The Stormy Present

---

"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present."

Abraham Lincoln

---

In Massachusetts, voting has begun. Democrats and Republicans will be choosing their candidates today to run in a six–week general election campaign (along with an independent) to fill the U.S. Senate seat that was vacated by the death of Edward M. Kennedy in August.

Taking this step toward choosing the successor to a man who spent nearly half a century in the Senate seems like kind of a strange — and yet appropriate — way to bring this decade to an end.

I remember, as if it were yesterday, something I said to a co–worker more than nine years ago, when the Bush and Gore campaigns were locked in their legal battle over the state of Florida — that the eventual winner of the election might regret being the winner. At the time, I was thinking of the narrow congressional divisions, but, in hindsight, I may have been right for reasons I didn't consider.

Whether I expressed that thought verbally or not, it is one I have had before, usually following presidential elections. In fact, I had that thought last year, even though Barack Obama's victory was being hailed by friend and foe alike, and his party had achieved large congressional majorities. I remember wondering, on Election Night 2008, how Obama was going to achieve the delicate balancing act that would be necessary to revive the economy, put millions of Americans back to work and successfully end two wars while not alienating any of his supporters — or further alienating his detractors.

The answer was simple. "The stormy present," as Lincoln called it, was too stormy. It couldn't be done.

Or could it?

We are now a week removed from the president's address at West Point, in which he announced plans to escalate U.S. troop involvement in Afghanistan, and we're starting to see the first results of polls on that decision. Quinnipiac reports that "[p]ublic support for the war in Afghanistan is up nine percentage points in the last three weeks, as American voters say 57–35 percent that fighting the war is the right thing to do."

Quinnipiac also reports that approval of Obama's handling of the war is up, and three–fifths of respondents support his plan to begin withdrawing troops in 2011, although a plurality believe Obama won't be able to keep that pledge.

On the other hand ...

Poll respondents also are skeptical — by a wide margin — about whether Obama deserves the Nobel Peace Prize he will receive this week. Perhaps that is because it is hard to reconcile the notion of a Nobel Peace Prize winner escalating a war.

Kennedy's successor — whoever he or she may be — will be confronted with the problems posed by the stormy present. No doubt there will be those among the new senator's constituents who will long for the seasoned leadership Kennedy could provide.

But that is not an option.

The option — aside from the one the voters have in choosing the nominees — belonged to those who decided to seek the Senate seat.

We won't know until Jan. 19, 2010, which one the voters will choose to serve the remainder of Kennedy's term.

And I have to wonder if the eventual winner might wish he/she hadn't won.

Which reminds me of another Lincoln quote, which may prove to be more appropriate than any of the candidates in today's primaries would care to admit:

"If it weren't for the honor of the thing," Lincoln said, citing a man who was tarred, feathered and ridden out of town on a rail, "I'd rather walk."

Hero Worship

A new presidency is sort of like a new automobile. It retains its original value while it is in the showroom, but it immediately starts losing value when it is driven off the lot.

The most tangible way of measuring the current value of a president is via approval ratings. They weren't measured for the first 31 presidencies so it is only possible to make educated guesses as to how popular or unpopular any of those presidents may have been at a particular time. The Roper Center has been charting presidential approval in various surveys (mostly Gallup's findings until the Clinton presidency) since the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Since Roosevelt's day, there have been 13 presidents (including FDR), and each has enjoyed, at some point, an approval rating as high as 67% — often higher. Barack Obama's high–water mark, according to Roper, was 76% — a level he reached back in February. From that time, Obama's approval rating has been sliding, as it does for all presidents although not in identical increments.

Obama's approval rating hovered in the upper 50s to low 60s into the summer, and the last approval number he had that exceeded 60 was recorded in a CNN survey back in June. CNN's findings are suspect in some circles because CNN is perceived to be a supporter of the president.

Then Obama's approval numbers slipped into the 50s as he and his vice president blithely dismissed June's job losses (nearly half a million) and turned their attention instead to a Supreme Court nomination that never appeared to be in jeopardy, a "teachable moment" over a beer with a white cop and a black professor, a speech to the nation's schoolchildren and the ongoing battle to reform health care.

A Fox survey in mid–October was the first to show Obama's approval rating below 50%. Some of the president's more ardent supporters will point out (and not without some justification) that Fox has been a frequent and vocal critic of the Obama administration, but Roper reports that Fox did find and report approval ratings exceeding 60% in all but one of the surveys it conducted between January and May.

Well, last month Fox reported that Obama's approval rating had fallen to 46% — which, coincidentally, is the same approval rating George W. Bush received in a Fox survey conducted the first week he was in office.

When the 2008 candidates for the presidency began lining up, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — mostly Iraq — were the hot–button issues. The economy hadn't imploded yet. And Obama was a consistent critic of the administration's Iraq war policies, which drew many young and minority voters to his campaign.

This week, Obama announced his plan for escalating the war in Afghanistan — as part of his strategy to bring American military presence there to an end. The decision may sound logical, even to diehard opponents of the war. In fact, a CNN poll indicates that most Americans agree with the president on this issue.

But Dana Milbank of the Washington Post reminds readers that liberal filmmaker Michael Moore posted an open letter to Obama at his website the day before Obama's speech at West Point and warned him that escalating the war in Afghanistan was the "worst possible thing you could do." Moore warned Obama that he was about to "turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics."

Milbank agrees with Moore that Obama's young supporters will be disillusioned by this move.

---

"Even before the surge announcement, support among liberals for Obama's Afghanistan policy had dropped 22 points since July, to 59 percent from 81 percent, according to a Post–ABC News poll. Overall liberal support for Obama had drifted down to 80 percent from 94 percent in the spring — and, given the noisy complaints from the left last week, that number seems likely to fall further."

---

Milbank writes that this "was bound to happen eventually.

"Obama had become to his youthful supporters a vessel for all of their liberal hopes. They saw him as a transformational figure who would end war, save the Earth from global warming, restore the economy — and still be home for dinner. They lashed out at anybody who dared to suggest that Obama was just another politician, subject to calculation, expediency and vanity like all the rest."

And Milbank says Obama has brought much of this anticipated negative response on himself "for encouraging the messianic cult as he stumped for change and hope."

All that may be true. And I admit that I have been bothered at times by the intense adoration of his loyalists, who often seem — to me, anyway — far too eager to let Obama off the hook for things they would be hesitant to overlook in someone else.

But, in Obama's defense, he did suggest during the campaign that he wanted to pursue a policy that would bring the conflict to a successful conclusion. At the very least, that means leaving a country that is stable enough to resist a Taliban takeover.

Obama was a frequent critic of the Iraq War and, if he sticks to his previously announced timetable, most of the troops in Iraq will be gone by next Labor Day. But his objectives are different in Afghanistan, and they will take longer to achieve because Afghanistan was neglected so much before Obama took office. His comments on the campaign trail indicate that he has always understood that.

His policy may not be popular, but it is consistent with what he said during the campaign. If his young and ethnic supporters don't get it, they weren't paying attention.

Well, I guess we'll find out when the next approval ratings come out.

Leaving Afghanistan

There's something kind of refreshing about a president who throws caution to the wind the way Barack Obama does — in spite of indications that he's digging a deep hole for his party in next year's midterm elections.

Is "refreshing" the right word? Or should it be "foolhardy?"

The latest such indication is his apparent intention to discuss, in a televised address tonight, why he believes the best course in Afghanistan is to deploy more troops in the next six months — with the ultimate goal of ending involvement in three years.

I have never been enamored of war. But, in the interest of full disclosure, I was in favor of a war in Afghanistan back in 2001 — because that is where the September 11 attacks were hatched.

Public opinion and I were on the same page in those days. And we seem to be on the same page today. In 2009, that page favors ending our involvement in Afghanistan.

And lots of Americans think the troops should be withdrawn immediately. Even with the terrible economy that was the primary backdrop to last year's election, there were many voters for whom the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and running a smart, cost–efficient foreign policy were the #1 issues.

Afghanistan's been an afterthought for years. In the public's mind, it was moved to the back burner after the Taliban were routed and Iraq was invaded. The troops have staggered gamely along, with no mission, no objective and no exit strategy. It is high time we stopped pouring lives and resources into that black hole.

Even so, I understand something that many Americans, impatient to save money and lives, do not appear to understand. Our long–term interests require that a war must be ended gradually. It cannot be concluded abruptly, especially in a place like Afghanistan, which needs far less instability than would be created by complete and immediate withdrawal for an environment that would welcome the return of the Taliban to thrive.

Three more years, though, is quite a bit more gradual than I favored. And I wonder how Americans will feel about increasing the nation's human and financial commitments to an unproductive conflict that is more than 8 years old.

Ed Hornick of CNN writes that "comparisons to the war in Vietnam are often invoked," although he is quick to add that "experts say while there are similarities between the two conflicts, there are more differences."

That's true, but it also reminds me of Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats during the Vietnam era and their pious proclamations that they were spending more money and risking more lives so the money that had already been spent and the men who had already died would not have been sacrificed in vain.

And that is at the heart of the comparison.

I'm sure office–holding Democrats who must seek re–election next year appreciate the distinction. "Vietnam" has become a euphemism for "military misadventure" the same way that any scandal is now referred to as "[choose a clever and appropriate substitute word]–gate" and a mass killing has become a "Columbine" (it used to be called "going postal").

In fact, recently, I heard someone use "9/11" as a euphemism for a sneak attack.

Under the previous administration, Afghanistan quickly got the short end of the stick when attention shifted to invading Iraq. Whatever opportunity may have existed initially to capture Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and bring him to justice evaporated, but American troops have remained to this day.

To a great extent, it has become the forgotten war, but not completely — the latest Gallup Poll says 55% of Americans disapprove of Obama's handling of Afghanistan. That's quite a reversal. In July, Gallup was reporting that nearly the same number approved.

"The decline in Obama's approval rating on Afghanistan is evident among all party groups," writes Gallup's Jeffrey Jones, "with double–digit decreases since September among Republicans (17 points), independents (16 points), and Democrats (10 points)."

Will Obama's approach in Afghanistan benefit the members of his party next year? It's hard to see how. Gallup has been reporting that Republicans are leading Democrats on a generic 2010 ballot among registered voters. They have been making incremental gains all year.

How can they be hurt on this issue? Obama may be motivated by a desire to end the war, but isn't increasing the troop strength likely to be perceived as almost an endorsement of the previous administration's policy, even if it is short term? It might even be interpreted as political pandering.

It seems to me that a complete withdrawal, however messy it might leave things in Afghanistan, would be a more powerful repudiation of the previous administration in the eyes of the voting public.

It is worth remembering that politicians don't get to decide what voters use to evaluate candidates and parties. Historically, Americans are more influenced by pocketbook concerns than foreign affairs, even wars, unless the war in question is extremely popular or unpopular. And polls, while neither infallible nor written in stone, are suggesting that the domestic issue that has the voters' attention is unemployment. On that issue, the administration's "record" is largely an unverifiable number of jobs that have been "saved," not jobs that have been created.

John Crudele observes, in the New York Post, that "the employment situation just doesn't improve that much from one month to the next" — which means that, unless something truly dramatic happens, there simply isn't enough time for the kind of clear economic turnaround on which Democrats need to be able to capitalize.

Well, things may look different as we get closer to the midterm elections. Maybe the jobs summit will be wildly successful.

A lot of things could happen.

Will the president find the words to persuade a dubious public that further extending an already overextended military is the right strategy?

Have the Terrorists Won?

It seems to me that truly historic days live on beyond their normal 24–hour lifespans and continue to influence our lives indefinitely, in ways that are seen and unseen, even if the public's attention has moved on to something else.

In fact, it reminds me of a pebble tossed into a pond or a lake. From that one tiny point of impact, the ripples fan out in ever–expanding circles, affecting everything they touch, until they are stopped by the distant shorelines.

Need a bigger, grander example? Think of the 2004 tsunami that began with an undersea earthquake in the Indian Ocean and led to the deaths of more than 225,000 people in nearly a dozen countries.

It was, in fact, months before the scope of the tsunami was understood. Indeed, it often seems to take the distance that time can provide before the full impact of an historic event can be comprehended.

I was thinking about this the other night while I watched a four–hour program on 9/11. That's an event that has been particularly fascinating for me because, at the time it happened, the office in which I worked had no TV set. Unlike most Americans, I didn't see the events as they unfolded.

I've only seen video footage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers and the bodies plummeting to earth from great heights. As appalling as those images are, it's one thing to have seen them as they happened, raw and uncensored, playing out in real time, and it's quite another to see film footage of something that has already occurred.

It's kind of like watching the Zapruder film, knowing that President Kennedy's head is about to be engulfed in a bloody halo and being powerless to do anything about it. You may want to yell at the screen, "Don't make that turn!" but you know that Kennedy's limousine will drive down Elm Street past the Texas Schoolbook Depository into history — and there isn't a thing you can do about it.

It's the same with the hijacked planes on September 11, I suppose. You can see the surveillance film of some of the hijackers being briefly detained at the security checkpoints. You can see footage of at least one of the hijackers with what appears to be a box cutter in his hip pocket, and you may feel tempted to yell at the screen, "Don't let him board the plane!" but you know he will, anyway.

And you know that the four planes will be hijacked and nearly 3,000 people will be killed on a crystal clear, early autumn morning.

Sept. 11, 2001, will always be a significant day in American history. But, once the shock from the attacks wore off and the stock market reopened and planes were allowed to fly again, life began to return to normal.

Even so, I think it can be argued that, as meticulous and methodical as the terrorists' planning was, those hijackings had consequences that the terrorists did not anticipate, consequences that continue to influence American life.

In the months after the attacks, for example, Osama bin Laden reportedly told some of his supporters that he didn't foresee the collapse of the Twin Towers. Is that credible? Bin Laden's academic credentials are unclear, but some have said he earned a degree in civil engineering. If that is so, he must have had some idea of what a fire fed by thousands of gallons of jet fuel could do to a skyscraper.

Whether bin Laden believed the towers would fall, his objective seems more certain. He was driven by a desire to bring jihad to American soil. Thus far, that has not happened. We've been told that additional terrorist attacks were thwarted by policies that were followed during the Bush administration, but we've seen no evidence to support that claim. There are those who believe al–Qaeda has been biding its time before striking again, similar to the eight–year gap that passed between the attacks on the World Trade Center.

But, while bin Laden apparently sought to engage the United States in a bloody conflict, he may not have anticipated the direction it would take.

He may not have realized how obsessed the neocons in the Bush administration were with Saddam Hussein, even a decade after the end of the Gulf War, or that they would use the terrorist attacks to justify an invasion of Iraq that continues to claim American lives and money at a time when both could be used more effectively.

But, from bin Laden's perspective, the terrorist attacks may have succeeded in achieving his goal, albeit in unexpected ways. His words may be contradictory, but I think we can agree that his goal seems to be toppling the United States. Al–Qaeda and the Islamic extremists may have a Dark Ages mentality and their objective may be predicated on the use of force, but in the 21st century, the best strategy for destroying a foe is to undermine that foe's economy.

I'm not suggesting that economists sympathetic to Islamic extremism infiltrated the American economy and proceeded to sabotage it. The greed at the top of America's economic food chain owes no allegiance to any faith — only money.

So what is the relationship between the Iraq war, now more than 6 years old, and the recession?

Clearly, many factors have been involved in the recession. But it can be plausibly argued that the combined cost of sustaining the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001 — more than $860 billion so far — has made things much worse than they might have been.

And that begs the question — Have the terrorists won?

War and Peace

It may be hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel as far as the economy is concerned.

But the light is becoming easier to see in Iraq — although it may seem every bit as far away.

Barack Obama said today that the nation has "begun the work of ending this war" and will all but end the combat mission by August 2010.

It is a gradual conclusion that is realistic and responsible, even if it is considered inadequate in many ways by Obama's fellow Democrats on Capitol Hill.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi feels the residual force Obama plans to leave in Iraq (between 35,000 and 50,000) is too large.

Other Democrats also quibbled with the number. Rep. Lynn Woolsey of California said such a force would be viewed by Iraqis as an occupation force.

Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who ran against Obama in pursuit of the presidential nomination last year, said, "You cannot leave combat troops in a foreign country to conduct combat operations and call it the end of the war. You can't be in and out at the same time."

But Obama's foe in the 2008 general election, Sen. John McCain, said Obama's strategy was "reasonable" and said he was "cautiously optimistic."

And a majority of the visitors to CNN.com — 55%, in fact — say the plan is "just right." The CNN poll isn't scientific, but nearly 180,000 people have responded to the question as of 4:25 p.m. (Central) today.

Obama, undoubtedly, needs to cultivate the support of Democrats in Congress. But his approach makes sense to me. Steve Benen writes in Washington Monthly that it's about time the war in Iraq came to an end, and he is right. But the conflict must be brought to a responsible conclusion.

And it will allow the United States to shift its attention back to where it should have been all along — Afghanistan.