Salter calls President 'Artfully Dishonest'

At his press conference Tuesday, President Obama was his usual assured and nimble self. He is one of the most graceful and appealing political communicators to appear on the national stage in my lifetime. He is, also, one of the more artfully dishonest ones.

He used a question about the uncertain prospects for a resumption of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to emphasize his persistence. According to the President, he professes a “whole philosophy of persistence,” and he cited several of his initiatives in which he calmly adhered to that philosophy while impatient critics carped about their lack of immediate success. Among the examples, this:

“When it comes to Iran . . . we did a video, sending a message to the Iranian people and the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran. And some people said, well, they did not immediately say that they we’re eliminating nuclear weapons and stop funding terrorism.”

Now, there are certainly critics of the President’s approach to Iran who worry it is based more on wishful thinking than the hard headed realism he promised to restore to America’s foreign policy. And some of those might have seen his videotaped Nowruz greetings to Iran as evidence of his naiveté. But to the best of my knowledge not even his most outspoken and implacable detractors insisted it produce Iran’s immediate disarmament and a cessation of its support for terrorists.

Nor has anyone criticized the President because he has not “immediately eliminated the influence of lobbyists in Washington.” No one of adult judgment would believe such a Utopian achievement were possible in the near or long term without first suspending the First Amendment. The President was criticized for promising repeatedly that his administration would not permit officials who previously were lobbyists to work on issues they once lobbied on, and then immediately proceeded to allow several former lobbyists to do so. Nor has he been criticized because he has “not immediately eliminated wasteful pork projects.” He has been criticized because he accepted without resistance an omnibus spending bill that was loaded with earmarks.

We had an indication of how the President favors this kind of straw man during debate over the stimulus bill, when he denounced Republicans who balked at the price tag or felt it wasn’t sufficiently stimulative as advocates of doing nothing in the midst of a global recession. Yet, Republicans opposed to the bill offered an alternative that was different in size and kind, but was, arguably, more stimulative and responsible than the bill the President supported.

He also likes to dismiss his opposition as biters of the hand of bipartisanship he has generously offered them. Yet, he declined to pursue genuine bipartisan compromise on the stimulus bill because it was needed so urgently he couldn’t spare the time to negotiate seriously. He ignored Republican concerns about earmarks in the omnibus bill because it was last year’s unfinished business. And he threatens to circumvent the traditional supermajority needed to pass major legislation in the Senate, and the bipartisan negotiations it requires, by putting the most sweeping, expensive and controversial policies proposed in his budget submission into budget reconciliation, which requires a simple majority of 51 votes to pass. His excuse: Republicans had similarly abused the process to pass the Bush tax cuts.

Perhaps, the President is a persistent man because, when it comes to this kind of disingenuousness at least, persistence pays off. Few in the press have been stirred to point out the many obvious discrepancies between the President’s declarations of his intentions and the reality of his actions anymore than they were inclined to do so during the campaign. He gets away with it. And it runs counter to the deepest instinct of most politicians to cease prevaricating when there is no penalty for continuing to do so.

When Ed Henry of CNN asked the President why he waited two days to express his outrage over the AIG bonuses, the President dismissively responded, “because I like to know what I'm talking about before I speak.” I doubt there was a single reporter in the East Room that night who believed the President’s explanation for his delayed reaction. They knew the administration had been surprised by the fierceness of the public’s reaction, and belatedly raced to catch up to it.

But there was nary a hint of skepticism offered. They all laughed in appreciation of the surefooted artfulness of the President’s putdown, no doubt offering him further assurance that when it comes to employing straw men and red herrings and other deceptions to promote policies that might very well bankrupt the United States, he would be smart to remain a persistent man.

Mark Salter Comments on Governor Jindal Speech

Jindal’s Pursuit of Happiness Leaves Country Wondering...

Last year, I had the pleasure of watching Governor Bobby Jindal participate in a town hall meeting with John McCain, and was deeply impressed with his command of complex policy issues, and his easy fluency in communicating his views to voters. It was an exceptional performance, which I was reminded of watching the Governor’s recent interview on Meet the Press. Regrettably, those talents were not on display in his nationally televised response to President Obama’s address to Congress.

Granted, it’s not easy following Barack Obama, whose communication skills, especially his appreciation of the physicality of memorable speechmaking, have no equal in politics today. But Jindal is a better speaker than he gave evidence of last Tuesday, and much better at communicating conservative principles and policies in a winning way.
The over thought staging of his speech (he should have appeared at seated at his desk or in an armchair rather than attempt to imitate a presidential stroll into the East Room), and the curiously emphatic and singsong enunciation of certain words in his address suggest too much coaching. That said, I doubt one missed opportunity will seriously cloud this promising young politician’s future, and I still look to him as one of a few prominent Republican officeholders with the talent and vision to help lead the Party out of the political wilderness it now finds itself in.

More disappointing than Jindal’s delivery was the address itself. It failed to offer worried Americans compelling alternatives to the sweeping proposals offered by the President, which considered together, promise the greatest government growth and intrusion into areas of private responsibilities since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Instead, Jindal offered an anodyne recitation of Republican opposition to government spending and high taxes. Americans, even those who are not in danger of losing their jobs or homes, want to know their government has a feasible plan to get us out of the economic mess that has ravaged savings for their retirement and their children’s college education.

Jindal spent a considerable portion of his address decrying government incompetence, using the example of the federal government’s woeful response to Hurricane Katrina as a reason not to trust it to do anything. But in these times, Americans aren’t satisfied with an alternative that only opposes and doesn’t propose solutions to the myriad problems confronting us from ruinously expensive health care to inadequate public education to crumbling infrastructure. They are looking for leaders with ideas for making government do better what it must do. Jindal has a reputation for innovative and effective policy ideas for many of the most pressing public concerns. He should have discussed a few of those Tuesday night as alternatives to the Democrats’ insistence on spending more on government programs that have already lost the confidence of the American people.

Although it would have put considerable pressure on the Governor and his speechwriters, they should have considered drafting his remarks after they viewed an embargoed copy of the President’s remarks. A hurriedly written and less rehearsed rebuttal to some of the President’s proposals that offered and explained conservative reforms that would, for instance, make health care more affordable and accessible or offered dissatisfied parents more educational opportunities for their children or stimulated small business job creation or spent wisely on necessary infrastructure improvements would have made a greater impression on voters than another boilerplate denunciation of government’s many inadequacies.

The argument Republicans should make, and Governor Jindal is well equipped to make, against the ruinous spending and tax increasing proposals of the President and Democrats in Congress is that government can play a competent and efficient role in helping Americans decide for themselves how to pursue happiness rather than President Obama’s bold but arrogant conviction that government should determine what happiness is and who deserves more of it and who deserves less. That is a response to this new age of Obama led government activism Americans will embrace.

Submitted by ASO member: Mark Salter

Mark Salter: Featured Blogger

Bipartisanship and Its Pretenders.

The growing center of American political opinion disdains, and rightly so, the puerile bluster and incivility often employed in the practice of politics. That sentiment stongly influences the new President's governing style, expressed in his prudential inaugural address, and his graceful moves to woo the opposition and impress the voters by paying a friendly respect to the station, if not always the views, of Republican office holders and conservative opinion leaders.

President Obama has a wily -- and I use that adjective admiringly -- sense of how to appear in perfect accord with the sentiment of a majority of the public that perceives in partisanship a root cause of the various economic ailments afflicting the country, and the lack of progress toward remedying them. He has done so by being genuinely agreeable in the company of Republicans and appearing patient with their assertions of honest policy differences, without yet hazarding the more complicated work of incorporating any Republican prescriptions into the current fiscal policies of his administration as written into law by Democrats in Congress. Although, it’s fair to note, he has managed to dissuade House Democrats from persisting in a couple of their more politically maladroit maneuvers, recognizing the jeopardy they posed to passage of his stimulus bill. (Taxpayer funded birth control may indeed stimulate activity but, alas, not much in the nature of immediate economic activity beyond, perhaps, the purchase of flowers and a nice meal.)

We are not yet two weeks into his administration, but President Obama has swiftly exercised the enormous political talent that won the presidency by using his considerable charm and graciousness to aggrandize an economic stimulus bill that is unique only for its immense size and otherwise quite common in its appetite for unproductive and, in many respects, injurious government spending and policymaking, into a much desired break with those dreaded “failed policies of the past” (would that America might live to see the day when any failed government spending policy is consigned forever to the past). He understands that if you can’t have bipartisanship in the realm of policymaking a spirit of civility and an advertising wizard’s creativity in marketing the old as new will do in a pinch.

In the hands of clumsier politicians, of course, such attempts at stylistic camouflage can come off quite comically. Witness Speaker Pelosi bumptious entrance into the new spirit of “partisan ambitions be damned; let’s get on with the people’s business.” After ramming through the House of Representatives without a single Republican vote a stimulus bill that harbored a great many objects of liberals’ pent up desire for government command of our economy, she protested her complete innocence as a Democratic party leader:

“I didn’t come here to be partisan. I didn’t come here to be bipartisan. I came here, as did my colleagues, to be nonpartisan, to work for the American people, to do what is in their interest.”

This news that the Speaker has risen above not only the implied vice of partisanship but the assumed virtue of bipartisanship will come as a surprise not only to Republicans in Congress, but to her liberal constituents, residing, as they do, in one of the more strenuously partisan congressional districts in the country.

Obviously, few in Washington, in either party, share the President’s adroitness at helping bad medicine go down tastefully by making civility appetizing enough for a public that thinks it’s hungry for bipartisanship, though many give it their earnest all. Even some of the keenest preachers of bipartisanship have abandoned their fondness for the notion in favor of the “being nice is good enough” school of advancing their governing agenda. The genial E.J. Dionne regularly used his perch on the op-ed page of the Washington Post to beseech Republicans in the years of their ascendancy to show more respect when tackling big national problems for the ideas and patriotism of the Democratic minority. Lately, he prefers a more tactical approach to cross-aisle comity. He laments the President, having treated Republicans nicely, received not a single one of their votes for the House passed stimulus bill, and, henceforth, he argues – and I’m putting it more vulgarly than E.J. ever would – the President should say “screw em,” and get on with the urgent task of expanding the welfare state.

There is confusion, in Washington and in the country at large, at the heart of this discordant and antique reality that remains lodged so firmly in the new era of hope and change.

Bipartisanship requires, irreducibly, a giving in and a standing by. That is the obvious nature of political compromise. Each side must bend their principles a little to accommodate those of the other side in exchange for preserving in whatever compromise policy results a respectable measure of those principles. It is tricky work that consumes enormous effort, to say the least. Naturally, given their possession of the White House and majorities in Congress, Democrats rightly expect to give in less and stand by their principles more than Republicans will, but give in to some extent they must if the President is, in fact, to employ bipartisan problem-solving in this our “winter of hardship,” as he aptly put it in his inaugural address.

Incivility has been one of the drearier qualities of political debate in the last twenty years or so, and it breeds personal animosities that bedevil even the sincerest efforts at political compromise. Both parties share in the blame for its occurrences, but it is not a partisan or institutional failing. Discourtesy never is. It is an entirely personal vice, which, when committed frequently by many individuals in a given profession, can falsely appear to be a flaw in that profession. The President’s genuine efforts to summon the better angels of our personal nature and his recognition that in this argumentative, heterogeneous society we are still bound closely together by the self-evident truths that are the basis of our political kinship are admirable. But civility is not now nor has it ever been a substitute for bipartisan policy accomplishment and the giving in and standing by it requires. It is simply good manners, and like good manners in any profession it smoothes the path to cooperation, but does not provide the hoped for product of that cooperation.

Republicans should never have been expected to endorse a free-for-all spending bill that substitutes the appropriators’ instinct for achieving occupational security at great public expense and Democrats’ faith in the virtues of big government for the most efficacious laws of free markets and free people. A truly bipartisan economic stimulus bill might have included more spending on public works than fiscal conservatives usually find advisable, given the inflation and higher interests rates it causes, in exchange for ensuring that the spending is, as some wise Democratic economists have urged, of reasonably short duration and actually stimulative. Or it might have permitted some of what Republicans judged nonsensical long term spending, and Democrats see as farsighted “investments in the future” in exchange for embracing the politically inconvenient but provably true conviction that reducing taxes on American businesses will do infinitely more good for the American people than handing them a check for $500.

Those are the kind of hard to swallow compromises that bipartisanship in deed and not just in name demands. Without it, we can surely still treat one another sociably, politely, respectfully as President Obama and Democratic majorities in Congress impose on the country a great many ineffectual or potentially ruinous fiscal policies. But button up your overcoat. This winter of hardship could last a while.

Submitted by ASO member: Mark Salter