, the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill and, so far, the Biden commission on the budget.
As president, Obama has proved to be a very good Senate majority leader - convening committees to do the work and intervening at the end.
All his life, Obama has worked in nonhierarchical institutions - community groups, universities, legislatures - so maybe it is natural that he has a nonhierarchical style. He tends to see issues from several vantage points at once, so maybe it is natural that he favors a process that involves negotiating and fudging between different points of view.
Still, I would never have predicted he would be this sort of leader. I thought he would get into trouble via excessive self-confidence. Obama's actual governing style emphasizes delegation and occasional passivity. Being led by Barack Obama is like being trumpeted into battle by Miles Davis. He makes you want to sit down and discern.
But this is who Obama is, and he's not going to change, no matter how many liberals plead for him to start acting like Howard Dean.
The Obama style has advantages, but it has served his party poorly in the current budget fight. He has not educated the country about the debt challenge. He has not laid out a plan, aside from one vague, hyperpoliticized speech. He has ceded the initiative to the Republicans, who have dominated the debate by establishing facts on the ground.
Now Obama is compelled to engage. If ever there was an issue that called for his complex, balancing approach, this is it. But, to reach an agreement, he will have to resolve the contradiction in his management style. He values negotiation but radiates disdain for large swathes of official Washington. If he can overcome his aloofness and work intimately with Republicans, he may be able to avert a catastrophe and establish a model for a more realistic, collegial presidency.
The former messiah will have to become a manager.
AS a longtime supporter and colleague of Barack Obama at the University of Chicago, as well as an informal adviser to his 2008 campaign, I had high hopes that he would restore the balance between government secrecy and government transparency that had been lost under George W. Bush, and that he would follow through on his promise, as a candidate, to promote openness and public accountability in government policy making.
It has not quite worked out that way. While Mr. Obama has taken certain steps, notably early in his administration, to scale back some of the Bush-era excesses, in other respects he has shown a disappointing willingness to continue in his predecessor’s footsteps.
In the years after 9/11, the Bush administration embraced a series of policies, including torture, surveillance of private communications, and restrictions on the writ of habeas corpus, that undermined the fundamental American values of individual dignity, personal privacy and due process of law. Its most dangerous policy, though, was its attempt to hide its decisions from the American public.
In an effort to evade the constraints of separation of powers, judicial review, checks and balances and democratic accountability, the Bush administration systematically hid its actions from public view. It promulgated its policies in secret, denied information to Congress, abused the process for classifying information, narrowly interpreted the Freedom of Information Act, punished government whistle-blowers, jailed journalists for refusing to disclose confidential sources, threatened to prosecute the press for revealing secret programs, and broadly invoked the state secrets doctrine to prevent both Congress and the courts from evaluating the lawfulness of its programs.
In doing so the Bush administration undermined the central premise of a self-governing society: it is the citizens who must evaluate the judgments, policies, and programs of their representatives. As James Madison observed, “A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps both.”
At least four obvious areas of concern regarding transparency confronted President Obama when he entered the White House.
The first involves the problem of classification, and it is, to be fair, a bright spot on the president’s record. Soon after taking office, Mr. Obama repealed a directive, issued by Mr. Bush’s attorney general, John D. Ashcroft, in October 2001, authorizing the government to classify information whenever its disclosure might potentially harm national security. This standard ignored the competing national interest in preserving an open and responsible government. Prior administrations had employed a more open approach, and President Obama’s repeal was a significant step in the right direction.
But his record on whistle-blower protection, another key area of concern, has been less laudable. In early 2009 members of Congress enthusiastically introduced the Whistle-Blower Protection Enhancement Act, which promised substantial protection to certain classes of government employees who report matters of legitimate public concern to lawmakers or the media. Although as a candidate Mr. Obama had expressed support for such a law, his administration cooled to the idea and let it die in the Senate in late 2010 (it was reintroduced in April 2011). Sadly, as a number of high-profile criminal cases against whistle-blowers show, the Obama administration has followed its predecessor in aggressively cracking down on unauthorized leaks.
President Obama has also followed Mr. Bush in zealously applying the state secrets doctrine, a common-law principle intended to enable the government to protect national security information from disclosure in litigation. Although legitimate in theory, the doctrine had been invoked in an unprecedented manner by the Bush administration to block judicial review of a broad range of questionable practices.
The dawn of the Obama administration brought hope that Congress would enact the proposed State Secrets Protection Act of 2009, which would have limited the scope of the doctrine. Indeed, shortly after President Obama took office, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. suggested that the doctrine should be invoked “only when genuine and significant harm to national defense or foreign relations is at stake and only to the extent necessary to safeguard those interests.”
Since then, however, the Obama administration has aggressively asserted the privilege in litigation involving such issues as the C.I.A.’s use of extraordinary rendition and the National Security Agency’s practice of wiretapping American citizens.
Finally, events during the Bush administration made clear that it was long past time for Congress to create a federal journalist-source privilege. Forty-nine states and the District of Columbia have recognized such a privilege, and members of Congress proposed the Free Flow of Information Act to recognize a similar privilege as a matter of federal law. If enacted, the law would enable journalists to protect the confidentiality of their sources, unless the government could prove that disclosure of the information was necessary to prevent significant harm to national security.
In what seems to be a recurring theme, Senator Obama supported the Free Flow of Information Act, but President Obama does not. In 2007, he was one of the sponsors of the original Senate bill, but in 2009 he objected to the scope of the privilege envisioned by the bill and requested that the Senate revise the bill to require judges to defer to executive branch judgments. Although the bill passed in the House in the last Congressional session, it stalled in the Senate and now has to be reintroduced.
The record of the Obama administration on this fundamental issue of American democracy has surely fallen short of expectations. This is a lesson in “trust us.” Those in power are always certain that they themselves will act reasonably, and they resist limits on their own discretion. The problem is, “trust us” is no way to run a self-governing society.
Geoffrey R. Stone is a professor of law at the University of Chicago and chairman of the board of the American Constitution Society.
Why Is He Bi? (Sigh)
HE was born this way.Obama is limited by his own political ambition
Bi.
Not bisexual. Not even bipartisan. Just binary.
Our president likes to be on both sides at once.
In Afghanistan, he wants to go but he wants to stay. He’s surging and withdrawing simultaneously. He’s leaving fewer troops than are needed for a counterinsurgency strategy and more troops than are needed for a counterterrorism strategy — and he seems to want both strategies at the same time. Our work is done but we have to still be there. Our work isn’t done but we can go.
On Libya, President Obama wants to lead from behind. He’s engaging in hostilities against Qaddafi while telling Congress he’s not engaging in hostilities against Qaddafi.
On the budget, he wants to cut spending and increase spending. On the environment, he wants to increase energy production but is reluctant to drill. On health care, he wants to get everybody covered but will not press for a universal system. On Wall Street, he assails fat cats, but at cocktail parties, he wants to collect some of their fat for his campaign.
On politics, he likes to be friends with the other side but bash ’em at the same time. For others, bipartisanship means transcending their own prior political identities. For President Obama, it means that he participates in all political identities. He does not seem deeply affiliated with any side except his own.
He was elected on the idea of bold change, but now — except for the capture of Osama and his drone campaign in Pakistan and Yemen — he plays it safe. He shirks politics as usual but gets all twisted up in politics.
The man who was able to beat the Clintons in 2008 because the country wanted a break from Clintonian euphemism and casuistry is now breaking creative new ground in euphemism and casuistry.
Obama is “evolving” on the issue of gay marriage, which, as any girl will tell you, is the first sign of a commitment-phobe.
Maybe, given all his economic and war woes as he heads into 2012, Obama fears the disapproval of the homophobic elements within his own party. But he has tried to explain his reluctance on gay marriage as an expression of his Christianity, even though he rarely goes to church and is the picture of a secular humanist.
While picking up more than three-quarters of a million dollars from 600 guests at a gay and lesbian fund-raising gala in Manhattan on Thursday night, the president declared, “I believe that gay couples deserve the same legal rights as every other couple in this country,” even as he held to his position that the issue should be left to the states to decide.
He’s not as bad as New York’s Archbishop Timothy Dolan, who gave another grumpy interview on Thursday, this time to The National Catholic Register, asserting: “You think it’s going to stop with this? You think now bigamists are going to want their rights to marry? You think somebody that wants to marry his sister is going to now say, ‘I have a right’? I mean, it’s the same principle, isn’t it?”
The archbishop concluded: “Next thing you know, they’re going to say there’s four outs to every inning of baseball. This is crazy.” (He’s beginning to sound like Justice Scalia.)
Still, Obama’s reluctance to come out for gay marriage seems hugely and willfully inconsistent with what we know about his progressive worldview. And it is odd that the first black president is letting Andrew Cuomo, who pushed through a gay-marriage bill in Albany on Friday night, go down in history as the leader on the front lines of the civil rights issue of our time.
But for the president, “the fierce urgency of now” applies only to getting checks from the gay community, not getting up to speed with all the Americans who think it’s time for gay marriage.
As with “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” Obama is not leading the public, he’s following. And worse, the young, hip black president who was swept in on a gust of change, audacity and hope is lagging behind a couple of old, white conservatives — Dick Cheney and Ted Olson.
As a community organizer, Obama developed impressive empathetic gifts. But now he is misusing them. It’s not enough to understand how everybody in the room thinks. You have to decide which ones in the room are right, and stand with them. A leader is not a mediator or an umpire or a convener or a facilitator.
Sometimes, as Chris Christie put it, “the president has got to show up.”
With each equivocation, the man in the Oval Office shields his identity and cloaks who the real Barack Obama is.
He should draw inspiration from the gay community: one thing gays have to do, after all, is declare who they are at all costs.
On some of the most important issues facing this nation, it is time for the president to come out of the closet.
Is Barack Obama a president or a pawn?
And is there any difference nowadays?
Seeing how narrow the boundaries of debate have become on the biggest issues facing the country makes the question unavoidable.
On the central near-term economic issue – jobs – Paul Krugman has trenchantly described the “learned helplessness” gripping the White House. As a result we hear only timid ideas that can’t make a real dent. Ditto on the long-term debt, where we’re asked to choose between a Republican plan that would add $5.4 trillion in red ink over the next decade and a Democratic plan that would add $7 trillion.
But the phenomenon goes far beyond jobs and debt. On the issues of bank capital and Afghanistan, both of which will be the targets of momentous decisions in the weeks ahead, the options being debated seem just as inexplicably narrow and out of touch.
Take bank capital first – specifically, the amount of capital large banks are required to hold as a buffer against loss. Inadequate capital at “systemically important” financial institutions was the main reason the housing meltdown led to epic taxpayer bailouts. Yet higher capital rules are being fought by big bankers, because such rules threaten their ability to pay themselves outrageous bonuses (which get goosed when they can show higher returns on a smaller sliver of equity).
That’s not what the big bankers say, of course; they claim their real concern is that higher capital rules will hurt their ability to lend and support economic growth. But outside of bank-funded studies that conveniently support this point of view, there’s little evidence that this is the case. Why would we listen (again) to the self-interested pleas of the same folks that helped tank the economy even as they got rich, escaped prosecution, and passed the bill to the rest of us?
Yet the big banks have already won. The new international Basel accords ask banks to hold capital equal to 7 percent of their assets. “If it’s for banks that lend to businesses and families in their communities, 7 percent is more than enough,” says Robert Wilmers, chairman and chief executive of M&T Bank, a big regional bank based in Buffalo. “But if it’s for banks allowed to engage in risky and speculative trading” – which our megabanks remain free to do – “its impossible to come up with the right level of capital because you don’t know what the dimensions of the trading are.”
Right now the Federal Reserve Board is talking about an extra 3 percent for the biggest banks, lifting total capital to 10 percent. But prudent Switzerland is requiring 19 percent. Why is 10 percent the outer limit of American debate? Wouldn’t 20 percent make us twice as safe next time casino capitalism runs amok?
Or take Afghanistan, where 100,000 U.S. troops will run through upward of $150 billion this year chasing what the CIA guesses are 30 to 100 members of al-Qaeda. No one supporting this decade-old war can define what “success” really means.
Yet the troop withdrawal options the president will review starting this week range from 3,000 on the low side to perhaps 20,000 on the high. How can the “boldest” withdrawal option leave us with more troops in Afghanistan than Obama inherited?
Why are the boundaries of debate so narrow?
On Afghanistan the answer is easy but almost never discussed: We don’t have a draft. Does anyone doubt that if this war weren’t being fought by “other people’s children,” more aggressive plans to end it would be on the table? Instead, even post-Osama, the president remains boxed in by the slim range of options his military leaders present. Obama chafes at his choices, but he hasn’t truly challenged them (perhaps for fear of the fallout if top generals publicly balked).
On banking, another set of powerful insiders still holds sway. At one level this is astonishing. President Bush’s Treasury secretary was the man who as Goldman’s chief executive led the charge for lower capital standards for investment banks. The current Treasury secretary let the housing and financial crisis build while big banks were under his supervision as head of the New York Fed. As Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner point out in their important new book, “Reckless Endangerment,” men who were on the payroll of profiteering housing giant Fannie Mae are still at the center of power – including former Fannie board member Bill Daley, now White House chief of staff; and former Fannie government affairs chief Thomas Donilon, now the president’s national security adviser.
When the voices at the table are so deeply invested in the institutions and habits of mind that brought the economy low, or that have made Afghanistan a quagmire, how likely is it that the options they present to a president will really change things? Sadly it’s already a cliche (dating from Jeb Bush’s presiding over the Florida recount) to note that when we see such cozy arrangements in developing countries, we call them “banana republics.”
A president’s power to shape events are more limited than we generally think. But a president’s power to shape the boundaries of debate are limited only by his imagination and by his appetite for political risk. From the looks of it, Barack Obama has plenty of imagination. So if he chooses not to challenge these boundaries, he’s a prisoner not only of entrenched forces arrayed behind the status quo; he’s a pawn, ultimately, of his own ambition.
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